The All-New STYLUS.

My memory of 90s polls was always that the dance and rap choices (at the top of the lists at any rate) felt, hyper-tokenistic, as if the rock critics involved had only ever heard a max of five records in each category.

yeah... i sympathize with 'em though. i used to f/w rap but wouldn't say jay-z had made a great album.

i think by 1999 the big dance album acts (underworld, leftfield, orbital) were out of fashion, but they had been EOY staples.

Seemingly, Lex, people just don't want to read or write about r'n'b albums as much. I'm not sure this qualifies as some kind of ghettoisation.

people with indie-centric backgrounds (regardless of their broad taste), at least (not a diss)

What about in general though; is there an r'n'b equivalent to Pitchfork? Mojo? Uncut?

spelling it out, consumers of music journalism tend not to like r/n/b.

because they're racist.

hahahahahaha

re 90s love : Dummy by Portishead.

surely that got a lot of love by the end of the decade ?

xposts yeah that's the thing, not sure whether there are really enough people who don't fit that description interested in challenging it or just trying to balance it. this came up on pfk thread and other places already and the only answer is for a (for argument's sake) 'soul-centric' critical movement to get big enough to match the platform of those mags and engage their audience in the same way (making them give more of a shit about polls, canon etc.). or be like FACT and balance the scales more genre-wise but then you still have predictable choices at the top.

the argument will never end, but i guess i'm guessing that the core audience for r/n/b doesn't read that much about music. would welcome contradiction, but, j/s, if there were a market for it, wouldn't someone be tapping it?

The "trouble" with R&B is that it's impossible to write about it even passably without some acknowledgment of the value of playing with (rather than appearing to break with) convention. Not that, like, indie rock is breaking with convention every five minutes either, but its approach just sits better with the entire underlying thrust of rock crit both historically and today.

Saw some old Lester Bang talking head footage tonight and he was hating on disco as some kind of zombiefied betrayal of the incendiary rebellious underground black music of the 1950s and I just wanted to go back in time and slap some sense into him.

Youtube commentary suggests that R&B fans are not at all interested in playing with convention and are more interested in R&B as some kind of spiritual communication device - the biggest difference between R&B and rock in that regard is that with rock (and not just indie-), rock crit modes of thought have filtered down to the general public who espouse rock crit 101 without even realising it, whereas this is much less true with R&B where it's like the languages being spoken w/r/t the same record can be very different.

Hoping that rock crit will drop its narrative of progress all of a sudden is prob. a fool's errand - Lex I think you may be quite unusual amongst established/successful rock critics insofar as you are both (essentially) a subjectivist and thoroughly convinced of your absolute rightness - i.e. for you there is no particular reason why R&B is better than indie-rock outside of the fact that you love the sounds of the former and you hate the sounds of the latter. Whereas a lot of critics rely on meta-theories, acknowledged or otherwise, to explain their genre-leanings.

Yeah the cultural differences can't be under-estimated - they really can be quite jarring to the extent where most mags probably don't think a hyper-consciously balanced list is worth the risk of alienating their audience with their own partisan attitudes.

I still cling to the 'we love everything equally' fantasy tho.

Lex I think you may be quite unusual amongst established/successful rock critics insofar as you are both (essentially) a subjectivist and thoroughly convinced of your absolute rightness - i.e. for you there is no particular reason why R&B is better than indie-rock outside of the fact that you love the sounds of the former and you hate the sounds of the latter. Whereas a lot of critics rely on meta-theories, acknowledged or otherwise, to explain their genre-leanings.

Can you expand on the last point? Explaining my high school tastes in an interview a couple of weeks ago, I remarked that, then and now, I saw no problem with creating a mixtape in which Amy Grant's "Every Heartbeat" followed Meat Beat Manifesto's "Now" and Luther Vandross' "Power of Love/Love Power."

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Andy K's list (posted on the decades list thread) is a great example of a list that actually feels weighted towards the end of the decade, not to mention being equal parts perverse and brilliant.

