" And Beyonce and Taylor Swift aren't the Dying Swan or St. Mathews Passion. You say that's snobbery or cultural elitism -- fait enough -- we need more of it."
It *was* snobbery and cultural elitism -- 25+ years ago. Their problem with you (and yours with them) is not that either of you is elitist; it's that you both are, but have different visions of what counts, and commercially and culturally, the Swift-like folks are in power.
Only if you can define beauty objectively. I don't know that it's possible to define beauty objectively. It seems to me that beauty is a matter of taste, but maybe I simply haven't considered some way of making that objectively measurable. Is it possible to determine something is beautiful even if you yourself do not find it beautiful? And I should clarify: I mean that you would recognize that it is beautiful (even though you don't feel that it is) in a way *other than* recognizing that many others would consider it beautiful.
I don't really think it's possible to know what of contemporary music will truly survive like Mozart or Beethoven until a hundred or two years have passed. Will it be Motorhead, Elton John, Taylor Swift, or pick your other talented songrwriter? I suspect more will survive to become iconic for the simple reason that there's so much more music in the 2020s than there was in the 18th or 19th centuries.
In terms of the big brains and beauty, I'm in a similar position: I don't have the philosophical training to make judgements, but I don't see how beauty can be objective. The very practice of defining what makes Beethoven "better" than Motorhead is subjective. The practice of defining the properties that make art more or less beautiful seems like it must, of necessity, be subjective.
OMG I tried to learn “Landslide” on the piano last year and it was one of the LEAST interesting chord progressions I had ever, EVER tried to learn. It’s not even a song. It’s one hook played over and over again (like all the modern pop songs).
A lot of Stevie’s songs are like that (Dreams, Angel, Gypsy, even Rhiannon) yet the band’s playing and Buckingham’s arrangements usually made them great.
I think Stevie gives an all time vocal performance on the recording and Buckingham has a great lead line. It fits really well on the album between two propulsive tunes, but I agree it’s a tedious song to perform.
I have no opinion about Taylor Swift one way or the other - believe it or not, I've never listened to her. Me, I like Neko Case. I just can't live in the godawful world you describe - life is too damn short for that kind of bullshit, and if these people want to make every cultural choice a matter of moral merits and demerits they ought to go talk to a recruiter and sign a contract and find out what being in an army is REALLY like.
I love just about everything FDB has ever written, but I am generally disinclined to think that the analysis of pop music criticism is a good use of anyone’s time. As Frank Zappa once noted: “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” I believe this is substantially true for pop music criticism generally. I’m also reminded of Vonnegut’s dismissal of hostile literary criticism generally: he compared literary critics who expressed hostility towards novels, plays, etc. to someone who puts on a suit of armor and attacks an ice cream sundae. I think this metaphor is less apt, but nonetheless it has a certain force.
Although I will add: I think that, most of the time, you write about important things. This is one of the many reasons I like and admire your work so much. I think there is a strong case that pop music criticism is by and large not an important thing. You are perfectly entitled to disagree!
“Man cannot live on bread alone.” Even conceding (for the sake of argument) that this isn’t important: what a dull life, to *have* to write only about Big Important Topics (which, almost by definition, excludes most hobbies, loves, and the little idiosyncrasies that make life worth living)!
Kind of depends on the thing for me. If someone is reviewing obscure experimental jazz that many people have never heard of it is maybe less useful if they are telling you don't listen to this record you wouldn't have otherwise heard of.
If someone wants to have a pop at something everyone is praising, based on genuinely held belief, that is maybe more interesting?
I guess that is to say someone could write mostly about music they like and it wouldn't mean they didn't dislike any music.
A lot of negative reviews of things get praised because of the strength of the language of invective - it's often harder to write about why something is good, especially, again with lyricless music or jazz or techno or whatever.
I suppose this is why most music reviews now are pop stuff - soft left politics makes a nice filling carbohydrate for the reviewer.
