FKA twigs

Just heard this from a few months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFtMl-uipA8

I like very much. What's the story, where to next, etc.

twigs

twigs

lol

twigs

<3 twigs, but let's not lie to ourselves, Arca is the real draw.

The Arca production is sweet, but I'm also a fan of her whispery tones.

So it's Arca or it's twigs or it's both or it's more or...

First ep was released in 2012 as twigs. In a pre-emptive move on her part to avoid a clash with another artist named twigs, she changed the name to FKA twigs before releasing the second ep in 2013. Arca has handle the production/beat-making on both iirc, and she writes and sings. Album in 2014 perhaps? Hope so.

Man that's involved. Anyway, thanks for the clearup.

I can't stand Water Me from the singles poll. I've listened to it through about a dozen times and still nothing sticks for me. She has an aggravating quality to it that reminds me of Peter Gabriel for some reason. I tried to bait jjj into talking shit about it on his anti-shriekfest thread, but it turned out he dug it. I just listened to another track (Papi Pacify) that seems more substantial to me though.

I like "Papi Pacify" (and ummmmmm, the video! I am here for all this gorgeous black people engaging in kink!). "Water Me" does nothing for me tho.

oh, I had the video on in a separate tab! :D

i love both of these eps, love this chick, love her producer, love her movie directors, will always support good looking multiethnic groups of teens doing pretentious Fashion things

I just came here for the distended eyes

really admire anyone who has never experienced the type of insecurity that lets them hear something in "water me"

really now?

Okay before I forget, that user name rules. (I am biased.)

https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/t31.0-8/10443065_273125599526507_6649757823116258883_o.jpg

LP1 out in two months.

YES

Wonderful cover, and it looks like none of the tracks are repeated from either EP. Can't wait.

http://disconaivete.com/post/89694315611

Hit play on the soundcloud embed, scroll ahead to the 30:00 mark. Then get gut punched by "Two Weeks".

yeah this sounds kind of incredible, wow

perfect

Just checked Amazon and the mp3 single is out tomorrow (I'd presume the same holds true for iTunes).

this is perhaps the first time i have found her interesting. earlier songs were way too wispy and distant for me; this seems way less brittle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yDP9MKVhZc

so is this Arca, or?

that song is delightful!

holy shit

so is this Arca, or?

She said in the little interviewlet with Ellie Goulding yesterday that she's actually been doing some production herself. Whether this is one of them or not, I don't know yet.

Goddamn

Amazing song, amazing video

Who is bankrolling this?

XL presumably

so is this Arca, or?

She said in the little interviewlet with Ellie Goulding yesterday that she's actually been doing some production herself. Whether this is one of them or not, I don't know yet.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, June 25, 2014 3:31 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this one was a Clams Casino production.

if so this is the first time i've enjoyed a clams thing in years

and the first time i've enjoyed a fka twigs thing anyway

v v v good

This is definitely a bold clam xp

I think this one was a Clams Casino production.

nah he said on twitter that he didn't produce it.

http://twitter.com/clammyclams/status/481446543598579712

Just twigged (har har) that the vid is probably a response/take on Kanye's Power vid?

What are earlier examples?

http://twitter.com/clammyclams/status/481446543598579712

― festival culture (Jordan), Wednesday, June 25, 2014 7:43 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol, that's some shonky journalism by Pitchfork and a host of others then.

Annnd new interview

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/06/meet-fka-twigs-musics-new-fashion-darling.html

"Two Weeks" has completely taken over my brain

basically I can't go more than 45 minutes without humming either this song or "Dark Horse"

^^ minus the Dark Horse part

"Two Weeks" has really changed the way I think about her - I hope the rest of the LP avoids the pallid and watery early songs (which I tried really hard to love, but just couldn't latch onto for whatever reason) and more full-bodied like the newest single. She seems like a pretty cool person in any case: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9460-fka-twigs/

I still think the songs on the eps are gorgeous and really can't comprehend how they're unlikeable—particularly "Water Me," which seems to be the one most scorned—but I'm looking forward to whatever her next move is.

leaked. if you need me, i'll be over here listening to this one on a loop for the next couple days.

this album is a real endorphin releaser.

i love "two weeks" and i think i also love "pendulum" but at this point i'm not convinced by the rest

I'm kind of floored by this tbh

The album is a big blur, but it's great.

This is a much more convincing artistic statement for me than the tracks I heard from the EPs without being substantially different; I don't know what is happening here that wasn't on the EPs but more of that, plz

For damn sure. It's a treat and works so damn well on a summer evening.

I've basically gone from thinking she was wildly overrated to being like...why are there not 1,000 new answers in this thread right now?

My favourite album from this year so far, I think.

am I the only 1 who reads this as "fucka twigs" in my mind?

Whoah on my first listen and this is super great. Portishead springs to mind + destiny's child or something I dunno but I like this a lot. I'm sure I heard the last EP but it didn't make much impression on me.

i guess i'm waiting to download the official version but based on the two singles this will be one of my fav albums of the year for sure

live at maida vale - http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ed2nc8#p0249zb1

apologies for tedious interview that precedes it

set starts at 4:49

ugh zane lowe is the worst

am I the only 1 who reads this as "fucka twigs" in my mind?

― DERE is no DERE DERE (Stevie D(eux)), Wednesday, August 6, 2014 5:25 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no

pendulum is quite good but i can't shake the feeling that i'm missing something in my core that allows me to get excited about this artist's work. as with kelela and SZA, i am impressed and enjoy the songs but i couldn't remember anything enough to hum them to save my life.

^^^ exactly how i felt about twigs before this album.

Kelela and twigs I think have far more focussed and refined aesthetics than SZA who I feel like is figuring herself out still - the album was sort of all over the place with a couple of gems. ("Julia", mostly).

I listened with fairly low expectations and this is really, really good, hairs-on-back-of-neck good in places.

All the "it's really about the producer" stuff upthread is revealed as cobblers by this point. With all the names knocking around - Arca, Dev Hynes, Paul Epworth, maybe Clams Casino - it's remarkably consistent in sound and aesthetic leaving you in little doubt that the person who's actually driving things is her. As opposed to other hyped new artists where the debut sounds like a bet-hedging grab-bag of different approaches.

And so many of these tracks SOUND fantastic, like pop songs stretched out until their component parts are miles apart, and then making maximum use of that space. I'm trying to work out why I find this all so affecting, she doesn't have a particularly great voice or what you'd call presence (other than in a kind of airy seductive ghost way) but her voice ties everything together perfectly, you can't imagine this working without her.

Terrible fucking name by the way.

I don't like the name either but I liked her explanation when I interviewed her: "I like the masculine letters. It sounds like a boy’s computer game. A sergeant has to save people. FKA twigs on a mission! FKA twigs do you read me? Copy that!" Then she started moving her arms like a game character running. She's quite odd.

The record is wonderful. At first I thought it was all just a beautiful blur but then I started listening to tracks in isolation and the different strengths and idiosyncracies come out. Two Weeks is one of my songs of the year.

Yeah it all seems kind of samey but then you pay attention and start to realise how much each track changes as it goes along, all these evolving shapes and sounds in the background.

Hate the first 15 seconds of Lights On though. Maybe they had the Pitchfork audience in mind and decided to include a rythmically inept guitar figure right at the beginning just to reassure them.

i love all kinds of sounds i could never hum to save my life

With all the names knocking around - Arca, Dev Hynes, Paul Epworth, maybe Clams Casino - it's remarkably consistent in sound and aesthetic leaving you in little doubt that the person who's actually driving things is her.

sounds like she produced a lot of it herself as well?

Yeah I think so.

i love all kinds of sounds i could never hum to save my life
― °ㅇ๐ْ ° (gr8080)

loving this. earnestly looking forward to lex explaining why we're listening to the wrong thing

I'm actually having quite a lot of trouble hearing this as an R&B album in any way, obviously there is loads of R&B influence in there but a lot of the time the melodies just don't feel like R&B melodies, there's this odd kind of English folkishness to some of the vocal lines. It's a weird blend but she makes it work.

I don't think it really has any pretensions of being "an R&B album", so to speak - it's much closer to Homogenic than Aaliyah.

Yeah, I'd be wary of falling into the Santigold trap here

i found myself humming the vocal melody to 'pendulum' in the shower this morning tbh

"When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later, now she's an R&B singer.. "

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/09/fka-twigs-two-weeks-lp1

Bingo.

Interesting that that quote appears in an article that also contains "Her hands wave violently around wisps of Afro that have escaped her do," and "Growing up in Gloucester as the only mixed-race girl in her Catholic school, a natural rhythm propelled her to childhood classes and through to an eventual career throwing shapes for pop stars".

Ugh son

Never saw it as an R&B album, or R&B artist for that matter. Lights Out and Kicks are my highlights so far.

Actually I've had Kicks on repeat for a while now.

i don't think i'd call this r&b but it's not so far out of that lane... it's sorta ambient slow jammy shit. detwangified mazzy star with more weed and a bulletproof soul.

listened to what i could find on US spotify on the way in to work tonight: two recent singles & EP2. i'd watched the "two weeks" & "water me" videos a little while back, spun EP2 at some point earlier this year, but tbh, nothing had stuck so clearly in my mind as the associated images of twigs herself (LP1 art has to be in the running for album cover of the year).

turns out, given some time, volume & attention, that "two weeks" is magnificent. not quite catchy enough for mainstream pop (is it?), but fascinating lyrics, voice & production. played it three or four times in a row and am looking forward to rest of the album. can understand the peter gabriel comparisons in relation to "pendulum" and some of the EP stuff, obv bridge point being "don't give up", maybe the so era in general. not the sort of thing i'd probably ever hear absent the attention hereabouts, so, as usual, thx, ILX.

"two weeks" is magnificent. not quite catchy enough for mainstream pop (is it?)

it's currently on Radio 1's A-list

I can't wait to see the "Kicks" video.

just glancing through the beginning of this thread and lolled at this:

<3 twigs, but let's not lie to ourselves, Arca is the real draw.

the best song on this album features production from paul epworth which is surprising considering the roster

a natural rhythm

just glancing through the beginning of this thread and lolled at this:

<3 twigs, but let's not lie to ourselves, Arca is the real draw.

haha, but the collision of the vocals with out there/stark/daring beats is still the thing...turns out she can make better beats for herself than Arca, so great!

btw anyone have production credits for this?

this is really interesting

so this is like totally an ilx album of the year right?

I feel like if this was the exact same album but had Karin Dreijer Andersson on the cover, it would unambiguously be ILX's album of the year

*googles*

ah good ol' melty face mask from the knife

So far I'm not into this the way I expected to be. Two Weeks/Pendulum/Kicks are great but the others kind of float by ime.

i feel like this relates the new shabazz palaces in some way, floatiness-wise

^^^ yup, I get the same feeling

Liking the vibe but find the vocals a bit too precious. Gets better after each listen in any case

So far I'm not into this the way I expected to be. Two Weeks/Pendulum/Kicks are great but the others kind of float by ime.

same but replace "kicks" with "video girl" even though i hate songs that slow down for no reason

wish this album was poppier

So far I'm not into this the way I expected to be.

yup. I'm trying though

I listened to it yesterday and it felt a bit samey and didn't grab me really tbh. I'll give it another go tho.

Perfect album! Straight prog, reminds me of David Sylvian of all things.

i think those wanting something poppier would be into this Shaprece EP: https://soundcloud.com/shaprece/sets/molting-ep-1

http://i.minus.com/ibx32hgaBcCgjg.gif

O_O

i could watch that all day

haven't heard the full album yet, but i think "water me" is my favorite single track so far. "two weeks" is close.

Amazing gif Grady

hat tip to goon tie

really feeling dumb for skipping her pitchfork set but she was playing at the same time as st. vincent

She'll be in the US for a month:

November 6th 930 Club, Washington, D.C.
November 7th Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA
November 8th Terminal 5, New York, NY
November 11th Brighton Music Hall, Boston, MA
November 13th Metro, Chicago, IL
November 14th Fine Line, Minneapolis, MN
November 17th Commodore, Vancouver, Canada
November 18th Showbox, Seattle, WA
November 20th Regency, San Francisco, CA
November 21st Regent, Los Angeles, CA
November 26th Parish, Austin, TX
November 28th Trees, Dallas, TX
November 29th Republic, New Orleans, LA
December 1st Mercy Lounge, Nashville, TN
December 2nd Terminal West, Atlanta, GA
December 3rd The Social, Orlando, FL

http://i.imgur.com/ySPZcO9.gif

Happy that cybergoth is finally influencing others

nice clip above of FKA twigs (not the lol-goths) is pretty much a catalogue of moves taken directly from voguing/the ball scene

she's doing handwork, spinning into a death drop, and then ends with some duckwalking

and doing it very well, obviously

yeah when i saw her at pitchfork she said she was learning how to vogue

I feel like if this was the exact same album but had Karin Dreijer Andersson on the cover, it would unambiguously be ILX's album of the year

― Star Gentle Uterus (DJP), Tuesday, August 12, 2014 10:26 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was gonna talk about how i don't like this as much as the grimes album but now i feel lke a racist

See this is the album I wanted Visions to be. Not of knock on Visions at all, just that LP1 is more my cup of tea.

