★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

seems to me that you and lex are both music critics who truck in genres that, in the grand scheme of music criticism, seem to be marginalized & overlooked. or at least, both you and lex spend a lot of time complaining about 'mainstream' coverage of your specialist genres by sites like pitchfork, how they privilege the wrong aspects, the wrong artists, how their aesthetics don't plug into your framework.

anyway seems to me that the weeknd have a 'sound' that some people on this board like, people who don't spend all their time listening to modern R&B, or at least not to the extent that the lex does. and so maybe these people enjoy listening to the weeknd precisely because they are not burdened by the baggage that someone like lex brings to the table! maybe the weeknd pushes certain buttons for them, buttons that are not valuable to the lex. and that's okay. coming in this thread and being all "pitchfork blah blah blah hate indie weakling pathetic trey songz" is kinda the equivalent of the dude in high school who pulls you out and says "you're listening to green day? GREEN DAY? don't you know there are 100 bands that are more punk than GREEN DAY?"

sometimes you just wanna listen to green day.

if you're asking if i see why lex's rhetoric makes it harder to listen to artists he likes sometimes, yes i do & i made that pt in the jazmine sullivan vs janelle monae debates

there were jazmine sullivan vs. janelle monae debates?

welcome to ilx lol

seems to me that you and lex are both music critics who truck in genres that, in the grand scheme of music criticism, seem to be marginalized & overlooked. or at least, both you and lex spend a lot of time complaining about 'mainstream' coverage of your specialist genres by sites like pitchfork, how they privilege the wrong aspects, the wrong artists, how their aesthetics don't plug into your framework.

fwiw i agree/disagree w/ how this is framed. or i think there needs to be some nuance. 'mainstream' sites are, in fact, specialist music sites w/ disproportionate influence on discourse. theres nothing really 'specialist' about the genres lex or i talk abt, except to the extent that theres not a history of critical framework around them to the extent it exists for other genres. as a result, the dominant stories about these genrescome from people not as familiar w/ the history and aesthetic value systems that have helped develop these genres. so i spend a lot of time trying to identify how these values are manifested in the music, then track those backwards into stories about how the music has developed. a project like this requires a certain amount of irreverence -- 'fake' stuff is always influencing 'real', or stuff i dont care for is often impacting stuff i do like.

regardless, framing this as a 'real'/'fake' thing the way lex often does is misleading & unhelpful. it becomes its own ideology. but just as youre free to dismiss my arguments about why the jacka is a great rapper (or whoever) im certainly free to dismiss the weeknd as being particularly interesting in the grand scheme of things no?

no one's actually made a case for what the weeknd are doing yet, all you've said is "well it's not like r&b at all!"

The primary appeal for me, as someone who listens to modern R&B more than anything else these days, is good slow jams are hard to pull off, and I think this album pulls them off. The guy's got a nice voice, and most of these tracks really do have huge hooks.

What it offers that other R&B doesn't, of course, is a much broader palette: more guitars, odder samples, glitchy beats, Souxsie and the Banshees-appropriated choruses. Some of that stuff works better than others—I particularly enjoy how hard some of these beats grind; it really hits home the angst—but I find most of it an interesting change of pace.

Also, some of the lyrics that are initially off-putting begin to make more sense over the course of an album. There's a nice, karmic balance over these nine tracks; every high is followed by a come down, every party by a morning after, every indulgence by a regret. The singer ultimately isn't quite the vain jerk he can come across as in small exposures; there's some depth to this songwriting.

^good post

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/03/the_weeknd_frank_ocean.php

i'm talking about evan's post, to be clear

all this stuff just feels to me like people who are so overly wary of industry machinery that they readily embrace other kinds of marketing and mythmaking -- people that don't give 2 shit about any new major label R&B album jump all over something that was shelved by Def Jam and uploaded to the artist's tumblr or is released by a mysterious anonymous collective

surprised that vv article was the first comparison to odd future tbh

xp otm, explains why theyres so much noise abt OF as well...much of which isnt talking abt the music. victory of new marketing

evan's post is good except i still dont get what 'huge hooks' hes talking about

the odd future thing definitely makes sense in that regard

i don't think i'm gonna touch the part about drake 're-inventing r&b' tho

Threads like this make me wonder whether Lex would like the first Junior Boys album if it came out tomorrow or whether he'd be using exactly the same argument.

that village voice article is really terrible

i just like disaffected party music its the ~modern condition~

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake that ppl are trying to will him into being important

Village Voice article just keeps shifting its goalposts between artistic and commercial success depending on whether the writer wants to disparage something or not. It's an incoherent mess.

