Best Music Writing

my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry. know what else people make lists for? the grocerys. laundry lists. lists of 10 ways to keep your man. The hell has this got to do with raw musical passion? the way i see it, you wanna read about music, leave it to the pitchfork boys and anthony fantano. but forget the lists and all this intellectual mumbo jumbo. just some thoughts..

Thanks for the kind words! I'm a big believer in variety though… I likes me some intellectual mumbo jumbo to balance out my raw musical passion. Too much of the latter and not enough of the former and I start feeling like I'm an extra in Point Break.

"my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry."

I dunno, I feel like the industry has a lot more efficient ways of being killed

"Top Ten Ways In Which The Industry Is Being Killed!" *starts writing list*

Great article, minor gripe – would be nice if there was a View All option instead of having to click 13 times to read the whole thing. I get that you're trying to increase clicks but it's a pain to navigate through it and makes reading it seem kind of disjointed.

hahaha that works well though when page 12 rails against it

~meta~

applauding that piece

yeah I laughed at that bit too

a lot of these are very valid points but I dunno, I like the Baker's Dozen feature, the tokenism and fronting that he talks about here is way more representative of an RYM list - most BD's read more like "these are 13 albums that are important to me that I want to talk about"; like half of 'em have some variation of "ask me tomorrow, and I'll come up with a completely different list"

As someone who loves making lists, Drew's article is OTM and brilliant. Though I think sometimes that's why I like list-making, because the very process of doing it forces me to think about this stuff (well, not the advertising revenue bit, I guess, although if anyone wants to pay me for my "top 50 nuclear war records" list or similar, I'd be very grateful).

It really is spectacular, Drew's piece.

not to be all "squee cuddlestein mountain" but it cheers me up to see these positive responses to the piece, thanks for reading what is a rather long affair. Glad the Quietus were down to present this. Don't wanna weigh in about the comments on the Quietus too much as that's not something I can be objective about, but the invocation of "white guilt" is interesting, to me.

the comments are hilarious

not sure i prefer a 14 page click-thru listicle about why best-of lists suck to a 14 page click-thru listicle of albums worth checking out

tbf there are are still lots of references to and photos of cool albums so arguably i'm getting both recommendations and self-awareness about recommending

Vanity project, emotionally crippled, precious boy, pretentious; it's almost as if you've hit a nerve there Drew, reading those comments ;)

I frequently enjoy the Bakers Dozen, I enjoy artists I am into speaking with passion about records they love, especially when they enthuse me to check out something I am not acquainted with yet. But your essay is already very valuable to me, and I will revisit it and the many interesting perspectives it gives me.

good writing though, last page aggressively otm

recently i interviewed an artist for the quietus and it was originally going to be in the bakers' dozen format - i specifically asked to change that to something more freeform/flexible because the idea of this artist talking about what i'm 100% sure would've been canonical rock records would've bored me to death

(and to the quietus's credit they were 100% ok with me requesting that)

cool story bro

?

are you confused why someone would think your story about the time you asked not to have to write about an artist's favorite albums because you thought their taste in albums would bore you was cool?

there's something self-serving and suspect about Public Displays of Taste.

Doesn't this objection apply far beyond just list-making? Pretty much all public announcements of aesthetic judgment are vulnerable to this suspicion, that what's really at stake is the writers's own narcissism. If list-making is done well, I don't see that it's worse in this respect than other kinds of criticism. Or is there something importantly different (in terms of self-portraiture) between talking about one's favourite records and talking about not-one's-favourite records?

xp i'm confused as to why you're being an aggressive cunt over a pertinent personal experience. if you think i intended to look cool or to self-aggrandise with something as minor as that, how do you even get through basic human interaction every day

If not for "Public Displays of Taste" I dunno what garbage I'd be listening to today. I trust the tastes of someone like say LJ or Dominique Leone a lot; I know DL has posted a few lists here and there and I find them very valuable

not sure "if this is how you react then how do you get through the day" is a stone you really want to throw, lex

i'll throw whatever stones i please. YOU can quit addressing me

just saying, i'm not the one who lost my shit at the mildest intimation of vanity

love the pictures in the article, I had to look up that Algebra Suicide album cuz I didn't recognize it

Me too...looks like it's a compilation.

