★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

very much doubt that scott veale is getting his cues from pitchfork

maybe not directly but cmon. the entire culture of music criticism has formed around the pfork canon. how else do u explain pnj results the last few years

'around' btw doesnt mean 'replicating' but rather the idea that everyone must engage w/ pfork-acclaimed artists

whether pro or con

Huh.

anyway lex thinking that the only reason this album 'blew up' is because of 'chillwave production' & a bunch of tumblrs is evidence of lex ngi

feel like if it was an album of female-empowerment anthems lex would be all up on it tho

feel like we need a spin-off thread soon, is pitchfork really the center of the music criticism universe

the entire culture of music criticism has formed around the pfork canon. how else do u explain pnj results the last few years

Music criticism as a field is imploding and the same 50 people write for overlapping venues?

why is indie central to music canons now in a way it wasnt a decade ago

im not saying there arent critics out there who work outside this obv ... i consider myself one. but cmon, the critical discourse is now oriented around the idea that indie records are consistently some of the most important & interesting records in a given year, and critics around the country / world reinforce that

using the big picture umbrella 'indie' here not just the national or w/e

i mean its kind of funny to listen to people go IF YOU DONT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW GREAT INDIE IS DONT READ PITCHFORK READ VIBE OR THE SOURCE & its like, do you think i can get an unsigned hype rapper article in a local paper faster than i can get an article on the weeknd into one? who is the editor paying attention to -- the one pitchfork critics are making a lot of noise about, or the one that source critics are making a lot of noise about

im not saying there arent critics out there who work outside this obv ... i consider myself one.

lol

why is that 'lol' to you

i feel bad for ppl showing up earlier in this thread naively 'enjoying the music' like mindless automatons. when will they learn to augment their listening by addressing the more fundamental issue that their emotional response takes place in a cultural space poisoned by ryan schreiber's ignorant hegemony. stop taking the blue pill guys

feel like you and lex spend so much time railing against the pitchfork hegemony that you two have become defined by your antipathy towards p4k, i.e. those who are always seeking to decenter the discourse end up becoming defined by the center *shrug*

except that doesnt describe my actual stance at all. i dont spend most of my writing time disparaging pitchfork acts, at all

i dont even think they should necessarily be disparaged. i dont rail against it 'because' its pitchfork. i like some groups that happen to be 'pfork bands' and some who arent. i write about acts that i think deserve critical attention, whether or not they fit into a preconceived idea of what pfork listeners 'like' but based on whether i like it & think it deserves those ears

so you've never complained about the rappers that p4k covers, or how p4k isn't covering enough of the rap & R&B you like?

so you've never complained about the rappers that p4k covers, or how p4k isn't covering enough of the rap & R&B you like?

― who is john nult? (dayo), Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:05 AM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no, i got a job w/ them and wrote about the ones i like

to be clear here,

1) i criticize certain artists for being generally not good vs. consensus, or underrated vs. consensus
2) i dont criticize 'pitchfork' or blame pitchfork for its audience or who its trying to target
3) i do think the pfork effect is damaging & unnecessarily and unfairly privileges certain kinds of artists -- and again, this isnt the site's fault per se -- but the way critics treat it as the center of the critical world is unfortunate

1) i criticize certain artists for being generally not good vs. consensus, or underrated vs. consensus

this is what I mean - if consensus for you is primarily determined by p4k, and you spend your time evaluating things against the p4k consensus, then...

fact is, as we've talked about like 9million times on ilx before, pitchfork isnt an entity in & of itself you can 'blame.' maybe you dont like what a specific writer does, or an editorial decision or direction someone has made. but its a group of ppl. the problem comes in when people take those individual opinions as being THE authority on music & that happens all the time. any small-scale band that happens to get a bnm is going to be in newspapers around the country for the forseeable future. that doesnt happen w/ say rappers in the source or bands in whatever metal mag is hot right now.

this is what I mean - if consensus for you is primarily determined by p4k, and you spend your time evaluating things against the p4k consensus, then...

― who is john nult? (dayo), Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:10 AM (50 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sure but i dont blame pitchfork. i blame the ppl who let pitchfork become this dominant voice! the people who think that they're missing out if they dont reflect what pitchfork is talking about, that few places w/ any kind of audience are willing to take a dramatic & unique step towards having another worldview. The Source tried it by giving the bun b record 5 mics & that was like :-/

3) i do think the pfork effect is damaging & unnecessarily and unfairly privileges certain kinds of artists -- and again, this isnt the site's fault per se -- but the way critics treat it as the center of the critical world is unfortunate

― they reminisce over dayo (D-40), Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:09 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i should mention that this is contingent on it being a place that continues to target one 'indie' audience -- like, you cant have it both ways, where its either a) 'if you want to read about rap treated fairly read another publication' or b) i think it should cover other genres fairly

so, 3) is only true if i'm forced to agree with a)

say im a music writer who wants to pitch a piece on kendrick lamar OR the weeknd. who do u think a big-city newspaper is likely to cover first (removing home team advantage from both artists -- no LA Weekly or Toronto whatever)

(lamar fyi was on xxl's 'freshman' cover)

(And this isnt even the big city paper editor's fault ... because he might just be responding to the level noise he hears from other critics/writers around him)

