Music Criticism in Video Form

Ahh Milton that's v interesting btw

@ WGW, I kind of feel the opposite, I kind of think everything matters and that it's good to engage properly and directly with people and I don't see the fun in owning an herb

I don’t know why I hate theneedledrop guy so much. I agree with him more often than not but I just don’t like his face or something. I hate that I hate him for no reason too.

Nvm I just got caught up on the Auerbach/Sunderland thing, burn everything and everyone

otm

Sometimes things are exactly what they seem like.

Auerbach/Sunderland?

Enjoy, if that's the word

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.qvMAnp774#.ybVmxoWWG

there's one graf in there, I don't really want to point out which it is but it doesn't take much detective work, that very heavily suggests that the only reason we didn't have a music GG is because m*lo didn't bite

xxxps
Auerbach/Sutherland more likely?

fgti otm throughout. Participating in the alt right via dogwhistle youtube videos and whatever is inexcusable given the toxicity of these communities and the harm they cause -- it's good his videos were demonetized -- but I don't think it's a good idea to fight these people by borrowing their tactics, from meme wars to abuse language to whatever.

when I was 15 we had Book of the SubGenius & the Research Pranks issue, and Boyd Rice was the main cautionary tale of what happened when a troll went too far -- today's 15 year olds have Kekistan. I don't like it but I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand the appeal

this aint a meme kid he's a fully grown ass married bald matt pinfield-esque man.

*abusive.

People need to do what they need to do but they should be aware that the alt right/gamergate communities are incredibly vile, and that they thrive on twitter flame wars etc. That's milo's whole deal, right? Baiting people.

Fgti great post!

Think you might want to read the rest of the thread after that post now.

Fgti I don't think you realize the tenacity of the brainwashed Fantano teens who attack anyone's mentions who might have a critical word to say about him. If there's a ferocity to my response it's bc of the brick wall like expeirence of entering into a "reasonable dialogue" with an ostensible "critic" like Anthony fantano, who is more of a cult of personality persona emulating the authority and knowledge of "critics" through theatrical performance than he is someone interested in any kind of intellectual inquiry. He's also, I think, far more accepting of reactionary bullshit than his followers realize, stuck as they are in a bubble where Richard Spencer's opinions are normalized. He might be a "liberal" but it's fruit of the poisoned tree

also the reason people seem gleeful is because the alternative is being terrified

Tweets that seem harassing, telling Anthony to "choke on your own diarrhea", "die in a fire", etc., and really? Is this really what we want to spend time on?

how many Needle Drop videos would we have to submit fgti to until he answers this in the affirmative? i'm thinking 2

Just wanna point out that I was clowning Broadly Pepe more than two years ago

Already dying at Vice's attempt at a women's vertical. pic.twitter.com/LT6yu5PLeE

— Chris Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) August 6, 2015

I couldn't help but also feel really weirded out by the torches-and-pitchforks-out response in the music and music journalism community. Tweets that seem harassing, telling Anthony to "choke on your own diarrhea", "die in a fire", etc., and really? Is this really what we want to spend time on? Is this really getting people that up-in-arms?

i agree with a lot of what you're saying but you're literally just talking about........ twitter

in response to any news breaking ever, there will immediately be 100 million randos telling someone to eat diarrhea and each of their posts will have zero to 3 likes

the argument is basically a gussied-up version of "liberals are actually just virtue-signaling"

lol flopson

and yes katherine I hadn't heard that term before but I think you're exactly right, and it's why I'm fearful of this line of thought

I fear that a handful of Twitter causes this year have caused me doubts about the authenticity of this 'progressive' fight or that-- i.e. people pointing out the TERFiness of pussy hats made me wonder if that angle was actually in good faith, wondering if there was any net benefit for trans women to make that argument, or if it was (actually!) a line of thought planted by the alt-right that sought to destabilize the effectiveness of the women's march by creating division

I don't actually think that but my brain has been reading everything as double-speak this past year

Anyway if you need me I'm going back to my comfortable solution-box of "hire more black writers"

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)

― dyl

is it? where is it? all i see are stupid kids who won't shut up about how mr. bungle is the greatest band ever and people who make long lists of records in languages they can't read.

my impression is that rym as a "culture" is stagnant and being eclipsed by the capitalist juggernaut that is discogs.

xp i mean alt-right attempts at social media false flags are always obvious because they make no attempt at making it believable to anyone who isn't alt-right. meanwhile ending the equations between gender and genitalia has been pretty central to trans activism for a long time? and this was one of the biggest marches in recent memory, why wouldn't it come up?

