My Husband's Stupid Record Collection

http://alltherecords.tumblr.com/post/83984052615/black-sabbath-paranoid-1970
http://alltherecords.tumblr.com/post/84084650719/black-sabbath-vol-4-1972
http://alltherecords.tumblr.com/post/84224673809/black-sabbath-s-t-1970

And while I think coke is totally stupid, I’m happy that they’re not actually thanking the Coca-Cola company because that would have been really weird and disheartening and way worse than thanking cocaine.

wow badass

cf. Cheap Trick reviews

there is this entire sound/aesthetic that is indie/cute/twee/adorkable that is completely not my thing,...I feel like it's somehow destructive to my own world view!

has anyone on ilx ever offered a full throated defense of cutesy "adorkable" twee? people here seem consistent in their view that they find this kind of thing nauseating. however, beyond this, there seems to be a lurking suspicion that the sweater vest aesthetic conceals a sinister, reactionary dimension. there was that recent pitchfork piece, "the unbearable whiteness of indie," that charged belle and sebastian and wes anderson with pushing an aesthetic that was prohibitively "white." and it's true: these kinds of things offer the illusion of a "sealed world," where everything is presented just so, and as with any walled garden it's hard to escape the feeling that much is being written out. o'holla here faces a similar double-edged accusation. at one end of things she is criticized for promoting "reactionary gender politics" for reasons that are pretty straightforward. but this accusation is entwined with the observation that she is a "cute" "indie" librarian (no need for scare quotes there - that's her actual job) with an open, candid approach to her material that people have learned to see as false and performative. (cf. "on smarm")

anyway, i think it's interesting that this blog is such a lightning rod. clearly, none of the attacks on her are fair at all, but the semiotics of both the blog and how people have decided to classify it are worth looking at. maybe people don't like that she is approaching the music from this ingenuous perspective, stripping it of its fragile yet elaborate critical context and assimilating it into her own little scrapbook of experiences. maybe this has colonial overtones. finally, i wonder if twee seems more sinister now than it used to because aspects of it have morphed into the almost blatantly fascist "kinfolk" aesthetic.

just want to throw in the words contemporary conformist

has anyone on ilx ever offered a full throated defense of cutesy "adorkable" twee?

iirc nabisco was pro-twee (in & out of ilx)

oh i didn't know he was out

never

I'm joking, Katherine.

my realpost would be "it's a dumb tumblr who cares" but that doesn't really suit the operatic mood of this weirdo thread

it is quite the clown show

http://wiccny.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cavaleria-Rusticana-pagliacci.jpg

"They dooooon.'t understaaaaaaaaan my fully realised and nuanced Cheap Trick taaaaaaake dowwwwwwwwwnnn....

Katherine!"

at one end of things she is criticized for promoting "reactionary gender politics" for reasons that are pretty straightforward. but this accusation is entwined with the observation that she is a "cute" "indie" librarian (no need for scare quotes there - that's her actual job) with an open, candid approach to her material that people have learned to see as false and performative. (cf. "on smarm")

you're over-reaching and not being entirely accurate in how you are representing what people have said. Nobody on this thread has criticized her, the author, for promoting "reactionary gender politics" -- in fact most of the posters to this thread are taking pains not to make that connection. I think her writing reinforces certain stereotypes and erasures of women as "serious" music fans and participants in weird (for lack of a better term) music communities. And that is my strongest reaction to it, because these are stereotypes I've personally had to deal with.

and I have no idea what you're trying to say with the line:

"an open, candid approach to her material that people have learned to see as false and performative."

Nobody on this thread has criticized her, the author, for promoting "reactionary gender politics" -- in fact most of the posters to this thread are taking pains not to make that connection.

No, but that connection was made, and that criticism was explicit, in several writers' responses when the blog first appeared.

I think her writing reinforces certain stereotypes and erasures of women as "serious" music fans and participants in weird (for lack of a better term) music communities.

I disagree, primarily because of a lack of evidence. I have not seen any writing about this blog that boils down to, "See, women don't really like music, and this blog proves it!" It's always third-hand, projected female opinions of what some imagined caveman sexist music bro somewhere might be thinking. It's female music writers tearing down a woman writing about music because they feel like she's making them look bad in front of men...when no men have actually had the response the women are complaining about/warning of.

t's female music writers tearing down a woman writing about music because they feel like she's making them look bad in front of men...

this is projection, btw

xp sarahell, i was definitely overreaching, and it was kind of shitty of me to spin things people said here into this larger meta-analysis. the stereotype reinforcement element of the blog is pretty clear to me; i guess my only reservation would be assigning responsibility for this to the author. but my post was mostly interested in whether there was some subliminal political reason for people's resistance to the cutesy indie aesthetic -- like when scott said that he saw a lot of people who looked like this woman, and that this was fine!, but still...

