Bands that hipster types diss to sound superior

This kind of raises a sub-question for me, which is that I tend to think way we use music socially is pretty inextricable from the music itself -- I mean, the people making it are in part making it to be used socially -- and so (for instance) not-liking Dark Side of the Moon because it's old hat and has been on the Billboard albums chart continuously since 1973 strikes me as a perfectly legitimate stance to take.

Harvey: how are you going to distinguish "sound" from "social context?" The artists are putting the latter into the work, and the listeners are usually getting the latter out of the "sound" of the music itself. When people hear and like -- for instance -- the Ramones, it's not in a vacuum: they're hearing social stuff going on right in the music, and they're surrounded by social stuff going on in their lives. When someone says "I love Joey Ramone's voice," they're surely making a social statement (about what is cool and what ways are interesting to act and what stance is interesting to take in relation to other people) as much as a "musical" one.

now you can always reffer people back to the url "Bands that hipster types diss to sound superior" you should tattoo it on the back of your hand!

incidently, i think DSOTM does indeed suck, and that Animals is a far superior work.

Bands that hipster types diss to sound superior !!!

What really irks me is when people I know stop liking a band because their ex girlfriend or boyfriend liked it. Or dislikes a band soley because of its fanbase.

HAVE YOU EVER MET A STRING CHEESE FAN??????

It's difficult, if not impossible, to know why someone really likes or dislikes something, and people are sometimes too quick to call other peoples' "ulterior motives" into question. I've certainly thrown around accusations like that.

How is that even possible?

ah the ex thing is understandable (yet irrational). Why put yourself through some emotional trauma because you like the actual music. Emotional well being is more important than being true to your personal tastes. And equally it's possible a person only likes the music because the ex liked them, this is true of quite a few girls I know.
In fact, I "made" a girl stop listening to Yo La Tengo because I broke up with her. oy!

Hehe. I hate most fanbases anyway.

How is that even possible?

It's not. What I meant to suggest is that some people try to find an "objective" reason or something outside the thing itself for dissing it. Or worst, hating something because they decided they hate it instead of letting it wash over them, i.e. dismissing a band out of hand because of their critical reputation rather than their music.

Of course, like I've said elsewhere, it's hard to actually know when someone is doing that, so debating someone based on that premise can be problematic.

I suspect this of myself, sometimes, actually, except I can remind myself that it's not true. When OK Computer came out, I had no particular snobbery to turn me against it; the friends I did most of my music-listening and music-talkng with loved it; I'd never previously had negative feelings about Radiohead; everything imaginable was pointing me toward liking it. But I just totally didn't.

What I've concluded is that while most everyone who likes the genre/similar bands will acknowledge Radiohead songs as admirable and accomplished and whatnot, there are three things about their music that it's very possible to just not care for: (a) Yorke's voice, (b) the occasional dirgelike/meandering feel of their song structures, and (c) something about the emotional content that I can't describe very well, except to say that sometimes it feels like it's kind of pleading at you in an irritating, pathetic way. All of which seem to get summed up into one when people describe Radiohead songs as just endless "moaning."

Not entirely sure if any of those explain my personal issue, and I don't dislike Radiohead, I don't think -- but those things certainly have to do with why I'm not particularly interested in them.

And I've noticed that when someone rants about hipsters around me they're usually wearing vintage clothes, sipping overpriced coffee or wine, thumbing through their latest issue of the New Yorker, while listening to Coltrane blare in the background. At least that's my Seattle and Vegas experience. The people who simply work and lead their lives are usually not even aware hipsters exist. And if they are, it just looks like another subculture to them.

Fuck off and die hipster! tee hee

I think ILM could make its millions with a new board game:

"Hipster!" The great new game from Hasbro! Fun for all the family!

Call out the player holding the hipster card! Build up street cred only to see it all blown away by critical revisionism!

Someone develop this game, please...

if hipsters exist, they are surely the very people deriding others as "hipsters" - the use of the term is a rhetorical preventative strike against being seen as unhip

You found me out! Now back to my latte sipping!