I love Grimes but 'Two Weeks' is objectively better than Grimes' entire catalog

crazy talk

like this a million times more than grimes

maybe i'm not at the right point in my life for this unrelenting crystalline dourness. i wish there were anger like a Knife album or joy like a Grimes album, but after a few listens i'm finding this stifling rather than cathartic. i think "kicks" does this album's thing best though

i dunno about the knife so much as like watery bjork, which is to say modern bjork

I love Grimes but 'Two Weeks' is objectively better than Grimes' entire catalog

― 龜, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 6:13 PM (1 hour ago)

yeah no. both good, quite different. objectively bullshit.

objecterizer

i wish there were anger like a Knife album or joy like a Grimes album, but after a few listens i'm finding this stifling rather than cathartic.

Think "stifling" is the point.

Happy that cybergoth is finally influencing others

― 龜, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 2:04 PM Bookmark

uh

really feeling dumb for skipping her pitchfork set but she was playing at the same time as st. vincent

― ╲╱\/╲/\╱╲╱\/\ (gr8080), Tuesday, August 12, 2014 4:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Let's go see her @ Metro.

Her live show looks amazing - the dancing O_O

btw anyone have production credits for this?

― festival culture (Jordan), Wednesday, August 13, 2014 12:21 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've read this on another board but not sure of its source:

Preface produced by FKA twigs
Lights On produced by Arca
Two Weeks produced by Emile Haynie and FKA twigs
Hours produced by Emile Hayie, Dev Hynes, Class Casino and Arca
Pendulum produced by Paul Epworth and FKA twigs
Video Girl produced by Emile Haynie
Numbers produced by FKA twigs and Sampha
Closer produced by FKA twigs, Cy An and Tic.
Give Up produced by Emile Haynie and Arca
Kicks produced by FKA twigs and Cy An
One Time produced by inc. And FKA twigs

Guess if someone actually owns the album they should be able to verify. I've ordered the deluxe vinyl, despite the groans of my hip pocket.

Grimes sounds (deliberately) cheap as hell while this is lush and expansive and perfectly produced. I don't understand why anyone is comparing them.

have you heard "go"?

Her first Ep, which i only heard for the first time a few weeks ago, definitely had an early Tricky vibe

OK, so a few weeks ago, I was wandering around Dawson's Heights (massive Mayan Temple-inspired Brutalist housing estate that hangs over South London like a battleship) sketching, and there was this song blasting out of someone's window, echoing off the concrete, which was the perfect soundtrack, all ghostly echoing Liz Fraser vocals with booming hollow trip-hop beats underneath. And I was asking around on Twitter, what the hell was this song I heard?

Bought the album and turns out it was indeed this.

But guys. C'mon. R&B? This is straight-up 4AD!

Seriously, on the first track, (and also on stuff like Closer) those vocal harmonies, I almost started giggling because it reminded me so much (in a good way) of medieval chant-based goth like Dead Can Dance / Miranda Sex Garden! (I have no idea if she's ~influenced~ by those artists, but to me, it sounds like she is mining the seams of early Baroque, the place where plainsong turns into polyphony, very early classical and "churchy" music.) Those kind of vocal swoops and "oh-oh!"s in an echo chamber totally remind me of early Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, His Name Is Alive, that kind of thing. But with South London beats bolted on underneath, in a really compelling and alien fusion that still totally works.

The other artist I can think of making this kind of music is Julianna Barwick. That kind of huge, cavernous, churchy polyphony with lots of airy, floaty space. Like, if you're approaching this thinking "R&B" you are going to be hugely disappointed and come out fuming like The Lex. That is not the slightest bit what this is. But if you come into this thinking "Julianna Barwick" or "Cocteau Twins with Night Bus beats" that's a heck of a lot closer to what's going on.

"The Knife"?!?! (No. Fever Ray maybe, with the more gothy side) "Grimes"? (again, 4AD) Bjork? What, coz she wears *princess leia braids*? You guys are just grabbing at straws with the ~ladyproducers~ here.

A bit of Julia Holter about her voice too. Anyway, LP1 is fucking amazing. Wasn't into the track that charted in the '13 poll but this album is something else.

is lex is the fucking slender man now or something

'Cocteau Twins with night bus beats' is a pretty good description but ~night bus beats~ are all about mopey solipsism whereas this is all about intense intimacy.

I think you're going too far the other way though, there is loads of R&B in the mix here, I don't know how you can listen to 'Two Weeks' without thinking of Ciara for example. But it's a part of the mix along with loads of other elements.

correct

good album

But yeah, equally, you wouldn't hear those folky modal melodies in any R&B that I can think of.

Just got tickets to see her play glasgow in october :)

On the is it or isn't it r&b, she said some interesting things herself in the Guardian recently:

We're in central London, in the pretty unerotic environs of a chain restaurant, but twigs remains obviously strange, a compact arrangement of eyes, biceps and goofy teeth. Those peepers grow and flash with irritation when I mention how much of the coverage of her music has seen her boxed alongside "alt-R&B" stars such as Banks, Kelela and SZA."It's just because I'm mixed race," she interjects. "When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later, now she's an R&B singer. I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song Preface is like a hymn. So let's talk about that. If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you'd be talking about the 'choral aspect'. But you're not talking about that because I'm a mixed-race girl from south London." She gives me a look as if I've asked her to take the restaurant's bins out.

In an attempt to placate her, I ask if she feels singular. Her face softens. "Very. I love annoying sounds, beats, clicks. Kakakakaka!" Her hands wave violently around wisps of Afro that have escaped her do. "I don't see anyone else doing that now. It's got loud noises in there, the structures aren't typical, it's relentless. It's like punk; fuck alternative R&B!"

ime everyone would prefer to be "not in a genre"; some of these songs regardless work in the traditions of r&b

Haha no, Alex has come back and said he kinda likes it now! Slender Man averted.

I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song Preface is like a hymn.

OK, now I'm glad that I was picking up on this, if she says it's in there deliberately. I wouldn't say folky, like DC (though I suppose it's that same medieval plainsong element that comes up in both (English) church music and folk music) but churchy.

The ~sonic textures~ are Night Bus-y because that's just the technology involved. I keep hearing trip-hop comparisons coming up, but that's because it's that pairing of the beats with wispy, ethereal vocals (thinking of Massive Attack working with Liz Fraser, Tracey Thorn) and also the warmth and intimacy rather than the desolation of the more technologically similar Night Bus-y stuff.

It's funny how 2 people can listen to the same thing and hear such different comparisons. Like, just listening to Two Weeks again, and I suddenly see what you mean by Ciara on those high super-soprano cooing noises. But the echo/reverb treatment on it made me think ethereal-goth. But that comes back to the idea of what signifiers actually *make* genre. (And the technology in that, like, how much of that 4AD-ethereal-goth sound was about a super-soprano feminine-ish voice run through reverb/delay units. And that sound is all over this record, flagging up "4AD" for me.)

...and she makes a really good point as to how much of assigning people to "genre" is down to visual cues (especially race and gender) rather than musical cues... #PostsVeryMuchInCharacter

in contentiously related news is anyone else deriving regular mild amusement from BANKS having a thing out called 'beggin for thread'

this is gonna be this year's album everyone loves and I don't get?

I guess large swaths of it are functionally similar to something, oh, Nan Vernon would release, except even more crystalline and glassy and sterile. but the "it's about SEX! except it's so glassy and sterile and British!" trope is one of my least favorite. plus, I don't care for Emile Haynie or Paul Epworth much

uh excuse u, "mmm this mbv album sounds like... a bag of sand" is a critical institution without national borders

Well as twigs-love picks up critical mass (LOL) of course "huh this sucks/IDGI" is going to be the exciting new contrarian stance to pose.

...and she makes a really good point as to how much of assigning people to "genre" is down to visual cues (especially race and gender) rather than musical cues... #PostsVeryMuchInCharacter

― are we shoegaze or are we dancer? (Branwell with an N), vrijdag 15 augustus 2014 15:05 (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Absolutely. And I'm very pleased she adressed this so straight-forward.

Listening to this for the first time. This is fuckin amazing. Detailed rewarding completely delicious soundworld.

i am listening to it again

'two weeks'/'hours' b2b mouthsuite is a coded holla at 1975 dude right

That's between you and your LJ slashfic community dude.

Textures apply to everything I do. Even within my music, I like smooth things, and then hard and fluffy things, all giving them their place to shine.

Yessss this is what I listen for in music and hearing her say this makes me v happy

i love this album so much

It's too bad she is playing Terminal 5 (the venue where acoustical detail and filigree go to die) but damn someone please take my old broke ass to this show

When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later, now she's an R&B singer.

I see and agree with all the comments you all are making about this, but also, come on, it's not like there's no predecessor or context for this. I have trouble buying that people were really hearing this blind and being like I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS?!?!? I know that's not really the point of the quote though.

I like the album a lot but there are a couple of tracks that get on my nerves. "Hours" is one, it comes back to the chorus too many times.

If you can't hear some slow jam R&B running through this, i'm assuming you haven't heard much slow jam R&B. it's certainly spacier but it's not as if there's no precedent there. dirty projectors is where my roulette wheel finally landed. pendulum (emphatically) / lights on / numbers are my high points, rest of the album never quite elevates for me.

some of the more out there dawn richards stuff isn't a million miles away from this

'two weeks'/'hours' b2b mouthsuite is a coded holla at 1975 dude right

makes me wish i were into "hours" which is kinda just impressively nothing imo

nothing is cool

that's what they tell me

'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.'

lol I might start saying this

Well as twigs-love picks up critical mass (LOL) of course "huh this sucks/IDGI" is going to be the exciting new contrarian stance to pose.

― are we shoegaze or are we dancer? (Branwell with an N), Friday, August 15, 2014 9:48 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are people allowed to dislike an artist without being accused of taking an "exciting new stance"? FKA TWIGS IS BEST MUSICIAN AROUND, NO DISSENT ALLOWED

I dunno; you tell me whether British people are ~allowed to~ just listen to our music that comes from Britain, instead of being accused of fetishising it coz it's "glassy and sterile and BRITISH!" and we'll talk about what's a stance or not.

huh i thought the singles jukebox posse would dig this! i can never figure u crazy kids out
gonna listen to some Yes

I'm not saying everyone is like that but there are definitely undertones, and no, I'm not talking about you

to me this sounds like a poppier version of like post-meredith monk vocal stuff - i hear a little bit of charming hostess even (maybe) - though that doesn't really account for the production element, more for the vocal piece

ngh ngh ngh jfc nnnnggghhhhhh

― Come and Heave a Ho (darraghmac), Wednesday, August 13, 2014 8:35 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nm, i changed my mind. it doesn't really sound like that at all, but it's what i keep thinking about as i listen to it

just chiming in to echo the love. Did not expect that at all tbh - I've always enjoyed her videos (it's the only area where the Bjork comparison seems apt) but found the music itself a bit thin. This album is something else though, so much to lose yourself in. Right now it's that woozy bass on "Lights on".

I don't really get the "glassy and sterile" comment - Twigs is such a presence on this.

there's little to no use of dynamics, her voice sounds wispy and distant, all the songs are basically the same tempo, the instruments sound like ableton presets, it's heavily produced, and every song mines the same depressed/wistful emotional palette

although i have to say i read the lyrics online the other day and they're really great on paper, don't feel them as much when listening though

and her dancing is straight fire beautiful tbf

there's little to no use of dynamics, her voice sounds wispy and distant, all the songs are basically the same tempo, the instruments sound like ableton presets, it's heavily produced, and every song mines the same depressed/wistful emotional palette

^see that's kinda why i like it tbh

there's little to no use of dynamics

don't agree with this at all. or maybe it's true in the strict sense, but there's a great use of rhythmic density (constantly shifting from very dense to very sparse) that feels very dynamic and alive.

"Glassy and sterile" is just such a weird way to describe an album that most listeners have been noting for its warmth and it's sensuality? OK, there are moments that are so blatant in their desire that they make me squirm a bit, but at the same time the urgency feels really honest, emotionally. (I like music that focuses on women as sexual subject, rather than sexual object.) Distant I don't get, either. Wispy, sure, but there's so much of it that is so up in your ear like a tongue. I could understand the criticism that at times it's almost too sexual/sexualised to the point where it seems almost too obvious, but this whole distant / depressed / glassy / sterile is like... what? This album is *dripping* with desire.

