Post a controversial music opinion

back to basics, just four guys in a room, grifting

xp: it’s like raaaaaaaaaaiiiiin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOo4e5fPVQ4

https://www.trendstees.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/John-Lennon-broke-up-Fluxus.jpg

Yoko Ono is a terrible artist and was the main factor in the break-up of the Beatles.
Pink Floyd only became good after Syd left.

These might be controversial on ILX but out in the real world they certainly aren't. Ditto 'music for teenage girls' comment. These are just bog standard boring old boomer fart opinions.

So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

These might be controversial on ILX but out in the real world they certainly aren't. Ditto 'music for teenage girls' comment. These are just bog standard boring old boomer fart opinions

I have no dog in the 'music for teenage girls' fight, but as for the opinions I expressed, I made that exact point in my post - they're controversial in here, but not out there. And as far as I'm concerned it's the real world that's right and ILX that is wrong. I have no problem with being described as a boring old boomer fart, in my ways that's exactly what I am.

It was kind of a drag when record stores used to keep Taylor Swift CDs in the "Young Adult" section.

Is this for real(?) I’ve never seen a “Young Adult” section in a record store!

I went to the Idiots section of the record store and then realized I was at Cracker Barrel

I have no dog in the 'music for teenage girls' fight, but as for the opinions I expressed, I made that exact point in my post - they're controversial in here, but not out there. And as far as I'm concerned it's the real world that's right and ILX that is wrong. I have no problem with being described as a boring old boomer fart, in my ways that's exactly what I am.

― joni mitchell jarre (anagram),

why on earth would you align yourself with "out there"?

when you look at a masculine counter-example like, say, spoon, they're doing it for the music and their audience is music-appreciators. as if spoon couldn't possibly be considering their audience's tastes and desires when making an album.

This reminds me of an interview w/Frank Black, talking about his Pixies songwriting, where he said something like (I'm paraphrasing from memory) - "I make sure to throw in some surreal bullshit, because that's what the college kids go for."

Is this for real(?) I’ve never seen a “Young Adult” section in a record store!

It was usually next to the Romance section

i think it's kind of funny how supposedly cynical marketing instincts are tied with fakeness are tied with comittees are tied with femaleness (because when is a woman pop star in control of her songwriting?) are tied with grifting and when you look at a masculine counter-example like, say, spoon, they're doing it for the music and their audience is music-appreciators.

How about the 10,000 clone-stamp bro-country singers who are so faceless and interchangeable the only way you can pick one out of the pack is when he foolishly allows the racism to metastasize from subtext to text.

the disingenuousness is obvious and indeed this has all been pointed out hundreds maybe thousands of times on this board, usually much clearer than here, for 20 fucking years now.

― Nedlene Grendel as Basenji Holmo (map),

Simon Frith has been beating this drum since at least 1978!

"springsteen is the real grifter"

nashville music machine is 100% a grift

all of life in all its facets is Grift

How about the 10,000 clone-stamp bro-country singers who are so faceless and interchangeable the only way you can pick one out of the pack is when he foolishly allows the racism to metastasize from subtext to text.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

I'm pretty sure, having spent hundreds of hour distinguishing Walker Hayes from Lee Brice, that the country men form part of a cynical marketing campaign.

I probably posted this before, but I went to some drive-in movie event sponsored by Chevrolet and they were just blasting bro country the whole night & then I realized that every single song mentioned a "Chevy" and I pretty much realized immediately that any of the post Big&Rich country poptimism (that I also engaged in, tbf) was a huge fucking mass delusion and total mistake

tis a grift to be simple
tis a grift to be free

lol

my huge controversial opinion is that Salieri deliberately killed Mozart by giving him too many assignments

drove my Chevy to the levee

I haven't been following the thread but I want to know if is a controversial opinion to imply some major label music is written or at least produced specifically with target demographics in mind? Or is the belief that this sort of thing only happens exclusively outside of the studio? Not referring to any aforementioned artists here btw

― Evan, Tuesday

The passive voice in your first sentence does a lot of work. Madonna, Swift, etc. don't sit down with producers and write music for a demographic -- why would they? They want streams, and before streams they wanted CD/download sales from as many people as possible. How a record company promotes them, though, addresses your point.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 1, 2022 2:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just wanted to know the consensus! I didn't really have a point to make. I know that the work I do designing commercialized retail packaging for corporate brands gives me insight into a lot of demographic and market research early in the development and I could imagine large music companies treating pop stars just like those brands, shaping them into the perceived perfect product based on testing and projections etc. and not necessarily being hands off only until after the music is made in the studio. Again not talking about anyone in particular, though the recent country clone examples seem like a good candidate.

i lowkey got obsessed with a recent stupid fucking nashville grift machine track "you time" by the american idol man that looks like a little boy and the video is literally him showing up to the studio in his pjs being like "ok what we recording today... ok later!" and like the dudes writing the song for him. hey it's honest work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxpFNYfePHk

all good xpost

Madonna, Swift, etc. don't sit down with producers and write music for a demographic -- why would they? They want streams, and before streams they wanted CD/download sales from as many people as possible. How a record company promotes them, though, addresses your point.

There was a fair bit of discussion in Nothing But a Good Time, the hair metal oral history, about how bands would often e.g. intentionally write power ballads (that they sometimes weren't crazy about themselves) in order to target teenaged girls; they'd release two harder songs first for the boys and then cross over with the ballad as the third single.

that's true

laurie anderson did a series of concerts in 2015 of music made stictly for dogs

Brian Wilson wrote symphonies that were only for God

my main point is I think some people itt are asking "well isn't there some circumstance where it's ok to talk about whom the music is geared towards?"