You're such an art fag brah! Where's my John Zorn Plays Kazoo Vol. 47 at?

But I still content that Piper was the best Floyd album.

Musicians

* Beck, musician famous for repurposing music and styles of the past.
* Cat Power (a.k.a. Chan Marshall), musician whose sincere-but-cryptic lyrics and famously unstable stage persona have influenced a generation of introverted female hipsters
* Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Brooklyn-based band that plays music in the style of Talking Heads and Television.
* DFA Records, home of LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, Hot Chip and many other artists.
* Death From Above 1979, guitarless duo known for their energetic live shows and sex-charged lyrics.
* Ira Kaplan, musician (Yo La Tengo) whose musical and personal style was especially influential with 1990s indie rock hipsters
* Les Savy Fav, art-rock band infamous in hipster circles for their live shows which feature obese frontman Tim Harrington prancing around onstage, making out with audience members, and removing all of his clothing.
* Milemarker, dance-punk band much in the vein of Death From Above 1979.
* Pavement, Godfathers of indie-rock and hipster heroes. Frontman Stephen Malkmus continues to reign over his hipster kingdom while continuing to produce critically acclaimed independent rock with his band The Jicks.

The Hipster Kingdom! and their King! Get down on your grubby knees and behold..

I also love the Les Savy Fav entry.

Billy Corgan?

Only some druggy hipster type would actually do such a thing, so relax, we won't blame you if we wake up in a wet bed.

well, if you can say I'm participating in the idea of "punk", but what exaclty is that? I don't particularly like punk (outside of a few typical standards, a la Ramones, the Clash, etc), I don't dress like a punk, I don't go to punk shows, and I don't know "what's cool" with punk people today. If I called myself punk in the presence of a hardcore punker, I would probably get attacked. well, maybe not, but since I don't have any punk friends, well, can you imagine my ignorance, yet? so back to the point...

I say I'm participating in the idea of "punk", but I don't know what that means, and I'm not consciously or activily doing what you accuse me of...

that doesn't exactly make a convincing argument.

furthermore, I don't know jack about the Ramones, except for the superficial 30 second tv ad propoganda, something about progenitors of American punk, yadda yadda yadda. I've never found that knowing more about a band or their scene particular endears me to the music they make. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect, and therefore I usually make it a point to avoid that kind of information. point being, it might include "a bunch of social stuff," but that doesn't mean I care about it or even know about it.

and you've never felt nostalgic, and something inextricably linked plays in your head?

sure music *can* do all those things, but does anyone actually like music because of those things? If I consciously put on a particular record in order to make myself feel like less of a loser, then I've already ruined the fantasy. If I put on a record for some other reason, and then if by chance, because possibly of other contributions to the situation/context, it makes me feel cool... then yes, fine and good. but the music is only one part of the equation and when you play that music in a different situation, you may not get the same results. just cause music *can* do something, doesn't mean that it does so.

yes, music does trigger a response, one that sometimes is connected to my real life and sometimes one that is connected to an imagined life, but I can't really say that I like the music *because of* that. its more of an afterthought.

Let's say you go home and listen to a CD of west-African pop. Now, if you're a musicologist, you might have some technical thoughts about the kinds of harmonies used and the timbral relationships of different traditional instruments. But if you're anything like the average American person, you do something else. You imagine the place the music comes from, the people who perform it, and the situations in which it might be performed. You might imagine what it's like to be in west Africa. You might imagine what it's like to be part of a group of people dancing and doing call-and-response singing. You might think about nature or sunlight. All of that means participating -- mentally -- in the social context of the music. No, it doesn't make you "a west African," but it gives you a way to think about that in your own head. And on an even more abstract level, it lets you participate in being the kind of person who listens to west African music: maybe it makes you feel globally conscious, or makes you feel like the music you're listening to has to do with "real" human experience, or makes you feel like the kind of person who's interested in the experiences of people who aren't necessarily like him.