I get that it is very much all of a mood, and all of a piece, sonically (though I agree with Jordan that the contrast of density with *space* provides the dynamics) but to me, the sonic cohesion just heightens its impact as an album, a work of art, the coherence and fully realised completeness of her vision. That might grate if it were longer, but it's short enough that the deliberate focused intensity is part of the appeal. It is a self-contained and cohesive world, by choice. Honestly, that heightens the appeal.

(But I suppose even just saying that plays into the "it's about SEX!" trope or something. Sigh. Because Sex is such an off-limits topic for pop music and all.)

see, I disagree; I think this is largely people reading things into the music from the lyrics that simply aren't there. goldenheart is a useful comparison point, because listening to something like "tug of war" or "frequency," *those* are dripping with desire, are very much subject as opposed to object and feel exciting to listen to. whereas listening to, say, "two weeks," the vocal tone, delivery and mood sounds like a high-school choral recital; you could functionally replace any dumb lyric about thighs or whatever with "ave maria" and have it come off exactly the same.

also, name one place where I have ever said sex was an off-limits topic for pop music. obvious or not! if anything, what this album needs is to be 1000% more obvious in its delivery.

Wow, choral recitals must have changed since I was at school!

Seriously, Goldenheart, as much as I love it, is over-long and over-blown and a thousand years long and sounds like a war (which is actually the point, I get that!) But that is a record it took me a long time to love, and repeated listenings while LP1 grabbed me on the first listen. It feels like a false equivalency to set up those two records because they do such different things.

If you don't like it, you know, you have the right to not like it, that's why there's chocolate and vanilla, but your criticisms just sound mystifying to someone who does like it. Like you've already decided just to hate it because it's ~British~ and ~trendy~ or whatever and you're just going to throw a bunch of adjectives and false equivalences at it to justify an instinctive dislike.

I haven't just decided to hate it because it was trendy -- I've listened to everything she's recorded well before this album was even close to coming out. I thought "Water Me" was basically OK (I think I compared it to Worm Is Green when I first heard it), but nothing more than OK; it seemed like an album track. "Papi Pacify" was a throwaway, and it's telling that almost every time people mention it they quickly skip past the actual music to get to the video, as if vaguely submissive foreplay is supposed to be a shocking image in 2013. maybe at some point I was put off by the stage name, but there are artists with worse stage names who are among my favorites.

as for the album proper, I don't even hate it! it's just that in almost any "genre" you can assign it to, there are countless people doing the same, but better, and not beneficiaries of the same praise. Not all of "Goldenheart" has anything to do with this -- that's one of the reasons why I like it more -- but the songs in which Richard does LP1's thing, she blows it out of the water. But maybe we need to get away from R&B -- it was always a weak comparison anyway (and leads to people like Banks being mentioned in the same breath, which, no). Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines, most of which get ignored. The closest match is likely Nicola Hitchcock on "Passive Aggressive." (Except that album suffers from the opposite problem -- LP1 ropes in Haynie and Epworth and makes them all blend into nothing, whereas Hitchcock had something like nine separate producers doing their own things, and it sounded inconsistent.) Or from last year, Goldfrapp's "Tales of Us" has more sensuality in any given four words than most of this entire album -- although I only know one person who agrees with me on this, and she's not a music critic. I could go on to mention tons of people -- Rebecca Collins and Laura Sheeran and Karoline Hausted and lots of other people that it feels slightly unfair to mention because they're lesser-known but who do basically this, IMO better.

i think you're selling the creativity of the production short, this feels like Yeezus in terms of bringing together sounds and ideas that have been bouncing around the electronic music underground (for lack of a better term) and putting them in a pop album context, and making it all sound pretty amazing.

i agree that she is pretty zeitgeisty and that's a rare intangible. it's just not one that necessarily comes with quality guaranteed c.f. yeezus

I disagree that there's next to no dynamics on this, her vocals are pretty hushed throughout but the production is all about the juxtaposition of light and floaty and rough and clanky. I didn't really appreciate it until I listened to it loud on good headphones though.

I received an email that was very upsetting to me and I just wanted to clarify something. I did not mean to hurt anybody's feelings or to shit on anyone's enjoyment of anything. It gives me no joy to feel differently about an album than the consensus; in fact, it does the precise opposite, because there is the risk of something like this happening.

I'm sorry.

god, I wish there was a way to word this that sounded less awful. I genuinely am sorry. I'm sorry for any feelings that were hurt (I know that sounds vague and/or evasive, but I don't know who to apologize to personally or what to apologize for specifically, or else I would.) I'm sorry I don't like the album. I wish I did more. I was under the impression that threads here were for discussion in general, whether positive or negative, but if that was the wrong impression to have I apologize for this too.

not from someone on this thread? i thought you were very polite about yr feelings about the album, and gracious to write so much grappling w/ why you don't like it

apparently not

fwiw I am gonna check out some of the names you mentioned, katherine! Didn't see a problem with your posts itt/dissenters in general

some of them could have been worded more politely in retrospect, and I apologize for that. basically now I feel like a piece of shit.

OK, that is really weird, because the discussion on this thread had been entirely good-natured and in good faith. I'm sorry you're being targeted by some disgruntled weirdo, katherine (but I'm certainly aware of the hostility ILX can generate towards women who dare to express opinions, especially contrary ones, in public.)

Yeah surely there's nothing wrong with explaining why you don't rate an album. I'm not particularly into LP1 but I don't have even half a well-thought-out rationale as katherine has.

yeah an um has the person sending the email read the whole rest of ilx cause

not conforming to optimized levels of politeness DNE being a piece of shit!!

one of the things i like about this album is that it's kinda... idk i don't want to say vulgar but it can be kinda filthy

or maybe just in contrast with my expectations for this kind of music?

OK, yikes. katharine, that was me and I signed the email, and it was not designed to make you feel like a piece of shit, and there's no targeting or disgruntledness, and I did it off-thread specifically not to call you out or turn the thread into a meta-discussion.

I sent it through the ILX mail system, so I can't retrieve the text, but you're welcome to post it here if you want. I really didn't think I said anything mean-spirited or inappropriate.

All I meant to do was to encourage you to step away from a thread in which you find yourself saying things like "it's just that in almost any 'genre' you can assign it to, there are countless people doing the same, but better, and not beneficiaries of the same praise", because I recognize, from personal experience, that vivid sense of indignation. But there's no "better" in the seemingly objective way you're phrasing it. And I feel like I have learned, slowly and over time, that picking this kind of fight doesn't end up bringing about anything I want, and that there are always other threads on which I could spent my time less frustratingly. So I tried to share that with you. Privately. If I did it poorly, or didn't explain enough, or the ILX anonymizer made it seem creepier than I realized, then I apologize.

And of course you're within your rights (and ILX practice) to do pretty much whatever you want. I have no authority here, it was just a personal, private, non-offended, non-binding suggestion.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltytlwomia7zcv5/facepalm.gif

oy

Please don't encourage Katherine to step away from any threads. I enjoy reading her thoughts about everything (even if I think she's wrong about this one).

Safe to say I accomplished nothing good by sending that note, either. I'm not sure what the moral of this experience is. Maybe it's that suggesting to someone that it's wrong to suggest that other people are wrong is still wrong.

To try to get this back on topic, I went and listened to the other singers you mentioned.

If the Rebecca Collins you mean is http://rebeccacollins.bandcamp.com, that doesn't sound much like FKA twigs to me at all. Sketchy, minimal, slightly off-key singer-songwriter stuff, but neither vocally nor instrumentally akin to FKA twigs to my ears.

The one Laura Sheeran song on Spotify is also in a pretty different space than FKA twigs, instrumentally, and the doubled vocals are creeping more towards Julianna Barwick. None of the twitchy/ethereal thing FKA twigs does.

Karoline Hausted gets into a little electronics on Echoes, but that still feels to me like a singer-songwriter album with a slightly shifted palette.

So when you say those three are doing the same thing as FKA twigs, I feel like we're experiencing different contexts, somehow. Did you really mean that you think they sound the same, or is it something else?

The last Goldfrapp album I thought had a pretty different kind of sensuality than LP1, but for me, at least, LP1's is more insistent and seems more like it's after something specific on its own terms. But wow is that a subjective thing.

And I loved Nicola Hitchcock (and Mandalay), but when you say "Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines", I feel like those are not exactly the same lines. LP1 seems no more like trip hop to me than it does like r&b. Whereas it does feel to me very much like another participant in this interesting emerging marriage of evasive, gauzy, constructed music to drifty, deliberately almost-translucent singing that I feel like a bunch of other artists are also exploring, and in whose company FKA twigs seems to me to be holding her own and contributing something discernably her own. My onging playlist of what I mean by this is here: http://open.spotify.com/user/glennpmcdonald/playlist/4hniDhyHk26LwvrNALpr2G.

Katherine's posts've been fine and that ws rly rly creepy of you

And yeah this album sounds like a joyless Grimes imo

The thing about Grimes is that she is a thoroughly awesome person whose music I find almost wholly unbearable

(Meaning, the degree to which I respond to LP1 is inversely proportional to how I've responded to every Grimes song I've heard and that disparity of personal reaction makes me summarily discount any comparison between the two)

...in almost any "genre" you can assign it to, there are countless people doing the same, but better, and not beneficiaries of the same praise. ...the songs in which Richard does LP1's thing, she blows it out of the water. ...Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines, most of which get ignored.

― katherine, Friday, August 15, 2014 2:20 PM (9 hours ago)

not siding w/ the sending weird mssgs part, and i always enjoy your posting, but i don't know what to make of criticisms like these. they have a the ring informed judgement, but are too sweepingly general to really grasp. it all strikes me as an elaborated version of, "i don't get what other people are seeing in this," or to strip things down further, "i don't like it as much as you."

which is fine, of course, but it's basically just an expression of taste. it doesn't say anything about the art's strengths or deficiencies (if art ever has those qualities). i like what i've heard of the album. the songs intrigue me, both as a sensual experience and in terms of the persona/ideas presented. i don't think of it as groundbreaking, forward-thinking or even particularly novel, but i do enjoy the listen, and that's far more important to me.

The thing is, ILM is often quite tolerant of 'not liking the thing' when it's posed in those terms: I just don't like the thing, I just don't get it, tell me what you're hearing here guys, because this just sounds like ... {a bag of sand or whatever} - to which the response will usually be something along the lines of "oh, but the intense *bagness* of the sand, and the wetness of the sandbag, and oh the sand, my god I love sand, have you ever seen sand that colour and texture before?"

What ILM tends to object to, is people who come in a thread where people are expressing love for something, and dismiss all that love with "but people only love this stuff because *off-base assumption that no one on this thread has actually said*!" The defence of "oh, but I'm not talking about you here, on this thread..." is not really a particularly good one considering that unless you have actually stated what you're talking about (what? Pitchfork? the Guardian? who?) the place you are making this criticism is on the thread, therefore you *are* indicting the thread and its denizens.

That was what I was trying to get at with my "oh lookit the exciting new contrarian stances" type posts. If one does not like having groundless and wrong assumptions made about your tastes and motivations, avoid putting them on others. I guess maybe it looked like I was needling katherine unnecessarily, but moving beyond the simple assumptions, and interrogating why you don't like something, and moving on to "well, I prefer A and B, I think they do X and Y better here" is more useful, because then we can have a conversation about *your* interpretations of X and Y rather than making assumptions about what other people think about X and Y.

But, y'know, the place for that is the ILM thread. And not creepy DMs, because let's face it, creepy unsolicited ILX DMs are not helpful (I've been hooking my ILX accounts to "use once and destroy" gmail accounts for the past 3 or 4 years to avoid getting any more of them).

http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/images/245x/TO67.jpg

^good album

i like this, but something about it seems so modish that i don't want to embrace it too tightly

Ban Glenn McDonald and lock this thread

max hi

Ban Glenn McDonald and lock this thread
http://www.legaljuice.com/files/2013/09/judge-gavel-order-in-the-court.gif

ban max.

max is cool

haha wait no offence glenn but that is an insane email to send. im totally down with people rolling into a thread and straight up saying "this is garbage and you are all nuts", so obv nothing katherine has said on this thread hits me as anything other than registering her thoughts on the album. what possible use is gatekeeping with some sort of if you cant say something nice dont say anything, esp here. every thread on this board is full of dissenters and thank god.

fka twigzzz more like hah owned

fpu stinkz

Ok, DMs considered inherently creepy here. Got it. Didn't know.

