pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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?

I dunno about the Jeep commercial, but some fairly "adventurous" artists like SZA are very popular...

no one said sza or others weren't, i'm talking a very specific thing that i detailed above

sad piano covers of old songs are a staple of movie trailers too

Ok, maybe we're crossing different discussion streams here... I agree there's bad homogenized music out there (and always was!)

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.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Monday, November 6, 2023 11:07 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, it's really ... work ... to keep up with stuff these days! In the '90s you had eclectic MTV playlists on a monocultural feed. Anyone inclined to dig a fraction deeper could get a Rolling Stone or a Spin or an Entertainment Weekly at the grocery store. In the '00s you had a netmedia ecosystem and the dying embers of MTV and Fuse and BET and late night talk shows and a Saturday Night Live that people didn't consume as YouTube highlights. Both decades had public places playing terrestrial radio instead of nostalgia playlists. YouTube, social media and streaming services have made EVERYTHING a la carte.

A lot of people wrote "hip Hop sucks now" essays for "#hiphop50" and would get these people yelling at them about Billy Woods and Veeze or whatever, and it's like, where is someone supposed to even hear Billy Woods and Veeze unless they were actively searching the internet or actively engaged in some sort of social media discussion? Think about how easy it was to discover, like, the Fugees or Goodie Mob in 1996.

sad piano covers of old songs are a staple of movie trailers too

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Monday, November 6, 2023 12:21 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

with the breathy vocals and affected pronunciations

i guess what i'm trying to get at is this feels data driven and different than the trend chasing in pop music that has always existed.

like they are hybridizing things in very specific ways based to appeal to a broad audience, often a sample or cover of an old song to appeal to older people then tastefully weaving it through approachable production aesthetics and performance tics of newer indie, r&b and pop music...like omar said there's a certain creepy thing about it. it feels like they are "maximizing" it to be palatable. also, it feels like the artist in this case isn't even trying to be distintinctive in a way that SZA is, the kind of distinctive that makes you a star...like I think the goal of the artist is to get a song picked up in a Jeep commercial.

it feels different than just "hey this shit is popular we should do that" that's always existed.

all true, i mean i wasn't exactly an indie rock dude in high school but i found it really easy to discover the Breeders and Sugar and The The and Catherine Wheel, because they were played on the radio. and from there, it really was just a matter of picking up Spin and RS or going to Tower Records and picking up Pulse, there was a sense that the curation was guided by actual humans who knew what was up. and whatever the homogenized stuff was thirty years ago at least it didn't sound like Maroon 5.

A good example of writers influencing programming was the "MTV Amp" era (brief as it may have been). The whole electronica thing was absolutely "critic-driven" – which is not to say kids weren't actually listening to Underworld – but there's no way MTV would have devoted a whole block to it if it weren't being written about everywhere at the time. (this is counter to my general "argument" btw, if you've bothered tracking it... lol)

how is it not their fault?

people are tired and there's no moral imperative for them to seek out weirdo music if all they want is something that sounds nice to get them through the day (the song above is bad but it "sounds nice") - if they want to style themselves as music nerds they should try a bit harder but being a music nerd is not for everyone and never has been

the real villains here are ed sheeran and post malone but the *real* real villains are the executives and tech bros and others whose power and profits come from sucking the life out of artists and audiences

I bet a lot of kids are discovering the breeders and sugar through spotify playlists - not saying that's better (or necessarily worse although I'm open to being persuaded)

the human element I guess (apart from any humans involved in making some of the playlists in whatever capacity) is artists' recommendations which probably carry more weight than critics these days

also friends - friends' recommendations are great for throwing the unpredictable into people's tastes

i don't really care that much about people discovering the breeders and sugar right now, but just noting how easy it was to simply hear them and others in passing back then. people didn't need to dig deep, they heard them on the radio. that goes for a lot of rap, hip hop, techno, rock, etc. the diversity and depth of what your average listener would be exposed to, it was amazing. it was a very rich era for casual discovery.

if one has the time to dig a bit, one can find so much great music now, but who really has the time, and there's of course the paradox of choice coupled with the homogenization of what gets the lion's share of the hype. right now it feels like half the people i know are either currently waiting in line for a U2 sphere show or somewhere in a Taylor Swift audience.

*homogenized music that gets the lion's share etc.

Sure, but today’s Billboard singles charts contain rap, pop, country, a lot more songs in Spanish than before. Unfortunately it was all made by 4 artists: Drake, Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift.

Just throwing this out there, but when Kate Bush was having her Stranger Things moment, neither my kids and their friends nor, as far as I can tell, most kids had any interest in listening to anything else by her.

today’s Billboard singles charts contain rap, pop, country, a lot more songs in Spanish than before

This last factor gives me a lot of optimism about "the culture"; the fact that Spanish-speaking artists are no longer seen as exotic, are no longer forced to "cross over" by recording in English, but can just exist as who they are, is great. I may not like the music (what I've heard from Bad Bunny and Karol G has mostly been terrible), but I'm glad it's out there.

somewhat related, and an obvious point previously talked about elsewhere: i recognize the album charts now might be a very honest accounting of all formats and streaming services blended together but the stagnation one sees on there never fails to surprise me, having grown up watching ever-shifting charts that year-to-year really showed the more rapid evolution of taste and music trends, for better or for worse.

