The All-New STYLUS.

'focus on the vocalist' has never been something that applies more to some genres than others in my book and never will be.

the sound of the vocalist the arrangement of the vocals the treatment of it that multi-layered cooing mulitple loops of the singer going round and round doubling back on themselves like a rift in the spacetime continuum yes yes yes yes yes gimme gimme more

what she's actually singing = who gives a shit? why would you care about that?

except barbershop xp

btw 'rock' is being stereotyped and reduced here maybe? not entering this argument tbh - some r&b is great and exciting (i recall being introduced to aaliyah and being all 'whoa great music') and some is stale and derivative - there are worlds within worlds - you can't group everything together

Where would you put it?

in a Tupperware.

If I can go back to S. Reynolds's complaint about the predictability of the top 20: I do think there are a lot of similarities between our list and Pitchfork (somewhat inevitable, as Nick admits), but I'm also pleased at some of the differences:

Burial, Untrue: #5 Stylus, #41 Pitchfork
Primal Scream, XTRMNTR: #10 Stylus, #142 Pitchfork
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale: #11 Stylus, #75 Pitchfork
Joanna Newsom, Ys: #14 Stylus, #82 Pitchfork
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP: #16 Stylus, #119 Pitchfork
Bjork, Vespertine: #17 Stylus, #92 Pitchfork
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: #18 Stylus, #124 Pitchfork

Not to mention the fact that nearly a third of the albums in the Stylus top 100 don't show up at all in Pitchfork's top 200, including 11 albums in the top 60:

24. Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft"
33. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
36. Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye
40. Studio, West Coast/Yearbook 1
45. Bark Psychosis, Codename:Dustsucker
46. Lindstrom, Where You Go I Go Too
49. Mountain Goats, We Shall All Be Healed
54. Britney Spears, Blackout
56. Booka Shade, Movements
57. Luomo, The Present Lover
59. Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Fishscale at number 11 is not a badge of honour imo

Right – it should rate higher.

I like it well enough but it doesn't deserve to be in the same 50 as any of Ghost's earlier albums.

to clarify previous posts, i just think one needs to be very specific here wrt RnB's common approach to vocals e.g. i don't think there's a greater empthasis on power in RnB (where it has been and remains common as you would expect) than there is elsewhere but there may be more empthasis on smoothness or technical 'correctness' generally than you get in Indie (would make sense if you regard the latter as Punk-derived). i dunno if i can define this properly tho, as my interest in/knowledge of singing (as opposed to sound) only goes so far.

http://www.oxygen.com/Press/Programming/TalkSex/images/SJ_Shoulder_Shrug.jpg

those are some high pants

They're not pants, she's springing out of a giant top hat.

interesting url

every place Fishscale rates over Supreme Clientele is a further demonstration of either "i don't fuck with rap" or "i am a lazy newjack".

Lazy dichotomies further demonstrate "I don't bother to read" or "I'm nearsighted."

Not touching the "who's a proper rap fan" argument but out of interest, why d'you rate Fishscale so high Alfred?

I love Ironman and Supreme Clientele, but i like how Fishscale sounds initially like a transitional effort, and an unusually rich one. The first half sticks to his tried-and-true, with beats to match, almost as if he's saying goodbye to the 36 chambers, then "Whip Me With a Strap" introduces the denser, harder, weirder second half, culminating in "Big Girl" and "Underwater" (I wish he'd make at least half an album with stuff that sounds like "Underwater"). I don't argue with others supporting SC or IM over this thing, but as a full-to-bursting miscellany Fishscale shows his strengths so flatteringly that the weaknesses aren't worth mentioning.

*Whip YOU With a Strap"

yeah that whole argument probably hinges on how you feel about the second half of fishscale--not crazy abt it myself

I guess I don't really feel that density much on Fishscale. To me it feels a lot frothier and poppier than the earlier work. And I've got nothing against pop or froth, but I don't really want it from Ghost? There are some straight bangers on the album but even the soul samples feel more obvious than usual to me. I've been back listening to it a fair bit this week to work out if my mind has changed but nah. Almost every full track stands up fine on its own terms but I just don't find the same magic or the same complexity that keeps me going back to SC.

I don't know you Alfred and I don't know what you think I should be reading, but that's my experience and my reaction to the placings on this list. Maybe I should have prettied it up with some "Barring convincing evidence to the contrary, in my experience someone who...." bullshit preamble if i'd known you were the kind of sniffy pedant who would respond to that with "lazy dichotomy".

Nothing particularly wrong with not fucking with rap or being a lazy newjack btw, unless, you know, you want to write about it for a living or something.

