"Should we be suspicious of hipsters’ newfound love of R&B?" or "Race and indie music, part 4762"

I'm exhausted, man *cues Jeremih playlist*

x-post--So you're with Will Hermes' response in that Slate.com discussion:

Why should the “blog-approved” success of Ocean and Miguel make us suspicious? Because it appears tokenistic? Shouldn’t the good stuff fire up as many imaginations/libidos as possible, especially those who don’t usually respond to mainstream R&B? I admit I’m frequently bored by its loverman clichés, soapy drama, and bottle-service grooves. But Channel Orange and Kaleidoscope Dream, both of which I adored, made me listen harder and dig deeper into the genre this year. I can only applaud if they do the same for others. Otherwise, it’s like the reverse of indie fans who get all sniffy when their favorites play Madison Square Garden.

how does one learn to groove so that one gets bottle service

indie or experimental R&B is officially the most overstated music trend of 2012, huh?

With its emphasis on melancholic confessionalism and interior concerns, so-called “progressive” R&B (far more so than most mainstream club-oriented R&B) delivered authentic blues feeling to a post-affluent culture suffering from collective disillusionment.

this is one of the false binaries (of many) that annoys me the most. if you look at Billboard's top R&B songs of the year, the biggest R&B songs were generally not very clubby, with a few exceptions (and fewer than usual):

http://www.billboard.com/charts-year-end#/charts-year-end/hot-r-b-hip-hop-songs?year=2012

I find almost every suggestion in these articles offensive: the implication that R&B is only just now experimenting, as if it's never been a forward-looking genre; the idea that "indie R&B" is pervasive trend when really there were only two albums that (very loosely) fit that bill that people heard or paid attention to; that suggestion that listeners have taken to two undeniably excellent albums only out of a sense of tokenism, etc, etc. It's all just horrible.

and Al is totally on the money. Critics are really misrepresenting contemporary R&B by making these acts seem like bigger outliers than they actually are

yeah i just said this on twitter but the annoying thing about "R&B was exciting THIS YEAR" is what it implies about last year and the year before (and how it lets people off the hook to move on next year) xp

xp Even the Miguel album, which sounds so awesome and distinct, had a lot of precedent in sounds that were playing on contemporary radio. It's not THAT big of a break or anything, he just too some in-vogue styles and stretched them into some really cool directions

the fact that Frank Ocean and The Weeknd (and also Kendrick) have been dominating urban radio for the last few months of the year, well after the acclaim, suggests that the critical accolades are helping them on a commercial level, so there's a whole chicken/egg thing

in that sense Miguel's unique because he blanketed the airwaves for a while before the critics came around

also because his first album was better anyway

*grabs coat*

haha @ at this comment:

Listening to certain people talk about "hipsters" is about as enlightening as listening to the people who accuse Obama of being a socialist.

Frank Ocean was successful this year because LOTS of people bought his record, not because some vague, nebulous pseudo-demographic bought it.

It's okay, you're old, I get it. So am I. But I'd like to point out it's just that much more pathetic when old people like us try to put our finger on the "disillusioned zeitgeist" as if we have any clue what the h@ll that even is anymore.

didn't we have this whole discussion on Janelle Monae a while ago and how horrible it was that she had so many white fans? is it not okay to dislike R&B in general but like some of the outliers?

as long as you don't get a Slate piece.

surprised to see this wasn't written by lex tbh

well apart from the love for Mars Volta lol

a racial perversion of the form itself

Bad luck Sly Stone and Prince. "Self-consciously artsy, experimental, inwardly focused (“looking for myself”), psychedelic, or trippy" makes you indie-rock.

guess this music isn't black enough for my white hipster ass, guess i'll have to go and listen to the steve harvey morning show to get the real goods

Bad luck Sly Stone and Prince.

