★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

the thing abt 'quirkiness' is only really addressed at other critics / journalists writing about how 'important' this is. its not addressed at people who just like the music, man. obviously my taste heavily overlaps w/ yours & jaxon's when it comes to this kind of stuff, but there is a commonality to all the stuff the three of us have ever talked about, which is that we all think the songs are good, right? like, you want to listen to them over & over? i know you like these, but for me these just arent good songs on the level of, like, former porn stars singing about 'flying like an eagle' or eartha kitt's disco record -- both of which are campy, but not, like, constructed sloppily as an affect. they both function to me the way great songs are supposed to function. that they are weird/interesting is a bonus.

anyway this is where it comes to an issue of taste -- i just wanted to be clear where my lines are w/ this

grady just listen to R&B

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

also, this was touched on upthread wrt 'pageantry and theatricality', but pop music has always been about more than faceless recorded music. image and quirk and mythos arent't unfortunate byproducts of pop music, they're part of its makeup. there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking the weeknd because of a quirky aesthetic.

i can't tell if you're flipping my argument on me on purpose or what but i was saying that 'anonymous' anti-image stuff like The Weeknd, while certainly shrewdly mythology-building in its own right, is kind of a way of hooking people who are turned off by more star/persona-driven R&B that's more overtly about dramatic videos and big melismatic vocal performances.

i dont know if i was flipping it on you or not but i was saying that image is part of it no matter what, and some ppl like the jj-abrams-ication image

you cant be "anti-image" i guess is what i was saying, there's no such thing

haven't listened to them, but on a scale of 1 - 10, how #based is this band?

the unspoken message i get out of conversations like this is kind of like "I really like R&B or the IDEA of R&B, but I'm only going to sit down with an album of it if it's something outside the major label system that gets blog hype as being especially weird or creative"
― some dude, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 5:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i just wrote something a little unsatisfying about this, but ... there's always the impulse to discuss this stuff on the level of media, perceived coolness, and what's "okay to like" -- what seems much harder for people to talk about is, like, what specific difference makes this intriguing to certain listeners in a way mainstream r&b is not? I'm not discounting the effect of media, or the air of cool, or tribal affiliation, but that feels minor: this record does concrete things differently than mainstream r&b I like just as much or better, and that sticks out pretty clearly if i, say listen to it during commercials on 106&park. production sensibility, emotional effect, sense of persona -- I don't even know that they're pointedly "weird" so much as just a slightly different thing. ("weird" depends where you're coming from, I guess; like many people, I enjoy r&b and beach house both, so this doesn't exactly jar!) it might be hard to articulate, but it seems easy to hear concrete choices here that will be inviting to one audience rather than another.

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

grady just listen to R&B

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

― gr8080, Thursday, 24 March 2011 21:35 (10 minutes ago) Permalink

tbf this was in response to you saying that this music made u think of sex & weed & dismissing sade as old woman music

man grady you really think sade is old woman music

hey nitsuh i guess what intrigues me about it would be, is this middle-ground artist actually appealing to both audiences, or are they just one audience's artist in the end, and if they end up appealing to both audiences, is it in the same way jay-z hates rap but loves coldplay cliche of ilx yore

does that make sense

like, what is the *social effect* of this sonic blending

better teachers in inner city schools

ha

jumping off that joke i have a friend who teaches in inner city schools & bless her heart she tries to push indie rap on her kids who are big gucci / waka heads and its just, like, the cornier end of cliche'd 'deep' indie rap & shes like 'they just wont listen to me!' & i want to break it down & be like 'youre fundamentally misunderstanding the way rap functions' but then i think i would seem mean so like most of my music nerdery i restrict it to ilx

friend of friend remixed. totally accentuating the burial aspects: http://soundcloud.com/vin-sol/what-you-need

D, i'm not saying they get both audiences -- seems really rare that anyone manages that. but there are simple, obvious, audible, above-anyone's-cynicism REASONS for which audience goes for it, not just "who said it was cool," right? it's not solely translating or marketing something for a new audience: it winds up actually staking out some sonic and emotional space that's just a little "different." which is cool! even if it sucks, the mere fact of opening up a few extra spaces seems nice to me. not for social effects, but just for musical ones. (though maybe those can become social ones down the road.)

ok yeah that seems generally true & i agree

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

not when the middle stances are privileged so heavily over the original styles and methods

or like one of em anyway

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

This is correct as far as it goes: the problem is that as a critical community we are having increasing difficulty identifying music that stakes out "weird middle stances" without the kind of signifiers of indie-friendly audience-crossing quirk that some listeners are objecting to here.*

This kind of thing is something we recognise full well in politics, and recognise as being important to how politics functions: the way in which particular rituals, affectations, phrases, ideas and allegiances capture the field of broad principles that everyone agrees in the abstract are good.

