thread of miguel

I like the quiet no frills opener but "DEAL" and "The Valley" are still slogs. "NWA" is OK. The rest is gravy. "face the sun" makes me feel happy all over.

yeah i'd agree with that - i relistened to KD the other day and had completely forgotten how front-loaded it is (but, as you say, not because the songs in the back half are bad per se)

"what's normal anyway" seems anomalous but i'm thinking it might be the heart of the album in some ways? if the first half of the album is the roleplay to the back half's pure feeling (obv only in a rough sense, not song-by-song accurate)

xp

I was surprised to learn that "what's normal anyway" wasn't a solo composition.

damn i hadn't even looked at the credits yet -- are the wikipedia ones right? benny blanco & cashmere cat worked on "...goingtohell" ??? so random

also, "flesh" is miguel, raphael saadiq and.... jai paul's brother?

The Thrill -> How Many Drinks -> Where's The Fun -> Arch & Point flows perfectly, I have no truck with this historical revisionism. Especially given there have been literally hundreds of more brazenly front loaded albums in recent years.

It does look worse up against the near flawless back half of the new one, admittedly, but I still rate KD slightly higher overall.

Is Miguel trying to tell us something on What's Normal Anyway?

Wiki credits are wrong.

Jai Paul's bro is on Flesh though right

this feud is infuriatingly reductive and everyone blaming miguel for stoking it should have an issue with the reporter who asked the question in the first place

― maura, Wednesday, July 8, 2015 11:11 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, Miguel and Frank happened to be in the same room for the first time in 2 years the day the interview took place, maybe the writer would've pushed that angle if that wasn't the case but we'll never know. and while i prefer Miguel musically, he really just has never taken the high road in this stuff. he actually said that Frank coming out “could have been a marketing ploy" in a radio interview, the whole subject of FO just seems to make him talk like a jackass.

him making a point of being all "I want people to know who I am and that I love women!" when announcing this album reads a bit differently to me now

http://i.imgur.com/rC7Ox4z.jpg

:D

him making a point of being all "I want people to know who I am and that I love women!" when announcing this album reads a bit differently to me now

oh come onnnnn

liking this album a lot more since I deleted "The Valley" and "gfg"

i mean, this is something Miguel has been asked about, and has responded to, since the beginning of his career. this is from a year before Channel Orange:
http://necolebitchie.com/2011/06/miguel-addresses-his-sexuality-i-love-women/

there are gay rumors about every (and i mean EVERY) successful male R&B singer but Miguel is one of the few where it became an overt component of his interviews/career narrative right off the bat without any real basis for it

I like frank ocean but I don't want to fuck to it. Point miguel.

^

lol at the idea of anyone who posts to a message board making decisions about music based on their sex lives

speak for yourself?

anyway, you can totally have sex to frank ocean if that's really your criteria

(also as meaghan garvey pointed out this whole thing leaves out dawn richard, who is also on their level, but maybe these unimaginative writers can only engage in one othering act at a time)

― maura, Wednesday, 8 July 2015 15:19 (Yesterday) Permalink

Brainwasher pointed out jazmine Sullivan's album is continually left out in these things (and maybe a more populist/popular example than DR)

I want to like JS more but every time I listen to her I'm just kind of like "smart songwriting" but nothing else draws me in.

anyway, you can totally have sex to frank ocean if that's really your criteria

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, July 8, 2015 9:40 PM Bookmark

I guess, but his music (and he himself) are kind of weirdly unsexy to me.

what is this "music to have sex to" thing?

i am disgusted that any of you people are having sex

srsly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ImRyPymRAM

I think we can all agree that sex is weird and gross

this album on the other hand just seems to get better every time I hear it, and I really don't get complaints about the sequencing

I feel like you guys are just grasping at "people we also like" straws to bring up Dawn or Jazmine as supposedly obvious female contemporaries of Miguel/Frank when Tinashe and Janelle Monae and Jhene Aiko are a much better fit

what if ~they're all different~

They're all very different! I just think "why bring up Frank Ocean and not Dawn Richard" sounds disingenuous or like you expect every writer to conform to your not very widely shared view of the R&B landscape

Disingenuous more so because it skirts around the reasons why gender still plays a disproportionate role in determining how we evaluate singers (or artists in general).

I think Tinashe is a good fit!

Yeah, the reach to Dawn Richards and not say, Jazmine Sullivan or Tamar Braxton or K. Michelle also feels representative of a disconnect between who a small set of music critics want to be relevant to R&B at the moment and who the average R&B listener is actually listening to on a regular basis.

hmm well no I don't hear much Sullivan, Braxton, or K Michelle in Miguel.

also: "a disconnect between who a small set of music critics want to be relevant to R&B at the moment" and R&B listeners is non-existent. IF you listen to R&B or adult R&B radio, you're sharing tastes with listeners.

Yeah Jazmine is more like a contemporary of Ne-Yo, and K. Michelle and Tamar are like throwbacks to that cohort who just happened to be late bloomers commercially. they feel like a very different breed to me than the eclectic Tumblr Coachella cool kid wave of Miguel/Frank/Weeknd/Jhene/Tinashe/etc.

Jazmine's stuff is notably less afrofuturist and experimental
no less wonderful

also: "a disconnect between who a small set of music critics want to be relevant to R&B at the moment" and R&B listeners is non-existent. IF you listen to R&B or adult R&B radio, you're sharing tastes with listeners.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, July 9, 2015 1:59 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, but Dawn isn't getting played on R&B or adult R&B radio, unlike Miguel/Frank/Weeknd/Jhene/Tinashe, which is where my point about the disconnect comes in. That she became the go-to here was an odd choice to me given that the odds of someone outside of ILX thinking of her before they'd think Tinashes or Jhene or any of the women I mentioned are extremely small, even when thinking in terms of like Tumblr coachella buzzword dead signifier R&B.

I guess I wasn't clear. I meant that most of us on ILM who love Dawn Ricahrd also listen to K Michelle, Ledisi, Keyshia Cole, and other R&B and adult R&B standbys.

dunno if that's true honestly. K. Michelle got a little groundswell on the last year-end poll but nothing near the votes that Dawn's records have gotten.

oh the poll

Haven't been following the conversation around this record too much. Has Frank Ocean really been invoked that often?

I go by seeing the same ten or eleven names in R&B threads.

Haven't been following the conversation around this record too much. Has Frank Ocean really been invoked that often?

― Evan R, Thursday, July 9, 2015 5:51 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in Miguel reviews? it was finally starting to become less of a ubiquitous theme (save for the Pitchfork review) before Miguel's little interview this week made FO a permanent part of his narrative.

Ha. I do think three or four years ago the comparisons were fair game—two extremely talented R&B singers, each carving their own path, and it was interesting to compare and contrast their visions. And there is some truth to the narrative that Miguel saw R&B changing, opening up to different styles and approaches, and really ran with it. But all that is pretty old news by now.

I've read many essays and reviews alleging that 808 & Heartbreak and Drake and whatnot changed it. How was it changing? Serious question.

yeah it felt pretty forced to me in 2012 but a little inevitable, and they were both L.A.-based guys. but in 2015, seeing "alt R&B" in every Miguel review, and "PBR&B" in the first sentence of The Weeknd's wiki entry, just shows how much those hacky angles stuck with people and continue to shape how they see these artists. (xp)