I think the 2010's will be dominated musically by...

i like to think the '10s are going to be dominated by on the corner rip-offs

all thoughts disconnected - sorry...

while I am ultimately way more sympathetic to Kate's perspective, I can sort of see where contenderizer is coming from, though not in terms of race, gender etc...

rock critics obviously prioritize rock music when composing their canon, and indie rock critics prioritize indie rock. indie rock is still, i guess, mostly white dudes. i tend to find the tokenism of P2K, etc. worse than if pfork had just made a list of indie records and called it "best indie rock of the decade".

the reason i find tokenism so frustrating is because its "inclusivity" is actually a formal and subconsciously vehement rejection of the value of the music it is "respecting". take jazz. i remember some rolling stone list that had the typical "kind of blue" and "a love supreme" entrys on an otherwise (surprise!) rock-oriented list. i think it is absolutely true that the music of miles davis or john coltrane is just as possible of completely galvanizing the human soul to love and action as the beatles or the velvet underground. so if those rolling stone writers had really heard coltrane in the same way as the beatles, there is no reason why there should not be many, many more jazz albums on the list ("crescent" and/or "live at birdland" is/are just as good and if "a love supreme" didn't get you to that conclusion, you weren't really listening in the first place), unless a certain viewpoint is being prioritized a priori to the actual listening, in which case, the power of coltrane is being completley ignored, boxed in, not being allowed to truly be; denied. in this decade, popism didnt break down rockism, just expanded its tastes, with similar results.

i dont believe in indie rock so i have to try and reconcile the fact that it is not diverse with the fact that i dont really care if it is made at all. i am only half-kidding when i say maybe all of the non-participating women, blacks, latinos, etc., are just smart! not to pick on Dan but since his tastes have already been mentioned, I think he is objectively correct in liking the Cure and probably not Grizzly Bear or the Decemberists. objectively! to put it another way, as much as i think that it can be enjoyable sometimes to watch it on a sunday with a few beers at a fun bar, i dont really care about (american) football. when i think about the totality of "football", not just the sport, but the "industrial" and social aspects of it, i tend to question why it needs to exist at all outside of something for kids to do on the weekends. so its hard for me to think of more women playing football as something as positive for women as, say, legislation ensuring equal pay for equal work. so i guess, ultimately, what i am honestly curious about is why, on the one hand, people think, in 2k9, or even SINCE 1995, that indie deserves, in any way, to be an organizing force or major narrative of music or music criticism? My other question is - when will indie rock critics, like die-hard racists be marginalized enough to no longer a determining factor in how the rest of us think about and discuss music? what responsibility do we have in bringing this about?

nu-lo-fi

Let me be plain about one thing: I do NOT advocate that kind of tokenism that you're saying Contenderizer is affeared of.

That's a misunderstanding of my position.

sorry didnt mean to insinuate that.
i think my perspective is more like:
tokenism seems to be the end result of any critique of rockism and indie rock. so fuck rocksim and indie rock.
house music is better than animal collective trying to figure it out.

oh hi this thread.

If every genre was made by a different set of ppl who had a hard time understanding each other maybe tokenism would be an issue. There are plenty of rock fans who love loads of jazz, and, not shockingly, most of the ppl who have boring taste in jazz have boring taste in rock too. On collective lists with voting the whole thing goes lowest common denominator across the board anyway but the good thing about having diverse groups of critics is they expose each other to lots of music&ideas. Genres aren't incommensurable, anyone who's paying attention is going to be making connections between a variety of stuff, noticing ppl copping moves and sounds from sources outside their genre. This is one of the best things about popular music. On this note I think chart pop is going to get broader and better and there will be more ppl moving from wherever they started to more generalist stuff e.g. black eyed peas (this is not nec. the better part). That they can crib from boys noize and coldplay style dreary brit indie on consecutive hits seems like a portent.

Moaning that Pitchfork cover too much indie rock is a bit like moaning that Vibe don't cover enough Beethoven. Saying on one hand that they're too white male indie rock heavy, and then moaning that their attempts to widen certain horizon reek of tokenism, is just having your cake and eating it.

Anyway, let's forget about this and keep on mystic megging.

I think that was my point... instead of trying to have them broaden their scope they should just narrow it and be a lot more honest about what it is.

I'm saying nearly all good critics have broad scope. Ppl complain the most about tokenism when it crosses demographic lines, staying within them as an expression of critical honesty is some steamy bullshit indeed.

xp eh that's dumb--there are non-indie rock records i found and enjoyed thru pitchfork.

if these critics had such broad scope why does this conversation exist in the first place?

and I am not saying pfork should stop reviewing non-indie releases.

sorry my above above post is referring to canons, lists, etc., not the entire scope of the website and what they review and what all of its critics listen to!

Shh!

shh i actually don't think i agree with anything yr saying but whatever i'm not going to get into it

Dog Latin, if Pitchfork chooses to have a Martin Clark column on dubstep and they had a reggae/dancehall column which they dropped, and they have had some reviews of pop, african, reggae, rap and more then they do open themselves to criticism. Vibe has not made any pretense towards covering classical music.

