★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMcY2DkuAoY

http://silencenogood.net/what-you-need-the-weekend/

http://savingsoulblog.com/2010/12/19/the-weekend-what-you-need-tom-wrecks-edit/

these dudes are friends of friends /no suzy

you from toronto? fucking love this song. is there more from them?

haha thats a p terrible post just reflexive i guess. i live in toronto (not from here tho)

anyway yah this is a jam "loft party" is p great track too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsWL6LI2htg&feature=player_embedded

'this morning' is less successful but kinda gives a handle on what theyre into:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFkrp5CL0iY&feature=related

beach house sample

which beach house song?

there's more than one?

(j/k!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PuAm7d0PA

not a chris isaak cover, not that i'd be mad at that

lol i was gonna start a thread, you should fix the title btw also yes i love all these songs. loft music and wicked game esp.

o snap. i never realized it was spelled w/o an 'e' at the end

These guys remind me of Arab Strap.

this is weird, cuz i usually agree w/ jaxon about like 90% of stuff, but i dont really like this. the first track the vocals are so heavily layered & echoed that I dont really 'feel' it & it makes me all Lex-ish wishing the performance was there, because the song is **aite** but not really much more than a slow jam. but whats a slow jam where the vocals are so filtered? All i can imagine explaining that is a bunch of gross Wire/chillwave/hypnogogic style stuff about ghostly memories of a slow jam or some ish

wicked games the vocals are better but the song has so many unnecessary 'fuckings' its distracting & lyrically corny in parts

I've got your performance right here.

jk

i guess the thing that i like is that it is sorta chillwavy whatevsy. it kinda reminds me of all that post dubstep r'n'b influenced stuff i'm really into but know nothing about like burial or james blake or deadboy remixes or burial or whatever (where should i look to get more of this stuff btw?), but it's more of an actual r'n'b song than those. my MO has always been chocolate in my peanut butter*. foreign takes on rock music, psychedelic country, disco jazz, synthy african music etc. i guess i really like this because it's not straight up r'n'b.

* does this make me corny indie fuxor btw?

yah this grafts together two things i really like: chillwave and cute-boy-r&b. usually this kindof yoking together of things i like pisses me off and i tend to be a bit like this is a watered down versh of 2 things i like but in this case i love it.

new stuff here; http://soundcloud.com/theweekndxo

jaxon what you said makes sense, i guess to me it just seems too close to actual R&B, not weird enough, to seem partic. novel. Burial im not a huge fan of but it at least has a beat style that exists outside of current R&B, this just sounds like an anonymous slow jam to me but w/ a plainer vocal performance

lol @ 'actual R&B' you are so weird

holy shit, thanks for that soundcloud link.

also, apparently i like burial so much i mentioned him twice

lol @ 'actual R&B' you are so weird

― nu rave electro banger coked out art school college party (Lamp), Monday, March 21, 2011 4:57 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not sure whats weird abt this

version of "The Morning" doesnt have the slo-mo vocal effect abused by salem

i liked the old version but i like this version too

"the morning" is pretty fucking amazing tho

this whole thing is weird as hell tho

i really am interested to find about who this guy is/what he's into/who he's affiliated with etc

i hear drake, trey songz, the-dream & dirty money as much as i hear hypnagogic pop

the thing i'm interested in is why the music codes mainstream r&b but the surface aesthetics & target audience are pure indie rock

so "what you need" samples "rock the boat" & "the party & the after party" samples beach house

when i heard that beach house i knew i knew it but it felt like some awesome classic rock radio wild card like wicked game or tusk or something and then i was like oh its beach house and maybe i like beach house now maybe

Your name looks weird.

anyone catch "Coming Down" before the download limit was reached? and what track number are it, Wicked Games & What You Need?

coming down is 7, wicked games is 5, what you need is 2

apparently co-signed by drake already
http://rapfix.mtv.com/2011/03/21/say-hello-to-the-weeknd-drake-co-signs/

shocking, that

nm. found an alternative dl

xpost. ha. ya

Look out for an abundance of emoness!

i guess i really like this because it's not straight up r'n'b.

* does this make me corny indie fuxor btw?

...yes?

i really hate this, like really really can't stand, and please can pitchfork types "doing" r&b just end already? it's gross

this guy isn't a pitchfork type tho, which is why it's interesting & how to dress well really isn't

or "these guys" or w/e

everything about the vocals makes me cringe (ughhh the OTT swearing just feels so contrived), there's like no emotion in it at all, and the music is generic chillwave? witch house is more interesting than this

i think deej's criticism that the songwriting isn't strong enough rings true at times but i think you're really evaluating the point of the project & other things about it

er, misevaluating

what is the "point" of this project then

like, the guy is a better singer than the-dream for one. also the music isn't generic chillwave in the slightest, at least the chillwave i'm aware of. it definitely is chill and at times can be chillwave-y, but it quite obviously expands on that. most of the time it sounds like a less pop-indebted version of the drake/40 sound (like, you could the beat for "fall for your type" on this album and you would hardly be able to tell)

what is the "point" of this project then

― lex pretend, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:31 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

honestly i'm not exactly sure, which is part of what i find interesting about them. but i think it's quite clear that they're going for something different than how to dress well, who pretty much seemed to be asking "what if i made r&b as indie as possible, also if i recorded my album inside a drain pipe?". weeknd to me seems like pretty straight ahead contemporary r&b, albeit someone w/ an interest in some types of indie music. i mean the guy sings about alize and making it rain and crap. it's more trey songz than pitchfork tbh.

i mean the guy sings about alize and making it rain and crap

this really comes across as so gimmicky though - it seems really forced. i'm not going to second-guess his motivation or background but it totally sounds like co-opting signifiers from the outside in the most boring way.

he's not even as good a singer as terius and certainly doesn't possess the wit or the gift for melody that makes terius' limitations as a vocalist easy to ignore.

and a huge #smh to most of the people bigging this guy up who never took the slightest bit of interest in trey songz - that right there is the warning sign

They mostly sound like a bad impression of a load of music I quite like. They dont seem to be able to program a beat that doesn't sound clunky and annoying either. What You Need is the best of a bad bunch so far. Maybe they'll come with more of that and refine their sound a load and grow into it but I dunno... It all seems early days for these dudes, right now it sounds like they're still learning and hopping on a load of trends from the shitty dubstep impressions in some of the beats to shity JJ/chillwave impressions in a load of the music to R&B in the vocals... They sound like they're playing dress up right now.

this guy isn't a pitchfork type tho, which is why it's interesting & how to dress well really isn't

― blingee cummings (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, March 22, 2011 8:14 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thing is, i like it sometimes when pfork guys try to do that stuff. they dont get an automatic pass in either direction. what matters imo is songwriting & this project has its moments --'the morning' is p great -- but some big misses too. that 'rock the boat' sampling one is generic as hell & the vocal effect is distancing. & the lyrics in the 2nd one, where he keeps saying 'motherfucker,' are really off putting & gimmicky. im kind of w/ lex here in that if you like this stuff, you should love the album tracks ("unfortunate" etc) on the last trey songz

i dont hear the 'indie'-ness of this at all tho -- sounds like R&B not always done very well

nabisco's last column is all abt this kind of thing btw

Everybody loves Trey Songz.

stoked lex doesn't like this

ha. but yeah, what are you guys hearing that is weird or interesting abt this? i mean, assuming you dont have probs w/ the songwriting i just dont get whats particularly out there abt it

I actually haven't herd the whole album yet. Planning on listening later today, but I'm basing all my fanboyism on 'what you need'. I'll check out Trey songz and would like any other recs like this.

the album as a whole does have some lapses in songwriting and definitely gets over on mood in places, but if you dig the general sound it's a pretty good album

yeah im basing this off the three songs ive heard so i need to hear the full record

my favourite r&b albums of 2011 so far are the kandi and marsha ambrosius, and the diddy/dirty money and dawn richard mixtapes

kinda loving this. does read a lot like htdw w/ "better" singing

this music is designed for sex+weed

this thread is gonna turn me into the lex

smoke weed listen to sade imo

sade makes me think of middle aged ladies

comment on karagarga:

The-Dream's infatuation with girls has made him the biggest pimp on earth. The Weeknd's infatuation with girls has made him painfully lonely, sorrowful and filled with heartache. Everybody else sits somewhere in between.

karablabla

The Weeknd's infatuation with girls has made him painfully lonely, sorrowful and filled with heartache

fkn inadequate indie losers

sade makes me think of middle aged ladies

― gr8080, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 7:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

with which u are v familiar obv

OK, this/these IS/ARE the person/people with the song containing "watch me knock your boots off." ("Would you like some making fuck/BERSERKER.")

What I've heard sounds shriveled and (like Lex said) forced.

ha glad im not alone w/ lex on this one no offense lex

kmt

lol you guys like jamie woon and harsh on this smh

havent heard the lp yet but 'night air' >>>>

grady just listen to R&B

havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet

xpost. ^ that's what's so wrong about your opinions. fuck all this "just listen to the real thing". it might not be the best songwriting (dunno yet), he def overuses the word 'fuck', but from what i've heard, he/they create a really great mood.

j shep!

http://twitter.com/jawnita/status/50279876359499776

jawnita

If u fuck with the weeknd and don't fux with loleatta holiday, I probably hate you
6 minutes ago via OpenBeak

What about Donnie Holloway?

yeah i dont like the real thing, sorry

my version is if you fux with the weeknd but don't fux with actual r&b, yr opinion is void

like seriously what motivates people to go check out the weeknd and stan for them but pretty much ignore marsha ambrosius or trey songz or kandi?

listening to 'hope she cheats on you (w/a basketball player) from marsha ambrosius, and i get the comparisons, but what i don't like about this, and what i do like about the weeknd, is the production. it's too big. i like some dirt in my recordings. i mean, calling me indie is just kinda ridiculous if you even knew what kind of music i listen to. i spend 99.5% of my time listening to music pre-1995. occasionally i get hold of something current that's a bit different, or revivalist or something, and only like it because it's not like everything else out there.

their cover art isnt indie-looking enough to draw my attention, sorry
xpost

this is the one by marsha a.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1TiM7dN5R8

havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet havent heard the lp yet

― gr8080, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 7:38 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but the lead single i think is p bad & thats like everyones fav cut

jaxon did u like trey songz 'unfortunate'

i dig that marsha ambrosius jam. does the rest of the record sound like that, or is this just her prince homage?

trey songz has many fine singles but 'house of balloons' >>> the last two trey songz lps

also it's pretty easy to see why ppl would fuck w/ this & not marshia ambrosious or kandi!! like, it's really patently obvious!

(honestly i like 'what you need' more though, it's got an atmosphere that sucks me in immediately)

xp

i dig that marsha ambrosius jam. does the rest of the record sound like that, or is this just her prince homage?

pretty much all sounds like that - don't think it's a classic album or anything, some of the songs don't quite work, but the sound is consistent and at its best it's rather incredible

also it's pretty easy to see why ppl would fuck w/ this & not marshia ambrosious or kandi!! like, it's really patently obvious!

i don't really see why people who enjoy something that sells itself as r&b-derived should be uninterested in actual r&b at all

im not sure lex's examples are the best ones to make a pt with -- hes comparing, like, stuff that came out recently & is R&B at some level, which is like, if you're looking for the vibe u get from weeknd you wont find it in a kandi lp.

lex i think that argument hurts your case here

like, i think 'actual R&B' is better than jamie lidell too, but then theres lots of 'actual R&B' that is as bad or worse. just relying on that authenticity argument is kind of empty & pointless. if weeknd was more 'real' it wouldnt necessarily make him 'better'.

if you're looking for the vibe u get from weeknd you wont find it in a kandi lp.

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:03 PM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark

this is what i'm saying -- the vibe & sound of the weeknd is not something you'd pick up in the jazmine sullivan album

that said i think there is lots of R&B that gets this vibe. & doesnt have weird stiff lyrics & anemic songwriting

i feel like theres a copout where if its weird or vaguely indie it gets a pass in the songwriting dept., or the performing dept. i dont really buy the 'it cant be compared to R&B because its not JUST R&B' when it suffers by some R&B standards imo but no one can articulate what its doing that R&B doesnt

anyway ill listen to the rest of this on the way home from work before weighing in more

that said i think there is lots of R&B that gets this vibe. & doesnt have weird stiff lyrics & anemic songwriting

this is also true -- if lex's argument was why would you fuck w/ the weeknd but not the-dream or diddy-dirty money then he might be onto something

i feel like theres a copout where if its weird or vaguely indie it gets a pass in the songwriting dept., or the performing dept.

lots of stuff that is sonically weird or interesting gets a pass in the songwriting/performing depts, genre aside

i agree n/a i just dont think this is weird enough

yeah the albums i cited don't aim for the same vibe at all but to be uninterested in them while stanning for the weeknd is still telling imo.

no one can articulate what its doing that R&B doesnt

yeah this is my issue too.

anyway i have to go, i have a date

no one can articulate what its doing that R&B doesnt

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

well i mean there IS some pretty clear aesthetic stuff -- i.e. "what you need" is heavy on the james blake EP style

altho i think the deadpan vocals really hurt that song

also lol @ ppl poo-pooing the weeknd for SWEARING TOO MUCH

yeah i don't get that at all

iirc its not a moral argument its about how it disrupts the tone & overall aesthetic

jaxon did u like trey songz 'unfortunate'
― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 7:51 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just got back from lunch and am listening to this. yes. it's pretty great. i listen to the radio pretty frequently in the car, so it's not like i don't like 'real r'n'b'. i think all i've heard of his is Bottoms Up. pretty generic radio pop, but this is more the vibe i'm looking for.

i also really like this song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4GJVOMjCC4

lex, personally i love some mainstream r&b, but i'm pretty happy going back to my '90s classics and don't tend to seek out new (under-the-rader) stuff in the same vein (although i'm always happy to check some out, and i appreciate when you post it).

but, it's very much in character for me to go for some shit that prioritizes mood & sonics ahead of vocals, which is what i'm hearing on this weekend tune.

xp

iirc its not a moral argument its about how it disrupts the tone & overall aesthetic

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 10:19 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark

adds to the tone and aesthetic imo

"Bottoms Up" is definitely the outlier on the latest Trey Songz album, which is definitely worth seeking out, Jaxon. The rest of it is just a riches of fantastic, tense slow jams. The Miguel album isn't nearly as even, but it does have a lot of great tracks on it, too.

i hadn't checked out any trey songz either, "unfortunate" is really nice

adds to the tone and aesthetic imo

― gr8080, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:06 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

to what end? feels like a way of saying 'yo this is real R&B!' like your dad using slang

hahahaha idk man he just sounds like a chill guy who uses swear words a lot; i'm not coming at this from a "BUT THIS IS NOT REAL R&B" angle at all

ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

i thought u were into this, lamp

haha no i want to defend these dudes but i know theres no point, its just irksome. @ some point to i think ppl like lex and deej just need to stop tryna listen to things they dont have the ears/vocabulary/mindset for instead of punishing us w/ their opinions abt

otm i dont listen to this and compare it to """REAL R&B""" at all

i think this should lead to a thorough discussion of what "REAL" R&B is anyways

i'm not going to read it, but you guys should just go ahead with it anyways

haha yeah i was gonna say "no, thanks."

i'm just kidding, i would be interested in an explanation of why this isn't "real R&B"

its obvious that it isn't "real r+b"

what baffles me is why that matters/ discredits it!!!

lex offtm but that marsha ambrosius youtube is stunning

its obvious that it isn't "real r+b"

oh ok i haven't listened to it but if it's obvious then nevermind

well the whole 'real r&b' thing is deeply stupid so w/e but i think deej's complaint abt the 'anemic songwriting' misses the point of what theyre trying to do, considering how much interest there seems to be in cultivating mood & atmosphere & in texture & pallete.

like i can see disliking this or finding the songs static & undynamic they do sorta sit there looking cool but its not like these kinda mood pieces somehow exist drastically outside the context of REAL R&B, this seems like a p meaningless binary.

i cant think of a good way of saying this but i think the 'real r&b' thing is about movement vs texture like a song off 'kandi koated' is going to draw the listener in & create an emotional connection through the lyrics & the dynamism of the song its still sort of a 'narrative' whereas weeknd are about creating and sustaining a ~mood~ that compells the listener its not going to be as varied or as structured its just sort a ~moment~

when i first started pushing Sa-Ra Creative Partners and some of that other detroit post dilla r'n'b, i got a lot of the same complaints. production over vocals. not good enough "songwriting" (whatever that meant), etc. i called jess an r'n'b-ist. it's funny that this kind of stuff can be looked over when listening to dance music, but not when it's 'r'n'b'

real r&b like cee-lo green's smash hit "fuck you"

XD

lol gr8080

a mojor problem i have w. these kinds of arguments is how they quickly kindof reveal themselves as being esst. abt authenticity on more levels than like being specific about genre. I mean yeah this thing is being received as indie AND rnb to varying degrees by diff listeners. and the way it gets represented in terms of such a binary will inevitably get tangled up in issues like genre-gatekeeperism and the prestige of certain types of fandom/scenesterism. So like for a certain person its of vital importance that like something like this remains w/n the context of rnb where it can be dismissed as technically inept or praised as sonically distinct or w/e.

like i mean lamp is right to say that these kindof dismissals are p dumb and miss the point and it reminds me of the way in which how to dress well was totally misunderstood by this board as like bad rnb for ppl who like indie when it was really about kindof discursively doing things that *connect* ambient noise w/ top40 rnb.

really these bands just seem in some way the wank fantasy of like early 00s rock crit and the cxn/discxn b/w "high" and "low" and pop and avant garde etc etc. I mean on one level im kindof suspicious of those arguments because they do seem *in some ways* bound up w/ perceptions of like great white indie patronising the great unwashed but at the same time maybe that's playing into the hands of certain poptimist arguments and their fetishistic authenticity contrarianism so idk.

