But in Trump 2.0 World, I think it may be time for you to do what you've so repeatedly and eloquently hung the poptimists for never doing: admit that this is a battle you've won.
Yes, but underdogs can't be allowed to WIN things; then where would their martyrdom be? And that's the issue with the culture war; Blue and Red Tribe each (mostly) control their sectors of the culture, but think that the Will of God/The People is that they should have control over EVERYTHING. So no one can celebrate a victory, because we DESERVED more. No one can ever acknowledge their own power, because then that would interfere with the narrative.
We have long since reached the point where winning award after award in times of heavily politicized moments is a distinct countersignal to actual coolness, if not talent itself.
Nobody would dare say Beyonce is a mediocre pop star because it's professional suicide. Yet, listeners have ears that can quickly discern this.
Similarly, nobody would dare come out and say that Kendrick Lamar is a weird manlet with hobbit hands (pax Byron Crawford) with no actual flow. For the same reasons.
The kayfabe is suffocating. If the Trump years accomplish nothing else, it will be putting an end of Hyping Obvious Mediocrities for socially and politically promoted reasons. Just let people enjoy shit, and let the actual recognition and praise fall where it may organically again.
To judge from the attitudes conservatives have cultivated towards the arts these past fifty years, the Trump regime won't accomplish this; it'll just hype up a bunch of new Obvious Mediocrities who are ideologically acceptable to Trump and Musk. Poptimism is as compatible with the current right as it is with the current left.
I don't see this. All I see is complaining about any culture even being vaguely right leaning is "edgelording" from the entrenched cultural powers that be.
Here's the thing the American left is deep denial about: they are the establishment. Zillennials are right leaning now precisely because the establishment left is now, without question, the faction with a huge stick up their ass. And worse, punishing people because they're mad.
So of course you're going to get shit like Kanye West in his weird mutant Nazi phases, anarchic metal bands, and a hardcore revival. This is the sometimes dark energy that was forcibly supressed bubbling to the surface again.
As Freddie noted, the lamest thing the establishment can do is promote "countercultural" figures that are not, in any way, the least bit opposed to the prevailing powers that be. That's Kendrick Lamar in a nutshell.
It has been very hard watching my left-leaning people become the reincarnation of Tipper Gore putting labels on CDs. I hate that they took my counterculture from me. They took my edgy boy and put him in the HR department. Is this what Boomers felt like when they put Dylan in a Pepsi commercial?
I enjoy Bob Dylan because he’s actually a great singer, his music readily enjoyable unlike this spoken word stuff. Beyond that my knowledge is limited to being married to a mild Dylan obsessive. That is, someone who has listened to *all* the albums and at a younger period of life tried to read nearly everything he ever wrote or said, profound or not; and listened to his satellite radio show whenever able. Dylan may be in the business of disappointing people but it would be a shallow misreading to imagine Dylan would scorn *Pepsi* or indeed much of the American 20th century.
He (famously?) was once ushered on to a stage by Joan Baez at some sort of reunion of the folk music makers and the crowd expectantly waited to hear something that would make them feel like the 60s hadn’t died . And he performed Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” for the baffled if not crestfallen audience.
I imagine his reaction to the Pepsi thing would have been - what, you don’t like Pepsi?
It doesn’t really matter whether he’s a lot more complicated or a lot less than people think he is.
Kendrick Lamar, of course, given the inverse nature of the talent required for his medium, *needs* to be complicated.
You're not wrong, and it's definitely a complicated dynamic. I have to think of Maynard from TOOL who basically told everyone in the 90s:
All you know about me is what I've sold ya, dumb fuck
I sold out long before you'd ever even heard my name
I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit
And then you bought one
So, in some sense when I went to his shop in Jerome, AZ and saw the ungodly markup on the flood of merch I was like, "well...he did warn us like 3 decades ago this was how this would go".
That said...I don't exactly give him a pass either. Hawking NFTs and "exclusive" merch at huge prices was a choice, and it all seemed really cynical too.
This feels like a crazy overcorrection to me. I'm not the world's biggest Beyonce fan, but she's clearly a talented singer, and I think it's borderline crazy to suggest otherwise. YMMV on if you like the songs she makes, but she can clearly has an impressive voice and vocal range.
