The All-New STYLUS.

I wonder, does "mainstream rock" - say, Nickleback, The Fray, etc. - have a critical centre either? The successful stuff gets reviewed much like Beyonce or Rihanna get reviewed, but yeah it occurs to me that in order to have a substantial discourse that would, say, produce either prominent genre specialists or (similarly) promote coverage of the less successful stuff, you need to have some strong sense of being a community apart from the mainstream - which country, rap, indie, dance music and metal all have, regardless of their actual level of success, which might be enough to qualify them as mainstream-in-fact.

This goes back to my point above, that the first, founding conceptual operation of music crit is to establish a sense of distance from "just" mainstream music consumption - which is different from saying that music crit is always defensive - much specialist music crit is or appears to be entirely oblivious to the existence of the mainstream.

But at any rate I agree that the conflation of R&B with "the mainstream" may be part of why it falls between these stools as such.

Although I do think gender is a big issue here. As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B variety.

Obv R&B does have genre-specialist critics, but not in the numbers you'd expect proportionate to its commercial success or even - on a tracks basis at least - performance in polls like this.

If I can be snarky for a second, I would note that I don't like the way these threads seem to devolve into referendums about one person's taste, esp. recently - Joe The Plumber tactics IMO.

The issues raised in this thread are (or can be) much more interesting than whether one person is right or wrong in their appreciation of X.

At this point I think we should probably consider the market forces that drive production of crit, which are not record sales or radio play, but magazine sales, website hits, and advertising spend. Who reads, and who is influenced by, music crit, who isn't, in terms of genre audiences, and why?

I dunno, I feel like this is one profession that's more defined by who steps up to perform it than what the audience or industry asks for. Indie-loving English majors are in far greater supply in the field of music writing than they could ever possibly in demand for.

That's very true, I guess, but if people didn't also want to read it then P4K would get no hits and no money, likewise magazines (the ones that haven't already folded, anyway). Obv moneys not the only driving factor in mags and websites existing, some will always be run for free, but it's nevertheless a factor.

Well, all sorts of websites and publications cover all sorts of music and get lots of hits/readers, it just happens that the ones that are more critic-driven and wordcount-heavy are indie or indie-leaning generalist types. And I have a strong hunch that whatever desire exists out there to read critical analysis of non-indie music, no matter how small, is probably pretty underserved.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B variety.

yeah, i think you said this w/r/t female singer-songwriters before, which rings v true - the reason i never really read much music crit when growing up is because it was mostly very snarky/dismissive of the artists i listened to as a teenager (tori amos, fiona apple, ani difranco et al). oddly enough apple became a lot more accepted (circa extraordinary machine) once she started hanging out w/indie-auteur faves like paul thomas anderson, developed that whole me-vs-the-record-label narrative which wasn't even true etc etc.

tori amos's weirdo electronic albums at the end of the 90s are still two of the most critically underappreciated ones i own - been revisiting them a lot this week and the scale, ambition and execution are still extraordinary, yet pretty much no one cares about them any more.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B

I don't read enough crit these days to say for sure, but my impression is that this isn't true of women's country music...assuming that by "women's music" you mean music made by women. If you're talking about music made for women then I don't know what this means so I can't say.

Hey, I really miss this website - it was kind of like "Pitchfork, but good"

Is there any hint that they might come back up?
Or is there another website out there like it?

Nope. The archives remain, and lots of us have found homes elsewhere. Thanks for the kind words.

so are there other sites like it?
I dunno, I liked the features like "Playing God", "On Second Look", etc. - kinda showed you guys thinking about music the same way obsessives like myself do.

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/

Playing God was fucking awesome, and I definitely have a number of playlists that adopted some of those tracklists.

Thequietus is the best thing since Stylus.

^^^mad trolling

TQ has good interviews but their taste is so boring that I really can't read anything else.

I only contributed to Stylus three times, but Todd Burns was one of the best editors I ever dealt with--one of the few who didn't, in the parlance of Sweet Smell of Success, expect you to jump through burning hoops like a trained poodle.

wait - is like every ILMer a former writer for this website?