― Tim F, Thursday, January 14, 2010 6:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

could some kind person link to andy k's list? i can't find that thread anymore.

http://blog.allmusic.com/2010/01/11/andy-kellmans-100-favorite-albums-of-2000-2009/

thx!!

Can you expand on the last point? Explaining my high school tastes in an interview a couple of weeks ago, I remarked that, then and now, I saw no problem with creating a mixtape in which Amy Grant's "Every Heartbeat" followed Meat Beat Manifesto's "Now" and Luther Vandross' "Power of Love/Love Power."

As in, many critics would not say "indie rock is by its nature superior to R&B", but they might talk about how they value sonic exploration, subversive songwriting, lyrics that express something honest about the creator's life and relationships rather than simply shoring up standard notions of romance, musicians who seem to play with the conventions of several genres rather than be bound by the terms of one genre, songs that seem to address nostalgia and fear of the future and self-doubt rather than being confined to love and lust... and then conclude that on this basis Animal Collective made the best album of 2009, rather than Electrik Red, say.

Whereas Lex's position appears to be "R&B is by its nature superior to indie rock" - it's not about enshrining general "transcendent" qualities and then saying that one genre tends to express those tendencies better or more often, but rather that the rules of R&B are simply better than the rules of indie rock.

Of course often eclectic types who trumpet their openness to all genres can be quite closeminded listeners because the transcendent qualities they look for are quite limited and/or rigid. Not accusing you of this at all though Alfred! Amy Grant to Meat Beat Manifesto genuinely is a big jump.

Whereas Lex's position appears to be "R&B is by its nature superior to indie rock" - it's not about enshrining general "transcendent" qualities and then saying that one genre tends to express those tendencies better or more often, but rather that the rules of R&B are simply better than the rules of indie rock.

i'm not really sure either of these is my position!

musicians who seem to play with the conventions of several genres rather than be bound by the terms of one genre, songs that seem to address nostalgia and fear of the future and self-doubt rather than being confined to love and lust

right, have people not been having so many conversations unpacking and discrediting the idea that the indie-favoured "meta-values" are in any way superior that everyone's a bit bored of it now? why haven't the supposedly smart, literate critical commentariat picked up on this? there's absolutely no excuse by now to take any sort of stance wherein "self-doubt" is automatically better than "love and lust"

i'm not really sure either of these is my position!

Ya could've fooled me on the first point!

there's absolutely no excuse by now to take any sort of stance wherein "self-doubt" is automatically better than "love and lust"

if people in question prefer complexity and ambiguity, then it's not really a stance that needs correcting. they like what they like. that's all the "reason" most people need.

I think if people ascribe complexity or ambiguity to one genre over another, or ascribe those things solely to the lyricist, that they're mistaken tho.

Also indie is chock-full of songs about love and lost. Gauche, wordy songs about love and lust.

Lex obv I don't agree with the argument (Electrik Red is my fave album of the year which is partly why I chose those examples), that's just what I consider to be a typical rock crit position.

i'm not really sure either of these is my position!

I'm basing that on the discussion we had a month or so back where you were saying that (if I can paraphrase what I took to be the general gist) the main reason people should listen to R&B rather than indie-rock is that it's better music. Feel free to correct me here though obv.

i'm not sure i have a set-in-stone "position" as such. that's not the point though - what i'm asking is why, having had these debates for nearly a DECADE now taking apart the "typical rock crit position" as you describe it - why has none of it stuck in mainstream criticism? why is that bullshit discredited way of thinking still so dominant? what will it take to effect change?

Different kinds of people wanting to be rock critics, I guess.

On my way out the door, so I can't comment on this in depth, but this article trumpeting the virtues of contemporary R&B is probably relevant:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ridiculed--belittled/Content?oid=924107

An awful lot of rock crit is basically trying to prove by science that yr favourite band is the best in the world and it tends to be fans of a certain strand of earnest lyric-focused music that most want to do that.

xxxpost to Lex:

Because music crit is born of self-consciousness about enjoyment, and that self-consciousness is almost always oppositional; it is not a "naive" I enjoy this thing here but always an I enjoy this thing here rather than that thing over there. The archetypal moment when you start thinking about e.g. "what is an interesting subject matter for a song" is when you say "the vast majority of other music makes less interesting choices.

