Music Criticism in Video Form

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

everyone here is old. but shit, you can draw a straight line from a lot of this shit back to chris morris, jerry sadowitz... lenny bruce, if you want to go back that far. comedy that trafficks in overt unpleasantness. ultimately everything that is done for a reason will wind up being done for no reason.

I suppose it's relevant in that one of the biggest tells that someone is further down the alt-right rabbit hole than they publicly let on is use of chan memes/terminology. with some exceptions, this stuff doesn't osmose the same way that, say, "on fleek" or whatever does

the thing is though how far off is that anti-comedy from the show about people working in the hell office?

I get your point but the focus of Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell feels very different to me, largely because of the ouroboros "the demons staffing hell are also tortured soles who are subject to Hell's eternal damnation" premise, which pretty much means every episode ends with the demons getting tortured as badly or worse than the souls they are targeting. The recipients of most of the cruelty are the middle-management characters dishing it out; I get that this isn't necessarily enough of a mitigating factor to redeem the show across the board but it feels to me like the ultimate reading of the show is "cruelty begets cruelty", which is a very different message than what I got from MDE ("isn't pain funny?").

That's probably way more analysis/leeway than Your Pretty Face deserves but that's how the show has come across to me, which is one of the reasons why I'm able to watch and enjoy it.

well if we're making parallels between proto-alt-right shit and people working in the hell office then the link is probably Dilbert/Scott Adams

wtf "soles" I need to get lunch

(I literally saw that, went "that isn't what I meant", deleted it and retyped "soles")

sole tastes better when you torture is

is=it

sorry

how about R&M? a hit show where a running joke is the lead character commits genocide and its justified because he is smarter than all the idiots

Idk if rick is shown to be justified...

Huge self-own to make this thread about clowning vlogger dorks about defending Rick & Morty

I assume you probably lean a little alt-right if you've ever watched more than one episode of Rick & Morty

well you're kind of a moron so that don't surprise me

"everyone here is old. but shit, you can draw a straight line from a lot of this shit back to chris morris, jerry sadowitz... lenny bruce"

people have sold me old national lampoons at the store and after not seeing them since i was a kid i was kinda stunned at how angry and full of misogyny and racism they are. like really really really mean and beyond over the top. and not isolated stuff. entire issues. and i used to buy them when i was a kid at the supermarket! my parents had no idea. just some good old fashioned ivy league white guy lols. totally reminds me of the worst internet stuff.

i don't wanna feed this sidetrack but what exactly is altright about rick and morty

How is that not feeding the sidetrack?

scott otm this shit ain't new

well you're kind of a moron so that don't surprise me

― frogbs, Friday, October 6, 2017 12:12 PM (forty-five seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the dude out here defending RYM and Rick and Morty, watching The Orville, posting all over Zappa and TBMG and Magic the Gathering and Norm MacDonald threads, writing treatises on vaporwave... you may want to take a look at the people in your immediate circle there, dogg