Music Criticism in Video Form

We've talked about this guy in other threads, but he and those who follow a similar path of doing music crit video-style deserve their own thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OElyc_yZU54

Dude's awesome.

this is the worst idea ever

^^^^^

tim's tv show was really good, but that had 3 people incl tim

the problem w/ this is that it takes me like... 6 mins to read two or three reviews on my own -- i don't really want to watch a 6 min video of a dude in front of a camera talking about something

i barely can find time to listen to the albums themselves

Unless his name is Scott Seward or Ned Raggett, I have no desire to watch a critic read his reviews.

You all will remember this day when this dude takes over the world.

Tbh I shut it off when he referred to Xasthur as "eight albums tall".

Why do you hate poetry?

No, I hate unfortunate references to Smurfs.

John D did an amazing flash animation review on Last Plane years ago (was just text but it sorta counts as video), was it for Radiohead?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4HW7jmRXeE

There's a pretty good Brokencyde reference in his Sleigh Bells review (1:30 or so):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJXrwCX20U

would be so bummed to come across this kinda shit irl anymore (bar? house show?). cannot imagine why anyone would seek it out online.

which, i mean, i'll read a record review from time to time, but i don't need the dude or lady gesturing at me and getting all nasal with it

I did this once. I intended to approximate Jay Smooth but I couldn't edit it down from 11 minutes. So.

I thought it was okay at the time but I am certain it's not worth watching now. Unless you like to see someone describing '70s Beach Boys records and all the while trying to talk through his bad haircut.

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

"However, if you were to take relentless breathy female vocals and put them over a Sunn 0))) track, it would ruin that too."

ppl at the twitter conf kept telling me to do a daily album review vlog like g4ry v4ynerchuck and his dumb wine because it will eventually = $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Do Pitchfork writers still review stuff for ABC News?

Can't find anything re: Pfork/ABC lately, but I did come across Renee Fleming's take on pop and indie rock (I honestly don't dare watch this myself, just wanted to share the link... view at yr own risk!):

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/video?catId=2898870&autostart=false

The Best of Beavis & Butthead

I actually really liked the Woebot.tv thing. This guy on the other hand just seems annoying.

Some of prindle's ones have been really great...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdNhxSDBV9Y

and

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

but then also, recently, very depressing if you've been reading him for a while.

prindle's are at least kind of fascinating/horrifying for fans of his writing, but this other dude...why the hell would anyone watch this?

unless they themselves have considered talking about an album for five minutes into a camera in front of a black backdrop

Because The Needle Drop dude rules.

is this who you want to be when you grow up or something?

i mean unless you can't find a guy in glasses to talk to you about albums in person, i can't see what purpose this guy serves.

he's got people to pay attention to music criticism -- that's something. also, dude's entertaining

dude has less than than 10,000 views on any video. Not bad for a vlog of a dude talking about albums for five minutes with no sound samples (wtf is up with that, btw?) but dunno if he "got people to pay attention to music criticism."

insofar as (1) he has some viewers and (2) you consider what he's doing music criticism -- and i do -- then "he's got people to pay attention to music criticism," at least momentarily

i mean, his is a small fuckin operation, but i'm all for some dude who obviously loves music doing a half-decent job turning other music fans onto good stuff

judging from the comments these people were already paying attention to music criticism when they got to him

sure, you're probably right -- all or even most of the ppl watching his videos probably already have some sort of interest in consuming music criticism, but at the same time he's at least furthering their engagement with it, which is neat. and i think he succeeds pretty well in doing pretty good reviews in this format. i'm all for people trying out projects like this. i also just like his stuff

*most or even all

the title of this thread made me think of something else entirely!

besides the derogatis show, are there any people doing criticism in audio form (which would seem like a more natural fit)?

there's a fantastic deconstruction of "hyper enough" on the laughter guns EP by some college DJs that I wish people would do more of, even if they're not joking.

one day someone will do this well

who wants to look at a music critic?

i was hoping da croupier was planning on launching a competing vlog

xpost

I was thinking this would be about critics tearing music videos apart beavis & butthead/MST3K style, where all you would see is a silhouette maybe.

video is a more forgiving and flexible medium than prose, i.e. allows a lot of more divisive stylistic chops to be sidestepped completely and a lot of observations are simpler to express in realtime. it's quicker&less effort also. reading a tool fan trying to spot instances of the fibonacci sequence in lateralus wld be awful, but youtube is like an anaesthetic. vlogs are shit. all you guys are fools for even imagining them imo.

irl lol, but

youtube is like an anaesthetic. vlogs are shit. all you guys are fools for even imagining them imo.

Huh?

minutes with no sound samples (wtf is up with that, btw?)

I think he used to have sound samples in some of his older review. Whatever happened?

yeah, i thought he did too -- copyright issues, maybe?

I'm trying to think where video offers an advantage over an audio review. Would you pull up spectrum analyses of records?
I think it could be a useful to show where someone maybe ripped off someone else, but it isn't immediately obvious by listening to it.

you could slowly pan over album artwork and pictures of the band while actors read quotes from the musicians, reading rainbow style.

interpretive dance

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

xp to ksh

video is less abstract and more sensory, & that dazzle sweetens the transmission of all sorts of shit. ppl will watch lots of shit they wldn't read, changing the ratio of yr senses can have a numbing effect, youtube is like an audiac, the headphone anaesthetic where you wld increase the volume till you couldn't feel any pain, or presumably, hear afterwards

the laurie anderson curlers line gets me every time!

xpost

wow. i should just stop reading & watching more on YouTube O_O

isn't mark prindle the guy who gave terrible reviews to all the miles davis discs?

yeah, i'm pretty sure it's him. OH BOY, SOMEDAY I HOPE TO HEAR THOSE REVIEWS IN "V"LOG FORM.

mark prindle's hyperactive reviews always made me think he'd sound like beavis.

besides the derogatis show, are there any people doing criticism in audio form

I wish audio criticism wasn't just guys talking about music, but rather making music in response. It would be fun if some music website ran a regular column in which the reviewer wrote and performed songs that described/responded to/criticized/analyzed new releases.

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

there is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmIfn85d3Q

xpost

i used to own that mini Marshall amp

dying @ Electronic Wuss video tbh

yung whiney done found his very own twitter gimmick i see

this is a masterpiece!
http://www.tubafrenzy.org/weblog/mp3/HyperEnoughPart2_TheDJsRevenge.mp3

modz plz mercy kill this thread, thanking you

Electronic Wuss one's spot-on. I'm just dreaming here, but if propagated widely enough I think it could kill off that whole genre.

Someone needs to check with continuity about that earring that starts showing up about a minute in on the Chris Brown one.

the only youtube things i ever liked were those Save The Album ones. cuz i will pretty much always prefer listening to musicians talk about their fave albums then listen to a rock critic talk about anything. not that they are all great (the save the album things), but i just like the idea. i've always been a fan of the desert island disc/invisible jukebox/blindfold test/etc/etc feature with musicians. probably more a fan of that kinda thing than i am a fan of most rock crit.

do you like listening to rock critics at all?

If anyone's interested, I just found the one I did: http://vimeo.com/7391295.

I only filmed it seven months ago and I already disagree with some of the absolute positions I take here. Also why do I care so much whether Brian Wilson's incoherent moans are from beyond edge of mental illness? Never record yourself doing anything.

i'm sure someone's mentioned it on this thread but it's absolutely ridiculous to review music in video format without including bits of the music or even clips from their videos or live shows. Weak, imo.

"do you like listening to rock critics at all?"

not too many of them. i don't really read rock crit much at all anymore. i read the reviews in decibel just to see what people are raving about there. i read ilm obviously. i think i would like a subscription to the wire because i am interested in some of the things they write about. i admire finney, sherburne, and stelfox. strange coincidence, that also happens to be the name of the law firm that represents me. wait, does tim write for the wire? in any case, they write about things that i become increasingly more interested in as time goes on. and write (and think) in a way that is interesting to me. i'd like to subscribe to a good classical mag too (but i do get jon lewis on ilm for free). i think i'd be all set. most "rock" writing is abysmal and impossible to read. let alone watch on video! talking about critical writing and reviews. there is still good historical journalism about music out there. even though it gets harder and harder to find.

i feel you on that, and i would totally subscribe to the Wire if it wasn't so damn expensive in the US

Decibel's the only music magazine I really love. i also read Pitchfork, and sometimes the New York Times and Village Voice music sections. and some blogs. but i've been looking at stuff in other music magazines at the bookstore lately and not too much appealed to me

wax poetics is great usually

okay, maybe "abysmal" is too strong a word. how about "not really worth reading unless i'm really bored and stuck somewhere and there is nothing else to read". that's more like it.

yeah. i just wish more magazines covered different bands and published more longform stuff. the world doesn't need twelve more articles on She & Him imo

wax poetics is great usually

― the dj screwtape letters (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 5:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

i've heard ppl say that here; i should buy a copy

Without wanting to big up my own show, I think Jordan is right to say that probably what made it more palatable was that it was in dialogue form - I think if music crit lacks anything by and large it's a sense of real life interaction between different viewpoints. One dude talking into a camera doesn't solve that. Most of my intentions* for the show were always to make it more like ILM-on-TV rather than Pitchfork-on-TV.