It also seems to me open to question whether for a display of taste to be self-serving is so repugnant. The ideal of a judgment that isn't in some way a pose seems like either a rockist or Kantian prejudice.

If I am interested in a person, I usually am interested in learning what music is important to them. This was the original point of me reading ILM.

xp i don't think the piece asks for that ideal.

also it seemed to identify narcissism as more of a basic condition which it expands on later in the piece (in the sections on being a friend, on "boring" favorites). i don't think it treats it as a sin or anything, just something that we might not think about as being constructed in these various ways very often, especially if we're close to the action (ime).

anyway, i found this piece getting at all of the reasons i find rateyourmusic culture boring (along with others i hadn't considered) with some clarity and precision. not a fan of the "white guilt" or privilege accusation lobbed at perspectives like this, or other consumers +1ing the status quo / industry insiders sounding like union bosses with their take on "but a list would be just as good".

theres something sinful about being invited by an esteemed internet music publication to give a list of albums by bands and not merely to refuse but to demur in this manner and cast into question the entire ideological foundation of lists of albums by bands culture

who among us has not dreamt of being asked to give a list of albums by bands to an esteemed internet music publication

why would anyone want to write for the sort of ppl leaving comments on that piece

"Favorite" is not an incoherent concept. It means "thing you most favor". Favoring can occur along many dimensions; presumably you can choose any one of them in writing this kind of list, arbitrarily even. The concept itself doesn't presuppose an objective standard of success, or that aesthetic experience can be measured, or that there's any reason that other people should care about your favorites or agree that they're good. None of that suggests that "favorite" is "worryingly unclear", let alone "fatally incoherent", let alone that it "would be best abandoned".

The whole essay raises some worthwhile points, but it's infected by that kind of sloppy jumping to dramatic conclusions. Other examples include the suggestion that to publish a list of your favorite records is be to "force them onto others and level things down to a monoculture in the process" (page 11), or to a a "mandate" that "this is MY favourite, now you MUST listen to it" (page 13).

The part at the end about assigning number scores and rankings to records is interesting, but it doesn't have much to do with choosing a list of favorites, where it's understood that favorite-status can be assigned in any number of idiosyncratic ways.

After reading this, I went back and read my favorite (ha) Baker's Dozen feature, with Mike Watt. It was a nice reminder that writing (or in this case talking) about music can be fun, thought-provoking, and inspiring, even in the dreaded list format. And strangely enough, I didn't feel like Watt was forcing or mandating anything. (His was a heavily male list though, can't fault that point.)

He's having his cake and eating it though. Either in the text or via the photos he's dropping plenty refs to albums and bands but it's an interesting way to do it. The Quietus is great though - partly because they are not about lists, breaking news about videos and all the other shit but I am still a fan of the baker's dozen.

Chris Don
7 hours ago

Listing a few records is possibly less posturing than the pretentious position taken in this piece.

though some of these reasons were better than others, this is the best piece by dd ive read
the comments it provoked are just as enlightening wrt the cognitive biases, aesthetic debility, reflexive woundedness, nostalgia, solipsism, myopic 'short shrift' etc that afflict the british internet

xpost to JRN

Because of the problems that afflict both the false unity of "you" (me when? me now at this moment? this year? over the course of my life?) and "Most" (with regards to which goals? in which context? with the intensity of this "mostness" measured and defined how?), even your allegedly clear and simple phrase "thing you most favor" is itself riven with ambiguities (feel free to claim that I'm holding words to a standard that their practical uses don't often reach if you like). Perhaps "fatally incoherent" was an overstatement as god knows no one is going to stop using it and if it's an intelligible word in a communally shared language then it's not "fatally incoherent", but I think the word badly stands in for the thing it gestures towards, and the thing that word gestures towards is far more complex and more interesting. I'm just being honest in saying that I don't regard "favorite" as a word which can be used clearly, because it doesn't map onto the cumulative effect of decades of passionately loving lots of music for different reasons in different contexts. The statement "lately I've been enjoying Record X" makes sense to me, and indicates both a time frame (recently) and some kind of practice of repeated listenings that were pleasurable. But, as I've stated, "Favorite" doesn't map onto how I listen to stuff, and, I'm guessing, doesn't actually map onto many other people's relationships to music either. Which is why most hardcore music nerds that I know *wince* when they are asked about their favorite band, artist or record- it's a kinda leading question that frames things in a way from the start which obscures what's being talked about. I'm fully capable of having just written a mellow, easygoing, "hey guys here's some records I like" response, and indeed I've done that many, many times for other publications over the years. This time I wanted to do something different.

as for photos, they originally asked me for 13 pictures of myself and at first I sent them that but then I worried that the result would come off as way too narcissistic and self-involved (an objection that obviously the essay itself courts relentlessly) so I took pictures of large swathes of our record collection as clumps / hoards / clusters- the modest intention was that the viewer couldn't tell which record was the "best" "greatest" or "favorite" among the vast moldering piles of crap that fill our house.