Also the economics of saying something is bad is just gone. Used to be able to make a buck saying something wasn’t up to snuff. Now if you do you won’t have access, you get attacked, and the economic security in passionate opinions is just gone
I'm not so interested in critics telling me "x is bad" or "y is good." The job of a critic should be to illuminate a work of art, to make readers think about its implications, meanings, connections with other works or the world at large, etc.
Of course nobody who works in pop criticism actually does this; it's all some variation on "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," and in its most pernicious form justified by a sloppy appeal to current fashions in social justice theory.
I may be wrong, but what I got out of the essay is that there is validity in critical reviews of art, but ascribing moral character to a person's taste in art is narrow, shortsighted and stupid.
For example, I listened to a chamber orchestra play Handel's Water Music. I later said that their tempo lurched (hopefully it was on purpose, but I don't think so) they weren't together and I didn't think the oboist was that good. That's different from saying I hate all of Handel's music and anyone who listens to Handel is an idiot or anyone who listens to classical music is a white supremist.
I'm really getting a kick out of FDB's essays because I'm learning a lot of new stuff. I'd never heard the term poptimist or rockist. There's a whole world of weirdness out there I didn't know existed.
I think the judging of people by their artistic tastes has always been present, but now it's hyped up and amplified as so many things are. With our interconnectedness on the internet, instead of individual opinion (maybe agreed upon by a few friends) you've got thousands or millions who agree and go one better and become more strident. What was once a pimple becomes a massive infection worthy of amputation.
Did not David Lee Roth teach the masses that rock critics lurve them some Elvis Costello, because most of them *look* like Elvis Costello?
Van Halen may have been buttrock, but Dave had a point. The average frustrated music critic is an English Lit major, not a Music Performance major. This is also why punk rock is a bigger hit with that crowd than it is with the general public.
Read Rolling Stone's review of blood on the tracks when it came out vs any review they've written in the past 10 years. One will be patently better than the other.
Any Rolling Stone review of Dylan's work of the last 20 years should be ignored. He hasn't made anything beyond a decent album since 1997's `Time Out of Mind' while RS would have you believe he's put out masterpiece after masterpiece, though they're all sub-`Self Portrait' quality. Especially when he's talking about love and relationships, which he now does with the same depth and artistry as a depressed teenager.
With regards to Taylor Swift: after listening to `Anti-Hero' I remain convinced that I am simply not a part of her target demographic, which given the self-pity, navel-gazing, and overwrought emotions on display in that video, appears to be adolescents. Maybe it's good but it's young adult music, so I don't expect for it to resonate with me in the same way that I don't expect YA books to be serious, or even interesting, literature.
Nice zingers with high quality refs. You deserve an A- at least. But no more. As an aging elitist struggling for relevance who has noticed Taylor Swift’s unabashed commercialism but couldn’t hum any of her songs, allow me to avail you of some ancient knowledge. Once upon a time there was such a thing as The Top 40. It was mostly junk but nonetheless reliably rendered a few enjoyable musical moments. Roughly co-existent was a genuinely worthwhile monthly that proved Zappa wrong, even as it typically praised his work. Creem never had the circulation of RS but bested it in many ways. As for Vonnegut’s amusingly Vonnegutian aphorism, well, Creem reveled in such. Those were better days, when loving Journey or Foreigner marked one as, at best, musically stunted, at worst as a kind of moron. But I digress. In fact, I’m now not sure why I bothered to comment at all, but perhaps it’s because the greatest rock rag of all time deserves to be remembered. As a former subscriber I feel compelled to spread the words: Boy Howdy!
In music journalism at least, poptimism was born out of a need to survive. Stereogum and Pitchfork weren’t gonna keep the lights on covering Arcade Fire and Deerhunter as the media landscape became harder to survive in. But they couldn’t come out and say it so instead they justified the decision by arguing that covering Taylor Swift and Harry Styles was based on the idea of making up for lost time and finally giving credit to major acts that had previously been under appreciated from a critical perspective. At this point though, they may actually believe it. Probably because P4K has since replaced its entire staff with pop acolytes
That's right, and there were other things too, such as the fact that the internet made the old model of rock snobbery based on insider information untenable.
