pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Spotify is the biggest "curator" out there and it's depressingly weak, repetitive, artists are forced to play the game, etc. The enthusiasm of individuals has always been where it's at, either coming from the best critics or sites (pitchfork at its best and many of the critics there who are also here on ilm, resident advisor, unperson writing on jazz, a few others), extremely thoughtful and deep-diving labels releasing either new or old music, compilation geniuses like Bob Stanley, college radio djs, etc. Bandcamp is pretty solid too, though we'll see where it's headed now.

This does all go for film as well, and curated services like Criterion channel are so crucial these days as more incisive critics get thrown over for dimestore amateur hour scribes who are hired to write pieces telling you to be excited by a random assortment of ten landfill movies that are coming to Netflix/Amazon/etc this month.

Lots of revelations on that front lately, from people setting up blogs separate from their day job in order to do Rotten Tomatoes reviews that boost garbage movies to the HBO exec telling his employees to make burner Twitter accounts and Deadline commenter accounts to fire back against critics that hurt his feelings

oh yeah, social media has its own form of film canon creation, but it's more along the lines of "What is the most badass scene in cinema?" followed by 200 Tarantino gifs.

in my day we didn't have gifs we just injured each other trying to recreate scenes from action movies

Back before cameras, that's how action legends were passed down from generation to generation. Just people kicking each other in the crotch.

a lot of these trends are indeed bad but people are having all kinds of other conversations including ones that were hard or impossible to have in whatever the golden age was

and so many people who mostly rely on steaming for music are also sharing each other's weird noise projects and making their own music with whatever's available

I'm rarely the least pessimistic person but there is so much great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures so some of the doom and gloom feels a little premature. maybe not with film? it doesn't mean as much to me as music so idk what's going on there a lot of it doesn't sound good

Relevant to this convo: https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/10/the-state-of-music-criticism

The fact that so many of them listen to the same stuff (…) makes me think the zeitgeist (or whoever underwrites it) has been pretty effective at consolidating their tastes.

Josh, do you feel like kids generally had more diverse tastes when we were the same age?

don't worry, the kids are cooking up another wave of ska

Wait until they use a Reel Big Fish song on Euphoria

don't worry, the kids are cooking up another wave of ska

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Monday, November 6, 2023 9:33 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i had mike park from skankin' pickle/asian man records on a podcast and he said there's a ton of energy with young kids and new ska bands right now

lots of punk retirement plan rockabilly parents are going to have opinions

I'm rarely the least pessimistic person but there is so much great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures so some of the doom and gloom feels a little premature

I mean, I agree that there's lots of great music being made all the time within and outside of these structures. But this was true way back when, too! Just because the access *is there* and has expanded doesn't mean that people are listening to it with any sort of engagement.

Like, a few years ago, I was at a climbing gym— hell, it's called a Boulder Lounge (lmfao)— and an Ata Kak song came over the system. Bouldering gyms are abysmal places for music, usually, but hey.

No one batted an eyelash, and I ended up talking to one of the desk guys about it. He said he just puts on an "international pop" playlist at the beginning of his shift and had heard the song dozens of times, couldn't name the artist, didn't know about Awesome Tapes from Africa, etc. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I think that this supposed "democratization" that yr on about isn't really what it's cracked up to be. People don't have to engage with music deeply or at all, of course, but I'd argue that it might be better if there was still some amount of *intention* that went into listening to and searching out new music, for those who are interested in such.

I feel like the general attitude about seeking out new music is that it's something you do as a teenager or college student and past that point it's kind of nerdy. Even famous musicians go out of their way to tell interviewers that they don't pay attention to new music, that they only listen to something new if someone puts it in their hands, etc.

Josh, do you feel like kids generally had more diverse tastes when we were the same age?

Good question! I'd say ... maybe? But perhaps only due to happenstance. Back when I was the age of my kids ... actually, by the time I was what they are now, I was off to the races, listening to all sorts of shit, basically where I am today. But before that I was beholden to a really limited funnel of media, essentially just the radio, much later, MTV. Plop a kid in front of the TV and they will watch anything, and that included 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger's Ball and all the other regular stuff MTV put in circulation. At the other extreme, I don't recall radio being as stratified as it is today. There was new stuff, there was classic rock, and there was not much else. But based on the '80s touchstones I (and lots of people my age) have, it feels like radio was pretty weird and diverse, but that could just be confirmation bias on my part.

Yeah, to be clear I’m not talking about nerds like us (who may have already been listening to the Velvet Underground or whatever), just your average kids who watched MTV and listened to the radio…

MTV was pretty diverse at its peak (late ‘80s to mid-‘90s), so the answer could be yes!

