I think the worst threads about music are the ones that...

I think the worst threads about music are the ones that sap away any sense of what's actually _fun_ about it: be that luriqua's "serious lyrics or serious dancing" t-bomb, or just shooting the shit and bitchy zinging it. It sort of reminds me of when Chuck Eddy used to just post spin numbers for Radio Disney tracks as a thread, and you're thinking... "These are just numbers... there's not even analysis of numbers here, it's just numbers". It's more "I Consider Music" than "I Love Music"
― Limoncello Carlin (The stickman from the hilarious "xkcd" comics), Saturday, February 7, 2009 1:32 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I dunno, if you're gonna strip music down to some sort of metallic carcass that we can all quantify it, at least do it via musicology, because then we can learn something from it. Otherwise ILX threads start to resemble Malcolm Gladwell's notebooks, and that's not something anyone needs.
― Limoncello Carlin (The stickman from the hilarious "xkcd" comics), Saturday, February 7, 2009 1:35 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah agreed, and I kind of turned away from ILM (I was there before ILE) because it got all listy and .xls and weird, in parts, I mean I dig why people do that kind of thing (bf football scores and etc) but... is it a male thing? Not stirring, curious.
― one art, please (Trayce), Saturday, February 7, 2009 1:35 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The thing is, I think people misunderstand the "statto" aspect of sports scores, because when my coworker correctly recites the birthday of every single Fulham first team squad player, or my uncle can remember the scorers in every single Northampton Town match since 1960-odd, there's usually a sense of "God, I'm awful to have dedicated so much of my brain to this, but whatever". I don't get that sense of... realisation that all that effort could be used towards something more useful when it's applied to music.
qf Robin Carmody (old ILX reference there)
― Limoncello Carlin (The stickman from the hilarious "xkcd" comics), Saturday, February 7, 2009 1:39 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i honestly thought this was an interesting/enlightening set of posts by our man Dom, and felt that leaving them languish in the o_O thread ghetto would be a shame.

thoughts?

(mods: feel free to lock/delete thread at Dom's/Trayce's behest.)

when Chuck Eddy used to just post spin numbers for Radio Disney tracks as a thread

Yeah, you guys are real deep thinkers all right. But when did I ever do this? (Maybe you dreamed it?)

ILM in crisis part VI

it was kogan who did that tbf

Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

Oh, I see. And Kogan never went on the "analyze" any of that music subsequently in that thread apparently, right?

Bosko Balaban Stats For Season

Name Bosko Balaban
Team Aston Villa
Total Appearances 0
Starts 0
Substituted 0
Total Minutes Played 0
Avg Minutes Played Per Start 0
Goals 0
Avg Goal Mins When Starting 0.0
Avg Mins Played/Goal Scored 0
Goals Scored As Sub 0
Number of Bookings 0
Total Booking Minutes 0
Avg Bookings Per Start 0
Number of Red Cards 0
Total Red Card Minutes 0
Avg Red Cards Per Start 0

Please help me to distinguish between Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy.

kinda feeling what dom's getting at but at the same time, sometimes you feel like discussing things earnestly, sometimes you feel like zinging, sometimes you feel like c&p-ing some number-heavy facts and figures.

and sometimes you miss the time when talking about music was more fun than talking about talking about music. but maybe that time never existed, i can't remember. anyway.

^^^^^^^YES^^^^^^^

The thing is, I think people misunderstand the "statto" aspect of sports scores, because when my coworker correctly recites the birthday of every single Fulham first team squad player, or my uncle can remember the scorers in every single Northampton Town match since 1960-odd, there's usually a sense of "God, I'm awful to have dedicated so much of my brain to this, but whatever". I don't get that sense of... realisation that all that effort could be used towards something more useful when it's applied to music.
qf Robin Carmody (old ILX reference there)

i think this is quite unfair? or-- i think this is quite a wilful representation of people's motives: that if you can sense a disclaimer, a 'okay i'm pretty uncool for knowing this but', it's okay, but if you don't get the sense that someone thinks their attitude to what they're interested in is something to be ashamed of, they're unconscionably awful. Might it not be worse? If you really have the sense that what you know about, how you know about it, is totally pointless and shameful, then your whole relationship to what you're interested in develops this passive-aggressive self-disclaiming attitude.

I guess the Carmody example is about a kind of lack of proportion - this one record IS the winter of discontent - and the fkogan-esque 'here are some figures' is kind of demanding that everyone else do the footwork of connecting the stats to a wider view? So they're opposite extremes. Posting figures you've copied from elsewhere means you haven't wasted brainspace memorising them, you're just bringing them there in the hope that a bunch of people will understand something from them. For some people the process of working that out is fun!

