thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

There's something endearingly hilarious about a decade and a half of voracious listening and critical discussion on ILM culminating in devotion to polite pseudo-pop by white Northern women. xp!

For me I can’t shake the hang up I have believing every meticulous detail of major pop records is coldly orchestrated by a team of marketers. I work in CPG package design for corporate snack brands and 100% of the brand and product is crafted with the intent to appeal to the broadest demographic possible. Similarly, the pop star’s story or album context reads like the romance copy on a box of crackers to me, and the music is produced in such a way that it sounds like it is pitching to be used in a TV commercial. So there’s something soulless about it. Hopefully this doesn’t just sound like a repackaging of the tired “authenticity” complaint, it’s more like that feeling where an advertisement is trying to trick me or something. Idk.

(Me xp barging in being a chart bore): TS vs AM will be an interesting UK sales week. AM have sadly never not had a number one album but will this be their Robbie vs JLS moment!! (probably I'm thinking)

lol whoops just read this thread

yes imago, I was mocking CRJ by bringing her up in the other thread

give it a fucking rest

For me I can’t shake the hang up I have believing every meticulous detail of major pop records is coldly orchestrated by a team of marketers. I work in CPG package design for corporate snack brands and 100% of the brand and product is crafted with the intent to appeal to the broadest demographic possible. Similarly, the pop star’s story or album context reads like the romance copy on a box of crackers to me, and the music is produced in such a way that it sounds like it is pitching to be used in a TV commercial. So there’s something soulless about it. Hopefully this doesn’t just sound like a repackaging of the tired “authenticity” complaint, it’s more like that feeling where an advertisement is trying to trick me or something. Idk.

I think the deal is that, as even Adorno recognized, you can't literally mass produce songs in the same way that you can mass produce bags of salt and vinegar potato chips - they still have to be distinct creative works that need to stand out and are heard as expressive or at least affective on some authentic level by listeners. (Obv you can mass produce CDs or mass distribute digital files but not the songs themselves. Ofc new flavours of chips or new packaging ideas are also developed but generally not as quickly as the number of songs released in a week.) 'Song factories' are ultimately only really factories in a metaphorical sense. So the tension between the industry's desire to control the product and market as you describe vs the nature of the product itself is what I think leads to the weird breakthroughs and surprises (even to the industry itself) and makes pop music interesting to the people who are interested in it. That said, it certainly still operates within limits and formulae and represents a narrow slice of the music that is out there, one that I think diminishes in interest for some of us as we get older.

It's increased in interest for me as I get older, but I also think it's "better" now than it has been in a while (or at least the narrow slice of it that I connect with) (or maybe there are other reasons, I dunno)

Anyway, isn't it natural for folks who listen to a variety of music throughout their lives (as ppl here do) to ebb in flow in what they're into?

I don't know if it's "natural" but that certainly describes my musical life! My interest in pop* has dwindled somewhat in my 40s, but so has my interest in what other people listen to when they're home by themselves.

* Whatever that means—I suspect we're all using different definitions.

There's something endearingly hilarious about a decade and a half of voracious listening and critical discussion on ILM culminating in devotion to polite pseudo-pop by white Northern women. xp!

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Saturday, September 3, 2022 9:48 AM (three hours ago)

this is a direct hit though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbo317IbmAc

why Tracey Thorn getting dragged into this?

I really want to like the Charlotte Adigéry album, Topical Dancer, because the production sounds amazing, but I am just not finding the wit in these songs that others are. The lyrics are kind of like annoying tweets and for me they reduce the songs to novelty. Take a track like "Thank You," which I listened to again this weekend, where the sarcasm is extremely drawn out and you get the point immediately.

sounds like SOMEONE'S volunteering for Thank You 2

Chris L otm

Yeah, the lyrics totally turned me off that album. I expect it'll still end up in AOTY lists from people who either don't listen to the lyrics or, worse, actually like them.

I am usually pretty hard to please if lyrics even risk being on the nose, cheap or preachy. Adigery's lyrics on this album are genuinely witty imo, they get away with it with impudence and charm to the forefront. Yeah, 'Thank You' might be a bit much, but I suspect it knows it's a bit much. There are a lot of layers, it isn't just normie tweets. I'd be repulsed if it was

There are so, so, so many worse lyrical offenders who basically get a free pass on here, so it's kind of staggering how some of you are turning on someone who evinces genuine sly wit and knows how to imply a story

Don't know what offenders you're talking about but 3 people so far have said they're not into it? Not a huge mutiny from the overall consensus, seems like.

The Ghost Club at 7:09 3 Oct 22

Yeah, the lyrics totally turned me off that album. I expect it'll still end up in AOTY lists from people who either don't listen to the lyrics or, worse, actually like them.

