Keeping Up With Music

^ that was me being sarcastic/bitter/frustrated: Wizkid has been dangling his Made In Lagos project in front of us for at least three years now. I suspect he has several discarded finished versions in his vault. I’m secretly hoping (still!) for Oct 1, Nigeria’s Independence Day.

To further answer (part of) your question:
On the Nigerian side of things, there have been recent releases by Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, Fireboy DML, Adekunle Gold, Patoranking and Kizz Daniel. Niniola will have an album out soon (that’s something to be excited about!), and so might Davido.

As for South Africa, Sun-El Musician has promised a new album in (Southern Hemisphere) “spring”, and Kabza De Small will undoubtedly drop (yet) another album, with or without DJ Maphorisa. I’m also looking forward to De Mthuda’s new album.

But there will be much more than just these obviously.

This is absolutely the first year I can remember where not only did I struggle to keep up with music, but I totally forgot about albums I liked from bands that I love. For example, I totally forgot that X released a good record this year. Or, the Dua/Jessie/Roisin glossy nu-disco trio, for example, all albums I really enjoyed and enjoy listening to yet keep forgetting to play. Or Fiona Apple and Kathleen Edwards, two artists I love that released great new comebacks that I love that I just keep forgetting to play. Looking over year-end lists, there is just so much I haven't heard or even heard of, and of the stuff I have heard it's just downright impossible for me to keep straight in my brain, let alone fore of mind. So much music!

Weirdly, I wonder if this has been inadvertently pandemic related. My family is around all the time, but I'm a speaker guy, not a headphone guy, and just haven't been free to blast stuff on the stereo when the mood strikes. Hmm ...

i've struggled a bit too tbh. combination of (1) leaving my desk job means i spent far less time sitting in front of a computer and reading reviews and mailing list emails and ilx or whatever when i should've been working, (2) being at home means i'm more inclined to listen to the records and cds i already own rather than scouting for new stuff on spotify or bandcamp, and (3) too much other crazy shit going on to worry about it all that much

I binged even more than usual on new releases this year and I kind of regret it. I should probably stop trying to understand what the fuss is all about when it comes to genres I *know* I don't care for at least 95% of the time. I think part of the reason I do that is because just having so much as a vague sense of what other people are into makes me feel less alienated (except it also has the exact opposite effect, concomitantly).

Took me 9 months to realize I could secretly listen to music on zoom calls

— vijay iyer (@vijayiyer) December 15, 2020

After a gap from 2004-2009 I managed to keep up with music from 2010-2019.
This year I can think of about five tracks which have been released.

as long as you're aware of "wap"

WAP is one of the five, yes.

Actually if Minecraft and Among Us parody songs count, real total is maybe 20 or 30.

'WAP' is pretty good, as are the ensuing Ben Shapiro self-owns.

I think I was arguing to deej elsewhere that the predominance" of "WAP" in 2020 feels almost like it has less to do with the song itself and more that it's maybe the only song this year that inspired both a massive tiktok dance craze and lots of political memes (via laughing at Ben Shapiro et. al) (though my favourite WAP meme was one about the despondence of the writers of KidzBop versions when they first heard it). So it feels like it sums up 2020 in that it captures a lot of the changing context in which music is situated now.

that's as good an explanation as any for why such a gleefully ridiculous sex jam will be the first song that people remember from the roughest year of American life since the depression

lol, i mean it will also be remembered for being a gleefully ridiculous sex jam, but I'm not sure that an equivalent song in say 2009 (which was also a pretty rough year for many) would have gotten equivalent critical traction.

the way I listen to music has changed - I live in a small flat with my boyfriend and it's harder to listen to stuff that he wouldn't want to because we are both always indoors now. When I'm physically going into work, I take a bus that's approx 40 mins each way and that's my time to listen to new music on my headphones.

We have listened to a lot of ambient and new-age adjacent stuff this year, more than any other. I don't think we'd have managed without Gigi Masin and Jonny Nash.

xpost should have qualified "predominance" as "critical predominance" in the first post (i.e. being p4k's song of the year)

lol I'm pretty sure I still haven't heard WAP but honestly haven't particularly connected to anything I've heard from Cardi B. *or* Megan Thee Stallion yet. Haven't even given the new Dylan the time and attention it deserves!

I consciously decided at the beginning of the year that I wasn't going to actively try keeping up with new music this year.

What that really meant was that I wasn't going to put in all the work that I usually do for the sake of creating a long best-of-the-year playlist: scanning Album of the Year for new albums every week, dragging them into an "new albums" playlist, listening to them repeatedly until I have a favorite track (or else I've decided the album isn't for me), scanning unperson's monthly jazz column to see if there are any albums I've missed, occasionally scanning The Singles Jukebox for songs with high scores and maintaining a playlist of those songs, aggregating songs that show up on major publications' year-end lists into yet another playlist and finding more favorites, etc. etc.

I've still heard a bit of new music this year, when I've happened to notice that an artist I like has put something out. But I haven't been systematic about it at all, so a lot has slipped through the cracks.

