★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

did drake bite the weeknd's swag or were they both doing it at the same time? the visual aestehtic of XO and OVO, the cryptic launguage, b&w photography, etc

also what's the deal with drake loving cough syrup all of a sudden

2011 is weird

also what's the deal with drake loving cough syrup all of a sudden

he hangs out tons w/ lil wayne?

drake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the weeknd honestly

I fucks with that "dreams money can buy" song

no he doesnt! they KNOW each other lets face it

idk syrup is pretty prevalent in rap culture

i wish drake, wayne & ross would just put their albums out on the same day & packaged together, maybe even they could be on every single song on each other's albums & have their own radio station for those songs

lil wayne would never take the time to take this picture, he loves drugs, he'd drink it up not find a cute photo for his instagram

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2g1nh7379w/Ter-8HViNII/AAAAAAAAAIE/9QPgQW6InXk/s1600/IMG-20110529-00044.jpg

he's so excited about his new toy

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FRHyIakxD6o/TeNOh5VZEjI/AAAAAAAADb4/vNFsPKQAT00/s1600/mwr.jpg

middle schools don't have Ned Raggett.

― hay lbj hayyy (absolutely clean glasses), Friday, June 17, 2011 5:11 PM (20 minutes ago)

at least not since the '80s

― hay lbj hayyy (absolutely clean glasses), Friday, June 17, 2011 5:11 PM (19 minutes ago)

seriously? this is too bad. I was definitely the Ned at my jr. high, but that was in the 70s. I think there must be a few schools where it's still safe to be Ned, but gee, maybe not.

i think the problem here is that you're following (?) drake on instagram

haha wow that is extremely lame

like people who tweet about how drunk/high they are

its not on instagram dude its on his web site

his blog that looks exactly like the weeknd's blog

everyone might not think of themselves as discerning, but there is a 'i prefer to trust the experts' (c. calvin & hobbes) that comes into play -- ppl may not think they are discerning, but they like to trust people who are, too. There is, ime, an aura of 'worthiness' to the weeknd that other R&B artists dont get to have -- or, for ex, ne-yo might have that aura on ILX, but he doesn't more broadly w/in critical community.

an example of how this works is how, after sideways came out, sales of merlot plummeted. Did people know they didnt like merlot until they were told they didnt like merlot, etc

I think we are making complimentary points, not oppositional. The baseline that anchors both is "ppl itt are mad at the writers, not the listeners".

(Also I don't find it surprising that Mark R would write well on stuff in a genre outside of what ppl would assume to be his sweet spot because in interactions here he's always had a very even-handed, holistic take on the music being discussed; "admit your lack of knowledge" is not the right way to express that approach but I intended to included and just didn't because lol too many words + something shiny)

I meant the actual Ned Raggett!

xposts

http://octobersveryown.blogspot.com/2011/05/call-up-on-drank.html

haaa, yeah, I was thinking more of Ned the Universal Force

Excellent Deej and dan posts in this thread. Love that 'sideways' anecdote. I assume sales of Pinot noir went up?

Yeah the world is rife with what you might call amateur discernment, people explaining what are very basic decisions of taste by reference to qualitative distinctions with questionable evidentiary basis. The tribalism of music taste can obscure this actually but look at how people talk about the newspapers they read or the tv shows they watch (or more pertinently, those they don't).

yeah i mean -- does ANYONE actually say "i don't know much about music, i just like the stuff i hear on the radio"? it seems like the less people know about music, the more adamantly dogmatic they are about what music is good and what isn't and why

yeah i mean i think anyone today especially should be humble about that stuff when you're talking irl -- to be fair, i might be more curt/ jerk-ish on here because i feel like amongst music nerds the chains are sort of loosed, whereas IRL i have a bunch of friends who know all this shit about beer & when i'm like "yeah i'm not into beer x" they get all omg wtf apoplectic & im like, well, tbf i havent really thought about it or tried to think abt what is going on w/in beer discourse or whatever. Same way I dont judge them for talking about how omg great the last kanye album was. so sometimes i do prob use ilx as more of a sounding board for those kinds of "ugh terrible line of thought" dismissive tendencies (i think a lot of ppl do, here, probably w/ better results than me, but im saying)

xpost even moreso with movies

Yeah I think that's right, if anything I find myself much less dogmatic than people talk to IRL, always pointing out that even if some pronouncement they've made has purchase in some contexts it's not true across the board.