This thread.

my friends' stupid quip collection.

It's female music writers tearing down a woman writing about music because they feel like she's making them look bad in front of men...

this is projection, btw

iirc some of the early criticism (on twitter and our worst music writing thread) came out of a bunch of men sharing/liking the blog in a "This is how chicks think about music" way

yo Treeship did you know a bunch of people joined ILM years ago in some sort of migration from a belle and sebastian fan board? this isn't anything foreign

nabisco's defence of twee (e.g. http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/6176-twee-as-fuck/) isn't a defence of modern-style cutesy adorkable twee, though i would say that the (largely rightful) critique of the latter often doesn't do a good job of disentangling what's going on there from what there is to be defended in the former, and can end up pretty reactionary itself as a result

A quick reminder of a rule I decided to go by: when Alex has more than one album by a band, I still listen to the shelf order, which is rarely chronological.

Disgusting savages, both of 'em.

tbh I think the husband is a savage and the worst crime the wife does is normalize his behavior

I feel like it would be much more interesting for my operatic soprano, country music loving wife to write her reactions to my goth/techno/industrial albums; it would be especially fun/interesting to see what it is about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult that appeals to her so much.

for sure, there's also the element of "white person discovers The Clash and Black Sabbath are pretty good"

like whoa man, film at 11, see the crazy action

http://idontliketheserecords.tumblr.com/

I disagree, primarily because of a lack of evidence.

It's female music writers tearing down a woman writing about music because they feel like she's making them look bad in front of men...when no men have actually had the response the women are complaining about/warning of.

In the same paragraph! I can see your cojones from HERE son

xp the opera pic is glorious

lol at idontliketheserecords, that guy is very much the same as librarian woman only he's all "ehhh fuck this shit" about everything that he didn't listen to in the 90s

his woman has some pretty cool records, mostly singles and stuff that you'd grab if you were a kind-of-anglophile dance music fan of an age and thought you might make some beats or dj someday

yah it's a much better record collection

aaaand it turns out she did used to dj

tbh in a really neckbeardy collector-style collection you seldom end up with a stack of random singles that have like one awesome remix on the b-side but dj types (or people that aspired but never really dj'ed) have mostly those

I feel like it would be much more interesting for my operatic soprano, country music loving wife to write her reactions to my goth/techno/industrial albums

lol would read

a few years ago me and my wife listened to our entire record collection in alphabetical order (partly for fun, partly to determine what to weed out). we didn't blog about it but it led to some funny discussions/arguments/opinions. I guess if you asked her she might say it was largely *my* collection but hey I would never have bought those AC/DC records, how did they get in there

when I joked about through my wife's dusty CD booklet from college and giving my opinions on various movie soundtracks, soulquarian-adjacent and womens-college-oriented folk albums, she was VERY enthusiastic. some obv potential pitfalls have kept me from pulling the trigger - listens are inherently cursory, you don't wanna be a presumptive prick but if you're overly deferential it's boring, what's the point unless you're gonna try to ride this thing to a book deal, etc - but it's still in the back of my head

joked about going through

also do i really want that many pictures of me beaming next to talib kweli and ani difrancos on the web

lol da croupier that sounds like my wife's cd booklet, does she have any dead prez mixtapes

Ha nah she didn't roll that deep

that guy's wife has a fuckin cool record collection and he's cute to me, obviously the superior blog

I wouldn't necessarily say _better_ but it's definitely more random and varied. Again, my opinion, but record collections that look like you just took two or three "best albums ever" lists and then added a few more albums from a handful of the artists is boring as hell.

obviously neither of them are pro music writers (and I still think it's weird a personal tumblr with a vinyl gimmick has all these ILM posters doing heavy analysis) and I'm no more here for this guy waxing poetic about Dre than her talking about ice cream but I've got lots of tabs open rn with his Youtube links, which is as much as I'll ask from a music blog. currently listening to Up Down Suite for the first time in at least 15 years. I'll probably make it 30 before I do it again but ahh the nostalgia

"and I have no idea what you're trying to say with the line:

'an open, candid approach to her material that people have learned to see as false and performative.'"

no, i get this. it's when you're being real and people accuse you of being fake. like someone will think a person is being a try-hard and is spending a lot of time meticulously grooming their public self, when actually all they're doing is spouting whatever crap comes off the top of their head. it's the sort of accusation that says more about the person making it than it does about the target.

that's why we haven't evolved a word for being disingenuous

to find out what happens... when people stop being polite... and start getting real...

IT WASN'T NOT FUNNY

That quote will never not be not funny.

"obviously neither of them are pro music writers"

yeah but the husband works for a public radio show based in nyc which is how this all got spotlit in the first place. same shit different year

why did i click on this thread