If you believe loving Fishscale more than the other Ghost albums is being a lazy newjack, I'll happily make you a T-shirt for you to wear that sez "Sniffy Pedant," sniffy pedant.

I mean, how the fuck do you know more than I do about hip-hop? and even if you did, who gives a shit?

Whip YOU With a Strap"

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 14, 2010 5:59 PM (11 minutes ago)

zvookster u may want to understand that this is how ppl talk to each other on this forum.

Burial, Untrue: #5 Stylus, #41 Pitchfork
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale: #11 Stylus, #75 Pitchfork
Bjork, Vespertine: #17 Stylus, #92 Pitchfork
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: #18 Stylus, #124 Pitchfork

Stylus got these right.

Primal Scream, XTRMNTR: #10 Stylus, #142 Pitchfork
Joanna Newsom, Ys: #14 Stylus, #82 Pitchfork
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP: #16 Stylus, #119 Pitchfork

Pitchfork got these right.

Final score: Stylus 4, Pitchfork 3.

no.10 for xtrmntr is just embarassing

Maybe top 100 would be a fair compromise.

man i cant fucking stand that noah berlatsky article. he also wrote a super corny review of that ehhh brooke valentine record for the reader .... its this cheerleading for R&B bcuz of its GIRL POWER & THE COMPLEX MUSICAL BACKDROPS kind of shit that totally misses the point of the genre, like its more about his OPENMINDEDNESS to the idea of listening to R&B than it is about how R&B functions

Nothing wrong with that!

kind of curious what the "point" of R&B is

Yeah, when Berlatsky's piece first came out, I wrote this:

Something about the article as a whole bugs me, though: even though I understand that its premise is a defense of a genre that's probably maligned by much of the paper's readership, it sometimes reads like a persuasive essay for a freshman comp class. With pat formulations like "contemporary R&B does have something to offer" and "The best thing ... isn't the lyrics, though. It's the music," I half expected the article to conclude with the old high-school paper stand-by, "Try it, who knows you just might like it." As it stands, "And it's right on the Top 40 station of your choice" isn't much better. I'm not entirely sure what would've improved the piece, but I'm sort of left wondering where all this nervous protestation sprang from.

kind of curious what the "point" of R&B is

― living like the Na'vi will never happen (HI DERE), Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:34 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the 'point' is a constantly shifting framework that exists & can be appreciated on its own terms, that doesnt require occasional periods of 'musical complexity' or GIRL POWER self-help anthems to be worthwhile

berlatsky also writes dumb challopsy articles abt comic bks, guy is a total troll do not feed

my favorite elektric red track was 'bed rest' which wasnt my favorite bcuz it was 'girl power'-y -- if anything its one of the more submissive traxx -- & although I appreciate the smooth production style, its actually one of the more dated-sounding tracks, its lushness not exactly "progress" from like "rock the boat" (which is the song it sort of resembles in my mind, if not explicitly). so why do i like this song?

jaymc's right, there's something weirdly juvenile like hes trying to justify the genre by aspects of it that aren't really what necessarily makes it good -- i just have a feeling that i would probably highly distrust his taste in R&B as a result.

every place Fishscale rates over Supreme Clientele is a further demonstration of either "i don't fuck with rap" or "i am a lazy newjack".

― zvookster, Thursday, January 14, 2010 12:45 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

i think this is a really rude and ignorant thing to say. they're both two of the best rap albums of the decade, and each have plenty of advantages over the other. the production is way more lush and exciting (and modern) on fs, especially compared what are basically just 90's beats on sc. obviously the raps are way more complex and intricate on sc, but they also make fuck-all sense a lot of the time. ghostface on fishscale is a really likable and hilarious guy, and his personality pervades the whole album.

my favorite elektric red track was 'bed rest' which wasnt my favorite bcuz it was 'girl power'-y -- if anything its one of the more submissive traxx -- & although I appreciate the smooth production style, its actually one of the more dated-sounding tracks, its lushness not exactly "progress" from like "rock the boat" (which is the song it sort of resembles in my mind, if not explicitly). so why do i like this song?

that's my favourite too but i think it might be a bit busier than early 00s Timba - there's just a bit more melodic detail in Terius stuff generally and esp. on Bed Rest an enhanced lushness, no?

Even if we are gonna focus solely on production "Rock The Boat" is a v. good reference point for "Bed Rest" - that def. could have been done by the non-Timbaland guys Aaliyah got to do the bulk of her last album (whose names escape me now, despite being my personal heroes 4ever for making Destiny's Child's "Perfect Man").