I think this stuff is actually pretty interesting to talk about, in terms of artists' intentions, and an alright way of thinking about classifications of music. There's music "for god", which of course quite a bit of music purports to be. There's also "music for animals", "Soothing Sounds For Baby", "music for people in an airport terminal", "for an individual person" etc.

What boring old boomer farts tend to mean when they say "music I don't like is for teenage girls" is that they think teenage girls are easily seduced and manipulated and probably too stupid to even suspect that they're being marketed to, whereas adult men are of course way too savvy to ever be persuaded by advertising.

in other words, a "grift"

people write music for other people

― Nedlene Grendel as Basenji Holmo (map), Tuesday, February 1, 2022 2:21 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

sometimes Mike Patton writes it for nobody

― he's very big in the region of my butthole (Neanderthal), Tuesday, February 1, 2022 2:22 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is so so LOL I love it

I do object to the objection to the deployment of "grift" or "scam" or any similar observation. (I thought there was some offensive anti-Semitic thing about the term when people were objecting.) There is such a thing as a "good grift" it's called a magic trick, and every successful musician achieves it, until they don't. I don't think it's an unfair assessment, I don't think it necessarily casts "people who've been taken in" by the grift/trick as being blind/stupid, their belief has been suspended, that's all

It was just over ten years ago that pre-Bangerz Miley and pre-Red Taylor appeared on the Grammies for a duet and I am absolutely sure that the discussion on this board had the tone of "Miley stay the FUCK away from our girl" and see, tables have turned

Also I do think the general tendency to assess female musicians based on their singing chops is the product of misogynist culture, this simply does not happen to men. Or maybe it does I don't follow the Edwin Collins/Andy Partridge discourse that closely

it's true there is a hint of misogyny to 'she can't sing'. or it's often paired with something that's more obviously misogynist.

Mewzig vor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ICfktt7Ugc

I regularly go to concerts with a toy piano and scream "flat!" and play the proper note over and over until they fix it

Sarah Brand ftw.

I regularly resist misogyny by judging Bernard Sumner on his inability to sing.

i think it's kind of funny how supposedly cynical marketing instincts are tied with fakeness are tied with comittees are tied with femaleness (because when is a woman pop star in control of her songwriting?) are tied with grifting and when you look at a masculine counter-example like, say, spoon, they're doing it for the music and their audience is music-appreciators. as if spoon couldn't possibly be considering their audience's tastes and desires when making an album. there is a funny 'protected innocence' aspect to it. so many men use this kind of discourse to sell music to men based on this desire for innocence and purity. talk about a grift lol. the disingenuousness is obvious and indeed this has all been pointed out hundreds maybe thousands of times on this board, usually much clearer than here, for 20 fucking years now.

Wouldn't a more analogous male artist be someone like Justin Bieber or Ed Sheeran? Might be interesting to see how discourse around Spoon compares to e.g. discourse around Mitski.

I do object to the objection to the deployment of "grift" or "scam" or any similar observation. (I thought there was some offensive anti-Semitic thing about the term when people were objecting.) There is such a thing as a "good grift" it's called a magic trick, and every successful musician achieves it, until they don't. I don't think it's an unfair assessment, I don't think it necessarily casts "people who've been taken in" by the grift/trick as being blind/stupid, their belief has been suspended, that's all

Given the way the poster in question was only calling hugely successful female pop stars "grifters", I'm not willing to grant him this more charitable reading.

I regularly resist misogyny by judging Bernard Sumner on his inability to sing.

lol I identify very strongly with this

Male artists with technically ‘non traditional’ voices (Dylan, Cohen etc) often get the plaudits for all these other things they have in their arsenal (lyrics, melody, phrasing etc) and often people go all in and their voice becomes part of the package that fans come to appreciate

Whereas I think there’s an assumption with female artists where the criticism is “she can’t sing” = what else does she do, surely she doesn’t write the songs or words or have any agency in her own music beyond the voice

Also some overlap with ‘female fronted’ bands = assumption that the male guitarist or whoever is the real genius behind the scenes

I'm fine with using grift wrt music if it's solely used to describe what Kid Rock is doing

Meredith Brooks, when interviewed by Guitar magazine for her first album, said she deliberately would not let anybody else play leads on her breakthrough album in 1997 because she said if she did, everybody would assume all the "cool" parts were played by her male guitar player and that she just played the simple stuff.

The Grifters were a cool band

There's a famous Björk quote about how she did basically everything on one of her albums, taking years to do so, and a male collaborator came in and made a few tweaks and every journalist assumed he did everything and all she did was sing.

I do object to the objection to the deployment of "grift" or "scam" or any similar observation.

I'm inclined to welcome the kind of magic trickery you describe and to be manipulated in this way and I see it as potentially enriching on an individual, case by case basis. But the cumulative effect of being constantly bombarded with seductive things is actually quite harmful.

controversial opinion: this thread was much better before it became an ILM thread again

I Love Marketing

fgti: I think I was the first to object to the term "grift," but tbc I wasn't saying you shouldn't use the word ever, it was a specific context.

OTOH, while I'm not a prescriptivist, the definition of grift is pretty narrow:
"to obtain (money or property) illicitly (as in a confidence game)" and "to acquire money or property illicitly"

So from my perspective, it doesn't mean "trick" and by this definition, there is no such thing as a "good grift" (apart from some kind of Robin Hood scenario). Vernacular usage may be trending your way, but the original meaning still dominates—the word spread like wildfire during the Trump administration for a reason—and anyway there is no way Austin intended it as a compliment on Madonna's stagecraft.

The Grifters were great; if they ever knowingly grifted they had a funny way of going about it