Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

xpost

his true calling now is philly boy roy

also is crabcore = indie?

fader makes all their money doing a billion othr things, mag is just branding, doy

yeah matt obv those first three you mentioned don't really fit that rubric and I don't see THAT much difference between them and a lot of stuff that is decried today. as for shellac, af

oops! as for shellac and amrep, I guess I just don't see a pressing need for that to come back

yeah matt obv those first three you mentioned don't really fit that rubric and I don't see THAT much difference between them and a lot of stuff that is decried today. as for shellac, af

― call all destroyer, Thursday, January 21, 2010 9:42 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the difference is rocking IMO and drummers that hit hard, which means a lot to me

am rep had some good shit but lots of bad (god knows i lived in mpls in the 90s)

shellac never left! and i just saw arcwelder like 2 weeks ago

i miss some of it

the nu-pigfuck

^there ya go

Man, I've erased about three or four different posts about how I had no use for aggressive indie rawk in the '90s -- be it the Jesus Lizard or Archers of Loaf -- but I fear I'm just being dismissive.

except that one year when matos organized a rebel alliance and did that other one and like three rap records placed higher than on pazz and jop and it was a paradigm shift or some shit

hahahaha I fucking wish

c'mon DUDE

*blasts "smallpox champion"*

*rocks out*

FYI, from the Awl: "People on the Internet Like to Argue About Music More Than They Like to Enjoy Music": Maura Johnston and Seth Colter Walls on Genre, 2009 and Pazz + Jop"

http://www.theawl.com/2010/01/people-on-the-internet-like-to-argue-about-music-more-than-they-like-to-enjoy-music-maura-johnston-and-seth-colter-walls-on-genre-2009-and-pazz-jop

(smallpox champion to jaymc)

(also matos just goofing come back to city pages they need u like a mutha, k thx!)

pining for macho attitiude arrived on this thread--didn't even need a chuck post!

Ha ha I thought Superchunk sounded pretty wussy back in the early '90s (and Torche are way too Foo Fighters for me), so I'll stay out of this.

but wait i'm enjoying music while i argue about music! i can do two and even sometimes three things at once.

xp But anyway, people should really check out Meercaz and Okie Dokie, who I namedropped in a Pazz & Jop essay once. (And I still think Red Swan and Drunk Horse might've made my favorite indie rock albums of the '00s, but I'm weird.)

Not that I'm unproud of the polls I did (not that you can fucking FIND them anymore, thanks a lot Gawker Media/Buzznet), but the differences weren't especially big between them and P&J, results-wise. Though they did exist, as I've talked about on other threads. Nevertheless, my dreams of an alternative poll with a big list of voters + a rather different p.o.v. didn't exactly come to pass. Harvilla and Baron do good work, esp. this year, under the drastically reduced circumstances (meaning manpower) at the Voice compared to when I'd come in and count ballots in '02-'03. (The biggest reason I stopped after two was that I had almost literally no help.) Which is why I just shake my head and chuckle sadly about all the "Let's change the whole thing!" posts I see here. Good luck. (mega xposts)

xp Not counting the Gore Gore Girls obv

(Stopped after two Idolator polls, not counting-ballots-at-the-Voice, just in case that was unclear.)

i did see drink horse play once; they kicked ass. superchunk never seemed to really rock hard to me, tho i never investigated them thoroughly

(smallpox champion to jaymc)

Haha. Actually, I've never minded Fugazi too much. Liked their last two albums quite a bit, in fact -- although that's mostly because they felt more expansive and moody and musically varied than the earlier stuff.

smallpox champion is a jam and a half btw

superchunk never seemed to really rock hard to me, tho i never investigated them thoroughly

their records from foolish on are more restrained than the first few, but live they always stepped on the gas real hard

Also, fwiw, my favorite album of 2009 was probably Dananananaykroyd's Hey Everybody!, and that sounds an awful lot like Fugazi in places. Sometimes it surprises me how much I like it, actually, considering there's actual screaming on the album -- but there's also big melodies and infectious jazzy guitar riffs.

i've been on a bit of chavez kick lately

xp And who knows, maybe I also like it in part because I'm not listening to a whole lot else like it. Maybe I'd like the Future of the Left album, too, if I weren't scared by it.

Harvilla and Baron do good work, esp. this year, under the drastically reduced circumstances (meaning manpower)

I agree, but damn do I wish I had Glenn McDonald to help me out when I was there. As far as I can tell, he does the work of 20 interns in a tenth of the time!

Ha, I bought a Chavez album in 1996 or '97 and sold it like a week later.

Glenn rules
xp

wait you're scared of music jaymc?

i would probably check out Dananananaykroyd based on jaymc's description if i wasn't scared of indie bands with stupid names that riff on the names of celebrities

I'm being facetious, Que. Some aggressive rock music is a little too much for me, though.

I felt that way sometimes in the mid-90s as I first navigated the waters of indie rock. I was a big fan of Pavement and Sonic Youth, but I didn't really feel at home in the world of indie until I got into stuff like Stereolab and Tortoise.

weirdly enough i saw doug mcoombs from tortoise playing bass for red eyed legends, which is the new band of chris thompson from skull kontrol/monorchid so the opposing forces are actually bros IRL

Yeah, he's in Eleventh Dream Day, too.

And v. much a bro in his own right. I see him at random shows all the time, or at least I did when I used to go to shows.

I wouldn't equate being slightly dangerous and disreputable with being loud and aggressive. There are lots of ways to challenge conventional mores.