Same with Kendrick. I haven't liked his last 2 albums much, but to say he has no flow and people only pretend to like him seems way off to me. I talk to a lot of rap fans with different tastes, and I don't think anyone has said Swimming Pools or MAAD City sucks, or that he didn't have a great verse on Collard Greens.
I don't think Freddie's point has ever been that people are pretending to like pop songs to fit in with tastemakers. People genuinely like pop songs because they are catchy, fun and feel good. I take his point (and I agree) that as adults we should strive to appreciate more thoughtful and well-contructed art, rather than just what provides us a sugar rush.
I'm not a huge pop fan or a fan of Beyonce at all, and I agree with Freddie's entire piece, but saying she's a mediocre pop talent is objectively wrong. You're making the same mistake as the nerds Freddie is making fun of in his piece.
You talking about Kendrick having 'no actual flow' makes you sound like you're doing an impression of somebody. Somebody who is pretending to know shit.
For what it's worth, the irony in this statement is stunning, as though the MAGA universe isn't the embodiment of a collective kayfabe propping up Obvious Mediocrities:
"The kayfabe is suffocating. If the Trump years accomplish nothing else, it will be putting an end of Hyping Obvious Mediocrities for socially and politically promoted reasons."
For my lame comment to a long, well-written article: Williamsburg is now filled with investment bankers and corporate lawyers. The hipsters with glasses who like jangly guitars now live in Ridgewood(-;
Also, Freddie, I love you man, but sometimes I feel like we're in a thematic loop here. Perhaps this is intentional, or not, and you've raised good points about poptimism, AI skepticism, and the parlous state of mental health reporting. Raising good points at each step.
The thing is, even though you're writing about these themes that you seem to care a lot about, we're not seeing a lot of *new* insights. It's good for new subscribers, true, but maybe there's some other things that are capturing your attention, too? Because I know I'd dig some more variety.
I've been joking this could do with an Mad Libs style template that just gets filled in every time. Freddie isn't the sort to pull a cheap trick like this, but I'm kinda tempted.
"The reality of pop hegemony has finally become so undeniable that few are still shameless enough to deny it, but the idea that popular music is a beleaguered subaltern is so baked into our music discourse that people don’t know what to do with themselves."
Wait until they get a "Pop Hall Of Fame". Surest sign I can think of that a genre has been institutionalized into irrelevance is when it gets a hall of fame.
Pop already has the award ceremonies and converted English Lit majors, so there's one pillar left to fall.
And I'm going to say it before anyone else does, the only thing that was even halfway cool about Kendrick Lamar's performance, designed as it was to send elite white tastemakers in the coastal urban centers into an orgy of self-congratulations, is that he did his diss track that calls Drake a pedophile, and none of those aforementioned tastemakers even felt moderately compelled to note that's just a BIT fucked up for an event aimed at mainstream normies.
It was weird to hear the whole stadium scream “A minor”. And see footage of people in bars chiming in for that line too. Sure, it’s a high point of the song and line where the all the lyrical density drops away and even a Kendrick tyro can make out the words, but jeez…It’s like you got all of America to shout “pedophile!” at once.
Yeah I like Lamar and admire him, but celebrating accusing someone of being a pedophile (even if artfully done) seems like messed up cultural moment. I think the play on words and the hook of the song make it fun but ultimately it is such a mean spirited song to win 5 Grammy Awards and be the center of Lamar's Super Bowl performance.
Also, I feel like having Jackson interrupt, "All the Stars" which has such a genuine celebratory sound and SZA showing off her formidable vocal range was an attempt at subversion but instead lead into Lamar's biggest and meanest hit---it's not THAT subversive.
To be fair, the Drake went to bat for a convicted pedophile and had a weird text friendship with a 14 year old Millie Bobby Brown. So it’s not exactly Elon Musk trolling the heroic submersible guy.
But it is very weird for critics to be openly invested in a rap beef.
