TOP 10 NOW: \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\shawty got poll poll poll poll poll poll poll (part II: 2008 ALBUMS)/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Just a pity that ILX polls dont allow you to rank a list of 20. Then you would get a lot more voters.

I seriously doubt this.

xp "difficult/forbidding/unfriendly" certainly is in the ear of the beholder, but for me music's certainly all about pleasure, of various stripes: profound, profane, boneheaded, cerebral, sensual...but to me there's just as much pleasure and joy to be had in discordant, brutal, nihilistic sounds as there is in soft, mellifluous, technicolour ones.

this list is notable for its distinct lack of the former, is all.

re: keenan. he runs a great wee record shop (though yeah, overpriced) but I'm not a fan of his scorched earth, atonal-improv-or-death approach. it's incredibly conservative in its own way.

It's not like Khanate even had an album out in 2008. They split up a few years back.
(However an album mostly recorded 3 years ago, with vocals just having been finally added by Mr Dubin himself ,has just come out and is the best album they made since the debut, so maybe it will make the 2008 poll next year!)

Just a pity that ILX polls dont allow you to rank a list of 20. Then you would get a lot more voters.

I seriously doubt this.

― Lots of praying with no breakfast! (HI DERE),

Why? Some polls get 150 votes. Would be a lot easier for lazy people to vote than emailing.

You still have to get said lazy people to pour through over 100 albums to pull out 20 they care about and order them. You also need a polling interface that allows you to easily do this.

Which unfortunately probably isn't possible

But if it was, i'm sure you would get way over 100 voters

there's always been a meme within the critical and broad-eared listening community that attaches a kind of political/aesthetic heroism to truly difficult music -- and that denigrates or condescends to the "merely pleasant". seems to me that this meme became dominant (or selectively dominant w/in people-thinking-and-writing-about-music circles) in the mid 80s-mid 90s, what with the anti-commercial stances, celebration of noise/experimentation for their own sake, contempt for pop, love for anything "extreme" or outsider-y, etc.

since then, these ideas & aesthetics have lost traction. it's hard to find a lot of critical/popular support for the idea that difficult, "challenging", willfully anticommercial music is inherently more valid (politically or otherwise) than things that might actually sell/appeal to general audiences. using pop forms to express rage or aggressive dissatisfaction is, i think, even looked at a bit askance. instead, there seems to be something like an orthodoxy of comfortable, cerebral pleasure in critical approaches to music. "music can be so nice, so majestic, so comforting, so thoughtful, so appealing and so much FUN -- why would you want to make it all harsh and angry and hard to listen to?"

i know i'm overstating things, and probably communicating badly, but something like this does seem to have happened over the last 10-15 years.

Some of us aren't looking for music that is difficult to listen to. We're looking for music that genuinely blows our minds with thrillingly original and fresh expression. I can't articulate it very well, but it seems to me that bands are happy if one element of their music is novel, rather than the whole joyful fabric of their music. You can be challenging and have fun at the same time!

Being novel for novelty's sake almost never works.

"looked at askance" unless delivered with a sort of good-natured teenage flair...

like, what makes khanate or whoever "further from the middle ground" than the foreign exchange or trus'me? depends on what you consider to be the middle ground...

this is disingenous. some musics are MUCH more audience-unfriendly than others, often deliberately so. rusted shut or blue sabbath black cheer are gonna push "that's not music, you can't play that shit in the office, turn it off NOW!" buttons for a lot more people than FE or trus'me.

same goes for a lot of noise-type electronic music, esp of the non-dance variety.

I don't mean for novelty's sake! I'm talking about artists with a vision that is authentically novel, that temporarily and thrillingly rewires the way one understands music.

LJ, have you heard the Alex Moulton record? I'd be interested in your take on it. It's prog-disco!

