pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

yeah, that happened much earlier on the singles front. But their album year-end list took a lot longer to change.

I've said it before, but no black artist won Album of the Year until Kanye in 2010. So far six out of eight winners have been black this decade.

i was loling at pfork when it started reviewing movies in like 2002.. like "oh how cute theyre reviewing movies"

I've said it before, but no black artist won Album of the Year until Kanye in 2010. So far six out of eight winners have been black this decade.

Interestingly enough, the same could be said about ILM's year end polls, except replace Kanye with Big Boi and not count 2017 yet.

:(

@Pitchfork stop culture vulturing the industry just to make y’all website hot. I don’t fuck with your website and this yall 2nd article on me. Watery dropped and y’all hopped on it on some bandwagon shit.

— King Squid 🐙 (@SahBabii) January 9, 2018

Music critics have always had an incredible hard on for the Blue Nile since those records came out, and they're still to this day one of those acts that are mostly cited by music critics, wannabe music critics and people who follow music critics. Nobody else actually gives a shit.

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican), Tuesday, 9 January 2018 16:48 (yesterday) Permalink

happily, I'm not terribly interested in the Blue Nile views of people outside that particular venn diagram.

Incidentally I discovered them at the beginning of 1998, I think through a Glenn McDonald review of Peace At Last, which prompted me to pick up A Walk Across The Rooftops instead. At the time I didn't fancy myself a wannabe music critic but it still struck me as among the most amazing music I had ever heard.

I think deej's analysis is correct, though I'd spin it slightly and say it's perhaps not so much (or not only) that the Blue Nile were always much better than their low profile suggested (this being true of any number of 80s acts who remain obscure), but also/rather that they were so much more singular: I think bands which plot out a sufficient space such that sympathetic listeners can say "this is my ideal sound right here and there is nothing else like it" will always end up garnering a rep - you namecheck The Blue Nile for a certain vibe because the closest analogues (Avalon et. al.) just aren't really that close.

otm

part of why pfork's news looks the way it does aside from conde nast traffic goals (tho it's mostly that) is that they have a lot of young writers on staff now (primarily writing news) who don't remember a pre-poptimist internet. the idea of not treating beyonce and rihanna as canon artists is foreign to them. there's a strand of connection from this worldview to the one that also opens up that canon to prestige tv i.e. stranger things.

"Kendrick Lamar Doesn’t Address Trump at Football Halftime Show: Watch" is pretty funny tho

I think deej's analysis is correct, though I'd spin it slightly and say it's perhaps not so much (or not only) that the Blue Nile were always much better than their low profile suggested (this being true of any number of 80s acts who remain obscure), but also/rather that they were so much more singular: I think bands which plot out a sufficient space such that sympathetic listeners can say "this is my ideal sound right here and there is nothing else like it" will always end up garnering a rep - you namecheck The Blue Nile for a certain vibe because the closest analogues (Avalon et. al.) just aren't really that close.

― Tim F, Tuesday, January 9, 2018 10:03 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im going to waggishly suggest that singular-ness is one major aspect of what goes into them being so much better than other acts & so my logic remains flawless B-)

That's fair, I assumed it's part of what you meant in the first place.

Perhaps stating the bleeding obvious, but:

I think a lot of these "oh you're treating your subjective opinion as objective fact" disputes seem to operate on the assumption that something can either be true for one person or true for everyone, and those two approaches are the only ways to look at it. Whereas obviously we don't have totally atomised or homogenised music tastes, but rather overlapping fields of group behaviour and interests. So the relevant questions that interest me are more: "why is this true for some rather than many, or many rather than a few? How do things change from one to the other?" And of course the answer to that is often tied up in the expression of taste, the fact that even the act of listening to music in the privacy of our own room at night is at least partly performative (even if only to ourselves). But the risk then is to reduce this to a set of demystified social cues, like "oh, x is popular because it's namechecked by y" - that's partly right, but people don't blindly follow and then agree with every namecheck from a trusted gatekeeper, it's also about how/why that music then fits in within the broader context of the person's tastes so that they respond it as much as they do.