Before today how many people did you DM (per month) over differences of opinion about music

dm's aren't creepy

you are just over-helping in a situation that doesn't require it & the more you explain how much you were trying to help the weirder it gets :)

method was sound. contentwise, you're just kinda overdoing it & is veering towards condescending which I would hope was not yr intent

I think I've used the specific ILX email function at least once before in its history. Maybe twice. But in other contexts I've had parallel public and private conversations without it being weird (as far as I'm aware). But I accept that it's considered creepy here. I apologize again, and say again that I meant to cause LESS upset than a comment on-thread, not more.

in the future plz comment on thread with the intention of causing more upset, its like people dont even read the faq

Katherine you are well appreciated around here, don't let these shenanigans put you off coming here.

what is a DM?

depeche mode?

double mocha?

check ur dms

death metal

I love the ideal version of this album more than I love how this sounds - I am totally on board with zeitgeisty sensual goth-crunk - but I just don't think there's enough here to sell it. There's no intensity and I after two consecutive listens back-to-back I'm still struggling for memorable hooks. I think what really lets this album down is that she doesn't have a strong enough voice, or at least she doesn't do enough with it.

I'm not going to claim the Jessy Lanza album from last year was perfect but I feel like it mined a similar territory to this and it has a bit of an edge over this.

xps sup

what the christ has even happened, if anything I agreed and said I was sorry

anyway, to get back to the original topic, the album itself is fine but I wouldn't go so far as to call it singular. I'm a bit stuck because the album/track this is reminding me of is very specific and I just can't think of the name for the life of me. Every name I've mentioned is sort of half-approaching the matter.

Nothing about this album's basic premise or core sonic territory are particularly original but I feel like its treatment of those sounds is pretty singular. Comparing this to Dawn Richard is a case in point - I mean it's closer to Armor On than Goldenheart-era Dawn, but even then the two don't share very much beyond R&B source material and a penchant for bleepy noises and dressing up as space warriors. Even when Dawn is doing intimate ballads she's still a dominant presence and all about the grand gesture ("you are my scripture"; "I broke down all the walls for you", countless bit of comic book or fantasy imagery) whereas Twigs uses these cavernous sonic spaces as backdrops to intense intimacy. And I think their production and (especially) the treatment of their vocals bears those differences out.

In general the album sounds like a lot of things (the Preface alone gives you Julia Holter choral voices, chopped and screwed walrus vocals, clanking industrial drums and rumbling dubstep bass) but it's the way it puts those elements together that gives it its singularity. It sounds like lots of other things but at the same time not much else sounds quite like it. "Singular" to me doesn't mean "completely unlike anything I've heard before".

I suppose another comparison point might be Luomo circa The Present Lover, where if you were just listening in the background for the first time you'd think that is sounded pretty much like any number of tasteful vocal house records, and then the further you get into it the more the various details begin to distinguish it. Although sonically this is kind of on point too, given both records' tendency towards hall-of-mirrors type production.

man, as someone who wrote this album off after finding all of the eps and singles really dull, I am REALLY digging this

idgi

i quite like this album in a non-committal way, can't hear what there is to be blown away by in it. sounds very lost-minor-90s-trip-hop-album to me. "two weeks" overshadows the rest of the album somewhat - it's the most r&b moment and i initially didn't like it because it sounded a bit like an art project version of ciara, but the abrupt switch-ups between vocal lines works so well. not much else sticks as much, unsure yet whether it's because the tunes aren't there or just not as immediate as "two weeks", unsure also if the arrangements interest me enough to really find out. i'm not especially keen on her all-build-no-release approach (vocally or structurally). i wish there was more choral stuff like "preface".

all the rhetoric around it is terrible. don't really hear much "futuristic" or "singular" in it (katherine otm on how it sounds like a ton of other things), and if i read one more male critic salivating over how no one else, ever, gets sex right like twigs does, ugh.

6/10 will probably use as background listening a couple more times this year

when i trust u we can retweet with the lights on when i trust u we can retweet with the lights on

...because really, what we need is more Cis *gay* men to tell us what female sexuality is supposed to look/sound like...

i am not telling you that. i'm saying fka twigs' presentation of power dynamics and intimacy in sexuality are things i've heard plenty of other female artists do, so all the rhetoric about how singular she is feels off to me. (and in a lot of reviews there's more than an overtone of Not Like The Other Girls) (which of course isn't her fault)

guys everyone can do sex in their own way

someone shd remix this album w a ton of sick drops tho

What do trans gay men think of fka twigs' portrayal of female sexuslity

what do asexual otherkin think of this snapchat of me flexing furiously

lol

I'm on the same page at stevie, surprised to be so into this, might go back and re-evaluate

love that this has turned into a contest concerning who can throw the most withering shade at some strawman's take on female sexuality. awesome. the music demands it.

the tunes aren't there

Most of my interest here is in the arrangements and textures and overall atmosphere, generally the songwriting feels insubstantial to me. I like the arrangements and textures so much though, but in general I feel that with more songs of the quality of Two Weeks it could have been astonishing.

this album is sexy as hell imo btw i'm str8

all the rhetoric about how singular she is feels off to me. (and in a lot of reviews there's more than an overtone of Not Like The Other Girls) (which of course isn't her fault)

― lex pretend, Monday, August 18, 2014 1:19 PM

This is the thing, Alex. That it seems like a lot of your (and others') negativity about this album is not actually about the album, but about the discourse *around* the album. For which she is not responsible, and it actually distracts attention from discussing the art to discussing How Men Write About Female Artists which is, y'know, there are a lot of discussions to be had about that but not another derail on another musician's thread. Because 1) it takes the focus off yet another artist's art and onto more fucking music journalists yet again and 2) you are not actually excepted from How Men Write About Female Artists!

I keep reading these criticisms that boil down to "but this sounds like {this other artist that does it better}". But when I go and listen to the few other artists that have been mentioned, sure, I can hear the influence of {future R&B / trip-hop / ethereal baebes goth} on FKA Twigs. Yes, she sounds vaguely like those genres. But then I go and listen to those artists, and they do not sound like twigs. Which makes me know that it's the combination which is appealing (I'm not using words like "singular" or "unique" or whatever because music doesn't have to be ~OMG totally unlike anything else~ to be appealing or good or anything, and the over-reliance on attraction to novelty and singularity as indicator of quality is something that usually spells "jaded pallet" to me.)

I don't have a huge exposure to music at the moment, almost entirely because of lack of cash and limited bandwidth (also, down to lack of cash) so I am facing limited options about what music to even *try out* at the moment. Maybe Twigs just struck a particular chord with the usual ILM-ers who are good predictors of stuff I'll like (DJP, MDC, Mel W) and people whose taste I trust. But that whole thing where people come in and tell me I shouldn't be listening to this thing I'm enjoying, I should be listening to {something which does not hit my buttons} - that gets to be a drag, where one feels like one have to defend my enjoyment of something, rather than just share my excitement. But, y'know, that's just part of ILM, along with {redacted, I'm not going to rise to that kind of tedious bullying any more}.

I wonder what setups people are using to listen to the album because after walking around with it playing through my ludicrously-expensive headphones, I have no idea how anyone can say it has no dynamics with a straight face.

#braggin

is this out for PONO yet?

xp: #notevensubtle

sick mouthy should be no one's role model when it comes to audiophiliac bragging

I'll cop to listening to this on expensive audiophiliac equipment too and DJP is otm

sick mouthy should be no one's role model when it comes to audiophiliac bragging

― lex pretend, Monday, August 18, 2014 3:13 PM (11 minutes ago)

oooooh sick burn wait what

Yeah, I have pretty amazing speakers, and that definitely contributed to my experience of the album.

(But, still, the first time I heard it, it was booming off echoey brutalist concrete, which was hardly an ideal listening circumstance, and I loved it then.)

It's definitely an album that benefits disproportionately from being listened to on speakers/headphones that really give you a sense of space.

Yeah I was listening on nice but not ridiculously expensive (grado) headphones and the pleasure this album brings seems v geared to that scenario.

see i just have $10 earbuds and this sounds totally sonically whitewashed to me. so maybe this really is just music for the landed gentry in which case 凸^-^凸

"only people with good audio equipment can really appreciate fkat" would be an excellent troll to foist on the internet at large

I dunno, I can hear the dynamics of LP1 on my shitty $20 Sony headphones.

People will spend 8 hours a day posting to ILM and spend $50 on 'brunch' but will still gawk at buying a nice pair of headphones ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Only if they're Beats headphones.

fuck Beats

My favourite genre. Fuck Beats.

I prefer fuck beats over nipplecore.

This album sounds great, and dynamics are stupid, who wants to listen to a record with their finger on the volume? not me

Not sure I would frame "dynamics" that way tbf

i listened to it on decent speakers and that's the thing, it sounded crystalline and quite lovely but in a kind of one-trick way?

the one album that kept springing to mind was björk's vespertine which i guess is a compliment, and tbh i love vespertine but it also has its share of songs that are a bit nothingy

won't someone hate this album on its own terms

i don't like the comparisons with records by singers (like dawn richard or whoever) because this feels like it's about (or inextricably tied to) the beats in a big way. like she's more interested in living inside the music than singing on top of it. which actually is pretty similar to Vespertine, although i find LP1 way hookier than that.

xps i haven't spent $50 on brunch in at least two weeks!

as far as sensual/floaty/ethereal R&B-not-R&B records, what i have heard of this so far (not had a chance to hear the whole album, just a few songs so i may change my mind), it made me think a lot of jessy lanza on hyperdub.

ah, just saw boxedjoy mentioned JL already...

"This is the thing, Alex. That it seems like a lot of your (and others') negativity about this album is not actually about the album, but about the discourse *around* the album. For which she is not responsible, and it actually distracts attention from discussing the art to discussing How Men Write About Female Artists which is, y'know, there are a lot of discussions to be had about that but not another derail on another musician's thread. Because 1) it takes the focus off yet another artist's art and onto more fucking music journalists yet again and 2) you are not actually excepted from How Men Write About Female Artists!"

pretty sure I am in fact excepted from How Men Write About Female Artists -- although you're now the fourth or fifth person to imply I'm a man in the process of saying how music is wrong, so perhaps there is something I'm missing. do I focus on how albums are received critically? sure! But I do this for everyone. It's part of how I think, it's not limited to this album, and perhaps this is naive but some part of me thinks that music writers can actually change narratives while they're happening, otherwise we as critics might as well drop dead while 53 Awesome GIFs of "Two Weeks" are assembled around our corpses.

as for your not hearing what I hear -- I don't know what to say to that. I'm sorry? I can't control what other people hear in music, I can only control what I hear. I'm also notoriously bad at pinpointing the exact song something reminds me of at any given time -- a lot of my suggesting names is me trying to figure it out for myself. (For example, the beginning of the new Charli XCX song sounds maddeningly like something I know, I'm trying to figure out what it is so I don't keep thinking it's Natalia Kills, and this is going to bother me until death or when the answer strikes me, whichever comes first.)

"But that whole thing where people come in and tell me I shouldn't be listening to this thing I'm enjoying, I should be listening to {something which does not hit my buttons} - that gets to be a drag" -- you're telling me. it's not like I'm invading the FKA Twigs Stan ProBoards Forum to troll, I'm posting in a thread dedicated to discussing an artist and sharing my actual opinions, which inconveniently in this case do not align with consensus. what boggles my mind is that all of this is in response to people who say they basically like this album! it's 6/10! it's better than average (for lex, that's *significantly* better, sorry lex)! actually, it doesn't boggle at all, because the angriest emails I've ever received have been in response to mildly complimentary posts/reviews.

that one part should be "I can barely control what I hear." there's probably another typo somewhere in there, but that's the one that matters. it's too early for this shit.

Is your name Alex? Because I have this crazy habit of addressing ppl by their display names and yours says "katherine".

no, but you specifically included others in that

The "others" whose dislike may be inspired by the ~discourse around twigs~ is nowhere specified as being contiguous with "male writers whose approach towards female artists is problematic." There are three groups in this sentence: 1) haters 2) ppl engaged in discourse and 3) male writers. I implied there may be overlap between A and B, and definitely overlap between B and C, but it's very hard to read any kind of a Venn Diagram which implies "A, therefore definitely C" which would be necessary to read that paragraph as calling *you* "a man."

I dislike conversing with people who imply I said things I specifically did not. So I don't think it's gonna be productive for us to continue this conversation.

the Twigs moniker makes me think of a high-fiber breakfast cereal. I was daydreaming about possibilities for collabs and it turns out there is already someone out there going by the name DJ Activia.

well...i like one song.

I apologize; perhaps I was being somewhat snarky because that is a thing that's happened to me multiple times and at this point it confuses me more than anything. I didn't mean to upset you, and I'm sorry. Once again, I really wish I liked this album more than I did because no album is worth the total swath of alienation that it has apparently become for me.

I am not upset, so there is no need to feel bad on my account!

(However, I would also like to say that I do find it irritating - not upsetting, just merely irritating in a petty way - when people imply emotions, such as "upset" to my words, when those emotions are not actually not there, and I am being super-calm and rational and in fact using set theory to explain myself! But the irritation springs from the perceived gendering here.)

I am generally not a lyrics person but the line "when I trust you, we can do it with the lights on" has been resonating through my mind since I first heard the album.

