Music Criticism in Video Form

I feel like I want to blame RYM a little bit for some reason.

it is part of the same bullshit to me. I realise fans of criticism as filing may feel differently.

All the aggregators -- metacritic etc -- definitely contributed to this tendency to evaluate art as just another commodity, along the lines of user enjoyment rather than any kind of respect for the work in itself.

which, y'know, is part of a very old and dishonourable teenage boy tradition, "proving" the superiority of yr own malformed beliefs

there's definitely something to want to boil down art criticism to a numbers game and how it facilitates a poisonous discourse, see also Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic (xp!!)

I Rate Everything.

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

― small doug yule carnival club (unregistered), Friday, March 4, 2016 12:43 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this still true

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:01 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

I think so. according to Socialblade, his review channel and his edgelord channel are both signed with Complex. it's pretty low of Complex to profit off of his bullshit even if it's true that youtube ended up demonetizing his more controversial videos.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/theneedledrophttps://socialblade.com/youtube/user/thatistheplan

like the core of his fanbase has been /mu/ & reddit types from the start, it's not surprising that he'd move to further capitalise on that, or that the undercurrents would become more explicit as they have elsewhere

(xpost -- his second channel was signed with Complex as far back as last November, but I'm not sure if his videos were monetized at that point)

yeah, GG just weaponized/took nuclear a group of people that already existed. (in games, this group of people was around doing more or less the same shit at smaller scale since dickwolves at least)

ugh. I had forgotten about the whole dickwolves thing.

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

(this is the fifth time I said "also" but the reason I bring games stuff up so often is that I'm in that scene)

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

"Jason" would be fine, lol

Fantano actually admits here that he's affiliated with Complex, but I'm not the first person to point that out

the bit comparing Fantano to a middle-schooler seems pretty OTM to me. he doesn't really strike me as being as malicious or committed as the Gamergate crowd, more like "anything for a good shitpost", the sort who'd try to argue "no we're actually MOCKING the bad guys, don't you see". dude just wants to transfer his living essence into a meme.

nothing about any of his supposed 'shifts' has been at all surprising to me, just from having seen what music he covered, how he talked about it and so forth in the few reviews of his i could stomach when he was getting started.

even then questions like "does this guy post on /mu/?" "does this guy avidly use rym?" "does this guy find racist memes amusing?" "does this guy think feminism is cancer?" "does this guy believe that encouraging people to treat each other with empathy is 'authoritarianism'?" etc would have been pathetically easy to answer accurately

how malicious or intentional he is is irrelevant imo

internet is so creepy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkUxFB6jbDc

i refuse to click on that

like I needed another reason to hate this guy lol

all this 4Chan/reddit/vlogger meme-dominated shit - where do these people even find the time to follow/catalog/participate in it all? It all strikes me as the kind of shit that only people with no jobs/children have time for. Like, explicitly the province of young men with too much time on their hands.

He's probably one of the 5 highest paid music critics in the world if that gives you some idea of how and why he finds the time

yeah I don't mean him specifically, since he's made an actual career out of it

how much is Armoured Skeptic paid

nothing about any of his supposed 'shifts' has been at all surprising to me, just from having seen what music he covered, how he talked about it and so forth in the few reviews of his i could stomach when he was getting started.
even then questions like "does this guy post on /mu/?" "does this guy avidly use rym?" "does this guy find racist memes amusing?" "does this guy think feminism is cancer?" "does this guy believe that encouraging people to treat each other with empathy is 'authoritarianism'?" etc would have been pathetically easy to answer accurately

well yeah I mean I follow a few pretty dodgy meme pages of Facebook that seem to have a weird affinity with this dude so this ain't surprising to me at all. I'm not absolving him at all, but giving him the "alt-right" tag seems a bit premature, it was kind of his destiny to end up this way

btw I'm not sure what RYM has to do with this, it's totally different than /mu/. unless you're referring to the culture of rating everything and freaking out over charts, which, idk if that's really the issue here

he really spent a lot of time editing those meme videos wow

One thing I'm getting from this thread is that people's tolerance for hate-watching things is much lower than for hate-reading

btw I'm not sure what RYM has to do with this, it's totally different than /mu/. unless you're referring to the culture of rating everything edgy black metal, minstrel show meme rap, japanese paedo cartoon soundtracks and pink guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP5UD833gQA

let's not

the stuff that happens in the last 90 seconds really isn't that different than Negativland's Over the Edge Radio or something

not only are these people's "politics" horrible but their sense of humor is shockingly shitty. Like where you get depressed by it. And their aesthetics are ugly!

https://pics.onsizzle.com/Instagram-240686.png

Whiney those Pink Guy albums have an average of 1.90 and less ratings than say, every single Gentle Giant album. what exactly are you talking about here.

frobgs please don't force me to bolster my argument with the "data" from RYM

cuz your argument is "gigantic music database also contains some albums I don't like". Pink Guy's album is rated on allmusic.com too bud.

if you see rym as a place where people just rate music according to whether they like it or don't seems pretty value-neutral.

but it's more than that. it's a community of people who not only believe that 'objective' evaluation of art/music is possible and necessary, but who highly value such evaluation as a means of constructing the canon/tomorrow's received wisdom. they take to the next level what they've observed the music press doing (in slapping star-ratings onto music and periodically slotting it into ranked lists). the music press has largely been rockist for decades, and i don't think i need to explain the implicit values and biases of rockism here. unsurprisingly, rym's collective rankings (the building versions of which seem to be how a lot of music gets on some devoted users' radars in the first place) are heavily skewed in all the predictable directions.

so yeah, not at all surprising when a fantanbro is a heavy rym user! (he was btw + might still be but i haven't cared enough to check recently)

the piece's author's twitter mentions are a mess omg, so many 'liberals' defending fantano's channel as a parody of the alt-right (??) lol

Really glad ilm exist atm. It's comforting to know that the world's biggest musicheads are not sociopaths (mostly!).

Sorry for getting corny for a second. Carry on.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. It's probably a "good" thing that not all ILMers post on ILE..........

Shaker - regarding where do these people find time...some jobs it's very easy to slack off all day on these kinds of forums.

Shakey**

None of us would know anything about that, of course.

Hahahaha

I really don't think the RYM issue is that complicated, the average forum, comments section, etc. tends to skew more to the right than the average media outlet

regarding katherine's "charisma" post upthread, i posted this w/r/t NARCOS on the netflix thread and maybe it kinda applies to these YouTube types:

i think w/film and tv depictions of sociopaths but it's an easy way out to make them avuncular (which was the right adjective for Moura's admittedly vv good performance.) i think w/a lot of these types there's a constant undercurrent of danger and fear that they put out along w/the likability. or i guess "charm" and "charisma" might be better in this case; some of the people i've known who were possibly (probably?) sociopaths have a lot in common: they draw you into their orbit, they like being at the center of attention, they wilt in certain situations where they are not at the center, people like them but they do not really possess qualities that--charisma and charm removed--make them admirable or worthy of liking. and there's always an undercurrent of something.

i mean what the alt-right has been "good" at (or i guess what the major personalities have cultivated) is this charismatic presence devoid of anything else.

xp well its a little hard to tell now, ever since Trump came along I've noticed a lot of discussion boards instituting a strict "NO POLITICS" rule, which is probably for the best

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them? The ones I've seen have been, like Treeship said upthread, really innocuous. Like, Mr. Rodgers-levels of subdued. I thought that was his brand—geek who shares dutiful, uncontroversial opinions about music in a soft-spoken voice.

christ i'm not gonna watch the fucker