& for a lot of us sometimes what is fun about music is lists requiring superficial but comprehensive general knowledge: otherwise why would there be so many 'name records which have a red cover and are not about communism'-type threads? Or indeed the 'favourite pieces of music trivia that are 100% false' thread, which I like a great deal more, but it depends on the same kind of knowledge, only this time in 'remember this artist? here is a joke statement about them' form. That thread is basically talking about talking about music - it's not about what's fun in the music, it's about what's fun in our knowledge about the music. When dudes get all 'lol britpop' they're not talking about what made britpop so important to them that they learnt a bunch of stuff about it, they're talking about the fact that they can still remember a bunch of longpigs song titles and that's pretty funny.

ugh tl;dr sorry.

and the fkogan-esque 'here are some figures' is kind of demanding that everyone else do the footwork of connecting the stats to a wider view?

I'm not sure about this--whenever I've seen Frank (or Xhuxk) cut & paste anything from a chart it's been more along the lines of "here are some songs I've never heard that seem to be getting airplay, has anyone else heard them?" or "some songs I like seem to be doing well on the charts" not a demand that people break out their calculators.

oh okay! tbh i never spent very much time on rolling teenpop, so it's entirely possible i'm misrepresenting.

i am always confused by the handwringing about what other people are doing on threads and how wrong or weird it is when it doesnt affect you. i mean really who gives a fuck? if you dont care about last.fm or would smash or lingbert or the metal chart thread or ILF why are you poring over it looking for how its being done wrong. conversely if you do care about whatever that is, do something useful like post in the goddamn thread and quit whining.

you realise this statement mayl be used against you in a future court of internet law, right?

not zinging anyone here doms post up top is pretty rational and is actually about something worthwhile because its talking about sort of a distinction in methods of critical reaction. the ones that dont make sense to me are all the "OMG LOOK AT WHAT THOSE FREAKS ON BLAH BLAH BLAH ARE DOING/STILL DOING NOW WTF HOW CAN IT BE POSSIBLE!!11!!11!!111" and thats it.

xpost heh yeah but i actually really dont get it because really other than funny shit if i dont care about something i just dont care, you know

i actually mostly agree with you but the human zoo is always endlessly fascinating what you're really decrying is shitty pile-on posts yeah?

truth be told as a mod my feelings are probably more extreme than most because i end up having to read lots of stuff i could care less about and maybe im just bitter about that.

xpost yeah exactly. i totally get that moment of complete o_O wtf, its the weird need for a bunch of other people to jump in and go "omg me too!" because no matter what the original problem is nothing is more boring than a bunch of people collectively OTMing themselves in a row.

jj, i posted the last.fm thread link to o_O. i did this because i think it's odd. i wasn't poring over it, or wringing my hands or having trouble getting to sleep because i was worried about it. apparently posting = whining for you, and now you're imagining things in ALL CAPS, which is perhaps a clue that you've been a mod for too long. like you say, who gives a fuck. they're not doing anyone any harm. maybe treat this thread the same way.

dude no need to get defensive im stuck at work and im bored and this also is not at all about any one thread in particular so chill out.

haha, i wish i was as chilled as you on this thread.

and also like NV said it isn't the moment of WTF at all, anyone who posts here that doesnt have those moments several times a day prob isnt paying enough attention. it is the obsessive repetitive "wow those people doing things i dont understand are continuing to do things i dont understand". im just saying that if you go back to a thread to see if there is more stuff that you hate going on, it is normally time to ask yourself "why am i still reading this?". its that whole taking another sip to see if the milk is really spoiled vibe that confuses me.

xpost

actually, caek, your last.fm posts were probably the mildest examples of wtf? on the o_O thread. a certain other poster who has posted more than enough on the actual l/f thread himself, lolling about the clueless jerks therein, on the other hand were quite wtf? themselves.

xp

or something like that.

ehhh lets leave the last.fm thread out of it though, this stuff happens to all sorts of threads. sorry to derail, i guess what im really thinking is that outside of actual analysis of methods of criticism, i dont understand why anyone really cares how someone else parses info and deals with music/whatever unless they are in direct communication with them. maybe i just run across so many crazy people in real life that i dont understand why people bother to deeply analyze the craziness of dudes personas on the internet.