Thank you Drew for saying so well what I've been trying and failing to say for years

really loved the one (think it was the last one) about numeric ratings and how gross they are, otm

after this i read through the mika vainio one and its completely predictable, the kraftwerk record the neubaten the coltrane &c and yet if you had asked him to just throw out some things he liked recently it would be a much more valuable

the clickthrough format is enervating as hell but it does provide a sort of penance for the compulsive list reader

the tune is space, what is your relationship with the Nurse With Wound List?

haha yeah in the longer version I went on about how the NWW list was an amazing counter-example in that it's a powerful countercultural syllabus that had this capacity to force noise/industrial/punk people to re-consider their anti-prog snobbery and obviously it's triggered all kinds of re-discoveries, reissues, lore, fandom- guess I'd say that that list functions differently because it was part of the artwork for NWW so it circulated in a different context than present day online journalism, it's pre-listicle and thus worked/works differently. It's also so MANY artists that it spreads beyond the "!0 Best" kind of exceptionalism- it's a hoard unto itself!

nww list is spiritually more like a pastebin dump than a listicle

Because of the problems that afflict both the false unity of "you" (me when? me now at this moment? this year? over the course of my life?) and "Most" (with regards to which goals? in which context? with the intensity of this "mostness" measured and defined how?), even your allegedly clear and simple phrase "thing you most favor" is itself riven with ambiguities)

Like I said, you can favor something in all kinds of ways. That doesn't tell against its coherence. It means that saying that something is your favorite (x) doesn't communicate an idea so clearly that no context need be supplied or explanation given. This is why, when people write about their favorite whatever, they usually give reasons to help the reader understand what they specifically mean. Using the term "favorite" gets them part of the way to conveying what they think and feel about the thing in question. It's all you can really ask from a word.

"Lately I've been enjoying (x)" suffers from similar problems. "Lately" does suggest the recent past, but "recent" is relative. And pleasure or enjoyment can come in all kinds of forms, some of them superficially contradictory--I enjoy things that make me laugh and things that make me cry and things that make me feel hopeful and things that make me feel bleak, and there are subdivisions upon subdivisions of feeling within each of those. Maybe "enjoy" is "riven with ambiguity", too. But that doesn't make it incoherent or uninformative.

"Favorite" doesn't map onto how I listen to stuff, and, I'm guessing, doesn't actually map onto many other people's relationships to music either. Which is why most hardcore music nerds that I know *wince* when they are asked about their favorite band, artist or record- it's a kinda leading question that frames things in a way from the start which obscures what's being talked about.

I don't know what it would mean for the term "favorite" to map onto a person's relationship with music. I also wince a little at the idea of being asked to supply my favorite song or record, but that's because there are all kinds of ways for something to be my favorite, and some of them are difficult or impossible to compare. That's consistent with everything I've said, though.

The broader point here is that your anxiety about favorites seems unconnected to your stance against formally-awarded scores and rankings. Unless you think it's a slippery slope from degree concepts to ten point scales, in which case I've got bad news about evaluative language in general.

ok now really ttws, just give us the real list

I wasn't familiar with Rick Moody but I will brace myself because I guess he'll be writing the Final Four analysis this year again.

Anyway, vote for Deee-Lite everyone!

If everyone could go and vote against "Torn" today, I'd be much obliged: http://www.marchfadness.com/#/championship/

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/15/520133445/culture-wars-trap-innovation-atlanta-hip-hop

thought this was kinda worthy (mumble rap thread participants may disagree. I dunno)

what would be their objections?

Too superficial maybe. Others might say "well of course the city is not supporting 'trap' culture"

Damn, Quincy Jones has some stories: https://www.gq.com/story/quincy-jones-has-a-story