pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Alfred you're a good critic even though I disagree with half your opinions so I'm not saying all criticism is shit but I have no desire to return to the days of old p4k, wenner stone, nme ladrock etc

most of the canon is alright I guess but plenty of stuff it leaves out is better

but critics have frequently lagged behind both mass culture and subcultures when it comes to recognising the most vital and interesting music of their times

subcultures: it wouldn't be the vanguard if no one was behind \o/

mass culture: i agree that the poptimist critics are right and rockism is wrong

also, since you brought up christgau earlier, he was one of the first critics to write positively and seriously about hip hop

i kinda think we have the opposite problem and mainstream critics/follow-on rubberneckers catch on too quickly to cool subcultures and blow up the spot

Who’s up for: Listening thread: every tack on Spotify

also, since you brought up christgau earlier, he was one of the first critics to write positively and seriously about hip hop

Agree with flopson. I think people confuse a call to bring back gatekeeping as a call to bring back the racist & sexist hierarchies that existed in the production of “prestige” but with critics gone (for example) the production of (sexist and racist) prestige continues without them… even critic-figureheads are produced by critical-audiences in the shape of ie Fantano, to continue producing the required slanted Prestige … instead of a community of writers you end up with symbolic audience whisperers for whom parasocial relationship takes over the entirety of the critical role… people rally around a micro celebrity figure who mediates their existing biases via performance

The loss of gatekeepers isn’t simply about critics. It’s also about DJs, independent label heads, etc, anyone who has a major curatorial role is relegated to Bossy Curator in the mind of the average consumer who thinks They Know Better “discovering” music marketed to them through algorithmic and influencer channels, through wildly untrustworthy mediums, through manipulations of social news sites (tmz akademiks popcrave) or even the news itself

Grear independent minded or iconoclastic curators are stuck putting together playlists for six of their friends who trust them, compete with social media influencers for spots as djs, compete with finance bros for spots running labels, generally have been marginalized by an ecosystem that treats them as The Man

This is as true within the communities typically known for being sources of culturally innovative music and art as it is in the realm of “very online indie” or whatever that most people probably think of as critic music

agree with flopson, too

Don’t read anything he wrote about early ‘90s gangsta rap if you want to keep using this argument
― The SoyBoy West Coast (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, 5 November 2023 10:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lolol

people can listen and figure out if they like it why do they need a critic

I think people have always made this argument and just never bothered to consider there were market forces and curators involved in getting that music from the people who made it to their ears. There’s payment for placement on streaming and promotion driving you to a soundcloud

It's easy to find things on streaming services that flatter your tastes. Not so easy to find things that are fresh and new and outside your comfort zone.

It's only anecdotal, but as far as what "kids" are listening to, I have kids (granted, now older kids) and I always ask them how they learn about new music. Most of the time, afaict, it's drawn from the social media zeitgeist. Tik Tok videos, TV soundtracks, maybe commercials, that sort of thing, but of course also playlists and whatever the algorithms suggests. The fact that so many of them listen to the same stuff - like, I dunno, Gracie Abrams or Sabrina Carpenter or Madison Beer or Melanie Martinez or Suki Waterhouse or any number of people I've never really heard but assume don't get played on the radio or get high profile reviews or whatever - makes me think the zeitgeist (or whoever underwrites it) has been pretty effective at consolidating their tastes. Needless to say, they also listen to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Rey and Kacey Musgraves, but also sometimes stuff like, I dunno, Miranda Lambert or Zach Bryan, who I can see popping up on a Kacey playlist. I have no idea why both of my kids know the words to Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride," though.

It drives me a little nuts that with almost unlimited options and paths they kind of follow the safest one, but I suspect I (and many of us musically restless listeners) remain the outlier.

D-40 otm

Break My Stride was used in Stranger Things

A thing I wonder after seeing all these kids movies that use 90s hip hop, if there will be a generation that knows more about De La Soul than Drake.

Spotify is the biggest "curator" out there and it's depressingly weak, repetitive, artists are forced to play the game, etc. The enthusiasm of individuals has always been where it's at, either coming from the best critics or sites (pitchfork at its best and many of the critics there who are also here on ilm, resident advisor, unperson writing on jazz, a few others), extremely thoughtful and deep-diving labels releasing either new or old music, compilation geniuses like Bob Stanley, college radio djs, etc. Bandcamp is pretty solid too, though we'll see where it's headed now.

