The All-New STYLUS.

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.

why is it that so often i get the feeling that when critics or listeners say you have to 'accept genre on its own terms' what they mean is 'you shld like about this music what *I* like about it'

have to admit this thread has lost me a bit around the time r&b stans started criticising that article posted above. because that article was from the beginning stated as being a 'defend this maligned genre' or a way of explaining what's good about it to people that might not be predisposed towards liking the stuff

now i'm not a writer so i can't assess whether it worked as a piece of writing or rhetoric. all i can say is that it listed a bunch of good stuff about contemporary r&b that i agreed with in a way that i understood and related to

i've understood now why i got such a dissing back in the s.reynolds when i said that i listened to music in a 'different' way coz i was a producer. i never stated that my way of listening was better or worse or more or less pure. just that it was different, that i focused on different things to like or hate or use to assign the concept of 'genre' to. you drew the conclusions about what you thought i meant

it is because you *do* actually belive that your way of listening to r&b is the right one and my way (even if it results in my liking the tracks) is somehow the *wrong* one. (also wondering if you'd get on a bus in south london and tell the teenage girls they're listening to their music wrong, that a white, middle-class, mid-20s gay male's interpretation of contemprary r&b is the correct one not theirs?)

that just stinks of arrogance to me and makes me less inclined to read your writing or pay attention to your tastes. weird that while lurking on the p4k thread i left feeling like i was on your side and end the stylus thread thinking that your nemeses are projections of your own demons and i'm going back to listening to old aphex twin records

(also wondering if you'd get on a bus in south london and tell the teenage girls they're listening to their music wrong, that a white, middle-class, mid-20s gay male's interpretation of contemprary r&b is the correct one not theirs?)

What's this even based on?

why is it that so often i get the feeling that when critics or listeners say you have to 'accept genre on its own terms' what they mean is 'you shld like about this music what *I* like about it'

im gonna go with garden variety paranoia

i was gonna say, it seems obvious how it would not exactly be a welcome contrib 2 a discussion bout how rnb is treated in a patronisingly tokenistic by the indie press, to say "what those p4k douches don't understand is how awesome it got when it got all Glitch-ey." i don't think its really that much of a leap to say that each genre develops its own internal themes, reference points and ways of conversing with itself, and that to make primary the one that is really the hallmark of another genre, and not exactly a defining characteristic of rnb exactly, is treating it tokenistically and like a lesser cousin of the music you like. i mean to ignore the person whose name is what sells the record in the first place...?

i don't think this should be confused with a greenbergian type of logic whereby each genre can only operate within its own framework, and is successful in the ways it displays the defining characteristics of its genre, rather that by listening to rnb with ears only tuned to idm-ey production means that you are missing out on all the other things that are going on, which is kindof unfortunate, because they are awesome. I know that i have gotten into genres by hearing i dunno, metal that feels kindof noisey and electronic and that i can "get" on the terms of music i already like, but to not open my ears to the other things that are happening in the music and starting to appreciate them too seems pretty close minded. i mean, lex posted a bunch of pre-millenial rnb that has a very different emph production-wise but is still awesome, and it might be worth your while giving them a listen with an open mind because you might find something else to dig about them other than the things you already do.

At the same time, telling someone that they're treating rnb as a lesser genre than 'actual' favoured genres does smack a little of gatekeeperism. Let people enjoy what they enjoy, for the reasons they enjoy it, and encourage them to enjoy what you enjoy too.

yeah rnb is such an intensely guarded secret

At the same time, telling someone that they're treating rnb as a lesser genre than 'actual' favoured genres does smack a little of gatekeeperism.

i have no idea how you think this is the case also

At the same time, telling someone that they're treating rnb as a lesser genre than 'actual' favoured genres does smack a little of gatekeeperism. Let people enjoy what they enjoy, for the reasons they enjoy it, and encourage them to enjoy what you enjoy too.

