ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2012

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

losing hope that stupid hoe beats out both

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.

This is a cute characterisation but really in the case of jackin' the development of a name was very similar, it's very much a localised phenomenon that - by the time a befuddled british dude becomes aware of it - already has a name, a sound, a code, a set of practices. There was no "what do you call it" moment as such.

It's different in the case of something like minimal which really coalesced already in the media spotlight, and where there was a discursive contest that lots of listeners/producers/critics/etc. were aware of before it had resolved. In that sense there was some legitimacy to people querying whether the music "should" be called "minimal" (though obv this was still largely a timewasting discussion) - whereas in this case the same kind of conversations don't occur because implictly we recognise that what befuddled british (or american or french or german or australian) dudes think isn't really pertinent.

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.

― The Reverend,

This year what with NM and I running the metal poll we did not have any bother with metal subgenres mainly because AG and Aerosmith were not posting/fighting with each other.
It did in previous years as AG & Glenn produced stats with results split into stupid sub-genres and sub-subgenres and sub-sub-subgenres. I dont think anybody missed those stats, arguments or AG himself. Most metal people do not care about sub-genres imo in the real world.
Better to trust xhuxx than the others.

It makes sense to me that dance music would have lots of fairly specific genre names. When a DJ walks into a record store it helps if they can say "Have you got any new 'Jackin House'?" rather than "Do you have anything that sounds like some records I heard in a club the other week?" Non-DJ, regular music fans probably don't go to a store looking for such a specific sound.

I missed today's rollout, but my favorite discoveries so far have been the non-Anglophone tracks: Javiera Mena, G-Dragon, "Lapaz Toyota". My least favorite was Japandroids - reminds me of The Thermals - maybe it's a Northwest thing. Most of the others I wouldn't mind hearing again. Maybe not the Tame Impala either.

My perhaps incorrect sense of the key difference between metal and dance music sub-genrefication is that metal (like rock generally) remains band oriented, such that it's likely for bands to be classed as working within a particular sub-genre. This presumably makes it easier to split things more cleanly into sub-genres and sub-sub-genres (i.e. even if we argue over whether band X is sub-genre y, the argument is still most likely to be had at that level).

This is true for dance music as well to an extent but often genre names stand in for artists, both in the sense that for particular scenes there's not much attention paid to artists qua artists, and in the sense that one artist may make tunes in a variety of styles, all bearing the same moniker but played by different DJs at different nights and embraced by different audiences. For the audience, it's the consistency of the music heard on the night (encompassing the music of dozens of different artists), rather than the consistency of a single artist's discography, which matters.

In this sense, (sub)genres become more important as ways of grouping things together rather than ways of splitting them apart, in circumstances where the particular sound or context of a tune (on a tune by tune basis) may seem more relevant to the act of grouping than the identity of the creator.

^awesome. pwning everything again...

i love japandroids but i wouldn't place "the house that heaven built" in my 10 favorite songs of theirs, which is probably saying a lot since their catalog only has about 30 songs so far (including 5 or 6 covers).

the tame impla is the first song i voted for, probably also the last one. i still quite like it. what is so bad about being obsessed with the beatles and making a half decent psycedelic song out of it? there is not much besides the title line in that song but that is already quite a lot these days.

That song sucks. Guitar shite imo.

i like it, but at this point i'd rather hear some of the other songs from Bonerism.

Most metal people do not care about sub-genres imo in the real world.

i do! i care about sub-genres because they tell me something about the established traditions a metal band is accessing, looking to refine, etc. and holy shit it helps to know the elements of death metal vs. the elements of black metal vs. the elements of doom vs. prog vs. whatever just in terms of figuring out why you like the stuff you like

most dont care about differences between death metal and black metal. Its just all extreme metal with blllllllllllllaaaargggggggghhhhhh Singing

.... okay

oh, unless you mean most people, whereas i initially thought you meant most metal people

the former

like most posters in this thread or out in the real world

most dont care about differences between death metal and black metal. Its just all extreme metal with blllllllllllllaaaargggggggghhhhhh Singing

― ɷ, Monday, January 21, 2013 11:15 PM (4 minutes ago)

I can tell you for sure that black metal fans and death metal fans, while they generally get along all right, do not in any sense not care about the differences in the subgenres. But I agree that most people who are not fans of extreme metal neither care nor can distinguish these differences. But the same can be said for dance/electronic/techno music.

At least dance music doesnt have a manowar saying death to false metal.

Anyway, I've been posting less because I feel like there's too much nonmetal on here, but I don't want to be That Guy (although I guess I just became him).

― Bound by Habitrails (J3ff T.),

Are Goat, Swans, Converge metal as the voters said or not metal?
Metal Poll 2012 - The Countdown

i mean, i feel like the metal/not-metal distinction is a completely different conversation from like subgenre overlap

well its not as if it doesnt happen with house/non-house.

isn't the charge that dance music and metal fans are elitists?

ehhhhhhhhhhfkajdlkjfkj maybe we shouldn't clutter up the tracks thread with this conversation

Does Lex count as dance music's Man0War?

IMO this is the off-time. Once tracks start rolling out again then no, this conversation would be clutter, but is it really clutter in the middle of the night and also helps to keep this thread bumped up to the top of SNA?

its healthy debate no worse than earlier IMO and reverend did ask about it

ɷ, who did you used to be?

I think he's another sock of NM whomever that is. ɷ posted all the rollout results for the Metal Poll.

NM and I are 2 people.

Well he isn't me, AG, JJJ, sendalai, or Mordy so AFAIK Mr. Butt/Nuttz is a previous lurker now poster.

its a latin small letter closed omega dammit! Don't you know your IPA?

and for the purposes of this thread Oɷ = hoe