Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

john i would say the gist is that ppl are mad that the internet has ruined the "surprise" aspect of a massive year-end critpoll

I guess another way we could read this thread is that a lot of misery is the result when I don't get the #1 spot - this was a preventable tragedy tho ppl, vote accordingly next time, not for me but for yourselves & the good of all future polls

Kevin,

In context I was referring to how lots of artists working in dance music these days seem always to arrive with these carefully wrought individualist aesthetics, all very literary and articulate and connoisseurial and aware of the past, and always framed in (even-if-unspoken) opposition to this idea of dance music as generic beats for the masses, and (more subtly) iconoclastic resistance to being defined in the context of a "scene".

Detroit Techno was actually already like this from the very beginning (curiously for such dancefloor-aimed music), and the above tendency also informs a lot of writing about IDM etc during the 90s and early 00s, but I think that it's really only been in the last few years that dance music crit generally has swapped to this way of thinking as the default position where even stuff designed for clubbing, for being immersed in a DJ mix, has become framed in the same manner. Possibly to do with the fact that the readership is more likely to engage with the music via the isolated MP3 rather than in the club or record store.

Not that the kind of reviewing you still get in the House 12" reviews section of Mixmag is particularly fantastic or especially more "appropriate", but I think it's definitely true that there's a much greater tendency among dance music critics to write about dance music artists as if they were writing about indie artists for Pitchfork.

john i would say the gist is that ppl are mad that the internet has ruined the "surprise" aspect of a massive year-end critpoll

― call all destroyer, Saturday, January 23, 2010 7:05 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i was surprised by the results of the singles poll, fwiw

It'll be interesting to see if the ILX singles poll has more or less of a nexus with what's really popular currently. Obv I don't expect it to be so GAPDY.

popular currently here or in the (heh) real world?

I suspect a lot of people have decided not to vote for GAPDY because of all the other polls and the reaction to them on here.

popular currently here or in the (heh) real world?

"the real world" - sales etc. I have a suspicion that our poll results will be similarly divorced from that, only in other directions.

yeah i think the ilx poll will be very "tracks"-ish, perhaps moreso than the P&J or even PF lists

would people who like those records really choose not to vote for them because of ILX stigma? if so that's pretty fucked up.

Phoenix and YYY are popular bands on ILX so I would expect them to do well. But who knows.

But i can totally see people not voting for those bands even if they like them just because they're fed up with a lot of the polls having the same end result. We will find out in 2 weeks I suppose.

i wonder if the poll had taken place at the same time as the other polls, so noone knew any results, if the ilx poll would have had similar results to p4k, P&J etc.

xpost to Tim F

You NEED to read my mentor/idol Will Straw if you haven't cuz he writes brilliantly about all this. His 1992 essay "Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular music" (click here to download) attempts a cognitive mapping of the cultures of alt.rock (I think we could slot 'indie' in here) and dance music. Dance music coalitions, he writes, "value the redirective and the novel over the stable and canonical, or international circuits of influence over the mining of a locally stable heritage" (385). What YOU'RE saying is that now dance music artists value the stable and canonical albeit as individual islands rather than coalitions that form into scenes (although that's not certainly not true of dance music across the board today).

But while I agree with you re: this transformation, I still wonder if there wasn't a species of that connoisseurial self-consciousness in disco. Straw has another essay, "Value and velocity: the 12-inch single as medium and artifact” (in Popular Music Studies. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, eds. London: Arnold, 2002), which moves towards making that case (and somewhat refuting the earlier essay).

Then again, for any of this to truly make sense, we'd have to agree that there's some sort of line connecting, say, early 1980s NYC dance music to Detroit techno.

Well yeah it's def. not across the board for dance music - this conversation is more about dance music criticism and what I would consider to be emergent/dominant/residual trends within it.

I'll absolutely read that Straw piece (thanks for the link) and I'm reluctant to comment beforehand, but I'd say if anything the current things which irritate me have grown rather organically out of dance music's internal critical predilections - in that, while critics are still trying to identify "the redirective and the novel", they're doing so in a way that privileges particular kinds of redirection/novelty over others. At the same time there's a lot of bad over-emphasis on "the stable and canonical" too. And I think - as opposed to my reading of Straw's quote - dance music criticism has always been a mixture of both, it's even more intensely canonical in some waysl then rock crit.

So it's complicated - no surprise there. Probably the only unifying across the board factor is that dance music criticism is growing more distant than ever from any kind of populist discourse - we may bitch about Pitchfork not covering Brad Paisley, but for Resident Advisor and FACT, producers who are totally within their spheres of coverage - say, David Guetta or Axwell or Afrojack (probably the most influential producer/DJ in commercial dance in 2009?) - may as well not exist.

I suspect a lot of people have decided not to vote for GAPDY because of all the other polls and the reaction to them on here.

― Pfunkboy (Herman G. Neuname), Saturday, January 23, 2010 4:27 PM (1 hour ago)

au contraire!!! Me and the missus were watching TV and there was a catchy song on a Ford (?) SUV commercial and I asked her "who is this?" and she shazaamed it and it was PHOENIX! I immediately added it to my ballot BECAUSE it was the first GAPDY song I heard and I want to fit in with the Jones'.