This seems really moody and kindof *about* hearing some slow jam and private dancers & c & c and i can get w/ that and they never turn the lights on here

considering how much interest there seems to be in cultivating mood & atmosphere & in texture & pallete.

i don't really get the big deal here either cuz i don't think the weeknd do any of those things particularly well either (and the vocals being so far to the forefront detracts from them) - i mean moody chillwavey texturey acts are ten a penny atm and i like many of them, and the weeknd just seem basic and not very interesting compared to white ring/games/hyetal or whoever.

i have no qualms about being an r&bist and sticking up for real r&b considering how everyone else would rather pretend it doesn't exist

yes lex, by enjoying the weeknd i have to pretend that the-dream does not exist. fascinating point.

yeah try stuff that isn't the pfork token r&b act

you're the one framing things as pitchfork acts or not a pitchfork acts!

a friend told me to check them out and i did. i dont give a fuck who's blog they're on or what artists they don't sound like who i should really be listening to instead. i just wanna get lifted and listen to this and make out w/ somebody.

also the-dream is pitchfork's token r&b act last time i checked!!!!

lex is veering into former-deej territory w/ this R&B inferiority complex

that's what i was saying

and i can't help it if yr taste fits an existing aesthetic

xp

oh ok i thought you liked the-dream,

the point stands re: you framing artists as pitchfork artists or non-pitchfork artists

i don't really get the big deal here either cuz i don't think the weeknd do any of those things particularly well either

okay, sure i mean i dont care if you 'like' these dudes but obv theyre working with a different toolkit than marsha ambrosiu. i dont even think its really worth interrogating this stuff now either - certain methodologies speak to certain audiences better for a host of reasons, also certain methodolgies may be 'better' @ evoking some moments or emotions.

also i guess im p big fan of 'kandi koated' mb not vocally on ilm but its... no1 is pretending she doesnt exist

btw can we get a thread title change, its really bugging me

also honestly i dont know how to say this in a nice way but your tendency to dismiss music that wants to convey reflectiveness or wistfulness or spiritual yearning as 'indie' and 'pathetic' is both sad and creepy

i like a lot of reflective and wistful music

suzanne vega

memoirs of an imperfect angel

kompakt
nicolas jaar
guido

No idea what REAL R&B means, especially as the acts Lex talks about are themselves a mutation of the original form. Why is it okay for them to take the genre into new places, but not, say, the Weeknd?

well the weeknd isn't taking the genre into new places -- i think the one thing that's good about the weeknd is that it's easy to see exactly how we've ended up at this sound -- the album feels to me like something that should be happening right now -- not that that makes it better/worse, but they certainly aren't taking r&b to new places, unless you consider a beach house sample to be "new places"

also i gotta say that if you want to make the argument that weeknd is r&b for pp that don't listen to r&b, ilm of all places is probably not that place

also i gotta say that if you want to make the argument that weeknd is r&b for pp that don't listen to r&b, ilm of all places is probably not that place

― blingee cummings (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^THIS. Like, Lex, I'm never totally unsympathetic to your concerns in these arguments but you always have this tendency to say "this is like music I like but for people who read pitchfork OH LORD WHY IS EVERYONE IGNORING THE REAL [RAP/R&B/DANCE/ELECTRONICA/WHATEVER] and....usually those of us who are boosting the aforementioned "fake" stuff are people who are totally on your side when it comes to Dirty Money or The-Dream or Electrik Red or Nights Slugs or Jazmine or even K. Michelle.

Part of me feels there's an interesting discussion to be had about the stuff plax brought up re: How to Dress Well and this and the discursive ways that they interact with chartpop, R&B, etc., but it can't even happen without everyone involved needing to prove their credentials as people who value "Real R&B" and value it more than whatever we're discussing - as though they do the same things, or as though we like them for the same reasons.

Sorry if that came off overly negative. I wasn't trying to attack you personally, it's just...taken as read, I guess, that you will probably find this sort of music HORRIBLY OFFENSIVE to your sensibilities, but enjoyment of music isn't a war or a zero-sum game, and it's in fact possible for some of us to like both. You reading these threads is sort of like me following Sarah Palin on Twitter. I *know* it's only going to piss me off and then I get to rant and be self-righteous. Which is nice, I suppose, but not as productive as it could be.

At any rate, I'm not sold on the entire thing yet, but "What You Need" is gorgeous and "Wicked Games" is p awesome also.

Also, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BSnOeMb6_o

i honestly have no idea how How to dress Well is connected to this or r'n'b in the least, besides the guy namedropping keith sweat every other question. once again, haven't heard the album yet, but from the few songs i've heard, just sounds like ambient indie w/falsetto singing. does falsetto always = soul?

and for how many times people namedrop them here, there's no thread on them?

i think i like how to dress well more than i like weekend

yes on weekend I dress well very much all the times thank you

weeknd is pretty good but this Marsha ambrosias album is next level

weeknd is kinda samey and one note, maybe I should listen to it more

dayo do you like brightblack morning light

haha no i want to defend these dudes but i know theres no point, its just irksome. @ some point to i think ppl like lex and deej just need to stop tryna listen to things they dont have the ears/vocabulary/mindset for instead of punishing us w/ their opinions abt

― r u levelled up? (Lamp), Tuesday, March 22, 2011 10:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah, this is unfairly condescending, i have the fucking 'ears/vocabulary/mindset' to get this, i fucking understand what they're 'going for' & ive been listening to this milieu for years dude. just because someone disagrees w/ you doesnt mean that they dont 'get it.' i mean andy k said hes not feeling this stuff either & you certainly cant accuse him of not 'getting it' when it comes to a) music that is about 'texture & mood' or b) R&B

of course i dont think u can say that about me either but hes prob a less controversial example

to all you dudes accusing me of it, im certainly not someone arguing that this is wack compared to 'real R&B' & its not an authenticity issue for me at all. i also dont know what dayo is talking abt w/r/t 'old deej' & R&B either

i repped for effing ariel pink & argued w/ lex for ages abt it or some other indie thing -- for me, if the songwriting is tight or interesting, if i think there's something novel going on, im into it. my problem w/ this shit is it sounds p generic & this supposedly interesting mood & texture dont sound v novel or interesting to me. this is basically 'electrosoul like jamie lidell' part 1000 as far as i can tell.

i listened to the entire thing on my way home & i think 'the morning' is the only song that really works well, because it actually bothers to have a worthwhile hook. they have some creative & interesting ideas to explore throughout -- i like the vocal sample, and later on the guitar-driven rhythm on 'the party & the afterparty.' for example. but yeah, for the most part the lyrics are stilted & awkward, the 'novel textures' arent nearly as novel as they think they are, the songwriting lacks hooks. this stuff imo doesnt function the way its intended most of the time.

heres something that i think is fair w/r/t R&B: I think its fair to judge music that has so many signifiers of R&B by comparing it w/ past examples of R&B. that doesnt mean im arguing whether its 'real' or 'fake' R&B at all -- im merely evaluating it by the same criteria that i would, say, teedra moses (who fwiw does a really great job w/ both songwriting AND cultivating a unique mood/textures etc)(or her producers do)
i also think the trey songz track i mentioned upthread is stronger than anything on this record

this isnt because these songs are 'more real.' its because i find the performances a lot more effective at conveying emotion/sexiness/a multitude of other feelings

will agree that "the morning" is the best track by a mile

i dont begrudge anyone who likes this record, fwiw. this is all about 'taste' in the end

but belittling ppl & painting me w/ a lexian brush is a bit ott

i briefly listened to this earlier and it sounded like something i might like. i didn't realise anyone else loved 'unfortunate' - so good

I think its fair to judge music that has so many signifiers of R&B by comparing it w/ past examples of R&B

yeah exactly - no one's actually made a case for what the weeknd are doing yet, all you've said is "well it's not like r&b at all!" - when i compare it to real r&b i'm saying it doesn't convey mood or emotion as well. and i've also compared it to more chillwavey acts too, and i've also said it doesn't convey mood or emotion as well as them either, so dismissing my criticisms as "it's just not lex's thing" doesn't wash - this is just shitty music that takes a bunch of signifiers that other people are presently doing a whole lot better, and doesn't do anything interesting with them

and given that i've loved a whole bunch of artists recontextualising r&b into different situations and aesthetics of late - kingdom, nguzunguzu, girl unit most obviously, but it seems like every electronic mix i hear nowadays is honour-bound to drop an old r&b track in somewhere - it's not like i'm remotely saying that ONLY REAL R&B COUNTS - it's that some people do it better than others

to all you dudes accusing me of it, im certainly not someone arguing that this is wack compared to 'real R&B' & its not an authenticity issue for me at all. i also dont know what dayo is talking abt w/r/t 'old deej' & R&B either

lol if you can't see the similarities
between lex's 'can't believe ppl are into this when there's so much Real R&B out there' and what you do wit goon rap then I don't even

also meant old deej because it seems d-40 is a more chilled out poster but feel free to prove me wrong

(like, you could the beat for "fall for your type" on this album and you would hardly be able to tell)

totally. i like the sound of this weeknd mixtape. to me it sounds closer to drake's r&b stuff and trey songz (ppl who like this should check out the 'anticipation' mixtape) than the-dream (although the lyrics are clearly terius influenced "got the walls kicking like they 6 months pregnant" lol)

i understand where the genre-defensiveness comes from but i don't even know anything about this guy? how comes it's a "pitchfork thing"? regardless maybe it's not as good as trey or whatever but that doesn't mean there's not something to enjoy here. so often on ilm things seem to end up like playing artist top trumps. " x > y so therefore never bring up y again unless you want to get into another argument about how x > y".

between lex's 'can't believe ppl are into this when there's so much Real R&B out there' and what you do wit goon rap then I don't even

also meant old deej because it seems d-40 is a more chilled out poster but feel free to prove me wrong

― dayo, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 9:22 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what do i 'do' w/ goon rap, do tell

*drama alarm*

i dont say what i listen to is more 'real' than anything else. i do make arguments about why music i like seems better / more significant or w/e but i dont know of any single time ive ever claimed an act is less 'real' than another one

& in fact i do embrace the artifice of certain pop rap acts regularly so

lol

okay I'll break it down for you

...

seems to me that you and lex are both music critics who truck in genres that, in the grand scheme of music criticism, seem to be marginalized & overlooked. or at least, both you and lex spend a lot of time complaining about 'mainstream' coverage of your specialist genres by sites like pitchfork, how they privilege the wrong aspects, the wrong artists, how their aesthetics don't plug into your framework.

anyway seems to me that the weeknd have a 'sound' that some people on this board like, people who don't spend all their time listening to modern R&B, or at least not to the extent that the lex does. and so maybe these people enjoy listening to the weeknd precisely because they are not burdened by the baggage that someone like lex brings to the table! maybe the weeknd pushes certain buttons for them, buttons that are not valuable to the lex. and that's okay. coming in this thread and being all "pitchfork blah blah blah hate indie weakling pathetic trey songz" is kinda the equivalent of the dude in high school who pulls you out and says "you're listening to green day? GREEN DAY? don't you know there are 100 bands that are more punk than GREEN DAY?"

sometimes you just wanna listen to green day.

if you're asking if i see why lex's rhetoric makes it harder to listen to artists he likes sometimes, yes i do & i made that pt in the jazmine sullivan vs janelle monae debates

there were jazmine sullivan vs. janelle monae debates?

welcome to ilx lol

seems to me that you and lex are both music critics who truck in genres that, in the grand scheme of music criticism, seem to be marginalized & overlooked. or at least, both you and lex spend a lot of time complaining about 'mainstream' coverage of your specialist genres by sites like pitchfork, how they privilege the wrong aspects, the wrong artists, how their aesthetics don't plug into your framework.

fwiw i agree/disagree w/ how this is framed. or i think there needs to be some nuance. 'mainstream' sites are, in fact, specialist music sites w/ disproportionate influence on discourse. theres nothing really 'specialist' about the genres lex or i talk abt, except to the extent that theres not a history of critical framework around them to the extent it exists for other genres. as a result, the dominant stories about these genrescome from people not as familiar w/ the history and aesthetic value systems that have helped develop these genres. so i spend a lot of time trying to identify how these values are manifested in the music, then track those backwards into stories about how the music has developed. a project like this requires a certain amount of irreverence -- 'fake' stuff is always influencing 'real', or stuff i dont care for is often impacting stuff i do like.

regardless, framing this as a 'real'/'fake' thing the way lex often does is misleading & unhelpful. it becomes its own ideology. but just as youre free to dismiss my arguments about why the jacka is a great rapper (or whoever) im certainly free to dismiss the weeknd as being particularly interesting in the grand scheme of things no?

no one's actually made a case for what the weeknd are doing yet, all you've said is "well it's not like r&b at all!"

The primary appeal for me, as someone who listens to modern R&B more than anything else these days, is good slow jams are hard to pull off, and I think this album pulls them off. The guy's got a nice voice, and most of these tracks really do have huge hooks.

What it offers that other R&B doesn't, of course, is a much broader palette: more guitars, odder samples, glitchy beats, Souxsie and the Banshees-appropriated choruses. Some of that stuff works better than others—I particularly enjoy how hard some of these beats grind; it really hits home the angst—but I find most of it an interesting change of pace.

Also, some of the lyrics that are initially off-putting begin to make more sense over the course of an album. There's a nice, karmic balance over these nine tracks; every high is followed by a come down, every party by a morning after, every indulgence by a regret. The singer ultimately isn't quite the vain jerk he can come across as in small exposures; there's some depth to this songwriting.

