What Is Rockism ?

if most clicks/views are coming from that subreddit i wouldn't say he is popular, but more like he, because of that dude posting the music to yt/reddit, has a niche following

popularity to me suggests mass appeal, and if you're referring to local fame as mass appeal, sure, he has it, but in terms of comparing popular mainstream music and non-mainstream, he seems to be pretty clearly on the niche side

there are yt vloggers with more views than this guy who appear to be nobodys

it is good shit, totally, but if i'm going to try to explain why that's up to 136k in a month and, say, sister irene o'connor's "fire", which i remember back from when wfmu featured it on their blog and which got upvoted to 750 when it was posted to /r/listentothis last week, is still only at 30,000 since january of 2014... i can't do it. it's completely and totally arbitrary. as far as i can tell the reddit zerg rush pushed something on youtube's back end where it started randomly recommending that record to people, and that's had a snowball effect, and sister irene o'connor never hit that trigger? god, the whole internet is a fucking invisible rube goldberg machine.

and yes i'm aware that audio-only posts of albums from 1979 don't compare in the number of clicks to man-babies cursing at video games.

I find cluttered often = rough edges, which is the appeal of a lot of music, surely? But yes, it's obvious on every level that she has much less monetary investment behind the writing / production (and marketing, etc.), but that's surely a symptom rather than a cause.

i just think of it in terms of my own experience

one year one of my bands made it into billboard's top 200 albums and top 100 requested songs in canada

nobody knew our first or last names or recognized us. metrics for our album/songs i'm going to assume were extremely low (no idea how we made it in, but apparently people were listening)

and this is a conventional measure (billboard) and it was over a decade ago

it's not something i studied or ever looked into but either something was rigged (i'm willing to go with this theory), the bar to make it into these billboard lists were extremely low or there was just a lot of bad music that year

do people know about d.a.'s "ready 'n' steady"? this was a record that appeared for three weeks in 1979 on billboard's "bubbling under" singles. problem was that while the song was recorded, it was never actually released anywhere. drove the whitburn junkies crazy for decades trying to find it! (it's a pretty good song!) in fairness to billboard, it is the only record to appear on their charts that was never actually released, which is a pretty good record all things considered, but man, the story of "ready 'n' steady" is so much of the story of popular music.

To Austinb's point, Father John Misty put out some "pop songs" on SoundCloud, just as an art prank (barff) to show how "easy" it was, and sure he's talented enough that he did a bunch of the au courant production tricks and got the surface level stuff pretty on I couldn't remember any of them the minute I flipped to the next thing

@Camaraderie: i think rough edges are part of the appeal for lots of music, but when you're trying to create a "pop hit" i feel like part of the point is to buff out those edges. it sounds "expensive" (to crib from Justin Bieber, pop critic), but it also just sounds more "perfect," which is where, i think, the concept of a "perfect pop song" comes from. the best pop, to me (subjectively speaking, as a listener) embraces its commodity status both structurally and in production.

or it's because Katy Perry's topline writers have a better grasp on tight melodies and the songwriting's less diffuse?

bonnie mckee IS katy perry's topline writer. dr. luke and benny blanco are producers.

i didn't know that, my bad @katherine. i shouldn't have collapsed all of her co-writers and producers in what i was saying.

an auteur like Prince for example (i could use recent rappers but then the thread would devolve into controversy from ppl who haven't paid attention to rap since Bush I) was ripped off left & right (likewise there was a counter-pressure from the Jam & Lewis-produced electro R&B of the era which was also ripped off) so people in the music industry made lots of money. Pointing to the fact that Prince is seen an "auteur" isn't to suggest we should buy into some uncritical cheerleading narrative (which tbh is the status quo right now lol but i dont mind) but also points to his centrality to the musical conversation and the way that it drives the entire *economy* of pop. And there are other examples who never achieve his level of fame, who toil in the industry and are ripped off but through the objective nihilism playground (or w/e) of that industry are under- or never recognized for their contributions. Much of my experience has been that the further i go into writing about music, the more i'm trying to identify those tributaries where innovation and trends really take place, and how they flow, and what inspires them; and explaining the context for it, because no one from The Industry managed to swoop in and A&R than innovation so that you didn't *need* context to "get it."

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Friday, 12 May 2017 18:46 (three hours ago) Permalink

I think dance music criticism (or at least the kind that I tend to like) has frequently tried to be nuanced in its treatment of the "flow" of innovation between apparent leaders and followers - the primary difference being that how this happens within given sub-genre X tends to escape late capitalism's Eye of Sauron unless and until someone troubles the charts with it.

By the same token those scenes aren't as conducive to the deep investigative profiling work you like to do vis a vis rap.

as far as "buffing out those edges" I think this too is confirmation bias -- a lot of hits are messy, full of seams, rush jobs, etc. if you listen to them as songs. "expensive" and "perfect" are pretty indicative I think because they don't actually mean anything

i didn't know "ready 'n' steady" actually got recorded! just assumed it didn't exist at all. lemme search

that should have said "A&R that innovation so that you didn't need context to get it" but i'm assuming you guys read that correctly

I think dance music criticism (or at least the kind that I tend to like) has frequently tried to be nuanced in its treatment of the "flow" of innovation between apparent leaders and followers - the primary difference being that how this happens within given sub-genre X tends to escape late capitalism's Eye of Sauron unless and until someone troubles the charts with it.

By the same token those scenes aren't as conducive to the deep investigative profiling work you like to do vis a vis rap.