^^

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

(I hate to ask because the problem is, when talking about female artists, there is a tendency in male listeners to reduce female artists to sex and nothing but sex and sexual appeal, erasing aesthetics, intellectual content, politics, etc etc. However, given how much of this album is very specifically about sex and sexuality and desire, it's weird not to talk about the lyrics, even if most male writers addressing this album have been doing it very badly, or in ways that are gross / overtly racist.)

Do you hear yourself as the "you" in twigs' songs? Are you the object being desired? Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you? Or are you identifying with the subject in this song, are you listening to these songs and feeling yourself relating to the desire she expresses, and wanting to be the "little spoon"? When you hear a line like "my thighs are apart for when you're ready to breathe in", are you hearing those thighs as *your* thighs, alive with longing for an inaccessible partner that you're gagging for? Or are you the "you" in the song who has to choose to breathe in, and get between those thighs?

I mean, I had a whole thread asking whether people heard themselves as the "you" in the song or the "I" in the song, but this really is one of those songs where I am curious how people hear that.

i identify w/ the object, the 'you' being sung to

I am identifying with the "you" in most cases here, but some of these lines are things I can see myself saying to someone else (such as the one I quoted).

i do not identify as the object or the subject, i appreciate it as really beautiful lyricism an artist is writing about an unknown 3rd person

I feel like a voyeur when listening to these songs

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

is it alright if it's neither? i picture it as her singing about just someone and not all these songs are written in the first person

(btw are we really still using "feminazi" here?)

wow did frogbs just word police on branwell

this could get good

How about you guys not do this, and just stick to the subject of the question I asked, huh?

We got some "you" answers, some "3rd person" answers, so this is interesting.

I always tend to take the perspective of the singer (whether male or female, in character or otherwise) in the same way I would a narrator.

Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you?

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

Why?

http://i.imgur.com/txEGwOo.jpg

it's "dreams time"

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

I kinda half understand why you'd say this. But then again, I do sometimes identify with the "you" in these songs, in that way. (is it wrong if I identify with the "you" in songs when it's Miguel singing what he'd like to do to a "you"? How about being the "you" when it's the Jesus and Mary Chain offering to be "your" plastic toy, or Interpol offering to be "prey for the female"?)

I find that switch back and forth between being the "I" doing the desiring and the "you" being desired, in songs like this, where the song seems to be a sexual invitation, really quite interesting.

(And I just checked the lyric sheets to see the perspective. Most songs have an I and a You, but several songs have an I, a You and a She. (I thought Video Girl was third person, but there's an I, a you and a she in the titular video.) But most of them are first/second person. She might not always be the narrator of the song, but all of these songs are sung from the subject position of a narrator.)

is it weird bc of assumptions about how women listen to music, versus how men listen to music? it seems normal to me to respond to a second person address as being directed at 'you.' this doesn't mean that there's some longing emotional subtext to that identification (tho there might be), just that when addressed as 'you' it makes sense to think it's actually talking about 'you.' especially if your gender/sexual identities are compatible w/ the singer.

I never, as far as I'm aware, imagine that I am the narrator, subject or object of popular songs recorded by people I do not personally know. I do not believe this personality trait to be a function of my sexuality, but I guess self-awareness is limited.

i think katherine is bringing up some urgent and key responses here to the idea in this thread that if you don't like this it's because you are "x" when sometimes people just dont like shit they dont like. it is imo the dumbest aspect of conversations abt music on this board/the internet/among critics in general. i realize no one likes to be wrong, but branwell, hammering home the "oh i never said that, you are just terrible at interpreting my words" over and over is just a bad look.

xp when you read second person narrative fiction (like bright lights big city) do you have any more identification or intimacy re the text than reading 3rd person or 1st person?

bc i do. i think it's natural to identify harder w/ "you" than with "him/her"

i'll never hear "feel like making love" the same way again

hahaha

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying, let alone being public on a lyrics sheet about saying, partly because the album seems to me like it's designed for listeners to occupy the sung-at role.

as for second-person narrative fiction suffice it to say I have many thoughts on this subject and they would all be pretty substantial derails, which I gather is a concern.

never even occurred to me that some people listen to songs as if they're being directed at themselves.
bizarre

well not like literally

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying

^^

^this, like i'm reading a novel. the subject or characters may resonate with me but literally identifying as the subject/object, nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6UAYGxiRwU

lot of x-posts now, but...

A lot of this stuff (re narrators, subjectivity vs vignettes) was brought up on this thread:

Do You Identify With Lyrics, And Ifso, How?

Personally, I don't think that relating to a narrator/object vs seeing a story externally is gendered, so much as it depends on the closeness of whether you can project/see yourself in that particular story or not. If it has become gendered, it's because of what subject positions are on offer.

I mean, obviously, I wonder, again and again, if it's harder for straight men to identify as the "I" of a song when it is a female narrator singing, because of the pressures of heteronormativity. Which is why I asked, when I had a large sample size of str8 dudes responding very positively to a female narrator as sexual subject, how they were viewing that subject in relation to themselves.

FWIW I usually view the "you" as another character within the song, usually a partly-unseen one.

Yeah, but Matt, why would you see it as weird if someone heard a song directed at a "you" and decided to imagine/project/relate to being a potential or symbolic "you" in regards to the sentiments of the song? Isn't that how art is supposed to work?

Because identifying or taking the perspective of the subject is more interesting - that's the perspective the singer has chosen to give us. If I'm listening to, say, Caught Out There I don't much care about the person being screamed at, much less about imagining myself in their place.

x-post now but...

partly because the album seems to me like it's designed for listeners to occupy the sung-at role.

Why have you made this assumption?

Because one of the things I like about these lyrics is the emotional flip of "am I supposed to relate to the 'I' here or the 'you' here?"

Like I can actually imagine really disliking these lyrics if I assumed that they were *intended* to be read just as some smutty come-on for het boys to get het-up over. (I haaaaated Madonna for many years in my teens, for the same reason. Wow, was I wrong when I went back and listened to the lyrics I had read that way.) But this album offers three subject positions to choose from, (the "you", the "I", a third person voyeur) and it's ambiguous which one "I" am supposed to take.

(And I think one of the reasons that Male Writers Talking About Twigs = such gross discourse is that they assume that it is *intended* as, and in fact, can only be read as "you, the male listener, is intended as the 'you', as the subject of sexy come-ons by the female singer." Which I think is a gross misreading of a rather ambiguous record.)

Sometimes songs or albums happen that way for me. I haven't been able to predict how for almost a decade now -- I've tried, and I'd probably be a better critic if I figured it out -- so it's not going to happen prompted by FKA fucking Twigs.

basically it's like the spinning dancer illusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer) -- it's obviously working one way, and though I vaguely know there are others around who see it the other way I just can't fathom how.

(yes, I know that is possibly an unfortunate choice of metaphor, but the duck/rabbit illusion doesn't work like that for me and those are the only two I know about.)

And I think one of the reasons that Male Writers Talking About Twigs = such gross discourse is that they assume that it is *intended* as, and in fact, can only be read as "you, the male listener, is intended as the 'you', as the subject of sexy come-ons by the female singer." Which I think is a gross misreading of a rather ambiguous record.

I haven't read a single male critic taking this approach fwiw. That's not to deny their existence but that's slightly bizarre projection.

You can start with that gross "natural rhthym" Guardian article linked upthread?

(granted, I've read a lot more messageboard, Tumblr, twitter than I have "Proper Critic" but this is part of the discourse, too.)

I mean, if it's going on at all -- I really don't want to turn this into a shitting-on-reviewers session, but I have noticed it in places -- it's going on subtly. this is 2014, most writers have learned not to lead with "Britney Spears extends a honeyed thigh" anymore. (yes, I know that RS feature wasn't all like that, but still.)

FWIW I don't think twigs is directly singing songs on this album to me; I am imagining some isolated lyrics in scenarios where a fictional version of myself is being talked to by a fictional woman.

And here I thought I was the only person who wrote DJP fan fiction! :-P

lol

Seriously though, any identification going on with how I'm processing these songs is happening at a remove; sometimes I'm hearing these as self-contained stories I'm watching as a remove, whereas other lines pop out has something that taps into a memory/thought/feeling and become more personalized, if still at a remove from reality. I'm not sitting here thinking "ooh this gorgeous woman is singing sex songs to me"; especially given that I have never met twigs, I can't imagine ascribing that kind of intent to her (or really, anyone's) music.

I assume all artists are speaking directly to me. Ice Cube and I haven't spoken since he released "No Vaseline."

http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/0_21_john_hinckley_450.jpg

btw with all the comparisons that have been drawn here and in reviews, i'm surprised that i don't see more (any?) mentions of Kelela.

I don't think anyone without a major mental illness thinks that songs are sung directly *at* them (well, not counting creepy fanzine or local press writers who don't realise it's performers' *job* to flirt with the audience/be friendly with interviewers) but more a fantasy / imagined thing, either with an imaginary person (or am idealised mediated view of the imagined heartthrob.)

But I kinda wonder about the assumption of thinking "oh, this is just a manufactured heartthrob/Wank object" as opposed to "I could take either role in this scenario" or "I could sing something like this to my lover" or "I could imagine a lover singing something like this to me."

haven't heard this yet but as a general thing i just do not "get" the idea of identification.

it's one of those things talked about in consumption of just about all artwork and i've never really gotten a good def of what part of the reader/listener/viewer experience "identification" is supposed to be

I can relate to that

Really? Like, you have never heard a lyric (or read a story, or watched a scene in a film) and thought "wow, I know *exactly* how that feels"?

would also probably add that I think this is an especially valid topic to discuss in regards to LP1 because most of twigs' interviews have been largely about what roles people take in such things.

Or even "Wow, I would like to know how that feels!" (even if it's not something you have experienced personally yourself.)

yes and yes. is that it? it's not what i'm after i guess, never has been. and really not on the level of lyrics. the feeling of being moved by what's happening and what commonalities might exist between the performer and me, even fictionally, i mean... who even cares? i don't care about that, in myself. people take it as a given as something worth having in art, to the point where there doesn't seem to be much interrogation of what it is

moved by what's happening VS what commonalities etc, i should say

anyway like i said i haven't heard this yet so, take it away, actually informed ppl.

ok well fyi this is a list of all the artists she sounds like

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32863603/Screenshot%202014-08-19%2018.17.51.png

hth

This album is making me want to go back to the EPs and see if I get anything more from them; previously they left me extremely cold.

I don't think anyone without a major mental illness thinks that songs are sung directly *at* them

oh sorry i should have clarified - I'm DJ Yella

hahahahahahahaaaa

looool

I bet you think this song is about you

the whole idea of identification with pop music is interesting to me. I always put myself in the mind of the singer, never the subject, whether or not I relate to the lyrics. But it's the songs with lyrics expressing thoughts/emotions I can really identify with are the ones that usually end up meaning the most to me. The gender of the singer and my sexual orientation have almost nothing to do with it

hi I am digging the fuck out of this album

that is all

^^

yeah this, and for what its worth I've really not heard the lyrics in my first 5 or 7 whatever listens. I just don't think the words are at all prominent on this lovely sounding record. But I often think that.

i still haven't listened to this album but whats wrong w/ identifying w/ subject, object, or 3rd person remove & why should your gender/orientation be determinative of any of the above?

there are a lot of lines on this that stand out, memorably phrased or not - "tell me what do i do when you're not here"; "when i trust you we can do it with the lights on"; "was i just a number to you" etc

haven't heard this yet but as a general thing i just do not "get" the idea of identification.

― goole,

otm. I've mentioned this here. For years I thought it was a consequence of being gay -- 95 percent or whatever of songs aren't about me anyway, so fictive leaps are required.

yeah totally not identifying with the 'you' of the album, clearly i identify with FKA Twigs (and i'm a straight male).

explicitly sexual lyrics delivered in (even an "arguably") erotic manner will inevitably create a sort of fantasy space, a field of play connecting the imagined performer or "voice" with the listener. not every listener will relate to this construct in the same way, of course. we all desire different things, but we're also more or less open to this sort of engagement. some listeners will choose to maintain critical distance, some will deny or vilify the invitation, while others will enter only on certain terms.

i wouldn't fault anyone for finding "two weeks" sexy or for acknowledging that their response to the music has a sexual component. better, i think, to be honest about such things than to sweep them from sight in the name of propriety. that's not a blanket license to drool in print. to the extent that the discourse surrounding a female artist is dominated by "sexual appreciations" expressed by male fans, things can get very gross very quickly. fine line, i suppose...

"numbers," lyrically, is like the other side of soft cell's "numbers"

I've never understood Alfred's "I have a hard time identifying with singers because I'm gay" line. I've always identified closely with singers straight, gay, male, and female.

I guess I should read the rest of the argument before I comment.