To my mind a big factor in making The Blue Nile ripe for greater post-mortem crossover over the past decade has been the critical redemption of monied class marginalia which started gathering steam in about the middle of the last decade - balearic, soft-rock etc. (which extended to a certain kind of eighties pop not necessarily swept up with the prior electroclash / eighties revivals - e.g. stuff like Billy Idol's "Eyes Without A Face"). Although superficially The Blue Nile doesn't seem entirely to fit into that space, I think their combination of smoothness, lushness and sincerity, and their distinct lack of youthful energy, is immediately much more attractive to listeners who are already primed to appreciate the former set of traits and not be concerned about the latter. That environment creates effects in the way that people talk about music that extend beyond the limits of the relevant revivals and the people actively participating in them. A music context in which that lost Lewis album can generate a lot of excitement amongst (a still relatively small group of) critics is a context in which The Blue Nile are more likely to be name-checked in the first place, more likely to end up in retrospective lists, more likely to get reviews on Pitchfork etc. At the same time, because The Blue Nile are not ultimately replaceable or capable of substitution within that field (which I'd argue Lewis is, really), the uptick in their popularity is basically detached from the fortunes of that particular revivalist scene

who would you replace Lewis with?

https://img.discogs.com/6tpu2PK6E-c0haBr3ABw1a-8g1w=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-6078906-1410515947-1544.jpeg.jpg

To my mind a big factor in making The Blue Nile ripe for greater post-mortem crossover over the past decade has been the critical redemption of monied class marginalia which started gathering steam in about the middle of the last decade - balearic, soft-rock etc. (which extended to a certain kind of eighties pop not necessarily swept up with the prior electroclash / eighties revivals - e.g. stuff like Billy Idol's "Eyes Without A Face"). Although superficially The Blue Nile doesn't seem entirely to fit into that space[...]

― Tim F, Wednesday, 10 January 2018 13:01

There are a few people making "chilled"/"balearic" compilations for whom it does (example 1, example 2).

(Also, *very* nicely worded explanation of the subjective-objective continuum, rather than dichotomy)

I think through a Glenn McDonald review of Peace At Last

damn, at the heart of all things is glenn

you namecheck The Blue Nile for a certain vibe because the closest analogues (Avalon et. al.) just aren't really that close.

i was gonna make this point and felt silly about it but you made it much better, thank u tim

Glenn McDonald reviewing a Blue Nile album blows my mind

To my mind a big factor in making The Blue Nile ripe for greater post-mortem crossover over the past decade has been the critical redemption of monied class marginalia which started gathering steam in about the middle of the last decade - balearic, soft-rock etc.

kind of interested in how that broad shift happened tbh - obv it's somehow connected to the revival of critical (and in some cases, popular) interest in the non-marginal stuff too (mac, dan, maybe michael mcdonald also). and now new age music, which very much falls into the category of 'monied class marginalia'.

with respect to the blue nile, i think that fleetwood mac are maybe a useful point of reference - there are parts of hats where it sounds p much like a tango in the night for lonely guys just thinking baout things. not just the synths either, there's the whole romantic sweep of their music - they completely lack the basic emotional chillness that i think is a basic part of a lot of other balearic or soft-rock alligned music. there's a point in 'downtown lights' for instance where it sounds like some sort of ecstatic communion with the city born out of the sheer ache of separation, an i-wanna-be-with-you-everywhereness willed into being on a rainsoaked streetcorner. see, i feel very unchill even trying to describe the feelings it gives me.

Sade and Tango in the Night are precisely the acts/albums I thought Tim was referring to with "monied class marginalia."

also -and this is entirely fanciful- but i listen to paul buchanan singing 'i know it's over now' and i can't help thinking about how morrisey's stock has fallen while the blue nile's has risen and maybe this is all part of some cosmic redressing of the books

https://media.giphy.com/media/7kFWNDCTwzsDm/giphy.gif

James Franco Says Sexual Misconduct Allegations Are “Not Accurate”

was Franco ever in a band or something?

