Music Criticism in Video Form

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

Going back to Maura's point, I don't often worry that people aren't seeing the differences I'm seeing between things like the better episodes of South Park/Your Pretty Face/Rick and Morty and the worst episodes of South Park/MDE/the bad Tim and Eric stuff because I don't often discuss those shows with other people; in a vacuum, everyone is interpreting them the same way I am (particularly since the people I do sporadically talk to about them view them the same way I do). That isn't giving me a clear picture of how they're actually going over in the wider culture.

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

― Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out. (ulysses), Friday, October 6, 2017 12:14 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Venn Diagram between "smug nerd 'fandom'" and "calling women cunts on Twitter" gets closer to a circle every day.

+ oh cool someone agrees w/ me about r&m
- it's whiney (j/k dude)

lol

idk if I really buy Whiney's guilt-by-association treatise there cuz um a bunch of those things are not like the others (TMBG? wtf)

BAZINGA

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

oh please do unpack this for me and point out who in my "immediate circle" is leaning alt-right because a non cosmic-brain genius like myself isn't quite so good at discerning stuff like that out of a post like "I watched 20 minutes of the Orville and didn't get the point of it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow-nuHCTA5E

Vaporwave is alt right?

"I watched 20 minutes of the Orville"

― frogbs, Friday, October 6, 2017 12:27 PM (two minutes 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

― Whiney G. Weingarten

whiney, i'm glad you've managed to reorient this thread to what it really needs to be about: killing all the nerds.

It's kind of fitting that this thread would devolve into white dudes playing "who's the real racist here?"

If everything is problematic then nothing is problematic

also lmao that the dude who draws a paycheck for rushing out clickbait like "The 50 Greatest Tom Petty Songs: The Definitive Guide" is now clowning on someone for using RYM

Yes, it's definitely NOT nerds who are out here writing treatises about how women shouldn't work in tech, and building Uber apps that make taxi drivers sleep in grocery store parking lots so white weekend warriors can earn some more Xbox money, and propping up/funding systems like Google and Facebook and Twitter that basically escorted a white nationalist into the white house. Yeah, better defend these people right away!

do they listen to TMBG though

some of the more reflexively cognisant vaporwave is sheerly brilliant and necessary. some is bad-creepy. sometimes it's hard to tell which is which at first, although I set my vaporwave standards high which tends to weed out the nefarious shit

for some reason r&m gives me the creeps where something like south park doesn't. maybe it comes down to personal aesthetic choice, maybe it's because parker and stone for all their outrageousness have an obvious moral centre*. but is it old paradigm to have morals idek any more

*if someone wants to argue r&m has morals rather than endless nihilistic anguish then be my guest

This isn't a nerd problem. This is a white people problem.

Stop blaming your sub-tribal affiliations for your across-the-board shittiness.

because parker and stone for all their outrageousness have an obvious moral centre*

lol no they don't

This isn't a nerd problem. This is a white people problem.

*ding ding ding*

people of color and women can also be nerds, they just tend to not be these assholes but the ones whose lives are directly affected