Music Criticism in Video Form

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

Like, if you don't think performative wokeness is an actual real thing, I have a Vice women's vertical to sell you

there is more to life than picking sides

In this instance, the side available to some of us have already been picked by the nature of the conflict and the other side LITERALLY would like to see us dead.

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

― frogbs

i continue to find most of my new music through rym - not through the ratings, which are increasingly useless exercises in mediated canon reinforcement, but through the lists, which are the work of music-loving eccentrics not terribly unlike the folks here except in age.

as much as we may mock the obsessive drive for arbitrary categorization, without it it's really hard to _find_ stuff. my life is appreciably enriched by people who make lists, particularly annotated lists, of their 200 favorite chamber pop songs, or who obsessively genre-parse in order to find the greatest spouge record.

xpost me

*Especially* since woke clickbait is currently a cynical move for a lot of very gross capitalism, cf. Mic.com

xp cosign plus I feel top 10 lists can be a great literary form

the "performative wokeness" waters here are muddied by:

1. the way in which market forces make certain poses trendy, and which once they get adopted by mass media are forced to at least slightly conform to market pressures, thus making their chest-beating seem more than a little insincere. (see: teen vogue, which loves to rake in the kudos for being "woke" while also treating young writers of color like crap / running infomercials for dr. luke's water (yes, he has a water brand) (maybe "pivot to water" is the next media trend??); obviously the just-deceased mtv news is an example here as well);
2. the rise of the "personal brand," which when combined with the market forces people to self-style as aspiring cult leaders because scale = money;
3. the glibness of twitter and the fact that it's a lot easier, especially in a hothouse environment where bad news seems to come down the pike on an hourly basis, to hold something at arm's length in an either ironic or just outright shitty way;
4. the paradox that saying nothing on social media isn't registered as tacit approval or tacit disapproval or anything at all, which can be frustrating for people trying to build the personal brands outlined in item 2 (not to mention for people who have to work under the paradoxical conditions outlined in item 1, so they can't be honest);
5. the way in which stances have to be extreme in order to cut through the clutter noted in item 3;
6. the market being essentially conservative in nature because the people in power don't want to cede what they have over something silly like social progress; and
7. mitch sunderland and his mcinnes jr. ilk being pretty horrible people at their core

also cocaine probably figures into this too

all of that, pretty much, plus the fact that the most consistent element of the alt-right (and the Trump administration) is projection

here's that water story btw. core hydration is dr. luke's water brand. poor ellie goulding

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/ellie-goulding-core-hydration-partnership

(I don't know if "projection" is the right word exactly, but the belief that everyone secretly agrees with them -- the "silent majority" thing -- but is afraid or unwilling to say it)

"my friend is a huge water geek"

It's also a lot easier to give credence to the projection argument when people on the opposite side of an issue from you are feeding you information behind the scenes to further your aims.

It's like a whole bunch of people re-enacting Claire McCaskill's strategy of helping the loon win the Republican primary so she could easily beat him in the general election, only they actually like and agree with the loon.

maura otm thank you

while I'm making friends all over the place the other criticism that bugs me is "well they're not ACTUALLY alt-right, they just invited white nationalists onto their podcast/asked people to mock their colleagues." as if you can just go about your media day and then stumble into a long-running far-right backchannel by mistake

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2017/10/06/the-year-the-journalistic-sewer-changed-hands/

^^^on the role of drudge/breitbart -- and in the uk private eye -- in the journalistic ecology (doesn't mention gawker, tho that was largely sleb-driven i suppose)

while I'm making friends all over the place the other criticism that bugs me is "well they're not ACTUALLY alt-right, they just invited white nationalists onto their podcast/asked people to mock their colleagues." as if you can just go about your media day and then stumble into a long-running far-right backchannel by mistake

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine)

i don't know all the details here, but where does something like million dollar extreme fit into this? i feel like a lot of the "alt-right" people do practice deceit and that, particularly as recently as a year ago, that strategy was a lot easier for them.

I don't know what that is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Extreme

Million Dollar Extreme is some super bullshit that slots right into the meme frenzy right-wing hate churn; they briefly had a painfully unfunny show on Adult Swim that got yanked very, very quickly.

(The one episode I saw of it featured as a cornerstone sketch a dinner party where a female guest fell into a glass coffee table and painfully pulled herself onto the couch whimpering and bleeding while her husband and the host argued over whether she should apologize for breaking the table. It is literally one of the cruelest, unfunniest things I've ever seen masquerading as comedy, with no punchline, no wordplay or cleverness in the dialogue, nothing other than two guys blandly ignoring a suffering woman bleeding to death on a couch.)

oh yeah they absolutely practice deceit, sometimes in the form of the old "it's just satire" line and sometimes by just straight-up lying.

(i did find it interesting that the "but he has a black so!!!" argument echoed through both of this week's kerfuffles)

xp

the thing is though how far off is that anti-comedy from the show about people working in the hell office? (the adult swim one, not THE GOOD PLACE.) i feel like the nihilistic edginess that adult swim in particular has adopted over the last few years is inevitably going to result in people confusing the "hilarious" with the "sociopathic and perhaps eventually genocidal if it goes on for long enough." (i'd argue that vine had this effect as well, cf. jake paul's antics)

but maybe i'm just old