thread to track Poptimism 2.0

sick of these yet? https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/projects/what-makes-a-hit/

(i haven't read the paper the visualization is based on)

Oh god

It is funny to me that an article might begin with a caveat along the lines of "pop music is often derided as manufactured...", and then follow that up with the most manufactured and useless I-Made-Some-Arbitrary-Metrics-To-Try-And-Correllate-Characteristics-Of-Pop-Singles-With-Chart-Performance pie-charting

There are so many things I want to learn about with regards to pop music, and statistical charting of tempos and "acousticness" aren't it; if anything, articles like these make me feel as if people are missing the point, making pop music all about "numbers" instead of "feelings"

i wanna see an analysis of those EQ tweaks they do to rev into the chorus of every song now

yeah i get the sense that these features don't adequately describe the audio analysis tools they are leaning so heavily on as the basis of their work. like the most this one says is 'sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2' but none i have seen so far has critically examined whether the select metrics these tools zero-in on are actually that salient as far as whether people respond positively or negatively to music. of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is, lol. ridiculous.

of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is

― dyl, Monday, July 23, 2018 12:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be fair this is also the music-critic party line

"sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2" is insanely obvious to anyone who's ever used serato

another thing i sometimes wonder about these pieces that do audio analyses of hits is how often the tracks they feed into their analytical tools aren't even the correct ones. like the one i linked above says it sourced audio from spotify (if i'm understanding correctly), but, like, you don't even have to go that far back in the history of the charts before you start turning up hits that aren't on any of the streaming services or digital download stores. not to mention the many that aren't available on digital platforms as their original versions, but ARE available as bad, cheap-sounding re-recordings from 15 years later. personally when i am searching for old + relatively forgotten chart music i often have to turn to youtube when the streameries don't have the proper versions!

If I had a way to automatically deactivate the Spotify audio-attribute API whenever anybody tries to use it to explain or predict hits, I would totally do that...

ha. yeah, and dyl otm - - - i'm waiting for something like "we analyzed fifty bubblegum hits from the early 70s, and surprisingly, the feature most predictive of a hit in this period was tinny late 80s digital production"

"the late 2010s were characterized by an uptick in songs that sound as if they have been shifted up a half-step in key"

Lol that's a joke, but that's actually a good trick. When you tune the track a little sharp it pops on radio

the streameries

nice

oh I meant people pitch-shifting videos for YouTube to get around copyright detection but that works too

this is killing me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q34lJ5gEJs

lmao that's deserves to take the 77 this year

lol excellent work.

loving this new mountain goats

UMS, how did you encounter this 4-year old youtube with 38 views?

Didn’t we talk about his guy recently in some thread?

I saw it on Facebook via a former ilxor

btw this guy's body of work in insane

so this is what kozelek is up to these days

Listen to @alyandaj's cover of @TheNational's "I Need My Girl" https://t.co/hfv5RvyYNQ pic.twitter.com/kCm6qp8e1C

— Stereogum (@stereogum) July 31, 2021

I was really hoping this would be the Pitchfork Peppa Pig review

you know you wanted it: freddie deboer on late-stage poptimism

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-few-indisputable-points-about-poptimism

absolutely not

it takes a brave man to say such unspeakable truths as, “things are different from 20 years ago”

But I do find sticking with what you already loved vastly more adult and sympathetic than the alternative, which is being a 37-year-old parent and starting a TikTok to aggressively display how much you love Camilla Cabello

Yeah pretty much the only options for being a music fan are carrying on with Indie Rock or stanning unpopular pop music.

What the fuck was that. At least his writing is gripping, I couldn’t help but to read to the end.

Personally, I don’t listen to disco because it sounds like absolute shit, and for the record a really big portion of popular disco was produced by white men

o rly?

Wow. As he's aged his brain has turned to cold broccoli.

Turned?

Remind me how he got (in)famous?

assumed this would be unreadable but it's actually extremely, albeit unintentionally, funny. "As one of the oldest Millennials" you said it boss!

weird conflation of the concept of poptimism in criticism with stan culture. Poptimism was about criticism, fandom, especially these days, not so. also, a million false binaries thrown about.

you could write a refutation of nearly every sentence, it's kind of impressive!

I would be impressed if you did

Remind me how he got (in)famous?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, July 26, 2024 10:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He made up some sexual assault allegations against someone he was arguing with.

I would be impressed if you did

― Paul Ponzi, Friday, July 26, 2024 10:30 AM (fifty-six seconds ago)

I'll do it in 2044, when it makes the most sense to do a line-by-line exegesis of something written about the contemporary

he really is a horrible misogynist prick though, like wtf is this: "the cool mom, who’s hip to Sabrina Carpenter and who thinks that this sentence is about someone else but I'm actually taking about you specifically, Jessica"

"but then this was always one of the worst things about poptimist essayists: they would make more limited and qualified versions of arguments that they knew full well would become sweeping and ugly in the hands of fans."

Ah yes, those dastardly poptimist essayists, using dog whistles to weaponize pop fans. Insane thing to say. His brain is entirely smooth.

to wipe the palate clean from that eye-watering fdb piece, this v enjoyable piece on mcfly, containing some thoughts on some of the risks and pitfalls in poptimism, got shared on tom ewing’s bluesky feed the other day.

i did subsequently try to listen to some mcfly for the first time in one thousand years but had to nope out fairly rapidly.

DeBoer is one of the absolute worst writers (and worst human beings, to be clear) around right now. Some writers I like, who actually know their shit, share his work regularly and it makes me reconsider what I like about them.

He and I once wrastled on Twitter; it was like rolling around with a baboon.

my primary assoc w/ fdb is him getting utterly clowned by/on Tiger Beatdown what feels like a century ago. good to see that didn't affect him at all lol

I have to admit, advanced degrees in english do let a person make bad arguments rather eloquently.
What undercuts it all is the vein of meanness that runs through his writing: he seems to have a lot of contempt for a lot of people.

it takes a brave man to say such unspeakable truths as, “things are different from 20 years ago”