Nick I think you're letting your broader position in the argument cloud your logic a bit. Broadly speaking I agree with the proposition that it's better to encourage people by suggesting them new things to listen to and new ways to listen to stuff, than to beat them with a stick.

However, I assume you're not seriously claiming that we shouldn't be allowed to criticise an article for offering a shallow, superficial (albeit positive) treatment of a genre, one that, by reducing its good qualities to one thing, suggests that all the other qualities we perceive are false or crap or meaningless? Whose "right" to be upset that someone is saying "x genre works like this" should we be protecting? Disagreeing with the article appears to trample on Karen's version of enjoyment of the music, but agreeing with it implicitly tramples on mine. I think we both have to accept from the outset that our mode(s) of enjoyment might be "trampled" in conversation. Karen does grasp this, I think - in other threads he's successfully reproduced the hallmark ILM tone of sneery dismissal of stuff other people like that he doesn't - so the outrage here strikes me as somewhat confected.

Of course it's not the case that there is one right way for listeners to listen and then all sorts of wrong ways that must be corrected. But when a person decides to write an article that seeks to establish (even if only by implication) what the right way is, they open themselves up to criticism, especially if their treatment betrays a lack of depth or breadth of understanding of the subject matter. This is true even with the caveat that there is no one right or "proper" argument. There is very little consensus w/r/t "what should be done" with regard to a whole host of social issues but that doesn't mean that a reader cannot distinguish between a bad argument or a good argument for adopting a particular course of action.

The end point of your apparent position here is actually (with respect, nick!) a kind of Fox News style anti-elitism, only applied to music: the claim that any attempt to criticise poorly thought-out arguments is GATEKEEPERISM, elitist sneering at actual people's lives etc. A justified response if the argument being made is really an attack on the original speaker's credentials, their right to have an opinion.* But not so justified if the argument is that the person's claims are founded on faulty premises.

* Obv. this happens a lot in music writing and within online music fan communities, and it's worth calling out when it does.

NB. Should stress that I don't think you're a kneejerk anti-elitist Nick - just that when terms like "gatekeeper" are flung around indiscrimianately that kind of thinking is always invoked.

To my mind gatekeeperism involves the control and privileging of knowledge and/or status, e.g. do you own (or know) the right records, have you seen x person play live, have you been into this stuff since a certain point in time.

i.e. it creates barriers which cannot be overcome simply through enjoyment of the music.

This is different from saying "a defence of R&B based solely on high production values is wrongheaded" - anyone can listen to an R&B record and (theoretically) enjoy the performance, the lyrics, etc.

This is a terrific thread - I'm really enjoying Tim's posts especially!

Haha, the last thing I am is a "kneejerk anti-elitist". The way the "there's more to ebb than IDMish production" argument (which is a fine and right argument) is occaisionally phrased, and especially by Lex, on this thread very much comes across to me as "you're liking this wrong, idiot" rather than "this is also great, try and get into this side of it". The side effect of "this is wrong, idiot" being that people who maybe were finding a way into a genre now feel criticised by the specialists, ie gatekeepered out. It doesn't matter squat if that's not what's intended by the specialists; if it's perceived by the entryists, and turned them away, then it's a bad thing and can only prevent the increase in discussion of rnb that escapes rock crit modes of thought.

Anyway, rnb did pretty damn well in the Stylus singles list, suggesting rock crit types do like it and want to write about it. Or at least dance to it. Why it didn't do well in the albums list is almost certainly connected to the "right way" of listening to it; ie I doubt many people sit down and take in a Beyonce or Aaliyah or Amerie album in one sitting because that's an old fashioned method of listening, maybe even a redundant method. If you take a genre on... Not it's "own" terms but it's "best" terms, then you have to do the same with a format, surely? Whether that be mp3s or "the album" or the EP or the 7" single or whatever, and some genres simply don't have much in common with some formats; Karen's not moaning about there not being enough IDM in the singles list.

Posting from my iPhone in bed so excuse the flow of this.