Spanish-speaking artists are no longer seen as exotic

agreed that it's a good thing...but..

i think it's partially because, language aside, i feel like national and regional differences (not saying they don't still exist) are really being scrubbed out too, like how different does bad bunny feel from a US R&B/hip hop artist if he wasn't singing in another language

i checked out the big popular reggae/dancehall playlist on spotify just to see what was up and i was kind of bummed out that aesthetically it felt like a lot of US sounds were predominant

bad bunny's new album is basically a rap album, a pretty big step back imo. his massive 2022 blockbuster 'un verano sin ti' was much more diverse and more informed by latin sounds. only a couple trap tracks.

Yeah so if you grew up reading NME in the 90's or P4K in the 00's or whatever, even RS etc, you might have got the idea pretty quickly that only music which is actively sought out is worthy of your close attention. Intended or not, I think in effect those pubs were giving eager listeners permission and encouragement not only to be more selective in our listening but to use music to insulate ourselves from our immediate surroundings.

The value of "poptimism", if it has value, hasn't just been to try to redress horrible inequalities. it's to say 'hey, you should actually pay attention to what's right in front of you, you should pay attention to what you've been conditioned to disregard.' i mean what a concept, that your own environment might be just as worthy of consideration as something hidden or remote.

Because we've ended up with a generation of musicians who think that it's fundamentally impossible to make "pop" music. and critcs who think their role is mainly curatorial, "hey check this out!", as do their readers. we never needed critics for that honestly, because we have enthusiasts. And if there's a secondary concern among critcs these days it seems to be with tracking and diagnosing shifts in consensus, which- who cares. but very few people, mostly academics i guess? are interested in filling the role of intermediary between artists and their audience that has traditionally fallen to critics, which is to help audiences decipher works, and to shape the creation of new work, to plot out new directions for the artists. But nobody's demanding that anymore, those who are still reading, you know, "above all else just name me some stuff i should listen to plz" - and idk maybe that's for the best given the ghastly way some of those rags have shaped music by shutting things out.

but what would be much more rewarding to me would be for someone to point out some value i have overlooked in what i already encounter every day.

'00s ILXOR types (me included) asking for pubs to think critically about popular music has definitely resulted in a real Monkey's Paw situation

It's nice to hear one of you admit it

there is a middle ground between taking modern pop songs seriously as an artform and ranking "super bass" as the 13th best pop song of all time

this is a pitchfork thread, not a billboard thread, so i digress i guess

Oh, that made me happy though! I love that song, and think it will always sound great. (The big problem with the Billboard list, IMO, was the short shrift given to songs from the past two decades... due to a "stand the test of time" standard or something like that. Most of the recent-ish choices were fairly uninspired; i.e., "Since U Been Gone" in the Top 20.)

(...sorry, # f'in 5!)

people are tired and there's no moral imperative for them to seek out weirdo music if all they want is something that sounds nice to get them through the day (the song above is bad but it "sounds nice") - if they want to style themselves as music nerds they should try a bit harder but being a music nerd is not for everyone and never has been

the real villains here are ed sheeran and post malone but the *real* real villains are the executives and tech bros and others whose power and profits come from sucking the life out of artists and audiences

― Left, Monday, November 6, 2023 11:57 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I bet a lot of kids are discovering the breeders and sugar through spotify playlists - not saying that's better (or necessarily worse although I'm open to being persuaded)

the human element I guess (apart from any humans involved in making some of the playlists in whatever capacity) is artists' recommendations which probably carry more weight than critics these days

― Left, Monday, November 6, 2023 11:59 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

also friends - friends' recommendations are great for throwing the unpredictable into people's tastes

― Left, Monday, November 6, 2023 12:02 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the thing I am resisting here is a "discursive paradigm" that is shared by lots and lots of people that downs people of taste and expertise in favor of 'personal agency' mixed with some myth of algorithmic wisdom that is much more influenced by marketing than people are willing to acknowledge; I am not saying 'its doom and gloom' to be into music, or that music is bad now. I am saying that the paradigm should be, 'there are friends of mine with good taste and I love learning from them instead of playlists,' that people should be rejecting this sort of assumption that the cream rises to the top & that what they surface just bumping around the internet is actually much more determined than they think

im being careful here not to conspiratorialize—I just think its a better attitude and would lead to better distribution, to a larger footprint, for good music at the expense of wack shit.

