OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

apologies for being passive-aggressive, it wasn't intended that way but obviously intention isn't really the thing

anyway anyone who claims there is no longer a critical mass of people who are worried about drum machines/rap/Beyonce in 2014 should spend the next year or two telling people they write about miley cyrus and really liked her album (doesn't matter if you did or not) and see what kind of reactions you get

The problem with that thought experiment is that there are a myriad of reasons to dislike the Miley Cyrus album beyond being a rockist.

Like, it's perfectly reasonable to be a fan of hip-hop influenced pop music and think "We Can't Stop" is braying, misshapen garbage; disliking that song and its album does not actually mean that all you want to listen to is Neil Young.

katherine OTM, frustrated with this entire discussion, most non-writers I know have no idea about these terms and what they are, and a NYT article is gonna be many people's entry point, it's important to comment and rebut etc. etc. instead of assuming that everybody in the world is on a page, up to date-- you can't assume those who aren't aware of these terms are "old" and/or not into music writing.

But disliking this album sometimes meant that you wanted to listen to Imagine Dragons.

xpost

Well... no. I wanted to listen to Kelly Rowland.

(also: Lorde)

brb gonna listen to "Kisses Down Low" for the 15,345th time.

this spectacle of people (mostly straight white men of a certain age) angry that we treat music made with drum machines, or for dance floors, or with rapping (unless it's 'political'), or by Beyoncé with the same respect and depth of thought we'd devote to anthems sung by bands of guys with guitars.

this feels pretty strawmanny especially on ILM where a lot of the anti-orthodoxy views wrt to pop vs. rockism are pretty distinctly influenced by white guys and sometimes and former posters of a certain age like xhuxk and kogan etc etc

Dear flamboyant goon tie which Lorde song were you talking abt being abt REAL ROCK being REAL MUSIC

her seger cover

i am totally listening to the Steve Miller Band right now. and the BC bud has really kicked in. shout out to the Hudson's Bay Company.

Well, jokes on me for wading in here, but "rockism" doesn't need to only apply to rock music, obv. Rockism imo is the dead puppy borne out of performative music practice, i.e. "people playing things", oldest trick in the book, you've got tonnes of people walking away from "learning instruments" with a taste for music that is visibly performed, and an appreciation for apparent skill in that performance. If you think that this is out-of-style, you just need to check out I dunno Imagine Dragons or Clean Bandit or Youtube videos of people playing things-- and rockism happens when some twisted/young/dumb/frustrated individuals (many-of-them powerful) will take this taste for performed music and twist it into "Miley sucks and is for children". Discussions about "the authenticity of a performance" are going to always exist while people enjoy performed music. Many of Lorde's artistic decisions, i.e. the format of her live instrumentation (stripped down, all sound sources visibly "performed"), the monologues she delivers onstage, the lyrics of "Royals", suggest that she comes from a background in performative arts and values things like authenticity. Same goes for The XX. Would never accuse either act of fetishizing anything but think they value many of the same things that so-called rockists do.

Ok that makes sense, thanks. Authenticity/honesty of some kind's p universally valued tho, isn't it? Like, how many beloved/critically discussed performers don't give a shit abt it (Dean Martin? The guy frm Limp Bizkit, maybe?), and do their audiences know?

Sure sure but I'm looking for some Germanic extended version of the word that is the "implied evidence of authorship and/or musicianship" flavour of authenticity

Well, Miley sucks and is for children. No one ever actually refutes this statement.

Oh no, as opposed to Serious music for adult men

metal is for children

Oh no, as opposed to Serious music for adult men

― brimstead, Tuesday, April 15, 2014 10:20 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait a second, you are expanding my mind here

my gosh, ten years on ILM and now thanks to you I finally get it

adults listen to the news on the way in to work, the rest of us are children, thank god

Serious music for adult men

perfect Nick Lowe sequel

Adulthood is a social construct. I listen to Raffi on the way to work.

The guy frm Limp Bizkit, maybe?

no the dudes from bizkit are serious abt what they do and Wes is a big nerd ass guitar mag zappa type dude they probably would talk yr fuckin ear off about how Tool are the greatest musicians that ever walked the earth and shit

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away cyrusish things.

basically ppl holding up bores like the black keys as some ideal of real music and ppl write about some crappy miley song like it's fuckin ulysses are both equally annoying

the only other thing i have to say is that in that one thing the writer says that everyone should have an assignment to have an opinion about a jason derulo album that came out this week and if it's all the same to you i think i'll drink a bottle of scotch with a fistful of ambien and wait for the sweet relief of death instead

Urghhh otm

m@tt is relentlessly OTM

even if i disagree, an article about miley like joyce would be way more entertaining (or at least potentially so) than some dad-rock cruft

Matt otm. Although I never feel like I even see people writing seriously about bands like the black keys anymore. Maybe it's because I don't read paste - does that even exist still?