I don't think it was a cynical decision, a lot of experienced journalists have always had a poptimism attitude - the fact that post-social media that's become this ram megastars down your throat model maybe couldn't have been predicted at the time. Plus the previous version of Pitchfork was even worse!
I can’t speak to the views/tastes music bloggers were harboring secretly. I disagree strongly that the current version of P4K is an improvement. CN has turned it into just another pop culture site at this point. Again, maybe this was due to the whole point about survival, but it’s lost much of its cultural clout in the process. It doesn’t so much make or break artists anymore, rather just chases existing trends.
Yeah if we are talking today's version I wouldn't differ with you. But when it first began opening up to pop and rap it also opened up to other genres too - I found that time more interesting than the original indie Pitchfork. But to each their own.
For all of it's pinky-up-snobbery of the aughts, P4K was still a half decent resource to at least find new music. The past decade(?) I've only come across new bands by word of mouth.
Are there fewer bands or just fewer outlets writing about them?
Also music criticism doesn’t really matter anymore thanks to the advent of streaming, so trying to make or break artists is kinda futile. P4K, for instance, has deemphasized its reviews as of late (fewer per day, pushed further down the homepage over time). Might as well steer into mainstream discourse head-on
Right, as much as I hate where we've ended up it is important to remember how much the whole paradigm has shifted since the 90s. So many big structural things are just so different.
Good point. Not to mention that poptimism is probably on some level more fun than pretending to like obscure indie bands that half the point was that nobody had ever heard of them.
But while some Indie bands were bad some were good you were still part of a scene! People you would know and meet. The music wasn’t always the end be all of it. I’m not sure there are scenes anymore in that fashion. And without scenes there’s just popularity contests.
Pitchfork was doing quite well covering Arcade Fire and Deerhunter. They were profitable and growing. Then they were bought by Conde Nast, who quickly killed off what made it special and made sure all the talent left.
It's possible. I still think this was a decision rooted in maximizing readership. CN's stewardship has been extremely disappointing. They stated explicitly that their reasoning for acquisition was to tap into an audience that they didn't have access to, then went and made Pitchfork like all of its other sites.
I think the same is across a lot of major publications. Look at NPR giving Tiny Desks to Post Malone or the New York Times spending so much time covering sound cloud rappers while giving less to the jazz and other general weird music it once did
It is also tumbling around in my mind with a point recently made in Unherd about critical theory, and how one of its limitations is that it never and can never turn its analysis of power and oppression on its own practitioners. It feels like there is a connection there, but I haven't had my coffee yet.
I suspect this tendency towards a combination of lack of self awareness (or self-reflection) and intolerance for dissent is inherent to those in power. The critical theorists are very much in power among the cultural elite.
Critical theory is modern gnosticism. If you've been illuminated and have the correct decoder ring, the universe is an open book to you, and critical theory is the hammer to fit every nail--even the nails that don't look like nails.
> I don’t have much patience for the idea that we live in a simulation
There are simulations and simulations. I likewise don't buy the computational version promulgated by technopositivist Silicon Valley dorks who mostly don't realize what they're reaching for is just the original Mormon conception of paradise, but I don't think it's fruitless to consider "simulation" in a more grounded and more social sense, where the penalties considered condign upon heresy dissuade almost everyone from openly espousing much of anything against the grain, but almost no one really buys into a meaningful fraction of the official line. But since you can't tell who's safe and who's not, and there's always a real chance of paying a meaningful cost for taking the risk and getting it wrong, everyone mostly behaves as if they believe, until the prevailing paradigm has changed sufficiently for everyone suddenly never to have bought into it at all.
That kind of simulation I think can live rent free in someone's head without them ever realizing it.