(*word chosen intentionally)

http://sharetv.org/images/kenny_everett_video_show_uk-show.jpg

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/PXwS1IJVmVA/0.jpg

http://www.tvcream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/kennyeverett1.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKDVCc34AXI

Decibel's the only music magazine I really love. i also read Pitchfork, and sometimes the New York Times and Village Voice music sections. and some blogs. but i've been looking at stuff in other music magazines at the bookstore lately and not too much appealed to me

ksh, you need to all get up on this: http://thequietus.com

there was a short-lived rock-crit show on VH-1 circa 1995: "Four on the Floor" starring some ex-colleagues of mine from r0lling $tone etc.

brad nelson is that bookshelf from ikea

http://genius.com/discussions/138517-Anthony-fantano-on-white-people-and-hip-hop

*spends a moment pondering whether/how much he really wants to watch someone named Anthony Fantano talk about white people and hip-hop*

Why do so many people who make youtube videos of themselves talking talk in that exact same "I am a smart guy recording a video of myself" voice?

hi -citta8 hours ago

"art doesn't belong to anyone" - white people
Reply · 46

lol i didn't realize ilm had a thread about this guy much less a user who was actually excited about his potential (?)

i also doubt very much whether i want to watch this video

woof @ this thread

markers is a prophet

i gotta remove that vlog from vimeo

that bookshelf was from target

this guy has gotten gradually more insane over the past 5 years, its been 'interesting' to watch. is this what being a music critic does to you?

does weird me out that this dude showed up right around the time i stopped writing rock crit on the regular. the game needed an anthony ______o to annoy it.

You all will remember this day when this dude takes over the world.

― ksh, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:14 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dude's awesome.

― ksh, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 12:02 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anthOny______o

i find that i cannot watch his videos

not only are they painful to watch but his irrtating voice and facial expressions ricochet around in my mind long after, that irritating false authoritativeness that seems to come solely from assuming he can get to the "correct" analysis of something because he is "smart"

i'm just thankful youtube seems to have figured out somehow to reduce the frequency of his videos in my search results after accidentally clicking on them a few times

obv this is comically vain, but it's like..."gee to make financial sense of being a full-time rock crit you'd have to be comfortable making big, obnoxious faux-quantitative evaluations of things that you will be increasingly not the target audience for as you age, believe i'll find new fields to plow and just stick to the occasional rock-related blog post and being a dink on ilx" meanwhile the The Dark Half was going on in Connecticut

Ladies and gentlemen, the gangsta rap pewdiepie is here

croup, you can seriously stuff the idea that you left rock criticism because you were somehow "above" it

i thought i was throwing in enough self-depreciation and acknowledgement of financial truths to avoid looking like that's what i'm doing, but guess not

i mean i worked as a gossip blogger for a couple years after, i'm not saying that's "above" rockcrit

word

but do allow me the vanity of seeing this dillpickle as like, a version of myself that didn't get over the idea of rating the rhymes of teenagers being a life purpose

accent on the word "rating"

lest it sound like i don't respect music journalism

or more thoughtful critical appreciations of work

i suspect that a substantial measure measure of AF's success owes to his appearance and tone. he has the face of children's show host, unremarkable yet extremely pliable, prone to rubbery, theatrical exaggeration. his expressions seem not expressive of an inner state, but contrived in an actorly manner to illustrate this or that point. while he speaks in a blandly authoritative manner, he's by no means deep thinker, and he throws in plenty of goofy asides to let you know that he's a "fun guy". all of this makes his videos easy to follow and soothing in the manner of crap network television.

oh he could definitely be gene shalit someday

if submitted to looping videos of fantano reviews i would admit to anything, it's absolute t o r t u r e to sit through, like get to the fucking point already - probably his audience enjoys lenghty hyperactive youtube hosts/channels more than i do

can easily see why it's popular though, seems to me it has a very calculated appeal like sean parkers international hipster playlist on spotify

if this is "popular" it's as good an argument for wiping out human beings as any

i suspect that a substantial measure measure of AF's success owes to his appearance and tone. he has the face of children's show host, unremarkable yet extremely pliable, prone to rubbery, theatrical exaggeration. his expressions seem not expressive of an inner state, but contrived in an actorly manner to illustrate this or that point.

not realizing where i was i assumed "af" meant arcade fire. still works kinda

while people praise ebert for all his warm-hearted blogging and support of the indie scene etc, dude got famous being a nonthreatening, amiable nerd who showed sincere respect for the medium while keeping it light and telling people what was worth seeing with his thumb. fantano fits the mold perfectly.

Ladies and gentlemen, the gangsta rap pewdiepie is here

― pro stroke Johnny Gill songs would rub you the right way (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, February 20, 2015 11:18 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha ok that even might be a LITTLE unfair to fantano, of whom i am NO FAN

Yeah, I mean, I kid but you can't really hate on Fantano

Dude found his own lane wherein he actually reviews for an audience that exists instead of the less than 1000 people on planet earth who give a fuck about "rockism" and "pazz and jop" and Wussy

Like he's not trying to get ALL UP IN OUR BIZ pitching clips to Fader or the Oxford American or whatever. Dude exists in his own bubble

a LITTLE unfair to fantano, of whom i am NO FAN

no fan o'?

Fantano? Not a fan.

lotta room for $$$ in a bubble

Wow, I definitely started this thread by posting video with the Needle Drop dude in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFo0j945vB8

thanks to deej's twitter i see this guy has some kind of latin-borat komedy r&b alter ego

most youth internet culture (aside from the racists) just pass me by w/o any impression but this little dingus makes me so angry

god yes me too

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/music-vlogger-anthony-fantano-mistaken-for-oregon-shooter

i say execute him just in case

ok lol

who wants to look at a music critic?

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, 9 June 2010 19:32 (5 years ago)

Just dawned on me this week that needle drop guy is uncommonly beautiful. Looks much better with a shaved head though.

thread title compels me to post that whenever I want to hear a hip-hop review, my first stop is Dead End Hip Hop

https://albumfriend.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/fantano2.png

usually goes down differently when they appear on each other's shows

I decided to give a fantano youtube a try. This guy lost me by talking longer than a minute

Oh shit.., he just sarcastically called me an independently thinking snowflake

I hate when youtube recommends this guy to me now (I found a stop suggesting option but it must still have kinks). I cringe everytime his trendy, bulbous, hipster face gets placed next to content I like

I want to kill him between the eyes

It's impressive how he manages to look so aggressively annoying in every single still image I've ever seen of him, that's some real brand cultivation. I tried watching a video once out of curiosity and made it about twelve seconds, just brutal.

Fantano is (slightly) less obnoxious than this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s8mhU6P1Ho

milo13 16,335
Upvote+2Downvote
Wow…Fantano is like me without bitches

i hate this stuff

even though i haven't watched any. the youtube screenshot previews in the sidebar are enough

I quite like this guy, he also does unboxings of limited edition box sets and stuff:

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

Never got the point of unboxing videos. Just seems like a boring video blogger ritual.

i think i'm old because i fucking hate all video content produced for social media. except cat videos and comical injury footage.

Yeah, unless the topic really benefits from being in a video form I tend to avoid videos. I shouldn't have to stop the music I'm listening to, or put headphones so I don't bother anyone, just to hear what could have just as simply been typed.

"Never got the point of unboxing videos. Just seems like a boring video blogger ritual."

hi you are not nine years old.

it's the latest in viral capitalist propoganda don't you know

I don't think most people doing unboxing videos are 9 either.

neither are the people doing the gamestop dumpster diving videos that my nine year old was obsessed with.

but yeah some unboxing stuff obviously for the people who are mentally nine. at heart.

dumpster diving videos >>>>> unboxing

But the unboxing videos usually look slow and ceremonial. As if they'd get a separate commentator if they could.

i worked with a guy who was into unboxing videos. basically he was quite an acquisitive, materialistic, fetishizing sort who got a visceral thrill from taking new goods, primarily electronic goods, out of their boxes after buying them. he explained that watching unboxing videos gave him a vicarious buzz.

he was 25 and quite immature/silly

http://channelawesome.com/category/videos/producers/todd/

i think this one lurks ilm. unless he's one of you? fess up!

I like really like Todd's One Hit Wonderland series.

sometimes it seems like the extent of the research he does is to read a couple wikipedia articles and type some stuff into the youtube search bar, but yeah, when it's good it really is good.

the bulk of his current-song-reviewing series used to be very much of the 'hetero white male reacts to/rants about things that were not made with him in mind' youtube genre which bugged me a bit but his output has certainly diversified since then and he does manage to be insightful

http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_834a9b96-e038-11e5-b357-0fc016531edd.html

"Fantano’s insights were greeted with silent appreciation and rapt attention, while his jokes were met with tear-inducing laughter, enough for him to consider a career as a comedian if the music review business ever tanks. But for now, “The Needle Drop” doesn’t seem to be losing fans or slowing down in any way."

He was the first guy to put in the amount of work like that on YouTube, his grind is admirable,” Ross said. 'Few people used that format to review music, and he’s not beholden to any big media corporation, so that resonates with disillusioned music fans.'

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/3b7uk3/hip_hop_reacts_to_gay_marriage_legalisation/csjvxts

lol, apparently he was partnered with Maker Studios (a Disney subsidiary) up until sometime last year

I know Todd lurks over at the AV Club, but I'm not sure he lurks here.

big fan of Nostalgia Chick, who left that site a year or so ago and just hosts her own youtube. haven't seen much Todd but he has guested in her videos before.

Fantano reviews memes now and they get 100k+ views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2zcJq-oFvg

nice try, this is just that new radiohead leak

Life is full of "I wish I realized I could have made money just by ______" headsmacks, and in this one the blank is "being annoying on video."

Like, I already talk about stuff in an annoying way all the time, if only I had turned the camera on?

Guess who's in this enlightening video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4lFSq_Efzk

Learning that's the tip of the iceberg.

oh good can we not write thinkpieces about this piece of shit now

Lmao Racethony Wartano gonna str8 clean up in Trump's America with the biggest audience of any working music critic while we're arguing about whether the 1975 is on enough lists

t/s is he the most popular music critic bc he uses sound effects when describing a swans record or does he court a white nationalist reddit audience

proud to have been right since day 1

You all will remember this day when this dude takes over the world.

― ksh, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:14 AM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does this really come as a surprise

Only in the sense that the reasons he was already disliked don't seem to have any relation/wouldn't point to this development

Unless I missed something

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

This guy's changing lives and none of you even appreciate it:

But is he changing his pants

the reasons he was already disliked don't seem to have any relation/wouldn't point to this development

wants to nail down and evaluate art = wants to nail down and evaluate human beings

Oh good call!

i guess i misunderstood this video, am i the only one? i thought this was making fun of this POV, admittedly i watched 2/3rds and didn't read anything about it.