No, mainly because it only contained terrible copy

they keep emailing me

http://www.pastemagazine.com/

ppl write about some crappy miley song like it's fuckin ulysses

this is great

Oh you mean serious literature for serious adult men? Burrrrrrn

That'd be like DeLillo

The way we tend to define this issue as revanchist rock music vs raunchy pop music kinda gets in the way, and makes it seem like the tension of ideas only exists in this extreme strawman form, as if the choice is between only Black Keys or Miley, or only one kind of value system or the other, in fixed opposition. Whereas in truth we're all pretty discriminatory in a multitude of different ways.

I think Wilson gets at this when he talks about his distaste for The Libertines, and the fact that often what we dislike most is stuff that we can project our own self-loathing onto.

I find the semi-articulated value systems behind (e.g.) both celebrations and criticisms of tumblr&b more interesting than those of Miley fans vs Miley haters or etc.

Tim F sharp as usual. I think my will to participate in thought experiments of overcoming my own most deep musical prejudices is just waning lately, i.e. I am becoming old. I've come a long way but Im tired now.

I'm less interested in the "check your privilege bias" side of things per se than I am in thinking about what kind of criticism we need to see i.e. what arguments are actually worth having at this point, what sounds are worth defending and on what basis, what lines are worth drawing.

My pet bugbear with all of this is that the debate gets reduced to a fight over what we can or should listen to, rather than a fight over what's worth saying about what we listen to.

Seriously though, whether a critic likes X or Y is basically of zero interest to me if they're a boring writer, and if they're a good writer then I'm likely to find their taste interesting no matter what X or Y happens to be.

tim otm but the debate is never going to happen on a purely abstract level, though the trouble with concrete examples is exactly what we've just seen - katherine used miley as an example, a good one to make a particular point, and then the thread turned into miley cyrus c/d.

the check-your-privilege side of things is very relevant to poptimism imo (you could use miley as an example for both sides here!) but really needs to exist in conjunction with a musical criticism - my bugbear about thinkpiece culture w/r/t pop songs is that it's so often done by columnists who may be good writers or have important thoughts on race or gender etc etc, but don't have much knowledge of pop music. how many miley thinkpieces deigned to even mention her music last year? or when sinéad waded in, how many mentioned her music? and an alarming amount of the latest round of sexualisation-in-the-music-industry thinkpieces apparently have no knowledge of anything that happened pre-rihanna.

i don't want to underestimate how much the r*ckism/poptimism argument STILL needs to be made, again and again, regardless of how over-it ilm is, because certain assumptions remain so pervasive, but as tim says at heart it's about good vs bad writing. but it needs a lot more specificity...

eg

what arguments are actually worth having at this point, what sounds are worth defending and on what basis, what lines are worth drawing.

well...what are your answers to these qs?

also have you actually seen anything that defends tumblr&b-as-tumblr&b? because i have not. only seen an endless stream of individual acts hyped up but little that defends the sound or scene above, say, blue-collar r&b.

"Tumblr&b"

lol at thinking music journalism is important in any way and that people actually care about it

imagine caring about "poptimism" or "rockism" and actually thinking that those ideas mean anything to anyone in the world outside of ILX.

Lex, the argument doesn't need to be made. People have enough to worry about already in their lives without the pressure of having to think "oooh, I dismissed a pop record, am I evil"

everyone's a critic critic

it wasn't even really a thought experiment, it is literally just what happens when you tell people in the real world, say people you might meet at a party or in a bar or at work, that you write about pop music (or listen to pop music in non-ironic fashion, for the "music writing doesn't matter" crowd.) obviously this is heavily self-selecting but it is self-selecting for anyone who thinks these people who will then judge you hard are strawmen. if miley isn't a good example justin bieber would work, or katy perry, or gaga. (beyonce isn't a great example, since her album is the "call me maybe" of its year -- i.e. major pop monocultural event that even the snobbiest of music snobs won't fault you for earnestly liking.)

beyoncé's also reached that point where she's enough of a cultural behemoth AND has been around long enough to have "paid her dues" such that, like kylie in the uk, most people just accept her presence

lol at thinking music journalism is important in any way and that people actually care about it

― online hardman, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 7:25 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weren't you stressing on here a while back about whether ppl liked your music writing and whether you'd be able to start getting paid off it

well, yeah, it'd be nice to get paid for something I do in my spare time. I don't expect anyone IRL to actually care about it though.

Btw, my ire is aimed at thinkpiecy stuff

lol at thinking music journalism is important in any way and that people actually care about it

― online hardman, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 7:25 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weren't you stressing on here a while back about whether ppl liked your music writing and whether you'd be able to start getting paid off it

Thank you for the reveal