Nearly.

I don't contribute to this site very much, but I only ended up here because Stylus folded. I loved that site, and posted to it a lot. Some of the most intelligent, and impassioned, engagements with reviews/writing I have found. Of course, a whole lot of horseshit, grandstanding, and just plain mean-spiritedness/petty trolling as well, but OVERALL a very admirable effort to let the masses in on the experience. This site is probably the closest to it, from a feel perspective (and all the alumni of course).

frogbs: there was a lot of stylus/freakytrigger/ilx crossover; a lot of the same people now right for singles jukebox

No trolling here! I dig Thequietus interviews, op eds and occasional reviews. Frankly I should use it more to check out what they're touting as they clearly come from the same post-punk roots as I do.

i wasn't a "writer" per se... but, when Stylus closed, i was the first regular commenter they thanked in one of their goodbye pieces ^____^

The Quietus is awesome btw

Uggh, I got mentioned in that Stylus goodbye as well. Both OK with that and totally embarrassed at the same time. Some real unfortunate posts by me in some of those pieces, but those were rougher times. Still sorry about some of them though.

likewise for me, i'm sure. but then it's not like i don't make unfortunate posts on ilx nowadays, so who cares

man, I didn't you two were commenters.

"zarklephaser" - i've said this before!

same as my Last.fm username the last 6 years or however long

http://www.last.fm/user/zarklephaser

Well, it pains me to admit it, but we’ve had plenty of favorite commenters on the site. Zarklephaser, Grand Banks, Florenz6, meatbreak, raskolnikov, et al.: we salute you!

WTF I WAS CALLED OUT AS A FAVORITE STYLUS COMMENTER??!?!!!

(totally unexpected, thanks to whomever suggested that!)

― stephen, Monday, October 29, 2007 10:49 AM (3 years ago)

Hahaha, that was all Todd's doing, singling you and the others out. I don't think anything has had as much sustained, impassioned, profane and repeated discussion in our virtual office over the years as the comments boxes. God bless our readers. And hello, Zarklephaser.

― Scik Mouthy, Monday, October 29, 2007 10:51 AM (3 years ago)

Ah, Alfred, one of my regretable moments was on a piece of yours. Sorry about that, I actually liked almost everything you wrote, but for some reason your Boredoms piece, and the subsequent comments, caught me on the wrong day.

This news is heartbreaking. :(

― three handclaps, Friday, October 26, 2007 9:50 PM

nuts that it's almost been four years since it closed . . .

i kind of wish Stylus had polls.

― Wrinklepaws

hahaha

Uggh, I got mentioned in that Stylus goodbye as well. Both OK with that and totally embarrassed at the same time.

Hey at least you got mentioned!

writing for this magazine was the second half of my adolescence and the reason i've gotten any work anywhere so yeah <3. the ideal writers' mag: polyvocal, always up for stuff, and unsustainable.

Yeah, I am happy I got mentioned, I am imagining that I got noticed mostly for being a good poster, but sure wish I could take back some of my comments. Great site though, thoroughly miss it.

ha, i just found a stylus 'stycast' podcast on an old drive - an interview that todd did with me for stylus in 2005!

The Stycasts were great. There was a very amusing one about 60s/70s stars trying to transition to the 80s.

lmao @ inconceivably atrocious, bully is a stone cold classic imo

Stylus Magazine said the song was "undoubtley" Fatboy Slim's "finest moment to date", noting "the ten-minute house anthem “Song for Shelter”, whose redemptive power was so awesome that it almost saved Larry Clark’s inconceivably atrocious film Bully simply by gracing the last scene."[1]

what's up with the Stylus website lately? their album reviews don't seem to be accessible anymore (and even the Archives link yields a 404 error) although their features and movie reviews are still online...

awww so glad you care

The site's slowly crumbling. I've been transferring reviews to my blog.

I've done the same thing with my reviews.

i still occasionally start typing in stylusmagazine into the search bar, from muscle memory, whenever i'm wandering the internet looking for something new

cuz we still rule