Sadly it is not satire

holy shit, then!

what y'all think about this asshole?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xva6KUM2aWo

Never understood the hate for Fantano. That 'SJW' attack video is def gross, but what does that have to do with his work as a music critic? Hysterical criticism of Fantano always struck me as anonymous music/pop culture writers getting salty that someone managed to become successful on their own terms with name/face recognition.

Never understood the hate for Fantano. That 'SJW' attack video is def gross, but what does that have to do with his work as a music critic?

Ugh I know right? Same way Hitler was treated iirc. He did some gross things but mein gott could he paint amirite?

Managed forty seconds of that video, my god

wow that guy in the shadows is fuckin hateful

oh, please! what does he say in that video that is so terrible? it's everybody else. guilt by association - Xgau is much more crass on a regular basis in his actual reviews.

xp

Just dawned on me this week that needle drop guy is uncommonly beautiful. Looks much better with a shaved head though.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, December 29, 2015

the immediate Hitler comparison was hilarious though, thank u

it wasn't so much him but that video was completely unwatchable

I'm not gonna pass up on a good clean Godwin if it's presented on a gold platter, yw xp

animated knight w robot voice hectoring in threatening monotone srsly going to haunt my every dream

ban flappy bird

@imago - Well, yeah. but so what? i don't watch his reviews regularly, but i don't hate him. people have had this visceral reaction the guy since he showed up on youtube (this thread!) and i can't figure it out. i get it, he's annoying, but he became successful on his own terms, built a following, and like i said, anonymous/faceless critics loathe him.

Why did the white men pick a creepy ambient drone as background music for their amazing questions?

i will cop to sometimes seeing what score he's given something if not his actual reviews. he tends to dominate the critical discourse for a lot of stuff i like. but there is undoubtedly something off about him

imago, maybe its time you do a little self-reflection, bub

If that video itself doesn't do it for you I stumbled on plenty others at the same time in the same vein that I can link if you want to pick and choose your favorite.

of Fantano going off on SJWs or whatever in a more explicit way? feel free - i wouldn't be surprised, but people being embarrassed or sheepish about paying attention to this guy's popular video blog is so weak. it just strikes me as jealous, sour grapes critics reacting to someone who's 'lame.' who cares?

the way he hates safe spaces is SO LAME

what you on about whiney? sure i went a bit out of line accusing the fader of performative trendy sex-positive hipster wokeness gone mad!!1 but i've said sorry, acknowledged my sins etc - in what fucking universe am i comparable to these creepy fucking hateful goons?

xp i agree, but again, what does that have to do with his music reviews? lemme know once Fantano reaches Ott levels of creepiness

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/a/ab/Albrecht_Krieger_01.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100529230117

I'LL SAVE YOU ANTHONY

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwODmry0QWzgGrV0afGkEVLVZYmZWa1UF

what you on about whiney? sure i went a bit out of line accusing the fader of performative trendy sex-positive hipster wokeness gone mad!!1 but i've said sorry, acknowledged my sins etc - in what fucking universe am i comparable to these creepy fucking hateful goons?

― illbient microtonal poetry Surbiton (imago), Monday, December 19, 2016 2:19 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not calling u a goon! Just saying the Fader thing plus the obsession with Rate Your Music and Fantano scores means you're def hanging out in goon-y parts of the internet and I'm worried they might turn our beloved woke vaccuum enthusiast into a pepe

xp hahaha WHOA! i stand corrected. is that his alt-account or something?

fyi i am pro-social justice, pro-safe spaces, pro-diversity (and in certain circumstances positive discrimination), anti-harassment and anti-asshole. with a few rough edges relating to perhaps false perception of some of the more extraverted forms of woke signalling. all the pepes are hateful horror cunts and i started the alt-right thread due to my horror of them

xp hahaha WHOA! i stand corrected. is that his alt-account or something?

― flappy bird, Monday, December 19, 2016 7:23 PM (one second ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It took a YT channel chock full of alt-right shit to convince you? My Godwin wasn't enough? Sad!

Yeah, apparently some character he's created to rant about that sort of things and other internet topics

xps

thing*

i am going to clean up rym one comment box at a time

It took a YT channel chock full of alt-right shit to convince you? My Godwin wasn't enough? Sad!

― Le Bateau Ivre

yep my spidey sense just wasn't going off before i saw that

wait how does rym fit in here

Fly on, flappy bird

http://files.gamebanana.com/img/ico/sprays/538578b593b47.gif

<3

wow good to know my irrational dislike of fantano was always rational

hah alot of that video was shot at what used to be a DIY venue called Couch Couch. the place was tiny.

which is funny cos there used to be a giant picture of the Beatles above that stairway.

this guys a total idiot tho, half this video is about how the song doesn't sound like The Beatles. like, no shit man

i am not about to spend time watching the videos on that Fantanto alt account, but just looking at the titles, is it possible that it's poorly executed satire of views he does not actually hold? for example, isn't he in fact vegan?

No, it's not possible, I watched some of them (regrettably).

The satire is aimed at criticizing "SJWs", generally. He holds the views. I know it seems like I was researching the guy here but really this was maybe 20 minutes tops of curiosity last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a39uDiht3tY

Also keep in mind that the SJW video I originally l linked was not a compilation of existing videos. All of the participants contributed to it (they were answering questions given to them). He chooses to call these people peers so its safe to say there is a lot of ideology overlap among them.

wow good to know my irrational dislike of fantano was always rational

LOL I made this *exact* comment in tweet form a few days back

todd in the shadows was discussed upthread at some point. i have stopped watching his videos, but they were occasionally insightful/entertaining even if his opinions/biases are very run-of-the-mill/blah. like his taste and values are nearly as bro-ey as fantano's (tho he would likely be aghast to be described as bro-ey) but at least he doesn't seem to be an awful person.

i am almost 100% sure he reads some of the writer-ilxors out there and may even stalk this forum sometimes! despite this i think he has managed to express positive opinions about more macklemore songs than about rap songs by any other artist combined.

Still prefer him over The Rap Critic.

wow ffs he's even doing that chin pinch thing in the thumbnail of that video

looking back it seems the clue that something was off & permanently dumb as shit was probably "this guy wants to do music criticism in the form of YouTube uploads"

and yes btw I'm keenly aware that he's spoken well of Joan Crawford at some point so Whiney you can stuff that arrow right back in yr quiver, you mug

imagining this dude shouting "No. Wire. Hangers. EVER!" in the middle of one of his reviews is surprisingly entertaining

I've been aware of Fantano as a name that crops up every so often in places on the internet where music discussion is taking place, but I've never once understood why people consider his opinions worth paying attention to. I've never once found myself interested in what Fantano thinks about... well, anything. I did watch a couple of his reviews a couple of years ago and I didn't find what he had to say particularly enlightening or engaging. Just as well, since apparently according to this thread he's a bit of a douche.

Flappy bird's sudden U-turn from being a passionate, heart-on-sleeve defender of Fantano to suddenly being irked by the way he grabs his chin (of all things) was a blessing to witness, though.

turkin

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/STINKPIECE_zpspv5yfw9u.png

we're gonna have music gamergate by July

I think if that were to happen it would be based off of pubs looking for strictly negative/positive pitches re certain records (as mentioned in the Hardwired thread). I think if that provably happened with certain artists that could really set off some shit.

(I'm not arguing *for* pubs getting dragged over it, I'm just saying it's a scenario.)

we're gonna have music gamergate by July

pr8z@k tried to get something going on this front last year but it came to nothing

It doesn't happen the same way w music because even the most entitled music nerd doesn't have this claim on being a real original music fan whose culture is being taken from them. Literally everyone on earth is in some capacity a fan of music & that's not true of vgs

Well except the deaf I suppose

Point is gamergate relied on this myth that doesn't operate in the music world

I dunno, if you take in account like Candy Crush and shit, I wouldn't be surprised if "gaming" had more active participants than music fandom in 2017

Like I bet the number of people who spent money on a video game >>>>> people who spent money on a streaming service/MP3/CD/vinyl and please no one Kool Aid Man in here with some fantasy of innumerable Midwestern normies torrenting their Adele bootlegs because you lived in a dorm once

and the leap isn't necessarily to "real music fan" but to "real music" fan, god knows there's enough of those fucks ever-ready to circle the studded leather wagons

and Whiney's right, what used to be the "casual gaming" market is fucking enormous now, my 75 year-old mom loves to play match 3 games and she hasn't got any real interest in popular music since the mid 1970s

but this is to pretend that Gamergate had any legitimate foundation beyond "white man-babies don't like being told that their cool culture might be offensive to non-white non-man-babies"

it didn't rely on any myth for longer than 2 seconds it was instantly "waaaaah SJWs want to take away my Call of Duty porn"

I'm psyched for the day Neutral Milk Hotel is considered un-woke.

my absolute favorite part about gamergate was that the ENTIRE THING was LITERALLY started because a handful of internet manbabies had some insane tantrum because (enormous gasp here) some videogame designer likes the dick and then the New York Times put it on the front page

Woman Enjoys Dick, Men Inexplicably Mad: Are Video Games In Crisis?

sure i once saw some long-running reddit or ktt thread where lifetime pitchforkers were raging/doxxing at every meaghan garvey rap rvw or whatever

I doubt there's many good scandals in the completely dull world of music writing anyway. Most publicists will tell you the majority of music writers don't even go to shows and I think all the constant Tweeting about award shows and Westworld plays out that they're mostly a bunch of shut-ins.