The historic of 70s/80s music that is still the main explanatory framework for popular music (ie “disco” “house” “hip hop” “techno”) all came from networks of tastemaker DJ’s who worked a feedback loop between industry and audience in a community hothouse that does not exist in the same way today. When I talk to a young artist finding success with a dance beat the usual comment is that it sounds like “video game music.” I think this sucks. See; music supervisors are the most influential

*history

“Anti gatekeeper” is a good temporal stance when gatekeepers are choking the populist fun but a bad one when populist fun is gamed by Netflix and Activision

so listen to the music your friends make?

people should be rejecting this sort of assumption that the cream rises to the top

like the music mags i grew up reading were constantly prodding me with this shit, sometimes very explicitly. "you should be listening to better music than what you already know and enjoy", the assumption we should be rejecting imo is that we should only be listening to "the best" music because that attitude is harmful and divisive.

"populist fun" - the populace is perfectly capable of enjoying serious minded, avant garde art when it isn't roped off.

I didn’t say anything about “make”

Populist fun was singled out because that could tend to get overlooked by critics not bc ppl shouldn’t like avant garde or something

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

could be a description of the 1975

When I read this discussion about lazy consumers, hollowed-out products, and Machiavellian music technocracy, I don't really find one to blame over the others. It's chicken and egg and reinforces my conviction that if the means change and it's interesting to note how the system morphs, it's perpetual and there's no peak or final dystopian version to expect.

And it's not like anyone has a higher ground or can escape it. An ILXor, en enthusiast, a critic, an academic may have a more diverse taste, listen to albums, study the music as a complete object in its environment. But that's still based around the experience of consuming. A voracious, multi-headed, atypical music consumer who happens to have a lot of questions only him/herself can answer and that may one day provide a mini culture theory, but a consumer nonetheless.

I bet that kind of not-so-ideal critical consumer was not found in greater number at any time in history.

i feel like national and regional differences (not saying they don't still exist) are really being scrubbed out too, like how different does bad bunny feel from a US R&B/hip hop artist if he wasn't singing in another language

This is a tangent, but tbh there's always been tons of artists around the world who just wanna play Rock or Jazz or Hip-Hop in the American style, and it doesn't always result in that magical "hitting on something different by imitation" thing you get with Krautrock (or the British Invasion for that matter); most countries have traditional Rock bands that are super popular and revered but have no footprint in the US, because the mainstream wouldn't care and tastemakers want something more exotic. So if their 20's equivalents get a shot at scoring big in the US, well, I agree it's not as cool as actual sounds from those countries penetrating that market, but it's still cool, why *shouldn't* the next big American-style R&B star be from Venezuela or wherever.

I have a few friends (into music and in their 40s) who engage with new music by just waiting for the end of year albums list and plough through those. So I guess, people do engage with music criticism but on a more surface level than before perhaps. Sounds kinda boring for me even if I kind of do that with the ILM end of year polls although theres some context added to that at least and engagement with other posters too

xpost I have a friend that lived in Ghana for a year or so. I asked her about highlife music, and iirc she said she never encountered it anywhere, really, and that what she heard on the radio sounded like what she heard on the radio everywhere, even if the language was sometimes different.

What's that cool global radio station app, Radio Garden? That's a good way to hear what other people are hearing.

I'm not always so up on new music so I sometimes check out what being talking about on ILM to try to divine what's going to end up on the end of year poll results. Judging by board discussion I'm expecting to see Dinosaur Jr.- Where You Been in the top slot.

might get pipped by the Beatles

thanks for clarifying D-40 I basically agree with you in that case

someone smarter than me could say something about neoliberalism as a social engineering project to create a specific type of agent / subject / consumer and how we reflect or feed into or push back against this process in various ways (which are then themselves turned into signifiers of individual / group identity and ways to accumulate cultural capital) largely unwittingly

we should and (I hope) can stop all this somehow or maybe it will just derail itself eventually

fwiw the personal ILM lists are always so much more interesting than the aggregated results and there's something about aggregation that turns so many idiosyncrasies into something predictable and MOR - this my other argument against using scores in criticism

I don't know, man. The aggregated results are gonna crazy this year with Roisin Murphy out of the running. Who's going to join Jessie Ware, Caroline Polachek, Kelela, Carly Rae Jepson and Tinashe in the top 10?

I didn’t say anything about “make”

oh i know, i'm saying it in a Calvin Johnson-esque "decentralize the music industry" kind of way. since marketing plays such a big role in what we encounter. but also because a bunch of my very favorite music was made by friends of mine. i don't think the Beatles or Aphex Twin are "better" than my friends in any formal or critical sense, and certainly not in terms of the impact of their music on me personally.

i don't like lists for various reasons and can't shake the feeling that making a personal list is like constructing a monument to my own biases.

xp lol I love all of those albums (except the roisin which I don't need to hear) so I guess I'm the problem

if I do a list this year none of my weird picks will probably make it but those will so I guess the biggest intrigue will be which order they appear in. it's like old school rolling stone - will pet sounds or exile beat sgt pepper this time?