I'm not a fan of anything I find preachy and didactic, so I can understand hesitance with the CAxBP album, but I think the appeal is as much the delivery as the lyrics themselves - as a performer she's playful, theatrical and kitschy, all in ways that undercut the seriousness of the politics in the album. Even something as heavy-handed as the we're-being-ironic-do-you-see chorus of "Blenda" is undercut by those chipper "bye bye!" backing vocals. To my ears it's certainly more capital-f Fun than Sault or any of the angry post-Brexit rock bands I'm being nudged towards by algorithms and 6Music.

in other news how the fuck has medicore twunk Harry Styles become the biggest star on the planet just now

(I do know the answer to this, sadly)

extremely otm and on-point posting x2

xp

he was the only one bold enough to spit on Chris Pine

Harry Styles' whole thing is so oily

Tbh I can't get past the album covers. Something so self-important-seeming about having no text except precious 70s Columbia logo seal of quality blah blah

Is this a place I can talk about two recent UK no. 1s? LF System's Afraid to Feel and Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal's B.O.T.A (Baddest of Them All). Neither of them is bad, in fact both are easily listenable in their chasing of classic funky house and speed garage modes respectively. But that's my problem - these were multi-week number ones in 2022 yet they sound like a no. 21 2002 hit by Dirty Vegas or someone (Afraid to Feel) or a no. 47 hit from 1997 (B.O.T.A). They're the sort of tracks which wouldn't have been big hits back then because more exciting examples were crossing over.

BOTA basically was a Top Twenty hit twenty years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfp2WSpGHUA

There's that! - although B.O.T.A.'s track reaches further back imo.

Banger btw

Actually listening to them side by side they're a lot more alike than had occurred to me. SHOCKIN

Yeah, 'Thank You' might be a bit much, but I suspect it knows it's a bit much. There are a lot of layers, it isn't just normie tweets. I'd be repulsed if it was

that settles it, then!

I wholly concur, a true scales-from-eyes moment. it’s now my 2022 AOTY So Far.
in fact, I would be in favour of us mandating imago to run ILM from here on out. if he would decide to ban everyone else from posting and recreate this sacred institution in his imag…e, renaming it ILIM, I will be fully behind ‘Im.

super idea. for your loyalty you shall be awarded an amapiano sub-board

I think the deal is that, as even Adorno recognized, you can't literally mass produce songs in the same way that you can mass produce bags of salt and vinegar potato chips - they still have to be distinct creative works that need to stand out and are heard as expressive or at least affective on some authentic level by listeners. (Obv you can mass produce CDs or mass distribute digital files but not the songs themselves. Ofc new flavours of chips or new packaging ideas are also developed but generally not as quickly as the number of songs released in a week.) 'Song factories' are ultimately only really factories in a metaphorical sense. So the tension between the industry's desire to control the product and market as you describe vs the nature of the product itself is what I think leads to the weird breakthroughs and surprises (even to the industry itself) and makes pop music interesting to the people who are interested in it. That said, it certainly still operates within limits and formulae and represents a narrow slice of the music that is out there, one that I think diminishes in interest for some of us as we get older.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Saturday, September 3, 2022 4:50 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wanted to come back to this discussion. Agree wholeheartedly. Nicely put about the weird breakthroughs and surprises even to the industry itself. Indeed the more control you exert, the more the deviations are going to stand out. You think you know what you're going to have, and then the end product looks like something else to the audience. That chase to pop perfection remains elusive, like waiting for stars to align. I like to think of pop as suspension of belief, a point of balance between manufacturing a calibrated product and true artistic vision, a realm of illusion. I am not sure if there is not an equivalent in every genre. Take folk, take jazz, every genre has its myths, every genre tries to capture something elusive. The process at play, the internal workings makes music interesting, not just the raw wild notes that Ornette Coleman hits. I'm not saying there is no difference between pop and the rest, there is. But all music involves a lot of control and ironing out, even when it doesn't feel that way.

What I find depressing in pop music is the image control and increasingly the message control. Also the dictates of trying to cover all bases by having one sad-but-hopeful songwriter ballad next to something dancy and uplifting next to ridiculous orchestration. Just copy-pasting formulas. But that's not inherently what pop music is.

Adorno was a great guy. Hopefully he would have been a belieber.

i wish there was a satisfying way of saying that I like the 1975 album and think Healy is an interesting, compelling pop star, songwriter and lyricist, but that i wish ILMers would devote like one eighteenth of the energy they do to analysing him and fuckin' taytay (okay and kendrick, who I love!) to other, less obvious stuff

can't we like, get deep into, idk, black midi, billy woods, idk, guess this is more a matter of what the people who like to get deep are into, and if that be the 1975 then so be it, be the change u want to see imago

i guess we're tiding ourselves over for certain seismic & imminent release dates

tired: 21st october
weyered: 18th november

shd have said 'weyeRD' lol

There’s not even an active Swift thread… your obsession w/her is bizarre, IMO (I don’t know the album’s release date by heart, and I’m looking forward to it)

i knewwwww i shd have scrubbed that bit from my post. please pretend i didn't write that bit

i mean the suppression of swiftalk is at least partly bc no songs are out and no one knows what the album sounds like

btw i am enjoying reading the 1975 analysis, i just wish more artists got the deluxe treatment!

or does only matty deserve it -_-

imago i promise to post in a billy woods thread if you start one

haven't listened to the new one yet, n.b.

Okay well I actually need to listen to his albums first too lol, it was an exaaaample

Let's start now tho

Pop music should not be “interesting” it should make your blood fizz like champagne or give you what feels like a mild electric shock

That sounds totally unpleasant, perhaps that’s why I think most pop music is absolute shit these days

I just meant it’s supposed to be visceral not intellectual or whatever

happy to talk about billy woods

more like billy goods

Have no idea who Billy Woods is, but if u start a thread I might read it

the thread where ilxors find out who billy woods is