The underdog thing isn't about recognition, though. Beyoncé has won all the awards she can win and her music is still not as good as a lot of other people's, both historically and today. A lot of people don't care for her, or find themselves more moved by the Beatles or Mozart or Amyl and the Sniffers or something. That's offensive and racist and has to end. It's a crime. The fact that you are not currently listening to her music and finding it transcendent, beyond anything anyone has ever produced, is a vile act of hate and is the reason Trump got elected.
Not a hot take - she's beige pap as a musician. Every criticism aimed at Taylor Swift's lab grown pop hits applies to Beyonce, but Beyonce's hype is just that more odious because it carried the stamp of approval from a poltical and social establishment that would berate, even ostracize, you if you pointed out the kayfabe, let alone said it sucked.
Father John Misty, who has written the odd lyric for her, had a pretty good take on that. As Freddie says about Kendrick, it's really hard for a person in her position, with her image and hundreds if not thousands of jobs relying on her and being an icon of black people, gay dance music people, etc. Like, obviously not in a 'i feel pity for the billionaire's hard life' way but if you're an artist like her you're trapped in a box that people will respond REALLY poorly to you trying to leave. I'm pretty forgiving of her music's blandness as a result. That's the product people want.
That said I'm going to keep listening to cool music for people who enjoy art. I am a dinosaur.
“A lot of people don't care for her, or find themselves more moved by the Beatles or Mozart or Amyl and the Sniffers or something.”
Or, say, “Kind of Blue,” or basically anything by Charles Mingus. Hell, Cindy Blackman Santana of all people has a version of “On Green Dolphin Street” that slaps.
The way our utterly demobilized liberal political culture resorts things which maybe aren’t as important as a lot of people think they are to the top of the heap, then mercilessly crucifies and/or shouts down those who disagree. And as far as I’m concerned, the fact that it’s happened here is one big reason why it seems to have happened everywhere.
"Elite white opinion embraced Kendrick Lamar as a conduit to #blackexcellence more than a decade ago, and this dynamic exists for the same reason that those endlessly-sweaty old white man poptimists can’t give up the ghost - because white people need to believe that they’re the good white people, just as men need to believe that they’re the good men, and they will create vast industries of art and criticism to suborn those feelings."
I like the Dylan comparison, but to be the unashamed Rockist that I am, Kendrick has never made music that intentionally ostracized and wrong-footed his own fans the way Dylan so often did.
Or maybe fandom is just different today, I dunno.
COULD Beyonce get the Beyhive mad at her? Is that even possible? Kanye accomplished a version of that I suppose, but the same critics are still finding merit in his actual new music.
Dylan endures precisely because every decade or so he changed and challenged himself artistically. At least in the 20th century. His last two decades of work has been mediocre juvenilia, as evidenced by the type and quantity of critical lauding it has received.
(Still somewhat undecided about `Rough and Rowdy Ways'.)
At first, I thought that to center the halftime show on yet another take down of Drake made Kendrick look kinda small. And wearing a pair of womens flared jeans would seem to offer some easy ammunition in that never ending, commercially rewarding conflict between multi-millionaires. If the goal continues to be about maximizing the potential audience, and what else is there at this point... how many "beef" explainers were published this last week?
Of course it was small, but this is the shit white culture critics in the Acela Corridor eat up with a spoon. On the one hand, they're pretending to be enlightened scholars and promoters of Authentic Black Culture in America, and the next, they're watching millionaire rappers engage in diss tracks like anthropologists wearing pith helments, binoculars at the ready to record the fascinating behavior on display.
They not like us got old months ago. Kendrick keeping the beef going after he was declared the winner by public opinion already is just insane. White people, of course, loved the beef because it gave them cover to say that Drake, a black man, isn't really black.
I’m a Drake fan, have been ever since I heard Shut It Down. Yea I’m white, yes I’m a Poptimist, no I do not imagine myself to be the underdog. Getting that out of the way.
