The All-New STYLUS.

The only real music is actual ambient sound produced randomly by one's environment. Everything else = COMMERCIAL ROCKIST SELLOUT. There, I've spoken.

^^^ Sockpuppet

next time i'll be sure to write benynes and tuss instead of internet lolspeak for the sockspotters!

if karen's not a sock he's still an unbearable poster to read & i dont really care if he thinks im so mean that he'll never listen to R&B again.

lol @ argument reducing to "maybe if R&B fans werent so mean, there would be more of them!!!" ooh point scored

i will say that sometimes something that can occasionally frustrate w/ the lex's writing is he wants to have his cake & eat it to, to be able to correct the structural inequities that do unfairly malign R&B while still occasionally indulging in the kinds of back-patting "most avant-garde beats on offer" like R&B fans care about having the most avant garde beats (is that even an accurate statement? what does it even mean?) etc

^^this is the kind of thing that bothers me most but prolly bc i've been guilty of it in the past and the narcissism of small differences etc

The difference is maybe that country and metal have their own critical infrastructure, hip-hop too, in a way that rnb seemingly never has

i think the main reasons as to why they're marginalised are quite straightfoward/understandable tho e.g. Metal's sonic 'extremity' and general aggression, and Country's perceived conservatism (decent gender balance notwithstanding). i'd suggest rap+R&B's remarkable occupation and domination of what Pop tended to entail in the US from the mid 90s (or at least early 00s) onwards led to a negative reaction from too many rock critics used to dismissing pop

To some extent country and metal have not only their own critical infrastructure but their own self-selecting community/class divide (class in the Frank Kogan sort of way, I suppose). Country and Metal's critical infrastructure exists not only as a result of marginalization by 'mainstream' criticism but also as an outgrowth of their own isolation from the mainstream by choice, perhaps?

In America country music's division from the broader pop market isn't just a result of past or present critical derision but also a host of political, class based, regional, etc. factors none of which are wholly explanatory but which lend themselves to the creation of a parallel cultural viewpoint.

Metal presumably functions differently in the specifics but with the same end result - neither has any DESIRE to capture the mainstream's affections in so far as country VIEWS itself as the silent majority/heartland to some extent and metal conceptualizes itself in opposition to the mainstream - as did rap as did punk as did any countercultural movement. 'Mainstream' criticism was slow to embrace rap as a 'serious' genre 'worthy' of discussion and thus a critical establishment for rap maybe developed out of need. Punk and its offshoots gradually turned into the current all-enveloping 'indie', which has been PBS-ed into the critical mainstream, explicitly linked to the rockist discourse of progress and so forth (and tbh was picked up by mainstream white critics much faster) so never reallllly required a separate critical establishment. I'm not sure why metal has remained divided while punk was coopted/embraced. Someone with a better knowledge of this should (and WILL) tell me why all of the above is totally wrong.

But I guess um...R&B doesn't really have a self-segregating/identifying community. R&B functions as pop in the marketplace of music ideas - it WANTS to capture the mainstream, it has no investment in walling itself off - whether out of a desire for 'purity' 'authenticity' or any other bullshit notions that drive underground scenes. Mainstream criticism though has always been heavily grounded in the legacy of the 60s 70s etc. and punk/college rock's evolution into no stakes NPR/PBS-ified indie has kind of captured that critical sphere over the past decade.

As R&B functions as a 'default' option sort of in the pop marketplace (to the point that pop = R&B frequently in normal conversation) the need to champion it to the public doesn't really exist (or isn't as broadly perceived as necessary) which is one of the things that for better or for worse creates a lot of critical/cultural establishments? Punk, indie, country, rap criticism all at some point felt the need to PROVE something (legitimacy, realness, worth) to their cultural predecessors/antagonists/rivals. R&B is such an assured and confident presence culturally that outside of critical circles (where R&B's champions feel outgunned and isolated sometimes per The Lex) there isn't much of a feeling that its success as a genre is at stake or that there is a pressing need to rep for it. Maybe?