The kids I grew up with in a pretty rural area of Illinois listened to a wide variety of whatever the radio stations in Chicago were playing. Most of my close friends, hardly what you would call music nerds at all, they were more country jock types I suppose, they listened to everything from wxrt to Q101 to bB96 to 103.5 the blaze. If you grew up in that area you know exactly what kind of music was on each of those stations. This is approx '87-'94, those formative junior high thru high school years. There was definitely judgment from some corners about what type of music you might listen to but that was kind of rare, I found there to be a lot of diversity going on. You'd have people listening to Kansas and black box and (breakthrough era) REM and Def Lep and Cheap Trick and Public Enemy and Skid Row. Depeche mode, U2, mellencamp, Run DMC, etc etc. it's not like people were digging deep into zine culture where I lived but they kind of listened to anything and everything. That era where it felt like for a moment every type of music was popular with everyone, recognizing of course that the kids who were wearing pushead Metallica shirts wouldn't have been caught dead listening to C&C music factory obviously.

Even famous musicians go out of their way to tell interviewers that they don't pay attention to new music, that they only listen to something new if someone puts it in their hands, etc.

This is a tremendous "irrationally angry" pet peeve of mine and not merely because it's almost always complete bullshit.

"I'm just so original, my work exists in a vacuum of uncommon authenticity and dazzling innovation, any similarity to any other musician living or dead is purely a coincidence, who is this John Coltrane person you speak of"

Give me artists like Kurt and Thurston whose interviews were always worth reading because I almost always came away with a list of cool obscure new artists to check out. I also miss Dusted's Listed feature, which I used to read religiously

My college pals in the early 90s listened to Garth Brooks and Nirvana (okay, not a huge stylistic range there).

"I'm just so original, my work exists in a vacuum of uncommon authenticity and dazzling innovation, any similarity to any other musician living or dead is purely a coincidence, who is this John Coltrane person you speak of"

I just figured they're tired and wanna cuddle up with what's familiar.

The most influential people in music atm are music supervisors, ime

xps all these trends towards homogenization are worrying but it's misguided to frame it in generational terms - why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook? didn't this sort of thing start in the 70s with classic rock radio anyway?

there is something to be said about the more amorphous or nonexistent "social movement quality" of most genre these days (at least in this part of the world) and how that has led to a general sort of crisis of meaning or whatever and that may tie into the genreless soup complaint about a lot of contemporary pop music

capitalism always tries to hollow everything out and turn it into the blandest and most scalable version of itself but it never totally suceeds and plenty of music resists this process and still finds fans

economics is where the real problems are (the bandcamp thing is v troubling) but it's reductive and backwards to blame that on fans being unadventurous or having bad / boring taste. *if* they do it's not really their fault anyway

why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?

thing is though led zeppelin and the stones are very different musically

why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?

I suppose one defense could be that the Stones/Zeppelin themselves were pretty diverse! And of course awesome.

lol

also much like Pink Floyd they both rule

i guess what i think of with homogenization of music is this kind of formless blob music like this cover of "i drove all night" from a jeep commercial with derek jeter, combines electronic and pop production touches, a classic rock song from the 80s, and that vaguely inspirational early 00s indie shit into this ikea type music, this is just one example but i hear a lot of stuff like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d53eIHropc

i feel like streaming has produced a lot of "data" on what people gravitate to and you can kind of stitch together musical audio signifiers for cross generational, broad appeal, i'm sure that will be done by AI exclusively soon

"why let the dad who only listens to stones and zeppelin off the hook?"

Maybe try to get him interested in newer bands like U2 and the Police

or Best New Artist winners Men at Work

it's similar to some articles i've read about how Netflix and Amazon used data to figure out these certain types of shows to produce, just trying to hit all the right notes, and while it's not like people haven't tried to copycat before i also feel like you can feel the uncanny hand at the wheel of some productions, like the recent Lord of the Rings show or a lot of the "bad dudes doing bad things" programs like Narcos.

economics is where the real problems are (the bandcamp thing is v troubling) but it's reductive and backwards to blame that on fans being unadventurous or having bad / boring taste. *if* they do it's not really their fault anyway

― Left, Monday, November 6, 2023 11:56 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I agree with almost everything in this post, but how is it not their fault? If we agree that we are living in something of a golden age for music consumers, with free access to millions of songs from the furthest reaches of the world, then assuming you are interested in music, what possible reason could you have for listening exclusively to the same music as everybody else?