― Tim F, Friday, May 12, 2017 5:35 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which dance music do you mean here? the heyday of pop dance in the 80s/early 90s is a rich, rich text for examples of the poptimist stars banking off others innovations. (I of course don't think ilx poptimists are ignorant of Madonna's "inspirations"/co-options, nor do I think that they're wrong when they point out that she did something w/ those innovations that many of the innovators would not have thought to do. However, a poptimism that focuses on the story of madonna at the expense of jellybean benitez because he wasn't 'scalable' misunderstands the history of music. Madonna is a funny example, I guess, because appropriation is so baked into her story at this point, but i guess what i'm saying is that the logic of capitalism taking innovations and making them as big as possible isn't a neutral good

i feel like that last post im just saying stuff everyone already knows. i certainly don't think tim doesn't know these dynamics

but i have also watched people malign 'rap for rap's sake' in poptimist context that ignores that sometimes genre cornerstone artists have actually shaped the sound of things; there are multiple forms of genre-ism & its not all an authenticity chase, black american music has a weird path going from underground phenomenon to accent in a katy perry video and the many stages in between.

like there was def a phase where the critical apparatus of [major publication here] would fuck with rap that existed to counteract the dominant idea of 'ignorant' rap music, or would fuck with the insanely popular pop rap, but stuff that didn't fit into those two boxes was by & large ignored as for "purists" unless it hit the hipster fetishization jackpot

this works with songwriters too -- to pick one example, a lot of britney's topline writers, at least before the 2010s, were black women, the britney-before-britney was jessica folcker, etc

(and of course purists do exist, although they've largely become a phantom boogieman/strawman to help drive lil yachty's PR dreams)

this works with songwriters too -- to pick one example, a lot of britney's topline writers, at least before the 2010s, were black women, the britney-before-britney was jessica folcker, etc

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Friday, May 12, 2017 6:52 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes—the entire industry is like this btw

i mean sometimes it makes sense, like I definitely think the Industry can often make smart decisions by looking at the bottom line, I'm not sure Skillz ever would have had a huge rap career even with tons of resources behind him, and it was very smart of Jive to not let Tribe put out "Georgie Porgie" lol

Lol @ "boogieman"

I mean there are plenty of white dude writers (certainly the majority of producers) so it isn't the *entire* industry

I don't really consider most writing about (any era of) Madonna to be dance music criticism precisely.

"pooh bear snapped" after the release of justin bieber's 'what do you mean' is my best tweet

I don't really consider most writing about (any era of) Madonna to be dance music criticism precisely.

― Tim F, Friday, May 12, 2017 7:08 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah i dont disagree i think i went off on that tangent just cuz i was curious what you meant specifically. obv i don't think matos writing about kompakt for minneapolis city paper applies lol

Me trying to read this thread like:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRvMXOrCmaBd-VewLmVqH-2yPcUyqeBLDYIaPnogrwK4un5eTtoTg

The forum for that kind kind of trash contribution is twitter

Me trying to read Twitter like:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRvMXOrCmaBd-VewLmVqH-2yPcUyqeBLDYIaPnogrwK4un5eTtoTg

me trying to watch family guy like

lol

that osamu kitajima is fuckin great, tyvm rushomancy

My city often feels like Rockism HQ. http://www.startribune.com/7-reasons-to-love-chance-the-rapper-ahead-of-his-sold-out-xcel-center-concert/422014033/

he's one of the worst music writers in the world

How integral his personal story is to his music.

*barfs*

his everyman persona

Guys, guys. . . guys, do you, like. . . are you, like, into bands or. . . ?????. . . do you like, like, listening to records. . . or. . . ???????

who are you

I love all you music critic guys

Just a guy that's into bands and likes listening to records.

And posting words

Enh.

http://wiwibloggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Salvador-Sobral-wiwi-jury-festival-da-cancao-.jpg

and lock thread

lol

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/
^^this is a decent (if overlong) piece but can't help but wonder why meta-rockism can't stay out of defending new sounds as reinvented versions of old genres, like here:

One legitimate complaint about Auto-Tune could be that it has stripped the blues element out of popular music—all those slightly off-pitch but expressive elements in singing—in favor of a remorseless flawlessness (which is why so much pop and rock today feels closer to the musical theater tradition than to rock’n’roll). But Future goes the opposite direction. He’s reinvented blues for the 21 century, restoring it not just as a texture (raspy, rough-toned) or as a style of delivery (somewhere between speech and singing) but as a mode of feeling, an existential stance towards the world.

... or maybe it's just not blues and hey that's OK too

Wielding Auto-Tune like this century’s equivalent of the electric guitar

rly...

Auto-Tune and other vocal treatments serve for Thug a role similar to the wah-wah effects that Miles Davis applied to his trumpet during his wild ’70s phase of fevered fusion.

I find these comparisons hilarious and unnecessary

Can’t believe those old Melody Maker rockism articles from the 80s haven’t been posted or scanned or transcribed online. It’s only a matter of time before all that old paper deteriorates and then all that great influential writing will be gone forever.

Reynolds is far from the first person I’ve seen describe Future as a “blues singer”

“‘The Percocet and Stripper Joint’ is just a 21st century update of ‘Rollin’ Stone.’ My column...”

And this is not the first time I've seen vocal production compared to Miles Davis, and it's pretty apt. Why on earth would comparisons need to be 'necessary'?

To be clear, I’m not mocking the notion—he’s got a natural growl in his timbre that isn’t unlike a less theatrical version of Howlin Wolf, or something.

xp if you think it's a good comparison fine, I thought it was an attempt at legitimizing Thugger/AutoTune which is unnecessary