^good post

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/03/the_weeknd_frank_ocean.php

i'm talking about evan's post, to be clear

all this stuff just feels to me like people who are so overly wary of industry machinery that they readily embrace other kinds of marketing and mythmaking -- people that don't give 2 shit about any new major label R&B album jump all over something that was shelved by Def Jam and uploaded to the artist's tumblr or is released by a mysterious anonymous collective

surprised that vv article was the first comparison to odd future tbh

xp otm, explains why theyres so much noise abt OF as well...much of which isnt talking abt the music. victory of new marketing

evan's post is good except i still dont get what 'huge hooks' hes talking about

the odd future thing definitely makes sense in that regard

i don't think i'm gonna touch the part about drake 're-inventing r&b' tho

Threads like this make me wonder whether Lex would like the first Junior Boys album if it came out tomorrow or whether he'd be using exactly the same argument.

that village voice article is really terrible

i just like disaffected party music its the ~modern condition~

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake that ppl are trying to will him into being important

Village Voice article just keeps shifting its goalposts between artistic and commercial success depending on whether the writer wants to disparage something or not. It's an incoherent mess.

i always thought of junior boys as way more in line with kompakt and ~soft sad techno~ than 2-step or the neptunes - i remember reading that sort of line on it and then just thinking WTF when i finally heard last exit because it really wasn't in there at all

i've bitched about the fennessey piece elsewhere but everything about it is bullshit, from its existence to its arguments

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake turn on the radio that ppl are trying to will him into being important

i already wrote an anti-drake piece on the shrimp a year ago or w/e it was so i'm wary of being too public w/ my criticisms of his critical fanbase -- plus i don't even dislike him that much anymore

my problem w/ the drake part of the piece is that he's just such an obvious extension of the five or so years in rap that preceded him -- him & 40 def have a unique 'sound' but that sound isn't even on the radio & their singles for alicia & jamie foxx, though i like both a lot, underperformed quite a bit for those particular artists

so i'm not even going to get into how absurd the idea is that he 'changed r&b'

Yeah like I said nowadays you just get the red mist whenver any article even mentions commercial rnb in relation to a bedroom or indie audience. Actually it seems perfectly obvious why people might like rnb sonics but not the vocals or lyrics, but filtering those sonics through an indie prism and then still calling it rnb probably isn't the best line to take either way.

what? the alicia song was one of the biggest R&B radio hits of last year and the jamie one is in annoying heavy rotation right now (xpost)

like, literally, the #1 most played song on R&B radio last year: http://www.billboard.com/#/charts-year-end/hot-r-b-hip-hop-songs?year=2010

yeah 'un-thinkable' is actually a bigger hit than i realized -- i guess i put it off to the side cuz the album as a whole felt like such a flop after the one before it

the whole foxx project was a failure pretty much & 'fall for your type' is a pretty minor it by his standards -- r&b placement aside

lol billboard airplay charts always confound me -- "there goes my baby"??

anyway drake is a kanye/wayne biter who hasn't changed anything -- we all know this

evan's post is good except i still dont get what 'huge hooks' hes talking about

― so fly zone (D-40), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 9:04 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

dude this has bigger hooks than Jamie Woon.

playing "Wicked Games" right now

dude sounds like a version of Chris Brown who can sing

i still get the sense every time i read abt drake turn on the radio that ppl are trying to will him into being important

― Moreno, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:21 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they just like his pop songs, i do feel like theres a concentrated effort to make him seem like some sort of high brow pop auteur genius which overstates things greatly imo

dude this has bigger hooks than Jamie Woon.

― gr8080, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:26 PM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i havent heard the woon album yet -- but nothing on this is as catchy as 'night air'

"Fall For Your TYpe" was #1 on the R&B chart a few weeks ago and is still in the top 5 -- that's pretty much the ceiling for R&B that sounds like R&B so why pretend those songs are failures just because they're not will.i.am/david guetta dancepop crossover hits as well?

alright i'll retract slightly

i retract slightly every time i hear those garbage songs on the radio every hour

hey-oooh

lean back

this is kind of great, or it would be with fewer "muhfuckers" and less noticeable autontune

his voice is good -- which makes the vocal filter on 'what you need' all the more inexplicable imo

'chillwave' marketing

the vocal filter on "What You Need" is very effective IMO

this is hitting me like a warmer version of Creep

i love the "motherfuckers"

very effective at doing what?

filtering vocals

for me it just feels distancing & cerebrally referential rather than giving any kind of emotional resonance

filtering vocals

― ♞/♘ (Lamp), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:38 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thats a method not an effect

i still think my fave jam is 'loft music' in large part bcuz it sounds like a lost downbeat dream track

I don't think the "muhfuckers" fit in his voice very well; for whatever reason they leap out like a sore thumb

conversely, the word "shit" seems to flow quite nicely in his delivery

very effective at doing what?

It seems like they are there to add in an extra layer of... for lack of a better word "distance" between the singer and the listener; it's using technology to inject a slight sense of danger into the song, making it sound slightly sinister and, as a result, sexier.

basically, all of the technology tricks in here are things I already like so putting a decent R&B singer in the midst of them is essentially someone creating the music I imagined in my head in 1996 but wasn't sure how to go about making

hmm yeah that has the exact opposite effect for me, feels like a way of distancing yourself from sexiness entirely, like one of the scary/sexy things about stuff like this to me is how intimate it can sound. Making it cold just makes it seem like a way to aim for 'remembering sexy' or something, which might be interesting if it wasnt the basis for the entire hypnogogic thing & countless wistful indie hazy records of the past few years. or burial. or whatever else. it doesnt do it for me any more

lol see I basically ignore all of that stuff until it appears in ILM EOY lists, and even then I usually continue to ignore it because I still haven't forgiven ppl for tricking me into listening to The Streets

lol

a way of distancing yourself from sexiness entirely, like one of the scary/sexy things about stuff like this to me is how intimate it can sound. Making it cold just makes it seem like a way to aim for 'remembering sexy' or something,

ha this is like exactly what i love about this album but couldnt articulate! thanks deej!

also Brightblack Morning Light are one of my favorite 00's bands so

yeah i mean i figured thats what ppl liked about it, feels like a cliche to me at this pt after all the chillwave & hypnogogy but i guess some things never die & played signifiers of nostalgia is one of them :O

this is less played bc its more elegant & refined & poised, its hazy but its not sloppy

"What You Need" seems to be pulling equally heavily from Tricky's "Overcome" and Madonna's "Justify My Love", two songs that I think are among the sexiest pieces of music on the planet, and then mixes it with tech tricks that are basically like catnip to me, so it's kind of a no-brainer that I would dig this almost instantly. Like I said, it's hitting almost all the same buttons as that Creep EP.

(which I will totally admit leans very heavily on the sloppy side of this spectrum)

its not reall abt 'nostalgia' tho imo its abt being at a party & feeling alone or the way you can feel like you know less abt a person after fucking them or seeing someone check their phone as soon as they get somewhere, already planning their exit. there are some sonic/aesthetic similarities w/'chillwave' stuff, sure, & they share a sense of alienation & displacement but weeknd are going after something else w/ these tracks imo

yall are some paranoid stoners

lol

ah fuck off, gr8 post

looking for rtc to weigh in

alienation and displacement

dial up the radiohead & release it anonymously -- guaranteed acclaim

anyway ill stop trolling now but this stuff still feels stiff to me & not in a way that makes me think abt when you're at a party but having a sad time there -- its not a problem of authenticity but i think a lot of stuff this purportedly does that is unique is stuff that isnt really that unique at all

"not the right kind of stiff"

i feeeeel the pain of everyone/then i feel nothing

I SHOULD dig this (and I don't care about authenticity) but all I keep hearing is an R&B-leaning She Wants Revenge.

The press I've read is kinda hysterical.

i honestly have no idea how How to dress Well is connected to this or r'n'b in the least, besides the guy namedropping keith sweat every other question.

Thank you, jaxon.

sounds kinda junior boysy to me eh

"not the right kind of stiff"

― wavy g. wavegarten (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:09 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol this is like the sexy photoes thread

s0 st1ff

dayo do you like brightblack morning light

― gr8080, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

no but I remember hearing about them

what's good?

the s/t one and "motion to rejoin" are both awesome

i only bring it up in this thread because it strips down/smokes out folky bluesy shit and favors repetition over "SONIC HOOKS"

Brightblack Morning Light ... WTF?

Just listened to the Trey Songzzzzzz album. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, just not that many things extraordinarily right with it. I dug Red Lipstick and Unfortunate and Unusual, but felt the rest was pretty generic and clinical. Paint by numbers radio pop. Nothing too adventurous. lot of r.Kelly rips and MJ bridges. The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

I like dirt and mistakes and imperfect singing and lack of hooks. And I like brightblack morning light.

And I dig this moody slowjam. Did this ever break outside the bay area? Deej said a while back, "with a name like erk tha jerk he probably won't". Ha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSbVOpKq9OI

A friend whose opinions about contemporary R&B I trust just sent this to me, so I'm downloading it as I type. Reassuring, though, to see that we're all reverting to type here.

the thing i'm interested in is why the music codes mainstream r&b but the surface aesthetics & target audience are pure indie rock

How To Dress Well?

lol read the thread first

"Wicked Games" is closer to Hall & Oates than The-Dream: asshole pleading for sympathy.

i always thought of junior boys as way more in line with kompakt and ~soft sad techno~ than 2-step or the neptunes - i remember reading that sort of line on it and then just thinking WTF when i finally heard last exit because it really wasn't in there at all

The sampler EP doing the rounds for about a year and a half before the album came out was much more 2-step based, including with stuff that basically sounded like Horsepower Productions et al - mainly original member Johnny Dark's influence I think.

The "R&B for Pitchfork" line - as distinct from other non-"pitchfork" (but in practice still hyped by pitchfork) but non-R&B appropriations of R&B seems to come down to the sense of purpose or function implied by context.

I've made joking claims before that all the R&B influenced post-dubstep that lex likes is basically the UK version of "How To Dress Well", and he has admirably not risen to the bait. The underlying implication of the joke is that these are all "indie" uses of R&B.

I assume Lex perceives a crucial difference on the basis that even (what I would call, I'm sure he wouldn't) the "indie" end of dance music still has a commitment to an idea of dance functionalism, a nominal belief that this music is designed to be deployed in public, to be responded to physically.

Whereas How To Dress Well and The Weekend share an assumed context of "isolationist" listening: you and your computer effectively.
Even if in practice the music is 90% consumed in that matter regardless. Of course lots of people listen to Trey Songz at their computers as well, and it can work really well in that context too (or rather, Trey can do both "Bottoms Up" and "Unfortunate").

So you could say that the argument is less about "realness" and more about whether there is any value in producing music whose "point" seems to be to reduce the functionality or the context-suitability of its source material. I think there is value in this, but am sympathetic to lex's position to the extent that I think that critically the value of this is overstated and over-represented.

Funnily enough the real prototype for lex's position here is not deej and goonery but vahid and Kompakt "soft sad techno" - vahid objected to the amount of attention given to this kind of music because it was effectively (in his opinion) indie kids sitting at computers sighing over mood and atmosphere (I'm am obviously being incredibly reductionist w/r/t vahid's opinion but this post is getting long enough already).

And people would respond and say: "but... I go out and dance to this stuff at raves too!"

But, I think, for Vahid, the sense was that the indieness of "soft sad techno" as an idea infected even the music's actual dancefloor existence. And of course the underlying issue is the privileging of that music over and above stuff only liked by clubbers.

So, always, even the fairly neutral judgments, come down to whether the music in question is reflective of some kind of broader fight going on.

Like, I think Junior Boys emerged at a time when entirely non-dancefloor appropriations of modern dance music (as opposed to, say, disco-punk revivalism) was at a low ebb, so there was nothing particularly "threatening" about critics loving them unless you took the Vahid line (can't remember what he thought of them actually). Also 2-step had died already so there was nothing "at stake" in their appropriations (beyond the tardiness of enthused critics obv).

Whereas now they might seem like an extension of James Blake et al and I can well imagine people hating them on that kind of basis.

I assume Lex perceives a crucial difference on the basis that even (what I would call, I'm sure he wouldn't) the "indie" end of dance music still has a commitment to an idea of dance functionalism, a nominal belief that this music is designed to be deployed in public, to be responded to physically.

this, really. this is what I secretly suspect is one of lex's measuring sticks - and it'd be interesting to talk about the function of music, the context & environment of listening and how that affects your reaction to music. like I've more than once seen j0rd or others deploy the "this pop song was pretty meh but after I heard it all over the place it really sunk in". see also: "the song that feels like summer"

booming post btw xp

I had a not dissimilar argument last fall when a couple of friends said Taylor Swift was the only "country artist they liked. Their constricted notion of what was acceptable country clashed with my constricted notion of what "country" signified as a genre. Certainly James Blake, Junior Boys, Burial, et al inspired lots of snickers from yours truly about how they wedded beatz to indie sensibilities. After all these months I'm thinking maybe I'm wrong.

Whereas How To Dress Well and The Weekend share an assumed context of "isolationist" listening: you and your computer effectively

a) is this true b) what r&b is not 'isolationist' by your measure?

Certainly it's more troublesome for me to explain how How To Dress Well is not R&B than explaining how Keyshia Cole IS.

also tim you make your argument about functionality w/r/t dance music, but then you compare that functionality to how to dress well/weeknd, which as lamp points out code as R&B - so there's a little bit of goalpost shifting in, unless I've misunderstood your post (which I probably have)

Just listened to the Trey Songzzzzzz album. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, just not that many things extraordinarily right with it. I dug Red Lipstick and Unfortunate and Unusual, but felt the rest was pretty generic and clinical. Paint by numbers radio pop. Nothing too adventurous. lot of r.Kelly rips and MJ bridges. The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

I like dirt and mistakes and imperfect singing and lack of hooks. And I like brightblack morning light.

― jaxon, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

not exactly running to TS's defense here, can't fault you for not loving that record. but i feel like you're laying out a lot of unspoken biases here that lead people to only listen to 'arty' sorta-R&B but not any mainstream R&B more contemporary than, like, Aaliyah. imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, it CAN be sonically unique or adventurous but if you show up hoping primarily for that or being turned off by studio polish or an emphasis on radio-friendly hooks yeah of course you're going to get bored and go back to blogsoul.

The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

waht

Trey embellishing every fucking word with unnecessary emphatic vibrato is what makes the emotions in his music come off insincere ftr

fwiw vahids argument there figures heavily into deej goonery (lol @ this coinage) ha

fyi jaxon i def wouldnt rep for that whole LP, although you highlighted pretty much my fav tracks. You should probably check out Trey's "Anticipation" mixtape that came out a year or so before it. Its not perfect but there are def some weird / interesting production choices, really spacey/sparse R&B along the lines of 'unfortunate' (although maybe nothing as good as that song)

Trey embellishing every fucking word with unnecessary emphatic vibrato is what makes the emotions in his music come off insincere ftr

^^^^ this. The gloss has nothing to do with it.

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

love that mixtape

imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances

as much as its a) dumb and b) a false binary i still kinda like my idea upthread that a lot of this argument is about narrative vs. emotive styles of music & whether certain genres are inherently wedded to one type of music or the other. i guess this sorta ties into tim's stuff about the functional use of music & how (for me) 'narrative' music is focused both lyrically & musically on movement & structure

Well, I could argue that imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B country is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, no?

Narrative writing remains a hallmark of country.

The gloss has nothing to do with it.

"Gloss" can still be used appropriately as a pejorative, i.e. "that keyboard part is just gloss," meaning it's not really very good and it's just there to give a sense of a particular production quality.

