Most Harmful Strand of Contemporary Music Criticism

Discuss.

sociopolitical context

Harmful? I dunno how much impact music crit has beyond itself in 2020. I'm sure there's a way of doing some of these approaches well or badly.

No doubt, but ILM polls thrive on light clickbait.

It may just be the time of year, but: lists

I find lists and scores pretty insulting to art a lot of the time but I'm not in beef mode today

Scores as the be-all and end-all, especially when they contradict the review's ostensible content, should've been included. Mea culpa.

As bearers of musical notation they're pretty classic tho.

lol i was trying to recall if i'd ever seen a review that included a score which contradicted the review -- until i realised you were talking abt the other (bad) kind of score

Think most of these can be good and can be bad, a variety of approaches is to be applauded surely. talking about the context of an LP without discussing the actual music and/or how it affects (or fails to affect) the writer is a hallmark of a bad review though, imo, though even that works sometimes I suppose

"three blind mice begins with an ascending sequence of notes but its problems as a melody merely begin here"

https://www.8notes.com/digital_tradition/gif_dtrad/THREEBLN.gif

Even classical reviewers don't do that lol. It would be kind of amazing if they did: 'here (exhibit A) is incontrovertible proof that Herr F. flubbed bar 23 of the stretto'.

2xp

trying to remember which stern pianist-critic dissed a rival by pointing out that when the going got fiddly, herr x. invoked compositionally unsanctioned rubato to allow him to "pause awhile" (he wasn't pointing at a score at the time tho) (i read abt it in the NYRB so it *might* have been charles rosen being snarky at alfred brendel, since that also took place in the NYRB lol)

i like lists (because for me they serve as an exercise in contextualization and an opportunity for discovery; i find it a useful extension to the venerable "these guys sound like captain beefheart on acid!!!" school of criticism) and only cover the unknownest of the unknown, so neither of those

i don't see a difference between "biographical filler" and "riveting neuroses" in practice, probably because my biography is riveting neuroses (with a smattering of sociopolitical context thrown in for leavening). when i write about music that's what i tend to write (though i do at least try to acknowledge the _existence_ of the music unlike some biographical filler/riveting neuroses writers).

i voted "Music exists qua music sub specie aeternitatis", it just strikes me as being so much "objectivist" bullshit

my real most hated strand of contemporary music criticism, though, is people who make up genres to cover music they like such as "zolo" or "escape room". this is sort of related to "there is only one genre and its name is"... it's more "there is a genre and it is made up of all the music i like and its name is"

i voted "Music exists qua music sub specie aeternitatis", it just strikes me as being so much "objectivist" bullshit

- revenge of the jawn (rushomancy)

by which i mean that, at least in the classical world, people say that it shouldn't matter that wagner was a nazi have a not-terribly-surprising tendency to turn out to be nazis themselves

speaking of wagner that recent article on wagner that said "I HAVE AN EXCITING NEW THEORY THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING ABOUT WAGNER'S ANTI-SEMITISM" was also fairly annoying. there's the self-hype, of course, the "I HAVE FINALLY FIGURED OUT THE MYSTERY OF THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT" sort of very successful bullshit, but also the implicit notion that because nobody had thought of it before it must be a groundbreaking stroke of genius rather than a nonsensical irrelevancy.

people who make up genres to cover music they like such as "zolo" or "escape room".

Had to google both of those. The latter in particular is just such a catch-all that I can't imagine ascribing even the loosest taxonomic meaning to it.

I read “biographical filler” as distinct from “autobiographical filler”

And yeah, while I enjoyed that Wagner piece for its wealth of historical data, the analysis struck me as wanting for the most part (I did mention how Mendelssohn, a Jewish convert to Christianity, was still a target of Wagner's antisemitism because, well, Blot und Boden may in fact have been part of his worldview after all?).

I read “biographical filler” as distinct from “autobiographical filler”

Yep, that's what I meant.

Weirdly, this might be 'Lemme parse those lyrics for you. Lyrics' for me. I don't care for that shit at all. Almost any other here - like NV said - can be done well, in some way. (not that that is happening a lot, but I wouldn't call most pf them particularly harmful).

Going by the grade def a major gripe though, as a write-in.

people who make up genres to cover music they like such as (...) "escape room".

You know this specific guy is an ILM regular, yeah(?)