Then let's say you put on an AC/DC album. If you're a normal person, you'd probably not thinking a whole lot about nature while listening to AC/DC. You might pump your fist in the air or bang your head or play air guitar. You might be reminded of beer. And in doing all of that, you're participating in the notion of what AC/DC means. By listening to AC/DC, you're getting to try on -- momentarily -- the role of the fist-pumper and the beer-guzzler and the naughty boy.

And then maybe you put on a Carter Family album, and you're not mentally trying on the "naughty boy" persona anymore; maybe now you're imagining clapboard churches in the south, or thinking about morality, and the persona is all different -- and maybe you feel now like the kind of person who's interested in history and knows something about America's past, and who you are and how you feel when you're listening are all different.

And that goes not just for every genre, but for every different act, even every different piece of music. So when someone asks you whether you like or don't-like something, that context is in there. Maybe someone doesn't respond to the Carter Family because he doesn't like peering into the past; maybe it's because he associates Christianity with bad things. Maybe someone likes west-African pop music because he feels disconnected from nature and community, and listening to west-African pop music makes him feel more in touch with those things. Maybe one kid likes AC/DC because he's a teenage jock and likes the idea of himself pumping fists and drinking beer and feeling his youth; maybe another kid hates AC/DC because he's always getting beat up by fist-pumping beer-drinking youth and has decided that they're stupid and he's smart and therefore he likes "smart" non-fist-pumping music like Radiohead.

And when you listen to music, you are participating in this.

When I hear the Carter Family, I think of my mother and it makes me sad. My mother sang those songs and played autoharp. Does that mean I am participating in the idea of being me, or my mother?

When I listen to West African pop, I groove on the guitars, voices, drums and horns. I don't imagine what it's like to be some Nigerian engaging in call and response vocals. Maybe I'll sing along, but I don't cast myself as some guy in Lagos. I sing along 'cause it makes me feel good, even if I have no idea what the words mean.

(And all of this ignores the extreme subjecivity of your imaginings. Why does African pop remind you of nature? It reminds me of sprawling cities like Lagos, Abidjan and Kinshasa, not jungle clearings or the savannah.)

some of these examples of participation seem to occur entirely within the imaginary. this seems to open up even more problems when I try to locate meaning derived from social contexts. my knowledge of west africa and west african society is paltry at best. any "imaginings" I may have will be stereotypical, ignorant or/and unrealistic. really when such imaginings occur, its more of a personal vision that has nothing to do with west africa and everything to do with my own ego/id/psychology/etc. the music and my own superficial knowledge really just serve as a spring board into something else. really, this could be said for any music inspired imaginings, even those involving music that is more culturally centered. at what point does this become a "social" experience? everyone's imaginings are going to be slightly, if not wildly different, with varying levels of realism, hollywood magic and pop culture in-jokes. is there any connection between them other than the superficial knowledge that serves as the theme?

hahaha! that's good. of course, I tend to think of it as becoming slaves of our own *successes*

societal stuff isnt 'pure' anyways, it gets distorted with each and every stage it passes through. which is how so much art gets perceived differently than it was intended by the artist. once it leaves the studio, the artist relinquishes control over it. it, like anything else, becomes part of society.

Would everything that you just wrote still be accurate if you wrote it in the first person and not the second?

Of course! Listening to Woody Guthrie makes me think about Woody Guthrie's social context. It also makes me think about the persona he created in response to that context. It also makes me think about what it means to be a person who listens to Woody Guthrie.

Which is why it gets interesting the further it gets removed from a social context.

This is definitely interesting, yes. Like you say, though, Mark, some of the interesting "context" and "ways of being" stuff with VU is in the music -- e.g., the juxtaposition of dead-sounding chanteuse (it doesn't take much to read that singing as "elegant" in certain ways) with grotty noise elsewhere. And whether you know stuff about specific context or not, you know certain things about the Velvets' way of being. They aren't going to sound active or fist-pumpy, for instance, not to anyone with even a passing familiarity with modern music. They do sound dissatisfied, like they're not happy with something. So there's a particular vision of cool that's wrapped up in the music -- VU cool -- and even without much context, if you heard the music, you could get a picture of how Lou Reed might talk.

