Maligned Genres aka "I like everything except..."

Also Jump Up is pretty explicitly designed for MC’s to ride over. Listening to the tracks individually misses the point really.

On that note, pleasant liquid 2-step merchant Calibre’s set with Bassman & Trigga, 2 of the yardie-est MC’s out there is a thing of wonder. Probably musical kryptonite to most of ILX tbf.

https://on.soundcloud.com/kBmt3WbSTeXWWkGU9

linear beats are great, check out shy fx remix of courtney melody vs pd syndicate (rodney p / mj cole) "ruff like we"

hey wait where’s vocalese in this poll

― the late great

does anybody besides miles davis hate bob dorough tho

does anybody besides miles davis hate bob dorough tho

I do. I am the jazz critic who hates almost all jazz vocals (with occasional latitude granted to Jeanne Lee, Linda Sharrock, Abbey Lincoln in full revenant mode, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Jazzmeia Horn). Scat singing is called that for a reason.

so if i understand you correctly what you’re saying is you’re too soft and unmasculine to enjoy lambert hendricks and ross

this performance is what finally made vocalese click for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhq7fSrXn0c

I do. I am the jazz critic who hates almost all jazz vocals (with occasional latitude granted to Jeanne Lee, Linda Sharrock, Abbey Lincoln in full revenant mode, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Jazzmeia Horn). Scat singing is called that for a reason.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

wait ELLA? you hate ELLA?

and i'm gonna be that super jazz nerd who points out that scat singing and vocalese are two entirely different phenomena, vocalese puts lyrics to songs that were originally instrumental. so oscar brown doing "afro blue" would be vocalese.

does anybody besides miles davis hate bob dorough tho

All I know about Bob Dorough is that Captain Beefheart used to play his records to the (Trout Mask era) Magic Band.

vocalese puts lyrics to songs that were originally instrumental

Grounds for arrest IMO.

otm

i can understand why someone wouldn't like jazz vox, even though i do. even if i lean more towards late night moody jazz vocals over high energy vocals. billie, helen merrill, sad sinatra, johnny hartman etc

i support al jarreau but not the manhattan transfer

Same, gotta say I'm not a big fan of scatting and even less of a fan of vocalese.

xp

All I know about Bob Dorough is that Captain Beefheart used to play his records to the (Trout Mask era) Magic Band.

― Maggot Bairn (Tom D.)

i basically got to know him through schoolhouse rock, like a lot of other people of my generation

vocalese puts lyrics to songs that were originally instrumental

Grounds for arrest IMO.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

nobody likes jazz police.

i'll admit my perspective is weird... i'm the girl who wants to like everything... if i hear something other people like and i don't like it, i need to figure out why. and often i wind up liking it, liking music other people tend to dismiss. fortune's 1985 s/t... i mean these days robert e.o. speedwagon is a watchword for the worst sort of villainy, and you know, i'm not sure that's entirely fair.

i'll admit my perspective is weird... i'm the girl who wants to like everything... if i hear something other people like and i don't like it, i need to figure out why. and often i wind up liking it, liking music other people tend to dismiss.

I know what I like and what I don't, and I'm not very "sellable" — you will almost never convince me to give anything a try, especially if it's in a genre or neighborhood I already think of as Not For Me. That said, I never try to convince anyone else that their taste is wrong. If you like something I think is terrible, that won't stop me from saying "I think that music is terrible," but I won't give you shit for liking it.

