Keeping Up With Music

Giving a song/album a chance to grow on me made sense when I paid money for each album. With streaming, it's the opposite: I'm paying for the entire library of music so spending time on 1 thing hoping my opinion of it will improve comes at the expense of giving other music a chance to immediately wow me.

Yeah, I feel this. I'm probably better in tune with my own tastes and inclinations these days as a result. If something doesn't move me in some way on the first listen, I probably won't bother with it again unless I see a few people writing or talking about what moved them about it in a convincing way. Even then, my initial impression rarely budges very much. I laboured through so much average music in my 20s, trying to find something to like about it because smart and cool people said they liked it. I don't really have that time or energy any more.

xxpost In some ways that's part of the problem, or the gift: even if there is good new stuff you might enjoy, you could probably spend a lifetime digesting ECM's '70s output alone! No one can listen to everything all the time, and even the most omnivorous listeners will have blindspots, willful or otherwise. Like the great ILM thread "last classic album you'd never heard before that blew your mind" or whatever. For some reason, I'd never heard Isaac Hayes' "Hot Buttered Soul." Why? Absolutely no idea. I knew it was on all sorts of lists, and I knew Isaac Hayes and his history, but I just never got around to it until, I honestly want to say, maybe after reading Whiney's Public Enemy book and learning how many samples from that album are on "Nation of Millions." Now it's one of my favorite albums. I could listen to it every day. I'm sure there are other albums like that.

I've listened to more new music this year than at any time in the past decade thanks to working from home but I don't know if I'm getting more out of it tbh. sometimes I look through my old ILM poll ballots and think... why did I vote for this again? I must have liked it a lot at the time but I don't even remember what it sounds like? and I have no interest in looking up what they're up to now. 

that's the thing with trying to keep up with too much imo, like there's a lot of music that you might objectively like or find good but true connection is rarer than you might expect. You may like (even love!) a song/album for a few months, but idk if it's worth it if it's not something you'll remember or can be bothered seeking out again five years down the road. 

re imago's original question on whether ILM covers all that it should: I do think that we're getting out of touch with a lot of what younger people are listening to now just because there aren't any zoomers on here lol. I hear what my teenager is listening to on the rare occasions she deigns to leave her bedroom door open and some of it is really cool! most likely made by a youtuber or tiktok-er and they probably don't even have a full EP or album, just a few random tracks here and there. or it's some obscure lo-fi indie dude whose song from 2013 is big among kids cause it was used on a popular fancam edit. 

I also think it's interesting that ILM doesn't even have threads on some major current artists e.g. BTS. I know most of the kpop thread regulars including myself have traditionally not been huge fans of BTS even before they broke through in the US but we're def showing our age imo, in the sense that we're not even trying to discuss this group who is creating, and will continue to have, a massive impact on an entire generation. can't tell if it's a language issue, snobbery, racism, or just none of us being in the right demographic to appreciate them properly. (and of course the gender thing - ILM-ers have always been more appreciative of female popstars and girl groups and take boybands less seriously.) 

I don’t understand how TikTok works as a music discovery platform. The clips are 15 seconds long? How can you get into something via a 15-sec. snippet? Is the idea to check out the full song on YouTube or something?

15 seconds is more than enough to get hooked on a piece of music, even 5 seconds could be

But where are kids hearing the full songs? They must go off to Spotify or someplace, right?

yeah spotify or youtube or bandcamp or soundcloud or wherever else people get their music. eye catching dancing/visuals + an ear wormy hook or chorus in under a minute is usually enough to get kids to search out the songs (and sadly also a method that’s much faster and more convincing than reading a two minute positive review).

Xxxp I alternate between extremes of going wide and going deep. I go through phases of collecting and listening back to lots of different stuff sort of ravenously. Basically just sampling everything for months or even years at a time without getting into any of it too deeply. Then i'll go back and pick a few things out of that, and I'll listen to the same 3-5 records almost exclusively for months (at least).

I don't really ever worry about missing out on what I haven't heard. What scares me a lot more is that i might not hear something again, or that I'll only hear it so many more times.