I don't imagine what it's like to be some Nigerian engaging in call and response vocals.

This is being way literal-minded again. It's not necessarily that you imagine being someone other than yourself -- it's that you get a chance to imagine yourself as participating in something else. (E.g. I don't imagine being a member of AC/DC, but I can imagine myself, for a moment, as being like that, and then I can work out whether I like that feeling or not.)

I sing along 'cause it makes me feel good

And the stuff I'm talking about is necessarily some part of why it makes you feel good, is what I'm saying -- and some part of why singing along with something else might make you feel bad.

Why does African pop remind you of nature? It reminds me of sprawling cities like Lagos, Abidjan and Kinshasa, not jungle clearings or the savannah.

(Sidenote: those sprawling cities have wind up with plenty of nature packed in the gaps, actually, which is mostly what I'm thinking of here.)

any "imaginings" I may have will be stereotypical, ignorant or/and unrealistic.

And this totally happens in people's music-appreciation. Just look at the history of appreciating black music in America, and the ways in which people are often imagining their way into stereotypes of black people. Or just the kernels of misguided or patronizing thoughts in people's imaginations -- people who respond to black music because it's "more primal" or "more authentic," people who like gangsta rap because it allows them to imagine themselves into a cartoon version of black masculinity ... maybe the best example I could have offered here is young white suburban kids listening to Doggystyle, the way much of what they're getting out of it is a chance to imagine themselves into particular way-of-being.

when such imaginings occur, its more of a personal vision that has nothing to do with west africa and everything to do with my own ego/id/psychology/etc.

Exactly. And that's a lot of why one person can love a band while another person doesn't -- because they're differently placed, in social terms, and interpret the social aspects of the music differently. If music were just a matter of the technical, then we'd be much closer to always liking the same things: "This is an excellent chord change!" "Yes, yes, it objectively is!"

Plus consider the way people argue about music, especially when they're young: it immediately bypasses technical aspects of the music and becomes about social evaluations of the people making it. "I like XYZBand because they're so smart and sensitive." "I like ABCBand because they're so bad-ass." "I like QRSBand because they're totally fun and I can dance to them." All those involve visions of what constitutes cool ways for people to be and act, questions of what purposes music can be used for (like dancing), and all the other stuff I'm going on and on about.

Two extensions:

1. When I'm writing a song, I'm also "writing an audience".

2. When I don't like a song, I don't like the kind of person liking the song makes me.

I like what you're saying throughout the thread, but i think you give the 'technical' aspects of music short shrift. i'd replace 'technical' with 'formal' and argue that what seem like minutia on a casual, social listen -- i.e. what's going on THIS SECOND and how it relates to what just came and what's coming next and what happens to that hi-hat or how that guitar chord changes to a IV chord but not just any IV chord, an inverted version with root notes switching and maybe the bass pinging out a high C instead of the root F and isn't that fucking heavenly and majestic -- that's the sort of thing that makes music last for me. social context is still there -- i listen to blue cheer partly cuz i like to imagine guys with frizzed-out curly hair down to their waists banging shit up, etc. -- but making a formal-appreciation leap is so much more satisfying for me, i.e. listening to the bizarre pure-tone shapes those guitars plow through on 'parchment farm' or whatever. i don't yell 'THIS IS SO FUCKING AMAZING' in a room w/ no one there like a loser when i'm listening to how morton feldman is ponderous and serious and important, but when he switches up the order or the accent of four seemingly dissonant notes and creates new fragments of a triad that try to suggest a different key but are then erased by a new puzzle that dissolves into something more sensuous and colorful and less 'dissonant' w/ shifting decays on each note to boot. yeah, the formal stuff can quickly send you up your own ass, but i think it's there in a lot more music than jazzbos or whoever like, so you can do the same thing with the clean and say "WOAH WHAT THEY CAME UP WITH THERE IS SERIOUSLY GREAT" instead of "THIS IS SO CATCHY AND SMART AND THEY CAN'T PLAY THEIR OWN INSTRUMENTS ISN'T THAT COOL"