"But since you can't tell who's safe and who's not, and there's always a real chance of paying a meaningful cost for taking the risk and getting it wrong, everyone mostly behaves as if they believe"
I'm reading and listening to a lot of things about what's going on in China the last ten years...mostly the Economist Drum Tower and Foreign Affairs articles...and the revival of the cult of personality Mao-style is very interesting. Everyone very publicly praises the Emperors new clothes, even though he's naked.
It's very popular to bash China, which I think is narrow minded. I agree with Xi that Wall Streets financiers aren't a positive for society, and I limited my kids electric time when they were young... but the desire for ultimate social control, ultimate power is very corrupting. The authoritarians amongst us would do well to look to themselves.
Full co-sign. I've always found Taylor Swift to be pretty uninteresting, so by Emily's logic it sounds like I'm a misogynist. My bad. Me personally, I'm going to see Death Grips tonight, without much care what it says about me as a person. I'm just a long-time fan getting to see them live for the first time, and that's enough for me!
I don't even know what passes for pop music these days, TBH. I discover new things occasionally, but I'm barely even exposed to pop music, despite having a 13-year old daughter.
I like Phoebe Bridgers, who is young(ish) and went on tour with Taylor Swift relatively recently, but it's like she was cryogenically thawed out from twenty years ago. I read an interview where she talked about how Elliott Smith was one of her biggest influences!
I love Phoebe Bridgers, but she also cites Taylor Swift as one of her influences (and Swift is a big fan of Bridgers). Her music is like a more sad, less poppy, less people-pleasing version of Swift's. If you liked Bridger's "Punisher", you may also like Swift's "folklore."
Freddie, why do you act like people who have so obviously never drank ten beers and smashed their faces into a wall to God Hates Us All know the first thing about music?
Heh does Slayer even register in the larger culture anymore? I'm probably getting too old to know. But yes, the comment was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. I've always been more of a Swedish death metal guy myself.
It's kind of interesting to me that music criticism is still so totally fucked, because I feel like (once you take the alt-right adjacent trolls out of the picture) film and TV criticism has actually flourished in the modern era.
I mean, Rotten Tomatoes has its issues. Sometimes there are movies that critics love, but audiences are divided on (like The Last Jedi). Sometimes there are popcorn flicks that critics hate, but audiences love (like Mario Brothers). But...these aggregators exist. If you want to find out the critical/audience consensus on a work quickly, you go there (or maybe IMDB). In contrast...for music? It's still like it's 1998. I guess Metacritic does have a music section, but do people even look at it?
You think Beyonce doesn’t dance live? But I get your broader point.
" And Beyonce and Taylor Swift aren't the Dying Swan or St. Mathews Passion. You say that's snobbery or cultural elitism -- fait enough -- we need more of it."
It *was* snobbery and cultural elitism -- 25+ years ago. Their problem with you (and yours with them) is not that either of you is elitist; it's that you both are, but have different visions of what counts, and commercially and culturally, the Swift-like folks are in power.
Only if you can define beauty objectively. I don't know that it's possible to define beauty objectively. It seems to me that beauty is a matter of taste, but maybe I simply haven't considered some way of making that objectively measurable. Is it possible to determine something is beautiful even if you yourself do not find it beautiful? And I should clarify: I mean that you would recognize that it is beautiful (even though you don't feel that it is) in a way *other than* recognizing that many others would consider it beautiful.
I don't really think it's possible to know what of contemporary music will truly survive like Mozart or Beethoven until a hundred or two years have passed. Will it be Motorhead, Elton John, Taylor Swift, or pick your other talented songrwriter? I suspect more will survive to become iconic for the simple reason that there's so much more music in the 2020s than there was in the 18th or 19th centuries.
In terms of the big brains and beauty, I'm in a similar position: I don't have the philosophical training to make judgements, but I don't see how beauty can be objective. The very practice of defining what makes Beethoven "better" than Motorhead is subjective. The practice of defining the properties that make art more or less beautiful seems like it must, of necessity, be subjective.
