FKA twigs

Only if they're Beats headphones.

fuck Beats

My favourite genre. Fuck Beats.

I prefer fuck beats over nipplecore.

This album sounds great, and dynamics are stupid, who wants to listen to a record with their finger on the volume? not me

Not sure I would frame "dynamics" that way tbf

i listened to it on decent speakers and that's the thing, it sounded crystalline and quite lovely but in a kind of one-trick way?

the one album that kept springing to mind was björk's vespertine which i guess is a compliment, and tbh i love vespertine but it also has its share of songs that are a bit nothingy

won't someone hate this album on its own terms

i don't like the comparisons with records by singers (like dawn richard or whoever) because this feels like it's about (or inextricably tied to) the beats in a big way. like she's more interested in living inside the music than singing on top of it. which actually is pretty similar to Vespertine, although i find LP1 way hookier than that.

xps i haven't spent $50 on brunch in at least two weeks!

as far as sensual/floaty/ethereal R&B-not-R&B records, what i have heard of this so far (not had a chance to hear the whole album, just a few songs so i may change my mind), it made me think a lot of jessy lanza on hyperdub.

ah, just saw boxedjoy mentioned JL already...

"This is the thing, Alex. That it seems like a lot of your (and others') negativity about this album is not actually about the album, but about the discourse *around* the album. For which she is not responsible, and it actually distracts attention from discussing the art to discussing How Men Write About Female Artists which is, y'know, there are a lot of discussions to be had about that but not another derail on another musician's thread. Because 1) it takes the focus off yet another artist's art and onto more fucking music journalists yet again and 2) you are not actually excepted from How Men Write About Female Artists!"

pretty sure I am in fact excepted from How Men Write About Female Artists -- although you're now the fourth or fifth person to imply I'm a man in the process of saying how music is wrong, so perhaps there is something I'm missing. do I focus on how albums are received critically? sure! But I do this for everyone. It's part of how I think, it's not limited to this album, and perhaps this is naive but some part of me thinks that music writers can actually change narratives while they're happening, otherwise we as critics might as well drop dead while 53 Awesome GIFs of "Two Weeks" are assembled around our corpses.

as for your not hearing what I hear -- I don't know what to say to that. I'm sorry? I can't control what other people hear in music, I can only control what I hear. I'm also notoriously bad at pinpointing the exact song something reminds me of at any given time -- a lot of my suggesting names is me trying to figure it out for myself. (For example, the beginning of the new Charli XCX song sounds maddeningly like something I know, I'm trying to figure out what it is so I don't keep thinking it's Natalia Kills, and this is going to bother me until death or when the answer strikes me, whichever comes first.)

"But that whole thing where people come in and tell me I shouldn't be listening to this thing I'm enjoying, I should be listening to {something which does not hit my buttons} - that gets to be a drag" -- you're telling me. it's not like I'm invading the FKA Twigs Stan ProBoards Forum to troll, I'm posting in a thread dedicated to discussing an artist and sharing my actual opinions, which inconveniently in this case do not align with consensus. what boggles my mind is that all of this is in response to people who say they basically like this album! it's 6/10! it's better than average (for lex, that's *significantly* better, sorry lex)! actually, it doesn't boggle at all, because the angriest emails I've ever received have been in response to mildly complimentary posts/reviews.

that one part should be "I can barely control what I hear." there's probably another typo somewhere in there, but that's the one that matters. it's too early for this shit.

Is your name Alex? Because I have this crazy habit of addressing ppl by their display names and yours says "katherine".

no, but you specifically included others in that

The "others" whose dislike may be inspired by the ~discourse around twigs~ is nowhere specified as being contiguous with "male writers whose approach towards female artists is problematic." There are three groups in this sentence: 1) haters 2) ppl engaged in discourse and 3) male writers. I implied there may be overlap between A and B, and definitely overlap between B and C, but it's very hard to read any kind of a Venn Diagram which implies "A, therefore definitely C" which would be necessary to read that paragraph as calling *you* "a man."

I dislike conversing with people who imply I said things I specifically did not. So I don't think it's gonna be productive for us to continue this conversation.

the Twigs moniker makes me think of a high-fiber breakfast cereal. I was daydreaming about possibilities for collabs and it turns out there is already someone out there going by the name DJ Activia.

well...i like one song.

I apologize; perhaps I was being somewhat snarky because that is a thing that's happened to me multiple times and at this point it confuses me more than anything. I didn't mean to upset you, and I'm sorry. Once again, I really wish I liked this album more than I did because no album is worth the total swath of alienation that it has apparently become for me.

I am not upset, so there is no need to feel bad on my account!