In this sense good R&B criticism in the mainstream is always the product of a double movement, a double-self-consciousness whereby you find value in the very thing which the entire structure of rock crit suggests that you reject. Me simply saying Teedra Moses writes lyrics about love that move me is naive youtube criticism; it becomes "music criticism" in the strong sense when I incorporate into that discussion an awareness of the prevailing critical suspicion of that style of songwriting.

But this is a more sophisticated process than simply saying "this indie band transcends the world of fake plastic emotion". And in an environment where, generationally, the process of the naive becoming the superficially-wisened reproduces itself constantly, you can't expect anything more than a maintenance of the trench line - there are always more young people saying the following words for the very first time: "at least my rock heroes write their own lyrics."

As someone else has said:

"If you have any kind of class-based take on music, the eternal recurrence, the changeless same, is slightly depressing. You can map out so much of the taste map in terms of social divisions (there is a space in UK music culture for instance that still corresponds to "mod", it has shifted in some respects because it's 40 years on, but fundamentally the same space… just as emo occupies the same space as Goth while chav is an evolution of casual which was an evolution of skin). I think that indie-hate as well as being an aversion to the music is at some unconscious level a frustration with this underlying social stasis and deadlock. That explains why people feel motivated to use the word "indie" almost like a racist insult. "Indie" becomes this contaminating taint, spoiling even good genres, so you have the Streets dissed as indie garage, Hot Chip as indie R&B, Justice as indie-house, "Stillness is the Move" as indiefied R&B. "

I agree with all of that but I would say that the "stasis" is shifting. Partly because whatever "emo" is now, it incorporates a lot more than Goth. There's a lot of Metal in there too, and the divide between emo/metal/indie kids and chavs has blurrier class boundaries because of that. Dance music as a broad church is a hilarious map of class/genre divides tho.

emo occupies the same space as Goth

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080503015204AAnJNeP

x-posts

wow this article http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ridiculed--belittled/Content?oid=924107 is really amazing

maybe it deserves its own thread

those last 2 or 3 paragraphs really hit on what it is that i like about this music. the production is simply astonishing. it's textural and lush and multilayered

i think alot of people of my generation had their opinion of contemporary r&b formed in the early 90s when it was to be fair in a bit of a dire state. at least production wise it did nothing for me and seemed to centre mostly around whitney houston / mariah carey style vocal acrobatics matched with really cheesy sounds which just didn't do anything for me

there was a distinct change which i experienced around the turn of the millennium where the arrangements suddenly became really really interesting

Production capabilities, already phenomenal, climbed into the stratosphere. The result is music of painstaking craft: layers of sound morph and twist through multiple bridges and intricate arrangements while a multitracked vocalist sings rings around herself.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^this to me sounds like the most interesting thing in the galaxy and makes me want to hear the music that inspired this purple prose (and read more of this crit's writing)

maybe that's me rewriting the rules of the game to enshrine my personal philosophy or what-i-like in music but this is the stuff that i'm looking for

It is indeed a very good article, but there's a sticking point in there that a think a lot of poptimists have often (certainly not always) been ambivalent about addressing, namely the very vehicle of top 40 radio -- especially given the well-observed point of r'n'b as a means of reaching to/standing for a wide and potentially otherwise voiceless audience -- as an entrenched business with its own particular goals and needs, namely making cash no matter what. The author gets close with "Personally, I find this straightforward embrace of commercialism refreshing" as well as noting the multiplicity of professionals involved in constructing the songs, but I almost want him to tease out his own implications of dealing with said system and the attendant gatekeepers that much more. (Puts me in mind of a legendary Martin Gore comment: "If you call yourself a pop band, you can get away with murder.")

Double x-post: Not really meant to suggest that all new genres are the same as old genres, I don't think - more that the same basic structure of cultural options reconstitutes itself, with particular sonic or stylistic signifiers floating within the structure to form new combinations.