And to me, the beef smells off. It feels manufactured; Kendrick wasn't the biggest despite the belief of the real hip hop heads that he should be, there was a Super Bowl slot coming up, it had to be a black artist because if the direction of cultural travel but he was in no position to solo it. So a critical darling started a beef with a man the music media abhors for being on top too long – novelty is the engine of media – and is declared the winner by that same media, now acting as impartial referees. Kendrick gets the Superbowl. He does a bunch of unremarkable album tracks from his unremarkable album and finishes with his beef song. All the headlines and most of the social media is about Drake. I dunno man, doesn’t feel like a win to me. Feels like your biggest moment was about another dude.
My 15-year-old son is totally in the bag for Kendrick and would disagree with all the above. But hey.
In about two years that style will be ubiquitous for men. It's taken four years or so for the two dominant styles of women's jeans to get there. Still expecting low-rise to reappear.
Obviously the only way to respond to this kind of thing is to openly state Lamar is terrible. Why? No death vocals, virtuoso guitar solos, or break downs so hard there'd be no way to dodge it when some stock boy with a bunch of face piercings is shoved into you as the circle pit opens.
Kendrick Lamar is not a good rapper, which makes his position as a figure of worship among the establishment culture critics even more embarrassing. His lyrics are banal. The beats are generic soundcloud crap. He has no flow. He cannot enunciate when he raps, which was painfully on display.
I give him credit for memorizing the complex coreography of the moment, but that doesn't translate into actual skills as an emcee. He's not even a mediocrity in that area - he's well below par. Rap lives and dies by the artist's basic skills as an emcee. Ice Cube was arguably the greatest rapper ever in his heyday, precisely because he was amazing at all the things Kendrick Lamar is absolutely terrible at.
It's hard to overstate how ridiculous you sound. I'm not a huge hip hop guy, but I'm friends with huge hip hop fans, many of whom don't have college degrees, and I can assure you don't give a shit about politics, or even who the 'elites' are.' All of them, to a person, think that Kendrick is an all-time talent, even those that aren't huge Kendrick fans.
You genuinely sound EXACTLY like the people FdB is making fun of. Just in the other direction. The confidence with which you say these things just makes you sound like a fucking idiot.
Global hits still exist, but they often aren't the songs that the NYT set go crazy for.
It's notable that the more Beyonce becomes some cultural icon, the less anyone talks about the actual songs, they are almost irrelevant to what people want Beyonce to be.
I expected hip-hop to be dead by now. As music art, it mostly sucks. At best, it is slightly interesting ghetto poetry with an irritating percussion backing.
But Beyonce winning a country music award... well that is yet another in a long list of evidence that the Grammy Awards are crap establishment BS. Frankly, I am in the mode of wanting to cancel all celebrity worship mechanisms for their complete lack of authenticity.
Every word of this is right.
But in Trump 2.0 World, I think it may be time for you to do what you've so repeatedly and eloquently hung the poptimists for never doing: admit that this is a battle you've won.
Yes, but underdogs can't be allowed to WIN things; then where would their martyrdom be? And that's the issue with the culture war; Blue and Red Tribe each (mostly) control their sectors of the culture, but think that the Will of God/The People is that they should have control over EVERYTHING. So no one can celebrate a victory, because we DESERVED more. No one can ever acknowledge their own power, because then that would interfere with the narrative.
We have long since reached the point where winning award after award in times of heavily politicized moments is a distinct countersignal to actual coolness, if not talent itself.
Nobody would dare say Beyonce is a mediocre pop star because it's professional suicide. Yet, listeners have ears that can quickly discern this.
Similarly, nobody would dare come out and say that Kendrick Lamar is a weird manlet with hobbit hands (pax Byron Crawford) with no actual flow. For the same reasons.
The kayfabe is suffocating. If the Trump years accomplish nothing else, it will be putting an end of Hyping Obvious Mediocrities for socially and politically promoted reasons. Just let people enjoy shit, and let the actual recognition and praise fall where it may organically again.
To judge from the attitudes conservatives have cultivated towards the arts these past fifty years, the Trump regime won't accomplish this; it'll just hype up a bunch of new Obvious Mediocrities who are ideologically acceptable to Trump and Musk. Poptimism is as compatible with the current right as it is with the current left.
I don't see this. All I see is complaining about any culture even being vaguely right leaning is "edgelording" from the entrenched cultural powers that be.