What does mainstream mean? Does it mean "music consumed by people without tribal loyalties"? Or "music you might expect to hear on daytime radio"? Or "music consumed by vast numbers of people"? Metal is mainstream by the last of those, country by two of those across huge swathes of the US. Perhaps it's that country and metal have created their own mainstreams, and their own extremities. Metal, say, is not in and of itself extreme, but it has adherents who value extremity. However, anyone who goes to metal gigs knows there are plenty of people there who don't exist in a self-segregating community, who are not metal genre loyalists above all, but who like the act they are seeing. I'm sure plenty of the country audience buy albums that aren't country ... so I don't think the argument that they are special cases where the critical invisibility is inevitable - unlike R&B - quite stands up.

PS I'd say metal, above all genres, has historically valued the mainstream - rap and metal are surely the two genres that have traditionally valued commercial success for its own sake, and the rewards that success brings

Lumping country and metal together qua "non-mainstream" is pretty weird, I think. Remember that Garth Brooks is the best selling solo artist in US history. That's not "creating its own mainstream", that is the mainstream.

If you're talking about "critical mainstream" it still doesn't work. Country artists haven't traditionally been looked down upon by critics. Each of the Rolling Stones Record Guides have lots and lots of country artists reviewed (many with some very good reviews). Maybe they're looked down upon by the indie rock critical mainstream but then you're just talking about genre specialists.

Euler OTM ... the central point is that "indie" critics (using the term broadly) have over the past 20 years come to dominate mainstream publications, and then the more widely read critical sites. Hence indie has become the mainstream in critical discourse, while it's nowhere near the mainstream in commercial discourse,

Fair enough. In that case, using Euler's measures (just by way of thought experiment), are R&B albums more or less likely to be reviewed/reviewed well by Rolling Stones Record Guides or comparable parts of the "critical mainstream"?

Is the issue that R&B is actually underrepresented critical, or undervalued critically? Or is it just that there is less space/call for R&B genre specialism (compared to say Country or Metal or Indie or what-have-you, which both appear in the centre of critical discourse and in their own critical spheres)?

Because while Beyonce or Amerie or whoever's albums are turning up in droves on these list-making exercises, I feel like they don't get a worse rap than most other albums in regular review season - whether courtesy Rolling Stone, Christgau, The Guardian or anyone else.

*aren't turning up in droves (clearly)

thats really not true. you'll get a few token records in every year (though never at number one of course) the genre is never represented to any depth

Sorry. Like I said above, typo. During regular review season they get more than token coverage, is what I meant. And often v. good reviews.

And again, the question of what it is about lists like these that result in underrepresentation of R&B is interesting, but in regularly running reviews I think there are probably as many well-reviewed/graded R&B albums in generalist publications (NYTimes, Guardian, Rolling Stone, whatever) as there are well-reviewed indie albums or well-reviewed rap albums.

And yes that statement is totally unfounded. When I have a spare moment I will scan through NYT and Rolling Stone archives of last yr or Metacritic or something to try and back that up.

yeah thats deceptive though. the center around music crit in generalist mags rotates remains indie, and marginally popular performer w/in that milieu are way way way more likely to get coverage than marginally popular but equally compelling artists in r&b/hiphop/metal/country/dance

Hmm. I'll buy that.

center around which

I wonder, does "mainstream rock" - say, Nickleback, The Fray, etc. - have a critical centre either? The successful stuff gets reviewed much like Beyonce or Rihanna get reviewed, but yeah it occurs to me that in order to have a substantial discourse that would, say, produce either prominent genre specialists or (similarly) promote coverage of the less successful stuff, you need to have some strong sense of being a community apart from the mainstream - which country, rap, indie, dance music and metal all have, regardless of their actual level of success, which might be enough to qualify them as mainstream-in-fact.

This goes back to my point above, that the first, founding conceptual operation of music crit is to establish a sense of distance from "just" mainstream music consumption - which is different from saying that music crit is always defensive - much specialist music crit is or appears to be entirely oblivious to the existence of the mainstream.

But at any rate I agree that the conflation of R&B with "the mainstream" may be part of why it falls between these stools as such.

Although I do think gender is a big issue here. As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B variety.

Obv R&B does have genre-specialist critics, but not in the numbers you'd expect proportionate to its commercial success or even - on a tracks basis at least - performance in polls like this.