It is or should be a feature of paying closer attention to music that you start to realize most hard and fast rules aren't really sustainable.

who here cares only about the music they and their friends make

lets all make an album like right now right here

this talk of 'experts' just reminded me of this lol onion article, btw
http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-on-internet-almost-falls-into-world-of-diy-mus,17013/

xpost as long as it's not chillwave

this implies that we're mad at ppl who like the record, instead of mad at ppl who write about it poorly / have poor justifications for it -- if u agree that sucks then we agree

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Friday, June 17, 2011 3:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i started out by questioning an instance of what i see as the special and unwarranted enmity that some ILXes seem to reserve for indie-friendly critics who dabble in rap, R&B and dance music, and which is almost always accompanied by a sneering dismissal of the widely-hyped artists they flock around (the weeknd, in this case). we can all easily agree that egregiously bad writing/thinking is objectionable, but that's a different issue.

lots of indie-friendly critics flock around The-Dream and pretty much all the people sneering at The Weeknd itt listen to him

yeah, it's by no means black & white. but fwiw, i took a bunch of shit for joining the terius fan club circa love king and having incorrect opinions. deej just doesn't cotton to my manner of speech. which has maybe embittered me, i dunno. i can't pretend my interest here is completely objective/dispassionate.

well there is a lot of sneering within the terry squad, but it's all generally shades of difference in a shared fandom of the same artist

yeah dream sneering is about the narcissism of small differences, it's a different thing.

i started out by questioning an instance of what i see as the special and unwarranted enmity that some ILXes seem to reserve for indie-friendly critics who dabble in rap, R&B and dance music, and which is almost always accompanied by a sneering dismissal of the widely-hyped artists they flock around (the weeknd, in this case). we can all easily agree that egregiously bad writing/thinking is objectionable, but that's a different issue.

because their dabbling is normative, whereas the reverse isn't true: e.g. what R&B heads think of indie rock isn't accepted as being the general truth of indie rock.

That gives their wrongheaded opinions more social weight than they would carry otherwise.

Also, those opinions tend to coincide with bad writing.

because their dabbling is normative, whereas the reverse isn't true: e.g. what R&B heads think of indie rock isn't accepted as being the general truth of indie rock.

That gives their wrongheaded opinions more social weight than they would carry otherwise.

Also, those opinions tend to coincide with bad writing.

― Tim F, Friday, June 17, 2011 6:21 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, that gets to the heart of it. i get annoyed by the constant (and to my mind, tiresome) complaint that indie-friendly critics are unfairly granted some special right to define discourse & canon. i mean, they often do define discourse & canon, but in a way that strikes me as neither surprising nor especially objectionable. and it seems to me that wrongheaded thinking and bad writing exist pretty much anywhere you care to look for them. they're at least as prevalent in the niche crit written by & for heads as they are in generalist/mainstream stuff.

in the end, i see much of this conflict as a battle between subcultural camps, and the only issue i have is the tendency to treat demonstrations of genre allegiance as good or bad taste/crit.

i mean, they often do define discourse & canon, but in a way that strikes me as neither surprising nor especially objectionable.

which is...

like, we're explaining why its objectionable, right here, in this thread

in the end, i see much of this conflict as a battle between subcultural camps, and the only issue i have is the tendency to treat demonstrations of genre allegiance as good or bad taste/crit.