The entire thing might be played out via buying power once the unscrupulous CEOs that actually own music sites notice the Fantano/RYM numbers and realize that anti-cuck/anti-patrician/anti-SJW rants will mean more engaged viewers and unique hits than woke thinkpieces

if there's something that makes "alt music" safer than games from a protopolitical phenom like this it's that alt music's audience hasn't been systematically fed for decades on a diet of literally solipsistic power fantasies while the gap between these fantasies and the players' actual experienced lives grew and grew -- on the other hand it def thinks it's better than everyone so who knows whee

and Whiney's right, what used to be the "casual gaming" market is fucking enormous now, my 75 year-old mom loves to play match 3 games and she hasn't got any real interest in popular music since the mid 1970s

― Rock Wokeman (Noodle Vague), Saturday, January 7, 2017 1:43 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah but that's my point video games have become like music, music was always like music

Nerds more likely to attach themselves to particular genre myths than "our overall popular music culture is being stolen"

(also even fantano is regularly exposed to images of nonwhites that have actually been created by nonwhites) xp

alt music's audience hasn't been systematically fed for decades on a diet of literally solipsistic power fantasies

i think the number of sensitive alt-types who turn out to be irl date rapists actually plays this out, but just with a different type of cosplay

Anyway, I def feel like the nearly 200,000 people that watched this video represent some kind of "silent majority" for alternative music nerds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqiY1YR4X-o

And someone is either going to figure out how to mobilize them or monetize them

lol whiney i kept it to a screencap for a reason

(but i also watched it, so. btw the whole thing is about denying the proposition that "alt" means "racist", like at a linguistic level: "alt-r&b" is made by black people, etc. nobody here has the life-minutes to burn.)

anyway otm that "games", broadly defined, are m/l For Everyone now and that was/is p much the whole problem.

200k ppl = "majority" is a pretty odd claim imo, that # of ppl who like that music would have to be almost infinitesimally small in the broader picture for that # to be a majority of any kind or even to imagine that it represents a majority who's not watching the video

i didn't have the life-minutes to burn on Fantano before i knew he was a bigot

fyi i am pro-social justice, pro-safe spaces, pro-diversity (and in certain circumstances positive discrimination), anti-harassment and anti-asshole

alas, too long for a display name

200,000 is certainly more people than watch a lot of the music videos by so-called indie rock darlings and certainly more than read a lot of the thinkpieces he's raging against.

I know it's not a real majority, but in the tiny insular world of five different sites posting WATCH THE NEW VIDEO FROM PHILADELPHIA SHRUG-ROCK BAND FERRNGULLLY it's basically Chewbacca mom

lol

but seriously the official video from the last bon iver album has 27 million views. this dude's paltry 200k are not on that level.

jesus christ that's 200 losers with a lot of time on their hands

I'm n-Ott gonna do a forensics breakdown but I can find some very well written about indie rock bands and very music-Twitter spicy takes that don't have 200,000 views

so the haircut was a clue after all

Just dawned on me this week that needle drop guy is uncommonly beautiful. Looks much better with a shaved head though.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, December 29, 2015

― salthigh, Monday, 19 December 2016 19:03

I haven't seen his thinkpiece videos but I stand by this statement. I heard that the "stinkpiece" he was criticizing was genuinely silly but I'm not jeopardizing my youtube recommendations to find out what he's like.

But is he really an actual bigot? Trump supporter?

All 200k views are from people who agree with its content.

i watched a few minutes of his stuff and he's...not alt-right fyi

thanks for the deep dive k3v

"i stand by his uncommon white nationalist beauty" - robert adam gilmour

the only reason there hasn't been a music g*mergate is that there hasn't been a music eron gj*ni

(that said female music writers have been doxed/etc in the past by the same crowd so it's closer than one might think)

Point is gamergate relied on this myth that doesn't operate in the music world

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, January 7, 2017 1:31 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the candy crush moms vs trv kvlt gamers thing was always a sideshow. gg was an antifeminist and antiliberal backlash. is there an audience for that in music criticism? i think there probably is. is there room for someone to make headway as a critic by being a very brave iconoclast against (just free associating here) the boring old schoolmarm 'progressive' values of the legacy music press? yes absolutely.

The entire thing might be played out via buying power once the unscrupulous CEOs that actually own music sites notice the Fantano/RYM numbers and realize that anti-cuck/anti-patrician/anti-SJW rants will mean more engaged viewers and unique hits than woke thinkpieces

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, January 7, 2017 2:08 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is as likely as anything imo

jim goad is still a thing, and he started as an offshoot of music culture, right?

Give the alt-right crowd the carrot (nu-metal) they always needed and the music world will be spared a gamergate-like event.

🤔

rock criticism's gamergate took place in 1979 and was called "disco sucks".

the candy crush moms vs trv kvlt gamers thing was always a sideshow. gg was an antifeminist and antiliberal backlash. is there an audience for that in music criticism? i think there probably is. is there room for someone to make headway as a critic by being a very brave iconoclast against (just free associating here) the boring old schoolmarm 'progressive' values of the legacy music press? yes absolutely.

― goole, Monday, January 9, 2017 10:54 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well if you define it like that literally anything can have its own gamergate, America just had its own gamergate that would seem to make a music journalism gamergate look like a candle in the sun

At this point the better question is why wouldn't there be a music Gamergate?

I doubt there's many good scandals in the completely dull world of music writing anyway. Most publicists will tell you the majority of music writers don't even go to shows and I think all the constant Tweeting about award shows and Westworld plays out that they're mostly a bunch of shut-ins.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, January 7, 2017 3:08 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you get that Gamergate wasn't driven by game critics but rather by the people playing games, right

given that a lot of the people who shot to fame as popularizers of right-wing nerd backlash seamlessly moved into mouthpieces for the alt-right more broadly... i mean i don't really know where you're going with that arg

to answer ums: i do think that pop music has, in whatever confused unhappy way, certain liberal ideas buried in it more deeply than video games do, or 'tech' more broadly

to complete the analogy, you'd need: some fake scandal supposedly showing the too-cozy relationship between well-connected music writers pushing music for its politics (or trying to punish for its bad politics), and a mass of fans who are angry enough about progressivism to turn it into a rolling crisis, with a growing hit-list of enemy-writers and a counter-slate of 'anti-pc' critics and musicians as heroes.

i could see glimmers of this in ugly moments -- i'm thinking of the inevitable chorus of rape denialist types that emerge when larkin grimm spoke out. but i don't know if i see those moments or groups forming. but they might!

...idk if sketching out an exact parallel scenario like that is all that useful tbh

swans bros are #1 on the alert list tbh

there's actually a fair bit of static in the metal world about sjw's trying to ruin everything by hating on goregrind etc. same shit, less traction.

I was going to bring that up but I only ever encounter it when EZ Snappin sends me a link

Right but what I was saying is you can find it at genre level but music is too decentralized, like I don't think macho grindcore fans and guys who don't want rap to sound too bling bling and ppl who think tool are the best are going to see common cause in going after sjw's who can in no way keep artists from being heard ?

America just had its own gamergate that would seem to make a music journalism gamergate look like a candle in the sun

totally off topic but when did "candle in the sun" become an expression? i never really heard it and then the miguel song came out and i've heard it other places lately too. obv i know "candle in the wind" but was i just missing a widely used expression?

does it become difficult to see
like a candle in the sun?

i think so

http://www.letsmakecandles.com/info_protect_from_sun_703.asp

I don't think D-40 has any clue what a grindcore fan looks like

https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/93/92/18/240_F_93921841_41w8FyxCphQPNEsvJ0t6PrhWgvcjzJnt.jpg

http://www.metalinsider.net/in-memoriam/grindcore-fan-that-happened-to-be-a-goat-passes-away

"to complete the analogy, you'd need: some fake scandal supposedly showing the too-cozy relationship between well-connected music writers pushing music for its politics (or trying to punish for its bad politics), and a mass of fans who are angry enough about progressivism to turn it into a rolling crisis, with a growing hit-list of enemy-writers and a counter-slate of 'anti-pc' critics and musicians as heroes."

all of this exists already.

also I shouldn't be surprised, given almost everyone here is male, but GG wasn't about politics -- that is the alibi GG made up in like a day to cover their ass. GG certainly tapped into politics but at heart it was about someone's ex getting revenge in the messiest, most trollish way possiblbe

*possible

Harrasment towards the lead singer of Chvrches (I forget her name, is it Lauren Mayberry?) was the one moment I believed something similar to gamergate would happen to the music community, it never reached crisis point like in the vg industry.

I can think of multiple instances where female music writers were harassed by roughly the same crowd, up to and including doxing

also I shouldn't be surprised, given almost everyone here is male, but GG wasn't about politics -- that is the alibi GG made up in like a day to cover their ass. GG certainly tapped into politics but at heart it was about someone's ex getting revenge in the messiest, most trollish way possiblbe

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine), Monday, January 9, 2017 3:57 PM (fifty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, maybe i'm not 'getting it' because i'm male, but how is that not also 'politics'.

like, the boundary between "politics" and "white male resentment" has all but been annihilated right?

http://i.imgur.com/XujHL.gif

the difference is that while the political resentment existed for decades, the thing that made it boil over was a harassment campaign against one female developer. the former was an excuse for the latter.

but then it turned into a harassment campaign against many female developers (and journalists) and implicitly against the very idea of female (or black, or gay, or...) developers unwilling to develop exclusively for straight white males -- i mean there were many victims in that thing besides ZQ and many toxic ideas about things much more general than ZQ, and i don't rly know what the point of reducing it to its flashpoint is. what they covered their ass with was the "ethics" shit -- that was garbage, no argument, but imo they v quickly became a genuine protofascist movement. now of course they've shed the proto.

(I'm exceedingly familiar with how the whole thing played out, no need to recap.)

the point is, it can start at any time, and what incites it will not be a music vlog or whatever, but someone's ex going nuclear. I can think of at least two separate instances where I was genuinely afraid this was going to happen, but fortunately they petered out. (deliberately not mentioning specifics because fading into obscurity is the best-case scenario for things like this, which I realize makes it difficult to argue.) it's different from just garden-variety internet nazism

I can think of at least two separate instances where I was genuinely afraid this was going to happen, but fortunately they petered out. (deliberately not mentioning specifics because fading into obscurity is the best-case scenario for things like this, which I realize makes it difficult to argue.)

oh no trouble believing this, or that, as u say above, the conditions are already in place in the music sphere.

the video game industry is an _industry_. there's serious money in it. i don't know what difference that makes, but it seems to me that money seems to be an extremely important factor in a lot of things these days.

strange times

Music industry generated revenues of 15 billion $ in 2015. Much less than video games (and film/television), but enough to consider there is serious money in it.