I've made joking claims before that all the R&B influenced post-dubstep that lex likes is basically the UK version of "How To Dress Well", and he has admirably not risen to the bait. The underlying implication of the joke is that these are all "indie" uses of R&B.

yeah i'm not saying that r&b can't be recontextualised - as i think i posted on tumblr, that nguzunguzu mix doing the rounds is a really incredible example of how it can be (and another reason to hate on the attention that the weeknd are getting) - ditto kingdom's r&b samples and many others. but really the trick of dumping a sped-up r&b sample into a post-dubstep track is itself getting pretty old at this point, you can always hear when people are doing it in a rote or uninspired way - it's a qualitative difference.

but i feel like you're laying out a lot of unspoken biases here that lead people to only listen to 'arty' sorta-R&B but not any mainstream R&B more contemporary than, like, Aaliyah

yeah this is otm - and with this in mind how is it possible NOT to be kind of angry at "arty" sorta-r&b being written up as though it was an amazing new direction for the genre?

Sure -- I listened to Bowie's Never Let Me Down a couple of hours ago; talk about redundant keyboard tinkles. But "gloss" as jaxon's defining it isn't what cripples Trey's recordings to my ears, and maybe I'm reading him enough but his statement implied that capital-G-gloss is a perennial problem.

xpost

really i think the superior "proper" r&b version of the weeknd isn't trey songz - as much as i'm fond of him he's not exactly a standout of the genre except by default - it's the diddy/dirty money remix mixtape

Well, I could argue that imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B country is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, no?

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 10:35 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Narrative writing remains a hallmark of country.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 10:35 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

what's your point?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAi2L3KgVw

Sorry

the trey songz anticipation tape does actually remind me a lot of what this sounds like its going for, maybe slightly more traditional & interested in making unusual choices but tighter in songwriting & extremely similar in mood

Just listened to the Trey Songzzzzzz album. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, just not that many things extraordinarily right with it. I dug Red Lipstick and Unfortunate and Unusual, but felt the rest was pretty generic and clinical. Paint by numbers radio pop. Nothing too adventurous. lot of r.Kelly rips and MJ bridges. The gloss and sheen make the emotion feel fake.

I like dirt and mistakes and imperfect singing and lack of hooks. And I like brightblack morning light.

― jaxon, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

not exactly running to TS's defense here, can't fault you for not loving that record. but i feel like you're laying out a lot of unspoken biases here that lead people to only listen to 'arty' sorta-R&B but not any mainstream R&B more contemporary than, like, Aaliyah. imo even the most modern hip hop-influence R&B is still very much about emotion and storytelling and vocal performances, it CAN be sonically unique or adventurous but if you show up hoping primarily for that or being turned off by studio polish or an emphasis on radio-friendly hooks yeah of course you're going to get bored and go back to blogsoul.

what's wrong with having these biases though

yeah thats p otm

what's your point?

i think he was responding to my post

nothing necessarily inherently wrong with them, but when i refer to them as "unspoken biases" i'm saying that people are making a lot of placeholder arguments or focusing on side issues instead of admitting to or even being aware of those biases.

what's wrong with having these biases though

― dayo, Thursday, March 24, 2011 2:54 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nothing which is why i dont have a problem w/ dude liking this record, its the critical hosannas greeting it that are absurd

My point: narrative is a characteristic of country more than R&B. But, like I said a while ago, caring about genre restrictions is kinda quaint, and I'm backing away from it.

jaxon has been pretty open about admitting that his like for the weeknd is about the 'indie' production - what other unspoken biases are there

sure but there's not actually any point in bringing that up. i didn't say R&B is the MOST narrative-driven genre or the only one, it's one of many. (xpost)

jaxon has been pretty open about admitting that his like for the weeknd is about the 'indie' production - what other unspoken biases are there

― dayo, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 10:58 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark

the unspoken message i get out of conversations like this is kind of like "I really like R&B or the IDEA of R&B, but I'm only going to sit down with an album of it if it's something outside the major label system that gets blog hype as being especially weird or creative"

jaxon has been pretty open about admitting that his like for the weeknd is about the 'indie' production - what other unspoken biases are there

― dayo, Thursday, March 24, 2011 2:58 AM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no one was telling him hes wrong for liking this stuff for that reason. biases tho are just biases, not rules, which is why when i was making my case against this i sorta sidestepped that ... i like a lot of the qualities he likes in older records too, & he & i have exchanged links/thoughts abt that stuff before, i just think that this misses out on a lot of stuff that he & i usually dig mutually

an example is sa ra, who i liked (albeit somewhat intermittently) but they fit in w/ a whole scene of post-dilla DJs that I used to be into, whereas this def feels more like 'listening' R&B TIm was talking abt, & sa-ra also just seemed to be weirder / more interesting in pushing stuff. as far as i can tell the only 'boundaries' being pushed in this record is stuff like, hmm, you got indie in my R&B / R&B in my indie

w/ the exception of the few creative ideas i thought they had that they couldnt really tie together into a Great Song package

the unspoken message i get out of conversations like this is kind of like "I really like R&B or the IDEA of R&B, but I'm only going to sit down with an album of it if it's something outside the major label system that gets blog hype as being especially weird or creative"

ennh this is a reach, i think

well, to put it another way -- mainstream R&B is loaded with a lot of pageantry and theatricality with all these beautiful people showboating with their big voices -- that's something you can buy into as a fan of the music and let it feed into your appreciation of it, but it's not that hard to ignore either if you'd rather just put on an album and zone out. maybe some people are so averse to it that they only want to hear R&B if there's some 'faceless' or 'introspective' aspect to the artist or their sound that makes it seem less showbiz.

how would you define the indie love for Janelle Monae?

She lives for the pageantry.

i get a feel from dayo & lamp's posts as if they feel that pro-weeknd folks are getting unfairly dismissed or something, which, well, you can come up w/ a justification for basically anything so anyone who is the hater on a record in an ilx thread is gonna end up on the defensive, but in reality there's a gigantic amount of pro-Weeknd feeling & not really many people who think it kind of sucks & is overrated in the crit circles we run in or discuss on ilx. when these dudes are performing on late night talk shows & getting featured out of proportion to their actual sales or popularity yet again, its just going to be more oppressive for those of us who think they're kind of an overrated group who just happen to be good at marketing. so, keep in mind that its not like you're going to lose in the long run. the 'right people' seem to like this band

i'm not saying there's an either/or dichotomy of only big glitzy Beyonce-type stars and only indie mystique collectives like The Weeknd -- obviously there are artists like Janelle Monae that are somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, or can't really be usefully measured on that spectrum at all

and really, i was overly dismissive of lex considering i more or less agree w/ his overarching point, which is that this group is not particularly great or important but they're quirky, which means a lot to critics right now in general

its something ive been wrestling w/ in other areas of music as well -- it seems like theres a disproportionate amount of media attention for 'certain kinds' of acts that is based on some fantastical notion of perceived significance that seems heavily inflated relative to musical accomplishments, but that ends up becoming 'true' through sheer force of will on behalf of influential people

imo

and really, i was overly dismissive of lex considering i more or less agree w/ his overarching point, which is that this group is not particularly great or important but they're quirky, which means a lot to critics right now in general

its something ive been wrestling w/ in other areas of music as well -- it seems like theres a disproportionate amount of media attention for 'certain kinds' of acts that is based on some fantastical notion of perceived significance that seems heavily inflated relative to musical accomplishments, but that ends up becoming 'true' through sheer force of will on behalf of influential people

imo

lol isn't this basically how 'buzz' works

yeah its more pronounced now that sales dont force media dudes to go 'i guess we should probably be paying attention to this artist who just went platinum without us paying attention."

well i feel like on ilm theres this way of seeing this divide i guess first of all as a divide & the second of all abt a bunch of contextual or extramusical things (dancing vs not-dancing, indie vs pop, communal vs personal, labels vs blogs) when i think its at root something abt the emotional content of the music itself & the structural/mechanical techniques that are used to 'get at' these emotions.

ugh i mean i guess im just repeating my same stupid points over & over here but weeknd dudes are all abt 'pageantry and theatricality' theyre just using it in service of a different emotional sensibility. thats why the whole indie in yr r&b thing is just... idk like an alien way of considering the issue unless you think r&b is strictly abt one kind of listening/engagement

i think a lot of people kind of want to listen to only exceptional music, as in things that are the exception to the rule or stand out from their genre, so anything that gets the weird/bold/arty tag gets a lot of attention that's ultimately a little divorced from how good or enjoyable it actually is. i totally understand that instinct, because when i was 14 the only jazz i was interested in was Sun Ra and the only classical i was interested in was The Rite Of Spring because that was what i'd heard was the OUT THERE STUFF, and now probably because of that i regard that kind of impulse as often simpleminded and immature.

ugh i mean i guess im just repeating my same stupid points over & over here but weeknd dudes are all abt 'pageantry and theatricality' theyre just using it in service of a different emotional sensibility. thats why the whole indie in yr r&b thing is just... idk like an alien way of considering the issue unless you think r&b is strictly abt one kind of listening/engagement

― ♞/♘ (Lamp), Thursday, March 24, 2011 3:23 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thats the thing dude, i think R&B is about a multitude of kinds of listening/engagement. i just dont think that what this is doing is novel w/in that context

ftr i was referring to 'pageantry and theatricality' as far as non-musical stuff, like how Trey Songz performing shirtless is as big a part of his popularity as his songs, or Mary J. Blige having this autobiographical narrative running through her whole career, things that are sidestepped by a group who obscure their identities or don't appear in record artwork/videos.

i think a lot of people kind of want to listen to only exceptional music, as in things that are the exception to the rule or stand out from their genre, so anything that gets the weird/bold/arty tag gets a lot of attention that's ultimately a little divorced from how good or enjoyable it actually is. i totally understand that instinct, because when i was 14 the only jazz i was interested in was Sun Ra and the only classical i was interested in was The Rite Of Spring because that was what i'd heard was the OUT THERE STUFF, and now probably because of that i regard that kind of impulse as often simpleminded and immature.

― some dude, Thursday, March 24, 2011 3:24 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah tim's talked about this a lot (and this is a better way of putting it than i did) but i think there's something really great about a flawlessly executed classic archetype sometimes, and that those songs do tend to be heavily ignored. its a lot of what i like about the goon thread is it at least seems to work at creating a context where rap doesnt have to stand out to people who dont listen to rap to be considered seriously as good music

Re: Janelle:

She lives for the pageantry.

There is a difference between pageantry received as being expressive of the individual artist and the pageantry received as genre formalism.

See also why many people can check for Kanye and Andre 3000 but complain about other rap being overblown or fantastical or not realistic.

Whereas How To Dress Well and The Weekend share an assumed context of "isolationist" listening: you and your computer effectively

a) is this true b) what r&b is not 'isolationist' by your measure?

I was talking about the way in which the music is presented and talked about. None of this stuff is "true".

also tim you make your argument about functionality w/r/t dance music, but then you compare that functionality to how to dress well/weeknd, which as lamp points out code as R&B - so there's a little bit of goalpost shifting in, unless I've misunderstood your post (which I probably have)

I was comparing the functionality or lack thereof in extra-genre uses of R&B - the comparison between how dance music (however indiefied) does it and how whatver we call this stuff does it. A listener's commitment to music as a public rather than private experience can be rooted in a bias towards pretty much any genre - e.g. see Carducci on rock, people talking about the importance of live jazz, live classical, people talking about the importance of festivals, whether stuff has street buzz in rap et al, people talking about the importance of pop radio.

The bottom line for me is that The Weeknd just doesn't work at the moment. It sounds slopy, half-baked and jumps on too many trends too obviously to get on board with right now. Thats what I mean when I say they're just playing dress up at the moment. There is some tallent there no doubt but it needs to grow into its own thing big time or its pretty pointless, to me at least.

I like a load of R&B impressions, its influence is all over a load of dance music I love right now and always has been tbh its like a bread and butter dance meme and has been since disco so I'm not against The Weeknd as an idea they just don't pull it off. They will prob get too much hype off p4k, this forum and the like now and not get chance to grow into their sound as well. They sound like they shouldn't have been picked up yet, they need a load more time before they find their feet imo.

I do think the current aesthetic valorisation of blurriness has tended to result in people excusing themselves for not bothering to polish their material more. But the problem is definitely broader than p4k-soul.

it seems like theres a disproportionate amount of media attention for 'certain kinds' of acts that is based on some fantastical notion of perceived significance that seems heavily inflated relative to musical accomplishments, but that ends up becoming 'true' through sheer force of will on behalf of influential people

this is basically my #1 beef - i think the weeknd suck but after a while that just comes down to taste - it's the fact that i seem to have to read so fucking much about an act LIKE THEM when acts LIKE KANDI - u can frame that divide into fake/real r&b if u want, and replace kandi w/whomever - get pretty much zero column inches

to further fan the flames I present to you, their cover art

http://pigeonsandplanes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/TheWeeknd_HouseOfBalloons.jpg

itt deej and lex get mad at tastemakers

lol @ ghost box+last nights party

btw if you like the weeknd you should check out the second jeremih album

jeremih is a way better comp than trey songz

I had never actually heard of Kandi before this thread but having Googled her I think Lex is glossing over the issue of good old fashioned AGEISM in her (and Marsha's) music being overlooked.

Thing is, this happens in indie as well - the internet is full of indie kids screaming at the sky because the indie music they love is being critically overlooked in favour of the Vaccines or Grizzly Bear or whoever.

Genres aren't monoliths for a reason and personally I think it's fine to engage with only a small part of a genre critically or otherwise - (Lex YOU DO THIS with country, and the more female-coded end of indie for that matter) but ppl shouldn't really presume to be speaking for or of the entire genre when doing so - cf NME writers talking about "dance music" in 2007 with exclusive reference to Justice and Simian Mobile Disco.

Dan comparing The Weeknd to the Creep EP is the first thing that's made me want to listen to this actually.

Not having home internet is really starting to fuck with my listening habits incidentally.

btw if you like the weeknd you should check out the second jeremih album

the first one is better though!

personally I think it's fine to engage with only a small part of a genre critically or otherwise - (Lex YOU DO THIS with country

i think i'd be wary of doing it if the only bit of country i engaged with was the one that every other critic was, or if i was framing the country artists i liked as bold new directions for the genre. as it is, taylor swift's huge enough to be assessed as a pop star, and as for sunny sweeney, hardly anyone's talking about her at all.

and i understand ageism being the reason kandi and marsha aren't sold as (or selling like) Hot New Pop Stars, but the critical press covers tons of old people and it shouldn't be an excuse anyway

/btw if you like the weeknd you should check out the second jeremih album/

the first one is better though!

/personally I think it's fine to engage with only a small part of a genre critically or otherwise - (Lex YOU DO THIS with country/

i think i'd be wary of doing it if the only bit of country i engaged with was the one that every other critic was, or if i was framing the country artists i liked as bold new directions for the genre. as it is, taylor swift's huge enough to be assessed as a pop star, and as for sunny sweeney, hardly anyone's talking about her at all.

yah but the first one is more peaky, second has a more even feel

What is the Creep EP?

I think this is partly a structural problem with r&b really, it's so commercially setup that only a very small proportion of artists have any visibility (critically or otherwise) at any given time. And while r&b isn't really bothered with critical consensus or even courting it really it does mean that artists like Dawn Richard or K. Michelle (or even Electrik Red) just fade into the background unless there are people prepared to heavily rep for them. It doesn't feel like it benefits from the internet and mixtape culture in the same was as hip-hop does at all, even though there's no reason why it shouldn't.

number none: creep ft. romy xx - days

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

xp

Oh yeah, i just thought it was a single rather than an EP.

