★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

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

lol

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,

ha this is like exactly what i love about this album but couldnt articulate! thanks deej!

also Brightblack Morning Light are one of my favorite 00's bands so

yeah i mean i figured thats what ppl liked about it, feels like a cliche to me at this pt after all the chillwave & hypnogogy but i guess some things never die & played signifiers of nostalgia is one of them :O

this is less played bc its more elegant & refined & poised, its hazy but its not sloppy

"What You Need" seems to be pulling equally heavily from Tricky's "Overcome" and Madonna's "Justify My Love", two songs that I think are among the sexiest pieces of music on the planet, and then mixes it with tech tricks that are basically like catnip to me, so it's kind of a no-brainer that I would dig this almost instantly. Like I said, it's hitting almost all the same buttons as that Creep EP.

(which I will totally admit leans very heavily on the sloppy side of this spectrum)

its not reall abt 'nostalgia' tho imo its abt being at a party & feeling alone or the way you can feel like you know less abt a person after fucking them or seeing someone check their phone as soon as they get somewhere, already planning their exit. there are some sonic/aesthetic similarities w/'chillwave' stuff, sure, & they share a sense of alienation & displacement but weeknd are going after something else w/ these tracks imo

yall are some paranoid stoners

lol

ah fuck off, gr8 post