Double x-post: Not really meant to suggest that all new genres are the same as old genres, I don't think - more that the same basic structure of cultural options reconstitutes itself, with particular sonic or stylistic signifiers floating within the structure to form new combinations.

― Tim F, Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:34 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

tbh i think i'd heed the point more if simey (or you -- no offence!) lived in the uk. i don't see an obvious continuity between most of them. i don't think there is a modern equivalent to the mod scene -- in terms of, well, anality.

im sure there are some real r/n/b heads who are prissy about style details, but not in the same way or for the same reasons. there has been social change among young people (and other people too) in the last 40 years: more of them go to university, for one thing.

More of them wear their fucking jeans halfway down their skinny buttockless arses too.

x-post Yes, and I'd say it's precisely those social changes which tend to result in the real changes in music "overall" over time (i.e. the emergence and disappearance of particular sensibilities) rather than specific stylistic development within music itself, let alone music critic debates.

actually really tired of people making out like R&B production is phenomenal etc. when it really isn't standout from genres. that applies to all aspects of it i think. not to take anything away from it, just let's be real here.

i'm not sure it really "improved" or "caught up" in these respects either (re-incorporating electro influence or whatever) but then i would rep for Guy and other early 90s RnB.

obv some people belittle RnB generally from that perspective so the above article makes sense in trying to convert sceptics, but still.

compared to yr average indie-pop (actual indie as opposed to landfill kind) band r&b production *is* phenomenal

Blueski: it's an article that's no less carefully crafted than any apologia for any other genre you might care to describe. High points and key themes are emphasized, problematic songs or sentiments or elements of the listening experience are acknowledged briefly and then steered clear from, etc. etc. That's no sin, otherwise we might as well all go home, but it is a portrayal through a lens. (Perhaps the most noticeably omission is also universal -- the risk of something 'phenomenal' by any description becoming too familiar and rote with overlistening, though ultimately that also depends a lot of things in a listener.)

xpost

The production aesthetics of Indie vs. R&B are so different that it is hard to compare. A lot of Indie music embraces a lo-fi or naturalistic or noisy approach to recording that probably sounds like "bad" production from the viewpoint of other genres. Apples to oranges...

one thing to be wary of is *only* appreciating r&b through its production - this is a huge factor in its diminished critical appreciation in recent years, as critics who seemingly only prized it for "innovative beats" and who needed obvious auteur figures like timbaland or the neptunes have become disappointed with how it's progressed since they fell off

i mean i completely disagree that early 90s r&b was in any way a low point!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ9HG0nGe-g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYwL-FzFDKQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGXxcSdsXJ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSIBVRP2G-U

i could go ON AND ON like erykah badu

this is exactly right, also i think its not going too far to say that the timbaland lust that happened at the end of the 90's was partly due to the fact that his aaliyah tracks in particular had a lot in common with idm at the time and that appreciating rnb because it sounds like somthing other than rnb maybe isnt the best angle

but that's *my* personal philosophy behind why i like what i like

'production' values and how they are used

this is what informs my personal decisions about why i don't like large swathes of indie and what i do like when i like r&b (or dance or rock or pop or whatever else i find i like in varying genres)

i don't have any particular allegiance to any genre any more i've found

Trying to remember who made the comment that folks who latched on to 'something other than r'n'b' singles didn't know how to deal with the long/slow ballads on the albums (whether also released as singles or not).

ok but that doesn't mean that production before timbaland were bad, it just means they had less in common with a certain idea of "good production"

Trying to remember who made the comment that folks who latched on to 'something other than r'n'b' singles didn't know how to deal with the long/slow ballads on the albums (whether also released as singles or not).

yeah i always found it sickening whenever reviews of r&b albums would cream themselves - rightly - over the bangers but dismiss the ballads completely (even when the ballads WERE bad - beyoncé's first album, i'm looking at you - the criticisms never got to why they were bad!)

also its been said a billion times before, but for the one genre of music dominated by women to be lauded for the men behind the scenes pulling the strings is pretty inevitable but gross