(However, I would also like to say that I do find it irritating - not upsetting, just merely irritating in a petty way - when people imply emotions, such as "upset" to my words, when those emotions are not actually not there, and I am being super-calm and rational and in fact using set theory to explain myself! But the irritation springs from the perceived gendering here.)

I am generally not a lyrics person but the line "when I trust you, we can do it with the lights on" has been resonating through my mind since I first heard the album.

^^

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

(I hate to ask because the problem is, when talking about female artists, there is a tendency in male listeners to reduce female artists to sex and nothing but sex and sexual appeal, erasing aesthetics, intellectual content, politics, etc etc. However, given how much of this album is very specifically about sex and sexuality and desire, it's weird not to talk about the lyrics, even if most male writers addressing this album have been doing it very badly, or in ways that are gross / overtly racist.)

Do you hear yourself as the "you" in twigs' songs? Are you the object being desired? Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you? Or are you identifying with the subject in this song, are you listening to these songs and feeling yourself relating to the desire she expresses, and wanting to be the "little spoon"? When you hear a line like "my thighs are apart for when you're ready to breathe in", are you hearing those thighs as *your* thighs, alive with longing for an inaccessible partner that you're gagging for? Or are you the "you" in the song who has to choose to breathe in, and get between those thighs?

I mean, I had a whole thread asking whether people heard themselves as the "you" in the song or the "I" in the song, but this really is one of those songs where I am curious how people hear that.

i identify w/ the object, the 'you' being sung to

I am identifying with the "you" in most cases here, but some of these lines are things I can see myself saying to someone else (such as the one I quoted).

i do not identify as the object or the subject, i appreciate it as really beautiful lyricism an artist is writing about an unknown 3rd person

I feel like a voyeur when listening to these songs

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

is it alright if it's neither? i picture it as her singing about just someone and not all these songs are written in the first person

(btw are we really still using "feminazi" here?)

wow did frogbs just word police on branwell

this could get good

How about you guys not do this, and just stick to the subject of the question I asked, huh?

We got some "you" answers, some "3rd person" answers, so this is interesting.

I always tend to take the perspective of the singer (whether male or female, in character or otherwise) in the same way I would a narrator.

Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you?

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

Why?

http://i.imgur.com/txEGwOo.jpg

it's "dreams time"

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

I kinda half understand why you'd say this. But then again, I do sometimes identify with the "you" in these songs, in that way. (is it wrong if I identify with the "you" in songs when it's Miguel singing what he'd like to do to a "you"? How about being the "you" when it's the Jesus and Mary Chain offering to be "your" plastic toy, or Interpol offering to be "prey for the female"?)

I find that switch back and forth between being the "I" doing the desiring and the "you" being desired, in songs like this, where the song seems to be a sexual invitation, really quite interesting.

(And I just checked the lyric sheets to see the perspective. Most songs have an I and a You, but several songs have an I, a You and a She. (I thought Video Girl was third person, but there's an I, a you and a she in the titular video.) But most of them are first/second person. She might not always be the narrator of the song, but all of these songs are sung from the subject position of a narrator.)

is it weird bc of assumptions about how women listen to music, versus how men listen to music? it seems normal to me to respond to a second person address as being directed at 'you.' this doesn't mean that there's some longing emotional subtext to that identification (tho there might be), just that when addressed as 'you' it makes sense to think it's actually talking about 'you.' especially if your gender/sexual identities are compatible w/ the singer.

I never, as far as I'm aware, imagine that I am the narrator, subject or object of popular songs recorded by people I do not personally know. I do not believe this personality trait to be a function of my sexuality, but I guess self-awareness is limited.

i think katherine is bringing up some urgent and key responses here to the idea in this thread that if you don't like this it's because you are "x" when sometimes people just dont like shit they dont like. it is imo the dumbest aspect of conversations abt music on this board/the internet/among critics in general. i realize no one likes to be wrong, but branwell, hammering home the "oh i never said that, you are just terrible at interpreting my words" over and over is just a bad look.

xp when you read second person narrative fiction (like bright lights big city) do you have any more identification or intimacy re the text than reading 3rd person or 1st person?

bc i do. i think it's natural to identify harder w/ "you" than with "him/her"

i'll never hear "feel like making love" the same way again

hahaha

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying, let alone being public on a lyrics sheet about saying, partly because the album seems to me like it's designed for listeners to occupy the sung-at role.

as for second-person narrative fiction suffice it to say I have many thoughts on this subject and they would all be pretty substantial derails, which I gather is a concern.

never even occurred to me that some people listen to songs as if they're being directed at themselves.
bizarre

well not like literally

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying

^^

^this, like i'm reading a novel. the subject or characters may resonate with me but literally identifying as the subject/object, nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6UAYGxiRwU