"Can you peg me?"
So we're just done with phrasing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2CE0DjDdVA
And he better nut up.
Almost all the critique about kpop comes from Black people; kpop borrows HEAVILY from hip hop and rap in terms of sound, look and dance.
And this is pretty distressing/aggravating for Black people considering how people co-opt/steal from Black culture constantly.
If you can't taste the cocaine backdrip when listening to Rumours, were you even alive in the seventies?
OMG I tried to learn “Landslide” on the piano last year and it was one of the LEAST interesting chord progressions I had ever, EVER tried to learn. It’s not even a song. It’s one hook played over and over again (like all the modern pop songs).
😂
Fleetwood Mac is awesome, but Landslide is an *incredibly* boring song.
A lot of Stevie’s songs are like that (Dreams, Angel, Gypsy, even Rhiannon) yet the band’s playing and Buckingham’s arrangements usually made them great.
I think Stevie gives an all time vocal performance on the recording and Buckingham has a great lead line. It fits really well on the album between two propulsive tunes, but I agree it’s a tedious song to perform.
I agree 💯 that the arrangements are what make them great
If you took the words "gypsy," "moon," and "witch" out of Stevie Nicks' vocabulary she'd be incapable of writing a song.
I have no opinion about Taylor Swift one way or the other - believe it or not, I've never listened to her. Me, I like Neko Case. I just can't live in the godawful world you describe - life is too damn short for that kind of bullshit, and if these people want to make every cultural choice a matter of moral merits and demerits they ought to go talk to a recruiter and sign a contract and find out what being in an army is REALLY like.
thank you for reminding me about Neko Case!
I confess that I do occasionally lose sleep wondering if a tiny spot on Taylor Swift's ass has possibly gone unkissed by music critics and her fans
I just saw a post saying she’s a better dancer than Michael Jackson was, so I wouldn’t worry too much.
LOL
She may be a better dancer than Michael right now at this moment, but otherwise...STFU!
I guess I am a rocktimist.....Taylor Swift would suck just as much were she a man or a dog or whatever.
Now she can write a song about me.....
I love just about everything FDB has ever written, but I am generally disinclined to think that the analysis of pop music criticism is a good use of anyone’s time. As Frank Zappa once noted: “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” I believe this is substantially true for pop music criticism generally. I’m also reminded of Vonnegut’s dismissal of hostile literary criticism generally: he compared literary critics who expressed hostility towards novels, plays, etc. to someone who puts on a suit of armor and attacks an ice cream sundae. I think this metaphor is less apt, but nonetheless it has a certain force.
Without the ability to say that something is bad, saying that something is good is meaningless. Empty. Not everything in life is good.
Fair!
Although I will add: I think that, most of the time, you write about important things. This is one of the many reasons I like and admire your work so much. I think there is a strong case that pop music criticism is by and large not an important thing. You are perfectly entitled to disagree!
“Man cannot live on bread alone.” Even conceding (for the sake of argument) that this isn’t important: what a dull life, to *have* to write only about Big Important Topics (which, almost by definition, excludes most hobbies, loves, and the little idiosyncrasies that make life worth living)!
Let the writer write, says I
Given that the imaginary "Rockist" straw man is the direct forerunner of the "Brocialist" slur, I think this essay is very much apropos.
Kind of depends on the thing for me. If someone is reviewing obscure experimental jazz that many people have never heard of it is maybe less useful if they are telling you don't listen to this record you wouldn't have otherwise heard of.
If someone wants to have a pop at something everyone is praising, based on genuinely held belief, that is maybe more interesting?
I guess that is to say someone could write mostly about music they like and it wouldn't mean they didn't dislike any music.
A lot of negative reviews of things get praised because of the strength of the language of invective - it's often harder to write about why something is good, especially, again with lyricless music or jazz or techno or whatever.