Here's the thing the American left is deep denial about: they are the establishment. Zillennials are right leaning now precisely because the establishment left is now, without question, the faction with a huge stick up their ass. And worse, punishing people because they're mad.
So of course you're going to get shit like Kanye West in his weird mutant Nazi phases, anarchic metal bands, and a hardcore revival. This is the sometimes dark energy that was forcibly supressed bubbling to the surface again.
As Freddie noted, the lamest thing the establishment can do is promote "countercultural" figures that are not, in any way, the least bit opposed to the prevailing powers that be. That's Kendrick Lamar in a nutshell.
".....the establishment left is now, without question, the faction with a huge stick up their ass."
It pains me to see that this is true.
It has been very hard watching my left-leaning people become the reincarnation of Tipper Gore putting labels on CDs. I hate that they took my counterculture from me. They took my edgy boy and put him in the HR department. Is this what Boomers felt like when they put Dylan in a Pepsi commercial?
I enjoy Bob Dylan because he’s actually a great singer, his music readily enjoyable unlike this spoken word stuff. Beyond that my knowledge is limited to being married to a mild Dylan obsessive. That is, someone who has listened to *all* the albums and at a younger period of life tried to read nearly everything he ever wrote or said, profound or not; and listened to his satellite radio show whenever able. Dylan may be in the business of disappointing people but it would be a shallow misreading to imagine Dylan would scorn *Pepsi* or indeed much of the American 20th century.
He (famously?) was once ushered on to a stage by Joan Baez at some sort of reunion of the folk music makers and the crowd expectantly waited to hear something that would make them feel like the 60s hadn’t died . And he performed Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” for the baffled if not crestfallen audience.
I imagine his reaction to the Pepsi thing would have been - what, you don’t like Pepsi?
It doesn’t really matter whether he’s a lot more complicated or a lot less than people think he is.
Kendrick Lamar, of course, given the inverse nature of the talent required for his medium, *needs* to be complicated.
Pepsi is foul, no matter who flogs it.
You're not wrong, and it's definitely a complicated dynamic. I have to think of Maynard from TOOL who basically told everyone in the 90s:
All you know about me is what I've sold ya, dumb fuck
I sold out long before you'd ever even heard my name
I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit
And then you bought one
So, in some sense when I went to his shop in Jerome, AZ and saw the ungodly markup on the flood of merch I was like, "well...he did warn us like 3 decades ago this was how this would go".
That said...I don't exactly give him a pass either. Hawking NFTs and "exclusive" merch at huge prices was a choice, and it all seemed really cynical too.
Time for a Punk revival. The Dead Obamas have a ring to it?
This feels like a crazy overcorrection to me. I'm not the world's biggest Beyonce fan, but she's clearly a talented singer, and I think it's borderline crazy to suggest otherwise. YMMV on if you like the songs she makes, but she can clearly has an impressive voice and vocal range.
Same with Kendrick. I haven't liked his last 2 albums much, but to say he has no flow and people only pretend to like him seems way off to me. I talk to a lot of rap fans with different tastes, and I don't think anyone has said Swimming Pools or MAAD City sucks, or that he didn't have a great verse on Collard Greens.
I don't think Freddie's point has ever been that people are pretending to like pop songs to fit in with tastemakers. People genuinely like pop songs because they are catchy, fun and feel good. I take his point (and I agree) that as adults we should strive to appreciate more thoughtful and well-contructed art, rather than just what provides us a sugar rush.
It's a crazy overcorrection because that commenter is the exact same type of guy Freddie is making fun, just in another direction.
I'm not a huge pop fan or a fan of Beyonce at all, and I agree with Freddie's entire piece, but saying she's a mediocre pop talent is objectively wrong. You're making the same mistake as the nerds Freddie is making fun of in his piece.
You talking about Kendrick having 'no actual flow' makes you sound like you're doing an impression of somebody. Somebody who is pretending to know shit.
For what it's worth, the irony in this statement is stunning, as though the MAGA universe isn't the embodiment of a collective kayfabe propping up Obvious Mediocrities:
"The kayfabe is suffocating. If the Trump years accomplish nothing else, it will be putting an end of Hyping Obvious Mediocrities for socially and politically promoted reasons."
