ILM's 2010's blindspots

as much as it would make more sense for, say, Teebs' Ardourto be hailed as a work of unsung genius in 2040, that CFCF project last year that rehabilitated corporate d&b (rather than the pioneers of the sound) made it clear you don't necessarily need diamonds, more just an affective/nostalgic pull due to ubiquity & life soundtracking

― loose Orwellian mobs (rob), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 1:17 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Definitely think this is true, but also think that the shifting context will still unearth stuff that is genuinely great and stuff that remains middling ... it might become more obvious once the overall aesthetic window is rehabbed but I don’t think ilm is apt to be excited about any mid tier shit just bc it’s on trend unless it’s new / doing a contemporary pastiche (I mean cfcf isn’t literally the lounge dnb of the era it’s playing off that sound)

flopson I think there at least must have been some mentions of AceMo & MOMA Ready separately?

For it to count as a blind spot for the purposes of this thread, which demographic groups must have been into it, in what countries, and how popular must the genre/subgenre have been exactly?

(ok is my name upchunk now? sorry for my opn posts)

yeah d40 my proposition is that this lost third way was last train to Paris - much better than Clintonism

if we're openly stating that entire styles 'deserved to be pushed to the side' then idek what ilm has become

― imago

older and more mature and now immune to the childish proposition that obsessing over your choices w/r/t cultural consumption is a political act of primary importance?

i post the post-marcberg/griselda/ka/mach hommmy/etc etc stuff on the rap thread but that stuff has never really been ilm

Idk we were always comfortable w old man rap to an extent, I think it’s just been more dominant in media about rap this year than in years past so now the gap seems more noticeable

For it to count as a blind spot for the purposes of this thread, which demographic groups must have been into it, in what countries, and how popular must the genre/subgenre have been exactly?

― pomenitul, Tuesday, December 15, 2020 1:49 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thank you for highlighting the subtext of the thread, dunno that it was needed but

i don't really like him but Post Malone has been one of the biggest artists of the decade and you'd never know here

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Ditto for Travis Scott, Halsey and lots of reggaeton/latin trap artists: J Balvin, Bad Bunny, Anuel Aa, Ozuna, Myke Towers, Maluma, etc... there are mentions here and there but you’d never guess they’re in the top 20 most streamed artists of 2020 by looking at ILM

flopson I think there at least must have been some mentions of AceMo & MOMA Ready separately?

― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:48 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a handful yea but still surprisingly few

Thank you for highlighting the subtext of the thread, dunno that it was needed but

It's your thread, so you get to set the rules to some extent.

there's a travis scott thread, idk if ilm or anywhere else on the internet is suffering from lack of discussion of the mcnugget rapper

ts: travis scott meal vs j balvin meal

That Travis Scott thread has 1 post in 2020 and like 4 posts overall. It might as well be gone and noone would notice.

And I don’t care to talk about Travis Scott either, just saying he was in the top 10 most streamed artists of 2020 but he’s virtually non-existent over here.

I think that deal with Fortnite probably inflated his numbers quite a bit.

there was discussion about him in the rap thread when astroworld came out. ilm got most travis scott-related debate out of its system after r*ccoon tan*ki trumpeted days before rodeo as the best mixtape of the decade.

poptimism means caring about what Sophie Ellis Bextor is doing in 2020 but not actually listening to the most popular music

flopson I think there at least must have been some mentions of AceMo & MOMA Ready separately?

― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:48 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a handful yea but still surprisingly few

― flopson, Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:02 PM (six minutes ago)

when I'm feeling sour about ILM, I'm tempted to say that "contemporary music" is one of its current blindspots. Obvs a wild exaggeration, but I know there will be entries in the eoy poll that have never or barely been discussed (e.g., Jayda G "Both of Us")

can't believe we're relitigating this but the casual racism was an obviously cack-handed attempt to satirise racial fetishisation by someone who should have known better, and it was used to condemn the entire musical output of an entire disparate & multiracial bunch of people

― imago, Tuesday, December 15, 2020 1:17 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like how in 2020 u can still raise the pc music bat signal and like clockwork summon a vituperative lj post which inexplicably defensively reference that they are multiracial

when I'm feeling sour about ILM, I'm tempted to say that "contemporary music" is one of its current blindspots. Obvs a wild exaggeration, but I know there will be entries in the eoy poll that have never or barely been discussed (e.g., Jayda G "Both of Us")

― loose Orwellian mobs (rob), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:13 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

eh i like how bobbins thread isn’t so closely aligned with the trendier RA/p4k stuff. lex was a huge Jayda G booster iirc. imo she’s hit or miss as producer and not good as dj

perhaps MOMA Ready don't need to be mentioned on ilm because they're ....... MOMA Ready!!

*MoMa, plz.

poptimism means caring about what Sophie Ellis Bextor is doing in 2020 but not actually listening to the most popular music

― Babby's Yed Revisited (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:12 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is a funny and true post but the inverse — paying attention to Travis Scott bc he streams to 13 year old fortnite dorks while ignoring significant and popular (but not broadcast via McDonald’s) rappers like lil baby polo g and rylo Rodriguez is just as blind in the opposite direction imo. I don’t really think ilm needs to be lectured that there are very popular things in the world that are structured to be popular like Travis and post malone. There are also things that are popular and doing interesting creative things, and things that are unpopular doing creative things that end up being pretty undervalued. Sometimes ilm was the only place championing them! Here is where we do another victory lap about diddy dirty money and being the only place who “got it right” vs all the critics fixated on das racist or whatevr

been meaning to check out the new rylo album, thanks for the reminder.

imago at 6:37 15 Dec 20
enjoying CAAL's playlist btw! even if it all kind of sounds like Patricia Taxxon but less good lol (she is basically the Bach of EDM innit m8s)

eh i like how bobbins thread isn’t so closely aligned with the trendier RA/p4k stuff. lex was a huge Jayda G booster iirc. imo she’s hit or miss as producer and not good as dj

― flopson, Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:18 PM (eleven minutes ago)

I wasn't really trying to say anything cogent about Jayda G in partic, and I don't follow the bobbins thread, I'm just lite bitching about the way ilm energy tilts toward the past and POLLs (I also think it's a little odd that people nom & vote for stuff in a message board's EOY poll that they have never really posted about on the board, but w/e, I'm sure they have their reasons)

anyway, I think the thread's actual premise is more interesting than that, sorry for derail

ya i agree w that last part. the eoy poll is kinda dying too though. last years was like 75% afro pop tracks

got XP’d, meant this also think it's a little odd that people nom & vote for stuff in a message board's EOY poll that they have never really posted about on the board, but w/e, I'm sure they have their reasons

I still think sometimes about Tim F's formulation around 2009 and the "problem" of music: The popular stuff that is good isn't populist; the good stuff that is populist isn't popular; the populist stuff that is popular isn't good. It felt true at the time!

I'm curious if there's a new analytic frame like that for our brave new world

lmao re jayda g

speaking of "the past", quick keyword search reveals myself and others discussing her in the bobbins thread 2016-2018 though we kinda stopped when she stopped making good music

I also think it's a little odd that people nom & vote for stuff in a message board's EOY poll that they have never really posted about on the board,

Conversely I try to discuss (or at least post) new music often, but ignore all the EOY polls

I think it's interesting that people seem to nom & vote in the EOY poll whom I never see posting on the board! (unless they post solely in threads I don't look at)

^lol I complain about this every year and then feel like a paranoid asshole

I should try to emulate Jordan's approach, but I thought the early 10s polls were fun and now i'm committed for some reason

deej, what does "populist" mean to you in that formula? accessible?

at least part of this is that, 20 years on, music continues to fracture into increasingly niche online microscenes so it's harder and harder to be a true "pop music" generalist

ya i agree w that last part. the eoy poll is kinda dying too though. last years was like 75% afro pop tracks

deej, what does "populist" mean to you in that formula? accessible?