I think this is partly a structural problem with r&b really, it's so commercially setup that only a very small proportion of artists have any visibility (critically or otherwise) at any given time. And while r&b isn't really bothered with critical consensus or even courting it really it does mean that artists like Dawn Richard or K. Michelle (or even Electrik Red) just fade into the background unless there are people prepared to heavily rep for them. It doesn't feel like it benefits from the internet and mixtape culture in the same was as hip-hop does at all, even though there's no reason why it shouldn't.

this is true - what's depressing is how few people really go all out to rep for less-known r&b artists. especially critics - this is what a critic's job should be!

xp it is an ep, with some good remixes. their next single features nina sky, btw. actually creep are another good example of recontextualised r&b that i really love.

still tho weeknd are p obv going for a mood that is p distinct from all these other artists you are mentioning itt so

^ why does this point get missed. lex it seems like you still feel that they're going for a certain mood + failing but i dont think thats it

Lex's point seems to be "how dare critics value this mood over all the others" but I still think that's an unfair caricature especially of the people in this thread.

that's a shifting-the-goalposts argument though, it could be applied to p much anything, ever. "oh they're not TRYING to do that!"

what i'm reacting to: they get write-ups, across the board, that tie them to r&b, and in many cases are held up as an example of where r&b as a genre should be going. so yeah i think it's fair to assess them on what r&b's genre values are. but also taking into account that they're not trad r&b, it's also fair to compare them to other non-r&b acts recontextualising the genre.

ANYWAY i am actually going to do an article about this now :)

ok this part - 'held up as an example of where r&b as a genre should be going'

i havent seen these writeups?

me neither, they are gen being received as chillwave appropriating rnb and i think the rnb side of their side is in gen being played way down.

of their sound

the terrible sean fennessey piece linked upthread

also i've been criticising this for being unremarkable by CHILLWAVE standards as well as r&b

Yeah you're more of a Neon Indian man.

yes you are clearly a massive chillwave fan

i don't have any investment in chillwave as a thing but people have kept saying that a lot of the UK bass music i like is chillwavey - i don't mind if it is or isn't

That stuff is chillwavey in the way that Kompakt is chillwavey, ie people are just talking nonsense based on vague sonic signifiers rather than function, scene or anything else.

so what you're saying is that you like chillwave from the vantage point of other critical discourses?

he likes chillwave that is actually what people in other genres are making, those people being people who would make chillwave if they weren't in other genres.

Souljazz's 'Rapegaze 2: The Dallas - London Connection' has a decent explanation in the liner notes.

the weather is very nice

What I was getting at is that "OMG this is chillwave" is the sort of sub-Whiney line people take when they have no idea about the genre in question but a stupid compulsion to have an opinion about it nonetheless.

Might get an ice-cream at lunchtime though.

I dunno, where does chillwave end anyway? Are Forest Swords chillwave? Creep?

I don't think "Days" is particularly R&B-ish? When I'm comparing it to The Weeknd songs I'm listening to, I'm thinking more about sound palette than execution; the singer for The Weeknd sounds too much in the Chris Brown/Ne-Yo/Raphael Saddiq being lazy vein to totally dismiss R&B influence upon their sound so I don't really get some of Lex's objections.

Also maybe I am granting more credit than is due because of how disappointing I found that Jamie XX/GSH album, which is currently my Event Zero for "music that is too sloppy to pull off what I think it's trying to do".

I dunno, where does chillwave end anyway? Are Forest Swords chillwave? Creep?

CHILLWAVE CONTINUUM

the ch'uum, as it is referred to at conferences all over england.

jeremih is a way better comp than trey songz

― ico, Thursday, March 24, 2011 12:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

have u heard 'anticipation'? i think its iciness is a lot closer to what this is aiming for

itt deej and lex get mad at tastemakers

― dayo, Thursday, March 24, 2011 11:03 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

who's mad?

im scoffing disdainfully @ them

I've listened to this now and much of it sonically is real 1998 arse-end of trip-hop stuff. Has he sung over the Sneaker Pimps yet?

i too was thinking along those lines Matt, especially Curvatia by SpaceK.

[granted i haven't heard that album in years and need to dig it out to see if there is a connection .. ]

still tho weeknd are p obv going for a mood that is p distinct from all these other artists you are mentioning itt so

― ico, Thursday, March 24, 2011 8:35 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^ why does this point get missed. lex it seems like you still feel that they're going for a certain mood + failing but i dont think thats it

― just sayin, Thursday, March 24, 2011 8:39 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

haha yeah I love how lex is all sputtering "b-b-b-but you should listen to marsha ambrosius!!!' when marsha ambrosius sounds nothing like this

anyway I just relistened to the second jeremih album and it's like a really good version of this album except it came out first

also you should skip the track with 50 on it

i never heard the second jeremih....to spotify i go.

it's great!

some good points here: http://blatantineptitude.blogspot.com/2011/03/jj-abrams-ication-of-music-on-web.html

version of "The Morning" doesnt have the slo-mo vocal effect abused by salem
i liked the old version but i like this version too
― gr8080, Monday, March 21, 2011 8:48 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lolling that salem is ref point, not dj screw

the beats remind me of this the-dream/santogold track which i love and still listen to a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtWT_6ftriU

so many posts since last night, it's almost too hard to respond to everything. i know this post is gonna come off a bit defensive but glad people aren't ganging up on me. i don't nec wanna be the strawman for 'indie' 'blog reader' who only listens to something if it's weird. but i might as well accept parts of it even though i dislike indie rock and i don't read blogs. i've always liked 'the exception to the rule' music. it's almost a joke now. i'm feeling this bette midler house track. but i'm so deep in the beardy/balearic/cosmic record collecting scene where i'm always on the lookout for a funky track by a generally non-funky musician. throw a synth on it™ and i'm in heaven. disco track by a rock musician. boom. popstar records in africa or african musician records in france. oh yeah. i'm also sorta ADD in my music tastes. i get so into some genre until i feel i've squeezed the life out of them then i'm onto the next one. so it's not that i'm like this outsider to r'n'b. i've been listening to it on and off since elementary school. and it's not like i have an aversion to radio pop. it's not the major label feeling that i didn't like about trey songz. that gloss has nothing to do with being on a major label. i love tons of major label stuff. there are tons of HUGE acts that can do interesting things. beyonce, rihanna, wayne (sorry guys). they can have a song on the radio a billion times and it still sounds interesting. even some BEP. i don't hate on those guys. but there really was a feeling on the TS album that he was reading from a script of cliched phrases of what an r'n'b loverman would say to his lady. i've since listened to the How To Dress Well & The Dream albums, trying to do a lil catch up on 'real' and 'not real' r'n'b. HTDW was my least favorite out of all this. i said i liked sloppy, but this was taking it too far. i liked the parts of it that were the least "soulful" i guess, but when he started singing over new jack loops w/noise on top. meh. the dream album was fantastic. everything about it, from the drum programming to the synths and his singing voice and production. there was dirt and noise in stuff. (i coulda done w/o that florida university song though, and wish cee lo didn't cover it). anyways, glad a thread like this has come along for me to spend some time w/different music. next up is frank ocean (not looking forward to it tbh) and jerimih's second album.

i can't rate the dream highly enough...i have listened to love king more than any other lp of the last few years.

curious to hear what you think of the frank ocean record, jaxon.

me too

the unspoken message i get out of conversations like this is kind of like "I really like R&B or the IDEA of R&B, but I'm only going to sit down with an album of it if it's something outside the major label system that gets blog hype as being especially weird or creative"

― some dude, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 5:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

and really, i was overly dismissive of lex considering i more or less agree w/ his overarching point, which is that this group is not particularly great or important but they're quirky, which means a lot to critics right now in general

its something ive been wrestling w/ in other areas of music as well -- it seems like theres a disproportionate amount of media attention for 'certain kinds' of acts that is based on some fantastical notion of perceived significance that seems heavily inflated relative to musical accomplishments, but that ends up becoming 'true' through sheer force of will on behalf of influential people

imo

― so fly zone (D-40), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 5:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

not to give the impression that i don't value music crit or pay attention to trends in crit circles, but i think not being a critic myself and just being a guy who likes music and occasionally gets paid to DJ gives me the luxury to not give a shit about this stuff?

also, this was touched on upthread wrt 'pageantry and theatricality', but pop music has always been about more than faceless recorded music. image and quirk and mythos arent't unfortunate byproducts of pop music, they're part of its makeup. there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking the weeknd because of a quirky aesthetic.

btw it should go w/o saying i'm pretty much in the same boat as jaxon taste-wise.

the thing abt 'quirkiness' is only really addressed at other critics / journalists writing about how 'important' this is. its not addressed at people who just like the music, man. obviously my taste heavily overlaps w/ yours & jaxon's when it comes to this kind of stuff, but there is a commonality to all the stuff the three of us have ever talked about, which is that we all think the songs are good, right? like, you want to listen to them over & over? i know you like these, but for me these just arent good songs on the level of, like, former porn stars singing about 'flying like an eagle' or eartha kitt's disco record -- both of which are campy, but not, like, constructed sloppily as an affect. they both function to me the way great songs are supposed to function. that they are weird/interesting is a bonus.

anyway this is where it comes to an issue of taste -- i just wanted to be clear where my lines are w/ this

grady just listen to R&B

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

also, this was touched on upthread wrt 'pageantry and theatricality', but pop music has always been about more than faceless recorded music. image and quirk and mythos arent't unfortunate byproducts of pop music, they're part of its makeup. there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking the weeknd because of a quirky aesthetic.

i can't tell if you're flipping my argument on me on purpose or what but i was saying that 'anonymous' anti-image stuff like The Weeknd, while certainly shrewdly mythology-building in its own right, is kind of a way of hooking people who are turned off by more star/persona-driven R&B that's more overtly about dramatic videos and big melismatic vocal performances.

i dont know if i was flipping it on you or not but i was saying that image is part of it no matter what, and some ppl like the jj-abrams-ication image

you cant be "anti-image" i guess is what i was saying, there's no such thing

haven't listened to them, but on a scale of 1 - 10, how #based is this band?

the unspoken message i get out of conversations like this is kind of like "I really like R&B or the IDEA of R&B, but I'm only going to sit down with an album of it if it's something outside the major label system that gets blog hype as being especially weird or creative"
― some dude, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 5:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i just wrote something a little unsatisfying about this, but ... there's always the impulse to discuss this stuff on the level of media, perceived coolness, and what's "okay to like" -- what seems much harder for people to talk about is, like, what specific difference makes this intriguing to certain listeners in a way mainstream r&b is not? I'm not discounting the effect of media, or the air of cool, or tribal affiliation, but that feels minor: this record does concrete things differently than mainstream r&b I like just as much or better, and that sticks out pretty clearly if i, say listen to it during commercials on 106&park. production sensibility, emotional effect, sense of persona -- I don't even know that they're pointedly "weird" so much as just a slightly different thing. ("weird" depends where you're coming from, I guess; like many people, I enjoy r&b and beach house both, so this doesn't exactly jar!) it might be hard to articulate, but it seems easy to hear concrete choices here that will be inviting to one audience rather than another.

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

grady just listen to R&B

― D-40, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

― gr8080, Thursday, 24 March 2011 21:35 (10 minutes ago) Permalink

tbf this was in response to you saying that this music made u think of sex & weed & dismissing sade as old woman music

man grady you really think sade is old woman music

hey nitsuh i guess what intrigues me about it would be, is this middle-ground artist actually appealing to both audiences, or are they just one audience's artist in the end, and if they end up appealing to both audiences, is it in the same way jay-z hates rap but loves coldplay cliche of ilx yore

does that make sense

like, what is the *social effect* of this sonic blending

better teachers in inner city schools

ha

jumping off that joke i have a friend who teaches in inner city schools & bless her heart she tries to push indie rap on her kids who are big gucci / waka heads and its just, like, the cornier end of cliche'd 'deep' indie rap & shes like 'they just wont listen to me!' & i want to break it down & be like 'youre fundamentally misunderstanding the way rap functions' but then i think i would seem mean so like most of my music nerdery i restrict it to ilx

friend of friend remixed. totally accentuating the burial aspects: http://soundcloud.com/vin-sol/what-you-need

D, i'm not saying they get both audiences -- seems really rare that anyone manages that. but there are simple, obvious, audible, above-anyone's-cynicism REASONS for which audience goes for it, not just "who said it was cool," right? it's not solely translating or marketing something for a new audience: it winds up actually staking out some sonic and emotional space that's just a little "different." which is cool! even if it sucks, the mere fact of opening up a few extra spaces seems nice to me. not for social effects, but just for musical ones. (though maybe those can become social ones down the road.)

ok yeah that seems generally true & i agree

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

not when the middle stances are privileged so heavily over the original styles and methods

or like one of em anyway

it actually seems to me that it would be productive if, instead of worrying much about audience-crossing and such, we considered it a GOOD thing for acts to stake out weird middle stances between styles and methods we're used to, just to open out the field and see what develops!

This is correct as far as it goes: the problem is that as a critical community we are having increasing difficulty identifying music that stakes out "weird middle stances" without the kind of signifiers of indie-friendly audience-crossing quirk that some listeners are objecting to here.*

This kind of thing is something we recognise full well in politics, and recognise as being important to how politics functions: the way in which particular rituals, affectations, phrases, ideas and allegiances capture the field of broad principles that everyone agrees in the abstract are good.

This is my perennial complaint: "weird middle stances" happen all the time well within the confounds of "generic" (in both senses of the word) music but the more critics try to adopt a kind of omniscient across-all-genres faux-objectivism the harder it is for them to recognise what is of interest within genre. The unsurprising irony of course is that critically the exception to this rule is indie rock itself, wherein actually generic (again in both senses of the word) music still can be celebrated insofar as the unspoken assumption that indie in and of itself is a "weird middle stance" confers legitimacy on even its most rote manifestations.

(*the massive caveat being that each and every one of us here is guilty of this in some area of music - but the point here is not the awfulness of individual instances of people doing this kind of thing, but the limiting effect of our entire critical discourse becoming premised on it)

just yesterday i was thinking "damn i wish i could throw up the nabisco signal over the weeknd thread"

:D

not when the middle stances are privileged so heavily over the original styles and methods

give me a break, dude.

No, lex is right. I've seen this a lot with listeners the last couple of years.

im going to backpedal slightly & say tim otm lol

yeah i dont think he is, even a little, but i guess this comes down to how aware you are of the 'critical community' & how you perceive it

lex, how many times have people called you geir?

yeah otm

writing this r&b/weeknd column at the moment and there's so much interesting stuff happening in r&b right now - it's been a beleaguered genre commercially of late, but in the past few months alone you've got two of its biggest stars explicitly defining it on record - r kelly singing "i wanna bring the love songs back to the radio" and diddy's intro to the r&b remix of "yeah yeah you would" - like they're pretty much staking something on this idea of "real", traditional r&b as something that's important to keep alive. and the career arcs of how kandi and dawn richard have wound up making some of the best r&b of the year are fascinating in themselves. and then that timothy bloom video that dropped out of nowhere and pretty much blew the r&b community away.

against this backdrop how the fuck do you even write a column purportedly about r&b and focus on the weeknd.

*tim otm

haha

lex, I'm curious to learn what you think of the new El Debarge record, my favorite "trad" R&B record of the last six months. Clearly he's following the classicist route (which he helped invent and define for R. Kelly and Ne-Yo).

i think lex has a point but the thing he should realize is that 'middle stances' being privileged over original styles isn't something that just happens to rap or r&b in the pitchfork universe -- it also happens to traditional indie music that ppl we would call squares like -- i think nabisco sorta wrestled w/ this sort of thing in his male bonding review from last year -- 'how do you make a plain r&b record appealing to people that are head over heels for the weekend' is the same as 'how do you make the make the male bonding record appealing to people that are head over heels for sleigh bells' -- it's something all formalists have to deal w/ now

i liked it alfred, albeit i didn't go back to it as much as the r kelly or jazmine ones - there was such a glut of r&b albums in december (each and every one EVEN KERI HILSON being exponentially more worthy of attention than the weeknd)

against this backdrop how the fuck do you even write a column purportedly about r&b and focus on the weeknd.