I voted for "sociopolitical context", although these would probably be worse:

My personality is that I hate Pitchfork
Here's a list. Here's another list
There is only one Genre and its name is […]

An approach focused on sociopolitcal context might be useful, ime usually when it is being done by an actual social scientist using actual social science research methodology. An approach based on asserting that there is nothing outside this, while technically accurate, generally results in a dud, though, and comes closest to doing harm imo. "Music qua music" and "lyrics" are at least engaging with the content of the work.

I guess lists with discussion and commentary can be good, too.

"everybody had PTO this week, so I was clearly assigned to write a review of this veteran band I've never heard in a genre I know nothing about"

voted for lyrics but only because it was my own vice back in the day

I'm (unsurprisingly) with Sund4r on this one. I take rush's point, but I feel like overemphasis on sociopolitical implications is a greater irritant in our current century. This is, of course, liable to change.

good thread. hard to pick one.

sociopolitical context and it isn't even close

I wrote a few CD reviews for a local paper when I was young and I tried to hit on all of these briefly in each review. I'll show myself out.

Which one is most likely to use the phraseology “What X understand(s) about Y is...”?

You know this specific guy is an ILM regular, yeah(?)

― stop creeping my instagram storiez (morrisp)

yes i do! and i don't, you know, want to beef on ilx, i know there's a long history of that, dude has a busy life and an active job and probably shouldn't bother to even engage with my frankly marginal crackpot concerns, but, i mean, if fantano was a regular here i'd still occasionally mention that he annoys the piss out of me simply because i feel like i'd be remiss not to.

my real most hated strand of contemporary music criticism, though, is people who make up genres to cover music they like such as "zolo" or "escape room". this is sort of related to "there is only one genre and its name is"... it's more "there is a genre and it is made up of all the music i like and its name is"
― revenge of the jawn (rushomancy), Sunday, January 19, 2020 10:34 AM (four hours ago)

Music is both endlessly divisible and reducible. There was a fantastic interview with Andy Votel a few years back where he was talking about the Rosebud Discoballs version of Interstellar Overdrive and poked fun at all the genre name silliness. Here it is:

On the subject of rock follies, this is from an album paying homage to Pink Floyd—with disco? Who are Rosebud?

They are like the French version of 10cc. They were Jean-Claude Vannier's constant backing band for everything, and he did thousands of pop records. But they also pretty much single-handedly invented French cosmic disco. Now, this idea to do a pop record based on Pink Floyd is a great idea on paper, but doesn't really sound anything like Pink Floyd. Trying to put prog through a '70s disco machine is alright, but trying to put late '60s punky rock & roll through a disco machine is not going to be a good idea. I don't know what the hell this is; it's just its own problem.

When you talk about all these musical genres it just becomes embarrassing, and farcical. Every week there's a new genre. There should only be about five genres, and one of those should be overambitious music. I would love to walk into a record shop and see a section saying overambitious music, and this definitely comes into that category. Trying to do a cheap record, that's going to make people dance in a nightclub, which is based on the entire career of Pink Floyd in one record is just so misguided. Pink Floyd were bloody overambitious in the first place. But every musician who appears on that record is a hero of mine.

So there's this really interesting question of like, if 'New Grave' doesn't get to be its own genre... then isn't all 'Rock' just folk music? etc etc And the idea of a reducible musical form has been at the forefont of a lot of technology lately.

I despise lists and rankings, but it's 'sociopolitical context' by some distance. If I understand correctly "music exists qua music sub specie aeternitatis" describes something like art-historical formalism? Seems to me an alright way of thinking about things.

Re: the Wagner/Nazi stuff and the art of 'unacceptable people' more broadly, see the documentary 'Unmappable' on the cartographer Denis Wood.

this is still the best tweet

Pitchfork: King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with his hit single "Goop on Ya Grinch" [7.6]

— guy who pays for winrar (@JucheMane) April 14, 2017

too real

I rarely see these trends in isolation, and it seems to me that most of the actual everyday annoying music crit involves some combination of at least two of them, in particular when "lemme parse those lyrics for you" becomes "let me take a very short lyric and use it to awkwardly shoehorn and justify an extended detour into sociopolitical context and/or biographical filler."

my real most hated strand of contemporary music criticism, though, is people who make up genres to cover music they like such as "zolo" or "escape room".