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

all assertions of taste are displays of arrogance but the game being played here is basically subhuman. still cant get over that lex quote above either, guess i lose too

sometimes i think its funnie bcuz at the core theres this you dont know it feels subtext like 'im the real head' but ppl nvr seem to cop to not being real ~indie~ headz, nvr seem to cop to their fundamental ignorance re: the horizons & just sleep under the ole pines &c &c &c

heres a really short way of summing up all these posts

pitchfork thinks about how its going to review things; sometimes i agree, sometimes i disagree, as do much of the staff and readership im sure

pitchfork publishes one of those opinions

there's an impact where 99% of newspaper critics feel obligated to listen to the band pitchfork is talking about & decide whether they are pro or anti (to show independence)

rather than looking at music independently, or locally, or thinking, what if i just decided not to listen to this bnm, and instead listened to this bengalese marching music? or this song i havent heard people talk about?

it doesnt mean you need to pretend to like things you dont like. it just means you might stop limiting yourself so heavily to the music covered by the site. imo, many critics end up so caught up in indie that it limits their view of music outside it

anyway, this is all imo obv & in no way represents the view of the site or anything else should go w/out saying.

dog, you're turning into that p4k dude

except im not actually talking about p4k itt

or anything that goes on w/ it -- im talking about how their taste is received in the wider world of critics

ok dude

im really confused by why lamp thinks this is a 'superiority contest.' we're just explaining that we think a record doesnt deserve acclaim & apparently thats being a huge meanie. cmon even the ppl who agree w/ lex overall on the band have distanced themselves or criticized his rhetoric. its ok to think something is good that other people dont w/out getting defensive about it

fact is, as we've talked about like 9million times on ilx before, pitchfork isnt an entity in & of itself you can 'blame.'

Further, the fact that Pitchfork exemplifies this kind of thing is really a historical accident (albeit one that is now self-reinforcing) - if it disappeared tomorrow that wouldn't kill off (or even substantially wound) indie-privileging any more than WaPo's or Fox News' the Guardian's disappearance would kill off the kind of political sensibilities those media organs are associated with. Obviously in the case of the Weeknd Pitchfork naming it BNM is more of a gateway for hype than a source of it.

In particular, the privileging of genre-transgressing indie-friendly takes on popular music long pre-exists Pitchfork and also has replicated itself in any number of areas of music not traditionally within Pitchfork' purview.

I think what interests me about comparing the hype-cycles of The-Dream and Weeknd is the sense that innovation within genres takes longer to be recognised than innovation across genres. And this is not just about people being motivated to check stuff out: it's also that The-Dream's rep as some kind of avant auteur wasn't even really being pushed by boosters of the first album, it was just "this is some real good really lovely sounding R&B". It's like, the language of innovation just doesn't come to mind until later, and the contours of difference only become prominent in retrospect.

Cross-genre innovation is sharper in this respect, but also maybe shallower - not in the sense of the music not being good or not being "deep", but in the sense that the sense that the music is doing something novel is more immediately apparent but for that very reason has a use-by-date - unless the Weeknd substantially changes its style it's difficult to imagine it still being hyped by album number 3.

yah that feels right. in this sense pfork operates as a choke pt / magnifier, its not a generator of 'indie' but rather warring sensibilities

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

Also this statement really rings true for me, and not just in R&B and not just about indie listeners.

Like, this is basically an across the board epistomological truth of music-listening, that the less heavily invested you are in a genre the more interested you are in stuff occurring on its "periphery", and the more value you discern in exploring those margins.

When, logically, you'd think it'd be the other way round.

me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdQh26ovW0Y

D-40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TlBTPITo1I

'indie only knows the warm grave, the cold embrace. ravens wings, oh ravens wings, we sing...'

Also this statement really rings true for me, and not just in R&B and not just about indie listeners.

Like, this is basically an across the board epistomological truth of music-listening, that the less heavily invested you are in a genre the more interested you are in stuff occurring on its "periphery", and the more value you discern in exploring those margins.

When, logically, you'd think it'd be the other way round.

― Tim F, Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:51 AM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

weird contradiction to this might be that point in the late 90s / early 00s where pop rap & 'rap' rap were overlapping heavily, it seemed like

Was pop rap really a periphery of rap though?

My argument only applies in respect of stuff consciously presenting or presented as peripheral.

i.e. Pitbull appearing on a J Lo single isn't selfconsciously transgressive in the way that the Weeknd is.

i was thinking people who think 'i only want to be peripherally involved in rap' often were just listening to top 40 which at that time was a pretty good representation of rap qua rap

Oh okay, I think that is a slightly different sensibility though true elsewhere as well - e.g. people who aren't heavily invested in dance music except for crossover hits (also quite representative at certain times).

Obv. late 90s / early 00s rap periphery: ClouDDEAD, Cannibal Ox/El-P

Maybe a kind of threshold case is say, Timbaland, whose late 90s/early 00s work both could be set up as genre-transgressive and genre-organic, depending on how you framed it.

You could imagine two people listening to the same record at that point and thinking "I like this because it (such an unusual twist on OR perfectly exemplifies) the core values of R&B / rap" depending on the narrative they used to frame the record.

(Timbaland also falling into the "only listens to chart hits" category at that point as well)

when I did my little bit of research about the last P&J singles poll and about how statistically it's less pop and more niche/indie than it used to be, Lamp and some other people acted like I was going to bumrush their homes and take away their National CDs or petition the Voice to change the way they tabulate ballots. even if you try to write descriptively (rather than prescriptively) about the state of music criticism and prevailing trends and biases it seems to trigger astrong "it's Chinatown...NO SERIOUSLY JUST FORGET ABOUT IT" response.

this still sounds pretty good btw

it's endured two weeks!

Just like Rebecca Black!

and Pitchfork!

And Fukushima radiation and no fly zones and...