"Should we be suspicious of hipsters’ newfound love of R&B?" or "Race and indie music, part 4762"

people who act like Miguel's first album sounded like an Omarion record are so annoying

we should be suspicious of terrible writers and their poor thesis construction

can't believe Frank Ocean doesn't do more songs with Girls.

haha

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-yBZr5goc4/TTwP48JUdBI/AAAAAAAABDA/bzxKqiwv9X0/s1600/Go+Your+Own+Way.jpg

- Bob Marley

Ribs & Barbecue & Bottle Service

the ribs & barbecue assertion is kind of genius because it appears to be impossible to verify/refute

I assumed everyone who was paying attention was into The-Dream in 2010. Also Frank was 2011. And The Weeknd album mentioned is a repackaging of 3 2011 mixtapes. And what about Beyonce's "4"? R&B hasn't gone anywhere.

As for Miguel, from my perspective he kinda broke-through this year, even though as mentioned earlier his 2010 LP is just as good.

funny how the comeback arguments always fail to mention that R.Kelly and Aaliyah.

the ribs & barbecue assertion is kind of genius because it appears to be impossible to verify/refute

― GIMME SOME REGGAE (DJP), Wednesday, December 19, 2012 12:51 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha yeah it's pretty googleproof

this is all making me nostalgic for the days when prince was the king of rock and boy george was the king of reggae and new order made some of the best latin freestyle and midnight star were a top-selling new wave act.

i definitely think there are old guard people who don't want their ideas of what r&b means to them to be messed with? just like the oldhead jazz people and oldhead rock people who stopped moving years ago. and they just look funnier and funnier in post-everything internet world. do the young people know their history and what r&b means within the context of the african american community, etc, etc. and the young people (black and white) grew up with shiny rap and undie rap and timbaland and fancy swedish euro-beats and indie rock and dubstep and the list goes on and on. its all fair game. and young r&b artists grew up with all that too! whats funny to me is that i have ALWAYS felt like music was a big melting pot ever since i was a little kid in the early 70s (thanks sly and hey thanks blood sweat and tears too while i'm at it) and the whole THING - or a big thing anyway - of the 70's was going anywhere and everywhere with your sound. and this is the stuff that the oldheads revere! so any "suspicion" about the intent of new artists is mighty suspicious to me. like you are trying to bring old arguments into a place where there really haven't been a lot of arguments. i thought the black eyed peas taught us something about life in the future but i guess not.

I want to hug you for that post, scott

I think this debate - like nearly every debate on ILM - keeps getting shifted back to the music and the artists when really it's about the framing of those things.

The problem isn't with Frank Ocean or Miguel (who are good-to-great and excellent respectively) but with listeners wanting to hype up a shift in their listening (in 2012, for a variety of reasons, these people started listening to more R&B again) as some kind of seismic shift in the music itself.

Yes there's always a melting pot, which is precisely why the fact that some people can ignore it for years until suddenly their noses are shoved in it again by critical opinion, and then they can act like it's all because of animal collective or something, is so >_<

R&B must be on its fifth or sixth generation of older fans who don't want their ideas of the genre to be messed with by now.

Channel Orange, Kaleidoscope Dream and Trilogy rescued the art form from the monotony of "baby, baby please," as Ocean, Miguel and Weeknd casually re-created it in their own images. Proving you could sing about dreams and drugs, make songs for women and men, and as long as it rang true, they would come. For their mighty efforts, we've crowned R&B the Comeback Genre of the Year.

DO YOU SEE WHY I FIGHT NOW

jesus fucking christ

1) i took an executive decision to skip every dog latin post in this thread
2) it's more telling who gets excluded from the hype than who benefits from it

thread is too fucking infra dig for me tbph but i just had to pop in and give a standing ovation to matt's perfect gifcraft

perhaps i am cynical but a large part of me feels like frank ocean is primarily referred to as 'alt' not because of his sound (which as many have noted is very traditional-leaning; i should note that i am also not that much of a fan) as much as his affiliation with the promoted-to-the-blog-heavens odd future collective, which is repped by the very plugged-in life or death pr. (the weeknd/drake affiliation is similar although not exactly so.) and i think this is what jason is getting to more than anything.

but then again i think we need to pull back the curtain on how soundalike acts are marketed to different demographics more often.