see also Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Missy Elliot, P-Funk, etc etc

also stevie wonder which is the real groove channel orange is riding on

anyway whatever @ this article, but the will hermes paragraph is super terrible

a wellknowncritic and former spineditor got really pissed at this article on my facebook. i didn't think it was that bad. and actually pretty comprehensive as far as why we like frank ocean articles go:

http://www.spin.com/articles/trend-of-the-year-alt-rb-2012-frank-ocean-weeknd-miguel?page=0

any article that describes Santigold as alt-RnB is by definition terrible and embarrassing

and also unconsciously racist

Self-consciously artsy, experimental, inwardly focused (“looking for myself”), psychedelic, or trippy

poor Lauryn Hill :(

This is from a Grantland piece on songs of the year. Some of its misassumptions underscore a point Al made up-thread:

The song was released on February 22, peaking at no. 17 on the Billboard Top 100 but no. 1 in my heart. Usher sings in falsetto (which is fairly uncommon for him) over a Diplo-produced beat, and it only takes about 30 seconds to understand why this song was not more commercially successful. It has none of the David Guetta, dance-music influence that suffused "OMG" and "Without You," nor is it a derivative of the Dr. Luke and Max Martin Swedish School of Music (which I like, too!) that dominates the Top 40. Rather, it's more akin to Usher's R&B songs, like "There Goes My Baby" and "Moving Mountains" — two songs that also failed to crack the Top 10. "Climax" sounds like the song that the fictional Usher of my mind should be singing: It's the perfect song for the singer who has transitioned from teenager known for literally dropping his pants while performing to world-famous pop star who wants to remind everyone of how talented he remains. If my Spotify plays count for anything, I have no doubt that "Climax" would be competing with "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" for the song of the year title.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8749345/from-frank-ocean-fiona-apple-grantland-staff-looks-back-most-notable-tracks-2012

inwardly focused (“looking for myself”),

does Rihanna qualify here?

he Dr. Luke and Max Martin Swedish School of Music (which I like, too!

he likes it! Send the hounds!

from the introduction:

finally the R&B singers were taking acid

I mean...? wau

go chambers brothers!

http://cdnl.complex.com/mp/620/400/80/0/bb/1/ffffff/6d32b8a7c422b646769365201c1fc1c3/images_/assets/CHANNEL_IMAGES/MUSIC/2012/01/george-clinton.jpg

so glad someone finally gave that guy some acid

should we be suspicious of hipsters writing about r&b...

I am suspicious of hipsters who have never done acid

mars volta 2012

on another note i'm sick of seeing this contrived interpretation of "call me maybe" as an ode to the simpler times when we spoke to each other and used phones

Okay so FWIW Jason King, who wrote the original post, just posted this in a FB comment chain in response to it:

I think Channel Orange and Kaleidoscope Dreams are to differing degrees solid musical statements. I also think there's a lot of other records this year that deserve as much or more attention but aren't getting it for reasons that are worth considering. My interest, with this post, at least was the return the conversation on music in 2012 in an explicit way to issues of identity. You can't really talk about the resurgent interest in R&B this year without talking about race, not to mention gender and class, etc. Birgitta - other than Kem's Xmas album, I don't think any of those artists had a new release this year...and the word count for these entries is very limited. While I think R&B is a very diverse and flexible category that doesn't need policing, with more space I certainly would have mentioned Keyshia Cole, Monica, Eric Benet and others that I thought put out solid albums. Joseph - I think Frank Ocean has come out without having to shoehorn himself into the traditional narrative of the closet (i.e. the you're either in or out dichotomy) and that may be more valuable in the long run. I don't think he is or wants to be a role model for any particular community.

Keyshia Cole, Monica, Eric Benet are very interesting picks to rep for. Dude either really listens to a TON of R&B, or he has absolutely no idea what the fuck he's talking about

Given what a turd the Monica album was, I'm tempted to take the more cynical read

so if a black artist make "Self-consciously artsy, experimental, inwardly focused (“looking for myself”), psychedelic, or trippy", is he unconsciously racist?

haha, wait, are we calling Jason King a racist now or am I misreading? cause if so, I have some news to break to you.

I heard Miguel's "Do You" for the first time yesterday, and for about half the song I assumed it was an indie band like JJ. Song is very similar in vibe to their track 'Ecstasy' - itself a riff on a Lil Wayne song.

