Post a controversial music opinion

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

Now I can't get the vision of Bernard Sumner singing "I Knew You Were Trouble" out of my head.

don't bring Kylie into it or you'll have yerman back

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.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, February 1, 2022 5:43 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos’] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raleigh_Grifter

I Love Marketing

― Evan, Tuesday, February 1, 2022 3:47 PM (thirty-one minutes ago)

A controversial opinion indeed.

xp good bikes! i had a no-brand knock-off version when i was 9 that just said 'SATAN' on the frame

"How's the literary grift go?" I asked.

He looked at me sharply, demanding: "You haven't been reading me?"

"No. Where'd you get that funny idea?"

"There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven't met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?" He had always liked to talk that way.

"Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk."

maybe John Cage 4' 33" is an example of a musical grift? like you went expecting music and got silence?

ban ums

Same thing but in reverse with "The Sound of Silence"

maybe John Cage 4' 33" is an example of a musical grift? like you went expecting music and got silence?

People asking for a refund were told "but money is everywhere, even in your empty wallet"

xpost please do

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.

could only make it a minute in but this video is extremely admirable

Robert Wyatt is a musical genius and one of the finest songwriters that's ever lived, but his twee whimsical Englishman voice can sometimes grate on me over the duration of an album. See also: the guy from Gentle Giant

I know. In the wrong mood he grates on me too.

Bowie has no front-to-back great albums.

"Scary Monsters" is pretty fucking close.

(xxp) You mean the second singer in Gentle Giant? It's the lead singer I can't stand.

(xxp) You mean the second singer in Gentle Giant? It's the lead singer I can't stand.

― Bastards of Fish (Tom D.), Thursday, February 10, 2022 10:08 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't realize there were two singers! Whichever one sings stuff like "An Inmate's Lullaby."

Yes, that's the keyboard player singing.

aren't there three singers in GG? at least up until Octopus there were

"An Inmate's Lullaby" is actually Derek Shulman singing, the Gentle Giant site confirms it.

Phil Shulman sang some leads on the early records, like "Isn't It Quiet and Cold".

So we still don't know who dislikes which singer.

Here's a helpful guide from their website, an example of a song where all three sing lead in different parts:

The Advent of Panurge
Lead vocals: Kerry, overdubbed (or perhaps with Phil); Derek ("Then said he fair Pantagruel..."); Phil ("Look at my friend...")

Gentle Giant was one of my dad's favorite bands and I only remember bits and pieces of their records from my childhood. I've never actively listened to them despite my love of many of their contemporaries like Camel, Yes, and even Yezda Urfa, who I am told is basically a GG clone band. I guess I should revisit at some point, I bet I'd love them now.

My controversial music opinion is that it's cool to read Rabelais and then name your rock song "The Advent of Panurge".