ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2012

Happy FARTBLOP is better than BLOPstep IMO

the mena song was released as a single this year iirc

or at least that's what i assumed

Have heard very little of the thread so far (TBF I've always been more of an EOY albums man). Looking forward to hearing more of these but I only got to check out a handful this evening because, well, life happens. But cheers guys for making it happen!

The Luz de Piedra de Luna video is from 2012 too.

@boxedjoy I was making a poorly-executed joke...was going to finish with "brb going to hang myself" but chickened out.

That makes more sense.

tim, 2 me this is more if someone was like, "oh my god have you heard this new FARTBLOP group Chic? they're amazing pioneers of a new genre called FARTBLORP" i'd be like "hmm idk sounds like disco to me... and why are you calling it fartblorp?"

also maybe this makes me a philistine but imo new dance genres should be created only every time we come up with new actual beats, not just bc some new producers are more prominently influenced by us r&b *shrugs*

― flopson, Tuesday, 22 January 2013 1:00 AM (57 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not a choice we make though.

People are always acting like sub-genres are something imposed on this innocent amorphous music from the garden of eden by irritating nitpicking critics (if that were the case then they'd possibly have better names).

But jackin' is a thing that exists in the world, you would never ultimately have heard of "You Want Me" or "Snapbacks & Tattoos" without people investigating that thing because this music has had basically zero presence outside of its own scene. So it's not me being annoying, it's just an objective fact.

I don't care if individual ILMers choose to hear these tunes as just "house" (which anyway is a much better approach than pretending they're uk funky) but being personally offended that a community of listeners have come up with a way to organise how they listen to music seems unnecessary to me, and also is a good way to cut yourself up from hearing potentially great music.

it's mostly just the name, like, did we run out of words for dance genres? afrobeats, too, although the thread title that introduced me to that supplanted most of my rage

― flopson, Monday, January 21, 2013 7:50 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so otm, can't believe adding an S to the name of something denotes a completely different genre. ditty "this is what the word 'funky' means now," gtfo.

"ditty" is my brave new subgenre of "ditto" btw

xp tim - yeah word i feel you, tbh i was mostly joking. i am personally offended by the choices of names lately, but you're right that that's not something even fans or prominent boosters of the genre have any influence or control over. i think my pov stems from rock scenes, where genres tend to be named retroactively & it's not seen as cool to flaunt the new name for your scene/approach, most rock musicians scoff at labels anyways especially those who are most influential in forming the scene ("music is music, maaaan") whereas in dance music it can be even like, a marketing thing, a way to differentiate stuff you & friends are producing & get ppl to check out what this new next thing is

that graphic's pretty cool, Rev!

http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html

so it occurs to me that "House" is a pretty weird genre term--there are different clusters of House that are VERY far from each other on that graphic; and it now occurs to me that I've basically assumed house was unproblematically linked to disco and ignored/misunderstood all other uses of the term....

Re: genre flagging, I think Rev has it on the head. Seeing as how dance is a progressive, chymeric genre, where subtle nuances are often introduced, toyed with and finally jettisoned within a mere matter of months, it requires a constant semantic stream in order to keep new ideas flowing through. Like slang, the language of dance music has to mirror the speed at which new sounds and styles fluctuate.
Funny that this seems to happen in dance music and metal, but maybe not so much in other genres. I wonder if there's also a bit of gate keeping involved here.

That was multiple xposts

anti-subgenre people coming off as just ignorant tbh. "electronic" and "dance" music contain vast multitudes, it's like saying we shouldn't subdivide "classical" music because it's all played by orchestras. subgenre divides reflect important geographic and cultural differences as well as sonic. you don't get to choose what subgenres are called, either, and should probably just get over it because expressing antipathy based on subgenre name is the most stupidly prissy objection possible.

things actually become much clearer once subgenres are properly delineated, like there's no question that eg "jackin house" and "minimal techno" mean specific and v different things, but tbh the much broader "house" and "techno" are much more vague.

That Pulp song sounds like a Wild Mood Swings outtake

hold up everyone i can clear this up in under two minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NSn5RfxoXs

i think it's possible to be passionate about dance music but feel antipathy towards certain genre names, i mean that's how i feel

I think something important that hasn't been invoked yet is the "wot do u call it?" moment that arises when a new constellation of genre logic forms in dance music. Those are generally the most exciting moments in dance music because producers are still testing out the limits of the new genre. But because of the way dance music nights are promoted and whatnot, the type of retroactive naming you see in rock doesn't really work in dance, and so "wot do u call it?" has to be asked.

I kind of wish someone would speak to how genrefication works in metal, because this is something I'm ignorant of and I'm curious to how it parallels/diverges from that in dance music.

things actually become much clearer once subgenres are properly delineated, like there's no question that eg "jackin house" and "minimal techno" mean specific and v different things, but tbh the much broader "house" and "techno" are much more vague.