I don't think there has to be anything inherently racist about this development unless you want it to be. It's a dialogue that's opened - Frank Ocean and the Weeknd appropriating 'chillwavey' sounds, indie acts appropriating r'n'b. These exchanges have and always will exist. Call it cultural appropriation if you will - cultural appropriation isn't always a bad thing, and I don't really see how it's all that different from how pop r'n'b and hiphop have moved towards trance and house sounds in recent years.

Being suspicious of "white people making black music" and vice versa is the dumbest thing ever, obviously. I'm just more concerned about everything turning into a big boring mush of a middle ground where all the tropes of either genre are in place without any of the bits that makes them interesting. Fusing indie and r'n'b sounds was maybe an interesting new thing when I first noticed it as a "thing" in 2009, but willowy Brooklyn girls in corduroy skirts doing their best to melismate their way out of their own meekness while sensitive LA boys who call themselves "singer-songwriters" put cassette rewinding noises and Coldplay samples over their own homebrewed confessionals - I'm not sure if this is a route that is leading anywhere exciting, at least not yet. Rather than getting affronted by a perceived race issue, or the bastardisation of one's favourite genre, people should be more concerned about whether these artists will manage break free of tokenism and derivativeness, whether something clearly unique will come out of this that doesn't appear to treat said generic tropes as a crutch or USP.

Overall, I can see this leading towards some really interesting stuff. There's something significant about this current battening down of tribal boundaries between supposed "white" indie music and "black" r'n'b - territories which have been marked out for too long IMO. So long as people aren't just doing the equivalent of wearing a Slayer t-shirt for the "rock-chic look", this could get more interesting. As it is, indie and r'n'b have finished making eyes at each other, they've started talking, but they've yet to reach first base.

Argh my eyes make it stop.

Bad luck Sly Stone and Prince. "Self-consciously artsy, experimental, inwardly focused (“looking for myself”), psychedelic, or trippy" makes you indie-rock.

otm. this describes gigantic swathes of the greatest music of all time.

^

Self-consciously artsy, experimental, inwardly focused (“looking for myself”), psychedelic, or trippy

actually a nice sentence, makes me want to put on "in a silent way".

I'm asking this because I don't really know, but is it fair to say that examples of cross-genre (or genreless) artists such as Sly and Prince became less ubiquitous throughout the '90s? I can only really think of a few examples, Outkast most prominently, who continued to carry the flame in a significant way beyond adding a bit of rock guitar to a track or whatever. Feels as though as the '90s and '00s wore on the boundaries between what was deemed "acceptable" in rock and r'n'b became increasingly more defined, which is maybe why there's suddenly a big hoo-hah in the media about this supposed radical new shift.

The article in the original post is so rambling and incoherent than I'm amazed Amateurist considered it a worthwhile base for launching into this tedious debate for the eight millionth time.

When you consider that classic soul is the single biggest component of both Kaleidoscope Dream and Channel Orange it's kind of amazing how little it gets mentioned in these arguments. Plus the lame notion that guitars and R&B are strangers to one another in the first place. No one embarks upon this kind of handwringing when listening to a Meshell Ndegeocello or Maxwell album.

worrying about who likes stuff you like is probably a cue to go and jump in the nearest stretch of deep water

along with worrying about why people like things or assuming you can guess.

lol yeah i'm no FrankOphile but it's definitely nutty to say Trey Songz made a better album and/or could better serve FO's material.

Trey is increasingly interesting to me in that he's got a good combination of talent/taste/popularity/work ethic, isn't making dance pop moves, and is semi-consistent as a singles artist, but he'll never make a great album and in years like this year all his success seems very hollow and irrelevant.

"FrankOphile"!

I kinda find Trey interesting in that he's somehow become the default center of r&b as a genre that everything else exists merely in relation to.

for better or worse, obv

myers talking some goddamn sense. she was good in halloween too

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5pbz6VwBX1ryrcu2o1_500.jpg

hey remember king? did they go on to do anything

http://www.kanyetothe.com/forum/index.php?topic=176613.0

I think I asked them what they were up to on twitter once and they never replied.

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

on the album

I've been meaning to get around to that record all year :/

is good

That Myers bit = one of the most sensible things I've read about all this so far

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anybody driving faster is a maniac? – George Carlin

^^^^ I always think of this when I see "hipster" threads now

ha otm

anyone cooler than you is a hipster, anyone less cool is a square, makes sense

http://www.factmag.com/2013/03/04/vandross-prince-dangelo-theyre-saints-to-us-inc-talk-debut-album-no-world-and-stripping-the-blackness-out-of-rb/

You'd think the bros in The Inc. would know how to navigate these waters more delicately, but no, everything they say in this interview is a disaster

Do you think the term alt-R&B is actually a way of taking the blackness out of R&B?

AA: “Yeah, it’s just taking the struggle out. I mean, there’s been all kinds of struggle – there’s black struggle, there’s been some white struggle, there’s been struggle around the world, and when we make these, you know, tags… that’s struggle’s real, and we don’t want to keep perpetuating it. We’re not here to just jump in the ring.”

DA: “I think you’re right about taking the blackness out of it, and that’s the worst part about calling music that name. We make black music, you know, we’re not trying to say that we’re making something else. We’ve always been touched by that music and that’s what’s gotten us out of some places, that’s what’s liberated us and healed us. We’re making music for that same reason – we’re not making it to be played in a coffee shop where everyone’s all happy, this is not for that.”

AA: “We’ve never even said that we are R&B. We’re just making our music. R&B is pretty much dead, rock and roll is dead – the only thing that’s left from this stuff is spirit. So that’s how we see it, it’s like a spirit, and when we need to get in our zone we put on Reverend James Moore. They’re all like saints to us – Luther Vandross is like a saint, and Prince and D’Angelo.

“And then on the other side, the poetry side, I look at people like Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful too.

And then on the other side, the poetry side, I look at people like Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful too.

omg

You'd think the bros in The Inc. would know how to navigate these waters more delicately

lol why would you think this

their album is just so so so bad

the one based around the dodgy gulf war metaphor is probably the nadir

http://i.imgur.com/r1ZqMF7.gif

the white side, the poetry side, the corgan side

you'd really think they'd be on some blues hammer tip after all that and not just vapid simpering neutered twaddle like a sad can of flat coke zero half-heartedly handed to an anorexic model slipping into a fatal coma

vapid AND simpering

alt-r&b could kinda work as gulf war qua baudrillard/virilio come 2 think of it

young lamp n plax all feeling numb playing desert strike

CORGAN'S WHITE POWER MAJIK

anything can work if its done well.

The return of the Bald White Dude
Making sure whites groove

the album is actually pretty pleasant is the thing, in the most frightfully enervated way

matt and luke goss form spacek covers band was how i correctly basically broke it down to an extent iirc

And then on the other side, the poetry side, I look at people like Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful too.

omg

― C: (crüt), Monday, March 4, 2013 1:47 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally had to rub my eyes and roll back away from the screen

so speechless at that part (the whole thing)

I spend all my time doing things that may be a bit tangential, but I think I'm going to go back to the core, the white music. Billy Corgan.

http://grungereport.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/billyhands.jpg

lol xp

i have to say it but saying "Billy Corgan and that white energy is powerful" is the only thing with a kernel of insight in the whole interview, the rest is incoherent if not contradictory

what clowns

i wdn't say "insight", i'd maybe go so far as "makes grammatical sense"

AA: “When Voodoo came out, if you read the reviews, people were like, ‘he’s mumbling’! You know, a good example is Terence Malick, the filmmaker. His movies to us are like divine breaths on film, but a lot of people really struggle with the lack of dialogue. Or Nirvana, that’s a great example – if you read the lyrics to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ it’s like, what did he say? None of the teenagers knew what the hell he was saying – it’s ultimately a feeling.

“But the lyrics are really fundamental.

Wow. These guys aren't the smartest are they? And that track on the link sounds like a first demo for something someone might be thinking of finishing off one day when they can be bothered.

i'll stick with the last Britney album. my kinda nu-r&b.

"Music today is tribal – not tribal as in an aesthetic, but like we’re all part of a tribe. "

whole interview reads like an onion article

otm

White power is energetic too

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/124/339500000_9bfce4ef90.jpg