I think tokenism is better than no coverage at all

people are gonna start being sloppy on purpose as a reaction to all the protools-edited-and-autotuned-to-sterility that's been so de rigueur lately.

Wonky, lo-fi, have you heard of these things?

yup, it might surprise you but actually yes i have heard of those things. however:

a) i don't really feel either of those styles particularly dominated this past decade, or any decade in particular, and
b) even if they did, other styles, besides lo-fi and wonky, could also be sloppy on purpose, and perhaps become The Next Big Thing. or, the sloppy-on-purpose aesthetic that influences those styles might come to inform a wide spectrum of genres, rather than just those two in particular.

SERIOUSLY EVERYONE, WALK AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER NOW, YOU DON'T NEED TO DO THIS AGAIN.

xpost haha i cant leave my computer i am at work i need to learn how to grow carrots and move out to the country

c.a.d. i am not here to troll so if you feel like honestly explaining why i am 100% wrong i would appreciate it but obv you dont have to.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT OTM

Sorry, realised that my post sounded more dismissive than it intended to. I did think it was an interesting idea - but the thing is, this aesthetic has been going on for a long, long time - that one might even say that the "deliberately a bit shit" indie aesthetic that developped in the late 80s was a reaction against pristine synthpop perfection as heralded by the ascent of sequencers and synths into mainstream pop music in the early 80s. Which I guess boils down to "good guess, actually, especially going by historical evidence."

and to the other thing - argh, hate to bring up points I've already brought up on the other thread, but... one of my complaints is that EVEN WITHIN the genre aesthetic of Pitchfork style indierock, there are still swathes of female artists that get ignored when it comes to Canon-making time. Even by their own limited, narrow standards, their Canon is sexist. But I guess that comes down to the lowest common denominator mediocracy of having a voted-on canon.

maybe they dont get ignored. maybe they dont like them.

sorry, that was an x-post the public service announcement. But I left it, as I was genuinely discussing the topic of the thread in the first paragraph!

(as an aside to Justen - isn't not liking someone based on their gender kind of a - no actually an incredibly reductive ad absurdam - definition of sexism?)

them = the music they make rmde

Best of 00s albums lists consist of white males because we invite Lex to vote in them but he's so tardy he never gets round to it despite seeming keen.

Love you, Lex. Wish you'd got a ballot in to me.

I did think it was an interesting idea - but the thing is, this aesthetic has been going on for a long, long time - that one might even say that the "deliberately a bit shit" indie aesthetic that developped in the late 80s was a reaction against pristine synthpop perfection as heralded by the ascent of sequencers and synths into mainstream pop music in the early 80s. Which I guess boils down to "good guess, actually, especially going by historical evidence."

yeah, it's true that concept has been around for a while (the stones as sloppy-antibeatles springs to mind for instance) but i think it's might take a different form this time around. i mean, yeah, punk and indie tend to favor a stripped down, get-rid-of all-the-dross-and-play it-like-you-mean-it-and-also,-you're-drunk-on-cheap-beer-and just-formed-the-band-a-week-ago aesthetic. but i'm picturing something more like big, multi-instrumented groups of players with chops, doing complex, well thought out arrangements into high quality microphones picking up every nuance of a well played, even virtuoso performance... but with all the idiosyncatic, not-quite-exactly-on-the-upbeat, not-necessarily-perfectly-in-tune parts of the best take being purposefully left in on the recording (or even raised in the mix, just so you know it's actually music played live, by real people in the same room with each other and stuff)

again many xposts

I think tokenism is better than no coverage at all

― curmudgeon, Thursday, 22 October 2009 16:45 (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

100% agree with this. Moaning about tokenism is ridiculous, but also moaning that such-and-such not getting enough coverage and making Pitchfork racist/sexist is also stupid.

there are still swathes of female artists that get ignored when it comes to Canon-making time

By this argument you could replace [female artists] with prety much anything - bugle players, Indonesian bands, I dunno. I mean, what exactly are your demands here? That every woman in music gets a bit of the Pitchfork/"canon" pie? Pitchfork and the NME and Drowned In Sound and Clash and whatever indie-based publication covers Bat For Lashes, School Of Seven Bells, the Dead Weather, La Roux, Little Boots, VV Brown etc etc... So where is the issue?

As for wonky, I think there's more to this than "making things deliberately a bit shit" - wonky subverts music in a slightly different way with a ketaminist "this time signature/melody line doesn't fit but it almost makes sense". it's not lo-fi in an incompetent way but very deliberate in its execution. i'd like to see more of this kind of thing creeping into other genres.

i tend to find the tokenism of P2K, etc. worse than if pfork had just made a list of indie records and called it "best indie rock of the decade".

thing is p2k coverage is subtitled "the decade in music" which can be assumed to be "the decade in music as seen thru the editorial lens of this particular publication" which is strong on indie rock but also strong on a couple other things and inclusive of many other things. assigning all this privilege to pitchfork's voice and then criticizing that voice is one of the weirdest things that keeps happening in this discussion.

i dont believe in indie rock

i don't know what this is supposed to mean--what would believing in indie rock entail?

objectively correct in liking the Cure and probably not Grizzly Bear or the Decemberists. objectively!

huh? i mean no one really cares if you like indie rock or not but what is this?

when i think about the totality of "football", not just the sport, but the "industrial" and social aspects of it, i tend to question why it needs to exist at all outside of something for kids to do on the weekends

no shit, very few things really "need" to exist at all and music isn't really one of them.