VG industry earns more than music.

My mistake, I thought the previous post was claiming the opposite.

no, you're right. there is serious money in it. beyonce makes serious bank. and people have tried to target beyonce, and so far they have failed.

gamergate is, at its core, about hostility to women. rock music has been fighting that battle for decades now, and it's losing badly. a successful gamergate-style campaign would require some degree of novelty, not just embracing the nuge and kid rock. you'd have to champion somebody like bieber over carly rae jepsen, and there's just too much cultural ossification in recorded music for people to do that.

music is also highly respected as an art by both music fans and industry as well as regular people that don't care too much. videogames still very much considered just base consumer products with no craft to them, with little cultural cache, and this resentment combined with a internet-fueled redpill conspiracy mindset is part of what feeds GG.

I heard there was an attempt at a metalgate a few years ago but nobody cared.

Sam Dunn/Banger did a panel about sexism in metal and I think it got a pretty hostile response.

tbh it's immaterial whether this turns into a Gate it's simply a question of noting that Fantohno is at best an alt-right sympathizer and all-purpose douchebag

I heard there was an attempt at a metalgate a few years ago but nobody cared.

there was, and you're right (it was a half-assed attempt by a longstanding metal provocateur/troll/dickhead) but women metal writers still got, and get, a fuckton of abuse in their DMs etc & in the comments on their stories, etc

i can't imagine something like "women vs. tropes in metal" ever taking off any more than i could imagine "women vs. tropes in pro wrestling" taking off. the thing about things like gaming and comics that make them such flash-points is that women are very heavily involved in those things. in contrast, metal and pro-wrestling are still predominantly male spaces, and while these scenes continue to successfully marginalize, isolate, and drive away women involved in them i don't see there being a great deal of controversy.

Asking again how far Fantohno goes? Trump supporter? Makes silly rants about political correctness? I think that's annoying and probably has some negative impact but is that all?

I don't believe he is actually a Trump supporter. He's more likely a bernieorbust type that is constantly at war with SJW strawmen. AKA a living caricature of the "typical redditor"

Can a Bernieorbust guy be a typical Redditor?

he's a bernie or buster but a really dumb one. the kind of guy who's not sure if he likes bernie or ron paul

also money is a bit irrelevant to GG because their primary targets are indie games, which make essentially none (it isn't comparable to music -- music has revenue streams open that games don't) (ugh, "revenue streams," but)

I always thought Anthony Boitano was just reading pitchfork reviews out loud

http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Tina-Fey-giving-herself-high-five.gif

http://www.thefader.com/2017/10/03/needle-drop-deleted-youtube-channel-this-is-the-plan

well.

A truly satisfying story, given his clear panic over being directly called on his shit.

yeah i was more nauseated by sam hyde's description of his sexual techniques than satisfied, but i guess ymmv

also, like, this is the sort of stuff those alt-right shitheads eat up as evidence that they're ~~the truly oppressed class~~

xpost Admittedly more in the sense of 'laying his shitheadedness all out' satisfying than having to deal with gross fuckup details, but yes.

Never reallt watched fantano's videos but this is still a weird story. My impression was that his reviews were kind of lame but innocuous?

The Fader article on this is ominous because they claim that video is the medium where the alt right flourishes.. and also the medium to which a lot of media companies are moving.

both of those things are true

My impression was that his reviews were kind of lame but innocuous?

how could you tell, you'd have to watch one

I disliked Fantano from the get go partially because we have very different tastes but is this article reaching a bit? Like, is he truly that lame? No way am I watching those Hyde and Akkad videos so I guess I'll never know.

In short, Fantano may have discerned from the popularity of his friends like Sam Hyde and Sargon of Akkad — not to mention his own icon status on /mu/ — that a market existed for reactionary video content.

this is really what it comes down to with most of these reactionary pivots. gamergate cracked open this massive White Nationalist Incel demographic and every scumsucker with a platform swam right into it. i don't think it's a case of anyone being "redpilled". i'm not sure people like fantano or pewdiepie or ian miles cheong actually believe in anything outside of themselves

qualx OTM

ive seen this dudes music reviews sitting on the sidelines forever and i dont know that ive ever clicked on one before and now i feel vindicated bc what a fucking creep

on a purely aesthetic level why would anyone want to look at people like af and pewdiepie let alone listen to their opinions

Like, is he truly that lame?

I followed him on tumblr back in the day (never been interested in vlogs), he would say the odd anti-sjw anti-gamergate thing every now and then but he'd sometimes call out racist messages he got sent to him around the time To Pimp a Butterfly came out. I never liked his politics but he wasn't nearly as bad as his godawful 94% male fanbase. It looks like he's totally gone down the alt-right rabbit hole now though

So yeah, i'm glad the fader is calling out his bullshit

the main thought i have of him is still people making fun of him on tumblr for having hentai displayed on his blog through his likes

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

I am deeply, deeply suspicious of anyone who uploads themselves to youtube and always have been.

the best illustration of just how far gone this particular YouTube/Let's Play/etc crowd is, for me, was when a commenter called one LP guy "far-left" for saying he supported Obama. some fuckin' karl marx shit right there

Words on a page is one thing I can more or less manage, the idea of people speaking their thoughts out loud is corrosive to well being

this is about music, nobody wants to look at people speaking, find another art form for that

also

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

― small doug yule carnival club (unregistered), Friday, March 4, 2016 12:43 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this still true

there's also, imo, something to the alt-right being enamored with charismatic personalities (obviously they're not the *only* ones, but it is a pretty consistent trait, and of course are all sorts of parallels you could tease out of that trait), and the only "pivots to video" that actually work for media being the one driven by charismatic personalities with large fanbases.

(once again, games might end up being the canary in the coalmine for this kind of thing -- I remember, when the Nick Robinson stuff happened, suspecting it would not be the last time. the traits that make shitty and/or abusive people function -- charisma, etc. -- are very transferable skills to media)

In July, 2016, Fantano appeared in a video called “QUESTIONS WHITE MEN HAVE FOR SJWs!” Posted and commission by TJ Kirk, also known as the Amazing Atheist, it brought together a group of prominent political YouTubers: Sargon of Akkad, a talking suit of armor called the Armoured Skeptic, and an anthropomorphic kangaroo called Atheism is Unstoppable.

wtf

Good question.

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.

xp katherine

the thing I can never figure out is who is it who finds assholes like AF charismatic

People who find racist trolling an amusing past-time

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.

good thing no-one whose views overlap with these shitlords are currently working the levers of power in the united states of america, phew

People who find racist trolling an amusing past-time

Fantano built up a pretty huge fanbase before the alt-right was even a proper thing though, and as established earlier itt the overt heel turn was pretty recent

Other assholes. Of whom there are a lot.

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.
― Treeship, Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:20 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what we're seeing now is 4chan kiddies turning into adults

True. But according to the Fader, the pivot was encouraged by the fact that there was a big overlap between his 94% male(!) fanbase and the alt right.

there is something in the "I am a master logician" - nu atheist - proving ur inferiority with algebra crowd that ties into the kind of "objective cataloguing" approach of a Fantano imo - the will to crush subjectivity under an ersatz analytical rigour

Xp simon. I've gotten so slow.

I feel like I want to blame RYM a little bit for some reason.

it is part of the same bullshit to me. I realise fans of criticism as filing may feel differently.

All the aggregators -- metacritic etc -- definitely contributed to this tendency to evaluate art as just another commodity, along the lines of user enjoyment rather than any kind of respect for the work in itself.

which, y'know, is part of a very old and dishonourable teenage boy tradition, "proving" the superiority of yr own malformed beliefs

there's definitely something to want to boil down art criticism to a numbers game and how it facilitates a poisonous discourse, see also Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic (xp!!)

I Rate Everything.

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

― small doug yule carnival club (unregistered), Friday, March 4, 2016 12:43 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this still true

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:01 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

I think so. according to Socialblade, his review channel and his edgelord channel are both signed with Complex. it's pretty low of Complex to profit off of his bullshit even if it's true that youtube ended up demonetizing his more controversial videos.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/theneedledrophttps://socialblade.com/youtube/user/thatistheplan

like the core of his fanbase has been /mu/ & reddit types from the start, it's not surprising that he'd move to further capitalise on that, or that the undercurrents would become more explicit as they have elsewhere

(xpost -- his second channel was signed with Complex as far back as last November, but I'm not sure if his videos were monetized at that point)

yeah, GG just weaponized/took nuclear a group of people that already existed. (in games, this group of people was around doing more or less the same shit at smaller scale since dickwolves at least)

ugh. I had forgotten about the whole dickwolves thing.

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

(this is the fifth time I said "also" but the reason I bring games stuff up so often is that I'm in that scene)

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

"Jason" would be fine, lol

Fantano actually admits here that he's affiliated with Complex, but I'm not the first person to point that out

the bit comparing Fantano to a middle-schooler seems pretty OTM to me. he doesn't really strike me as being as malicious or committed as the Gamergate crowd, more like "anything for a good shitpost", the sort who'd try to argue "no we're actually MOCKING the bad guys, don't you see". dude just wants to transfer his living essence into a meme.

nothing about any of his supposed 'shifts' has been at all surprising to me, just from having seen what music he covered, how he talked about it and so forth in the few reviews of his i could stomach when he was getting started.

even then questions like "does this guy post on /mu/?" "does this guy avidly use rym?" "does this guy find racist memes amusing?" "does this guy think feminism is cancer?" "does this guy believe that encouraging people to treat each other with empathy is 'authoritarianism'?" etc would have been pathetically easy to answer accurately

how malicious or intentional he is is irrelevant imo

internet is so creepy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkUxFB6jbDc

i refuse to click on that

like I needed another reason to hate this guy lol

all this 4Chan/reddit/vlogger meme-dominated shit - where do these people even find the time to follow/catalog/participate in it all? It all strikes me as the kind of shit that only people with no jobs/children have time for. Like, explicitly the province of young men with too much time on their hands.