There are no artists I follow, really. A crate digger friend remarked that I'm "extremely album-oriented" and that's accurate. Like, most people have artists they love, and want to investigate those discographies and I... don't. I mean there are artists who have made albums that are all time favorites, that i love more than life itself... and i have never even borhtered listening to any of their other work even once. I don't feel I need it for whatever reason. I don't know why. When inwas a kid and could only afford a handful of albums a year, maybe a dozen or a bit more if I was very lucky, I only bought albums by artists I'd never heard before. With very, very few exceptions. It felt, like, wastefully extravagant to have more than one album by the same people back then. I had friends who would buy every Pavement album before checking out someone else and I was actually... disgusted by that!

Now i am properly ranting sorry. So, yeah, i go through these phases, and it really has nothing to do with keeping pace with all the amazing things coming out, I'm completley disengaged from that.

I don't force myself to like anything either. If i hear something once, and it doesn't either a. make me want to play it again straight away or b. Leave a funny linering aftertase or something that sticks with me and makes me want to play it again EVENTUALLY. that's it. A lot of my favorite records are the latter kind tho.

youtube comments on music videos are now as full of tiktok-related comments as they are of "(x) sent me here" or "who's listening to this in 2020?" or "this is when music was great, not like now"

No BTS thread is surprising! They derserve a thread

My method of music discovery has been the same since I was 13 - I mainly read a lot about music, old and new, and if it looks interesting, in the pre-digital age I'd rent LPs/CDs in the libary and tape/CDR them, and for the past 22 years I'd download and dunk it into my library. Plex or iTunes will then feed it to me when I play random albums, filter by genre & then shuffle, etc. Keeping up for me just means keep reading about new music and listening to it.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember much serious talk about the musical merits of Take That, Hanson or Westlife in the "ILM golden age".

Take That and Westlife were irredeemable shit, dunno enough about Hanson to judge, Backstreet/NSYNC might be a better comparison as they had a few decent pop hits.

I don't get BTS to be honest, think it's probably just not for me.

eye catching dancing/visuals + an ear wormy hook or chorus in under a minute is usually enough to get kids to search out the songs

When was this ever not enough?

my response was to morrisp on tiktok as a music discovery platform.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember much serious talk about the musical merits of Take That, Hanson or Westlife in the "ILM golden age".

yes and i've always wondered why that was. even for kpop, there are tons of great boy group songs posted on the rolling threads every year but the ones that crossover onto wider ILM and make it onto the EOY 77 have almost all been by girl groups (2ne1, f(x), red velvet, blackpink, loona. lone male exception: G-Dragon).

I am not a huge fan of BTS but their songs are better than 95% of boyband songs from the 90s/00s, and a lot of it sounds, well, like a lot of other pop music that ILM usually likes. so yes, it's surprising they don't have a thread yet. anyway, my main point was that even on a forum as expansive and diverse as ILM, there are massive blindspots, and i'm sure there's lots of other genres/subgenres that we're ignoring.

start a thread, Roz. I would be happy to listen to BTS, just nothing has grabbed me in any of the songs I've heard so far.

i just said i wasn't a fan or else i would have started one already lol. my fave is prob Dope.

But if you don't keep up with all the new stuff you'd like, isn't there the risk you'll fall into lazy habits, find yourself easy prey to hype, and mostly just listen to what the Pitchfork-industrial complex wants you to?

There is no such thing as 'keeping up'. In any given month the amount of music you or anyone else listens to is absolutely dwarved by what you don't listen to. There are vast amounts of music being released, plenty of it great, that never gets talked about or shared here or anywhere else.

So "keeping up" is entirely illusory. And even the most self-consciously wide-ranging of listeners are limited by their routes of discovery, whether that's ILM or Pitchfork or streaming services or crate digging or anything else. Some of the people who make the least effort to "keep up" in the traditional sense have the most interesting and often the most rewarding music habits, people can spend entire years down the rabbit hole of one genre.