I would be very surprised if he wasn't.

tango in the night for lonely guys just thinking baout things
haha, that's good

as you elaborated, though, it's so romantically pathetic (in the Greek sense)

it should be noted that the original u.k. pressing of a walk across the rooftops on Linn was designed to appeal to people who owned multiple copies of the mobile fidelity sound lab pressing of Aja. also, nobody owns any other album on Linn. #hipmusicalcrush

I don't think The Blue Nile's stock has risen at all - it's more or less the same as it's always been. It's easy to get the impression that it's risen based off activity on this forum, but in the real world I'd say no. Morrissey's stock has definitely been damaged over the last couple of decades.

turrican tell us more about the real world

The biggest difference between Avalon and the first two Blue Nile LP's is that it's a far more exciting and absorbing record.

the reason that x is a bad poster is not bc they believe their opinions are objective reality but bc they are fundamentally incurious about what other people think and act like a humorless wiener about it

or even less "fundamentally incurious what other people think" than fundamentally incurious about the contexts in which music is meaningful to other people

this of course is an extremely dissonant attitude on what is ostensibly a ***discussion*** board imo and primarily expresses itself as long stupid arguments about the beatles

Translation: "Wahhh, why can't I have influence on people that can make up their own minds?"

it's a far more exciting and absorbing record.

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican), 10. januar 2018 17:50 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're so pathetically bad at this.

your ability to absorb information is deeply impoverished

xp

i think their stock has risen a little but not a great deal

Yes, so Brad is annoyed that I won't (and don't - and I've already explained why) take his opinions seriously, and Frederik is doing his usual predictable Scrappy Doo routine.

None of this having anything to do with the perception of the Blue Nile beyond these forums, of course.

UFO kinda OTM but I feel that it just feels that way because a couple of people got into those records on this forum and were heavily vocal about it.

Or because Pitchfork just published a 'sunday classic' review of them. You're literally discussing them on the pitchfork thread. How dumb are you?

hey everyone, i just went out into real life and took some readings. turns out that the stock of blue nile has risen, but only by 34 points, which hovers on the edge of stastistical significance. i repeat, blue nile's stock is up by 34 points over the last decade in the real world.

Well, objectivity has spoken. Discussion closed.

this argument is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Smart enough to realise that Pitchfork in the big scheme of things - even though it's obviously made a name for itself - still only speaks for a very small percentage of people on the planet, Frederik.

you know what i'm bullish on? eastern sounds by yusef lateef. keep hearing people mention it. and you can even get 50 bucks for the 70s reissue now. did pitchfork write about it?

I think we should settle this Blue Nile matter as we do all others, by checking Youtube views and Spotify streams, and then divining how many of them were Sincere

the hats reissue was largely ignored by the press in 2013 and i'm not sure that things have changed that much since then (t's nice p4k cares about them now) but i would like it if they had

lol scrappy dane

blue nile owns the zone u bums

also, kinks village green mania shows no sign of abating. people still REALLY want that record. the price just keeps going up and up for old copies. it's nuts.

"sir, your product is The Blue Nile records"

i do feel bad for that destroyer guy because he obviously likes a lot of really talented artists and it must be hard to never reach that level and want to so badly. kinda like all those people who wanted to be the beach boys and who nobody listens to anymore.

The fact that this thread is still discussing the Blue Nile is one of the most ILM things I've ever seen.

kaputt is better than everything that influenced it (though i know thats controversial), and he doesn't seem too fussed about that sort of thing really. in interviews for the last two albums he's seemed fairly bewildered that he got so much attention for kaputt but also doesn't really care if it happens again

he might say that in an interview, but his haircut says "it's hard"