He's probably one of the 5 highest paid music critics in the world if that gives you some idea of how and why he finds the time

yeah I don't mean him specifically, since he's made an actual career out of it

how much is Armoured Skeptic paid

nothing about any of his supposed 'shifts' has been at all surprising to me, just from having seen what music he covered, how he talked about it and so forth in the few reviews of his i could stomach when he was getting started.
even then questions like "does this guy post on /mu/?" "does this guy avidly use rym?" "does this guy find racist memes amusing?" "does this guy think feminism is cancer?" "does this guy believe that encouraging people to treat each other with empathy is 'authoritarianism'?" etc would have been pathetically easy to answer accurately

well yeah I mean I follow a few pretty dodgy meme pages of Facebook that seem to have a weird affinity with this dude so this ain't surprising to me at all. I'm not absolving him at all, but giving him the "alt-right" tag seems a bit premature, it was kind of his destiny to end up this way

btw I'm not sure what RYM has to do with this, it's totally different than /mu/. unless you're referring to the culture of rating everything and freaking out over charts, which, idk if that's really the issue here

he really spent a lot of time editing those meme videos wow

One thing I'm getting from this thread is that people's tolerance for hate-watching things is much lower than for hate-reading

btw I'm not sure what RYM has to do with this, it's totally different than /mu/. unless you're referring to the culture of rating everything edgy black metal, minstrel show meme rap, japanese paedo cartoon soundtracks and pink guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP5UD833gQA

let's not

the stuff that happens in the last 90 seconds really isn't that different than Negativland's Over the Edge Radio or something

not only are these people's "politics" horrible but their sense of humor is shockingly shitty. Like where you get depressed by it. And their aesthetics are ugly!

https://pics.onsizzle.com/Instagram-240686.png

Whiney those Pink Guy albums have an average of 1.90 and less ratings than say, every single Gentle Giant album. what exactly are you talking about here.

frobgs please don't force me to bolster my argument with the "data" from RYM

cuz your argument is "gigantic music database also contains some albums I don't like". Pink Guy's album is rated on allmusic.com too bud.

if you see rym as a place where people just rate music according to whether they like it or don't seems pretty value-neutral.

but it's more than that. it's a community of people who not only believe that 'objective' evaluation of art/music is possible and necessary, but who highly value such evaluation as a means of constructing the canon/tomorrow's received wisdom. they take to the next level what they've observed the music press doing (in slapping star-ratings onto music and periodically slotting it into ranked lists). the music press has largely been rockist for decades, and i don't think i need to explain the implicit values and biases of rockism here. unsurprisingly, rym's collective rankings (the building versions of which seem to be how a lot of music gets on some devoted users' radars in the first place) are heavily skewed in all the predictable directions.

so yeah, not at all surprising when a fantanbro is a heavy rym user! (he was btw + might still be but i haven't cared enough to check recently)

the piece's author's twitter mentions are a mess omg, so many 'liberals' defending fantano's channel as a parody of the alt-right (??) lol

Really glad ilm exist atm. It's comforting to know that the world's biggest musicheads are not sociopaths (mostly!).

Sorry for getting corny for a second. Carry on.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. It's probably a "good" thing that not all ILMers post on ILE..........

Shaker - regarding where do these people find time...some jobs it's very easy to slack off all day on these kinds of forums.

Shakey**

None of us would know anything about that, of course.

Hahahaha

I really don't think the RYM issue is that complicated, the average forum, comments section, etc. tends to skew more to the right than the average media outlet

regarding katherine's "charisma" post upthread, i posted this w/r/t NARCOS on the netflix thread and maybe it kinda applies to these YouTube types:

i think w/film and tv depictions of sociopaths but it's an easy way out to make them avuncular (which was the right adjective for Moura's admittedly vv good performance.) i think w/a lot of these types there's a constant undercurrent of danger and fear that they put out along w/the likability. or i guess "charm" and "charisma" might be better in this case; some of the people i've known who were possibly (probably?) sociopaths have a lot in common: they draw you into their orbit, they like being at the center of attention, they wilt in certain situations where they are not at the center, people like them but they do not really possess qualities that--charisma and charm removed--make them admirable or worthy of liking. and there's always an undercurrent of something.

i mean what the alt-right has been "good" at (or i guess what the major personalities have cultivated) is this charismatic presence devoid of anything else.

xp well its a little hard to tell now, ever since Trump came along I've noticed a lot of discussion boards instituting a strict "NO POLITICS" rule, which is probably for the best

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them? The ones I've seen have been, like Treeship said upthread, really innocuous. Like, Mr. Rodgers-levels of subdued. I thought that was his brand—geek who shares dutiful, uncontroversial opinions about music in a soft-spoken voice.

christ i'm not gonna watch the fucker

My favorite music reviewer is being hit-pieced by far-Left journalists. That's it. No more. We're tolerating this too much. Regardless of whether you hate the anti-SJW community, this is pure slander of an innocent man.

Get it trending#NeedleDropNotAltRight

— Arch Alien (@The_ArchAlien) October 4, 2017

A bold rallying cry for these times.

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them?

This was the dude's Twitter icon for years:

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/016/217/photo.jpg

Even if he doesn't actually shout in many of them, how is that appealing.

"So what's your chosen public image...oh okay a shaven headed ranter. And...bye."

shiftless teens/20s guys who are unable to enjoy art without external validation from as much authority as possible have existed since long before RYM

yeah but they used to just get a copy of the rolling stone guide and then grow out of it

but it's more than that. it's a community of people who not only believe that 'objective' evaluation of art/music is possible and necessary, but who highly value such evaluation as a means of constructing the canon/tomorrow's received wisdom. they take to the next level what they've observed the music press doing (in slapping star-ratings onto music and periodically slotting it into ranked lists).

i think there are two forces at work here both largely taking impact from the technology of the internet itself. 1) the need to be an Expert on everything. this is a big internet thing, something that emerges in social spheres, perhaps it is a result of the aggressive/territorial propoganda of capitalisam, the hyper consumerism of post-modern late capitalism. the way we represent ourselves on the internet largely starts with lists, lists of favorite books/movies, lists of consumer products, there is an aggressive need to indulge in this and yeah the ages old traditions of consumerist promotional materials.

2) the methods of art production have been democratized. this is in some ways a bad thing for art. whereas in the past technology and skill cut the average person off from the ability to create, now technology makes it a convenience available to everyone. now people that in another era would have never attempted to make art are getting into "making art" via the hyper consumer route, it is a way to feed their consumer ego, their brand, etc. you see this in Pateron and the modern cult of personality. people on message boards talk about copyright strikes towards their favorite youtuber and say that they are making "art" by playing these video games that somebody else made.

i think in some ways this is good, that art should be available to everyone, but certainly it loses a craft, and you have essentially illiterate (from a traditional art-history educational background) people writing for other illiterate people about art. this is not art. this is criticism. just because you made a video does not mean it is film and it is art. a lot of this criticism is made by people that don't really care about art outside of a consumer sphere - they aren't artists themselves - so much as they care about movies and maybe the political drama surrounding it. not to say it is all bad of course and there are people doing great things (and i far prefer youtube over television) but the convenience of the technology and platform lower the bar to entry and allow a lot of shitty people in.

The internet puts people in touch with others who share their absolute worst tendencies. And it allows them to spend all their time with these people, in a cocoon of toxic reinforcement, and ignore outside influences. When they live this way for long enough the outside world comes to seem strange and alien, and they can only make sense of it with language they learned in the cocoon, i.e. prejudices and generalizations, the kind of thoughts that thrive in environments without light or oxygen. So the internet -- a technology that was supposed to help us feel connected to people all across the globe -- has actually turned out to be a remarkably efficient incubator of hardcore racists and ideological misogynists.

xp j. Basically you're right -- tendencies that were bad i. The past can become so much more damaging today.

good way to set up meets for swingers too

Sure, but if one of these romantic liasions disappoints the male party he just might spend the rest of his life whining about it on an MRA forum, to the point where sexism, along with bitterness, comes to be a core feature of his personality.

They need to warn people about getting sucked into online hate communities the way they used to warn people about getting drawn into cults.

I'm always curious what hair was split when an Adam bruneau ends up here instead of in the needle drop comments section

now deej

Impact!

Needle Drop shows cancelled after controversy https://t.co/4jrOJRBkxY pic.twitter.com/T9uE3P5wH1

— BrooklynVegan (@brooklynvegan) October 5, 2017

I'm a little surprised by this. Are the people that enjoyed his terrible music reviews really put off to learn he has other terrible videos as well?

I was barely aware of this guy for the longest time. I watched his reviews of my records, which he liked, but commented on strangely, and I felt odd about his analyses. I watched a couple other of his reviews and felt he had a profound inability to feel any empathy for any musician who he perceived as "the other"-- women, black musicians, queers, all kind of just were these aliens who made and said things that he wasn't able to directly relate to his own experience. The bodies and minds and art of "the other" were just accessories to his own experience. At a point when he was retweeted into my Twitter timeline one too many times, I blocked him and forgot about him.

About a year ago, a Twitter friend commented something about "a vegan Youtuber" and I replied, "the one bald one or the one with the fedora?" He said "the music reviewer" and I said "if he puts numbers on the art, then he supports the patriarchy and must be euthanized". I stand by the quantitative-analysis-of-art-favours-power-structures-already-in-place idea. "Euthanized"? Not a bad way to be put retired, but it was a lame joke.

Six months later, I guess Anthony found the tweet and made a big deal out of it. He screen-shotted it and made it his banner and @'d me a bunch, suggesting I was aligning myself with historical groups that support euthanasia-- Nazis, I guess. The feeling I felt was mostly bemusement at how little I cared, that this kind of internet trolling just didn't really affect my mental state, or make me feel threatened, and after about 30 minutes of concern I pretty much forgot about it and moved on.