Frank Ocean is also referred to as "alt" because he told a story in his liner notes about how he had a crush on a guy

it's certainly noteworthy in my own life that my straight friends are more enthusiastic about an album by a purportedly bisexual man than I am.

its certainly noteworthy that the king of reggae, boy george, had 6 top ten hits in the u.s. and nobody even knew if he was a boy or a girl.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0wjd3W0JO1qf9xgfo1_500.jpg

i'm just glad this thread for some reason reminded me of culture club cuz now i want to dig out i'll tumble 4 ya long version 12 inch.

we miss her blind

hairy wrists in that pic are a bit of a giveaway scott

hairy wrists in that pic are a bit of a giveaway scott

oddly, this is the first thing I noticed too

sexist part imo

if boy george had been a girl she would have been called girl george ok?

i've been playing this sooooooo much lately. the whole 4-song arista thing is amazing, but this is the real deal. would play this in clubs every night if i were a deejay. one of the whitest bands on earth, right? vampire weekend couldn't do this kinda thing if you gave them a decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR2IjhDs2FM

i remember the boy george debates in school! is she/he a he or a she? everyone loved him no matter what he was though.

okay I was pretty young when Culture Club was on the scene and I remember the confusion being "why is he dressing like that?", not "is that a boy or a girl?"

the latter argument was reserved for Poison

everyone on this thread should listen to the haircut thing. so cool.

would have had sex with Rikki Rocket if his name were, say, Rita Rocket

damn -- the bassline on that Haircut 100 track

Stepping back a bit and making sure I've got this straight -- so Jason King is among other things being zinged for apparently not knowing his Maxwell. Gonna go back in time to his stellar EMP presentation on said musician and be sure to let him know that. (Also like the Rev noted there's something else about Jason a few folks apparently have missed.)

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, December 19, 2012 6:48 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seriously! this whole thread is collapsing my brain.

that whole tangent started because someone took my dismissal of that SPIN article and applied it to a quote from the original article; I wouldn't really worry much about it

scott otm. suspicious about all this suspicion. it is no surprise that bad writers write badly about good music, but i don't perceive any great injustice in the embrace of this or that by these or those, even if it's just shallow-end dilettantism. everybody's gotta start somewhere.

maybe i'll try to see if i can get all the way through that frank ocean album again

haha scott, i listened the crap out of that haircut 100 song when i first discovered it

the thing that irritates me the most about the initial ramble posted is that the provocative headline covers maybe three paragraphs of what was actually written

also, ppl won't stop trying to make Azealia Banks happen

everybody should understand everything about the history of all music before writing anything

that's what i did, and look at me know.

i like the ann powers thing after jason's thing. on slate.

scott otm. suspicious about all this suspicion. it is no surprise that bad writers write badly about good music, but i don't perceive any great injustice in the embrace of this or that by these or those, even if it's just shallow-end dilettantism. everybody's gotta start somewhere.

― i know your nuts hurt! who's laughing? (contenderizer), Wednesday, 19 December 2012 22:01 (24 minutes ago) Permalink

Everybody does gotta start somewhere. Why can't they just admit that? Why can't people just be like "oh yeah I heard this Frank Ocean album was really great from Pitchfork and Fader and etc. and then I heard about the Miguel album too, and I checked them out and quite liked both of them, and that's two R&B albums I've liked this year, which is unusual for me because I don't really listen to the style much" rather than "R&B has been vapid and formulaic for some time now, but thankfully these two dudes have turned up to save black music from itself"

welcome to my heavy metal universe, tim.

why can't people who don't understand everything about the history of all music avoid making blanket statements like 'R&B has been vapid and formulaic for some time now'

xxp: because no one cares about someone's personal journey through music but everyone cares about identifying The Next Big Trend

tim also otm, but see bad writers writing badly