latepassapedia: records that were light years better the ones indie dudes eventually endorsed as classics

I see now that it's more about being cooler and more knowledgeable than indie fans abt jazz and hip hop so I'll just remove bookmark

― niels, Friday, November 30, 2018 10:28 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i get that ppl can get petty / personal about this stuff but i think there are genuinely lots of critics who are just responding to the conversation and then there are critics (and fans) who do the hard work of listening to lots of music & figuring out what people are missing out on and helping to propel that attention, and i don't really see a problem with pointing out where the illusion that 'critical consensus = quality' falls apart. I also don't see how its 'cool chasing' to make these arguments ... most ppl here are pretty invested in music & i dont think there's really that much of ppl being like "damn tim f is wearing a leather jacket & sunglasses when he posts about Herbert what a badass" going on

tim f is a badass who posts in a leather jacket and sunglasses, but not because he posts about herbert

otm

Guys I told you not to share those pics.

i think there are genuinely lots of critics who are just responding to the conversation and then there are critics (and fans) who do the hard work of listening to lots of music & figuring out what people are missing out on and helping to propel that attention, and i don't really see a problem with pointing out where the illusion that 'critical consensus = quality' falls apart.

yeah exactly, and I'd make the further point that just because hypothetical critic A misses the bus on one record that hypothetical critic B was right onto, doesn't mean their roles aren't reversed in respect of another record. I think any critic worth their salt develops a fair amount of humility about how much amazing music being made right now they are not aware of it for the simple reason that it's impossible to be on top of everything. If anything, the more music you consume the stronger that feeling becomes. For my part, I'm just following the conversation in the majority of areas of music I try to check out.

I'm not so interested in the fact that this happens and who was there first as I am in the ways that it can happen. A lot of it comes down to context, and what constellations of other contemporaneous music a record arrives within, and whether that constellation creates a broader sense of momentum that propels and incites people's curiosity.

A recurring feature of several of the suggestions in this thread is that the earlier record that didn't get as many plaudits also didn't really make a huge amount of sense within a critical context at the time of its release, whereas by the time of the follow-up there was a broader attitude of interest generated not merely by the earlier record but by other records.

Isolee is a good example here: "Beau Mot Plage" was a hit within certain house music circles, but otherwise Rest was a knotty record that wouldn't necessarily have seemed representative of anything happening within dance music that was worth talking about more broadly, unless you happened to be paying very close attention to the scene from which it emerged (nb. in June 2000 I certainly wasn't; I only checked it out the next year after Simon Reynolds said it was his album of 2000).

Whereas by 2005, anyone who paid attention to critically feted dance music at all would have been marinated in years of celebrations of microhouse-through-minimal-house, in which context WeAreMonster seemed like An Important Record.

c.f. Luomo's Vocalcity - another mid-2000 record in the same broad style as Rest that lots of people missed initially (I first heard it about a year later) but which is more in the Bon Iver mould of being afforded all those critical hosannas once people did discover it. It's interesting to consider what is the distinguishing feature here; one may be that Vocalcity, like For Emma, Long Ago, doesn't really need a surrounding context in order for its importance/singularity/etc. to be understood or made sense of, it's more in the artist-is-a-genre vein.

Clipse seems like the archetypal example of this whole idea, in part because it's hard to attribute the leap in interest for HHNF relative to Lord Willin' to anything other than changes in the way that mainstream critical attitudes towards rap had shifted between early 2003 and late 2006. The debut was hardly an obscure record, and there's not really anything about the follow-up that suggests that critics were latching onto something different to what they could have latched onto with the debut had they so chosen.

skinny love is kinda the archetypal indie song of its era so it's hard to think of that record as in any way passed over

It always bugs me that Floral Shoppe won all the awards, but Eccojams was the better record by miles - it was obvious at the time that Floral Shoppe was a kind of "consolation prize" that was in the right place at the right time, and of course nowadays vapourwave is a silly joke that has been and gone. But Eccojams has something haunting about it. It has an emotional dimension that vapourwave mostly avoided.