This Fader article is interesting and seemed like a lot of work, and definitely caught me up on crypto-Nazi "edge lording" and what I guess has been going on on those other message boards I don't frequent any more. But, after it's publication, I couldn't help but also feel really weirded out by the torches-and-pitchforks-out response in the music and music journalism community. Tweets that seem harassing, telling Anthony to "choke on your own diarrhea", "die in a fire", etc., and really? Is this really what we want to spend time on? Is this really getting people that up-in-arms?

What I'm trying to say is that I can't help but feel that there is a creepy side effect of this whole affair, and (sure) the way that "social justice issues" enact themselves on social media as a whole. I feel as if the urge to shun anybody who has a really dumb explanation as to "why they don't say the n-word" manifests itself as like, a license to bully, a license to shit-post. It feels like Brooklyn Vegan comments sections all over again. I don't understand why people can't just block and move on; or, barring that, engage with the man directly and discreetly.

I think too that any aggressive response to this Fader article only increases the possibility of some kind of 'white straight male victimhood' complex and will just make things worse. I've gotten super aggro online about that rock band from Kent called Slaves, but I was like... flabbergasted and couldn't control my anger. Does this outrage actually solve anything? Can't we just wait until Anthony goes the way of Chris Ott? Ignore him until he's just a ghost, enjoying his binge-drinking and his beautiful family?

Are people really upset about the fact that Anthony does some crypro-blackface on a side-channel, enough to turn this into an internet firefight? How much more do I have to read about his black wife? or about how his side-channel was satirical? or that he's a Bernie supporter? Why can't people just block him and forget. Ian Cohen sucks, so I blocked him too; if Fader finds out that he's a secret pigfucker and he loses his Pitchfork job over it, I will feel sad for him but happy that music was his side-gig; he's a lawyer? I heard? good. He'll be fine. I wouldn't crow with glee that this music writer I don't like is a pigfucker. Why do I feel like "the resistance" is enacting patterns of abuse and online bullying for no reason except ragey-ragey-rage? Why do I think the response to this article is just making things stupider? Why am I even wasting time on this post?

I think too that any aggressive response to this Fader article only increases the possibility of some kind of 'white straight male victimhood' complex and will just make things worse.

this is totally otm, but i'm also torn w/r/t how funny it is when someone tells a vlogger to choke on his own diarrhea

Are people really upset about the fact that Anthony does some crypro-blackface on a side-channel, enough to turn this into an internet firefight?

"Upset" is strong but yes, for what I hope are obvious reasons I do care that this dude was making money off of shit toxic to my family's existence and I'm glad Youtube demonetized his garbage, removing his incentive for continuing it.

I mean, the bigger picture of your post fgti is that nothing matters anymore and, looking a month down the road, I'm guessing Fantano will be fine and the Fader will be fine and Slaves will change their name like Viet Cong or Eskimeaux or the Morning Benders and be fine

so in the meantime it's fun to repeatedly own a herb

fgti I love you and that post is both accurate and booming

>I think too that any aggressive response to this Fader article only increases the possibility of some kind of 'white straight male victimhood' complex and will just make things worse.

the examples cited in that Fader article that are still online & watchable in their entirety are clearly a lot more complex than what they're being made out to be in that article. especially as he gets more into the Meme Review & densely edited youtubepoop stuff. irony has evolved in some very tortured ways online over the last 10 years, so I have found myself growing more charitable about interpreting someone's intent with an online post or video than I ever used to have to be. kids are drawn to the unspeakable, and today we live online.

when I was 15 we had Book of the SubGenius & the Research Pranks issue, and Boyd Rice was the main cautionary tale of what happened when a troll went too far -- today's 15 year olds have Kekistan. I don't like it but I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand the appeal

I am fine with that channel being demonetized, especially as his reaction / rationale for then pulling his work is that there's no point for it to be up because he's no longer making any money from it. he's got some more work to do on what he believes & I hope he comes out of it. the most interesting bit of the interview with Akkad is the brief bit where they're both delirious over how they can live off their videos.

DJP oh no, totally, I'm not policing the response of direct victims of his hate speech, and I'm not trying to be anti-anger, or anti-violence, or even anti-cruelty, I fully want Barron to be the first to be hung, and by his feet, and for a long time, I'm just (in this case, and other cases previous) finding that the response across Twitter, by musicians and journalists who really ought not to give so many shits, is so... gleeful, weirdly over-aggressive, that it feels inauthentic. Like pageantry. Like an exaggeration of the "trauma" and "class oppression" that might be experienced if Fantano gave somebody's band a bad review, or no coverage at all. Like people railing against white supremacy online but calling the cops when the neighbours' kids make too much noise. Like people exploiting the cause and language of social justice in order to give themselves free rein to be a piece of shit online.

Ahh Milton that's v interesting btw

@ WGW, I kind of feel the opposite, I kind of think everything matters and that it's good to engage properly and directly with people and I don't see the fun in owning an herb

I don’t know why I hate theneedledrop guy so much. I agree with him more often than not but I just don’t like his face or something. I hate that I hate him for no reason too.

Nvm I just got caught up on the Auerbach/Sunderland thing, burn everything and everyone

otm

Sometimes things are exactly what they seem like.

Auerbach/Sunderland?

Enjoy, if that's the word

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.qvMAnp774#.ybVmxoWWG

there's one graf in there, I don't really want to point out which it is but it doesn't take much detective work, that very heavily suggests that the only reason we didn't have a music GG is because m*lo didn't bite

xxxps
Auerbach/Sutherland more likely?

fgti otm throughout. Participating in the alt right via dogwhistle youtube videos and whatever is inexcusable given the toxicity of these communities and the harm they cause -- it's good his videos were demonetized -- but I don't think it's a good idea to fight these people by borrowing their tactics, from meme wars to abuse language to whatever.

when I was 15 we had Book of the SubGenius & the Research Pranks issue, and Boyd Rice was the main cautionary tale of what happened when a troll went too far -- today's 15 year olds have Kekistan. I don't like it but I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand the appeal

this aint a meme kid he's a fully grown ass married bald matt pinfield-esque man.

*abusive.

People need to do what they need to do but they should be aware that the alt right/gamergate communities are incredibly vile, and that they thrive on twitter flame wars etc. That's milo's whole deal, right? Baiting people.

Fgti great post!

Think you might want to read the rest of the thread after that post now.

Fgti I don't think you realize the tenacity of the brainwashed Fantano teens who attack anyone's mentions who might have a critical word to say about him. If there's a ferocity to my response it's bc of the brick wall like expeirence of entering into a "reasonable dialogue" with an ostensible "critic" like Anthony fantano, who is more of a cult of personality persona emulating the authority and knowledge of "critics" through theatrical performance than he is someone interested in any kind of intellectual inquiry. He's also, I think, far more accepting of reactionary bullshit than his followers realize, stuck as they are in a bubble where Richard Spencer's opinions are normalized. He might be a "liberal" but it's fruit of the poisoned tree

also the reason people seem gleeful is because the alternative is being terrified

Tweets that seem harassing, telling Anthony to "choke on your own diarrhea", "die in a fire", etc., and really? Is this really what we want to spend time on?

how many Needle Drop videos would we have to submit fgti to until he answers this in the affirmative? i'm thinking 2

Just wanna point out that I was clowning Broadly Pepe more than two years ago

Already dying at Vice's attempt at a women's vertical. pic.twitter.com/LT6yu5PLeE

— Chris Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) August 6, 2015

I couldn't help but also feel really weirded out by the torches-and-pitchforks-out response in the music and music journalism community. Tweets that seem harassing, telling Anthony to "choke on your own diarrhea", "die in a fire", etc., and really? Is this really what we want to spend time on? Is this really getting people that up-in-arms?

i agree with a lot of what you're saying but you're literally just talking about........ twitter

in response to any news breaking ever, there will immediately be 100 million randos telling someone to eat diarrhea and each of their posts will have zero to 3 likes

the argument is basically a gussied-up version of "liberals are actually just virtue-signaling"

lol flopson

and yes katherine I hadn't heard that term before but I think you're exactly right, and it's why I'm fearful of this line of thought

I fear that a handful of Twitter causes this year have caused me doubts about the authenticity of this 'progressive' fight or that-- i.e. people pointing out the TERFiness of pussy hats made me wonder if that angle was actually in good faith, wondering if there was any net benefit for trans women to make that argument, or if it was (actually!) a line of thought planted by the alt-right that sought to destabilize the effectiveness of the women's march by creating division

I don't actually think that but my brain has been reading everything as double-speak this past year

Anyway if you need me I'm going back to my comfortable solution-box of "hire more black writers"

but it's more than that. it's a community of people who not only believe that 'objective' evaluation of art/music is possible and necessary, but who highly value such evaluation as a means of constructing the canon/tomorrow's received wisdom. they take to the next level what they've observed the music press doing (in slapping star-ratings onto music and periodically slotting it into ranked lists). the music press has largely been rockist for decades, and i don't think i need to explain the implicit values and biases of rockism here. unsurprisingly, rym's collective rankings (the building versions of which seem to be how a lot of music gets on some devoted users' radars in the first place) are heavily skewed in all the predictable directions.

so yeah, not at all surprising when a fantanbro is a heavy rym user! (he was btw + might still be but i haven't cared enough to check recently)

― dyl

is it? where is it? all i see are stupid kids who won't shut up about how mr. bungle is the greatest band ever and people who make long lists of records in languages they can't read.

my impression is that rym as a "culture" is stagnant and being eclipsed by the capitalist juggernaut that is discogs.

xp i mean alt-right attempts at social media false flags are always obvious because they make no attempt at making it believable to anyone who isn't alt-right. meanwhile ending the equations between gender and genitalia has been pretty central to trans activism for a long time? and this was one of the biggest marches in recent memory, why wouldn't it come up?

i still don't get why "a bunch of random dillweeds wanna come along for the ride" is a reason against publishing an article about anthony fantano courting reactionaries. or are you just against the behavior of randoms?

the awkward lesson of mass social media i keep learning is that the amount of human beings currently alive is incomprehensible and terrifying and most of them really just wanna come along for the ride

Actually most of them just want to find parking, if I correctly remember my cabaret voltaire

xp to rushomancy tbh what i wrote probably better describes denizens of acclaimedmusic and such, altho there's substantial overlap

I stand by the quantitative-analysis-of-art-favours-power-structures-already-in-place idea.

does anyone remember the link to the rather-good article about this topic? maybe an ilxor wrote it?

drew daniel's quietus baker's dozen?

that was it!! thank you :)

my impression is that rym as a "culture" is stagnant and being eclipsed by the capitalist juggernaut that is discogs.