― lex pretend, Thursday, March 24, 2011 6:11 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

well idk i guess it depends on what you find interesting?

if you find r&b interesting exclusively when it's not being r&b, gtfo basically

well i would generally agree w/ you but i'm not really sure who you're talking about

i think the weeknd are too r&b to appeal to someone who outright hates/ignore the genre -- again, they're a far cry from how to dress well or gayngs

btw i'm actually listening to the whole weeknd thing now for this piece - the sacrifices i make - the songwriting is pretty much non-existent, it really is like a particularly boring version of that trey songz mixtape

if you find r&b interesting exclusively when it's not being r&b, gtfo basically
― lex pretend, Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:20 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is like coming into my house, shitting on my rug and telling me to leave

wish instead of wasting time tryna HAVE OPINIONS abt worthless chillwave or other cool music u dudes wld just stick to posting abt taylor swift all day

i'm glad i'm in a profession that is never the subject of ILX threads

lemme just say that i am not into every band trying to mix indie w/r'n'b.

Raw Moans
Maybe the only band on this list who’d admit to listening to R. Kelly… The San Diego duo of Laotian American fashion reconstructor Joseph Vorachack (who also records with Top Girls and Party Trash as Skylines) and Jeff Graves use the Oakland Raiders’ logo as their own and manage a kind of dark humor in even the bleaker edges of their R&B-meets-goth-industrial pop soundscapes. Raw Moans isn’t dark in the sense of some of the other folks — it’s late night and insular and lonesome, even when it isn’t. Disaro released the double CD-R We Want It Beautiful Not Real and RW RMX at the end of 2010.
http://rawmoans.bandcamp.com/album/rw-rmx

^ this is worth hating on for all the reasons upthread.

Raw Moans isn’t dark in the sense of some of the other folks — it’s late night and insular and lonesome, even when it isn’t.

so it's dark then

yeah see weeknd gets play cause its better than 100 raw moans doing the same thing but shitter, not because its doing diddy/r. kelley r&b but indie

i think lex has a point but the thing he should realize is that 'middle stances' being privileged over original styles isn't something that just happens to rap or r&b in the pitchfork universe -- it also happens to traditional indie music that ppl we would call squares like

I dunno, I think that the discourse is divided pretty evenly between people who will check for Male Bonding and The National and the like and people who will dismiss out of hand on the grounds of absence of innovation.

But try and imagine P&J, say, getting behind Trey Songz to the extent it gets behind The National.

Obv R&B isn't a special victim in this regard, but it's a prominent example: it's almost impossible for most critics to valorise the-dream without setting him up as some kind of internal exception to the genre-rule (and to be fair he kind of invites such a response). I think there is much more widespread (though certainly not unanimous) critical support for the idea of "good honest (indie) rock" than for "good honest R&B".

I still don't understand why we equate "privileged by critics" with "privileged"

The same way Beltway reporters confuse "us" with "them."

I still don't understand why we equate "privileged by critics" with "privileged

only insofar as we're talking about critical discourse.

In the same way that complaints that hollywood privileges "happy endings" aren't conclusively answered by pointing to the fact that hollywood is not representative of reality.

Yes, but I think it tends to be based on a very tautological definition of "critical discourse." For instance, one in which anyone talking about the Weeknd is part of "critical discourse," and the people already talking about Trey Songz are not. Or a video debuted on Pitchfork constitutes hype in "critical circles," whereas a video debuted on B.E.T. does not. In which case ... of course critics tend to privilege the things critics privilege.

Mostly I just want to be be clear that by "middle spaces" I wasn't talking about genre cross-pollination, or even really audience cross-pollination. That just wraps things even further in a critical discourse, and my point is that critical discourse is surely not the reason someone might respond to, say Weeknd! The reason the group might appeal to someone from one audience is the same reason it might not appeal to someone from another -- it's making specific decisions, about things like mixing and arrangement and self-presentation, that are inviting to some sensibilities and not others. To me, this isn't just about genre; it winds up staking out an actual mood and emotion effect that cannot just be substituted with any random other piece of r&b. This does not make it better or more important, but it certainly keeps me from being weirded out that some arty/indie-leaning listeners might be more interested in Weeknd than in Trey Songz, or that people who write about music for that audience might cover them.

I mean basically ... maybe this is an admission that I should not be writing about music at all, but hey, audiences are looking for different things -- I care about why, but I've ceased to understand kicking against the fact of it, I guess?

Well I'm not really kicking against the fact of it either, or surprised that some audiences might prefer Weeknd over Trey Songz, or saying that they're wrong to do so, I'm just saying none of this happens in some ideologicaly pure zone of "pure music".

People's enjoyment of stuff tends to follow established, carved-out water courses, is all, and of course this is as true for lex enjoying R&B as it is for p4k-reading-strawman enjoying indie.

To me, this isn't just about genre; it winds up staking out an actual mood and emotion effect that cannot just be substituted with any random other piece of r&b.

Strictly speaking no music is really substitable for another. I could just as easily argue that Trey Songz and Teedra Moses are not commensurate or exchangeable with one another. It's not so much Weeknd's "point of difference" that is being fantasised into existence here, but the very distinctiveness of this point of difference relative to a perceived undifferentiated morass of "genre".

People perceive difference in part because they're encouraged to do so, and fail to perceive it elsewhere because it's not drawn to their attention.

^^^yeah this is what im saying nabsico, like, i dont see nearly as much variation w/ this act as proponents of the artists do from the R&B mean

tim, people will especially notice points of distinction -- even minor ones -- if those distinctions address particular needs they have, resolve conflicts they have, and so on. in this case, it's not that Weeknd are uniquely different from other r&b! it's that the particular ways they're different do something of value for some narrow pocket of listeners.

some narrow pocket of listeners who happen to wield influence!

tim, people will especially notice points of distinction -- even minor ones -- if those distinctions address particular needs they have, resolve conflicts they have, and so on. in this case, it's not that Weeknd are uniquely different from other r&b! it's that the particular ways they're different do something of value for some narrow pocket of listeners.

Yes but this kind of implies that needs spring forth fully formed and pre-exist the music that addresses them and the discourse around that music.

Whereas music, like any product, like any art, mostly manufactures the needs it addresses. It's very rare that we perceive some musical absence until it is filled: the impression of absence is retrospective.

For the sake of clarity I'm not here to bitch about the Weeknd. What I'm saying would be no less true (just true in a different way) if the p4k-strawman-listener actually checked for Trey Songz instead.

xp -- Or maybe here's an analogy. There is abundant variation among dog breeds. They vary on all sorts of levels. A basenji does not differ from "most dogs" any more than countless other breeds. But if your particular relationship with dogs is that you just hate the sound of barking, then the barkless basenji is going to be unique to you in an incredibly specific way. So I guess I'm just trying to flip the question around from "what are Weeknd doing that's so special" to "what needs do certain listeners have that Weeknd might turn out to scratch?" (I haven't listened quite enough to be sure -- for all I know, it might just be about mixing r&b in a way that hits the ears like an indie album, rather than a super-compressed radio r&b single.)

xp -- Tim, I'd agree with that, sure: the needs, inclinations, and sensibilities we're talking about are totally learned and built. Though I think lots of them are just built around some previous need...

this argument is just "people have different tastes, whaddya gonna do about it", right? i mean fair enough i guess but it feels like completely giving up if you can't argue why something sucks or is amazing - and in any case it doesn't answer my beef w/the disproportionate coverage.

So I guess I'm just trying to flip the question around from "what are Weeknd doing that's so special" to "what needs do certain listeners have that Weeknd might turn out to scratch?" (I haven't listened quite enough to be sure -- for all I know, it might just be about mixing r&b in a way that hits the ears like an indie album, rather than a super-compressed radio r&b single.)

Yes this makes sense to me.

I just think it's important to stress that the needs in this case are public more than private, at least in the way they're articulated. I don't believe people tend to think to themselves "yes I love this and the reason I love this is that it answers a need I have for music that mixes R&B and indie" solely in the privacy of their own heads. That notion of need both precedes their experience of the music, assuming they've read anything about the music before it, and then retroactively structures their enjoyment as expressed to other people, in person or on ILM or on a blog or in a review or whatever. It's a public idea that renders a private experience communicable.

Connected to the fact the needs are learnt and built is the fact that needs are also justifications for conduct (though this definitely doesn't make them either bad or untrue) - I drink three beers each night and when asked why I say it's to unwind from this work, and I think this is simultaenously true and also a handy way to lend some kind of publicly legitimate cause-and-effect coherence to my behaviour.

And when we realise this is the case, the distance between the lines of enquiry: "what makes this so special" and "what needs does it fulfil" disappears, because the apparent filling-of-needs and the public-basis-of-specialness are one and the same.

maybe this is because it's 1.30am here but i honestly have no idea what that last sentence means tim.

It's kinda funny that someone compared these guys to trip-hop upthread cos Marsha Ambrosius covers Portishead on her album. Not that it means anything.

yeah the portishead cover is kind of pointlessly faithful

aaah I was wondering where I had heard that before

maybe this is because it's 1.30am here but i honestly have no idea what that last sentence means tim.

I interpret nabisco's position as being "what is worth thinking about with the Weeknd is not why they are special in general, but why they are important or interesting to particular listeners and what needs they are fulfilling for those listeners."

IMO this isn't really a dichotomy, because what particular listeners want and need is already shaped and formed by their interaction with public discourse.

i.e. radical subjectivism is bogus and lends too much mystical authority to "this is just the way I feel".

fwiw cuz im not sure this is always clear w/ these comparisons i brought up the trey songz comparison bcuz a few tracks on the last album & much of the anticipation mixtape are both fairly unusual considering his reputation as an artist & imo covers very similar 'vibes' to what this is aiming for, but does it more successfully.

and at some point i do kind of think that what this does for listeners that other 'regular R&B' artists dont becomes, well, it does what they dont, and that at some level its simply reactive.

see i'm more interested in what leads some people to download The Weeknd's songs or album and get excited about it when that connection doesn't occur for most other new R&B records outside of maybe The-Dream -- it seems like a matter of being only receptive to that music when it comes from certain avenues more than there being something that distinct and unusual about the music itself.

in my case, it was cuz jaxon recommended it!

yes but you check for r&b outside of the weekend, so that doesn't really count

i don't i don't nec wanna be the strawman for 'indie' 'blog reader' who only listens to something if it's weird. but i might as well accept parts of it even though i dislike indie rock and i don't read blogs.

― jaxon, Thursday, March 24, 2011 3:24 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

2 of your first 3 posts on this thread were links to blogs, i'm sorry if that led me to make scandalous assumptions about your web browsing habits.

yes but you check for r&b outside of the weekend, so that doesn't really count

― wavy g. wavegarten (J0rdan S.), Friday, March 25, 2011 2:42 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha yeah i know i wasnt really 'making a pt related to the argument' more just saying why i bothered

see i'm more interested in what leads some people to download The Weeknd's songs or album and get excited about it when that connection doesn't occur for most other new R&B records outside of maybe The-Dream -- it seems like a matter of being only receptive to that music when it comes from certain avenues more than there being something that distinct and unusual about the music itself.

― some dude, Thursday, March 24, 2011 4:37 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

srs dont get why you guys have wasted 300 posts itt trying to figure out how The Weeknd is different from "other R&B" i dunno maybe fuckin listen to it it sounds way different

my "avenue" for downloading the weeknd's songs: i heard "the morning" on a youtube link a friend sent me and i really liked it so i listened to the other stuff. when the mixtape dropped this week i downloaded it. NO BLOGS WERE INVOLVED.

also i own a basenji mix:
http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/29441_1488590575961_1269860854_1354382_3862676_n.jpg
since she's not 100% basenji, she can bark but rarely does

VERY pertinent

2 of your first 3 posts on this thread were links to blogs, i'm sorry if that led me to make scandalous assumptions about your web browsing habits.
― some dude, Friday, March 25, 2011 2:48 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Ha. I'd never been to those blogs in my life before. I can't remember where I first heard "what you need", but it made a serious impact and I couldn't find anything else about them on the internet at the time (prob also because I spelled their name wrong). I just posted those links so people could hear the tracks. I was honestly surprised that this thread got so few responses at the time. I sent it to a few friends over IM and still not much. I actually figured deej wasn't feeling it because he didn't really say anything over IM, but I didn't really think that much of it. Tastes are tastes and just because someone doesn't completely agree w me, I'm not gonna change my opinions. But seriously, I'm kind of lolling at all the crazy reactions this thread is getting now that there's argument involved. Now that blogs and pitchfork or whoever is talking about. It's been like a month or something and people are already sick of critics talking about these guys. You guys are kinda silly btw. Just enjoy life, don't worry what critics are saying, what it means to the grand scope of things, smoke a doob, make out w your chick or dude and fucking chilllllll.

remembering that night/septembers coming soon/im pining for the moon

can i just:

btw i'm actually listening to the whole weeknd thing now for this piece - the sacrifices i make - the songwriting is pretty much non-existent, it really is like a particularly boring version of that trey songz mixtape

― lex pretend, Thursday, March 24, 2011 12:23 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

thank you lex for making this sacrifice

Just enjoy life, don't worry what critics are saying, what it means to the grand scope of things, smoke a doob, make out w your chick or dude and fucking chilllllll.

― jaxon, Friday, March 25, 2011 2:03 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol you're posting on a message board started by belle & sebastian fans and populated by music critics

haha for a bunch of p self-aware message board posters some of u guys are getting pretty het up about "blogs"

the weeknd, exciting new blog&b band

i would kind of like an instrumental version of this album

maybe one of you guys who reads a ton of blogs (jaxon?) can let me know if one exists

max at the end of the year can you make a top 10 list of albums you would like if there was no singer

^^^ seconded, also could you post it on your blog

i can make that list right now

• all the albums

make a list of threads that would be better without music critics talking about The State of Music Criticism

some of us like talking abt thinking abt music n stuff sorry

*takes photo in front of plant in kitchen while wearing sunglasses, posts to flickr*

being cranky abt music that u dont like is fun imo sorry we brough bad vibes

oh sorry, didn't realize you guys were having fun.

well yeah man, laugh all u want but i do enjoy thinking thru why i like/dont like things critically & discussing that stuff here

im not sure who u think is being aggy here anyway.

yeah most people in this thread apart from lex aren't really frothing.

"what is worth thinking about with the Weeknd is not why they are special in general, but why they are important or interesting to particular listeners and what needs they are fulfilling for those listeners."

why is what indie listeners think always considered so important? what other demographic gets this attention paid to it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/24/weeknd-rb-indie

if i hadn't pitched one, would i be seeing any columns at all about any other r&b release of 2011 so far?

why is what indie listeners think always considered so important? what other demographic gets this attention paid to it?

― lex pretend, Friday, March 25, 2011 5:22 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is the real question right - why is the majority of music criticism focused on indie music. if I were spitballing I would suggest it's probably something to do with the current state of music criticism being derived from a tradition of rock-focused criticism that grew out of the rock explosion in the 60s. but I don't know anything about the history of music criticism, so.

nitsuh's latest column re: this - http://pitchfork.com/features/why-we-fight/7948-why-we-fight-12/

idk indie as a whole has a large history of engaging w/ itself in a paratextual way that easily puts it into conversations w/ rock crit. i kindof hinted upthread that hwtd kindof does this connect the dots thing where it finds something similar in the synth washes on Fancy as in the gurgling drones of Live Loop. I kindof think this is what makes indie ideal for conversation w/ rock journalism and kindof closes the loop somewhat to the exclusion of other genres. also bc everyone is out to get lex.

There's an argument that criticism is the lifeblood of indie music, it NEEDS it in a way that r&b, which is a global pop phenomenon, doesn't, but that only really suits the artists who are right at the top of the pyramid and as a result the others tend to disappear withotu trace.

But do what extent do those artists further down actually court the press? It reminds me a bit of the pub argument I had about Night Slugs and Hyperdub getting the lion's share of the dance press through promotion, design, branding, where yr average funky producers get virtually none despite making music that's as good if not better.

