OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Still thinking about that NYT Mag piece. I got breakfast at the diner this morning and they played Eurhythmics, Lady Gaga, Heart, Rihanna, Ace of Base, Kim Wide and Katy Perry.

Of course I sat shivering and confused, these songs hitting me like Esperanto.

Finally a song with a man's voice came on. I stood on the table, kicked all the food off and screamed all the words like a normal person

anecdotal experience truther up in here

Have a hoagie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

there are no commercial stations in the entire country that would play that many female-led songs in a row

I think it was 106.7 Lite FM, but keep trying!

There was two songs from men in there too iirc

Both of which I saluted like a flag

Of course bodega hoagie radio is just Mentors, Meatmen, XXXManik and the Eminem songs about killing his ex-wife

Looking like a lab experiment for Eurocentric beauty, toting a bank account full of platinum records and a panoply of celebrity friends, if Swift couldn’t seem to find love, and she wrote about this problem often, rooting for Taylor Swift the Cultural Question to find happiness was a bit like rooting for the house in blackjack.

"And how many celebrity friends would you like from your account today Ms Swift"

"Taylor Swift the Cultural Question" clap clap clap.. "Taylor Swift the Cultural Question" clap clap clap..

idk I like that sentence

yeah it's a bit overstuffed but I prefer that to bland

Bloody Nora, the radio guy just mentioned Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale 'Der er forskel' to express the difference in quality between these two teams. This isn't supposed to be educational ffs

sry rong thraed

bump

How do I express my hatred of this shit without going on some "I'm not like the other gays" tangent: https://www.billboard.com/articles/events/year-in-music-2017/8070980/best-gay-anthems-2017-songs-halsey-rupaul

Charli knows what The Gays™ want

Re: that Riton song - how does a house song w/ a choir and MNEK manage to sound rote, guess I answered my own question

https://www.xlr8r.com/reviews/2017/12/nabihah-iqbal-weighing-of-the-heart/

The promo information said one of the important elements of retiring the Throwing Shade name in favor of her birth name is to promote her Asian heritage. Good. But what’s interesting about her mixed ethnic heritage and education and experience is that the music to my ears sounds very "white." The subject matter colorless. I don’t sense the Asian-British experience we’re usually given. In an interview with i-D when asked to name a memorable song from her childhood, she said "something by Oasis." Now what’s beautiful about that is it’s unexpected and rarer than a white guy referencing a minority’s culture.

Excellent foot in mouth situation courtesy of Anton Lang reviewing my album for @XLR8R. The reason why I've chosen to use my birth name is to breakdown racial prejudices such as this. Sorry if you think I shouldn't be able to make guitar music because I'm not white. pic.twitter.com/TS7Fve1VSj

— Nabihah Iqbal (@nabihahiqbal) December 21, 2017

But he's not saying she shouldn't be able to make guitar music because she's not white - he's saying he had higher expectations of her (based on an awareness of her prior work) than bland indie. If that's prejudice, OK then.

it absolutely is. if he'd listened to it blindfolded would he have said the same thing? come on. also, his pulling out of a chance to chat with her about this on the radio speaks volumes.

wow that is like a vortex of awful ideas and awful writing

old man yells at the cloud https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-lost-art-of-music-snobbery/article37455129/?cmpid=rss1&click=sf_globe

not gonna get capt-save-a-weingarten here, but I mean I do think there IS a viable defense for music snobbery, especially when sites are out here running in-defense-of-normies articles like this

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/people-in-their-thirties-cant-stop-hoarding-cds?utm_term=.fkNJmLD8d#.rdearp9wG

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/i-love-my-five-dollar-headphones-and-i-bet-you-will-too.html

or this intro from the Vinyl Me, Please guide, which, lmao, fucking NO

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaUmBxCjVxo/

...

However, this article is ... not it.

not actually "laughing my fucking ass" off at that, but the NO stands

Also, I still love you, Max, even if I disagree with your article

Not sure Bob Dylan is a "thing no one else followed", even back then

it's the snobbery bit that's ridiculous and boring and doesn't not need expressing in public

not being personally interested in swathes of popular culture is absolutely legit on a personal level, even believing that those swathes are in some definable or objective sense lesser is umremarkable as a personal feeling, sometimes you might make an interesting case in a conversation. getting into it as a public thinkpiece invariably puts you on the side of the idiots tho.

i guess there's a subtle distinction between "snobbery" and "one-upmanship" and that article is really about the latter and the latter is for jerks

I mean also where is he actually encountering this?

No, it's the neo-snobs that have me riled up, those ADHD completists who stream all of the cool stuff and have the gall to flaunt the secret knowledge that was so hard won for us.

Did he get triggered by a /mu/ post or something

signs your article is bad: the “bad guys” in your head have a dsm5 diagnosis

he really pushed the boat out with “snoboisie”
u_u

"Do you know how hard it was to track down a Big Star record in 1982?! All three of the band's albums were long out of print,"

the 1978 PVC pressing of the 3rd album wouldn't have been hard to find in 1982. and they put it out again in 1985 and that pressing was everywhere. 1982 not a bad year to be a fan of almost anything from the 60s and 70s. everything was everywhere.

i was trying to describe the 90s CD boom to my kid the other day. he didn't know about the gold rush era. people going to Tower and spending a grand on jazz and soul and psych reissues like it was nothing. all of a sudden being able to buy 20 nurse with wound albums in one shot. people went nuts.

lol, i do remember that time period; watching people go to the counter with ridiculous stacks of cds

in 1982, real snobs just did mail order.

The vinyl me please guy rhapsodizes about wanting people to spend time with albums that matter meanwhile my buddy gifted me his (arrived in the mail like this) warped Vinyl Me Please copy of Dan deacon's Spiderman of the Rings.

I promised I'd be more charitable in 2018 but I am trying to wrap my mind around fighting The Evil Algorithms by going to major-label artist playlists. (the whole "Spotify can tell me that people who listen to Lorde also listen to other pop songs by young women, but it can’t pick out just the right one the way Lorde herself can" thing is showing up in more and more criticism.)

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16840940/spotify-algorithm-music-discovery-mix-cds-resolution

tech sites' music coverage is terrible

true but you'd expect them to be better than music sites at not talking about The Algorithms the way you'd talk about Bigfoot

(this is probably one of my biggest pet peeves right now because

a) the word "algorithm" has an actual meaning. like, every time you've done a multiplication problem, you used an algorithm
b) algorithms don't appear from the autonomous mind of skynet or whatever, they are made by people, but it's much easier to blame it all on The Algorithms than to think about why people might make the coding decisions they make and what influences them
c) the existence of an algorithm does not make something automatically bad)

Feel like that article could be a short little blurb suggesting people pay attention to how the music presented to them got to be presented to them and put time in to find ways of getting music presented to you in ways that work best for you.

Feel like it's not really doing that but gesturing towards it, but missing looking at how the songs got presented to Lorde in the first place (possibly algorhythmically) and to (take things a cynical step further) assuming that she just chose those cuz she liked them and not for label promotional reasons, etc...

it's almost certainly not Lorde (or anyone else), though, it's a 23-year-old in the office coordinating with other 23-year-olds when Justin Bieber can spontaneously tweet about this great new song he discovered

it's those damn 23 year olds!

to be fair sometimes they're as old as 29

don't trust anyone under 30

there's another "ooh spooky algorithms" piece by Rhett Miller in the outline (admittedly it touches on other subjects)

Didn't see it up there, does it have a bafflingly incongruous title or something?

can't link rn but it's actually in The Baffler, sorry