I suppose this is why most music reviews now are pop stuff - soft left politics makes a nice filling carbohydrate for the reviewer.
Also the economics of saying something is bad is just gone. Used to be able to make a buck saying something wasn’t up to snuff. Now if you do you won’t have access, you get attacked, and the economic security in passionate opinions is just gone
However, some bad things are awfully good.
I'm not so interested in critics telling me "x is bad" or "y is good." The job of a critic should be to illuminate a work of art, to make readers think about its implications, meanings, connections with other works or the world at large, etc.
Of course nobody who works in pop criticism actually does this; it's all some variation on "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," and in its most pernicious form justified by a sloppy appeal to current fashions in social justice theory.
I may be wrong, but what I got out of the essay is that there is validity in critical reviews of art, but ascribing moral character to a person's taste in art is narrow, shortsighted and stupid.
For example, I listened to a chamber orchestra play Handel's Water Music. I later said that their tempo lurched (hopefully it was on purpose, but I don't think so) they weren't together and I didn't think the oboist was that good. That's different from saying I hate all of Handel's music and anyone who listens to Handel is an idiot or anyone who listens to classical music is a white supremist.
I'm really getting a kick out of FDB's essays because I'm learning a lot of new stuff. I'd never heard the term poptimist or rockist. There's a whole world of weirdness out there I didn't know existed.
I think the judging of people by their artistic tastes has always been present, but now it's hyped up and amplified as so many things are. With our interconnectedness on the internet, instead of individual opinion (maybe agreed upon by a few friends) you've got thousands or millions who agree and go one better and become more strident. What was once a pimple becomes a massive infection worthy of amputation.
Did not David Lee Roth teach the masses that rock critics lurve them some Elvis Costello, because most of them *look* like Elvis Costello?
Van Halen may have been buttrock, but Dave had a point. The average frustrated music critic is an English Lit major, not a Music Performance major. This is also why punk rock is a bigger hit with that crowd than it is with the general public.
Kurt Cobain looked like Elvis Costello?
He looked and acted more like an English Lit. major than DLR.
And yet DLR had a vocal range of six notes, all flat.
Also, one Elvis Costello is worth 60 Taylor Swifts in my book.
Read Rolling Stone's review of blood on the tracks when it came out vs any review they've written in the past 10 years. One will be patently better than the other.
Any Rolling Stone review of Dylan's work of the last 20 years should be ignored. He hasn't made anything beyond a decent album since 1997's `Time Out of Mind' while RS would have you believe he's put out masterpiece after masterpiece, though they're all sub-`Self Portrait' quality. Especially when he's talking about love and relationships, which he now does with the same depth and artistry as a depressed teenager.
With regards to Taylor Swift: after listening to `Anti-Hero' I remain convinced that I am simply not a part of her target demographic, which given the self-pity, navel-gazing, and overwrought emotions on display in that video, appears to be adolescents. Maybe it's good but it's young adult music, so I don't expect for it to resonate with me in the same way that I don't expect YA books to be serious, or even interesting, literature.
"The reason the critics all like Elvis Costello better than me is because they all look like Elvis Costello"
David Lee Roth
Nice zingers with high quality refs. You deserve an A- at least. But no more. As an aging elitist struggling for relevance who has noticed Taylor Swift’s unabashed commercialism but couldn’t hum any of her songs, allow me to avail you of some ancient knowledge. Once upon a time there was such a thing as The Top 40. It was mostly junk but nonetheless reliably rendered a few enjoyable musical moments. Roughly co-existent was a genuinely worthwhile monthly that proved Zappa wrong, even as it typically praised his work. Creem never had the circulation of RS but bested it in many ways. As for Vonnegut’s amusingly Vonnegutian aphorism, well, Creem reveled in such. Those were better days, when loving Journey or Foreigner marked one as, at best, musically stunted, at worst as a kind of moron. But I digress. In fact, I’m now not sure why I bothered to comment at all, but perhaps it’s because the greatest rock rag of all time deserves to be remembered. As a former subscriber I feel compelled to spread the words: Boy Howdy!