I couldn't care less about what people think of my music taste, and I like the flow of ever Lamar song I've heard.
If you really think his millions of fans are all pretending, you're deeper in your own kayfabe than any of the people you're condemning here.
As for Beyonce, I haven't hear enough of her singing to have an opinion.
I mean, no one says that about Lamar because that is not a good faith criticism of his music. It’s just an insult about his height.
Success in art has always been random, same as quality.
For my lame comment to a long, well-written article: Williamsburg is now filled with investment bankers and corporate lawyers. The hipsters with glasses who like jangly guitars now live in Ridgewood(-;
Lol.
Also, Freddie, I love you man, but sometimes I feel like we're in a thematic loop here. Perhaps this is intentional, or not, and you've raised good points about poptimism, AI skepticism, and the parlous state of mental health reporting. Raising good points at each step.
The thing is, even though you're writing about these themes that you seem to care a lot about, we're not seeing a lot of *new* insights. It's good for new subscribers, true, but maybe there's some other things that are capturing your attention, too? Because I know I'd dig some more variety.
Yeah, I knew we'd be seeing this exact article. Not mad about it though!
I've been joking this could do with an Mad Libs style template that just gets filled in every time. Freddie isn't the sort to pull a cheap trick like this, but I'm kinda tempted.
There's some insights here on race and virtue signalling, but all the complaining about "poptimism" just sidetracks the article.
Would love to see some writing about... [gestures towards Washington DC]
Otherwise it runs the risk of becoming Grumpy Entertainment Weekly
Yes, this is becoming the Rick Beato of Substack.
"The reality of pop hegemony has finally become so undeniable that few are still shameless enough to deny it, but the idea that popular music is a beleaguered subaltern is so baked into our music discourse that people don’t know what to do with themselves."
Wait until they get a "Pop Hall Of Fame". Surest sign I can think of that a genre has been institutionalized into irrelevance is when it gets a hall of fame.
Pop already has the award ceremonies and converted English Lit majors, so there's one pillar left to fall.
Looking forward to the rockist renaissance this will inevitably produce.
Seriously, back when me and my friends were talking about how much REALER grunge was than Mariah Carey, at least the numbers backed us up.
And I'm going to say it before anyone else does, the only thing that was even halfway cool about Kendrick Lamar's performance, designed as it was to send elite white tastemakers in the coastal urban centers into an orgy of self-congratulations, is that he did his diss track that calls Drake a pedophile, and none of those aforementioned tastemakers even felt moderately compelled to note that's just a BIT fucked up for an event aimed at mainstream normies.
Left or right, one tactic that’s embraced by all is calling your opponent a paedo. Cool culture.
Drake is not a political figure, and people have sound non-political reasons for thinking he's a pedophile.
No they don't. They have the usual half-formed stew of internet bullshit.
It was weird to hear the whole stadium scream “A minor”. And see footage of people in bars chiming in for that line too. Sure, it’s a high point of the song and line where the all the lyrical density drops away and even a Kendrick tyro can make out the words, but jeez…It’s like you got all of America to shout “pedophile!” at once.
and, so?
Yeah I like Lamar and admire him, but celebrating accusing someone of being a pedophile (even if artfully done) seems like messed up cultural moment. I think the play on words and the hook of the song make it fun but ultimately it is such a mean spirited song to win 5 Grammy Awards and be the center of Lamar's Super Bowl performance.
Also, I feel like having Jackson interrupt, "All the Stars" which has such a genuine celebratory sound and SZA showing off her formidable vocal range was an attempt at subversion but instead lead into Lamar's biggest and meanest hit---it's not THAT subversive.
To be fair, the Drake went to bat for a convicted pedophile and had a weird text friendship with a 14 year old Millie Bobby Brown. So it’s not exactly Elon Musk trolling the heroic submersible guy.
But it is very weird for critics to be openly invested in a rap beef.