If I can be snarky for a second, I would note that I don't like the way these threads seem to devolve into referendums about one person's taste, esp. recently - Joe The Plumber tactics IMO.

The issues raised in this thread are (or can be) much more interesting than whether one person is right or wrong in their appreciation of X.

At this point I think we should probably consider the market forces that drive production of crit, which are not record sales or radio play, but magazine sales, website hits, and advertising spend. Who reads, and who is influenced by, music crit, who isn't, in terms of genre audiences, and why?

I dunno, I feel like this is one profession that's more defined by who steps up to perform it than what the audience or industry asks for. Indie-loving English majors are in far greater supply in the field of music writing than they could ever possibly in demand for.

That's very true, I guess, but if people didn't also want to read it then P4K would get no hits and no money, likewise magazines (the ones that haven't already folded, anyway). Obv moneys not the only driving factor in mags and websites existing, some will always be run for free, but it's nevertheless a factor.

Well, all sorts of websites and publications cover all sorts of music and get lots of hits/readers, it just happens that the ones that are more critic-driven and wordcount-heavy are indie or indie-leaning generalist types. And I have a strong hunch that whatever desire exists out there to read critical analysis of non-indie music, no matter how small, is probably pretty underserved.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B variety.

yeah, i think you said this w/r/t female singer-songwriters before, which rings v true - the reason i never really read much music crit when growing up is because it was mostly very snarky/dismissive of the artists i listened to as a teenager (tori amos, fiona apple, ani difranco et al). oddly enough apple became a lot more accepted (circa extraordinary machine) once she started hanging out w/indie-auteur faves like paul thomas anderson, developed that whole me-vs-the-record-label narrative which wasn't even true etc etc.

tori amos's weirdo electronic albums at the end of the 90s are still two of the most critically underappreciated ones i own - been revisiting them a lot this week and the scale, ambition and execution are still extraordinary, yet pretty much no one cares about them any more.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B

I don't read enough crit these days to say for sure, but my impression is that this isn't true of women's country music...assuming that by "women's music" you mean music made by women. If you're talking about music made for women then I don't know what this means so I can't say.

Hey, I really miss this website - it was kind of like "Pitchfork, but good"

Is there any hint that they might come back up?
Or is there another website out there like it?

Nope. The archives remain, and lots of us have found homes elsewhere. Thanks for the kind words.

so are there other sites like it?
I dunno, I liked the features like "Playing God", "On Second Look", etc. - kinda showed you guys thinking about music the same way obsessives like myself do.

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/

Playing God was fucking awesome, and I definitely have a number of playlists that adopted some of those tracklists.

Thequietus is the best thing since Stylus.

^^^mad trolling

TQ has good interviews but their taste is so boring that I really can't read anything else.

I only contributed to Stylus three times, but Todd Burns was one of the best editors I ever dealt with--one of the few who didn't, in the parlance of Sweet Smell of Success, expect you to jump through burning hoops like a trained poodle.

wait - is like every ILMer a former writer for this website?

Nearly.

I don't contribute to this site very much, but I only ended up here because Stylus folded. I loved that site, and posted to it a lot. Some of the most intelligent, and impassioned, engagements with reviews/writing I have found. Of course, a whole lot of horseshit, grandstanding, and just plain mean-spiritedness/petty trolling as well, but OVERALL a very admirable effort to let the masses in on the experience. This site is probably the closest to it, from a feel perspective (and all the alumni of course).

frogbs: there was a lot of stylus/freakytrigger/ilx crossover; a lot of the same people now right for singles jukebox

No trolling here! I dig Thequietus interviews, op eds and occasional reviews. Frankly I should use it more to check out what they're touting as they clearly come from the same post-punk roots as I do.

i wasn't a "writer" per se... but, when Stylus closed, i was the first regular commenter they thanked in one of their goodbye pieces ^____^

The Quietus is awesome btw

Uggh, I got mentioned in that Stylus goodbye as well. Both OK with that and totally embarrassed at the same time. Some real unfortunate posts by me in some of those pieces, but those were rougher times. Still sorry about some of them though.

likewise for me, i'm sure. but then it's not like i don't make unfortunate posts on ilx nowadays, so who cares

man, I didn't you two were commenters.