I sometimes fear that my tastes in music are built entirely and predictably around major sevenths. I'm also incapable of writing a song that doesn't substitute major sevenths for every major chord possible. It's pathetic. And yes, I've wondered forever how they were possibly seen as inappropriate all the way into the 19th century; I assume it's something to do with the beginning and end of the chord being only a half-step apart. (Which is also why, incidentally, I think they have the particular poignant effect that they have; someone said to me once that every song I write has the same monotonous quality of "longing," and I'm pretty sure the longing in question is the longing of that last note to push up one little half-step and become the root note.)
-- nabisco (--...), August 31st, 2004 4:13 PM. (nabisco) (link)

That bit at the end about poignancy and longing is perhaps the best place to begin here. Your posts above suggest that you must enjoy or relate to this sense of poignancy -- does it accord with you thinking of yourself as a romantic, as someone who's sensitive or emotionally attuned?

I guess I'm curious because the maj-7th is one of the only musical techniques I gravitate toward nearly exclusively: put a maj-7th in a song of any genre, and I'm more likely to respond favorably toward it it. And of course I don't believe that maj-7th chords are inherently BETTER, in an objective sense, than non-maj-7th chords, so the key is to work out precisely what they're doing for ME.

altho to be fair i don't know that the guk are necessarily more "feeling" objectively (whatever that might mean) than another band or if they just are presented in that way to hs kids, but in any event the point is that bands mean different things to you based on yr. own personal time/place/&c

Well my original point was that the "formal" stuff is inextricable from the "social" stuff.

E.g., part of your sense of what Blue Cheer is includes something like "these are the kinds of guys who play 'bizarre tone-shapes.'" (As opposed to some other act whose tone-shapes are more comfortable and conventional.) And being amazed by the Feldman shift you're talking about involves the belief that there's value in that kind of subtle detail-oriented formal approach to music. (Someone else might not like the piece because he wants to hear human voices talking about recognizable stuff.)

So there are formal levels and social levels, yes, but I think my point is that they can't reliably be separated; they're all mixed in together and reflecting on each other, and we have social reasons for liking formal stuff, and sometimes formal reasons for liking social stuff, and so on.

xpost

Major-sevenths have a particular feel, to me, and it's one I associate pretty specifically with stuff in the real world; I definitely tie them to "ways of being," depending on how they're employed. One reason "Tighten Up" reads as particularly joyous, to me, is that the energy of a soul/dance format gets hinged on the wistfulness of the major-7th, which leaves the whole thing feeling rather friendly, like it's being transported by its own soft good feeling. But then we start verging into hippie territory.

I think I posted on the maj-7th thread about why I thought they had that quality -- the fact that one note is just a half-step short of getting back to the root, so close but not quite.

But yeah, it feels better to come at music with an open mind about what it's actually doing and acting out, as opposed to too many cultural cues about what it supposedly is like. Getting back to the opening question, I do think it'd be sad to hate Dark Side of the Moon based on what it's supposedly like. I just don't think it's bad or weird to get a clear picture of what it really is and dislike it for the way that reality operates in the culture around you.

I just put on some Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sea and Cake, Phoenix, and Erlend Oye, and boy are you wrong.

*NB I don't really think you do it TO sound superior, but you sure sometimes DO sound kind of smug when you diss stuff -- hell, we all do that. THAT'S WHERE THE FUN IS.

you sure sometimes DO sound kind of smug

'sometimes'

http://www.air-and-space.com/20020420%20Pt%20Mugu/3%2021%20QF-4S+%20155749%20VX-30%20crash%20explosion%20l.jpg

But I kid the bands etc.