OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

the gradual accumulation of scorn seems to outweigh the short term benefits

Yeah, maybe, but is that measurable in any way? Or are there many examples of sites/pubs that went too far with this shit and are now out of business?

http://flavorwire.com/553256/stereotyping-you-by-your-favorite-album-of-2015
belongs here, yea or nay?

yea

Genuinely surprised the Kamasi Washington album wasn't on that list. Seemed ripe for exactly that kind of cheap joke.

lol it's ok

the neon indian one should be 2007

oh ffs: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hello-from-the-same-side/

That is one for the ages

wow.

Ooh, but it sounds so smart!

Here, identity is a secondary, implicit factor that affects performance, but not the primary, overt criterion for in/exclusion, so “Hello” liberalism can pass as nondiscriminatory and quintessentially liberal. However, the parallels in reception of Trump and “Hello” show that liberal “Hello” fans who overtly disidentify and disagree with Trump’s politics want to experience the same feeling of white privilege in terms more palatable to liberal tastes. This strain of “Hello” fandom is the (neo)liberal version of the same white supremacy that Trump expresses in more traditional terms.

i think i just pulled something

Given the general trend in pop-culture writing in 2015, I'm genuinely surprised at the universal ridicule that piece - which, make no mistake - is a mountain of rotting garbage - is getting. It's only the next point on a line other writers have been marking out all year long.

what we get is a completely standard rock beat, with nary an Amen, breakbeat, 808, or trap hi-hat anywhere in the song.

the gift that keeps giving

yeah this thing is just a perfect storm of bad writing trends, it's the season finale of Thinkpiece Island

xxp honestly it just read as overreaching academic hackwork to me, the kind of theory-kit quick-read that you can get on any academic's blog or in a thrown-together conference presentation. but then i read the author preening about criticism of the piece only confirming her point, which is supremely irritating. i've seen other work of hers that seemed good (with allowances for different academic / pop crit competencies) but i find it deplorable that there are actual working critics out there who could far outstrip her own 'read' on her topic yet lack the prestige of third-gen frankfurt school allusions that would help them mount bad faith defenses of bad thinking like 'u must be butthurt bc my critique implicates u'. oh so trap has funny hi-hat programming wow lotta first-rate knowledge at the forefront of culture you're flashing there no chance an actual critic could ever compare.

http://i.imgur.com/XVz51n2.jpg

ah yes, what if we are the ones who are actually the...what

also reaching for the "trump" card is like one step away from godwin's law here -- really want to read the marshall hatford take on adele.

fuckin kylo ren there

the comparison of an inoffensive song you don't dig to actual physical racial violence is outlandish. and the fact that adele by all accounts is slotted as a "soul" singer of some sort goes completely unremarked, which makes the piece sort of astonishingly and proudly ignorant in terms of its treatment of race.

skrrrrt

not to mention the consistent idea that "naturalness" is a "white" thing, which completely eclipses an entire tradition of neo-soul, roots hip-hop, etc. etc. not to mention which a "natural" as a hairstyle is well... like somebody get this author an Erykah Badu album stat

spite some kind of modern virtue

From the Quietus best albums thing, just one sentence

"The RSS B0ys are a quick fuck on a dirty gas station-toilet with some anonymous stranger." Sonja Matuszczyk

Uhh huhhhhhhhh

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-lemmy-and-motorhead-gave-metal-its-umlaut-20151229

this is pretty bad. i'm not sure which is worse on this, the writing or the editorial. on the editorial side, we have a headline about the importance of the umlaut to motorhead which omits the umlaut. on the article side, we have an article about how motorhead brought the umlaut to metal which openly acknowledges that motorhead did not bring the umlaut to metal, but got it from blue oyster cult. also there's this bizarre tangent about amon duul. i'm not sure if browne is actually unaware that umlauts are a standard part of the german language or knows but doesn't care.

Just dropped in to see if that garbage New Inquiry piece had made it. This thread never lets me down.

(Lemmy, a collector of Nazi memorabilia, rarely if ever commented on any connection between that umlaut and Nazi-era use of the dots in say, "Führer.") For Lemmy, the umlaut, like the music and lifestyle he lived until his body couldn't take it anymore, spoke — or pronounced — volumes.

yeah, i got rooked into promulgating the umlaut piece myself... people want more lemmy content right now! A piece on the pictographic history of his mole would likely have tremendous click-through.

that's more of a right-hand-side-of-the-browser affiliate program link

i stand corrected

nazi-era use of the dots

of course after ww2 the decision was made to remove the dots from the word Führer

for a fairer Germany

as someone who has sub-edited not one but two Motorhead-dedicated magazine specials in recent years, the umlaut is the bane of my life.

Let’s be clear on one thing about this record. It isn’t a rap album your average fair-weather hip-hop fan who only listens to what BET and Hot 97 feed them will ever begin to comprehend. In order to fully cognate the textural and lyrical parameters on display, you will have to go back to the likes of Funkadelic’s America Eats Its Young or Brer Soul by Melvin Van Peebles or even Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet to comprehend where this talented young man is coming from. Just as with D’Angelo’s The Black Messiah, To Pimp A Butterfly is exactly the kind of challenging, confrontational truth many Americans been waiting to hear from the black community.

just like The Black Messiah

*just as with The Black Messiah

Offered without comment.

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/life-ruined-says-Daniel-O-Donnell-superfan/story-28465949-detail/story.html

the photographer should have cajoled him into smashing all his memorabilia up for the camera imo

That would have added a frisson of psychopathy which would make the whole thing more believable.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/01/what-past-coachella-lineups-would-look-like-today/

i have no idea what that is for

http://www.digitalthirdcoast.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/fewer-clicks1.png

tried reading that on mobile and got one of those full-page 'download this app to proceed' roadblocks. hisssss

In order to fully cognate the textural and lyrical parameters on display
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr05%2F2013%2F7%2F9%2F19%2Fenhanced-buzz-2038-1373414176-0.jpg&f=1

good lord what is the fucking point of that Coachella poster piece

^^^ btw I've clicked through four pages of it so far :(

You might as well be asking what is the point of Consequence of Sound. There appears to be none.

omg that coachella piece is amazing. the headliners are basically the same. this is like clickhole quality "here's what famous stars would look like if we photoshopped a hat onto them" stuff.

Writer learned who Bowie was via Snapchat a few minutes before getting the assignment

http://www.thefader.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-obituary-essay

idk if i'm going to regret engaging but: where is the evidence of that