There probably are examples of this, but just so you know, that's not really where the terms "zolo" and "escape room" came from.

I only cover the unknownest of the unknown is one of the least bad of these, but it also very neatly describes the yearly 'what are you listening to' threads

There is only one Genre and its name is [afrobeats]

love ya really breastcrawl ;)

(tbc I really don't mind genre-specialised music criticism or genre-specialised ilm posters; i'm really only teasing and i'm grateful to said specialists for helping me discover so much)

the top one is obviously by a million miles the worst one, followed by the lyrics one

My personality is that I hate Pitchfork

this one roasts me tbf

Surely streaming an youtube are more harmful to music criticism than anything about criticism, considering I can go listen to something for thirty seconds and find out if I like it instead of having to read a website so I can guess if I’ll like it.

ah but how do you decide what to try for 30 seconds ;)

Music criticism can address issues other than whether you like something. Also, the OP doesn't say that what is being harmed is the field of music criticism.

"let me take a very short lyric and use it to awkwardly shoehorn and justify an extended detour into sociopolitical context and/or biographical filler."

this is like when future's 'march madness' came out and everyone couldn't stop talking about a non-sequitur lyric about police violence.

"I only cover the unknownest of the unknown"

tbh this is p much the only style of music crit that has any value to me nowadays

Ah, Rosebud. I've loved Rosebud since, well, probably the '90s when it was one of those legendary Pink Floyd cover albums I had a bootleg cassette of.

I like Rosebud _because_ a disco cover album of Pink Floyd songs, from "Interstellar Overdrive" through to "Have a Cigar", is such a manifestly terrible idea (and I don't think "prog disco" is any better of an idea than "psych disco", though I improbably enough have heard some pretty decent prog disco tunes, such as Tomsix's "Lookin' For A Little Light"), because Rosebud's career is a compendium of such terrible ideas of which "disco Pink Floyd cover album" is probably the best. Other ideas included a 7" disco single based on the Stanley Kubrick film "Barry Lyndon" and a record of disco Dixieland called "New Orleans Junction" (yes, I know this concept was done by others, and done well; most ideas in the realm of disco were, on paper, extremely bad ones). I've unfortunately only heard one track of each of these projects, because they are of similar high quality to their Pink Floyd cover record.

That's the sort of music I love - I know someone else arbitrarily and inaccurately came up with the idea of "outsider" music, and the sort of music I like, which I _don't_ think of as a genre, is misfit music. Bad ideas that yield results which, if not "good" in any critically defensible sense, are fascinating and enjoyable to listen to. I am in love with a world which produces artists like Rosebud.

I will have to check out "Unmappable". It sounds like an interesting film and it's less than half an hour, so I might actually watch the whole thing!

Which option is this?

https://i.postimg.cc/dQTrSs5T/HYPERLINK-TO-RAP-GENIUS.jpg
(from Yahoo)

Re: the Wagner/Nazi stuff and the art of 'unacceptable people' more broadly, see the documentary 'Unmappable' on the cartographer Denis Wood.

― Deflatormouse

well i did watch this and i didn't think it was that interesting or revelatory; what i got out of it was that there's nothing that people won't excuse or overlook if you're a white dude. which i already sort of knew?

What do you think people should be doing about Wagner's anti-Semitism?

hey keep it on ile

shit, something is f'd up on my SNA

totally fair brad!

So far: 261 messages and only two Twitter embeds itt. I rest my case.

I would love to read an ethnomusicological/folk-tradition-focused piece on hardcore (the knuckle-walking punk variant, not the techno variant). Sure, there's room for stylistic individuality, but so much of the music is about the community talking to itself (all those songs about brotherhood and "the scene") and enforcing norms, musical and otherwise.

yeah me too - it seems like a beast that never changes, it's hermetically self-perpetuating. individual artists and how "original" they are are sort of irrelevant. I think a similar approach is useful/more interesting for a lot of enduring subgenres and subcultures.

mark s speaking a lot of wisdom upthread as well :)

:0

Yeah, good post.

Sure, there's room for stylistic individuality, but so much of the music is about the community talking to itself (all those songs about brotherhood and "the scene") and enforcing norms, musical and otherwise

digression, but i was chuckling about this recently w/r/t a recent-ish phenomenon of hardcore bands in my area being promoted/advertised as "surf punk" despite being sounding p hardcore-by-the-#s, and realizing it was bc they occasionally played riffs on one string rather than chords, and to many ppl who are just ultra steeped in that sound to the exclusion of all others anytime a hardcore band plays a single notes rather than a chord theyre like "whoa, what is this the ventures? surfs up!"

what if they played riffs... on TWO strings

Whoa there Paganini.