This does all go for film as well, and curated services like Criterion channel are so crucial these days as more incisive critics get thrown over for dimestore amateur hour scribes who are hired to write pieces telling you to be excited by a random assortment of ten landfill movies that are coming to Netflix/Amazon/etc this month.

Lots of revelations on that front lately, from people setting up blogs separate from their day job in order to do Rotten Tomatoes reviews that boost garbage movies to the HBO exec telling his employees to make burner Twitter accounts and Deadline commenter accounts to fire back against critics that hurt his feelings

oh yeah, social media has its own form of film canon creation, but it's more along the lines of "What is the most badass scene in cinema?" followed by 200 Tarantino gifs.

in my day we didn't have gifs we just injured each other trying to recreate scenes from action movies

Back before cameras, that's how action legends were passed down from generation to generation. Just people kicking each other in the crotch.

a lot of these trends are indeed bad but people are having all kinds of other conversations including ones that were hard or impossible to have in whatever the golden age was

and so many people who mostly rely on steaming for music are also sharing each other's weird noise projects and making their own music with whatever's available

I'm rarely the least pessimistic person but there is so much great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures so some of the doom and gloom feels a little premature. maybe not with film? it doesn't mean as much to me as music so idk what's going on there a lot of it doesn't sound good

Relevant to this convo: https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/10/the-state-of-music-criticism

The fact that so many of them listen to the same stuff (…) makes me think the zeitgeist (or whoever underwrites it) has been pretty effective at consolidating their tastes.

Josh, do you feel like kids generally had more diverse tastes when we were the same age?

don't worry, the kids are cooking up another wave of ska

Wait until they use a Reel Big Fish song on Euphoria

don't worry, the kids are cooking up another wave of ska

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Monday, November 6, 2023 9:33 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i had mike park from skankin' pickle/asian man records on a podcast and he said there's a ton of energy with young kids and new ska bands right now

lots of punk retirement plan rockabilly parents are going to have opinions

I'm rarely the least pessimistic person but there is so much great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures so some of the doom and gloom feels a little premature

I mean, I agree that there's lots of great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures. But this was true way back when, too! Just because the access *is there* and has expanded doesn't mean that people are listening to it with any sort of engagement.

Like, a few years ago, I was at a climbing gym— hell, it's called a Boulder Lounge (lmfao)— and an Ata Kak song came over the system. Bouldering gyms are abysmal places for music, usually, but hey.

No one batted an eyelash, and I ended up talking to one of the desk guys about it. He said he just puts on an "international pop" playlist at the beginning of his shift and had heard the song dozens of times, couldn't name the artist, didn't know about Awesome Tapes from Africa, etc. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I think that this supposed "democratization" that yr on about isn't really what it's cracked up to be. People don't have to engage with music deeply or at all, of course, but I'd argue that it might be better if there was still some amount of *intention* that went into listening to and searching out new music, for those who are interested in such.

I feel like the general attitude about seeking out new music is that it's something you do as a teenager or college student and past that point it's kind of nerdy. Even famous musicians go out of their way to tell interviewers that they don't pay attention to new music, that they only listen to something new if someone puts it in their hands, etc.

Josh, do you feel like kids generally had more diverse tastes when we were the same age?

Good question! I'd say ... maybe? But perhaps only due to happenstance. Back when I was the age of my kids ... actually, by the time I was what they are now, I was off to the races, listening to all sorts of shit, basically where I am today. But before that I was beholden to a really limited funnel of media, essentially just the radio, much later, MTV. Plop a kid in front of the TV and they will watch anything, and that included 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger's Ball and all the other regular stuff MTV put in circulation. At the other extreme, I don't recall radio being as stratified as it is today. There was new stuff, there was classic rock, and there was not much else. But based on the '80s touchstones I (and lots of people my age) have, it feels like radio was pretty weird and diverse, but that could just be confirmation bias on my part.

Yeah, to be clear I’m not talking about nerds like us (who may have already been listening to the Velvet Underground or whatever), just your average kids who watched MTV and listened to the radio…

MTV was pretty diverse at its peak (late ‘80s to mid-‘90s), so the answer could be yes!