― lex pretend, Monday, January 21, 2013 5:27 PM Bookmark

yes! this is otm

lol gr80

Xpost It's not quite the same thing really rev, but there are tons of metal sub genres which to most people sound almost entirely the same.

i think it's possible to be passionate about dance music but feel antipathy towards certain genre names, i mean that's how i feel

well aren't you a precious flower

how you feel is irrelevant

how WE feel is irrelevant, as tim says these subgenre scenes and names are pre-existing before any of us got there, and if you want to listen to the music you need to deal with it tbh

no one ever argued uk funky was a good genre name but who cares? it was great music

^ lol

minimal techno feels a lot more like something that was necessary to define than jackin house, though. i feel like the pace of the genre-naming has outstripped the pace of innovation in music almost

if i was deciding genre names I wouldn't choose 'jackin' either.

otoh you can ultimately get used to anything. For years people complained that "UK Garage" should refer to British bands ripping of early 60s rock music rather than British dance producers ripping of Timbaland. No one complains about it now because it's just part of the (historical) landscape.

And really, why should "house" be called "house"??

minimal techno feels a lot more like something that was necessary to define than jackin house, though. i feel like the pace of the genre-naming has outstripped the pace of innovation in music almost

― flopson, Tuesday, 22 January 2013 1:38 AM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is more about the pace of innovation than the pace of genre-naming though, bassline (the real direct ancestor to jackin, scene-wise) is about 8 years old now (and that's being conservative i.e. measured from when you started to hear the term a lot), so it's not odd that people would have reframed their taste in that time.

xp lex i agreed with tim's post where he said exactly what u just said, the post u quote was re "you don't get to choose what subgenres are called, either, and should probably just get over it because expressing antipathy based on subgenre name is the most stupidly prissy objection possible:" i don't dislike the music because of the stupid names, i just think the names are stupid... i feel the same way about chillwave and most new internet microgenres

you make it sound like there's some committee somewhere in charge of naming all the genres rather than regional scenes coming up with their own vocabulary to describe their own sounds

it's not a linear chronological thing either

quite separately and more subjectively I tend to think that the sillier the name the more likely that the music will be good

quite separately and more subjectively I tend to think that the sillier the name the more likely that the music will be good

WITCH HOUSE

xps i'm not saying we should, like, do something about it, but it sucks to have to say these words out loud--esp if you are into the music

get over it?

"donk"

Yeah I was about to say I think most of the time people get annoyed by these sub-genre names because it makes it harder to talk about with people in public.

lex is a douche flopson, get over it

"witch house" didn't strike me as a silly name in isolation, only in the sense that I struggled to see why it had been chosen for that music. A properly silly name for it would have been, I dunno, "neck snap" or something.

oh yeah r***gaze too I guess

Witch house missed a trick by not being called haunted house

i think rap is a pretty good model more genres should follow. crunk, trap, drill. they're simple, bear some (if not literal at least intuitive) connection to the actual music, generally feel more necessary because the sound really catches on, don't invent genres every time some british dude is befuddled at a club night. otoh rap is way more innovative & has more scenes worth following than dance music so

That's totally subjective and you know it flopson

sorry my new years resolution was not to respond to posts with the word "subjective" in them

to the 7 who voted for javiera mena, thank you for introducing me to my new favourite popstar. also i was just "ugh" when i heard references to 'jackin house' but that donkie punch track is the bomb.

Right, so I was ignorant re funky/jackin. I noticed all references to funky are in the past tense. Is it dead? I guess the Soul Jazz comp should have been a tip-off.

Even as a fan of house music it's hard to keep up with this stuff especially as this music has almost no profile in the US.

Rap has never needed to operate the same way because rap djing isn't driven by beatmatching or hours of continual dancing and it's less dj-driven to begin with. Rap songs can be all at different tempos with different rhythms and fit together better than a bunch of dance tracks with different tempos and rhythms, which is a recipe for a total mess.

good points all

(Incidentally, since I jumped into this discussion, if anyone is thinking "since when is he all into funky house," I'm not really. I still am put off by the vocals in a lot of it, but the beats tend to attract me and I'd probably dance to it if I were to hear it in a club (not likely to happen). And one of my favorite tracks from last year was Andy Jay and S-Tee's "Spiralling.")

imo jackin, funky, afrobeats are cool names cos they're simple, bear some (if not literal at least intuitive) connection to the actual music, are necessary because the sound really catches on, and aren't invented simply for marketing purposes

"Jack" holds a funny place in the English language, with its very elastic meanings.

errr....um I just ducked in to say I'm enjoying the rollout, A+ work on the images J0rd they look fab and uh MOAR NICKI and that is all

continue jacking in yr houses etc

Catching up with this now - starships beating out beez hurts, but nice to see dawn richard (twice!) and the goddess JAVIERA and her orgy of cowbell