Kinda ironic that the more you actually get into R&B the harder it becomes to say "this track is good this track is bad and here's the simple reason why" - as deej notes it's not obv why "Bed Rest" is his favourite ER track, and I'm guessing that's because his relative enjoyment of different ER tracks is picking up on so many different components (production, sure, but also tune, performance, lyrics, theme) and synthesising them so immediately that the judgment becomes intuitive, like being able to see the answer to a logic puzzle without quite knowing how you worked it out.

^^^ Of course this is true for any genre to the extent that the listener is trying to be honest with themselves about what it is that they're enjoying and not simply translating their enjoyment into mechanistic rules for success and failure.

I want to return to something Tim F said a few hours ago, namely, "it becomes "music criticism" [of R&B] in the strong sense when I incorporate into that discussion an awareness of the prevailing critical suspicion of that style of songwriting." As a consumer but not producer of music criticism, this seems wrong as an aim (I am not sure that Tim is offering it as an aim, so consider this a request for clarification). Good crit of R&B would avoid this kind of double-consciousness and would take for granted that R&B songwriting is fully worthy of appreciation, even by the sort of person who would bother reading music crit. Defensiveness is never a turn-on. Say what's great about the music (or what's not). Create the framing for what you do by doing it, not taking for granted trad rock crit's framing.

I should clarify that what I was getting at is more the way in which rock criticism ("rock" is intentional there) as a discourse tends to frame (generally) and constitute or shape (on an individual level) the coverage of R&B (and many other genres for that matter), rather than what I would specifically advocate as a goal.

Having said that I think there's a difference between the self-reflective double-movement I'm referring to and "defensiveness" per se, and it would be reductionist and just wrong to say that R&B coverage in mainstream music crit is always about defending R&B - the double-movement I'm referring to is bound up in the process of producing music crit generally, whereby you simultaneously immerse yourself in a discourse and feel a sense of internal distance from the discourse. In this sense it applies as much to writing about rock as to anything else.

Notably, people who come up entirely through dance music crit discourse (e.g. Mixmag etc.) - and I assume the same goes for various other style-specific critical communities - still tend to apply the same hierarchical structures as rock music crit, just with different concrete signifiers occupying the same conceptual chairs (i.e. what counts as real, what counts as soulful, what counts as raw, what counts as accomplished, what counts as inventive etc.) - Lester Bangs treating disco as the decline and fall of early black rock and soul is like a madlib that can as easily produce pipecock treating rave as the decline and fall of house/techno, despite the fact that you're talking about two fairly separate music crit discourses.

To steal a bit from Chuck Eddy, the problem with people demanding that we talk about genres "in their own terms" is that sometimes it's very productive to apply the terms of one genre to the other - i.e. to think about rock in disco terms, to think about rap in country terms etc. The real thing people are fighting when they demand to think about something "in its own terms" is the unspoken assumption that we should apply rock (or, these days, rather, indie) values with respect to everything. The double-movement I'm talking about is simply the movement beyond that moment, to the point where you no longer apply rock crit's unconscious hierarchy but are free to make whatever hierarchy you like.

bed rest doesn't sound like rock the boat tho

tl;dr xpost

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every place Fishscale rates over Supreme Clientele is a further demonstration of either "i don't fuck with rap" or "i am a lazy newjack".

― zvookster, Thursday, January 14, 2010 12:45 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

i think this is a really rude and ignorant thing to say. they're both two of the best rap albums of the decade, and each have plenty of advantages over the other. the production is way more lush and exciting (and modern) on fs, especially compared what are basically just 90's beats on sc. obviously the raps are way more complex and intricate on sc, but they also make fuck-all sense a lot of the time. ghostface on fishscale is a really likable and hilarious guy, and his personality pervades the whole album.

― samosa gibreel, Thursday, January 14, 2010 4:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lol if any number of ilx regulars said this no one would blink

i think this is a really rude and ignorant thing to say.

well i'll think about bullshit preambles and qualifiers in future so people don't catch feelings, but really it's an easy shorthand to understand, just means for you that you have lived with ghostface's records a little and share company in your placing with what in zvookster's opinion are newjacks or non-rap kind of dudes.

I hope no-one ever invents a way to track who gets the most 'tl;dr' responses.

tl;dr

Kidding! ;)

Personally, I find this straightforward embrace of commercialism refreshing.

worst sentence ever?

haha yeah for real. the bending over backwards is just so awkward. its ok to like pop music that embraces commercialism but trying to turn that into a virtue is wacky

its ok to like pop music that embraces commercialism but trying to turn that into a virtue is wacky

really?