― The Reverend (rev), Tuesday, February 17, 2009 12:06 PM Bookmark

i think our voting procedure is working out just fine

^^^

You are basically using a lot of obfuscatory words to say "I'm talking about artists I like," LJ

So I am, Dan. I'm just a bit of a fiend for progression and structural complexity tbh

Will check out Moulton. Like I say, I actually made quite a few really sweet discoveries and have few complaints about the overall poll results. Not perfect for me, but really good music.

That record totally fucked my mind last night.

I like structural complexity as well, but I also like structural simplicity and find that when it's done well, it is near untouchable; this is the main reason why I have absolutely no beef with Lil Wayne placing in the top 10 of this poll.

Well, I'm all for simplicity if it's presented in the form of a strong, personalised, and convincing musical narrative. I'm guessing things like Lil Wayne (and my own vote Half Man Half Biscuit) fall into such a category. More important still than progression is for a song to determine its identity at any one given moment, and to fight for that identity, whether it shifts or not.

i think one thing that's definitely happening is that the commercial/noncommercial barrier has been getting wrecked for the past ~10 years, which may be a driver for what contendo was saying.

i think the list strays quite far from the middle ground in all directions tbh, and i don't see why the music you're complaining didn't make it is any more worthy of inclusion than all the music we voted for which didn't make it...like, what makes khanate or whoever "further from the middle ground" than the foreign exchange or trus'me? depends on what you consider to be the middle ground...

for starters, I'm not in the least bit complaining, or maintaining that anything else is 'more worthy' of inclusion. just registering an observation that what are commonly thought of as more extreme/experimental styles are largely absent.

the question of where the middle ground lies is an interesting one though, and by no means simple. maybe it's to do with the unifying elements of western pop music - maybe linear and/or traditional structures, repetitive rhythms, relatively mid-paced tempos, etc. maybe it's to do with mood, vocal delivery or decipherable lyrics. maybe it's to do with whether you can dance to it or whether it has a 'tune'.

in other words, I clearly shouldn't have used the term. for my purposes here, I'm talking about stuff that inspires the reaction mentioned by contenderizer – i.e "that's not music", aka the contents of the wire/terrorizer.

(although it's interesting that the bug was the wire's no.1 album of the year, although this was perhaps unexpected from the other direction, given that it's a relatively accessible, if dark record.)

out of curiosity lex, what do you consider to be the more experimental/far-reaching/whatever offerings here?

i think the bug makes PERFECT sense wr2 the old-school anticommercial stance. though it's pleasant to listen to, it's also socially/politically critical and self-consciously "dark", even a little bit "dangerous". would have gone over big with the your flesh crowd circa 1990.

another way to look at this is to say that there isn't a lot of politically-engaged music on this list. several gestures in that direction, but only a few albums that make an explicit issue of their politics/social critiques. and maybe that's to be expected, but nor are there many albums that even imply a political engagement through anger, alienation, confrontation, difficulty, etc.

i mean, that's my at-a-glance read, but is it fair?

"nor are there many albums that even imply a political engagement through anger, alienation, confrontation, difficulty, etc."

= missing the point? if not so aggressively, then how do these records address their political context?

is there politically-engaged music that potentially could be on the list but isn't? i'm just trying to think of what the alternative is.

i thought it was a great year for politically-engaged music - certainly erykah badu, young jeezy and the bug all felt momentous in the way they grappled w/social and political ideas, and in the way they all seemed to capture something distinctly of 2008

out of curiosity lex, what do you consider to be the more experimental/far-reaching/whatever offerings here?

lol i'd've said the bug or erykah, but apparently the bug is "accessible". whatever! you try playing that in any office.

Most people are well-versed enough in a couple of genres to make claims as to what constitutes "the middle ground" of those genres. But I don't think anyone on ILM can hold themselves out as understanding the middle ground of contemporary music generally, because, well, they haven't traversed all that ground. After all, at base this metaphor means a middle distance between two points, and it's not feasible to argue that all music can be arranged into a linear fashion from most to least experimental given the multiplicity of divergent impulses that music may choose to express, and the variety of mutually exclusive sonic approaches by which this can be done.