The underdog thing isn't about recognition, though. Beyoncé has won all the awards she can win and her music is still not as good as a lot of other people's, both historically and today. A lot of people don't care for her, or find themselves more moved by the Beatles or Mozart or Amyl and the Sniffers or something. That's offensive and racist and has to end. It's a crime. The fact that you are not currently listening to her music and finding it transcendent, beyond anything anyone has ever produced, is a vile act of hate and is the reason Trump got elected.
Not a hot take - she's beige pap as a musician. Every criticism aimed at Taylor Swift's lab grown pop hits applies to Beyonce, but Beyonce's hype is just that more odious because it carried the stamp of approval from a poltical and social establishment that would berate, even ostracize, you if you pointed out the kayfabe, let alone said it sucked.
Father John Misty, who has written the odd lyric for her, had a pretty good take on that. As Freddie says about Kendrick, it's really hard for a person in her position, with her image and hundreds if not thousands of jobs relying on her and being an icon of black people, gay dance music people, etc. Like, obviously not in a 'i feel pity for the billionaire's hard life' way but if you're an artist like her you're trapped in a box that people will respond REALLY poorly to you trying to leave. I'm pretty forgiving of her music's blandness as a result. That's the product people want.
That said I'm going to keep listening to cool music for people who enjoy art. I am a dinosaur.
“A lot of people don't care for her, or find themselves more moved by the Beatles or Mozart or Amyl and the Sniffers or something.”
Or, say, “Kind of Blue,” or basically anything by Charles Mingus. Hell, Cindy Blackman Santana of all people has a version of “On Green Dolphin Street” that slaps.
I picked exclusively white people to set up the racism joke.
Ah, right. In any case, I appreciate the joke’s punchline, even if I sort of spoiled the set-up. I couldn’t resist working some jazz in there!
Bravo. Fred, you nailed it to the wall again.
Nailed what,exactly?
The way our utterly demobilized liberal political culture resorts things which maybe aren’t as important as a lot of people think they are to the top of the heap, then mercilessly crucifies and/or shouts down those who disagree. And as far as I’m concerned, the fact that it’s happened here is one big reason why it seems to have happened everywhere.
"Elite white opinion embraced Kendrick Lamar as a conduit to #blackexcellence more than a decade ago, and this dynamic exists for the same reason that those endlessly-sweaty old white man poptimists can’t give up the ghost - because white people need to believe that they’re the good white people, just as men need to believe that they’re the good men, and they will create vast industries of art and criticism to suborn those feelings."
Humans sure are weird.
I'm prob just stupid, but I don't even know what FDB writes about often times. Wtf is the is his point here?
"Status Games Humans Play".
Keeping oneself on the inside of Wilhoit's Law is a long and deeply held practice. Once a matter of life and death, now just social life and death.
I like the Dylan comparison, but to be the unashamed Rockist that I am, Kendrick has never made music that intentionally ostracized and wrong-footed his own fans the way Dylan so often did.
Or maybe fandom is just different today, I dunno.
COULD Beyonce get the Beyhive mad at her? Is that even possible? Kanye accomplished a version of that I suppose, but the same critics are still finding merit in his actual new music.
I'm glad you brought up Kanye: "as soon as they like you, make them un-like you"
Unfortunately For the past 6-7 years or so he's stopped trying to that with his music and is using unhinged bipolar rants intstead.
`He not busy being born is busy dying'
Dylan endures precisely because every decade or so he changed and challenged himself artistically. At least in the 20th century. His last two decades of work has been mediocre juvenilia, as evidenced by the type and quantity of critical lauding it has received.
(Still somewhat undecided about `Rough and Rowdy Ways'.)
At first, I thought that to center the halftime show on yet another take down of Drake made Kendrick look kinda small. And wearing a pair of womens flared jeans would seem to offer some easy ammunition in that never ending, commercially rewarding conflict between multi-millionaires. If the goal continues to be about maximizing the potential audience, and what else is there at this point... how many "beef" explainers were published this last week?
Of course it was small, but this is the shit white culture critics in the Acela Corridor eat up with a spoon. On the one hand, they're pretending to be enlightened scholars and promoters of Authentic Black Culture in America, and the next, they're watching millionaire rappers engage in diss tracks like anthropologists wearing pith helments, binoculars at the ready to record the fascinating behavior on display.