The point I'm slowly burrowing towards is that it's not enough just to blame the critics, although many of them are certainly lazy and don't listen to or review things they aren't spoonfed. It's a question of whether the promotional infrastructure is adequate enough in other genres or whether it is failing its artists.

not sure pointing out how indie everything is is the solution to stopping people talking about what indie listeners think.

But do what extent do those artists further down actually court the press? It reminds me a bit of the pub argument I had about Night Slugs and Hyperdub getting the lion's share of the dance press through promotion, design, branding, where yr average funky producers get virtually none despite making music that's as good if not better.

not sure about this, am sure e.g. Donae'O would've done as much press as he could whereas Hyperdub is surely supposed to have some mystique and their stuff isn't likely to appeal to popular clubs in the way much funky would. it is really down to the whims and characteristics of the critics available, and their willingness to intellectualise (write about) dance music that ISN'T thought of as edgy or in any way alt which the two labels you mention do evoke by name alone.

Hah, you're skirting around the point that Hyperdub gets press because it cleaves to an indier sensibility. Artiness, mystique, ease of intellectualisation. Same with Warp in the 90s.

... and Hyperdub's promotional people know how to court that, obviously.

i feel like i'd get my point across better itt if i went full carles and talked about how R&B is 'so hot right now' but only if it has some 'altbro-friendly branding'

i swear to god, people, part of the reason you think the world is dominated by "indie" criticism is because that's all you're reading or considering "criticism." in the US there remain magazines, websites, columns, and reams of daily newspaper coverage of things like mainstream r&b, but for some reason people rarely conceive of them as part of "critical discourse" or real "critical opinion" -- they privilege indie and then ask why indie is so privileged.

the other part is that "indie" stuff -- and many other niches -- developed a purpose to criticism (and grew a community around it) in times when that was the only way it could communicate and exist; it organized along those lines in a way things that functioned as pop didn't. it seems to me that deep critical communities of fandom -- constituencies that are actually organized that way -- are starting to develop for pop and r&b, even if you don't count the massive chunks of twitter and facebook and people's actual lives that ALREADY do that but aren't considered "criticism" because they're not indie enough to be bitched about.

also gr80 otm with this

oh ok, we're the snobs because we don't consider fan updates on social networking sites to be criticism. got it.

although honestly it might not be a bad idea to submit a collection of #teambreezy tweets to the next da capo

yeah i mean, criticism is central to indie but indie isnt central to crit! just because R&B / etc genre crit isnt as fleshed out as indie doesnt mean that those of us who care abt good critical writing of the form should have to do so on indies terms. or am i misunderstanding

if you think daily newspapers, Vibe columns, and black music journalists are on the level of facebook status updates, then yes, that's pretty snobby

i think that many times those ppl privilege a lot of indie / 'crit music' more than they should

i mean im not sure that what we're critiquing here is, like, 'people who write about indie primarily & also like R&B for the moment' but a wider structural understanding of genre that privileges certain stuff, a way of thinking that impacts jay-z and kanye as much as a dude who regularly reads pfork

Not to mention that there's as vibrant a pop-music blogosphere as there is an indie one - something I didn't fully appreciate until I met friends of friends who get as much free music, early leaks, tickets and press access to Kylie/Kelis//whoever for running pop blogs. They can be as frothing-at-the-mouth fanboyish as the indie blogosphere, but they're as much criticism as Stereogum or Gorilla vs Bear or whatever. (i.e. not full length fleshed out genre crit, but the universe exists, you know?)

yes but what were talking about IS full length genre crit, not internet enthusiasm

Well, to be fair, a significant chunk about this conversation started because The Weeknd "appeals to people who read blogs" or whatever the quote was. I just meant that I think that rap blogs/r&b blogs/VIBE/etc. perhaps interact with each other in similar ways that Stereogum/GvB/P4K/etc. do? The existence of somewhat discrete spheres of music appreciation ranging from internet enthusiasm to full length genre crit doesn't necessarily create a hierarchy, except insofar as the majority of people writing HERE perhaps fall into social and professional circles closer to one of those spheres than the other? Or that something about the organizational structure/visibility/discourse within or surrounding each of those spheres seems to imply a hierarchy?

Congestion + cold meds + lack of sleep apparently causes me to end sentences in question marks. Apologies. That paragraph should be more assertive.

uh i mean the mist commercially successful AND most blogged abt star of last year was lady gaga but yr arguments are getting closer and closer to "why doesnt the blogosphere have exactly the same taste as me?"

well blog/crit types have their "OUR pop star who should be as huge as Gaga" in Robyn etc. a star as big as Gaga being as hotly discussed in those circles as their web-friendly niche artist equivalent is a rare phenomenon.

I feel like we're inverting or extrapolating one or two arguments or questions (which I might phrase as "why does an R&B act like The Weeknd so quickly gain the kind of critical acceptance similar mainstream acts rarely if ever receive?" and "do generalist critics need non-rock music to code as 'weird' or 'exceptional' to make time for it?") into a whole bunch of other tangents that I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere with (like "why is music crit so dominated by indie in the first place?" and "why does white people never want to R&B?").

if this was being discussed w/ a cadre of vibe writers right now id likely be dealing w arguments that arent too different from this one. its not like the heirarchy of R&B writers is somehow more self-aware of the interactions of these kinds of values than indie writers are

i mean, im sure at some level they are, but its a matter of degree rather than an oppositional relationship

if you don't count the massive chunks of twitter and facebook and people's actual lives that ALREADY do that but aren't considered "criticism" because they're not indie enough to be bitched about.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, March 25, 2011 12:47 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh ok, we're the snobs because we don't consider fan updates on social networking sites to be criticism. got it.

― NO BLOGS WERE INVOLVED. (some dude), Friday, March 25, 2011 12:51 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

if you think daily newspapers, Vibe columns, and black music journalists are on the level of facebook status updates, then yes, that's pretty snobby

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, March 25, 2011 1:06 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

this isn't even goalpost-shifting, btw, it's a straight up shell game.

i realize im being, like, an R&B nationalist here vs. an accomodationist but at the upper reaches of music criticism it does feel like there is a conglomeration of values that serve to disadvantage certain aesthetic choices, and that those aesthetic maneuvers just happen to be ones that have certain social bases

I guess some people just don't want those entrenched values and aesthetics in the critical community questioned because it's SO BORING AND META or because we already fought the war on Rockism and didn't you hear Rockism lost so we're all good now.

i swear to god, people, part of the reason you think the world is dominated by "indie" criticism is because that's all you're reading or considering "criticism." in the US there remain magazines, websites, columns, and reams of daily newspaper coverage of things like mainstream r&b, but for some reason people rarely conceive of them as part of "critical discourse" or real "critical opinion" -- they privilege indie and then ask why indie is so privileged.

no ppl like the lex & tim f & deej or on some 'liberal media bias' shit & p4k is their nyt. the whole 'indie dominates the critical discourse & marginalizes pop/rnb/rap/dance/country/polka' myth is so foundational to their worldview theyll go to an length to justify it, ignore any media that doesnt confirm it, and rationalize any critical postion that legitimizes it

ohh the #1 artist on pazz & jop is a rapper but not the right rapper. oh some local alt weekly has a column abt a new r&b groups mixtape but it has too many indie signifiers. oh the times magazine has a profile of dance-pop megastar but it mentions memory tapes blah blah blah

(i just realized that w/ the comparisons to black nationalism or something this could be read in a way i didnt mean -- some kind of racial essentialism of music or something like that -- but i trust that u guys know i obv dont believe indie is a 'white thing' or something like that, that this is way more complicated etc)

no ppl like the lex & tim f & deej or on some 'liberal media bias' shit & p4k is their nyt. the whole 'indie dominates the critical discourse & marginalizes pop/rnb/rap/dance/country/polka' myth is so foundational to their worldview theyll go to an length to justify it, ignore any media that doesnt confirm it, and rationalize any critical postion that legitimizes it

ohh the #1 artist on pazz & jop is a rapper but not the right rapper. oh some local alt weekly has a column abt a new r&b groups mixtape but it has too many indie signifiers. oh the times magazine has a profile of dance-pop megastar but it mentions memory tapes blah blah blah

― i always think about you (Lamp), Friday, March 25, 2011 5:57 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its not like there isnt historical precedent for this **burns disco records**

what's the correct position to take instead, Lamp? all rap is the same and all R&B is the same, critics who backed Arrested Development over all other early '90s rap are cool because hey at least they had the genre covered at all?

like, if it's not about being able to perceive and discuss the nuances of the music, the marketing of it and how it's received by the public, if it's all just about broad strokes and general categories as far as you're concerned, then yeah I could see how you think we're calling for genre affirmative action or something stupid like that.

whatever it is it isnt this:

i realize im being, like, an R&B nationalist here vs. an accomodationist but at the upper reaches of music criticism it does feel like there is a conglomeration of values that serve to disadvantage certain aesthetic choices, and that those aesthetic maneuvers just happen to be ones that have certain social bases

you might not like what im doing rhetorically but my overall point is right man.

Yeah I mean clearly if you're an R&B singer then being seen in the papers turning up to parties regularly and looking cool is WAY more important than a good Pitchfork review when it comes to selling records, but it doesn't really help the music being taken seriously in the kind of level playing field way the Lex is gunning for.

Actually, if you're an R&B singer, it's not the Arcade Fire you should be aiming for a level playing field with, it's Lady Gaga.

the lets smoke a doob & make out w/ your girl isnt a non-position any more than 'political moderation' is -- if you dont want to engage in discussion abt this artist thats fine but this 'you guys are tooooo anxious' thing is goofy.

Yeah I mean clearly if you're an R&B singer then being seen in the papers turning up to parties regularly and looking cool is WAY more important than a good Pitchfork review when it comes to selling records, but it doesn't really help the music being taken seriously in the kind of level playing field way the Lex is gunning for.

― Matt DC, Friday, March 25, 2011 2:22 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

but does "this artist doesn't care as much about good reviews or rely on them to reach their audience" then mean that their music is less deserving or in need of good or thoughtful criticism? there's a fine line between pointing out the status quo and how we got there, and endorsing it as the way things simply are and might as well stay.

of course people who aren't fans of r&b are also not anxious about the critical reception of it!

i think i need to defend my point in that post grady quoted better bcuz it may have been a clumsy parallel. What im arguing is that critics should at the very least ACKNOWLEDGE an existing value system outside of indie's and take the perspectives into account as equally legitimate. That currently, artists like this are set up against entire genres whose histories are marginalized. its like celebrating "Rapture" -- its a cool song, deserves to be celebrated, brought scenes together. but in the end, in the annals of rap history, its really not the greatest example of the genre

i think there are constellations of 'values' that link artists & scenes & ideas & 'taste' together and i can see the value in trying to map those constellations, to unravelling the complex interplay btw social forces that help bind those constellations together, give them shape and force. i mean its interesting to look at the aesthetic & social throughlines that connect the weeknd not just to 'indie' but to like type records ambient records or contemp photography or movements in modern design &c &c &c. and then to find how these connections in turn shape the audience for this music, how it helps determine who & how the music is heard

or i guess put another way: im deeply interested in the sort of 'emotional connection' that music seeks to make w/ a listener. its p much the only thing i post abt srsly on ilm. & often critics on ilm seem interested in talking abt the connections that exist btw music & other music or larger social trends or w/e. both of these are interesting but sometimes i feel like you guys ignore the basic f(n) of music to play this why x and not y game.

ughhh this is too long but: 10 ppl right abt the weeknd. 100 ppl write abt chris brown. if you only focus on the 10 ppl who care abt the weeknd is indie really dominating the critical discourse? or are you the ones 'privileging' a certain kind of discourse?

(and personally i cringe at the idea that anything on this is 'rapture' level)

obviously there will always be some musicians that have a Serious Artist or Brilliant Eccentric image, and others that have a Fun-Loving Entertainer or Careerist Hack image, and obviously that's always going to lead audiences to treat their music with different levels of respect or consideration. that doesn't mean that their images always correlate to the quality or content of their music, or that critics shouldn't try to dig deeper and figure out if hey maybe there's something more interesting going on in the music than those surface level categorizations make you believe.

should i read this thread

you guys can go ahead and have your meta-discussion on the state of music crit but its total bullshit to pretend that The Weeknd is in the same category MUSICALLY as Diddy or Marsha Ambrosius or even a "sparse, dark & moody Trey Songz mixtape"

obv there is a crossover but it sounds totally fuckin different than that stuff so different people are writing about it and different people are listening to it

xpost YES

it really doesn't sound that different from trey songz' recent slow jams

i mean the songs are worse and the voice is worse and the lyrics are worse but yeah

it is insane that someone pays you to write about music

its like celebrating "Rapture" -- its a cool song, deserves to be celebrated, brought scenes together. but in the end, in the annals of rap history, its really not the greatest example of the genre

Except no one, not even the most rockcentric of critics, thinks of 'Rapture' as rap, especially after 20+ years of pop songs with a rap in the middle of them.

gr8080 what do u think of the tom ewing article linked upthread

smarter people than you think otherwise

xp

Except no one, not even the most rockcentric of critics, thinks of 'Rapture' as rap, especially after 20+ years of pop songs with a rap in the middle of them.

― Matt DC, Friday, March 25, 2011 6:43 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and we'll see how time treats the weeknd as well

its total bullshit to pretend that The Weeknd is in the same category MUSICALLY as Diddy or Marsha Ambrosius or even a "sparse, dark & moody Trey Songz mixtape"

i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd but afaict it's not any more different from those 3 other things than those 3 things are from each other. but it's definitely unfortunate and counterproductive to this discussion that that totally random assemblage of recent records has become this thread's shorthand for all contemporary R&B.

i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd i haven't heard a lot of The Weeknd

The Weeknd is TRIP-HOP this has already been covered.

should i read this thread

bro - & i cant really imagine myself ever saying this again - this thread needs you

afaict it's not any more different from those 3 other things than those 3 things are from each other.

this is true. and - o my life o my sacrifice - i have heard everything that the weeknd have made, it was almost as unenjoyable as that week i had to listen to the jessie j album on loop

i listened to the song this thread is named after. i don't think i've said really anything itt that suggests otherwise or that i wouldn't have a right saying without listening to their entire album.

some dude, that "shell game" post seems like the point where this thread is becoming too dicky to even post in -- I'd already said "magazines, websites, columns, and reams of daily newspaper coverage" before I even mentioned social media

ok but this thread has taken off since they dropped a full album/tape this week fyi

xpost

i'm sorry if that wasn't sufficiently clear

sorry for thinking its really weird that you would call foul or at least stroke yr chin about the way an album you havent listened to was getting covered

tbf hes arguing abt abstract 'issues' here not the specific characteristics of this record

What's weird is that when white Britishes dudes from the Stones onwards appropriate black American or Jamaican music for an indie audience there's usually an understanding or a celebration of their limitations and a fun point of differentiation, with some self-clowning thrown in for good measure, which is why Toddla T - a pasty white guy from Sheffield, can release a dancehall album without anyone batting an eyelid.

holy crap @ this thread

what's the correct position to take instead, Lamp? all rap is the same and all R&B is the same, critics who backed Arrested Development over all other early '90s rap are cool because hey at least they had the genre covered at all?

trying to form a slightly more coherent take on this qn - at this moment in history when music is so readily accesible to anyone w/ an internet connection its worth thinking abt music as much fitting into 'emotional' or 'functional' constellations as traditional sonic/cultural ones. & so instead of always using genre as a starting (& end) point in these discussions its worth acknowledging the emotional content of the music & how big a part that plays in how its received

does that even make sense?

i do think that indie music is privileged in mainstream discourse nowadays & i think you can see that laid out in something like the pazz & jop results of the past two years when compared to the pazz & jop results from 5 years earlier -- that said i'm not totally on the side w/ lex going 'oooh lord robert please make pitchfork pay attention to kandi' because whatever, i mean really

Pazz and Jop is not "mainstream discourse".

lamp u realize that i started writing about rap/R&B because it felt like most critics i read -- aside from, like, kelefa sannah & some of the bigger nyt/nyer names -- didnt do that w/ those genres? its kind of funny to me this feels like a weird inverse of whats going on really

hey guys, i'm peacing. someone lemme know if these guys put out more music or something

its total bullshit to pretend that The Weeknd is in the same category MUSICALLY as Diddy or Marsha Ambrosius or even a "sparse, dark & moody Trey Songz mixtape"

yeah by the way the album totally is

Pazz and Jop is not "mainstream discourse".