In music journalism at least, poptimism was born out of a need to survive. Stereogum and Pitchfork weren’t gonna keep the lights on covering Arcade Fire and Deerhunter as the media landscape became harder to survive in. But they couldn’t come out and say it so instead they justified the decision by arguing that covering Taylor Swift and Harry Styles was based on the idea of making up for lost time and finally giving credit to major acts that had previously been under appreciated from a critical perspective. At this point though, they may actually believe it. Probably because P4K has since replaced its entire staff with pop acolytes
That's right, and there were other things too, such as the fact that the internet made the old model of rock snobbery based on insider information untenable.
I don't think it was a cynical decision, a lot of experienced journalists have always had a poptimism attitude - the fact that post-social media that's become this ram megastars down your throat model maybe couldn't have been predicted at the time. Plus the previous version of Pitchfork was even worse!
I can’t speak to the views/tastes music bloggers were harboring secretly. I disagree strongly that the current version of P4K is an improvement. CN has turned it into just another pop culture site at this point. Again, maybe this was due to the whole point about survival, but it’s lost much of its cultural clout in the process. It doesn’t so much make or break artists anymore, rather just chases existing trends.
Yeah if we are talking today's version I wouldn't differ with you. But when it first began opening up to pop and rap it also opened up to other genres too - I found that time more interesting than the original indie Pitchfork. But to each their own.
Oh sure. Wasn’t really sure which versions you were referring to. But yeah in that sense, agree
For all of it's pinky-up-snobbery of the aughts, P4K was still a half decent resource to at least find new music. The past decade(?) I've only come across new bands by word of mouth.
Are there fewer bands or just fewer outlets writing about them?
Also music criticism doesn’t really matter anymore thanks to the advent of streaming, so trying to make or break artists is kinda futile. P4K, for instance, has deemphasized its reviews as of late (fewer per day, pushed further down the homepage over time). Might as well steer into mainstream discourse head-on
Right, as much as I hate where we've ended up it is important to remember how much the whole paradigm has shifted since the 90s. So many big structural things are just so different.
Good point. Not to mention that poptimism is probably on some level more fun than pretending to like obscure indie bands that half the point was that nobody had ever heard of them.
Q: How many indie music fans does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: It's an obscure number ... you've probably never heard of it ...
The amusing thing is that Swift herself made the same point in "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"
"And you would hide away and find your peace of mind
With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"
She also went out of her way to make an indie record herself.
But while some Indie bands were bad some were good you were still part of a scene! People you would know and meet. The music wasn’t always the end be all of it. I’m not sure there are scenes anymore in that fashion. And without scenes there’s just popularity contests.
Why do humans feel the need to be part of a "scene"?
Community, tribal instincts, acceptance, fun, youthful purpose, friendship, being human
Things are very different for cats. We like what we like because we like it, and have no need to be part of any "scene".
Pitchfork was doing quite well covering Arcade Fire and Deerhunter. They were profitable and growing. Then they were bought by Conde Nast, who quickly killed off what made it special and made sure all the talent left.
It's possible. I still think this was a decision rooted in maximizing readership. CN's stewardship has been extremely disappointing. They stated explicitly that their reasoning for acquisition was to tap into an audience that they didn't have access to, then went and made Pitchfork like all of its other sites.
I think the same is across a lot of major publications. Look at NPR giving Tiny Desks to Post Malone or the New York Times spending so much time covering sound cloud rappers while giving less to the jazz and other general weird music it once did
Bravo! This is spot on.
It is also tumbling around in my mind with a point recently made in Unherd about critical theory, and how one of its limitations is that it never and can never turn its analysis of power and oppression on its own practitioners. It feels like there is a connection there, but I haven't had my coffee yet.
I suspect this tendency towards a combination of lack of self awareness (or self-reflection) and intolerance for dissent is inherent to those in power. The critical theorists are very much in power among the cultural elite.
