This is the thread where millenials can ask old-timers music-related questions about the past.

it's like there's a whole message board about it or something

Loving something is not the same as being a tight-sphinctered pedant about it. I love(d) The Uncle Floyd Show.

but really what did the uncle floyd show actually say about how we're all puppets of the oligarchy

'happens to benefit' implies a passivity i dont really intend, but i feel like this conversation is missing the perniciousness of this stuff

Alright, (no sarcasm), i think i get your point now, d-40. I agree that sharing obscure tastes (in music/film/art) with someone is a good thing/icebreaker/bonding mechanism. But i don't think that attitude has to be so aggressively anti-pop. I hate modern pop music, I just don't feel the need to complain about it because who cares.

Or rather, i don't think lamenting the loss of "connecting with people based on mutual obscure taste" has to necessarily be in opposition to pop.

but really what did the uncle floyd show actually say about how we're all puppets of the oligarchy

D+

L-R: puppet of the oligarchy, Uncle Floyd

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YTJBDUN8iSE/SYpM6k2TysI/AAAAAAAABSI/sIgIUPHeQIw/s400/UncleFloyd.jpg

morbius do you listen to effectively wild because at least we can bond over that

o shit are you sam miller

no, i am not as big a dork as Sam Miller

bonding with you sounds unwise in these times of Ebola

shit sorry bruh

(my current display name is a SM quote, v inattentive on yr part)

ok now i don't know who's trolling who anymore because that's why i made that joke, jesus christ look what the internet does to bored people with office jobs

just confused cuz you asked if i listened to EW

i mean, i figured there was an remote possibility you'd thought of the phrase on your own in a moment of despair

*a, so i thought i should trust but verify

yeah gotta say brooks isn't helping himself any by writing a blog post to defend himself wherein he refers to himself in the third person. i mean, if you absolutely can't write something that makes you look sympathetic, at least you ought to be able to flame well.

It was weird but again I think he was trying to make clear that he is only using text already in the original article to defend the quotes Holden was isolating.

hard to argue in favor of his response post on a board where the poster hall of fame is the zing thread

d-40 I find some of your posts on this piece pretty otm but do you know this dude personally?

Dan Brooks is the drummer for Gay Dad.

I think a piece like this was always going to get a lot of backs up around here. It made me cringe a bit myself, mostly due to my ILM-trained aversion to un-selfconscious displays of rockism. However, I thought it was interesting more because it described a particular experience in a way that I haven't seen written about that much. I'm more interested in the social history than in the musical opinions (which are pretty superficial). Also because I'm old too and can relate to that feeling of suddenly having received an untold bounty of musical riches - far more than I ever dreamed was possible - and yet feeling occasionally a nostalgia for all that other stuff that you weren't supposed to care about - and that frankly was usually an enormous pain in the butt - but that sometimes made the experience, I don't know, somehow richer and more meaningful. That sounds trite, and no, I wouldn't go back to the way things were even if you paid me. But I guess it's just that feeling when the world suddenly passes you by, you get a glimpse of your mortality I guess, which can be the basis of interesting writing.

d-40 I find some of your posts on this piece pretty otm but do you know this dude personally?

― The Complainte of Ray Tabano, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 9:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i've just been reading his blog on & off for about a year & find it really pretty well written & would consider myself a fan of his writing

I still think there's a huge amount of disingenuousness about an average ilxor's past propensity to judge someone for their musical choices. Like a reaction to corny indie fuxx mentality that ones sees in themselves

― deej loaf (D-40), Wednesday, October 22, 2014 11:24 AM (Yesterday)

I totally agree with you! It is one of the things that fascinates me about ilx.

i feel like it's much easier to argue in favor of the original post by far. while it rubbed me the wrong way, i can see why others wouldn't be bothered by it/would agree with the social-currency-of-music ideas he's talking about - and i wouldn't say that people with positive feelings about it are LOL DUMB INDIE-ROCKISTS and/or sexists by default.

the second piece is just pure unmitigated smarm and mansplaining. like some vicious, dipshitty hybrid of chuck klosterman and like, charles krauthammer.

o.nate's post is totally OTM

So one day in the 80s I walked into a chain store, and heard the manager telling a clerk (not customers), "All the records are going back tomorrow." Bought what I could, and sure enough, when I went back a couple days later, it was all tapes and CDs: they had both been peripheral, now they were both in the main aisles, the LP bins, both in longboxes (nice art on those). Both were smaller than LPs (singles were gone too), so more in the same space; both were cheaper to make than LPs (I read), and CDs were more expensive than LPs, even when on sale, which was most of the time. Friends mentioned the same thing happening at other stores, so seemed like the great transition wasn't entirely voluntary.
Although: cassettes were very handy, and more reliable than 8-tracks, as long as you kept your player clean. Another motivator, before the records went: there were even cassette-only deals, like a friend had two Grateful Dead albums on one pre-recorded tape: pretty sure it was Working Man's Dead/American Beauty; how's that for range? What got me were the CD-only albums, especially jazz, especially Gil Evens' There Comes A Time, very different from the already very different LP.
But right before that (around the time the new LPs disappeared), was an interview with an engineer, who said, "A really good stereo will still sound better than a really good CD player. But a cheap CD player will kick the ass of a cheap record player." OK, cheap is real, I'm in.