This is my perennial complaint: "weird middle stances" happen all the time well within the confounds of "generic" (in both senses of the word) music but the more critics try to adopt a kind of omniscient across-all-genres faux-objectivism the harder it is for them to recognise what is of interest within genre. The unsurprising irony of course is that critically the exception to this rule is indie rock itself, wherein actually generic (again in both senses of the word) music still can be celebrated insofar as the unspoken assumption that indie in and of itself is a "weird middle stance" confers legitimacy on even its most rote manifestations.

(*the massive caveat being that each and every one of us here is guilty of this in some area of music - but the point here is not the awfulness of individual instances of people doing this kind of thing, but the limiting effect of our entire critical discourse becoming premised on it)

just yesterday i was thinking "damn i wish i could throw up the nabisco signal over the weeknd thread"

:D

not when the middle stances are privileged so heavily over the original styles and methods

give me a break, dude.

No, lex is right. I've seen this a lot with listeners the last couple of years.

im going to backpedal slightly & say tim otm lol

yeah i dont think he is, even a little, but i guess this comes down to how aware you are of the 'critical community' & how you perceive it

lex, how many times have people called you geir?

yeah otm

writing this r&b/weeknd column at the moment and there's so much interesting stuff happening in r&b right now - it's been a beleaguered genre commercially of late, but in the past few months alone you've got two of its biggest stars explicitly defining it on record - r kelly singing "i wanna bring the love songs back to the radio" and diddy's intro to the r&b remix of "yeah yeah you would" - like they're pretty much staking something on this idea of "real", traditional r&b as something that's important to keep alive. and the career arcs of how kandi and dawn richard have wound up making some of the best r&b of the year are fascinating in themselves. and then that timothy bloom video that dropped out of nowhere and pretty much blew the r&b community away.

against this backdrop how the fuck do you even write a column purportedly about r&b and focus on the weeknd.

*tim otm

haha

lex, I'm curious to learn what you think of the new El Debarge record, my favorite "trad" R&B record of the last six months. Clearly he's following the classicist route (which he helped invent and define for R. Kelly and Ne-Yo).

i think lex has a point but the thing he should realize is that 'middle stances' being privileged over original styles isn't something that just happens to rap or r&b in the pitchfork universe -- it also happens to traditional indie music that ppl we would call squares like -- i think nabisco sorta wrestled w/ this sort of thing in his male bonding review from last year -- 'how do you make a plain r&b record appealing to people that are head over heels for the weekend' is the same as 'how do you make the make the male bonding record appealing to people that are head over heels for sleigh bells' -- it's something all formalists have to deal w/ now

i liked it alfred, albeit i didn't go back to it as much as the r kelly or jazmine ones - there was such a glut of r&b albums in december (each and every one EVEN KERI HILSON being exponentially more worthy of attention than the weeknd)

against this backdrop how the fuck do you even write a column purportedly about r&b and focus on the weeknd.

― lex pretend, Thursday, March 24, 2011 6:11 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

well idk i guess it depends on what you find interesting?

if you find r&b interesting exclusively when it's not being r&b, gtfo basically

well i would generally agree w/ you but i'm not really sure who you're talking about

i think the weeknd are too r&b to appeal to someone who outright hates/ignore the genre -- again, they're a far cry from how to dress well or gayngs

btw i'm actually listening to the whole weeknd thing now for this piece - the sacrifices i make - the songwriting is pretty much non-existent, it really is like a particularly boring version of that trey songz mixtape

if you find r&b interesting exclusively when it's not being r&b, gtfo basically
― lex pretend, Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:20 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is like coming into my house, shitting on my rug and telling me to leave

wish instead of wasting time tryna HAVE OPINIONS abt worthless chillwave or other cool music u dudes wld just stick to posting abt taylor swift all day

i'm glad i'm in a profession that is never the subject of ILX threads

lemme just say that i am not into every band trying to mix indie w/r'n'b.