To be honest, it's been kind of relaxing. I've ended up just listening to a lot of old stuff. At one point I worked on a 1999 playlist. But as the best-of-2020 lists have been coming out, I've found myself wanting to...get a handle on all of it. So I'm not sure yet whether this year is a permanent break from Keeping Up or just a temporary one.

xp The first time I heard WAP was the other day, when I listened to Pitchfork's top songs of 2020 list!

lack of commute has killed my primary listening mode - has been tough to replace it tbh. podcasts have suffered this year too for me.

around the house i put on stuff i already know - too distracting to listen 'actively'

This is absolutely the first year I can remember where not only did I struggle to keep up with music, but I totally forgot about albums I liked from bands that I love. For example, I totally forgot that X released a good record this year. Or, the Dua/Jessie/Roisin glossy nu-disco trio, for example, all albums I really enjoyed and enjoy listening to yet keep forgetting to play. Or Fiona Apple and Kathleen Edwards, two artists I love that released great new comebacks that I love that I just keep forgetting to play. Looking over year-end lists, there is just so much I haven't heard or even heard of, and of the stuff I have heard it's just downright impossible for me to keep straight in my brain, let alone fore of mind. So much music!

Weirdly, I wonder if this has been inadvertently pandemic related. My family is around all the time, but I'm a speaker guy, not a headphone guy, and just haven't been free to blast stuff on the stereo when the mood strikes. Hmm ...

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 15 December 2020 21:59 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel this post. I was reminded yesterday of the existence of the Eddie Chacon album, which I loved when I first heard it and then promptly forgot about. Dylan too!

I think this year I have listened to as much new music as ever, but in the same way that I struggle a bit to keep track of what happened in which month this year (like, all the jokes that currently it's the 247th of March or whatever), almost all experiences of music have felt more transient, and less amenable to ordering and recollection.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Right!

Including that we can't dance to these songs at a club but we can perform/watch tiktok dances.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

my real name rhymes with and has the exact same number of syllables as "a savage" and the fact I haven't been able to do a karaoke performance of Megan & Beyoncè with my personal spin on it is killing me

xp great post, Tim

this year, probably more than any other, i've listened to the same 10-12 new or new-to-me albums hundreds of times. they were all very good at giving me what i needed in particular moments, and i kept coming back to them. i just didn't feel the need to adopt more, though i did scan through a few new releases here and there. my music listening experience is more and more becoming this reader response thing where every time i listen to the same thing my experience is a little different but no less rich. but the thing has to have sort of passed a few tests for it to get there, lol.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

very jealous, i miss hearing music in a room with friends. some music just needs to be embodied and shared in social, physical space.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Possibly the first thing I've read that's helped me understand tik tok!

there IS too much music out there, it's too readily accessible, and as a consequence it is devalued. I find that to ring true for me personally, one of the ILX champions of crate digging, Google, Soulseek, Discogs, whatever

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Thursday, 11 July 2024 16:05 (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

discuss

(i strongly disagree)

when was our crate digging championship exactly?

lil message for all you bedroom pop wannabes: don't release that ep you've been piecing together all these months. you'll merely be devaluing the real musicians

i just don’t have time to keep up. i literally missed almost every Bandcamp Friday earlier this year because I was just too busy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

I just listen to what boxedjoy and one or two other ilxors tell me is good, system works for me

Lol this is true

COVID = not going to the gym = stopped listening to metal/pop/rap and when I started going back I found I just didn't want that music as much anymore. I listened to almost all vinyl during the pandemic and jazz became a much larger percentage of my listening. I also started smoking more pot and wanting music with an indefinable grove.

I am slowly delving back in to metal at the gym, but mostly classics instead of new stuff.

The ILX EOY polls used to be my main source of connecting to new music. Every year I would get at least 3-5 albums and a handful of tracks that would stick with me and become evergreen gym favorites. I have found the last few polls just haven't stuck with me for more than a month or so.

I still love to discover things I haven't heard before, but in most cases these are old things, not new things.

I also turned 50 during the pandemic although I am sure this had nothing to do with this, haha.

grove = groove

Am I even listening to anything anymore? Hearing has almost completely annexed my experience of music.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, July 1, 2020 5:41 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Resonates strongly with me, although I feel like I've resolved that by being absolutely ruthless with things that don't immediately excite me and generally letting things rise up to the surface. Even so, I still do not come back to everything I put in my top at the end of the year.
Anything else is like dipping your toe in a meaningless flux - there's no keeping up, only drowning.

It's a sobering and even terrifying feeling to look back at your AOTY lists from just a few years ago and read the names of albums and even artists you don't even recognize

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

It strikes me that the situation you describe is just the culmination of the way music has been headed since at least the 80's?

I know obv you're not a "it's not REAL instruments" rockist but it feels to me like as soon as you get into the electronic music era things like jam sessions and live concerts (as opposed to club settings) become less important.

Yeah i think you're right. I don't just mean jamming though.. I'm thinking about a kind of informal creative serendipity that the industry structures of earlier eras could facilitate - recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and radio studios as crossroads and nexuses of different sounds and talents who would end up liking each other, having sex with each other, doing drugs together, maybe even making music together. But there are others on this board who can speak accurately about what it's like in this spaces now, and what the opportunities are for this sort of thing these days, and I may be off base.

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

once more, with feeling

thinking locally, labels like international anthem and drag city have stables of artists that they support on their own releases and also pair/group together to record and then they release the recordings. it's not like stadium music or anything but it is definitely happening and, some might say, popping.

Yeah I was going to mention the London jazz scene as well as a place where young artists often collaborate.

I agree there do seem to be a ton of scenes like that it's just really hard to hear about them

I also object to the inclusion of sex/drugs into the formula. There’s hopefully more professionalism these days??!!!

Forms of popular music gradually becoming folkified in the sense of being local, outside of business models, played for (self) entertainment by friends

Basically my ideal music culture is the union camp jam session in Matewan

Not a lot of sex and drugs on offer there, probably for the best

I guess you haven't seen the director's cut