i always thought of junior boys as way more in line with kompakt and ~soft sad techno~ than 2-step or the neptunes - i remember reading that sort of line on it and then just thinking WTF when i finally heard last exit because it really wasn't in there at all

i've bitched about the fennessey piece elsewhere but everything about it is bullshit, from its existence to its arguments

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake turn on the radio that ppl are trying to will him into being important

i already wrote an anti-drake piece on the shrimp a year ago or w/e it was so i'm wary of being too public w/ my criticisms of his critical fanbase -- plus i don't even dislike him that much anymore

my problem w/ the drake part of the piece is that he's just such an obvious extension of the five or so years in rap that preceded him -- him & 40 def have a unique 'sound' but that sound isn't even on the radio & their singles for alicia & jamie foxx, though i like both a lot, underperformed quite a bit for those particular artists

so i'm not even going to get into how absurd the idea is that he 'changed r&b'

Yeah like I said nowadays you just get the red mist whenver any article even mentions commercial rnb in relation to a bedroom or indie audience. Actually it seems perfectly obvious why people might like rnb sonics but not the vocals or lyrics, but filtering those sonics through an indie prism and then still calling it rnb probably isn't the best line to take either way.

what? the alicia song was one of the biggest R&B radio hits of last year and the jamie one is in annoying heavy rotation right now (xpost)

like, literally, the #1 most played song on R&B radio last year: http://www.billboard.com/#/charts-year-end/hot-r-b-hip-hop-songs?year=2010

yeah 'un-thinkable' is actually a bigger hit than i realized -- i guess i put it off to the side cuz the album as a whole felt like such a flop after the one before it

the whole foxx project was a failure pretty much & 'fall for your type' is a pretty minor it by his standards -- r&b placement aside

lol billboard airplay charts always confound me -- "there goes my baby"??

anyway drake is a kanye/wayne biter who hasn't changed anything -- we all know this

evan's post is good except i still dont get what 'huge hooks' hes talking about

― so fly zone (D-40), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 9:04 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

dude this has bigger hooks than Jamie Woon.

playing "Wicked Games" right now

dude sounds like a version of Chris Brown who can sing

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake turn on the radio that ppl are trying to will him into being important

― Moreno, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:21 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they just like his pop songs, i do feel like theres a concentrated effort to make him seem like some sort of high brow pop auteur genius which overstates things greatly imo

dude this has bigger hooks than Jamie Woon.

― gr8080, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:26 PM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i havent heard the woon album yet -- but nothing on this is as catchy as 'night air'

"Fall For Your TYpe" was #1 on the R&B chart a few weeks ago and is still in the top 5 -- that's pretty much the ceiling for R&B that sounds like R&B so why pretend those songs are failures just because they're not will.i.am/david guetta dancepop crossover hits as well?

alright i'll retract slightly

i retract slightly every time i hear those garbage songs on the radio every hour

hey-oooh

lean back

this is kind of great, or it would be with fewer "muhfuckers" and less noticeable autontune

his voice is good -- which makes the vocal filter on 'what you need' all the more inexplicable imo

'chillwave' marketing

the vocal filter on "What You Need" is very effective IMO

this is hitting me like a warmer version of Creep

i love the "motherfuckers"

very effective at doing what?

filtering vocals

for me it just feels distancing & cerebrally referential rather than giving any kind of emotional resonance

filtering vocals

― ♞/♘ (Lamp), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:38 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thats a method not an effect

i still think my fave jam is 'loft music' in large part bcuz it sounds like a lost downbeat dream track

I don't think the "muhfuckers" fit in his voice very well; for whatever reason they leap out like a sore thumb

conversely, the word "shit" seems to flow quite nicely in his delivery

very effective at doing what?

It seems like they are there to add in an extra layer of... for lack of a better word "distance" between the singer and the listener; it's using technology to inject a slight sense of danger into the song, making it sound slightly sinister and, as a result, sexier.

basically, all of the technology tricks in here are things I already like so putting a decent R&B singer in the midst of them is essentially someone creating the music I imagined in my head in 1996 but wasn't sure how to go about making

hmm yeah that has the exact opposite effect for me, feels like a way of distancing yourself from sexiness entirely, like one of the scary/sexy things about stuff like this to me is how intimate it can sound. Making it cold just makes it seem like a way to aim for 'remembering sexy' or something, which might be interesting if it wasnt the basis for the entire hypnogogic thing & countless wistful indie hazy records of the past few years. or burial. or whatever else. it doesnt do it for me any more

lol see I basically ignore all of that stuff until it appears in ILM EOY lists, and even then I usually continue to ignore it because I still haven't forgiven ppl for tricking me into listening to The Streets