It's all such wearisome horseshit.
On the nose.
They not like us got old months ago. Kendrick keeping the beef going after he was declared the winner by public opinion already is just insane. White people, of course, loved the beef because it gave them cover to say that Drake, a black man, isn't really black.
Drake was the one who restarted the beef after it died down by filing an insane lawsuit against their label.
I’m a Drake fan, have been ever since I heard Shut It Down. Yea I’m white, yes I’m a Poptimist, no I do not imagine myself to be the underdog. Getting that out of the way.
And to me, the beef smells off. It feels manufactured; Kendrick wasn't the biggest despite the belief of the real hip hop heads that he should be, there was a Super Bowl slot coming up, it had to be a black artist because if the direction of cultural travel but he was in no position to solo it. So a critical darling started a beef with a man the music media abhors for being on top too long – novelty is the engine of media – and is declared the winner by that same media, now acting as impartial referees. Kendrick gets the Superbowl. He does a bunch of unremarkable album tracks from his unremarkable album and finishes with his beef song. All the headlines and most of the social media is about Drake. I dunno man, doesn’t feel like a win to me. Feels like your biggest moment was about another dude.
My 15-year-old son is totally in the bag for Kendrick and would disagree with all the above. But hey.
Kayfabe.
On one side. Not sure Drake had much to gain from this.
In about two years that style will be ubiquitous for men. It's taken four years or so for the two dominant styles of women's jeans to get there. Still expecting low-rise to reappear.
Obviously the only way to respond to this kind of thing is to openly state Lamar is terrible. Why? No death vocals, virtuoso guitar solos, or break downs so hard there'd be no way to dodge it when some stock boy with a bunch of face piercings is shoved into you as the circle pit opens.
Kendrick Lamar is not a good rapper, which makes his position as a figure of worship among the establishment culture critics even more embarrassing. His lyrics are banal. The beats are generic soundcloud crap. He has no flow. He cannot enunciate when he raps, which was painfully on display.
I give him credit for memorizing the complex coreography of the moment, but that doesn't translate into actual skills as an emcee. He's not even a mediocrity in that area - he's well below par. Rap lives and dies by the artist's basic skills as an emcee. Ice Cube was arguably the greatest rapper ever in his heyday, precisely because he was amazing at all the things Kendrick Lamar is absolutely terrible at.
It's hard to overstate how ridiculous you sound. I'm not a huge hip hop guy, but I'm friends with huge hip hop fans, many of whom don't have college degrees, and I can assure you don't give a shit about politics, or even who the 'elites' are.' All of them, to a person, think that Kendrick is an all-time talent, even those that aren't huge Kendrick fans.
You genuinely sound EXACTLY like the people FdB is making fun of. Just in the other direction. The confidence with which you say these things just makes you sound like a fucking idiot.
I don't think the Superbowl halftime show is the biggest concert that ever existed. Superbowl barely scrapes 180 million viewers worldwide.
1.9 billion people watched Live Aid.
1.5 billion watch the World Cup final, and with it, some usually shit Eurotrash DJ concert beforehand.
Global hits still exist, but they often aren't the songs that the NYT set go crazy for.
It's notable that the more Beyonce becomes some cultural icon, the less anyone talks about the actual songs, they are almost irrelevant to what people want Beyonce to be.
I expected hip-hop to be dead by now. As music art, it mostly sucks. At best, it is slightly interesting ghetto poetry with an irritating percussion backing.
But Beyonce winning a country music award... well that is yet another in a long list of evidence that the Grammy Awards are crap establishment BS. Frankly, I am in the mode of wanting to cancel all celebrity worship mechanisms for their complete lack of authenticity.
Sooner the better, my boy
"Disco sucks"
Agree. The disco era was saved by and destroyed by the Eagles, etc. So why isn't the hip hop era saved and and destroyed by real music?
White people love palatable corporate "blackness". It's been stuffed down our throats my entire life.
Buy the vibe, get the music/movie/art for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_%26_Mau-Mauing_the_Flak_Catchers
Exactly
Cancel my subscription
lol
Why is this, of all Freddie pieces, the one to offend you?