My other question is - when will indie rock critics, like die-hard racists be marginalized enough to no longer a determining factor in how the rest of us think about and discuss music? what responsibility do we have in bringing this about?

i mean aside from the gratuitous use of "racists" which you can honestly fuck off for the answer is easy--too many people in this conversation come off as boring scolds who can only talk about something in reference/relation to this hegemony in which critics they don't like write for a readership they don't like or care about. like, start your own discourse about things you're interested in among ppl you like talking with. no one is under obligation to read/respond or not read/respond to anything!

thing about "tokenism" is that it's actually incredibly useful in giving ppl inroads to things they might not be familiar with. but (and this is no shock considering who has been in this conversation) at some point it's on the listener to decide to investigate further or to decide not to. i mean if you want to argue that listmaking itself is a dumb exercise then hell yeah carry on but fact is lists are not created for people like you or me.

Pitchfork and the NME and Drowned In Sound and Clash and whatever indie-based publication covers Bat For Lashes, School Of Seven Bells, the Dead Weather, La Roux, Little Boots, VV Brown etc etc... So where is the issue?

To repeat what I said IN THAT THREAD, the problem is, why were none of these artists (and a load more that I listed in the thread that were more US-centric) - despite the coverage - included in The Canon?

Its way, way, way too soon for any of those specific artists to be in any kind of canon though.

ok thanks. I will digest.

1 quick thing... use of term racist is not to characterize or compare indie writers. more about what you said in:re perception of dominance in discourse all out of whack with reality.

And yet it's not too soon for Merriweather Post Pavilion (released last year) to be number one on their Canon?

But that's right, I'm turning into a "scold" for raising these issues in the first place - what a lovely, gender neutral term to have chosen to describe a woman. Nuff said.

What are you referring to? Kid A is their record of the decade...

Sorry, got the ILX vote and the actual result mixed up, but still. In the Top 20, regardless.

If it's "too soon" for Bat For Lashes then surely it's "too soon" for Sufjan, right?

Sufjan and Animal Collective have both been making music for a lot longer than Bat For Lashes though!

But are we talking "albums" or "artists", you aren't being consistent.

kate you can think whatever you want and i really don't care but i am INCREDIBLY SYMPATHETIC to the issues you are raising, and you have successfully "raised" them. that being said, you and everyone else who can't seem to get past PITCHFORKPITCHFORKPITCHFORK have done nothing to "advance" a "conversation" about the "issues" that have been "raised."

If it were *just* Pitchfork, I'd just roll my eyes and go "corny indie fuX0rs, I don't even read P4k" - but it was about 3 or 4 "canonical lists of the 00s" in a row - Uncut, Pitchfork, RateYourMusic and something else - might have been that All Songs Considered but I don't think it was.

I reached saturation point, OK?

When it gets to the point where Uncut - UNCUT freaking magazine - ends up having the most women on a list, you start to get frustrated with lists and who makes them.

This was all stuff brought up on the other thread, FWIW. But I'm gonna actually put myself on a temp leech ban from ILX for the rest of the day because I'm becoming compulsive about these threads, and that's not good for me, or for debate.

or if you're me you start to stop caring about lists and who makes them xpost

as i said above it's completely unsurprising that we do this over and over because lists are not written for ILM users--they are written for college freshmen with large external hds

also, i think the pop scene will move away from repetitious electronic-beats-based jams in one key and get all complex and chord-changey again. maybe even with harmonies. and rap will go through this thing where it SOUNDS almost indistinguishable from samples-based 90's jams, with the same drum sounds and swing settings, but actually the music will be performed by hired musicians.

who sound like they're on a record from the 60's, but arent.

big, multi-instrumented groups of players with chops, doing complex, well thought out arrangements into high quality microphones picking up every nuance of a well played, even virtuoso performance... but with all the idiosyncatic, not-quite-exactly-on-the-upbeat, not-necessarily-perfectly-in-tune parts of the best take being purposefully left in on the recording (or even raised in the mix, just so you know it's actually music played live, by real people in the same room with each other and stuff)

not gonna happen since home recording technology is going to get even cheaper and more ubiquitous, and it makes more and more sense to piece together stuff at home rather than pay for a bunch of studio time in a big, nice room.

really i think music is going to get even more cross-pollinated and omnivorous, ie it'll be more expected and less novel to mix genres, recording techniques, and cultures.

one word. Hongrotronica. Highly melodic and catchy Beatles-esque electronic dance music. lots of mellotron samples.

Music needs more mellotron samples.