"prog punk"

but yeah booming post from mark s, great points

mark s is an ever-eloquent and insightful post-boomer. ;)

Too much going on here to respond to everything but Re: Jes Skolnik twitter thread and music theory/terminology.
One of the functions of criticism traditionally has been to circulate ideas and perceptions. And frequently this is realized by inventing new vocabulary and repurposing existing words to define or shape those concepts.
"Hardcore techno" and "hardcore rap" may be seen as 'rockist' in that they draw an implicit comparison to "hardcore punk". Just applying the language of rock criticism effectively subordinates these forms to rock.
I can't really know, but it seems crucial to the trajectory of rap and hip hop that its artists and critics developed a language for discussing it and redefined existing terms.

And actually, quite a few disparate ideas in this thread refer to some dynamic of domination/subordination. I'm not sure I buy into the perception of critics as gatekeepers. The way I see it, they've served really effectively as part of a continuum between artists and their audiences. They put forward theories that help audiences to decode artworks and spur on the creation of new work at the same time. This has afforded them a power to steal autonomy and meaning from artists at times, so quite a few artists have developed acute self-critical reflexes (which shapes the creation of new work, etc).

Maybe I'm out of touch. But the major crisis in criticism I see is that this dynamic has broken down?

"Hardcore techno" and "hardcore rap" may be seen as 'rockist' in that they draw an implicit comparison to "hardcore punk". Just applying the language of rock criticism effectively subordinates these forms to rock.

i don't believe the term "hardcore" for the style of dance music emerging out of the rave culture in the late 80s/early 90s has any relation to hardcore punk

etymology of "hardcore" predates punk considerably - originally referred to unemployables/undesirables/criminals and then to pornography

although tbf he did say implicit and not explicit

Just applying the language of rock criticism effectively subordinates these forms to rock.

best throw out the rest of language then because

good morning!

I wish I'd been participating.

dunno if I've anything to add :(

The number one song in the country features a rapper putting a $10,000 bounty on George Zimmerman, but def keep saying that lyrics or politics have no place in music writing...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

def keep saying that lyrics or politics have no place in music writing...

Has anyone here said this?

Nope

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

specific user such as imago

Our focus group has spoken. Condé Nast, take heed!

run it with the "I left out ‘this review is in fact about my own, riveting neuroses’ on purpose." in, u coward

I did what I could, Rhonda.

That's a fun thread. I'll answer before reading.
- From the list, socio-political context, hate pitchfork and unknownest of the unknowns.
Others
- Was 2015 a better year for music than 2003 ?
- I like mindless fun and my fascist narrow shit taste is called poptimism
- Tokenism / artifical elitism

the times they are a changing

- Was 2015 a better year for music than 2003 ?

Agree that 'Ain't what it used to be' should've been an option. Extra points when said hot take is expressed by teenagers.

oh for the days before "ain't what it used to be" arrived to harm us

Precisely!

"In Hesiod's version, the Golden Age ended when the Titan Prometheus conferred on mankind the gift of fire and all the other arts"

my personality is that i hate fire and all the other arts

Lol. Raymond Williams to thread!

Tbf the Ancient Greeks were no Mesopotamians and the Neolithic was no Upper Paleolithic.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/21-lY6bp3JL._SX312_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaHEusBG20c

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41ZITqQku7L._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

paleolithic is made up iirc

https://ancientpatriarchs.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/raiderlostark.jpg?w=672&h=372&crop=1

https://ancientpatriarchs.wordpress.com/

i call this piece "wave goodbye to the good old days"

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/10/cave021_wide_7b07da56ffd96885f75d8750968c5c5eddba8039_s40_c85/lead_720_405.jpg

If you weren't weaned on vulture-bone flutes and rotating cubes, I don't want your opinion on music.

Lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BD1rAzJgzI

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

If you weren't weaned on vulture-bone flutes and rotating cubes, I don't want your opinion on music.

― pomenitul

fez didn't even come out until i was 36!

Pure, pure vulture-bone

That’s a flute I’d like to own