★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

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

looking for rtc to weigh in

alienation and displacement

dial up the radiohead & release it anonymously -- guaranteed acclaim

anyway ill stop trolling now but this stuff still feels stiff to me & not in a way that makes me think abt when you're at a party but having a sad time there -- its not a problem of authenticity but i think a lot of stuff this purportedly does that is unique is stuff that isnt really that unique at all

"not the right kind of stiff"

i feeeeel the pain of everyone/then i feel nothing

I SHOULD dig this (and I don't care about authenticity) but all I keep hearing is an R&B-leaning She Wants Revenge.

The press I've read is kinda hysterical.

i honestly have no idea how How to dress Well is connected to this or r'n'b in the least, besides the guy namedropping keith sweat every other question.

Thank you, jaxon.

sounds kinda junior boysy to me eh

"not the right kind of stiff"

― wavy g. wavegarten (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:09 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol this is like the sexy photoes thread

s0 st1ff

dayo do you like brightblack morning light

― gr8080, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

no but I remember hearing about them

what's good?

the s/t one and "motion to rejoin" are both awesome

i only bring it up in this thread because it strips down/smokes out folky bluesy shit and favors repetition over "SONIC HOOKS"

Brightblack Morning Light ... WTF?

Just listened to the Trey Songzzzzzz album. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, just not that many things extraordinarily right with it. I dug Red Lipstick and Unfortunate and Unusual, but felt the rest was pretty generic and clinical. Paint by numbers radio pop. Nothing too adventurous. lot of r.Kelly rips and MJ bridges. The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

I like dirt and mistakes and imperfect singing and lack of hooks. And I like brightblack morning light.

And I dig this moody slowjam. Did this ever break outside the bay area? Deej said a while back, "with a name like erk tha jerk he probably won't". Ha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSbVOpKq9OI

A friend whose opinions about contemporary R&B I trust just sent this to me, so I'm downloading it as I type. Reassuring, though, to see that we're all reverting to type here.

the thing i'm interested in is why the music codes mainstream r&b but the surface aesthetics & target audience are pure indie rock

How To Dress Well?

lol read the thread first

"Wicked Games" is closer to Hall & Oates than The-Dream: asshole pleading for sympathy.

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

The sampler EP doing the rounds for about a year and a half before the album came out was much more 2-step based, including with stuff that basically sounded like Horsepower Productions et al - mainly original member Johnny Dark's influence I think.

The "R&B for Pitchfork" line - as distinct from other non-"pitchfork" (but in practice still hyped by pitchfork) but non-R&B appropriations of R&B seems to come down to the sense of purpose or function implied by context.

I've made joking claims before that all the R&B influenced post-dubstep that lex likes is basically the UK version of "How To Dress Well", and he has admirably not risen to the bait. The underlying implication of the joke is that these are all "indie" uses of R&B.

I assume Lex perceives a crucial difference on the basis that even (what I would call, I'm sure he wouldn't) the "indie" end of dance music still has a commitment to an idea of dance functionalism, a nominal belief that this music is designed to be deployed in public, to be responded to physically.

Whereas How To Dress Well and The Weekend share an assumed context of "isolationist" listening: you and your computer effectively.
Even if in practice the music is 90% consumed in that matter regardless. Of course lots of people listen to Trey Songz at their computers as well, and it can work really well in that context too (or rather, Trey can do both "Bottoms Up" and "Unfortunate").

So you could say that the argument is less about "realness" and more about whether there is any value in producing music whose "point" seems to be to reduce the functionality or the context-suitability of its source material. I think there is value in this, but am sympathetic to lex's position to the extent that I think that critically the value of this is overstated and over-represented.

Funnily enough the real prototype for lex's position here is not deej and goonery but vahid and Kompakt "soft sad techno" - vahid objected to the amount of attention given to this kind of music because it was effectively (in his opinion) indie kids sitting at computers sighing over mood and atmosphere (I'm am obviously being incredibly reductionist w/r/t vahid's opinion but this post is getting long enough already).

And people would respond and say: "but... I go out and dance to this stuff at raves too!"

But, I think, for Vahid, the sense was that the indieness of "soft sad techno" as an idea infected even the music's actual dancefloor existence. And of course the underlying issue is the privileging of that music over and above stuff only liked by clubbers.

So, always, even the fairly neutral judgments, come down to whether the music in question is reflective of some kind of broader fight going on.

Like, I think Junior Boys emerged at a time when entirely non-dancefloor appropriations of modern dance music (as opposed to, say, disco-punk revivalism) was at a low ebb, so there was nothing particularly "threatening" about critics loving them unless you took the Vahid line (can't remember what he thought of them actually). Also 2-step had died already so there was nothing "at stake" in their appropriations (beyond the tardiness of enthused critics obv).

Whereas now they might seem like an extension of James Blake et al and I can well imagine people hating them on that kind of basis.

I assume Lex perceives a crucial difference on the basis that even (what I would call, I'm sure he wouldn't) the "indie" end of dance music still has a commitment to an idea of dance functionalism, a nominal belief that this music is designed to be deployed in public, to be responded to physically.

this, really. this is what I secretly suspect is one of lex's measuring sticks - and it'd be interesting to talk about the function of music, the context & environment of listening and how that affects your reaction to music. like I've more than once seen j0rd or others deploy the "this pop song was pretty meh but after I heard it all over the place it really sunk in". see also: "the song that feels like summer"

booming post btw xp