― loose Orwellian mobs (rob), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:57 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

well it was tim's formulation not mine but iirc something like uk funky was both populist and good but not popular, ie it was dance music and had hooks and was like, popular in a sense of having a real devoted scene behind it where some songs could be "hits" but in a smaller scale and not actually chart internationally

streaming of course didn't exist then. The entire structure of the music industry has shifted. Also there's an international trend toward local music, of which I see the internationalization of drill as being a signal... like an obsession w/ the sound of the moment of the "break" toward local heroes, anti-industry music.

ooh that's interesting. there do seem to be a few emerging local dancehall scenes where prev people might have just settled for JA stuff, though I'm basing that on fairly thin evidence

making a professional sounding record at home really got a lot easier during the 10s as well, which i think would lead to localization

Jayda G bashing is making me sad :(

ooh that's interesting. there do seem to be a few emerging local dancehall scenes where prev people might have just settled for JA stuff, though I'm basing that on fairly thin evidence

― loose Orwellian mobs (rob), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:08 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you could argue the entirety of trap dancehall is kind of working along parallel lines to drill: https://afropunk.com/2019/10/choppa-rising-a-history-of-jamaican-trap-dancehall/

making a professional sounding record at home really got a lot easier during the 10s as well, which i think would lead to localization

― Vapor waif (uptown churl), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:16 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

definitely. also that you can make music videos for a couple grand in your backyard and upload them to youtube instead of needing a $50,000 budget, and make them look cool with relatively cheap drone cameras

but also *consumption* of local artists is up across the board on streaming services, more people in brazil are listening to brazilian music in 2020 than were in 2017 and so on

Jayda G bashing is making me sad :(

― boxedjoy, Tuesday, December 15, 2020 9:36 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah come on "both of us" is incredible and one of the best things she's done and fuiud

but also *consumption* of local artists is up across the board on streaming services, more people in brazil are listening to brazilian music in 2020 than were in 2017 and so on

this is really interesting to me

same. didn't we have a thread about this streaming-driven possibility once?

And thanks for the Afropunk link. I knew bits of that story but hadn't seen it all laid out in detail like that, and while I've rinsed "Brik Pan Brik" I didn't realize how central scamming was

i don't care much for nu jayda but it's ok with me if you do, it's just as ok to dislike or ignore this or that music as it is to like or follow this or that music

deej, what does "populist" mean to you in that formula? accessible?

― loose Orwellian mobs (rob), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:57 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

well it was tim's formulation not mine but iirc something like uk funky was both populist and good but not popular, ie it was dance music and had hooks and was like, popular in a sense of having a real devoted scene behind it where some songs could be "hits" but in a smaller scale and not actually chart internationally

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Tuesday, 15 December 2020 21:01 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is correct - "populist" as in: emphasis on 'hit singles' (however small the pond in which the ripples occur) and anthems, and direct engagement with the audience which is relatively less mediated by a professional critic class.

Something that makes this formulation not really work well now is that over the past decade almost all contemporary music experience has become mediated by some sort of online gatekeeping process, and the difference between some fantasy of some unmediated fan engagement with music as distinct from our own post-Eden filtering of everything through professional critical discourse is difficult to maintain when half the actually published music crit these days is along the lines of 'IDK who needs to hear this but some of you don't appreciate Maluma's secret gay energy and it shows', and when half the world is like a gatekeeper for five people via playlists and social media posts.

So I think it becomes a lot harder to categorise scenes by the divergent ways in which their fans engage.

xpost I do think my favourite "moment" in music this year was, after being encouraged to listen to her RA mix in the untrendy dance music thread, the part where she mixes in "Both Of Us" and it feels like clouds parting to reveal a wide beam of sunlight