Phrased as gauchely provocative as I could muster tbh, but the formation of canons is definitely part of this discussion. I rather admire those who specialise deeply in a more restricted area (and then stay in that lane) but I can't imagine doing that myself

BTS for the most part are pretty bland by kpop standards so it's not surprising no one here is really that into them and despite their breakthrough in the west it seems like it's really more of an insular thing with a gigantic cult fanbase than something that's become a more integrated part of the us pop mainstream so i'd imagine if you don't seek them out they're still quite easy to have completely avoided? i did really love their gqom track "idol" though, that felt exciting. if there wasn't the kpop thread to absorb the "they actually broke through" discussion etc. i'm sure someone would have made one then, and that's the most interesting thing about them - that they managed to break through in the west in a way no other kpop group has really come close to.

There is no such thing as 'keeping up'. In any given month the amount of music you or anyone else listens to is absolutely dwarved by what you don't listen to. There are vast amounts of music being released, plenty of it great, that never gets talked about or shared here or anywhere else.

So "keeping up" is entirely illusory. And even the most self-consciously wide-ranging of listeners are limited by their routes of discovery, whether that's ILM or Pitchfork or streaming services or crate digging or anything else. Some of the people who make the least effort to "keep up" in the traditional sense have the most interesting and often the most rewarding music habits, people can spend entire years down the rabbit hole of one genre.

This is all true but I think a lot of music (and movies and literature and etc.) enthusiasts engage in some suspension of disbelief about it - that old Lester Bangs story about dreaming of a bunker with every album ever released.

xpost all true. my main point again was about ILM and what gets discussed or covered - BTS was really just an example. there's plenty of bland music that gets attention around here, like there's multiple ed sheeran threads and not all of them are dunking on him lol.

It's virtually impossible to ignore Ed Sheeran in fairness, he gets everywhere.

In 2011 I spent the year listening to as much new music as I possibly could, didn't know about ILM at the time so went between music blogs / review sites, hypemachine and release lists, in the end came out with a list which had some crossover with EOY lists, but had loads more weird electronic music of various sorts.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon.

― Siegbran, Friday, July 3, 2020 10:39 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Have you guys seen the 1975 thread?!

*ducks*

xp Like this was in my top 5 out of the 20,000 or so tracks I listened to and it never got so much as a mention on ILM as far as I can tell from searching, and not sure why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZlzIsfE--g

xpost speaking of bland

*ducks too*

:D

*ducks*

that old Lester Bangs story about dreaming of a bunker with every album ever released.

Lol right now we're all essentially living in bunkers with every album ever released! Though sadly I think I've been listening to music *less* the last few months, because my entire family is at home and I prefer the stereo to headphones. There is some stuff they'll tolerate but I know there's a ton of stuff they'd gong after a minute. They did all seem to like the Jessie Ware when I had it on at dinner the other night, Pet Shop Boys on random last night was well received. But there was something accessible/popular I can't remember I had on where one of them came in right at an uncharacteristically loud part and told me to turn it off or way down, and rather than remind them it was something they liked I just turned it off.

Oh, and re: Tik Tok, I refuse to engage with something that cuts attention spans even shorter, but my daughter was driving with me and I think Coldplay's "Clocks" came on the radio, and I said, oh, this is a nice song, and she said she was a fan. I asked her how she knew it and she said people do Tik Tok's to the intro. Actually, even funnier, the next day she was trying to remember what song it was, and we had both forgotten (I literally just remembered right now), so she was racking her brain for what she heard and kept running down the litany of wrong-path classic rock acts. "Was it Led Zeppelin? Was it the Eagles"? Etc. (None of which she likes unless it was covered on "Glee" or appeared in a movie or something, some other context.)

You may like (even love!) a song/album for a few months, but idk if it's worth it if it's not something you'll remember or can be bothered seeking out again five years down the road.

If it gave you enjoyment for any amount of time, it's worth it imo. It's preferable that it give you endless enjoyment but let's not get greedy.

Same thing with movies innit. There's some movies I enjoyed watching but don't ever want to see again, forgot what happened in them, etc. Totally worth seeing tho. Then there's the personal pantheon that I know I'll watch many times again.

my main point was that even on a forum as expansive and diverse as ILM, there are massive blindspots, and i'm sure there's lots of other genres/subgenres that we're ignoring.