I like scatting and vocalese. Betty Carter rules. Dee Dee z rich water rules.

lol Dee Dee Bridgwater

this thread causes brain damage

so oscar brown doing "afro blue" would be vocalese.

abby lincoln does a great version of this, as well all know

I know what I like and what I don't, and I'm not very "sellable" — you will almost never convince me to give anything a try, especially if it's in a genre or neighborhood I already think of as Not For Me. That said, I never try to convince anyone else that their taste is wrong. If you like something I think is terrible, that won't stop me from saying "I think that music is terrible," but I won't give you shit for liking it.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

oh i'm not inclined to sell people on stuff, nobody's paying me for this stuff; i'm just a big nerd who goes off about stuff she likes, sometimes in a socially awkward way. also a lot of the stuff i like is stuff which is... let's say sort of a niche taste. i wouldn't know _how_ to sell a record like shiru8bit's _faulty robots_, a collection of music made for the astonishingly primitive commodore PET sound chip. i mean if that's the sort of thing someone would be interested in, they probably wouldn't need any more selling than that, and if they weren't, no amount of salesmanship would suffice.

it's totally fine to not like ella's singing, it's just unusual and sometimes i get taken aback a little bit. i'm pretty open about liking music i think is terrible - _faulty robots_ sounds terrible and i love it. there are good chiptune records but you just can't make a good chiptune record on that soundchip.

my brother used to give me a lot of shit for liking terrible music. i mean he still would i guess but we stopped talking. i concluded that he didn't actually like me very much.

I realized that I didn’t really know what Goa trance sounded like in the first year of the pandemic, and so just went to youtube and can’t relate at all to people hating this music with any vehemence. Anyway, I like this old school mix a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnT0rt3ZJQ

yeah I can’t hate

Does the music hypnotize goats?

love that free jazz is included in both this poll and the hip genres poll

― c u (crüt), Friday, 19 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Lol love this for free jazz.

be a bit flat if it didn't have polarising response innit

Flat Jazz

like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoP00Dz8uJY

Psy-Trance - there was a brief moment in 94/95 where Goa Trance, still showing it's EBM and New Beat roots, sounded new and exciting. Especially on acid. I still love that stuff. Within a year it had found a formula and for the past three decades psytrance has stuck rigidly, unwaveringly to that formula. Musically and culturally it seeks to emulate that one moment when it blew people's minds. It fails.

Electro-Swing - is shit, but it's not like anyone just happens across it. You'd need to hunt it out if you wanted to hear it. I've not given it a thought in over 15 years, so whatever.

Country & Western - is a massive, multifaceted genre that's been around in numerous forms for a century. You'd have to be doggedly resistant to say you hate all of it.

Opera - as above. It might not be your thing, but saying you hate it all is a big statement that suggests you don't know it very well.

Free Jazz - eww. No. Make them stop.

Happy Hardcore - a few times at multi-room raves I'd wander into a happy hardcore room. Every time it was absolute swivel eyed mayhem. For about three minutes it'd be the best thing ever. Then it became grating and I ran away.

Jump-Up Drum'n'Bass - in 96, when DnB was dominated by either floaty Bukem stuff or moody tech-step, Jump Up was like a breath of fresh air, all hiphop samples and massive basslines. It bought joy back to the DnB dancefloor. Couldn't tell you if it's still around today or what it sounds like if it is.

Indie Landfill - leave it in the landfill please.

Tech-House - 90s tech-house was wonderful. Then, around the stroke of midnight of the millennium, it turned into an inexplicable global phenomenon at the same time as becoming the most dour plodcore. The last few years it seems to have hooked up with the early trance/prog-house revival and has got good again.

Undie/Backpacker-Hop - idk what this is. I think I'll leave it that way.

Gabba - I used to know a straight edge punker who loved gabba. He'd go to gabba nights and vibrate on the dancefloor for hours. Good for him and anyone else who likes it.

Nu Metal - PE and Anthrax did the rap-metal thing so well that everything else even attempting to enter the same ballpark was utterly superfluous.

Goa/psytrance was at the cutting edge of electronic music production for a lot longer than just two years - it ran out of steam in the mid-2000s and it’s mostly a self-referencing genre at this point, but it did have an almost 15 year run of constant innovation.

You could argue that most of the innovation was being done in parallel in other genres (by people like like BT and Tipper for example). It’s not as if the psy guys were the only people to dig deep on Nord Modular / Kyma / Eventide Harmonizers etc.

xpost to spandex/general thought re:opera-
i am very hesitant to write off an entire genre/style (besides grunge, natch) but hoo boy have i struggled with opera. and i've tried a lot. i will continue to try, but yeah: not something i want to seek out.

anyway, voted numetal.