Critical theory is modern gnosticism. If you've been illuminated and have the correct decoder ring, the universe is an open book to you, and critical theory is the hammer to fit every nail--even the nails that don't look like nails.
> I don’t have much patience for the idea that we live in a simulation
There are simulations and simulations. I likewise don't buy the computational version promulgated by technopositivist Silicon Valley dorks who mostly don't realize what they're reaching for is just the original Mormon conception of paradise, but I don't think it's fruitless to consider "simulation" in a more grounded and more social sense, where the penalties considered condign upon heresy dissuade almost everyone from openly espousing much of anything against the grain, but almost no one really buys into a meaningful fraction of the official line. But since you can't tell who's safe and who's not, and there's always a real chance of paying a meaningful cost for taking the risk and getting it wrong, everyone mostly behaves as if they believe, until the prevailing paradigm has changed sufficiently for everyone suddenly never to have bought into it at all.
That kind of simulation I think can live rent free in someone's head without them ever realizing it.
"But since you can't tell who's safe and who's not, and there's always a real chance of paying a meaningful cost for taking the risk and getting it wrong, everyone mostly behaves as if they believe"
I'm reading and listening to a lot of things about what's going on in China the last ten years...mostly the Economist Drum Tower and Foreign Affairs articles...and the revival of the cult of personality Mao-style is very interesting. Everyone very publicly praises the Emperors new clothes, even though he's naked.
It's very popular to bash China, which I think is narrow minded. I agree with Xi that Wall Streets financiers aren't a positive for society, and I limited my kids electric time when they were young... but the desire for ultimate social control, ultimate power is very corrupting. The authoritarians amongst us would do well to look to themselves.
I was thinking more about Miłosz through the lens of Twitter, or maybe vice versa. Also about 2024.
Full co-sign. I've always found Taylor Swift to be pretty uninteresting, so by Emily's logic it sounds like I'm a misogynist. My bad. Me personally, I'm going to see Death Grips tonight, without much care what it says about me as a person. I'm just a long-time fan getting to see them live for the first time, and that's enough for me!
Whenever anyone mentions Beyonce I assume they're talking about the actress in the third Austin Powers movie. She also does music?
The only good pop music these days is Electric Callboy.
Is it misogynist to not like Taylor Swift even though I think that Mushroomhead was better with the female singer?
I don't even know what passes for pop music these days, TBH. I discover new things occasionally, but I'm barely even exposed to pop music, despite having a 13-year old daughter.
I like Phoebe Bridgers, who is young(ish) and went on tour with Taylor Swift relatively recently, but it's like she was cryogenically thawed out from twenty years ago. I read an interview where she talked about how Elliott Smith was one of her biggest influences!
I love Phoebe Bridgers, but she also cites Taylor Swift as one of her influences (and Swift is a big fan of Bridgers). Her music is like a more sad, less poppy, less people-pleasing version of Swift's. If you liked Bridger's "Punisher", you may also like Swift's "folklore."
This is really well fleshed out! I get the point now.
Freddie, why do you act like people who have so obviously never drank ten beers and smashed their faces into a wall to God Hates Us All know the first thing about music?
Heh does Slayer even register in the larger culture anymore? I'm probably getting too old to know. But yes, the comment was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. I've always been more of a Swedish death metal guy myself.
It's kind of interesting to me that music criticism is still so totally fucked, because I feel like (once you take the alt-right adjacent trolls out of the picture) film and TV criticism has actually flourished in the modern era.
I mean, Rotten Tomatoes has its issues. Sometimes there are movies that critics love, but audiences are divided on (like The Last Jedi). Sometimes there are popcorn flicks that critics hate, but audiences love (like Mario Brothers). But...these aggregators exist. If you want to find out the critical/audience consensus on a work quickly, you go there (or maybe IMDB). In contrast...for music? It's still like it's 1998. I guess Metacritic does have a music section, but do people even look at it?