I dunno about the Jeep commercial, but some fairly "adventurous" artists like SZA are very popular...

no one said sza or others weren't, i'm talking a very specific thing that i detailed above

sad piano covers of old songs are a staple of movie trailers too

Ok, maybe we're crossing different discussion streams here... I agree there's bad homogenized music out there (and always was!)

I feel like the general attitude about seeking out new music is that it's something you do as a teenager or college student and past that point it's kind of nerdy. Even famous musicians go out of their way to tell interviewers that they don't pay attention to new music, that they only listen to something new if someone puts it in their hands, etc.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Monday, November 6, 2023 11:07 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, it's really ... work ... to keep up with stuff these days! In the '90s you had eclectic MTV playlists on a monocultural feed. Anyone inclined to dig a fraction deeper could get a Rolling Stone or a Spin or an Entertainment Weekly at the grocery store. In the '00s you had a netmedia ecosystem and the dying embers of MTV and Fuse and BET and late night talk shows and a Saturday Night Live that people didn't consume as YouTube highlights. Both decades had public places playing terrestrial radio instead of nostalgia playlists. YouTube, social media and streaming services have made EVERYTHING a la carte.

A lot of people wrote "hip Hop sucks now" essays for "#hiphop50" and would get these people yelling at them about Billy Woods and Veeze or whatever, and it's like, where is someone supposed to even hear Billy Woods and Veeze unless they were actively searching the internet or actively engaged in some sort of social media discussion? Think about how easy it was to discover, like, the Fugees or Goodie Mob in 1996.

sad piano covers of old songs are a staple of movie trailers too

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Monday, November 6, 2023 12:21 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

with the breathy vocals and affected pronunciations

i guess what i'm trying to get at is this feels data driven and different than the trend chasing in pop music that has always existed.

like they are hybridizing things in very specific ways based to appeal to a broad audience, often a sample or cover of an old song to appeal to older people then tastefully weaving it through approachable production aesthetics and performance tics of newer indie, r&b and pop music...like omar said there's a certain creepy thing about it. it feels like they are "maximizing" it to be palatable. also, it feels like the artist in this case isn't even trying to be distintinctive in a way that SZA is, the kind of distinctive that makes you a star...like I think the goal of the artist is to get a song picked up in a Jeep commercial.

it feels different than just "hey this shit is popular we should do that" that's always existed.

all true, i mean i wasn't exactly an indie rock dude in high school but i found it really easy to discover the Breeders and Sugar and The The and Catherine Wheel, because they were played on the radio. and from there, it really was just a matter of picking up Spin and RS or going to Tower Records and picking up Pulse, there was a sense that the curation was guided by actual humans who knew what was up. and whatever the homogenized stuff was thirty years ago at least it didn't sound like Maroon 5.

A good example of writers influencing programming was the "MTV Amp" era (brief as it may have been). The whole electronica thing was absolutely "critic-driven" – which is not to say kids weren't actually listening to Underworld – but there's no way MTV would have devoted a whole block to it if it weren't being written about everywhere at the time. (this is counter to my general "argument" btw, if you've bothered tracking it... lol)

how is it not their fault?

people are tired and there's no moral imperative for them to seek out weirdo music if all they want is something that sounds nice to get them through the day (the song above is bad but it "sounds nice") - if they want to style themselves as music nerds they should try a bit harder but being a music nerd is not for everyone and never has been

the real villains here are ed sheeran and post malone but the *real* real villains are the executives and tech bros and others whose power and profits come from sucking the life out of artists and audiences

I bet a lot of kids are discovering the breeders and sugar through spotify playlists - not saying that's better (or necessarily worse although I'm open to being persuaded)

the human element I guess (apart from any humans involved in making some of the playlists in whatever capacity) is artists' recommendations which probably carry more weight than critics these days

also friends - friends' recommendations are great for throwing the unpredictable into people's tastes

i don't really care that much about people discovering the breeders and sugar right now, but just noting how easy it was to simply hear them and others in passing back then. people didn't need to dig deep, they heard them on the radio. that goes for a lot of rap, hip hop, techno, rock, etc. the diversity and depth of what your average listener would be exposed to, it was amazing. it was a very rich era for casual discovery.

if one has the time to dig a bit, one can find so much great music now, but who really has the time, and there's of course the paradox of choice coupled with the homogenization of what gets the lion's share of the hype. right now it feels like half the people i know are either currently waiting in line for a U2 sphere show or somewhere in a Taylor Swift audience.

*homogenized music that gets the lion's share etc.

Sure, but today’s Billboard singles charts contain rap, pop, country, a lot more songs in Spanish than before. Unfortunately it was all made by 4 artists: Drake, Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift.