The All-New STYLUS.

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?

sure, "personally i find this refreshing!" is a bit patronising. but "this is utterly upfront about commercialism, which is a thing i really like about it" seems a totally reasonable thing to say.

Yeah but only someone who never listens to pop music would think of said upfrontness as being "refreshing".

It's like saying "oh, you didn't go to university, how novel!"

idk man, i think the question we really need to be asking is this: why is there food everywhere? Where has it come from? Can we get confirmation that the party definitely wasn't catered?

BTW what if god was one of us

What if you did?
What if you lied?
What if I avenge?
What if eye for an eye?

Thanks Tim! I get it now: your view is that the comparison of R&B to other genres in criticism is a natural critical device and not necessarily to be avoided; where problems may enter is in automatically comparing it to rock, instead of, say, to disco or country.

The idea of criticism being a madlib, as you nicely put it, seems to ensure that looking for mind-opening insight in any criticism is bound to end in disappointment, because its form is just being mechanically filled in. It's not like I have any ideas of how to innovate in its form, though. And the writing of criticism is supposed to happen so quickly: you can't take a year to sit on a particular piece, and so that necessitates having formal devices that are easy to fill. So I appreciate that even without formal innovation, merely expanding the range of musical signifiers beyond rock would be a serious move toward having a more musically open criticism.

Yes - the "double movement" is basically consciousness-of-the-madlib, and as such could occur in any genre-crit-context.

What I'm saying is kinda inspired by studying Adorno, whose position is (to reduce it massively) that our "flight from Eden" is basically the way in which instrumental rationality has come between us and a more intuitive relationship to ourselves/others/nature. But he does not advocate some "return to nature", which would be impossible and somewhat cynical, a false reconciliation. Rather, only by turning rationality on itself, by out-thinking our own conceptual blinders, can we catch a glimpse (in negative, as it were) of the kind of intuitive relationships we have lost.

Similarly, you can't get down to a kind of pre- or anti-rock-crit "listening degree zero" where you suddenly hear music "for what it is". The genie is out of the bottle. In this context, someone saying "stop being a rock critic and just enjoy the music man" ("writing about music is like dancing... etc.") is the equivalent of the false reconciliation - a mere suppression of our awareness of the relationship between thought and experience.*

Rather you can only continue to think about the relationship between thought and the experience of music - the way the structures of our thought structures our experience of music - until you've obtained as much self-awareness as is possible of how the former shapes the latter.

* This would be my critique of the Melissa Blackshaw article discussed on the Kode 9 thread - arguing in favour of the primacy of music over theory is all well and good but just saying it doesn't make it so, any more than in the case of a politician saying "poverty transcends politics." The only way to get to that point would be to pass through such a process of self-awareness w/r/t one's structures of thought and listening (and the r'ship between these) that you can literally deconstruct your own listening habits. Much in the same way that in order for poverty actually to transcend politics, we would need to completely restructure our political systems.

While I agree that restructuring one's own listening habits is pretty difficult, restructuring one's writing habits is less so, except for the institutional structures that demand reviews with very little turnaround. So you don't have time to think "outside" the madlib as it were. Your suggestion, which I take it implicitly grants this point, is to use the madlib structures as something to play with, not to throw out, but to yield fertile comparisons that haven't been exploited fully yet. Or at least that's partly what you mean.

The idea of criticism being a madlib, as you nicely put it, seems to ensure that looking for mind-opening insight in any criticism is bound to end in disappointment, because its form is just being mechanically filled in. It's not like I have any ideas of how to innovate in its form, though. And the writing of criticism is supposed to happen so quickly: you can't take a year to sit on a particular piece, and so that necessitates having formal devices that are easy to fill. So I appreciate that even without formal innovation, merely expanding the range of musical signifiers beyond rock would be a serious move toward having a more musically open criticism.

― Euler, Friday, January 15, 2010 12:53 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think the thing that drives me is that i feel at this point like the 'innovation' is actually within the music -- if i feel inspired to write something about music, it's because it's creating new things for me to talk about in an interesting way. Writing about music has, in fact, started to affect my own taste in this way, that novelty (although 'novelty' almost feels too small-bore for what im talking about) becomes a more important value -- not so much novelty of the song's style, but novelty of narrative about the song's style.

so the song almost dictates whether or not i can come up w/ something 'worthwhile' (basically, something that communicates ideas i have about a song)

Which boils down to some ancient nonsense about indie fans having "fear of the middle of the body" and being in some kind of Deleuzian double-bind mind trick which stops them liking things on a purely sensual level because they're afraid of sex, and, oh look, r'n'b fans aren't, they're more sensually comfortable and not, therefore, as far from Eden etc etc and that's all BOLLOCKS it's just that some people like indie and some like r'n'b and some like bits of both and some like jazz and some like classical and some don't like music at all.

Xposts.

Euler I know what you mean & I think that's something that through practice becomes more 2nd nature ... first you're hyper-aware of 'the madlib' but as time goes on you learn to sort of read past it subconsciously, or just more easily

nick it doesnt boil down to that at all

And the type of people who have the time and space and inclination to write, especially about music, which does not really put a roof on your head, are genrally middle class white males, and, y'know, what do people always say? Write what you know.

Xposts.

This sense of there being no surprises on these kinds of lists is exactly why I got us to do this; I said in my intro essay "Umberto Eco recently said that “we like lists because we don’t want to die”, which makes a certain amount of sense even if we generally seem to list things at points of death, or at least points of change, however arbitrary. I think my favourite thing about lists has always been their capacity to surprise and educate, to remind us of things we forgot and introduce us to things we never knew existed....

I was thinking along these lines last week, specifically about the nature and origins of list-making. Interesting to know is that writing has its origin in accounting and recording trade -- it took a long time before writing evolved beyond that. Even with modern list-making there's still that ancient and unchanged accountant's mindset of first and foremost setting the record down for posterity, of trying to imprint the idea that "this is how things objectively are," and people are drawn to that format.

And, as I said to Ned the other day, even the Ten Commandments is a list. Moses originally had a really thought-provoking essay called "On Morality" or something, I'm sure, but God told him would never work with people and so a list was made.

thanks deej---I didn't mean it as a criticism but rather just as a way to understand what Tim was getting at. But your reply about how musical innovation can give you an opening for writing something "worthwhile" about the song (if I understood you correctly) is different from what Lex was saying yesterday. He seemed to say that seeking innovation in music was importing rock values into whatever kind of music is being considered, because rock's values include innovation; while (evidently) R&B's don't. I saw where he was coming from (which isn't to say I agreed) but your view seems to be: you value innovation not b/c you've implicitly accepted rock's values but because you're a critic and innovation spurs good criticism.

Funnily enough Nick, one of the reasons I feel an increasing sense of distance from "anti-rockism" is that what I'm talking about really has little to do with what actual styles of music people predominantly listen to. The apparent answer - eclectic, multi-genre listening - doesn't get to the heart of the issue at all.

E.g. advocates of eclecticism, esp. if they place a celebration of it at the centre of their m.o., so often are merely concealing a different sort of inflexibility, a constraining series of mostly unexmined principles w/r/t what music should be.

Of course you can't rid yourself of these sorts of structuring biases any more than you can pick yourself up off the ground.

I think as a writer almost the best thing you can hope for is to be generative of thought-structures that help people to get into the music, rather than simply to reinforce thought structures that ossify or hypostasize certain explanations for musical enjoyment.

= I agree with deej that what becomes exciting for me is "novelty of narrative about the song's style".

I think as a writer almost the best thing you can hope for is to be generative of thought-structures that help people to get into the music, rather than simply to reinforce thought structures that ossify or hypostasize certain explanations for musical enjoyment.

I agree with this completely, which is why I'm so frustrated with Lex being given an opportunity to try and do this, passing it up because he was too busy partying, and then whinging.

Euler there's three different uses of the term "innovation" here:

Deej-positive = innovation as novelty, i.e. new or fresh approaches to old ideas
Rock-crit-positive = innovation as progression, i.e. this announces a new paradigm
Bad rock-crit about R&B = "innovation" as sounding more like the music we like, i.e. "isn't it exciting that this Destiny's Child song sounds like Mouse on Mars"

Lol Nick I'm not sure that voting in the stylus poll = generative of new thought-structures though.

Tim what does rock-crit-positive mean? You mean, from *your* crit point of view, innovation as progression is a good thing? Or from the *rock* crit point of view, innovation as progression is a good thing?

From a rock crit point of view.

Which is not entirely wrong or anything, just often mis- (or at least very selectively) applied.

ok---the line between innovation as a new approach to an old idea, and as introducing a new paradigm, seems unclear to me. Take Autotuned vocals for instance: are they the former or the latter? I'm just trying to get clearer on what's being said.

I think the difference is that innovation in the first sense is plausibly deniable. So, like, Deej is writing about new trends in bay area rap. And some critics might say "you're just trying to magic some innovation into existence that doesn't exist in order to stave off boredom." But conversely you could argue that the failure to perceive or create novel narratives is a sign of the creative exhaustion of those skeptics.

Almost goes without saying that a lot of rock-crit is beholden to pseudo-objectivism, assuming that at the end of days aliens will write on a tablet that The Beatles / Nirvana / Radiohead really were the real deal.

Whereas I suspect deej simply relies on his enthusiasm and the persuasiveness of his own argument; it doesn't rely on some kind of rock-crit-consensus validation.

cool; that's why I was suggesting yesterday when I said that defensiveness is a turn-off. Let your enthusiasm for the music propel your prose into something persuasive for the listener. Preferably without trying to replace the old rock tablet with some new tablet that includes r&b or rap---the tablet is the problem, not merely the inclusiveness of the tablet. /obvious

i think the thing that drives me is that i feel at this point like the 'innovation' is actually within the music -- if i feel inspired to write something about music, it's because it's creating new things for me to talk about in an interesting way

this is an interesting way of looking at it, though i don't think it's one i recognise in how i write, really. or maybe it is, the album i felt most "inspired" to write about last year was the rihanna one, which certainly did have a ton of "novel" elements to it. conversely the music i least feel like writing about these days is techno, i feel like i've exhausted all the adjectives i have for it, though this doesn't preclude enjoying it at all...

i think the idea of being a distinctive artist is a lot more helpful than being an "innovative" one tbh - and it's that quality that i look for more...

The only way to get to that point would be to pass through such a process of self-awareness w/r/t one's structures of thought and listening (and the r'ship between these) that you can literally deconstruct your own listening habits

the danger in doing this is that you can become overly set in your listening habits - i don't want to lay out rules & regulations w/r/t how my taste works - and in any case much of the time there isn't ANY sense to how i respond emotionally to music, cf kogan's incredibly helpful boney joan rule.

I agree with this completely, which is why I'm so frustrated with Lex being given an opportunity to try and do this, passing it up because he was too busy partying, and then whinging.

too busy WORKING for actual £££, fyi

i think the idea of being a distinctive artist is a lot more helpful than being an "innovative" one tbh - and it's that quality that i look for more...

expanding - "innovation" is definitely a praiseworthy quality (though in and of itself it doesn't make something worthwhile), but so is "hewing to convention" in the right context - and of course the two are not mutually exclusive. so merely saying something is "innovative" isn't particularly helpful in criticism (though god knows it's a great hook to get sceptical readers into something) - you have to discuss in what ways a certain artist is being innovative, or being conventional. eg taylor swift - who you could never call an "innovative" artist - but she's someone who's utterly distinctive in the way she goes about making music.

the danger in doing this is that you can become overly set in your listening habits - i don't want to lay out rules & regulations w/r/t how my taste works

Actually that was kind of my point Lex! The Boney Joan rule is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about as a "deconstructionist" tactic.

Also lex yr definition of "distinctive" is basically what i meant by the "deej-positive" version of innovation.