rap seems particularly prone to this as it can seem like a chore to go back and listen to a hip hop album that came out 3 or 4 years ago

I really prefer "Ruins" to any of the later Oneohtrix Point Never things
Beyonce "B'Day" was, in my small world anyway, the album that opened the gates of pop (broadly speaking) to me and my indie friends and everybody put away their Shins records forever
Shostakovich symphonies 5 > 10 > 4 is the consensus but I think but 4 > 10 > 5 is correct
Eno: Green > Jets > Tiger > Science is the consensus but I think Tiger > Jets > Science > Green is correct
Stereolab mk. 1 > McCarthy >> all other iterations

Also:

I say this every three weeks I feel but Fucked Up's "Epics In Minutes" is one of the best albums (compilations) I can think of and towers over "Hidden World" and everything else
(edited because I said this seven years ago already)

Does The Outsiders vs. Chief from Eric Church fit here?

I really love Give Me Back My Hometown, but Outsiders is lesser overall I think. I dunno about indie dudes I guess, but it felt at the time like all critics were showering praise on The Outsiders retroactively for Chief

It's hard to tell with a case like that, since "Springsteen" (from Chief) is the song that got him noticed by country outsiders

1989

sorry - wrong way round. taylor had 4 (better) records under her belt before 1989

I was saying that indies were up on those records. You guys should stick to gchat for stuff like this.

― peacocks, Sunday, January 30, 2011 7:10 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you should stick to dchat, where the d stands for my dick

― url sweatshirt (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, January 30, 2011 7:11 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Shostakovich symphonies 5 > 10 > 4 is the consensus but I think but 4 > 10 > 5 is correct

Stalin was a milquetoast Animal Collective fan but even he knew that the Pretty Toney Album is better than Fishscale.

Shostakovich symphonies 5 > 10 > 4 is the consensus but I think but 4 > 10 > 5 is correct

It's 14 > 10 > 15 > 13 > 4 > 1 > 8 > 9 > 5 > the rest, as far as I'm concerned.

Oooooh, no 11? No Leningrad? Wow

For The Roses - Joni Mitchell

Also yeah, Shos 11 bangs wtf

10 is really amazing, the first mvt. is perfect in every way, along with 1st mvt. Bartok Music For Strings+ it's my favourite 'unspooling' in the canon. 2nd mvt. is fun when Dudamel does it; 3rd mvt. is good jokes I guess, the DSCH thing is cheesy; 4th mvt. well idk I read that at the premiere all the starving Leningradians ran out into the street crying with joy at its conclusion but to me it just sounds like a snooze alarm that won't quit

"For The Roses" isn't "light years" ahead of "Blue" but I do think it deserves much more love than the three more-celebrated albums that followed it

Listen I like For the Roses a lot but that is a wild opinion

FTR seems entirely in Blue's shadow and appears to be a bit of a blank spot, some songs are every bit as beautiful, fraught and confessional as Blue.

The 11th Symphony is decent film music disguised as Soviet agitprop. Not a bad work by any means, but it lacks the tragic heft of his less populist pieces. I like my Shosty either morbidly despairing or caustically mocking the powers-that-be, head-on, so I tend to gravitate towards his later material. Anyway, in keeping with the thread's premise, I do agree that the 4th is a better work than the 5th (I may even prefer the 1st, overall) but it doesn't top the 10th.

Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman >>>>> Sweetener

The new Idles seems like a pretty good example of this phenomenon.

Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman >>>>> Sweetener

― ufo, Tuesday, December 4, 2018 8:17 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

severely otm

extREMELY otm ^

Ariana Grande, My Everything >>> dangerous woman > Sweetener

christ, of all her records, my everything?

hell yeah. now don't have me take this all the way to the "inclining" thread!

er, declining. so many threads.

jesus this thread is embarrassing plz stop