Music Criticism in Video Form

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

My favorite music reviewer is being hit-pieced by far-Left journalists. That's it. No more. We're tolerating this too much. Regardless of whether you hate the anti-SJW community, this is pure slander of an innocent man.

Get it trending#NeedleDropNotAltRight

— Arch Alien (@The_ArchAlien) October 4, 2017

A bold rallying cry for these times.

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them?

This was the dude's Twitter icon for years:

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/016/217/photo.jpg

Even if he doesn't actually shout in many of them, how is that appealing.

"So what's your chosen public image...oh okay a shaven headed ranter. And...bye."

shiftless teens/20s guys who are unable to enjoy art without external validation from as much authority as possible have existed since long before RYM

yeah but they used to just get a copy of the rolling stone guide and then grow out of it

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).

i think there are two forces at work here both largely taking impact from the technology of the internet itself. 1) the need to be an Expert on everything. this is a big internet thing, something that emerges in social spheres, perhaps it is a result of the aggressive/territorial propoganda of capitalisam, the hyper consumerism of post-modern late capitalism. the way we represent ourselves on the internet largely starts with lists, lists of favorite books/movies, lists of consumer products, there is an aggressive need to indulge in this and yeah the ages old traditions of consumerist promotional materials.

2) the methods of art production have been democratized. this is in some ways a bad thing for art. whereas in the past technology and skill cut the average person off from the ability to create, now technology makes it a convenience available to everyone. now people that in another era would have never attempted to make art are getting into "making art" via the hyper consumer route, it is a way to feed their consumer ego, their brand, etc. you see this in Pateron and the modern cult of personality. people on message boards talk about copyright strikes towards their favorite youtuber and say that they are making "art" by playing these video games that somebody else made.

i think in some ways this is good, that art should be available to everyone, but certainly it loses a craft, and you have essentially illiterate (from a traditional art-history educational background) people writing for other illiterate people about art. this is not art. this is criticism. just because you made a video does not mean it is film and it is art. a lot of this criticism is made by people that don't really care about art outside of a consumer sphere - they aren't artists themselves - so much as they care about movies and maybe the political drama surrounding it. not to say it is all bad of course and there are people doing great things (and i far prefer youtube over television) but the convenience of the technology and platform lower the bar to entry and allow a lot of shitty people in.

The internet puts people in touch with others who share their absolute worst tendencies. And it allows them to spend all their time with these people, in a cocoon of toxic reinforcement, and ignore outside influences. When they live this way for long enough the outside world comes to seem strange and alien, and they can only make sense of it with language they learned in the cocoon, i.e. prejudices and generalizations, the kind of thoughts that thrive in environments without light or oxygen. So the internet -- a technology that was supposed to help us feel connected to people all across the globe -- has actually turned out to be a remarkably efficient incubator of hardcore racists and ideological misogynists.

xp j. Basically you're right -- tendencies that were bad i. The past can become so much more damaging today.

good way to set up meets for swingers too

Sure, but if one of these romantic liasions disappoints the male party he just might spend the rest of his life whining about it on an MRA forum, to the point where sexism, along with bitterness, comes to be a core feature of his personality.

They need to warn people about getting sucked into online hate communities the way they used to warn people about getting drawn into cults.

I'm always curious what hair was split when an Adam bruneau ends up here instead of in the needle drop comments section

now deej