Raw Moans
Maybe the only band on this list who’d admit to listening to R. Kelly… The San Diego duo of Laotian American fashion reconstructor Joseph Vorachack (who also records with Top Girls and Party Trash as Skylines) and Jeff Graves use the Oakland Raiders’ logo as their own and manage a kind of dark humor in even the bleaker edges of their R&B-meets-goth-industrial pop soundscapes. Raw Moans isn’t dark in the sense of some of the other folks — it’s late night and insular and lonesome, even when it isn’t. Disaro released the double CD-R We Want It Beautiful Not Real and RW RMX at the end of 2010.
http://rawmoans.bandcamp.com/album/rw-rmx

^ this is worth hating on for all the reasons upthread.

Raw Moans isn’t dark in the sense of some of the other folks — it’s late night and insular and lonesome, even when it isn’t.

so it's dark then

yeah see weeknd gets play cause its better than 100 raw moans doing the same thing but shitter, not because its doing diddy/r. kelley r&b but indie

i think lex has a point but the thing he should realize is that 'middle stances' being privileged over original styles isn't something that just happens to rap or r&b in the pitchfork universe -- it also happens to traditional indie music that ppl we would call squares like

I dunno, I think that the discourse is divided pretty evenly between people who will check for Male Bonding and The National and the like and people who will dismiss out of hand on the grounds of absence of innovation.

But try and imagine P&J, say, getting behind Trey Songz to the extent it gets behind The National.

Obv R&B isn't a special victim in this regard, but it's a prominent example: it's almost impossible for most critics to valorise the-dream without setting him up as some kind of internal exception to the genre-rule (and to be fair he kind of invites such a response). I think there is much more widespread (though certainly not unanimous) critical support for the idea of "good honest (indie) rock" than for "good honest R&B".

I still don't understand why we equate "privileged by critics" with "privileged"

The same way Beltway reporters confuse "us" with "them."

I still don't understand why we equate "privileged by critics" with "privileged

only insofar as we're talking about critical discourse.

In the same way that complaints that hollywood privileges "happy endings" aren't conclusively answered by pointing to the fact that hollywood is not representative of reality.

Yes, but I think it tends to be based on a very tautological definition of "critical discourse." For instance, one in which anyone talking about the Weeknd is part of "critical discourse," and the people already talking about Trey Songz are not. Or a video debuted on Pitchfork constitutes hype in "critical circles," whereas a video debuted on B.E.T. does not. In which case ... of course critics tend to privilege the things critics privilege.

Mostly I just want to be be clear that by "middle spaces" I wasn't talking about genre cross-pollination, or even really audience cross-pollination. That just wraps things even further in a critical discourse, and my point is that critical discourse is surely not the reason someone might respond to, say Weeknd! The reason the group might appeal to someone from one audience is the same reason it might not appeal to someone from another -- it's making specific decisions, about things like mixing and arrangement and self-presentation, that are inviting to some sensibilities and not others. To me, this isn't just about genre; it winds up staking out an actual mood and emotion effect that cannot just be substituted with any random other piece of r&b. This does not make it better or more important, but it certainly keeps me from being weirded out that some arty/indie-leaning listeners might be more interested in Weeknd than in Trey Songz, or that people who write about music for that audience might cover them.

I mean basically ... maybe this is an admission that I should not be writing about music at all, but hey, audiences are looking for different things -- I care about why, but I've ceased to understand kicking against the fact of it, I guess?

Well I'm not really kicking against the fact of it either, or surprised that some audiences might prefer Weeknd over Trey Songz, or saying that they're wrong to do so, I'm just saying none of this happens in some ideologicaly pure zone of "pure music".

People's enjoyment of stuff tends to follow established, carved-out water courses, is all, and of course this is as true for lex enjoying R&B as it is for p4k-reading-strawman enjoying indie.

To me, this isn't just about genre; it winds up staking out an actual mood and emotion effect that cannot just be substituted with any random other piece of r&b.

Strictly speaking no music is really substitable for another. I could just as easily argue that Trey Songz and Teedra Moses are not commensurate or exchangeable with one another. It's not so much Weeknd's "point of difference" that is being fantasised into existence here, but the very distinctiveness of this point of difference relative to a perceived undifferentiated morass of "genre".

People perceive difference in part because they're encouraged to do so, and fail to perceive it elsewhere because it's not drawn to their attention.

^^^yeah this is what im saying nabsico, like, i dont see nearly as much variation w/ this act as proponents of the artists do from the R&B mean

tim, people will especially notice points of distinction -- even minor ones -- if those distinctions address particular needs they have, resolve conflicts they have, and so on. in this case, it's not that Weeknd are uniquely different from other r&b! it's that the particular ways they're different do something of value for some narrow pocket of listeners.