Moreover the upshot of the celebration of extremism ten-to-fifteen years ago is that a lot of those outer edges have been well-mapped and no longer contain vast tracks of uncharted territory. It's incredibly difficult to stumble upon absolutely new ground now, and innovation such as it is occurs in moments of recombination and resulting mutation (i.e. a large part of the GGD album's "step forward" from God's Money is its active engagement with dance and urban music, which transforms their prior sound into something relatively new-sounding). For the most part, people who continue to dwell at "the outer margins" do so with the same potential for greatness as any genre-devotee, but that's what they are: a genre-devotee, working within a tradition. If anything, it's precisely the "pop"-tinged noise outfits that have something to offer here, insofar as the broader listening community simply haven't engaged with noise at all, and hence are more liable to - as per lj - have their "minds blown", even if the music doesn't appear challenging to noise-hardcore

fwiw Gang Gang Dance for instance didn't exactly blow my mind but I really really love the album as a narrative, and enjoy the thoroughly appealing combination of statements they make

xxx-post no. i don't see much explicitly political music that's close to surface WR2 the pop mainstream and/or critical interest zone. i mean it's here and there (queer politics in stuff like Antony, throwback punk stuff like Against Me!, teen alienation in crystal castles, implicitly political extreme music like BSBC & load bands, etc.), but seems to have become quite unfashionable as of late. a few years ago, it seemed like "new weird america" bands like animal collective were expressing some dissatisfaction with commercial music forms and technological society, but those critiques no longer seem present in ACs music. and that strain of wild & woolly "freedom" isn't as popular as it once was.

lex OTM, though. there is some. i'd mentioned the bug, but badu & jeezy 2. those seem like real outliers, though. rare things. and where's the rock/indie equivalent?

a few years ago, we might have seen stuff like the locust, blood brothers at least flirting with the list, right?

if Burn, Piano Island, Burn didn't make the list in '03 then tbh ILX fucked up big-time

agree w/ tim WR2 the "well-trodden"-ness of the outer edges. i think we're seeing the pendulum of interest in extremes swing back after a few decades in the twilight zones. i'm not bitching about this, though - just observing the effect.

lex OTM, though. there is some. i'd mentioned the bug, but badu & jeezy 2. those seem like real outliers, though. rare things. and where's the rock/indie equivalent?

is this where we get into the quirkification of pop culture over the past few years, and the resultant fear of earnestness?

probly

yeah i mean that animal collective song has the line everyone quotes--"i don't care much for material things / i just want 4 walls and adobe slats" etc. etc. which could be read in that way but any dissatisfaction they're expressing is pretty vague--not surprising when they have reasonable means and (as far as I can tell) normal middle-class backgrounds.

i think you're right abt blood brothers but i don't really want to revisit the days when people were repping for them either.

lex: heh! I meant it was relatively accessible in a wire context. the bug would last far longer on an office stereo than, say, borbetomagus.

Tim: you're right re: middle ground and all. I guess more broadly, the list is narrow in terms of its adherence to western pop styles - i.e. no jazz, classical, free improvisation, folk, modern composition, world music (I know, a rancid term, but what else is there?) - unless the finnish psych counts. I only alighted upon the lack of 'noisy stuff', for want of a better catch-all, because that constitutes a significant chunk of the music I know and love, and its absence is therefore the most glaring to me.

i just can't think of too many indie standard-bearers who really have the gravity and credibility to do something as convincing as Jeezy or the Bug (whatever I think about their music).

arcade fire, hold steady, AC all could pull it off, if they wanted to, if they really meant it. and i guess i should include arcade fire among the bands who do retain a political edge in their music.

another faded trend that recently kept politics, punk "opposition" and social critique in the indie/critical eye: GSYBE! & constellation-style cinematic sadcore.

^ the latter thread persists in the current vogue for vaguely "metal" post rock stuff, instrumental or otherwise. isis, pelican, jesu, etc. much of which IS strongly political.