I really don't want to ~shut down debate~ on this, because it is obviously a topic of huge interest to me... BUT I do think this is supposed to be a thread about FKA Twigs and people should probably listen to the album, and comment on whether or not or how they relate to {this specific set of lyrics} rather than making this another general "how do you relate (or not) to lyrics?" thread, because we already have one (possibly several) of those threads?

tl;dr you should probably listen to LP1 before you comment

i'm open to people commenting on whatever they like, so long as the conversation doesn't fall too far afield of the music. a bit of digression in threads keeps things interesting, and i tend to like conversations that move back and forth between the general and the specific. doesn't seem to me that anyone here's saying anything untoward or counterproductive. but that's just me.

anyway, discussion of the sexyness of this music is a little strange to me. for one thing, i rarely relate to music & musicians that way. to use my earlier language, i hang back from the field of play, maintain my critical distance or w/e. i'm struck by the delivery of lines like "you're the only one who instigates, get your mouth open," but i don't swoon. it's not like she's singing those words to only to meeeeee. for another, the sort of whispery, upper register singing twigs typically trads in strikes me as strangely disembodied, perhaps especially when set against booming, hollowed out beats. fragile humanity stranded amidst precision-engineered future junk, evokes an inner state, but seems somehow to deny the physical. get the same thing from radiohead, tbh, and grimes too.

for contrast, the lower, fuller voice twigs uses to deliver the "how would you like it if my lips touched yours" section of "hours" seems more vivid, physical and (yeah) sexy to me than the rest of the album. it's a great album, btw. much more satisfying as a whole than the discussion itt this thread suggests.

trads = trades, natch

"numbers," lyrically, is like the other side of soft cell's "numbers"

― when you call my name it's like a prickly pear (Crabbits), Tuesday, August 19, 2014 7:46 PM (Yesterday)

otm! one of soft cell's finest, and yeah, the twigs song is almost an answer record (intentional or not). something similar in the arrangement, too, though i can't put my finger on just what. maybe those clanking bell noises? echo the synth stabs in the soft cell track. suspect i'm reaching there...

I've never understood Alfred's "I have a hard time identifying with singers because I'm gay" line. I've always identified closely with singers straight, gay, male, and female.

same - i've always found that kind of transference pretty natural, it's like as long as i identify with the spirit of the lyrics the details don't impede that

yeah i would have thought identification is that much more powerful for the songsphere not being the reality in which it features

I've never understood Alfred's "I have a hard time identifying with singers because I'm gay" line. I've always identified closely with singers straight, gay, male, and female.

― The Reverend, Wednesday, August 20, 2014 3:40 AM

I enjoy the story the singer tells; I don't look for parallels with my own life. That's what I meant.

OK, I started typing on the other thread, but I guess we're having this discussing here still.

saw it! Thanks.

No, I haven't posted it yet, I'm still typing. Sigh. It's a complicated post. (Which means that it will probably either go over people's heads, or just be misinterpreted, hoo hah.)

OK, I'll put it here because the revived thread now seems to have a good conversation about non-English language audiences and lyrics. Christ this is an epic now, which I didn't intend when I started typing.

I've never understood Alfred's "I have a hard time identifying with singers because I'm gay" line. I've always identified closely with singers straight, gay, male, and female.

same - i've always found that kind of transference pretty natural, it's like as long as i identify with the spirit of the lyrics the details don't impede that

― lex pretend, Wednesday, August 20, 2014 9:39 AM

I mean, this is such a nebulous thing because, granted, there can be so many layers to what it means to "identify" with a lyric or a singer.

I'm going to start right out, by saying that there are likely people for whom this is a "can't" - people who experience neurodiversity, people on the spectrum, people who are for whatever reason just can't or don't experience that emotional brain-mirroring state so that "identifying" with the subject or the object of a song is just not within their capabilities. And I'm going to then say, if this is your deal, I am not talking about you. I recognise this is a thing.

I'm talking about people who state that they are certainly capable of listening to a lyric or a singer and thinking "Oh, I know what that feels like" or "I would like to feel like that" or "I am certainly capable of feeling like that, if I were in a similar situation." And yet think that this experience is unimportant, or not worth considering, or even (quoting goole) "who cares about that."

Because that doesn't sound like a can't, that sounds like a won't (or, in some cases, I'd venture, a "mustn't")

(Also, I am not talking about the "I don't really listen to lyrics" crowd. I am mostly of the "I don't listen to lyrics" persuasion, in terms of lyrics are not the number one thing that attract me to a song - yet I am still able to identify with lyrics, and think it is important and worthy of consideration and worth caring about when I do.)

"There are not a lot of lyrics available for my particular subject position" is, I feel, a valid complaint. For gay ppl in a world full of str8 lovesongs; for women who are interested in male-dominated genres of rock music; for PoC who have been pushed out of American chart music. I certainly *get* what it's like to rarely see anyone like you represented in the music of your choice. But many, many people in this position develop the ability to identify with the subject positions of the more represented. (I found a way to identify with the lyrics of the omnipresent cis-het dudes of indie-rock through some common emotional resonance!)

But the comments that come up repeatedly in this argument, the "mustn't"s and the "that's uninteresting" or "oh, that's just how ~girls~ listen to music, me, *I* am objective and not distracted by identification or not" that bug me. It's not whether you're male or female, or gay or straight - it's whether you think that ~identifying with a song's lyrics~ is a useless, de-emphasised, non-objective, illegitimate, weak-sauce, over-touchy-feely, girly way of consuming music. And I do think that's a position that's tied up with machismo, and the privileging of certain *conceptions* of masculinity.

...

I guess to bring this back to Twigs, this is the main thing that feels really different to me from the ~ethereal baebe~ school of goth I hear in it: There is no "I" in the ~ethereal baebe~. There are lots and lots of female singers, but they are either 1) singing in made-up languages (Cocteau Twins) or Latin and Medieval French (Dead Can Dance, Miranda Sex Garden) or Bulgarian or made-up syllables to make note-holding sound good. Or 2) they are female vocalists working as mouthpieces for male lyricists or curators (This Mortal Coil, His Name Is Alive). It took ages for me to work out why I loved this kind of music, but found it so emotionally unsatisfying. There is no "I" there; it runs the risk of girly voice as accessory or even gimmick. But it wasn't until I heard Lush, who sung in ~ethereal baebe~ stylings, but very pointedly sung from their own subject-positions - and were criticised for doing so! (or else, their agency was denied, and it was assumed that their (male) producer was doing all the work.) that I suddenly realised what it was that was bugging me about ~ethereal baebe~ as a genre and a trope!

One of the things I like about this record is that it is ~ethereal baebe~ with a very strong subject position "I", and an object. An ethereal baebe, but with agency and desires of her own, which ethereal baebes are not supposed to be, they're supposed to be, well, ethereal and wan and incorporeal and wispy.

Anyway, I've been typing forever now, so I guess I'm gonna put this on the twigs thread instead now. Sorry for the great length. Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. :-/

God I feel like I've farted in this thread now. I should have posted it in the other thread. Or just not at all. I never feel good after posting massive ILM posts. Never, ever, ever.

not like i've lived with this album long enough to have strong opinions one way or the other, but i do feel that it drops off a bit in the closing stretch. "kicks" wraps things up nicely, but "closer" and "give up" pass in a blur. perhaps over time i'll find something there, but for now, i'm more inclined to start over when "numbers" fades.

I really don't want to ~shut down debate~ on this, because it is obviously a topic of huge interest to me... BUT I do think this is supposed to be a thread about FKA Twigs and people should probably listen to the album, and comment on whether or not or how they relate to {this specific set of lyrics} rather than making this another general "how do you relate (or not) to lyrics?" thread, because we already have one (possibly several) of those threads?

tl;dr you should probably listen to LP1 before you comment

― Shugazi (Branwell with an N), Wednesday, August 20, 2014 2:52 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

classic threadpolicing

classic something

It took ages for me to work out why I loved this kind of music, but found it so emotionally unsatisfying. There is no "I" there; it runs the risk of girly voice as accessory or even gimmick. But it wasn't until I heard Lush, who sung in ~ethereal baebe~ stylings, but very pointedly sung from their own subject-positions - and were criticised for doing so! (or else, their agency was denied, and it was assumed that their (male) producer was doing all the work.) that I suddenly realised what it was that was bugging me about ~ethereal baebe~ as a genre and a trope!

the truth is that i listen to a lot of female singer-songwriter artists where i identify primarily w/ the subject role and not the object - i'm thinking primarily of like neko case, kathleen edwards, laura marling, etc where the gender difference is not an impediment to identifying w/ their content. i think partially it's different w/ FKA bc the kind of lyrics are less... carefully i'm going to use the word 'introspective' here, but really i think the lyrics are just very dominating - sudden and explicit. so i don't think it's about the gender, but maybe more about whether i can imagine myself saying these things - or easier imagine myself hearing these things. i don't know if this complicates what you're saying at all - bc i think these singer songwriter artists (i wouldn't describe them as ~ethereal baebes~) do have a 'strong subject position I, and an object.'

oh, also i wanted to add maybe it has something to do w/ the production as well. that there's a feeling of distance + space from the vocals and singer which makes me feel as a remove, whereas some of these other artists i mentioned are incredibly intimate from a production pov.

Maybe it's not threadpolicing. Maybe it's more like "I'm about to write a big massive fuckoff post which is only tangentially related to the artist being discussed in this thread, and I recognise that some people prefer not to read my massive fuckoff tl;dr posts, so shall we take this somewhere else?" as a gesture of respect to other readers of the thread, that they might not be interested in the same stuff as me?" Just maybe?

Maybe if you're going to say things in a public forum you should chill abt how they're received?

I don't understand not being into "Closer" and "Give Up", PARTICULARLY "Give Up"

Closer is the one that always gets me, because of the shape-note harmonies.

look i feel like I'VE been misunderstood, so i'll have to answer on that other thread i guess, when i have some time, if this post doesn't cover it

"And yet think that this experience is unimportant, or not worth considering, or even (quoting goole) "who cares about that.""

that isn't what i meant and i don't think my post indicates that. the point is my, goole's, experience doesn't seem that important or interesting. the emotion brought out by music has a feeling of coming from outside the self or from non-linguistic sources, so tying them back into some personal similarity with my life (if that's what people mean by identification) isn't something i tend to do. certainly some music 'feels' closer to me than others, but how is that identification? rather than just liking it?

and i wasn't denying that this is important, or the being "represented" in a hierarchical world as you say isn't vital and tied up in body politics, that's all true. i was saying, people talk about identifying but i don't know what they mean when they say that -- the implied def's keep slipping around in this thread already. i don't think representation and identification are the same thing, exactly, are they?

x-post to goole, sorry if I misunderstood, gonna read you again and come back on that?

The feeling of distance and space (plus the alienness, the remoteness) of the production and delivery is what totally codes "ethereal baebe" here - and the interesting thing is first, the contrast between the distance/space/remoteness of the production and the warmth and intimacy of the content.

But the thing about the "ethereal baebe" was that she was always coded so *passive*. (My former housemate used to do a great ~ethereal baebe~ impression of hanging her head limply and singing "I'm tooo drugged to fiiiight yooouuu".) And part of the schtick here is the contrast between the expected passivity implied by taking the Submissive's position, and the fact that these lyrics actually end up almost aggressive in their pursuit of the desired object. Which, yeah, as I think katherine pointed out - this is almost a cliche. The cliche being, "ooh, in psychosexual dynamics, the submissive partner almost always ends up in control". But it's that I/you subject switch, which of these positions is on offer to you? Which one is the passive or active position? The submissive pursuer, or the dominant pursued?

sometimes i don't identify w/stuff because the ppl making it seem so far from my experience but whatever lyric might tap into something inexpressible or universal sadness

like danny says by the ramones:

Danny says we gotta go
Gotta go to Idaho
But we can't go surfin'
'Cause it's 20 below

like the ramones are far from me as surfing and idaho but i dunno i think about that lyric all the time

that isn't what i meant and i don't think my post indicates that. the point is my, goole's, experience doesn't seem that important or interesting. the emotion brought out by music has a feeling of coming from outside the self or from non-linguistic sources, so tying them back into some personal similarity with my life (if that's what people mean by identification) isn't something i tend to do. certainly some music 'feels' closer to me than others, but how is that identification? rather than just liking it?

I think this is what I was trying to get at with my addendum, where I started with identification as "I have felt like this" but also proceeds beyond that to "I could imagine feeling like this". It's kinda the process of being able to look through someone else's eyes, from their point of view.

And on one level, representation is important, because being able to see someone *like you* represented as an available subject position is really important.

But, on the other hand, one of the purposes of art, is to try to instil a sense of... emotional imagination. Of experiencing the subject position of someone unlike you, and being able to recognise their humanity, and recognise their experiences and emotions as real - and potentially ~identifying with~ (in the more nebulous sense) someone not like you.