Gil *Evans*, even

haha I remember that engineer quote

just wondering
October 22, 2014 at 6:30 pm
So re that Poetry Prof bit, were you being tongue in cheek in calling her gutless for leaving only a Malkmus cd out? Maybe she just likes him (he is fond of poetry). If everyone is misinterpreting you, perhaps you are being less than clear.

Also, you are in your thirties now, haven’t you realized that some people might like both Kesha AND the Slits? Or maybe Kesha and Miguel and blues and other non-rock? Or maybe just books, and yes no music. Shocking …

danbrooks
October 22, 2014 at 9:08 pm
No, dude, that had not occurred to me. I’ve always assumed that each person only likes one band. It’s the same way that you either like Spotify or you don’t; liking some things about it and disliking other things is inconceivable.

ok

wooooooooooow he is salty. him and ariel pink should hang out and collaborate on a tune about how the social justice warriors are out to get them.

so Brooks doesn't like Miguel, books, and non-rock

When the Rodney King uprisings happened were you there?

lol y I was in 6th grade I think and we were supposed to go to catalina island for the yearly retreat (a week of "roughing it") and they postponed it bc black people, although ultimately we wouldn't have been anywhere NEAR south central DRIVING to OR from Long beach. Nb. I knew, like 3 A.A. people between the ages of 0 and 15, iirc

Mind you, the great transition did seem mainly about chain stores/mass appeal/legit releases. For everything else (and more), in the *late* 80s, with my massive K-mart RCA CD/Cassette/AM/FM boombox (detachable speakers) already a constant companion (incl. at record shows, to motivate buyers), I became a subscriber to Goldmine Magazine (more like Crackpipe Magazine).
As far as an actual backlash against non-vinyl, there were a few dealers ranting in Goldmine ads, but the only diehards I actually knew were much younger: my high school buddy's middle school son, already a budding singer-songwriter, and his muso buddies refused to listen to anything but vinyl. My friend: "Son, if you're really serious about music, or even if you aren't, you're missing a lot! You're making a big mistake!" This. of course had opposite affect.
Son's debut album was cassette-only, I think, but later reissued on vinyl, and he's always made a point of vinyl options for each album, whenever they become feasible, and long before the great resurgence (was re-discovered each recent year in features).

"to motivate buyers": also my aging portable stereo, but "record shows" were already all-format (even a guy selling cylinders, once). A friend bought a bunch of Beefhearts for 50 cents each at a yard sale, and tried to re-sell, but they were all eight-tracks; no sale at that rec show (though later in Goldmine)

Beefheart was mostly OOP except as pricey imports, at that point.

We got our first CD-player, I think a JVC CD boombox, maybe some time in the late 80s. I remember even having our neighbors over -- the whole family -- to check it out.

For a while it seemed like Graceland was the ONLY album we owned on CD, although maybe my parents had a couple of classical albums. We listened the shit out of it, and I was also pretty obsessed for a while with the fact that you could skip tracks/easily forward or reverse to an exact second of music. I think at that point we had pretty much already been switched exclusively to cassettes from vinyl for at least a few years -- I mean we still played vinyl a lot but only bought cassettes (especially bc you could listen to them in the car).

It's funny, all the emotion this think piece has generated. I wouldn't have imagined the degree of personal investment of the responses.

Eh, I'm too old to be a hater. You reach a point where you just realize some things aren't for you, or you're not ready for them, or whatever. Hating takes up way too much energy.

Per "High Fidelity": It's not what you like, it's what you're like!

This was a good comment on his post, which I think we can possibly more easily relate to as POST ROCKIST MUSIC FANATICS because it doesn't contain mentions of specific artists we feel defensive for: http://combatblog.net/?p=6851&cpage=1#comment-69258

Nice!

not sure i even completely agree w/ it but i do think it's interesting

and then immediately following that, in brooks's own comment:

"Also, if you like schadenfreude and would like to get a sense of how Holden writes about subjects other than me, there’s this piece in Vice:" http://noisey.vice.com/blog/why-are-you-fetishizing-girls-who-like-rap-music

"if you like schadenfreude?" if he's shitting on her piece for being either badly written (inaccurate IMO) or somewhat smarmy/overwrought (somewhat accurate), uuummmmm, pot meet kettle. if he's trying to be like "when she's not shitting on me her writing's fine," which i doubt but is possible, i dont even know.

sure, he wasn't trying to be elitist (according to him). fine. still kind of a douchenozzle. verging on ott-esque tbqh

to clarify: if he was trying to be like "when she's not shitting on me her writing's fine," that's kinda tacitly condescending, but i guess well-intentioned? i just seriously doubt it

Could you clarify the end bit a bit more?

nm I just reread the original

More from Uncle Maven's musical adventures:
Well now, sometimes when I'm walking down the road, I spy a CD. Long as it doesn't start falling apart when I pick it up, can take it home, rip it to Wav. Can't do that with a record or an mp3, by cracky. (Re-wind an unravelled, tossed-out-of-the-car cassette? With a pencil? Too much work, wouldn't be reliable, and haven't found one in ages.)

This was linked from the Steve Albini thread, but is relevant here as well. Colorful description of the way the record industry used to work:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full

millennials v gen z!!!! pic.twitter.com/JSkJ2MLDJs

— Chris Fleming (@chrisfluming) March 8, 2021