Music Criticism in Video Form

The entire thing might be played out via buying power once the unscrupulous CEOs that actually own music sites notice the Fantano/RYM numbers and realize that anti-cuck/anti-patrician/anti-SJW rants will mean more engaged viewers and unique hits than woke thinkpieces

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, January 7, 2017 2:08 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is as likely as anything imo

jim goad is still a thing, and he started as an offshoot of music culture, right?

Give the alt-right crowd the carrot (nu-metal) they always needed and the music world will be spared a gamergate-like event.

🤔

rock criticism's gamergate took place in 1979 and was called "disco sucks".

the candy crush moms vs trv kvlt gamers thing was always a sideshow. gg was an antifeminist and antiliberal backlash. is there an audience for that in music criticism? i think there probably is. is there room for someone to make headway as a critic by being a very brave iconoclast against (just free associating here) the boring old schoolmarm 'progressive' values of the legacy music press? yes absolutely.

― goole, Monday, January 9, 2017 10:54 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well if you define it like that literally anything can have its own gamergate, America just had its own gamergate that would seem to make a music journalism gamergate look like a candle in the sun

At this point the better question is why wouldn't there be a music Gamergate?

I doubt there's many good scandals in the completely dull world of music writing anyway. Most publicists will tell you the majority of music writers don't even go to shows and I think all the constant Tweeting about award shows and Westworld plays out that they're mostly a bunch of shut-ins.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, January 7, 2017 3:08 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you get that Gamergate wasn't driven by game critics but rather by the people playing games, right

given that a lot of the people who shot to fame as popularizers of right-wing nerd backlash seamlessly moved into mouthpieces for the alt-right more broadly... i mean i don't really know where you're going with that arg

to answer ums: i do think that pop music has, in whatever confused unhappy way, certain liberal ideas buried in it more deeply than video games do, or 'tech' more broadly

to complete the analogy, you'd need: some fake scandal supposedly showing the too-cozy relationship between well-connected music writers pushing music for its politics (or trying to punish for its bad politics), and a mass of fans who are angry enough about progressivism to turn it into a rolling crisis, with a growing hit-list of enemy-writers and a counter-slate of 'anti-pc' critics and musicians as heroes.

i could see glimmers of this in ugly moments -- i'm thinking of the inevitable chorus of rape denialist types that emerge when larkin grimm spoke out. but i don't know if i see those moments or groups forming. but they might!

...idk if sketching out an exact parallel scenario like that is all that useful tbh

swans bros are #1 on the alert list tbh

there's actually a fair bit of static in the metal world about sjw's trying to ruin everything by hating on goregrind etc. same shit, less traction.

I was going to bring that up but I only ever encounter it when EZ Snappin sends me a link

Right but what I was saying is you can find it at genre level but music is too decentralized, like I don't think macho grindcore fans and guys who don't want rap to sound too bling bling and ppl who think tool are the best are going to see common cause in going after sjw's who can in no way keep artists from being heard ?

America just had its own gamergate that would seem to make a music journalism gamergate look like a candle in the sun

totally off topic but when did "candle in the sun" become an expression? i never really heard it and then the miguel song came out and i've heard it other places lately too. obv i know "candle in the wind" but was i just missing a widely used expression?

does it become difficult to see
like a candle in the sun?

i think so

http://www.letsmakecandles.com/info_protect_from_sun_703.asp

I don't think D-40 has any clue what a grindcore fan looks like

https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/93/92/18/240_F_93921841_41w8FyxCphQPNEsvJ0t6PrhWgvcjzJnt.jpg

http://www.metalinsider.net/in-memoriam/grindcore-fan-that-happened-to-be-a-goat-passes-away

"to complete the analogy, you'd need: some fake scandal supposedly showing the too-cozy relationship between well-connected music writers pushing music for its politics (or trying to punish for its bad politics), and a mass of fans who are angry enough about progressivism to turn it into a rolling crisis, with a growing hit-list of enemy-writers and a counter-slate of 'anti-pc' critics and musicians as heroes."

all of this exists already.

also I shouldn't be surprised, given almost everyone here is male, but GG wasn't about politics -- that is the alibi GG made up in like a day to cover their ass. GG certainly tapped into politics but at heart it was about someone's ex getting revenge in the messiest, most trollish way possiblbe

*possible

Harrasment towards the lead singer of Chvrches (I forget her name, is it Lauren Mayberry?) was the one moment I believed something similar to gamergate would happen to the music community, it never reached crisis point like in the vg industry.