― And the piano, it sounds like a carnivore (contenderizer), Saturday, June 18, 2011 2:03 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

except that music is as much about issues of race / class / gender / identity as life is, & once those become intertwined w/ aesthetics...

i mean, was the civil rights movement (sorry for temporarily trivializing this but bracket it as an exaggerated example that imo is no less related) just about a battle between subcultural camps on a broader scale? the fact is that these kinds of iniquities permeate all aspects of our lives

i think though most of us in the terry squad sneer by nature, we are long past the point where we're sneering on behalf of terry himself

except that music is as much about issues of race / class / gender / identity as life is, & once those become intertwined w/ aesthetics...

agree, but these issues aren't being directly addressed itt, and i don't imagine much good would result from the attempt. i agree that inequities do permeate all aspects of our lives, but i don't think that all inequities are equally objectionable. like one of mr. jay batman's big peeves was a grudge against the power of majorities to dictate reality, and i just don't agree that that's an intrinsically bad thing.

^ i mean, it certainly can be. it can be terribly unjust. no argument there.

agree, but these issues aren't being directly addressed itt

― And the piano, it sounds like a carnivore (contenderizer), Saturday, June 18, 2011 3:27 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is demonstrably incorrect -- it happened as of this most recent revive

eh, if there's a substantial class/race/gender-gender based objection to the dominance of indie-friendly crit in the US, it hasn't been laid out clean itt.

to tell you the truth, i'm not at all prepared to get into this tonight. i got company over. they're looking at me funny. plus it will make everybody else on ILX hate us. not that i'm saying no...

i never say no...

deej is your problem basically that the Weeknd is crappy r&b that is gaining undue traction w/ hipsters and critics because of its obvious surface indicators of 'depth' and 'seriousness'?

that x how its being impressed upon those ppl thru some not so great argumentative strategies

Do you really think ILX is any more socially advanced than a middle school?! I've thought of the mods as janitors and assistant principals ever since I became one.
― Mr. Patrick Batman (WmC), Friday, June 17, 2011 4:05 PM

many times, coming into these threads i feel like i'm throwing sawdust on puke

the less people know about music, the more adamantly dogmatic they are about what music is good and what isn't and why

this is a partial t-bomb. also that onion mustard enthusiast article is such beautiful gem, a long, fond, familiar lol at the male brain.

brainwasher: I'm reading this Ne-Yo interview in VIBE, and they're asking him about Frank Ocean and The Weeknd smh

me: gughguhg

brainwasher: VIBE: If your 2008 album represented Year Of The Gentleman, 2011 is definitely “Year of the Asshole,” in terms of R&B. What do you think of the wave of explicit R&B that’s popular now?
lol WAHT
"new wave of explicit R*B"

VIBE: Word. In a lot of ways, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd represent that polar opposite of your style.

NE-YO: I haven’t heard a lot of Frank Ocean’s stuff. I dig “Novacane,” I like his storytelling. Somebody just recently put me up on The Weeknd. I like his vibe; he’s definitely one of those cats that might curse you out on a record, but he’s going to sing, so you almost don’t even notice that he just cursed you out. I dig it though. It’s—for lack of a better word—definitely music you fu@k to, not make love. Even in that, he has some very honest songs. He says “Tell me you love me…I know you don’t love me,” talking to this stripper chick. I feel him on that. Like you need this money; you’re going to treat me like you love me, that’s what I want. That’s some real sh*t.

2011 is definitely “Year of the Asshole"

"Even in that, he has some very honest songs. He says “Tell me you love me…I know you don’t love me,” talking to this stripper chick. I feel him on that. Like you need this money; you’re going to treat me like you love me, that’s what I want. That’s some real sh*t."

...

I love it when interviewers try to project their own perspective on to their subjects, and they don't bite.

I love it when interviewers get a chance to talk to one of the biggest mainstream stars of a genre and they just want to ask questions about up-and-coming internet artists.