★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

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

I had a not dissimilar argument last fall when a couple of friends said Taylor Swift was the only "country artist they liked. Their constricted notion of what was acceptable country clashed with my constricted notion of what "country" signified as a genre. Certainly James Blake, Junior Boys, Burial, et al inspired lots of snickers from yours truly about how they wedded beatz to indie sensibilities. After all these months I'm thinking maybe I'm wrong.

Whereas How To Dress Well and The Weekend share an assumed context of "isolationist" listening: you and your computer effectively

a) is this true b) what r&b is not 'isolationist' by your measure?

Certainly it's more troublesome for me to explain how How To Dress Well is not R&B than explaining how Keyshia Cole IS.

also tim you make your argument about functionality w/r/t dance music, but then you compare that functionality to how to dress well/weeknd, which as lamp points out code as R&B - so there's a little bit of goalpost shifting in, unless I've misunderstood your post (which I probably have)

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.

― jaxon, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

not exactly running to TS's defense here, can't fault you for not loving that record. but i feel like you're laying out a lot of unspoken biases here that lead people to only listen to 'arty' sorta-R&B but not any mainstream R&B more contemporary than, like, Aaliyah. imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, it CAN be sonically unique or adventurous but if you show up hoping primarily for that or being turned off by studio polish or an emphasis on radio-friendly hooks yeah of course you're going to get bored and go back to blogsoul.

The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

waht

Trey embellishing every fucking word with unnecessary emphatic vibrato is what makes the emotions in his music come off insincere ftr

fwiw vahids argument there figures heavily into deej goonery (lol @ this coinage) ha

fyi jaxon i def wouldnt rep for that whole LP, although you highlighted pretty much my fav tracks. You should probably check out Trey's "Anticipation" mixtape that came out a year or so before it. Its not perfect but there are def some weird / interesting production choices, really spacey/sparse R&B along the lines of 'unfortunate' (although maybe nothing as good as that song)

Trey embellishing every fucking word with unnecessary emphatic vibrato is what makes the emotions in his music come off insincere ftr

^^^^ this. The gloss has nothing to do with it.

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

love that mixtape

imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances

as much as its a) dumb and b) a false binary i still kinda like my idea upthread that a lot of this argument is about narrative vs. emotive styles of music & whether certain genres are inherently wedded to one type of music or the other. i guess this sorta ties into tim's stuff about the functional use of music & how (for me) 'narrative' music is focused both lyrically & musically on movement & structure

Well, I could argue that imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B country is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, no?

Narrative writing remains a hallmark of country.

The gloss has nothing to do with it.

"Gloss" can still be used appropriately as a pejorative, i.e. "that keyboard part is just gloss," meaning it's not really very good and it's just there to give a sense of a particular production quality.

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.

yeah i'm not saying that r&b can't be recontextualised - as i think i posted on tumblr, that nguzunguzu mix doing the rounds is a really incredible example of how it can be (and another reason to hate on the attention that the weeknd are getting) - ditto kingdom's r&b samples and many others. but really the trick of dumping a sped-up r&b sample into a post-dubstep track is itself getting pretty old at this point, you can always hear when people are doing it in a rote or uninspired way - it's a qualitative difference.

but i feel like you're laying out a lot of unspoken biases here that lead people to only listen to 'arty' sorta-R&B but not any mainstream R&B more contemporary than, like, Aaliyah

yeah this is otm - and with this in mind how is it possible NOT to be kind of angry at "arty" sorta-r&b being written up as though it was an amazing new direction for the genre?

Sure -- I listened to Bowie's Never Let Me Down a couple of hours ago; talk about redundant keyboard tinkles. But "gloss" as jaxon's defining it isn't what cripples Trey's recordings to my ears, and maybe I'm reading him enough but his statement implied that capital-G-gloss is a perennial problem.

xpost

really i think the superior "proper" r&b version of the weeknd isn't trey songz - as much as i'm fond of him he's not exactly a standout of the genre except by default - it's the diddy/dirty money remix mixtape

Well, I could argue that imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B country is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, no?

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 10:35 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Narrative writing remains a hallmark of country.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 10:35 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

what's your point?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAi2L3KgVw

Sorry