It's this dual process that is why art is important, what art is *for*, really. That two-step process of identification - firstly seeing your subject position represented. And then again, learning to identify with someone unlike you, is really important in the formation of sympathy, empathy, compassion, all of those emotions and capabilities that get demoted in the "treat everything ~objectively~" approach (and not coincidentally, get coded as "feminine" in the weird gendering of emotions scheme.) I do think that learning to put yourself in the place of the "I" in a song is part of that formation of emotional imagination process.

It's just that, in this particular space, some people have to work harder to *find* art that mirrors them (while others have to work to find art that *doesn't* mirror them). This is a problem.

This album is good and gradually opening up to me, but I think the last three years of palid, arty, Internet-hyped R&B have numbed whatever "OMG" impact this might've made on me

even more thankful now that I have avoided most of the past three years of pallid, arty, Internet-hyped R&B now

This album is good and gradually opening up to me, but I think the last three years of palid, arty, Internet-hyped R&B have numbed whatever "OMG" impact this might've made on me

― Evan R, Wednesday, August 20, 2014 2:18 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this is exactly why i haven't listened to this

cant think of a less interesting direction for crit music at this point

I wish this was arty! It's just pallid.

i dunno seems "arty"
who knows what that means tho

put it in the banned words file along with "angular"

it's kinda hopped up on goofballs compared to a lot of R&B that i hear at least, but i dunno maybe it's like a lot of stuff like deej says

though generally a slam, "pallid" seems a fair reflection of the breathy vocal approach, low impact beats, and hookless drift of the songwriting. where gothic ethereality meets post-burial beatmaking, the connotations become less negative anyway.

"arty" is harder to parse. i suppose it typically means, "not conventionally pop, not formally bound by genre, perhaps willfully <strange> or <difficult>." also suggests either sophistication or pretension. again, can see why folks might apply it here.

laurie anderson's music might just as fairly be called "arty and pallid", and i love laurie anderson, so...

"But this bag of sand is so baggy and sand-shaped!!!!"

What is "the other thread" ppl keep mentioning here?

Do You Identify With Lyrics, And Ifso, How?

ty

One unexpected thing I'm taking away from this album is a healthier respect for Paul Epworth's versatility.

He's got more than just an EP's worth of ideas

I just tried to like that post, I've got to get off of Facebook

current lyrical obsession: "I could kiss you for hours and not miss a thing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkK8g6FMEXE

one thing i'm gradually noticing is that music everyone else goes nuts for that i don't is often characterised by really spidery, skittery beats which i guess are complicated syncopated rhythms or something.

i wish there was more layered choral stuff on this album! it's growing on me though

xpost mtv played that video so much in 1998. EVEN WHEN I DREAM OF YOUUUUUUUUUUU

The headphones pro tip helped me a lot with this album.

i wish there was more layered choral stuff on this album!

Me too. That's one of my favourite things TBH. Someone please commission FKA Twigs to write an Opera, or an Oratio or something along those lines.

I also wish that

I love when she goes all demented-Enya on "Closer"

god yeah enya! that's totally a good comparison to some of the stuff they do w the layer vox

*enya awakes from unholy slumber*

This thing she did with dance group Wet Wipez is awesome - "Preface" remixed by Aphex and most definitely, "arty":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A43M0GJ0tA

I could watch her dance all day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nGFNayjYrM

not actually remixed by Aphex btw, just a bad (and badly-phrased) comparison, sry about that

Holy shit, that Wet Wipez thing is probably the single most Goth thing I have ever watched in my life. So amazing. Waaaaaaahhhhhh. <3

i am listening to this album as a kind of dystopic inversion of grimes' utopian "visions".

I am listening to this album as if I only ever heard half of Grimes' album once

i am not listening to this album anymore

I am still listening to this album.

I listened to this album! Twice!

sometimes i am listening to this album
other times i'm not
i'm an enigma

areyoulisteningtofkatwigs.com

I keep listening to this album, but Two Weeks remains the always-coming-back-to-you-boo song.

I think this album is way boring

the "when I trust you we can do it with the lights on" is quoted in a lot of reviews, can't help but wonder if this is a sexually progressive or conservative statement, also, if you have sex in the morning does that count as sex with the lights on?

after listening to this a few times, i do like it a lot, though it does (willfully i imagine) mostly ignore songwriting dynamics as a few people have said, but i dont mind that. she does sound very much like a slightly mannered art school-ciara like how jessy lanza sounded like an art-aaliyah, so i could do with less use of that sort of ecstatic flutter she does so frequently (oddly, she also makes me think of maxwell - not saying she has the voice, but i keep getting flashbacks to lifetime, like shes memorised certain phrasing that she has now built into her arsenal of vocal effects/tipping points). does make me think that while i enjoy how she challenges journalists' perceptions of her based on race, the R&B-ness of the album (even as it quite obviously isnt straight R&B) can't really be denied. also, closer is an incredible song (and maybe the only/most 4ad sounding thing on here). makes me think a bit of salem and ooOOO (however you write it).

yeah, closer is my favorite song on the album too but i am a witch house apologist.

I don't really have a favorite at this point; sometimes I'm not in the mood to hear "Hours" or "Pendulum" but I still love them.

Thinking Pendulum is my fav

the rap bit in "Hours" is my favourite thing on this

okay the lyric that is currently haunting me is "Pull out the incisor/Give me two weeks/You won't recognize her"

watching "Marathon Man" with the narrator of this song must be decidedly odd

(was gonna say "The Dentist" but that felt a little too pat)

Favorite new production tics I only noticed after 30+ listens:

The pulsating underwater drums on the leadup to the bridge

The multitracked vocal adlibs after the bridge

(In re: Two Weeks, obv, which I think is the song of the year for me so far)

Her music is fairly interesting, but does she have the worst name ever? She probably does.

Like.. How do you even parse a name like that? It's just trying to be annoying afaict.

I assume the FKA stands for 'formerly known as' given her legal trouble - I'm in the 'it's so bad it's good' camp

I mean thank god she didn't name herself "Social Media"

But FKA... Ok, can maybe go with this if something good is coming.. Twigs. TWIGS? TWIGS PLURAL? AS IN MORE THAN ONE TWIG?

I would probably really like her if not for this.

If my dad said 'who are you listening to at the moment?' and I said 'FKA Twigs' he would have a fucking field day.

Twigs was a great name by itself fuiud

Yes, would be fine by itself. With FKA it magically becomes very ugly IMO. Dunno, I should probably get over it.

You guys are doing it wrong, it's "fuckah twigs".

Soon to do a duet with RAH DIGGA!

chap what's yr dad's deal

but does she have the worst name ever? She probably does.

She doesn't call herself Pissed Jeans or Diarrhea Planet or Fartbarf, so it's not the worst by any means.

It's a bad name (Twigs is good though) but not the worst name ever.

http://nosnobsallowed.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hotympackshot.jpg

Rah Digga rules

funny i don't entirely love the song "pendulum" but there is this one vocal harmony that she does i think twice in the song that just sounds like the best thing ever.

Yeah, her name somehow really bothers me as well. Feel really superficial getting hung up on it, but it's the only thing stopping me from loving this record.

tend to think of it as a shortened version of wka fka twigs

anyway it's a good name, alluringly awkward is appropriate

i've lost interest in this alb tho. probably all u ppl's fault tbf

'numbers' has stuck with me, probably because it is the purest most obv lol 90s throwback on there, no fannying about

Heh, that's the one I skip. It's the one that really veers into 'IDM dudes thinking they're doing Aaliyah' territory for me.

yes!! be real with yourselves!!

Or to put it the other way, I like this album because there's so much warmth in the sounds, which I don't get when I listen to, say, Jessy Lanza or Kelela or any other time some jobbing vocalist phones up Kode9 or Bok Bok for their offcuts.

anyone complaining about the name should really be forced by martial law to submit a preferred alternative

i would imagine the process of typing out 'battle angel alita' or whatever would prove to be v rehabilitative

that reminds me actually where is the gareth metford review

"Jobbing vocalists" "offcuts" "IDM dudes"

I mean, fuck this attitude forever.

It doesn't matter how much the artists talk about their involvement with the songwriting process or production process, it's always just PRODUCER DUDES DOIN' THE REAL WORK HERE and the women stand around "begging for offcuts" and just drizzling their little vocals over the top.

Seriously, I do not have enough "fuck you" in the world for this way of thinking about or talking about or projecting onto music, artists and the songwriting process. And if you think it's "rude" for me to put it this way, then GOOD. It's a shitty, dismissive, sexist attitude and fuck it with guns. You're gross for still talking this way.

Nah it was entirely meant to be shitty and dismissive but don't read it as 'PRODUCER DUDES DOIN' THE REAL WORK HERE' because they're the main target - I am shitty and kneejerk dismissive about nearly all Hyperdub/Night Slugs releases that I hear and enjoy being so. I've done both vocalists a disservice there so sorry, fair cop.

FWIW I don't actually like either vocalist or their songwriting but the Kelela album in particular doesn't SOUND like a properly collaborative process, it sounds like the producers doing the same thing they always do and Kelela doing what she can over the top, which I'm totally find with in MC-led genres but is hit and miss when there are actual singers involved. The two elements sound awkwardly grafted onto one another.

One of the great things about this record it that is DOES sound like the work of a properly integrated process with Twigs leading it. I mean I said upthread:

All the "it's really about the producer" stuff upthread is revealed as cobblers by this point. With all the names knocking around - Arca, Dev Hynes, Paul Epworth, maybe Clams Casino - it's remarkably consistent in sound and aesthetic leaving you in little doubt that the person who's actually driving things is her.

Arreet !

Don't think I've posted on ILM for a decade but breaking silence to express my joy upon listening to LP1. Heard Video Girl in a skeezy record shop with a faulty striplight - sublime moment.

holy shit, geordie racer hi

No opinion about Lucki Eck$ yet (a quick google turned up another track he's done with Danny Brown but I haven't listened yet) but has anybody heard/seen this track she produced for him?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZfMhK0vjeg

I just watched the interview with Kelela and Bok Bok where they both basically said that the NS crew sent beats to her and she wrote songs over the top of them, which isn't to diminish her creative input into the tedious album they made together but the artist-producer dynamic is a long way from what's happening here.

I liked the interview where Twigs was explaining that her producers were there basically as technical hired hands to help her execute her own vision, even down to 'find me a chord that sounds forlorn but with a hint of hope' or something in that vein.

The best artist-producer pairings are usually some kind of symbiotic relationship like Katy B and Geeneus but this album feels very much the result one of one forceful vision.

re the name i wonder if the pointless terminal -s in nicknames is a brit thing

IIRC "twigs" was a reference to her legs and she has two of them, so

apparently its a reference to the noise it makes when her joints crack

I think I might buy this purely on the basis that Geordie Racer popped up for the first time in years to rave about it. It's a sign.

Interesting thesis there thomps xp

thomp is right. Twigs is a nickname from her dance classes when she was a teenager. When I interviewed her she stretched her neck at one point and it did indeed make a loud crack.

Closer slays me. Julee Cruise vibes. I think only Video Girl and Numbers are less than brilliant. I can see this topping all kinds of album polls this year.

<iframe width="400" height="500" frameborder="0" src="http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/embed/smpEmbed.html?playlist=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fiplayer%2Fplaylist%2Fp0265pwy&title=Alice%20Levine%3A%20FKA%20Twigs%20in%20the%20Live%20Lounge%3A%20FKA%20twigs%20covers%20Sam%20Smith's%20Stay%20With%20Me%20in%20the%20Live%20Lounge&product=iplayer";></iframe>

valuable new posters

hey san lazaro, i don't think embeds really work here :/

try this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ecvhzc

xxpost - i think that scratcha dva song with fatima 'just vybe' is a good example of what was being talked about, it sounds like she got a ready made instrumental (which it was, and the instrumental is great on its own) and just blurted out the first thing that came to mind over it. sometimes a singer working a beat theyve been sent works just fine, but yeah, most of the time theres a sense of no real connection between the vocals and the actual track. doesnt mean that the (female) singer has no input or isnt doing anything important, it just means that there isnt much sense of real collaboration happening. the twigs album doesnt sound like that at all.

The thing is, it doesn't actually matter if the singer has zero input into either the production or the writing process as long as the PERFORMANCE is great and sometimes the performance is what we're all here for. Think about a record like Show Me Love by Robin S, where even the most phallocentric of dance music fans doesn't give a shit who wrote or produced it.

This isn't confined to female singers, I've talked about jobbing male house vocalists on the Disclosure thread and jobbing grime MCs on the Ill Blu thread, sometimes jobbing vocalists are literally just that. Twigs clearly isn't any of these things.