Goa/psytrance was at the cutting edge of electronic music production for a lot longer than just two years - it ran out of steam in the mid-2000s and it’s mostly a self-referencing genre at this point, but it did have an almost 15 year run of constant innovation.

― Siegbran, Saturday, 20 May 2023 20:34 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Your mileage may vary, but I guess the point I'm making is that many derided dance sub-genres were once vibrant scenes that passed their best before date.

xpost to spandex/general thought re:opera-
i am very hesitant to write off an entire genre/style (besides grunge, natch) but hoo boy have i struggled with opera. and i've tried a lot. i will continue to try, but yeah: not something i want to seek out.

― my beard exists more than i do. (Austin), Saturday, 20 May 2023 21:02 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wouldn't say I'm an opera fan (except to that scary Italian bloke in Naples - I think I gave the right answer, as his face brightened and looked less murderous when I said "yes").

I'm told that it's a thing to see live, and the only one I have was Pirates of Penzance, which put a big smile on my face.

saw the comment about free jazz, can’t take the rest of Spandex’s post seriously as a result

Pirates of Penzance v much an operetta I think, not opera.

Free jazz is the only genre here I actually seek out;
C&W and opera will never be my focus, but I'll listen to some here and there;
I didn't know any of the songs on the top 50 indie landfill list, and I'm not curious;
I might dislike examples of these electronic genres, but I don't know enough from the names to tell them apart;
That leaves nu-metal as the only one for which I have specific negative feelings.

Enough beer and sausage and you might find yourself pogoing around to some polka. That is true of quite a bit of party music, the right vibe and buzz - it works where you would never listen to it straight.

i think polka suffers from its association with lawrence welk... i find it to be a vibrant and engaging form of dance music. there's a comp i like called _deeper polka: dance music from the midwest_.

i once heard from an acquaintance (who was fairly well versed on all things folky/rootsy) that they preferred mexican norteño bandas because it was "like polka, but with better melodies." can anybody weigh in on that?

(also don't mean to be offensively ignorant, but to my untrained ears there is a lot of musical similarity between polka and norteño music)

https://www.expatinsurance.com/articles/polka-influence-on-mexican-music

i thought everyone knew this? it’s all in the wiki, check the section called “history”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norteño_(music)

well that didn’t work so hot, but from the section on “history”

Emperor Maximilian I brought European music to México. By 1864 he had accumulated marching bands and musicians to entertain him. When Maximilian's empire was defeated, many of his former soldiers and fellow countrymen fled north and dispersed into what is now the southwestern United States. Norteño music developed from a blending of Mexican and Spanish oral and musical traditions, military brass band instrumentation, and Germanic musical styles such as polka and waltz.[citation needed]

European immigrants from Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States also brought dance traditions such as the varsovienne. The focus on the accordion in the music of their home countries was integrated into Mexican music, and the instrument is essential in the genre today. It was called norteño because it was most popular in the northern regions of Mexico.

https://www.expatinsurance.com/articles/polka-influence-on-mexican-music

― Day 1 fan (morrisp), Sunday, May 21, 2023 8:28 AM

i thought everyone knew this? it’s all in the wiki, check the section called “history”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norteño_(music)

― the late great, Sunday, May 21, 2023 8:29 AM

thx!

(and no, not everyone knows this stuff. some of us were raised in extremely racist environments where showing any sort of interest in this kind of thing was grounds for punishment)

you should have just played it off, like “i am researching debased forms in order to prove the inherent superiority of pure germanic polka”

-1000 NO TALKING BACK OR EXPLAINING YOURSELF

but seriously, the correlation/influence is f'kin rad and metaphorically spits in the face of racist assholes everywhere. what's not to love?

i do like Norteño a lot though i haven't heard much, honestly the only album i really know is Volé, Soñé Y La Ame by Norteño 4.5 but it's good!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Winner no surprise
But 10 votes for C&W?