The kids I grew up with in a pretty rural area of Illinois listened to a wide variety of whatever the radio stations in Chicago were playing. Most of my close friends, hardly what you would call music nerds at all, they were more country jock types I suppose, they listened to everything from wxrt to Q101 to bB96 to 103.5 the blaze. If you grew up in that area you know exactly what kind of music was on each of those stations. This is approx '87-'94, those formative junior high thru high school years. There was definitely judgment from some corners about what type of music you might listen to but that was kind of rare, I found there to be a lot of diversity going on. You'd have people listening to Kansas and black box and (breakthrough era) REM and Def Lep and Cheap Trick and Public Enemy and Skid Row. Depeche mode, U2, mellencamp, Run DMC, etc etc. it's not like people were digging deep into zine culture where I lived but they kind of listened to anything and everything. That era where it felt like for a moment every type of music was popular with everyone, recognizing of course that the kids who were wearing pushead Metallica shirts wouldn't have been caught dead listening to C&C music factory obviously.

Even famous musicians go out of their way to tell interviewers that they don't pay attention to new music, that they only listen to something new if someone puts it in their hands, etc.

This is a tremendous "irrationally angry" pet peeve of mine and not merely because it's almost always complete bullshit.

"I'm just so original, my work exists in a vacuum of uncommon authenticity and dazzling innovation, any similarity to any other musician living or dead is purely a coincidence, who is this John Coltrane person you speak of"

Give me artists like Kurt and Thurston whose interviews were always worth reading because I almost always came away with a list of cool obscure new artists to check out. I also miss Dusted's Listed feature, which I used to read religiously

My college pals in the early 90s listened to Garth Brooks and Nirvana (okay, not a huge stylistic range there).

"I'm just so original, my work exists in a vacuum of uncommon authenticity and dazzling innovation, any similarity to any other musician living or dead is purely a coincidence, who is this John Coltrane person you speak of"

I just figured they're tired and wanna cuddle up with what's familiar.

The most influential people in music atm are music supervisors, ime

xps all these trends towards homogenization are worrying but it's misguided to frame it in generational terms - why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook? didn't this sort of thing start in the 70s with classic rock radio anyway?

there is something to be said about the more amorphous or nonexistent "social movement quality" of most genre these days (at least in this part of the world) and how that has led to a general sort of crisis of meaning or whatever and that may tie into the genreless soup complaint about a lot of contemporary pop music

capitalism always tries to hollow everything out and turn it into the blandest and most scalable version of itself but it never totally suceeds and plenty of music resists this process and still finds fans

economics is where the real problems are (the bandcamp thing is v troubling) but it's reductive and backwards to blame that on fans being unadventurous or having bad / boring taste. *if* they do it's not really their fault anyway

why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?

thing is though led zeppelin and the stones are very different musically

why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?

I suppose one defense could be that the Stones/Zeppelin themselves were pretty diverse! And of course awesome.

lol

also much like Pink Floyd they both rule

i guess what i think of with homogenization of music is this kind of formless blob music like this cover of "i drove all night" from a jeep commercial with derek jeter, combines electronic and pop production touches, a classic rock song from the 80s, and that vaguely inspirational early 00s indie shit into this ikea type music, this is just one example but i hear a lot of stuff like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d53eIHropc

i feel like streaming has produced a lot of "data" on what people gravitate to and you can kind of stitch together musical audio signifiers for cross generational, broad appeal, i'm sure that will be done by AI exclusively soon

"why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?"

Maybe try to get him interested in newer bands like U2 and the Police

or Best New Artist winners Men at Work

it's similar to some articles i've read about how Netflix and Amazon used data to figure out these certain types of shows to produce, just trying to hit all the right notes, and while it's not like people haven't tried to copycat before i also feel like you can feel the uncanny hand at the wheel of some productions, like the recent Lord of the Rings show or a lot of the "bad dudes doing bad things" programs like Narcos.

economics is where the real problems are (the bandcamp thing is v troubling) but it's reductive and backwards to blame that on fans being unadventurous or having bad / boring taste. *if* they do it's not really their fault anyway

― Left, Monday, November 6, 2023 11:56 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I agree with almost everything in this post, but how is it not their fault? If we agree that we are living in something of a golden age for music consumers, with free access to millions of songs from the furthest reaches of the world, then assuming you are interested in music, what possible reason could you have for listening exclusively to the same music as everybody else?