― Matt DC, Friday, March 25, 2011 7:02 PM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is it 'indie discourse'?

Pazz and Jop is not "mainstream discourse".

― Matt DC, Friday, March 25, 2011 3:02 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark

well maybe it's not "discourse" in and of itself but it does represent 'mainstream discourse'

Mainstream discourse = what you see on TV, what people talk about in the bus queue, what they dance to in town centre/High Street nightclubs, what you hear piped through in average chain stores, in non-music magazines and newspapers. There might be more indie in there than there was pre-Pitchfork in the US, and pre-Britpop in the UK, but a poll of music writers doesn't represent mainstream discourse even if it might overlap with it.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/03/rock-critic_pop_5.php

(btw, just to be SUPER-CLEAR about what I meant about newspapers: I don't understand why, for instance, a review Sean Fennessey writes for Pitchfork constitutes core "critical discourse," but a review the same Sean Fennessey writes for the Washington Post -- of Trey Songz, Mike Posner, Kelis, Usher, etc. -- is assumed not to. I don't get why a Caramanica or Frere-Jones thinkpiece that touches on indie constitutes "real criticism" but the stuff they write about other kinds of music just ... drifts away. The main explanation I can see is that there are more people interested in reading one than the other -- and while this might suck for some folks, market-wise, I don't see what's so terrible about the market for people who like reading critical articles about music having different sensibilities from the people who like watching TV about music, listening to satellite radio shows about music, watching documentaries about music, etc. etc. etc. Will step out of this one now.)

"magnificent think piece"

c'mon whiney you can't even think that, it was absolutely dreadful

fine, maybe i should say 'mainstream critical discourse' -- i assumed that's what we were talking about

that piece was basically "here is some "r&b" that's important cuz it has indie signifiers, and commercial r&b doesn't sell as well as it used to so i'm dismissing it"

yeah by the way the album totally is

i dunno it's closer to burial & james blake imo

nabisco i guess my motivating factor (& i hope u dont step out, i dunno why ppl think this thread is bad vibes but i think some of the discussion has been good??) in saying this stuff is that theres an element of self fulfilling prophecy to what youre saying -- maybe more of these non-indie fans would be more likely to read criticism if there was more criticism that was written for them

i dunno it's closer to burial & james blake imo

― gr8080, Friday, March 25, 2011 3:11 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark

nooooooooooooo

like, the weeknd is definitely more burial & james blake than dirty money & the-dream & drake & trey songz are burial and james blake but the weeknd is certainly more dirty money & the-dream & drake & trey songz than it is burial and james blake

Actually what it sounds like is a very rudimentary post-1998 Massive Attack if they decided to rope in some Terius clone on vocals. It's not actually new in the slightest, there are probably a load of mashups that approximate the same sound.

that piece was basically "here is some "r&b" that's important cuz it has indie signifiers, and commercial r&b doesn't sell as well as it used to so i'm dismissing it"

― lex pretend, Friday, March 25, 2011 7:10 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

you do realise sean fennessy writes abt r&b quite a bit right

like, he doesnt dismiss it

yeah that wasn't fair at all

i mean i thought the piece was hyperbolic in some bad places but that's just the guy writes about a ton of commercial r&b

some dude, that "shell game" post seems like the point where this thread is becoming too dicky to even post in -- I'd already said "magazines, websites, columns, and reams of daily newspaper coverage" before I even mentioned social media

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, March 25, 2011 2:50 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm sorry if that wasn't sufficiently clear

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, March 25, 2011 2:51 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but my response only addressed the social media part, and I thought specifically mentioning those things would be understood that way, so the way you interpreted my post as equating that to the other things I hadn't talked about felt a little manipulative to me. if it was all a big misunderstanding then i'm sorry for being dicky.

also I read lots of music writing in daily papers like the Wash Post and occasionally write some (I interviewed Trey Songz for the Balt Sun!), and I don't feel like anything I've said has ignored the existence of those kinds of outlets.

deej mentions "criticism written for fans of r&b and rap" but one thing i'm interested in is whether the rap & r&b world's fascination with "haters" (by both artists and fans) has stifled that type of criticism at all

the "#teambreezy" effect

true

likewise i wonder if the perception (or reality) that major labels nowadays value only what sells over what is 'good' has done the same for that type of criticism

like tons of ppl -- both fans and writers alike! -- wouldn't say "hey look this b.o.b album sucks balls", instead they'd say "hey it's not my thing but can't knock the hustle!" or whatever the hell

i dont think that someone writing about R&B or rap makes them immune to charges of not recognizing the type of biases we're discussing here fwiw

like, its completely fair to accuse someone of indie-centrism or other biases or blindspots, even if they were once music editor at vibe (nb im not saying this is the case w/ sean)

matos told me that fennessey's a former vibe editor - had never heard of him before this week - i assume he's just gotten old and past it, happens to so many

you dont need to be an 'indie writer' to hold values that negatively reinforce opposition to certain aesthetic qualities of some genres

i've definitely felt a subtle shift from a few years ago when i started writing about a lot of regional/urban music that doesn't typically get a lot of critical ink, where a lot of artists were (and to an extent still are) super grateful to get that kind of coverage, but now in the Twitter era there's a lot of emphasis on having "supporters" and "followers," and more artists seem totally disinterested or outright hostile to the idea of opening themselves up to criticism or any kind of feedback that isn't 100% cheerleading.

but once again, artists not chasing down critics or catering to them is not really a good reason not to cover them if their music is good and worth writing about.

lol lex -- i'm pretty sure you and fennessey are the same age

some people grow old before their time ;_;

hahaha

He also writes for the NY Times and Washington Post and tweets and blogs. Maybe his handling of this one item should not define him for you.

its pretty lol that you complain abt how little ppl write abt r&b and you've never heard abt this guy

The article in the Guardian references Toop's Sugar & Poison. The journalist needs to reevaluate this. The mood on that compilation is no where near Weeknd are aiming for. S&P is an exercise in indulgent, bitter-sweet, melancholic soul. Weeknd quite obviously play for a seedy, sexual but vulnerable mood. In my opinion there is a lot of rubbish being written about Weeknd. Who judges the music the like on the same scales? I've really enjoyed Weeknd's mixtape this week but they've(he's) yet to create something truly worthy.

trying to form a slightly more coherent take on this qn - at this moment in history when music is so readily accesible to anyone w/ an internet connection its worth thinking abt music as much fitting into 'emotional' or 'functional' constellations as traditional sonic/cultural ones. & so instead of always using genre as a starting (& end) point in these discussions its worth acknowledging the emotional content of the music & how big a part that plays in how its received

I think we all do this, including all the writers you complain about in this thread lamp. The only difference is that when people aren't into something much they tend to downplay the "emotional" content as they don't consider it very effective or compelling.

At any rate what I've been trying to say is that "emotional content" is cultural, and no more genre-neutral than sonic content. Just as people get primed to connect with certain kinds of sonic tricks (both by listening to music and reading about it / discussing it) they get primed to connect with certain emotional tricks as well.

Personally I haven't really had a position on Weeknd in this thread, or even the media's treatment of R&B really, I'm just a bit suspicious of any arguments premised on some vague dichotomy between thinking and feeling.

please tell me you've at least listened to them

question for you guys re: avenues to discovering the weeknd:

a friend of mine said she found out about the weeknd when it came up on a pandora station she had programmed to play artists like:

• radio dept
• kings of leon
• erykah badu
• adele
• phoenix

payolandora?

best bit on the thread so far is lex not knowing who my beautiful dark twisted fennessey is

thats "hurricane" fennessey to you

One time I used pandora to find some good 70s new age. It kept playing blaring droney crap that I 86'd until it basically went "fuck it" and started playing Jaheim and teedra Moses. turned out that was what I was looking for all along.

tim, i meant to note earlier that i definitely know what you're getting at on this thread. the only thing i feel a need to note is that the "priming" you're talking about is surely, for most people, an INCREDIBLY complicated interaction between stuff in the world (narratives about genre, media, social taste, etc.) and a lot MORE stuff about themselves (self-image, emotional desires, etc.) i worry when conversations seem to be overemphasizing the first part. but maybe that's not what's happening here.

I like this and don't feel conflicted about that.

wicked games one is pretty cool. that's the only youtube i could get to work.

"does this make me corny indie fuxor btw?"

dude, you are rarely corny. and you have better taste than most people. that's why i first clicked on this thread. not for no controversy! no lexoversy!

i dig some of the discussion though. and you are all lucky because i have very little to add.

i knew i smelled somthing burning in here. you guys were thinking and stuff! god bless you.

The background vocal sample on The Party and The After Party... where's that from? It's killing me.

it's Beach House.

hi scott seward you're my favorite kind of music critic

u mad

The background vocal sample on The Party and The After Party... where's that from? It's killing me.

― Popture, Friday, March 25, 2011 11:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's Beach House.

― gr8080, Friday, March 25, 2011 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

bet i'm gonna love this record huh

tim, i meant to note earlier that i definitely know what you're getting at on this thread. the only thing i feel a need to note is that the "priming" you're talking about is surely, for most people, an INCREDIBLY complicated interaction between stuff in the world (narratives about genre, media, social taste, etc.) and a lot MORE stuff about themselves (self-image, emotional desires, etc.) i worry when conversations seem to be overemphasizing the first part. but maybe that's not what's happening here.

yeah absolutely. I guess when we're talking about stuff in general it's easier to focus on the "stuff in the world" than the "stuff about [the listeners]" because (a) people's discussions about why they like things tend to emphasise the former anyway even if the latter is more important to them (for ease of communication as much as for any other reason) and because (b) the areas of overlap and are likely to be greater with the former.

Like, as much as saying "Weeknd-fans have this idea about R&B" is an unfair generalisation, I would have thought "Weeknd fans identify with this notion of the hollowness at the heart of hypersexualised modernity" (or insert other similar prevailing explanation for the emotional appeal of this music) to be far more of a generalisation.

Which is not to say that critics shouldn't indulge in this kind of thing, but I notice that people only have an issue with it when they're getting all defensive "these are not my thoughts get out of my brane!"

Tim what do you think about this album

dude, you are rarely corny >:-0

The background vocal sample on The Party and The After Party... where's that from? It's killing me.

― Popture, Friday, March 25, 2011 11:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's Beach House.

― gr8080, Saturday, March 26, 2011 1:51 PM (5 hours ago)

Oh thanks, It was thinking it sounded a bit like B BEAT GIRLS "FOR THE SAME MAN" Classic Version 1983 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rJp80ozJ4c) , but it's just that sounds a little like Beach House.

btw did anybody notice in one of the songs he goes "fun fun fun fun fun"

now I understand why everybody's lookin' forward to The Weeknd

weeknd warriors

I'm listening to anticipation right now, it's nice but I don't think it's directly comparable to the weeknd, yeah the production is stripped down and bare on some tracks, but the vocal arrangements are still very lush compared to the weeknd

Given most people who would be boosting Trey over the Weeknd probably would say that the latter's vocals are its weakest link, that ought not be so surprising.

I don't dislike Weeknd's vocals except for particular moments actually; I agree he sounds more like Jeremih than Trey.

I'm kinda loving that hollowed out, empty-eyed feeling of the opening bars on the morning

I briefly flirted w/ trey songz after cb broke my heart/rihannas face but i was put off by his luvvverman thing and it felt like it was for 30smthg professionals and that you should listen to it w/ a glass of wine and watch the city through your floor-ceiling windows. weeknd sound like you're watching the end of a party through smoke.

I'm kinda diggin lamp's appraisal of different emotional spaces upthread, and yeah emotional responses are enculturated, guess it appeals to my culture

you could dub a weeknd track of this vid and it'd be ~just right~

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

*over this vid

The Weeknd actually remind me a lot of my own obsession with a hidden history of isolationist/intergalactic R&B future-slow-jams, so I can't object to this dude too much because it's the kind of thing I might try to do if I was a musician. Anyway if I was gonna make an R&B-for-Weeknd-fans mixtape it'd be stuff like:

The-Dream - Abyss
Jeremih - The 5 Senses
Ashanti - Voodoo
Tweet - Drunk - ACTUALLY GRADY, MAX, PLAX ET AL LISTEN TO THIS!!!

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

fwiw the dude's voice wasn't what i had a particular problem w/ it was the songwriting & i guess vocal arrangements, sure -- to me those sound underwritten -- partly improvised but in a way that signifies to me anyway carelessness rather than craft

I dunno, the dude is going for a very specific feel w/ the arrangements in say, house of ballons/glass table girls - I don't think it bespeaks carelessness at all

that tweet track is amazing btw

that would be where I hear what lex & andy were talking about w/r/t it sounding 'forced' like this guy waltzes into a studio & thinks he can diy his way into a classic R&B record that gets a pass bcuz people will say like grady was that oh its not R&B at all -- it gets to be bad at these things because its made for burial fans

like most of the haters itt have been "trey songz did the same style but did it BETTER" but so far nobody's really offered up what metrics or continuum they are putting trey songz ahead of the weeknd on

real rnb

like most of the haters itt have been "trey songz did the same style but did it BETTER" but so far nobody's really offered up what metrics or continuum they are putting trey songz ahead of the weeknd on

― who is john nult? (dayo), Sunday, March 27, 2011 2:31 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i havent??

multiple xxxxpost I think this is always an issue with "outsider" takes on genre: in most cases people who follow the genre closely can actually point to a myriad of examples where the genre itself previously has produced stuff in the same vein, so they're more likely to see the point of difference as ~60% market positioning.

Of course no-one (except arguably Drake, and then fitfully) has made the above sound their raison d'etre, so it's also about giving that sound a certain conceptual unity, about stating that it's the goal rather than just something done on the way to doing a number of other things.

I imagine lots of hip hop listeners would have felt similarly about the critical rise of trip hop at the time: like, we do this kind of thing anyway, you're just not listening hard enough.

do you see your name in that post deej?

I think "Unfortunate" is more genuinely impressive surround-sound (the variety of vocal approaches are important) and also more moving, but it's a matter of degree for me rather than "this is great that is awful".

Maybe we should talk about "Shades" here also.

i might not be the best representative for the anti-side in this case though as my issue is more with the execution than the overall attempt. Like, im into that one jamie woon song, and i dug the way ariel pink did this kind of thing sometimes. its not an overall anti-indie bias, i was fairly surprised that i didnt like it when i first listened

'this kind of thing' being genre mixing generally, pink sounds nothing like this obv

Of course no-one (except arguably Drake, and then fitfully) has made the above sound their raison d'etre, so it's also about giving that sound a certain conceptual unity, about stating that it's the goal rather than just something done on the way to doing a number of other things.

― Tim F, Sunday, March 27, 2011 2:33 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i remember talking w/ noz about that song 'dominoes' by big pink that was year ended last year, and about how it was like a nas/jay-z hot line/hot song but with gucci instead. There's a bias here in that, theres a density of these kinds of ideas in a genre, and then someone focuses on one of them to give it 'conceptual unity' & its taken more seriously (still unclear on why Big Pink's groupie misogyny barely raised an eyebrow)

year ended at pfork

so what about the execution don't you like, deej