★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

^^^^^^OTM

honestly it should be like hey if you think that's dope R&B you really need to hear this other stuff that's just incredible! spread the love!

It would help though if they would listen to my Vandross-Freddie Jackson comps though.

feel very odd bringing this up -- lol too much time on ilx -- but honestly i keep thinking of this statement strongo made back in the mists of time, that sooner or later the white kids with spock haircuts were going to try to sound like timbaland

idk, i bring up dope r&b all the time and there's no way it gets a hundredth of the attention my more uh aggressive stance does.

or as tom ewing put it on tumblr:

The question “hold on, why are you paying attention to this stuff and not to that stuff?” is a) fundamental, b) often hard to ask politely, c) very much in the interests of the attention-payers not to answer. So trolling works as a way of asking it, for me.

(i don't think i'm trolling though!)

okay correct me if I'm wrong but no one I can find in any of the pictures of The Weeknd that pop up on GIS are actually white...?

hope not cuz theyre dropping nbombs like no tomorrow

The Weeknd dude is not white.

“hold on, why are you paying attention to this stuff and not to that stuff?”

is how i feel abt ppl who listen to salem & not dj screw

i don't dislike salem particularly but it's p much an exact parallel yeah

is how i feel abt ppl who listen to salem & not dj screw anything else

tbf Salem is fucking awful by any metric

also, in light of this being a discussion about a black dude making music who was signed by another black dude, could we maybe think a few times before leaning so heavily on the "this is what happens when white people try R&B" arguments?

I don't think it took people long to pay attention the-dream, deej. At what point in the-dream's output do you think people should have been paying attention, and, more importantly, what distribution channels would have allowed them to do so?

When the-dream-produced snoop dogg song played on MTV and mainstream rap radio, that earned him recognition by a lot of ordinary non-music-journalist folks. On the other hand, if I weren't on ilx and if I didn't open pitchfork for a few days, who knows when I would have heard of the weeknd.

indie people maybe?

or just shut-in people

xp

Canadian is the white of the world

xxxp they are not going to start thinking that way.

Canadian is the white of the world

― ★ Project Pat ★ What Cha Starin At ★ I Ain't A Mirror ★ (some dude), Tuesday, March 29, 2011 5:44 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

irl lol

bamcquern his debut album was almost completely ignored by critics -- this is pretty much an inarguable fact

if the 'people' we're talking about are sites like Pitchfork, PF didn't review The-Dream until his 3rd album and only included his 2nd in an 'honorable mention' addendum to a year-end list

1. Nobody cares about critics, certainly not your average listener.
2. As an average listener who doesn't care about critics, it seemed that his first album got plenty of attention. It's the two after that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.

No, the "people" I'm talking about are me and people I know who listen to the radio and ask me if I've heard x song.

British people, man. What the fuck.

haha this dude otm

Because nobody actually cares about pitchfork. I don't even read their reviews when I go there; I just scan the titles and go back to ilx.

maybe you've noticed that the audience being discussed 90% of the time ITT is people who don't listen to R&B radio and read blogs or are critics themselves

The question “hold on, why are you paying attention to this stuff and not to that stuff?” is a) fundamental, b) often hard to ask politely, c) very much in the interests of the attention-payers not to answer. So trolling works as a way of asking it, for me.

hmmmmm

I was looking at Metacritic because of another album (ahem) and kind of lolling that the Pitchfork review was on the bottom of the "most clicked" list (the top was Tiny Mix Tapes, oddly-to-me)

You have to consider more goes people discover music in this conversation and not so much what their tastes or motivations for listening are. People like r&b. It's not something only you guys like because you have special nonracist ears.

How, not goes

ok thanks for playing Donnie in The Big Lebowski itt, your contributions have been very entertaining

also in what alternative universe was "Gangsta Luv" at all a significant moment of exposure for The-Dream

--i like weeknd though & think they are making worthwhile music w/ a good balance of reverence/traditionalism & novelty, feel salem lean way too heavy on the latter & their music doesn't feel like they understand how achingly beautiful dj screw music can be, how deep/low it is, how it crawls etc.

i got into contemporary r&b via reading ilx so obv the argument u dudes are putting forward is a salient one to me. but idk i just don't feel like listening to it that often & don't feel the need to explore it too far. like flopson r&b canon is like, confessions, terius discography, aaliyah s/t, tp-2 & kelly's 12 play, b-day. not saying i'm satisfied forever but just like, this morning i listened to the marsha ambrosius album, & it was ok but i don't expect i'll listen again, besides a few songs. i'm into the genre & it satisfies a partic need i have but i'm not invested in it the same way i am w rap or something, where i want to hear pretty much everything good ever. i suspect a lot of weeknd fans are casual r&b fans with some small subsection of r&b in their pockets who since they aren't so heavily rooted in the tradition of the genre are more eager abt stuff on the periphery of r&b

a little goes a long way w/ R&B, i agree with you on that -- there aren't THAT many mainstream R&B albums released in a given year and they're not all great after all.

In this universe, because it exposed me to him on cable tv where I have considerably less autonomy about the music I'm exposed to than on the internet. And if you're focused on media outlets that matter and that potentially review r&b records, and not listeners of mainstream rap and r&b radio, then you're taking about a very few individuals' editorial policies, which means you're saying very little that's meaningful. Unpaid blog writing certainly doesn't count because there are thousands of those and you can self-select.

I haven't seen the big lebowski.

xxp yeah! and it seems reasonably unique imo. like aside from 1 or 2 things on the thread jaxon started, nothing really captures the vibe of this. not saying theres not other r+b stuff that does, im sure its out there. i feel like lex is just angry that its self-hating and not congratulatory fwiw

Wait, flopson is talking about how much the guys from Salem don't understand the "aching beauty" of DJ screw and not their music itself?

what

ok well ive got class in ten minutes & have to eat a sub before so itèll have to wait i guess

have fun eating a sub and not reading the thread, whiney

bamcquern also have we considered the plight of those hermits living in a cave these past four years who understandably will have no idea of The-Dream at al? If they only emerged in the last week it'd make total sense that they were into The Weeknd but not The-Dream yet. It's not a conspiracy though! We really should think about such people before jumping to inane, unsustainable conclusions like "The Weeknd has gotten more internet hype in 1 week than The-Dream got in 1 year."

feel salem lean way too heavy on the latter & their music doesn't feel like they understand how achingly beautiful dj screw music can be, how deep/low it is, how it crawls etc

Think it's your wording, flopson, rather than what you meant. No offense to you :)

http://i54.tinypic.com/9sf0qd.jpg

wow the founder of Pitchfork digs the album Pitchfork just named 'best new music,' great find dude

this whole thread plays like a superiority contest btw its totally gross

you just won the contest btw

nothing but generalizations and judgmental assholes imo

Srsly though who apart from lex has been remotely judgmental in this thread?

Why does indie dudes get so butthurt about their taste in stuff?

yeah idk maybe not w/e

god i'm such an idiot--srly thought i had a chance in the superiority contest

cheer up; with that attitude you stand a good chance at the inferiority contest