Not to derail but I don't think Discogs even tries to offer much to supplant that tendency to want to rate and review. You can do both but they are barely developed features. Charts hardly figure. Even the specialist groups are very low on traffic for the most part.

Maybe that's what you meant but I don't see this dynamic. Also it's pretty small beans as a 'juggernaut' really.

fgti I'm sympathetic to a lot of your thoughts and found Angela Nagle's short book Kill All Normies an interesting read on the topic of both the extremely toxic alt-right and the problematic virtue-signaling of "the tumblr left"
http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies

the meat is iirc in the first 20 pages

does anyone remember the link to the rather-good article about this topic? maybe an ilxor wrote it?

― dyl, Friday, October 6, 2017 2:35 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

drew daniel's quietus baker's dozen?

― imago, Friday, October 6, 2017 2:36 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

drew namedrops 12 albums in the course of the article iirc

great to see everyone is condemning the true enemy in this story about reactionaries and actual nazis: "virtue signaling"

"virtue signaling" is as sociopathic a term as "sjw" or "snowflake" imo. also, the implication that ranking art is fascist is really irritating and wrongheaded. fantano fell off because he's a pushover who can't resist the broader will of the market/kindergarten. not because he's a music critic who makes lists.

i think we need to keep sight of the real enemy but i also find it regrettable that fgti can express a very thoughtful, conflicted sentiment and have it reduced to an easily dismissible buzzword like "virtue signaling". i think this is part of his point, and part of why these "debates" (for lack of a better term) are so unproductive. there is more to life than picking sides

"performative allyship" seems to be the preferred term in social justice circles, but in practise it basically means the same thing afaict?

it's not reducing it to a buzzword, it's providing a synonym for the following:

I'm just (in this case, and other cases previous) finding that the response across Twitter, by musicians and journalists who really ought not to give so many shits, is so... gleeful, weirdly over-aggressive, that it feels inauthentic. Like pageantry.

that said i understand why the idea of discussing ancillary aspects of social justice issues may strike some as a waste of time or getting off message (not to mention reeking of privilege); i can live with that view but we may have to agree to disagree

like, sure, no one likes people who are progressive on paper or on twitter but not in their private lives, but the problem isn't their posting about social justice on twitter. the problem is their being a reactionary pustule in real life, and the secondary problem is hypocrisy

(you can witness this happening in real time, incidentally, with (again) the polygon stuff -- the internet anime frog crew has latched onto "actually 'feminist men' are all abusers" and have absorbed it into their argument bank. not because they care about abusers, but because it's a convenient set of words to say)

Katherine completely otm

Jesus fucking Christ everyone read that BuzzFeed article before you post some pearl clutching phony bullshit

Every person involved in the alt right should have their lives ruined

These people want a new Holocaust and we're sitting around worried about the tone of the discourse or oh jeez these kids are really showboats aren't they

the implication that ranking art is fascist is really irritating and wrongheaded

nobody's said that. but some forms of criticism are more driven by a will to diminish and dominate, cataloguing and scoring has that in it. good critics explore and open up the work they engage with. dickheads gas it and pin it to a board.

agreed, but cataloguing and scoring and sites like RYM specifically is what's largely kept me *away* from just exploring the canon of rockism

i think the best function of those kind of sites is pulling together new information, and i guess if filing is the price you pay for it it's no big deal

How do you feel about, say, the Billboard Hot 100?

it's a marketing thing, i stopped getting excited about whether somebody i liked was in the charts when i was still a teenager

and history seems to be coming round on this one

M@tt and katherine OTM

Katherine, you're making the same argument as "wau sean spicer got invited to the emmys but people want hillary clinton to fuck off wau."

Yes, obviously, worse thing is worse, but that shouldn't make the lesser thing off limits

Like, if you don't think performative wokeness is an actual real thing, I have a Vice women's vertical to sell you

there is more to life than picking sides

In this instance, the side available to some of us have already been picked by the nature of the conflict and the other side LITERALLY would like to see us dead.

agreed, but cataloguing and scoring and sites like RYM specifically is what's largely kept me *away* from just exploring the canon of rockism

― frogbs

i continue to find most of my new music through rym - not through the ratings, which are increasingly useless exercises in mediated canon reinforcement, but through the lists, which are the work of music-loving eccentrics not terribly unlike the folks here except in age.

as much as we may mock the obsessive drive for arbitrary categorization, without it it's really hard to _find_ stuff. my life is appreciably enriched by people who make lists, particularly annotated lists, of their 200 favorite chamber pop songs, or who obsessively genre-parse in order to find the greatest spouge record.

xpost me

*Especially* since woke clickbait is currently a cynical move for a lot of very gross capitalism, cf. Mic.com

xp cosign plus I feel top 10 lists can be a great literary form

the "performative wokeness" waters here are muddied by:

1. the way in which market forces make certain poses trendy, and which once they get adopted by mass media are forced to at least slightly conform to market pressures, thus making their chest-beating seem more than a little insincere. (see: teen vogue, which loves to rake in the kudos for being "woke" while also treating young writers of color like crap / running infomercials for dr. luke's water (yes, he has a water brand) (maybe "pivot to water" is the next media trend??); obviously the just-deceased mtv news is an example here as well);
2. the rise of the "personal brand," which when combined with the market forces people to self-style as aspiring cult leaders because scale = money;
3. the glibness of twitter and the fact that it's a lot easier, especially in a hothouse environment where bad news seems to come down the pike on an hourly basis, to hold something at arm's length in an either ironic or just outright shitty way;
4. the paradox that saying nothing on social media isn't registered as tacit approval or tacit disapproval or anything at all, which can be frustrating for people trying to build the personal brands outlined in item 2 (not to mention for people who have to work under the paradoxical conditions outlined in item 1, so they can't be honest);
5. the way in which stances have to be extreme in order to cut through the clutter noted in item 3;
6. the market being essentially conservative in nature because the people in power don't want to cede what they have over something silly like social progress; and
7. mitch sunderland and his mcinnes jr. ilk being pretty horrible people at their core

also cocaine probably figures into this too

all of that, pretty much, plus the fact that the most consistent element of the alt-right (and the Trump administration) is projection

here's that water story btw. core hydration is dr. luke's water brand. poor ellie goulding

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/ellie-goulding-core-hydration-partnership

(I don't know if "projection" is the right word exactly, but the belief that everyone secretly agrees with them -- the "silent majority" thing -- but is afraid or unwilling to say it)

"my friend is a huge water geek"

It's also a lot easier to give credence to the projection argument when people on the opposite side of an issue from you are feeding you information behind the scenes to further your aims.

It's like a whole bunch of people re-enacting Claire McCaskill's strategy of helping the loon win the Republican primary so she could easily beat him in the general election, only they actually like and agree with the loon.

maura otm thank you

while I'm making friends all over the place the other criticism that bugs me is "well they're not ACTUALLY alt-right, they just invited white nationalists onto their podcast/asked people to mock their colleagues." as if you can just go about your media day and then stumble into a long-running far-right backchannel by mistake

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2017/10/06/the-year-the-journalistic-sewer-changed-hands/

^^^on the role of drudge/breitbart -- and in the uk private eye -- in the journalistic ecology (doesn't mention gawker, tho that was largely sleb-driven i suppose)

while I'm making friends all over the place the other criticism that bugs me is "well they're not ACTUALLY alt-right, they just invited white nationalists onto their podcast/asked people to mock their colleagues." as if you can just go about your media day and then stumble into a long-running far-right backchannel by mistake

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine)

i don't know all the details here, but where does something like million dollar extreme fit into this? i feel like a lot of the "alt-right" people do practice deceit and that, particularly as recently as a year ago, that strategy was a lot easier for them.

I don't know what that is

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

Million Dollar Extreme is some super bullshit that slots right into the meme frenzy right-wing hate churn; they briefly had a painfully unfunny show on Adult Swim that got yanked very, very quickly.

(The one episode I saw of it featured as a cornerstone sketch a dinner party where a female guest fell into a glass coffee table and painfully pulled herself onto the couch whimpering and bleeding while her husband and the host argued over whether she should apologize for breaking the table. It is literally one of the cruelest, unfunniest things I've ever seen masquerading as comedy, with no punchline, no wordplay or cleverness in the dialogue, nothing other than two guys blandly ignoring a suffering woman bleeding to death on a couch.)

oh yeah they absolutely practice deceit, sometimes in the form of the old "it's just satire" line and sometimes by just straight-up lying.

(i did find it interesting that the "but he has a black so!!!" argument echoed through both of this week's kerfuffles)

xp

the thing is though how far off is that anti-comedy from the show about people working in the hell office? (the adult swim one, not THE GOOD PLACE.) i feel like the nihilistic edginess that adult swim in particular has adopted over the last few years is inevitably going to result in people confusing the "hilarious" with the "sociopathic and perhaps eventually genocidal if it goes on for long enough." (i'd argue that vine had this effect as well, cf. jake paul's antics)

but maybe i'm just old

everyone here is old. but shit, you can draw a straight line from a lot of this shit back to chris morris, jerry sadowitz... lenny bruce, if you want to go back that far. comedy that trafficks in overt unpleasantness. ultimately everything that is done for a reason will wind up being done for no reason.