Yeah I think it's a partly-justified fear of making "big statement" music that prevents indie standard-bearers from doing this. One way to think about the Animal Collective's new album - which is probably the biggest big-statement indie album in a while and almost certainly will be the most successful critically this year - is that all of that impulse is poured into the music, and the lyrics are deliberately mundane and domestic by comparison (e.g. singing about taking yr daughter to school through the park).

This is separate but strongly related to the "quirkification"/"fear of earnestness" in mainstream music Lex refers to (I assume we're talking Mika etc.); in both cases, one issue at work is that bands/artists who are trying to stylise themselves as individual become suspicious of their capacity to pull off earnestness without coming on all Coldplay,

xp strange you should mention that, as a silver mount zion's last album fits the bill. it's more bitterly optimistic than angry though.

but certainly, "faded trend" would apply.

If anything, it's precisely the "pop"-tinged noise outfits that have something to offer here, insofar as the broader listening community simply haven't engaged with noise at all

i think "noise" has the potential to become the next "alternative," "indie" or "emo," in the sense of a somewhat vague modifier that sounds hip and could come to signify commercial music that doesn't have a lot to do with its original usage. you already see this in a lot of record reviews, people throwing around "noise" to mean all sorts of things, but i could easily see it making the leap to yr average 14-yr-old, with the right band to sell it. among other things, it's an adjective perfectly suited to irritate parents.

I would say though that the "politics" in a lot of those post-post-punk threads felt very ossified, as much a part of the genre-tradition as certain types of guitar-sounds and therefore no longer very meaningful-sounding.

Similarly, I don't need here to another nu-soul song about body-image and/or refuting the (visual) expectations of the mainstream. Or another post-Ani-DiFranco folk-punk singer proudly proclaiming his/her sexual ambiguity.

Such political interventions usually have traction at the beginning but if they're standard genre moves then that traction wears away.

xp: this has already begun, with fuck buttons.

This is separate but strongly related to the "quirkification"/"fear of earnestness" in mainstream music Lex refers to (I assume we're talking Mika etc.)

not even just mainstream music - mika certainly fits though, as does pretty much every artist in IT'S THE FUTURE, IT'S THE FUTURE: BBC Sound of 2009 'Longlist' Poll

it's wider than that though...it's stuff like juno opting for quirkiness over emotion at, like, every single juncture, and wes anderson's entire career - self-conscious cleverness, quirkiness and metatext is the dominant mode of expression in indie/pop culture right now, and it's not terribly conducive to big political statements.

one issue at work is that bands/artists who are trying to stylise themselves as individual become suspicious of their capacity to pull off earnestness without coming on all Coldplay

yeah, but you don't have to go back very far to find a huge amount of critical interest & popular/scene support for earnest feminist artists/bands like le tigre & sleater kinney. post riot grrrl stuff. and less earnest but equally political stuff like peaches, chicks on speed, punky lo-budget electroclash in general. have those veins dried up too?

also parts & labor for the not-so-noisy "noise" thing. but then again, they're a good example of a contemporary band with a strong political stance/identity.

^ remainder of the former = the gossip

One way to think about the Animal Collective's new album - which is probably the biggest big-statement indie album in a while and almost certainly will be the most successful critically this year - is that all of that impulse is poured into the music, and the lyrics are deliberately mundane and domestic by comparison (e.g. singing about taking yr daughter to school through the park).

How so, "biggest"? Most ambitious? Best? Most open-minded and musically-stunning? Or most adorable, most pleasantly-rendered?

Such lyrical content is a bit of a cop-out, I find, and you run the risk of explaining it away with a pat qualitative dichotomy, although I do accept that the lyrical content is kept simple so as not to work against the music. (Which is a deficiency in my book.)

The album itself I've heard once, and I didn't like it all that much. It had a little of the whole Deserter's Songs "spangles of bright colour draped on a clothesline" thing to it; the songs didn't transcend or transform for me, they merely throbbed, spun and dissolved.

I will give it more listens, though.