"1901" had definitely grown on me thanks to that ad, I have no problem admitting.

i think GAPDY will all do well in this poll except for maybe grizzly bear -- phx & yys have pretty big fanbases here, dp had a rather large & positive thread & i think tons of ppl like anco. i didn't see much talk about grizz tho

I predict in the ILX poll Y>A>P>D>G

still will bet many fake ilx dollars on anco winning v easily

ilxor hates grizzly bear huh? I thought that album was great. I found the new YYY's album to be pretty blah

almost weird how trendy it's become for "other music" types to hate on Grizz, seems unfounded. They lost their "cool", I guess the XX and DP have it now?

i think grizzly bear probably sold well at other music

@waka shame, oh I meant people that WORK there, not the shoppers! The shoppers are just NYU students. It's the bros that work there that are "part time critic" "part time musician" "part time music store clerk" etc....

DJ's at Daddy's once a week. Freelances for the Voice, does a review for Spin or EW to "make extra cash" etc etc

Those types.

Is the "problem" with Grizzly Bear that they're kind of like an equiv. of Wilco now?

They seem like the one band in the GAPDY list which are totally US indie qua indie (and more so now than previously).

Whereas I think it's easier to say e.g. "I like Phoenix because they're a fab pop band, not because I'm totally into all that indie stuff" - and then other variations on this for the other bands.

honestly has anyone really listened to da grizz? Seriously, Daniel Rossen's guitar work and chords are far more adventurous than Wilco. They may now appear to be the "next wilco" which means many will declare them as "boring americana" but honestly, me thinks they are so much more

ps. I also think there's a lot of people on here that dislike bands like Grizzly Bear primarily because they 1: don't like their bio/look 2: don't like their fans or people they perceive to be their fans and 3: they like to be contrary and say Brad Paisley is amazing.

I mean that they're the equivalent of Wilco in the sense of how they fit in discursively - not referring to their strict sound, which is usually one of the less important things in issue when people decide not to check something out.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone on ILX in terms of rather liking Yellow House but then finding it difficult to motivate myself to listen to the new one.

people on here that dislike bands like Grizzly Bear primarily because...they like to be contrary and say Brad Paisley is amazing

Or, why contrarians have more fun, volume 4,276. Not that I like Paisely beyond a couple singles, but I've had more fun trying to get into him than trying to get into Grizzly Bear.

"I'm pretty sure I'm not alone on ILX in terms of rather liking Yellow House but then finding it difficult to motivate myself to listen to the new one."

this is me! i loved yellow house. so did lots of people on ilm. there are raves galore about it here. but, yeah, didn't go out of my way to hear the new album. i'm sure its fine.

do any rock critics work at Other Music? and write for EW? i want names.

Brad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazingBrad Paisley is amazing

Is the "problem" with Grizzly Bear that

Grizzly Bear brings out the red state asshole in me. I want to beat them up and take their lunch money and then go listen to Skynyrd or AC/DC and maybe even vote republican. Well not the republican part but you understand...

I like neither Brad Paisley nor Grizzly Bear. (I live in a place where the dreadful C&W stuff some of you have taken to fetishizing is as ubiquitous and unavoidable as indie music is in the worlds some of you seem to inhabit and loathe.) "Grizzly Bear brings out the red state asshole in me" is a bracing and honest admission, but not a very persuasive argument.

People who regard anyone who likes, say, contemporary country (or anything, really) as big fake fronting fetishists come off like douchebags, imo. Take people at face value that they like what they say they like.

(Actually, I don't know that it's an honest admission, do I? But I assume it is.)

xp to myself

Are you kidding? Regarding anyone who likes GAPDY as a big fake fronting indie fetishist is an ILM raison d'etre.

lol wtf does that even mean?

m.v., shut up

I really don't think the typical knock here against insular indie rock listening habits is that it's all an elaborate put-on and nobody actually likes that stuff, but if you can find some posts that put forward that sentiment, I'd love to see them.

The perils of living in a red state.

http://blogs.channelnewsasia.com/suzanne-jung/files/2008/11/obama2004.jpg

"We got friends in red states who dig Grizzly Bear, we got friends in blue ones who love Brad Paisley. Over there's my friend Chuck Eddy, the embodiment of what it means to be truly purple."

"Fetishizing" GAPDY vs "Fetishizing" Brad Paisley

fetish - 12 definitions - 1. An object thought to have magical, especially magically sexual, powers

mmmm then I could definitely fetishize Brad Paisley.

haw!

Seriously, I'm tired of people using red-vs-blue state bullshit to explain why people like a band.

plus, grizzly bear's yellow house is in massachusetts where they elect republican male models.

"i'm scott brown and i approve of the hairy bears. i mean grizzly bear!"

http://thepoliticalclass.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b6e9e8970b0120a791e534970b-pi

Seriously, I'm tired of people using red-vs-blue state bullshit

Oh man, I was gonna say LOL about your Obama purple state thing until I realized you're sick of bullshitters like me.

Removing the red state joke from it, Grizzly Bear are too wimpy and respectable for me. I'm sure plenty of smart people like them and they're great at what they do, but for me personally, it's barf city bro.

would people who like those records really choose not to vote for them because of ILX stigma? if so that's pretty fucked up.

― some dude, Sunday, 24 January 2010 00:43 (18 hours ago)

my ballot was probably somewhat influenced by this. not that i'm shy to vote for them because of people hating on them, but more that even though i love GADY a lot (not huge on P) i voted largely for albums that i was exposed to through ilm this year, and not so much other places. i think a lot of people who post as little as i do still vote in the poll, and i do feel a certain responsibility not to obscure the results away from being representative of the albums that were actually a big deal here. it would be kind of lame if dozens of lurkers all voted GAPDY and then those ended up all being top ten, since they're not all necessarily albums that were widely loved by the actively posting crowd. i still voted dirty projectors, and nominated a few albums that i'm sure no one else voted for, but there was definitely an element of strategy to my ballot.