i still don't get why "a bunch of random dillweeds wanna come along for the ride" is a reason against publishing an article about anthony fantano courting reactionaries. or are you just against the behavior of randoms?

the awkward lesson of mass social media i keep learning is that the amount of human beings currently alive is incomprehensible and terrifying and most of them really just wanna come along for the ride

Actually most of them just want to find parking, if I correctly remember my cabaret voltaire

xp to rushomancy tbh what i wrote probably better describes denizens of acclaimedmusic and such, altho there's substantial overlap

I stand by the quantitative-analysis-of-art-favours-power-structures-already-in-place idea.

does anyone remember the link to the rather-good article about this topic? maybe an ilxor wrote it?

drew daniel's quietus baker's dozen?

that was it!! thank you :)

my impression is that rym as a "culture" is stagnant and being eclipsed by the capitalist juggernaut that is discogs.

Not to derail but I don't think Discogs even tries to offer much to supplant that tendency to want to rate and review. You can do both but they are barely developed features. Charts hardly figure. Even the specialist groups are very low on traffic for the most part.

Maybe that's what you meant but I don't see this dynamic. Also it's pretty small beans as a 'juggernaut' really.

fgti I'm sympathetic to a lot of your thoughts and found Angela Nagle's short book Kill All Normies an interesting read on the topic of both the extremely toxic alt-right and the problematic virtue-signaling of "the tumblr left"
http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies

the meat is iirc in the first 20 pages

does anyone remember the link to the rather-good article about this topic? maybe an ilxor wrote it?

― dyl, Friday, October 6, 2017 2:35 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

drew daniel's quietus baker's dozen?

― imago, Friday, October 6, 2017 2:36 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

drew namedrops 12 albums in the course of the article iirc

great to see everyone is condemning the true enemy in this story about reactionaries and actual nazis: "virtue signaling"

"virtue signaling" is as sociopathic a term as "sjw" or "snowflake" imo. also, the implication that ranking art is fascist is really irritating and wrongheaded. fantano fell off because he's a pushover who can't resist the broader will of the market/kindergarten. not because he's a music critic who makes lists.

i think we need to keep sight of the real enemy but i also find it regrettable that fgti can express a very thoughtful, conflicted sentiment and have it reduced to an easily dismissible buzzword like "virtue signaling". i think this is part of his point, and part of why these "debates" (for lack of a better term) are so unproductive. there is more to life than picking sides

"performative allyship" seems to be the preferred term in social justice circles, but in practise it basically means the same thing afaict?

it's not reducing it to a buzzword, it's providing a synonym for the following:

I'm just (in this case, and other cases previous) finding that the response across Twitter, by musicians and journalists who really ought not to give so many shits, is so... gleeful, weirdly over-aggressive, that it feels inauthentic. Like pageantry.

that said i understand why the idea of discussing ancillary aspects of social justice issues may strike some as a waste of time or getting off message (not to mention reeking of privilege); i can live with that view but we may have to agree to disagree

like, sure, no one likes people who are progressive on paper or on twitter but not in their private lives, but the problem isn't their posting about social justice on twitter. the problem is their being a reactionary pustule in real life, and the secondary problem is hypocrisy

(you can witness this happening in real time, incidentally, with (again) the polygon stuff -- the internet anime frog crew has latched onto "actually 'feminist men' are all abusers" and have absorbed it into their argument bank. not because they care about abusers, but because it's a convenient set of words to say)

Katherine completely otm

Jesus fucking Christ everyone read that BuzzFeed article before you post some pearl clutching phony bullshit

Every person involved in the alt right should have their lives ruined

These people want a new Holocaust and we're sitting around worried about the tone of the discourse or oh jeez these kids are really showboats aren't they

the implication that ranking art is fascist is really irritating and wrongheaded

nobody's said that. but some forms of criticism are more driven by a will to diminish and dominate, cataloguing and scoring has that in it. good critics explore and open up the work they engage with. dickheads gas it and pin it to a board.

agreed, but cataloguing and scoring and sites like RYM specifically is what's largely kept me *away* from just exploring the canon of rockism

i think the best function of those kind of sites is pulling together new information, and i guess if filing is the price you pay for it it's no big deal

How do you feel about, say, the Billboard Hot 100?

it's a marketing thing, i stopped getting excited about whether somebody i liked was in the charts when i was still a teenager

and history seems to be coming round on this one

M@tt and katherine OTM

Katherine, you're making the same argument as "wau sean spicer got invited to the emmys but people want hillary clinton to fuck off wau."

Yes, obviously, worse thing is worse, but that shouldn't make the lesser thing off limits