― Roz

Absolutely, there is way to much music out there to even attempt to discuss all of it among a fairly small group of ILM regulars. There's no discussions on aggrotech, calypso or Turkish chartpop. I don't really dislike K-pop, or pop from anywhere else for that matter, but I'm not sure if I have much useful to say about it - I mean the last cheap-and-cheerful throwaway pop music I really loved was italo disco.

It's virtually impossible to ignore Ed Sheeran in fairness, he gets everywhere.

It's really not. I have never heard a whole Ed Sheeran song. (I have never heard a whole Beyoncé song.)

I have no idea what Ed Sheeran sounds like.

I would be up for a calypso thread (though I know it's basically heritage music now)

Ed Sheeran doesn't sound at all distinctive, you have probably heard him and not realised.

BTS was really just an example. there's plenty of bland music that gets attention around here, like there's multiple ed sheeran threads and not all of them are dunking on him lol.

We also have a 1D thread. I think all of the examples Siegbran gave were pre-ILx so not sure how we would have had contemporary threads on them...

I don't mind BTS but don't find them that exciting, and definitely have a tendency to fall into the 'girl groups or GTFO' k-pop bracket. Big exception would have been when EXO went epic ('Mama', 'Wolf' etc), but that's soooooo long ago now.

do we have a "newly released albums i'm listening to this week" thread? just speaking pragmatically as someone who does like to keep up (probably have heard ~300 new albums so far this year) it's a pain to check a dozen different places online to find out what's out and an active thread where ilxors just post the brand new releases they're checking out would be useful for this purpose.

just smoothly blend a "whatever new music you are listening to" post into one of the politics threads imo

do we have a "newly released albums i'm listening to this week" thread?

Not quite the same thing, but we do have a Rolling Favorite Tracks + Albums 2020 thread, and it doesn't get bumped as often as it should imo (I, too, am guilty of this).

that thread is super useful, yes, shout out to ulysses for putting in some work there in 2020

another "never heard Ed Sheeran" person here btw

I *think* I've heard one song by him. Certainly only one song that I'd recognize by name.

I went from buying 400+ non-current-release albums a year and maybe 10 current-release albums from 2000-2015, to by now buying 200-300+ current release albums per year the last few, and honestly, it's wonderful to be overwhelmed by how much excellent new music there is. For me, most of that excellent music is being made by Black artists (mostly) pushing the boundaries of or completely obliterating genre. Obviously even buying hundreds of records a year, you'll "miss" tons of great music--but so what? That's what the rest of your life is for, to "discover" it later. I'm just trying to enjoy the pleasure of getting to hear all this happen in more or less real time, and it's a deeply necessary antidote to the hope-sucking nature of so much of the current era, outside of realms of human creativity.

The pan/sans/anti-genre music made by Black artists the last half decade should be revered, like mid-80s "house," 78-82 "post-punk," 80s-90s "golden age" hip-hop...

But perversely, it'll probably take a catch-all term for geeks to latch on...https://t.co/BjUjExA7jp pic.twitter.com/uVAWILskoz

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) July 3, 2020

On 7/3 all $ spent at @Bandcamp goes to artists/labels, and @MikeSchpitz and I will buy you (2) digital albums by of your choice by Black artists!

Just retweet w/ a link to a favorite album by a Black artist.

Goal is 78 albums! 6/5+6/19, we bought 132 albums--keep it going! pic.twitter.com/FxNrWj7DYu

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) July 2, 2020

this is the only ed sheeran song you really need to know imo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yN1JBYTtF8

and thanks for the love.

here's my ongoing 2020 keepers playlist; not everything I hear is on spotify but most of it is: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kXJmmQP3udiqToIDPQvZp

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-41-most-anticipated-albums-of-fall-2020-cardi-b-sufjan-phoenix-2-chainz-and-more/

41!

I don't think I've ever listened to 41 albums released in a single year (let alone a single season) within that calendar year. Maybe in 1998 when I lived with a guy who would compulsively buy music, like weekly trips to the record store, coming back with a stack of 10.

I don't think I've ever listened to 41 albums released in a single year

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/030/710/dd0.png

all that but no Arch Garrison or Hen Ogledd