I can think of multiple instances where female music writers were harassed by roughly the same crowd, up to and including doxing

also I shouldn't be surprised, given almost everyone here is male, but GG wasn't about politics -- that is the alibi GG made up in like a day to cover their ass. GG certainly tapped into politics but at heart it was about someone's ex getting revenge in the messiest, most trollish way possiblbe

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine), Monday, January 9, 2017 3:57 PM (fifty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, maybe i'm not 'getting it' because i'm male, but how is that not also 'politics'.

like, the boundary between "politics" and "white male resentment" has all but been annihilated right?

http://i.imgur.com/XujHL.gif

the difference is that while the political resentment existed for decades, the thing that made it boil over was a harassment campaign against one female developer. the former was an excuse for the latter.

but then it turned into a harassment campaign against many female developers (and journalists) and implicitly against the very idea of female (or black, or gay, or...) developers unwilling to develop exclusively for straight white males -- i mean there were many victims in that thing besides ZQ and many toxic ideas about things much more general than ZQ, and i don't rly know what the point of reducing it to its flashpoint is. what they covered their ass with was the "ethics" shit -- that was garbage, no argument, but imo they v quickly became a genuine protofascist movement. now of course they've shed the proto.

(I'm exceedingly familiar with how the whole thing played out, no need to recap.)

the point is, it can start at any time, and what incites it will not be a music vlog or whatever, but someone's ex going nuclear. I can think of at least two separate instances where I was genuinely afraid this was going to happen, but fortunately they petered out. (deliberately not mentioning specifics because fading into obscurity is the best-case scenario for things like this, which I realize makes it difficult to argue.) it's different from just garden-variety internet nazism

I can think of at least two separate instances where I was genuinely afraid this was going to happen, but fortunately they petered out. (deliberately not mentioning specifics because fading into obscurity is the best-case scenario for things like this, which I realize makes it difficult to argue.)

oh no trouble believing this, or that, as u say above, the conditions are already in place in the music sphere.

the video game industry is an _industry_. there's serious money in it. i don't know what difference that makes, but it seems to me that money seems to be an extremely important factor in a lot of things these days.

strange times

Music industry generated revenues of 15 billion $ in 2015. Much less than video games (and film/television), but enough to consider there is serious money in it.

VG industry earns more than music.

My mistake, I thought the previous post was claiming the opposite.

no, you're right. there is serious money in it. beyonce makes serious bank. and people have tried to target beyonce, and so far they have failed.

gamergate is, at its core, about hostility to women. rock music has been fighting that battle for decades now, and it's losing badly. a successful gamergate-style campaign would require some degree of novelty, not just embracing the nuge and kid rock. you'd have to champion somebody like bieber over carly rae jepsen, and there's just too much cultural ossification in recorded music for people to do that.

music is also highly respected as an art by both music fans and industry as well as regular people that don't care too much. videogames still very much considered just base consumer products with no craft to them, with little cultural cache, and this resentment combined with a internet-fueled redpill conspiracy mindset is part of what feeds GG.

I heard there was an attempt at a metalgate a few years ago but nobody cared.

Sam Dunn/Banger did a panel about sexism in metal and I think it got a pretty hostile response.

tbh it's immaterial whether this turns into a Gate it's simply a question of noting that Fantohno is at best an alt-right sympathizer and all-purpose douchebag

I heard there was an attempt at a metalgate a few years ago but nobody cared.

there was, and you're right (it was a half-assed attempt by a longstanding metal provocateur/troll/dickhead) but women metal writers still got, and get, a fuckton of abuse in their DMs etc & in the comments on their stories, etc

i can't imagine something like "women vs. tropes in metal" ever taking off any more than i could imagine "women vs. tropes in pro wrestling" taking off. the thing about things like gaming and comics that make them such flash-points is that women are very heavily involved in those things. in contrast, metal and pro-wrestling are still predominantly male spaces, and while these scenes continue to successfully marginalize, isolate, and drive away women involved in them i don't see there being a great deal of controversy.

Asking again how far Fantohno goes? Trump supporter? Makes silly rants about political correctness? I think that's annoying and probably has some negative impact but is that all?

I don't believe he is actually a Trump supporter. He's more likely a bernieorbust type that is constantly at war with SJW strawmen. AKA a living caricature of the "typical redditor"

Can a Bernieorbust guy be a typical Redditor?

he's a bernie or buster but a really dumb one. the kind of guy who's not sure if he likes bernie or ron paul

also money is a bit irrelevant to GG because their primary targets are indie games, which make essentially none (it isn't comparable to music -- music has revenue streams open that games don't) (ugh, "revenue streams," but)