When I was at school some of my friends and i used to talk in very music crit terms about, like, the new kylie single or the new janet jackson album or whatev, though I wasn't in some kind of non-indie bubble, i was also consuming a lot of that stuff (admittedly more the 80s UK variant). We weren't reading any music press at that stage (those same friends still don't really, and still talk about kylie etc. in pretty much the same terms), I think we were just picking up on modes of thinking about music that was like a middle ground between generalist pop culture consumption and the kind of "close reading" we were told to undertake in literature classes.

I sort of think that the opposition between "people interested in music crit" and "drooling masses" ignores the fact that a lot of people are like my high school friends. They never really got into capital letter music crit because they do the same thing on an ad hoc, casual basis amongst themselves - analysing a new pop album to death while being indifferent to published reviews of that album.

I don't think there's an organic connection between indie and the form of what we consider to be capital letter Music Crit, but more to the point I don't think that this form of thinking about music is a total construction either, a straightforward consequence of being immersed in (usually indie friendly) rock crit which has set up its own standards for how one approaches music. Certainly to an extent it is, but a lot of people who don't read music crit at all will talk in very similar terms about music they like if you start a discussion with them. The distinction my anecdote above points to (and it's not the only possible distinction, but maybe it's a relatively important one) is that indie and music crit are so mutually dependent that the one almost necessitates the other, it would be highly unusual to find someone who owned all the GAPDY albums but wasn't a big consumer of music crit; whereas fans of other genres might be just as critical in their thoughts and discussions about music while being disinterested in the music crit industry per se - they can like Kylie and become "critical" in their assessment of her music without the necessary intervention or assistance of consuming published music criticism.

i mean also:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-12-22/music/the-decade-in-music-genre-hype/

maybe you could just file "indie nerdball interest in pop music" under 2001-2008

yeah tim's post is important, i think it needs to be said that R&B definitely has its own discourse going on, and living in a city like chicago its actually a pretty vibrant & in-depth one -- its just that it definitely tends to center more around record store employees & DJs & radio than written crit -- & presumably music message boards, etc. lots of people are having these conversations, "oh that track is a classic" "i always thought that song was overrated" "remember when DJ xyz used to play it at venue zyx" -- really the level of discourse is pretty much the same. Im not really convinced that a website that focuses on criticism couldnt surround other genres. it might not be as big as pfork, where you have this kind of unified alternative flag.

didn't you sort of answer your own ? though there deej? Chuck (via Frank), nabisco, and others have also pointed out elements of what you're saying here: Indie was historically less real-world social, with a lot of people gathering around the music or broadcasting their opinions about it via alternative forms of communication-- college radio/zines/blogs/etc-- because they had to both construct an alternate system for communicating about the music and, often, had to look outside of their communities in order to find ppl to talk to. Something like R&B, which is more social in the first place, seems like it would function the way you and Tim describe it, and as a result there isn't a historical relationship between (self-)published conversation and the music.

would be interesting to see if more R&B/pop crit can develop now that a lot of the better artists there are as niche as anything else. It's almost like there is more need for it now than ever

one of the tensions that has always existed in rap writing (& for me an important one) is that a lot of the ppl who would write about rap were not always intersecting w/ the social/communal critical communities in rap, and a lot of the conflicts w/r/t the genre on the internet are related to these conflicting discourses -- especially now that there is a strong (if niche) critical community around hip hop that is entirely divorced from for example my high school experiences

hahah matt Chavez is basically my favorite band ever

drive like jehu rules too

oh god yes

Yeah, I think what I was trying to say is similar, in some ways, to what Tim's saying. The distinction's not between "people who read/write criticism" and "unwashed masses of fans." It's between people who are accustomed to engaging with music via reviews and analytical essays, and people who are accustomed to dealing with music via conversations, DJs, radio chatter, conversations in stores, tabloid magazines, different kinds of blogs and comment boxes and message boards, TV coverage, etc. All those conversations can take place at different levels of thoughtfulness, using different types of language, with different assumptions. And different types of music will be over- or under-represented in any one of those spheres.

So when someone tells me that Criticism should encompass more different kinds of music, I think "yes, totally," and then I think, "well, it already would, if what we thought of as Criticism wasn't just middlebrow analytical writing, and included all those other things from the get-go."

(Obviously it'd be difficult for P&J to rope in voters from among, like, "this guy who has great conversations about music with his friends," but just as an example: what might it look like if you asked a bunch of radio DJs?)

Drive Like Jehu dudes were in the band Pitchfork, so it all comes full circle.

haha

Matos: Here, for some consolation, is my 2006 collation of the two polls, and the even more detailed 2007 version. I have all the album votes from 2007, at least, and I think I actually have all the whole ballots from 2006...

one of the tensions that has always existed in rap writing (& for me an important one) is that a lot of the ppl who would write about rap were not always intersecting w/ the social/communal critical communities in rap, and a lot of the conflicts w/r/t the genre on the internet are related to these conflicting discourses -- especially now that there is a strong (if niche) critical community around hip hop that is entirely divorced from for example my high school experiences

This something that seems so blindingly obvious to me (in a good way, deej), and is a big part of why I'm so hesitant to get involved in rap crit compared to say, R&B crit (apart from the more prosaic issue being that i'm great at remembering song lyrics and bad at remembering rap lyrics, and this means I find it hard to say anything interesting or original about the latter). Do you think that it is or should be a similar issue-for-consideration for R&B? i.e. are their social/critical communities in R&B that are being ignored when people like say me write about it, and is this a problem?

I know that in the case of dance music I'd say that there are certain life-factors that I would point to when judging someone's capacity to engage with the music. But it's complicated. I feel I'm in a position to talk about UK Funky, say, despite obviously never having physically engaged with the community, but only because of the presence of a whole host of vitiating factors.