(I think I got Jessy Lanza wrong though, she's clearly part of a songwriting partnership with Jeremy Greenspan, I think the Hyperdub thing just confused me. It doesn't change my view that virtually everyone working in this scene is lame and worthy of my instant pissy dismissal).

dont know how/why anyone would deny that 'jobbing' could be an accurate description of an artist in pop music

A "jobbing musician" is a term for a specific role within the music trade. It's analogous to "session player" or "gun for hire" or, in writers' trade, a hack. Using the term is not necessarily a pejorative, but, like "hack", something which originally simply meant "worker for hire" has taken on a decided pejorative tone. (As in, workhorse, rather than creative.) It means a specific thing, and it's fine when used in the context of that specific thing: a session player.

If MDC was trying to say "a jobbing vocalist is the thing that FKA Twigs is not"; that's fine, we have no disagreement there.

But he didn't stop there, he went on to talk about jobbing vocalists hanging round back doors begging for offcuts from dudes, in which case, why not go whole hog with the sex worker language and just call them "working girls"? That way of talking about musicians, especially female musicians, is really gross, though there is certainly a long tradition of it.

And there's this automatic assumption, right there with Jessy Lanza (and previously with Barbara Panther, and previously FFS even with people like Bjork) that if a female singer is being promoted, she's just singing or doing something decorative over the top of a producer's creative work, rather than being a songwriter or creative driving force or even a collaboration. "Ooh, I got this one wrong" - yeah, this would be an excuse if it wasn't the assumption made with tedious regularity.

You know, in hip-hop, when a rapper spits a lyric over a previously produced piece of music, it's commonly accepted that rapping is still a creative, generative activity in its own right. The verse may fail, but it's accepted that rapping over someone else's beats is still an active creative performance, in which the rapper is a creative agent. (Unless of course it's Nicki Minaj, in which case, someone will point out the number of male co-writers on the track.) But, somehow, get a vocalist (usually female) singing over the top of someone's beats, and that is just assumed to be decoration, "jobbing musician" work, where she has no more agency than the 303 that provided that bassline. It's funny, that. It's really funny, that.

And even when you're allowed FKA Twigs to be the loophole girl, and "clearly, she doesn't work like that" you are still casting this pejorative pall over other kinds of collaborations.

A lot of projection going on here. I didn't actually talk about hanging round back doors and I didn't actually use the phrase "begging for offcuts", which you put in quotation marks upthread and have repeated here, which adds an additional gross dimension even before you go all out with the sex worker language. You shouldn't actually need to resort to this sort of rhetorical dishonesty.

And there's this automatic assumption, right there with Jessy Lanza (and previously with Barbara Panther, and previously FFS even with people like Bjork) that if a female singer is being promoted, she's just singing or doing something decorative over the top of a producer's creative work, rather than being a songwriter or creative driving force or even a collaboration. "

The thing is, you aren't actually listening to me or engaging with what I'm saying, you're arguing with a prevalent attitude (which definitely exists and which I pretty much agree with you about). In the Barbara Panther thread I actually said the exact opposite of what you seem to think I said (and talked about Bjork there as well). I don't actually believe that Aaliyah was just a cipher for Timbaland or any of that stuff, Twigs would only be the "loophole girl" if you hadn't read my posts about Katy B or Beyonce or Jessie Ware or a host of other female artists who aren't seen as traditionally auterish. Even the phrase "phones up Bok Bok or Kode9 for their offcuts" which is dickish (I am capable of acknowledging when I am being a dick, although I reserve the right to be a facetious dick about scenes I dislike) doesn't actually contain presumptions about whether or not the singer writes the songs.

somehow, get a vocalist (usually female) singing over the top of someone's beats, and that is just assumed to be decoration, "jobbing musician" work, where she has no more agency than the 303 that provided that bassline

There's a nuanced discussion to be had around this if you're interested in having one. The extent to which a record is producer-driven or artist-driven (or label-driven) varies from record to record. I don't actually think vocals are ever just decoration, even when the vocalist just turns up and sings what's given to them, because as I said upthread performance is what really matters and performance is as much a part of the creative process as songwriting is. Lots of people think the opposite but these people are basically the worst.

But a lot of the time the producer they're working with is an integral part of the sound as well (eg Katy B + Geeneus) and talking about their contribution is entirely valid as long as you don't pretend it's just a producer's record rather than a collaborative project. Then there are records where there are glaring mismatches between producer/songwriters and singers (ie some Ciara stuff) and then it's worth exploring why something doesn't work. I am more of a sonics person than a lyrics person which does skew my discussion in one direction.

Unless of course it's Nicki Minaj, in which case, someone will point out the number of male co-writers on the track

The number of male co-writers on a track is an entirely pertinent detail to point out in a discussion about whether a track is grossly patriarchal or subversively feminist, as much as it was on the Electrik Red thread when you said "despite all the gurl power stylings, they are still females singing men's words".

or any other time some jobbing vocalist phones up Kode9 or Bok Bok for their offcuts.

― Matt DC, Saturday, September 6, 2014 9:43 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Your word.

You don't keep track of the actual words you use, then accuse me of not paying attention? I'm not really interested in this kind of game-playing.

It's a shame because there is an interesting discussion to be had, but not under these circumstances.

Exactly. I didn't use the phrase "begging for offcuts" that you quoted me as saying, and I don't believe you are unaware of the literal, rhetorical or emotive difference, or you wouldn't have used it.

Words have connotations, though you are playing the rhetorical game of trying to pretend that they don't.

That you say "jobbing vocalist" and bring with it the association of "hack" as opposed to something neutral like "session musician".

You say "offcuts" and bring with it the etymological derivation of offal, rotting meat and begging for scraps instead of using something neutral like "B-sides".

Then try to play this game that they are just ~neutral terms~ instead of pejoratives? "Oh, I didn't mean it that way" is not the same thing as "these words do not have pejorative connotations." Which I'm certain that *you* were aware of, or you would have chosen other, more neutral words.

BRB, just going to phone up and beg for a pizza.

A hack begging for waste products is a *very* different image from a session musician phoning a producer up for a piece of music to work on. The latter implies a partnership; the former implies something gross. Do not try to pretend like the words you chose did not imply a certain relationship and power structure there.

Also I fully accept your point, my post was intended to convey disrespect (although I like offal a lot more than I like Hyperdub productions). And I used "jobbing vocalists" in the same way that I (*rushes for search function*) talk about jobbing nu-disco producers, jobbing pop-grime mcs and jobbing indie bands when I want to convey their unremarkableness.

I am not actually playing games with you, I have been (more or less calmly) responding to your points while quite reasonably objecting to your putting words in my mouth.

i think it's hard to know exactly who is involved with what, and to what extent when we're talking about a collaboration, and this ambiguity leaves the door open to sexist assumptions about the relative roles singers play in the production of their own music. kanye has worked with tons of collaborators on his last two albums but he is still discussed as an "auteur" where people are quicker to dismiss the contributions of female artists. i sat in on an english class for rising high school seniors in philadelphia this summer and the teacher at one point openly expressed skepticism that nicki minaj writes her own music and at the same time chastised the students for not appreciating the greatness of tupac. branwell basically otm.

This isn't confined to female singers, I've talked about jobbing male house vocalists on the Disclosure thread and jobbing grime MCs on the Ill Blu thread, sometimes jobbing vocalists are literally just that. Twigs clearly isn't any of these things.

No I basically agree that female artists get a load more shit from people denying their creative input than male ones do.

This is basically going to come down to whether I see a word as pejorative because of my context, or you see a word as not-so-pejorative because of differing context.

You admit that you used pejorative words because you intended disrespect towards Hyperdub, but in the process (what, with the hacks and the rotting meat) can you understand why someone would interpret that as being disrespectful towards vocalists? (Especially with regards to vocalists who *are* the named artist on the record, such as Jessy Lanza, rather than a session player who barely garners a "featuring" credit.)

With regards to the creative process and collaborations and how they work, look, unless A) you are in the recording studio with them or B) someone like FKA Twigs chooses to tell you in an interview how they work, you are basically just writing fan fiction, if you think you can tell, by listening to a finished record how that creative process worked or who was driving it (and it's possible for more than one writer to drive a project.)

My point is, again and again, people are FAR more willing to interpret a male collaborator as having agency than a female one. And your whole "oh, but I talk this way about ~male jobbing vocalists~ toooooo" sounds really far too close to a #NotAllMen.

And I'm not actually that interested in talking about ~how collaborations work~ because quite frankly, one of the people in this conversation has worked at different times in their life, both as a producer writing for other singers, and as a session player turning up to add bits for money. And the other person is basically writing fan fiction based on records and labels they like or don't like. The answer to how collaborations work is genuinely: IT DEPENDS. But the gendering of who is seen as an agent in a collaboration and who is not, that is a constant, and it's a boring one I cannot believe I am wasting another sunny Sunday afternoon getting into, yet again.

Well, I didn't know 'offcut' meant rotten meat, so I've learned something today. I just thought it meant not prime cut, but the more you learn.

An offcut means the bit you have left over after your other work (be it meat, wood, whatever).

You never know exactly how a recording process works (and talking about the finished product is usually more interesting than talking about the process) but in some cases you can take an educated guess - ie if there are multiple producers with a highly unified aesthetic (like this album) or if the songwriting and production sounds very similar to what the songwriters/producers do for everyone else, or if the producer's usual sonic signifiers are absent (like the Omar Souleyman record produced by Four Tet).

(I really mean the producer-artist dynamic, not the process, I'm none the wiser as to how this album was made)

funny how when I raised the exact same point about pc music it was "the most repulsive thing I've ever read"

Like to shout out all the session musicians, jobbers, backing vocalists, hired guns, hacks, you all made some of the greatest pop music. Waddylyfe

as for "offcuts" I've read enough mixed metaphors that the idea of someone using "offcuts" and intending a pejorative meaning is... rather difficult to believe (plus, if we're going to nitpick offensive metaphors then "fuck it with guns" would come rather higher up on the list than "offcuts," which is why I suggest we don't.) as for "jobbing," it's kind of hard to believe that anyone who's in the business of music writing sees this as an insult given that music writing in 2014 consists almost entirely of jobbing. some things are just jobs, you know? rent must get paid.

In my experience, the gauzy veil is often drawn round the truth of who did what post-recording. As we're getting subjectif and theoretic like, I wonder if FKA Twigs is 'collaborating', as she has a creative agenda to pursue (whoever she records with), 'cause I agree with Janny Wurts who sez:

‘To collaborate, you have to let go. The outcome will not be your work anymore, but something else altogether. You will not control it. It is going to be different. If you can handle the idea that the concept will go its own way, and be other than what you expect, then you're in line for a successful partnership. You need to respect your partner -- know their strengths and also know your own -- and just step in and let the synergy happen. The peril is in getting too attached, or trying to hang on to your private identity. If you can't free wheel and just let things happen, let that juggernaut go its own way, you will be miserable. Sometimes the tightest friction that arises in the collaborative process gives rise to the most transcendent bits of inspiration. The trick is to look for the silver lining, not get sucked into the mire of arguing.’

....and I think that applies to this thread too ;)

No, it doesn't surprise me that a music writer would see "jobbing hack" as non-pejorative, or why.

"Offcuts" dictionary denotation means scraps. In carpentry, it's sawdust and those little odd-shaped bits of wood too small to use for other jobs. But it's definitely picked up a pejorative connotation due to its association with butchery and offal.

And yes, "fuck it with guns" is an offensive term, it is an old ILX phrase with a history as the most offensive thing one can say about something, and was used deliberately to show the height of my distaste for DC's language. So you can stop the pearl-clutching now.

I do actually have a great deal of respect for session players, jobbing musicians, backing vocalists and hired guns. Which is why it really offends me to see their work reduced to the level of sawdust and offal.

I mean, come on! Even DC has admitted that he intended what he said to be highly disrespectful. What we are arguing about is where that disrespect ended up being aimed.

I'm not pearl-clutching, I'm just pointing out how fruitless this path tends to be. (Besides, if we're being this pedantic, wouldn't it be the *producers'* work reduced to sawdust or offal?)

The "it doesn't surprise me that those hacks see 'hack' as non-pejorative!" comment is not worth addressing.

If I'm honest I was just kind of derisively gesturing in the direction of the entire scene, but I definitely eyeroll more towards the producers than the singers. Kelela I would probably like in a different context.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/radical-strain/

mentioned: fka twigs, some ilxors

She's nommed for the Mercury!

intention of that tni piece is cool but the execution is hideous

TNI piece OTM OTM OTM so fucking OTM it hurts and I really hope that "the execution is hideous" is some kind of ironic joke because if it is, it's failed, and if it's not, christ, you're hideous.

lmbo

lol

feel like the piece overrelies somewhat on critical darlings and the past five years (I mean, shit, if there was ever a topic to pull out the cliched-and-now-timely-too Kate Bush reference, this is it) but overall it's good

She's my favourite music writer tbqph