Whereas I work with aspies for a living so it ain't no thing.

hahaha

you're thinking... "These are just numbers... there's not even analysis of numbers here, it's just numbers". It's more "I Consider Music" than "I Love Music"

the fkogan-esque 'here are some figures' is kind of demanding that everyone else do the footwork of connecting the stats to a wider view?

You know, I just want to reiterate what horseshit this is, given the fact that the thread apparently being referred to had as much "analysis" and "connecting with a wider view" on it than just about any other ILM thread in recent memory. And that Kogan did more "footwork" as far explaining why he loved music than almost any ILM poster has since.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/Chinatown.jpg

Last night I pulled out a Smokey Robinson collection to see if it was true that Stevie Wonder co-wrote "Tears of a Clown". I was so inspired by the music that I listened to it straight through two times in a row.

I thought about searching and bumping a Miracles thread to express how much fun I was having, or maybe starting my first poll to justify talking about "I Don't Blame You at All". Or go to the 1970 thread and make a comment like, "I wish I didn't know Stevie Wonder was involved with "Tears" because that somehow diminishes it for me."

Wasn't sure what to do, so I just kept drinking and most likely posted something embarrassing before I fell asleep.

lol mod joek time?

"I wish I didn't know Stevie Wonder was involved with "Tears" because that somehow diminishes it for me."

Within a hair's-breadth of a SB.

xhuxk, I'm sorry, my wording was poor: i didn't mean a one-way 'i have posted some figures: now everyone else should tell me what they mean', but that it seemed to me that the posting of figures was done in order to start a process of working out what they mean. My point was that the demand isn't just on the poster of figures to explain what the figures mean, but also on the people they're talking to. I did not mean to imply that Kogan did no footwork: I was trying to explain why I found the Kogan and Carmody examples to be mutually contradictory.

or at least very different things.

i think Dom meant to imply that both of those examples (+ others no doubt) are products of the same "pathology", call it nerditis maybe? but then maybe he should come here and explain what he was getting at himself?

dom's post is kinda interesting, but it's hard to take too seriously because dom can never decide himself how "serious" he wants to be about anything -- he sort of has a horror of it, but conversely also wants to be the smartest guy in the room, the basic hangup of the irony-not-irony generation. it sets up a game of always having to figure out whether someone means what they say about anything, which to me is twice as tiring as any po-faced psycho-socio-cultural analysis or ocd data-crunching.

"I wish I didn't know Stevie Wonder was involved with "Tears" because that somehow diminishes it for me."

not a big stevie wonder guy but wtf @ this.

Yeah agreed, and I kind of turned away from ILM (I was there before ILE) because it got all listy and .xls and weird, in parts, I mean I dig why people do that kind of thing (bf football scores and etc) but... is it a male thing? Not stirring, curious.

this is the most interesting part of the exchange that kicks off this thread to me - not so much for obv. J0hn D. freshman gender studies stuff (my wife's a scientist, I'm not real sure stats & interest in same code as gendered) but for the before/after binary of ilm going "listy" from something else. which I think did happen - it was always happening, lots of music ppl are really into lists & charts (obviously) - but the introduction of polls kinda kicked it into overdrive - there're poll threads with interesting discussion on them, I'm not Draconian "stop the polls" dude, but even the best ones die pretty quick once the results are in, which is completely weird. it's like any discussion however interesting is, for many, incidental to the more important Establishing Of The Numbers - "cool, we have a winner, whew, glad we can file that." It's like: I can dig charts and numbers and data but they're always much less the point than trying to understand people's reactions to the music they hear, finding out something about that, seeing where the thoughts lead.

tl;dr polls still suck & poll-haters were always right about their pernicious effect on ilm

I was never a fan of the poll threads -- I understand why they exist and as John notes good discussion can sometimes occur on them but yeah, they're ultimately a bit dispiriting. I would have thought differently at one point, doubtless -- it's obviously not like I've never enjoyed or drawn up lists and rankings and the like! But lately it's all struck me more and more as a 'eh, who cares' thing -- and that's partially of interest because while I've liked to have thought of myself over the years as someone who followed his own impulses, it's more accurate to say I've followed my own biases, and as much as I don't want to be shaped by a larger outside quantifying measure, it's driven me more than I want to admit.

otoh, if there's some particular album or artist you're suddenly interested in talking about and there hasn't been any discussion of it on ilm in a few years, a poll is a more reliable way to kick up some new discussion than just reviving some old thread with a post or two; thread revivals often sink away even faster than polls. at least with a poll sometimes you can get a few days' worth of discourse going, which is maybe all yr really looking for.

musically's trax poll reminded me of how great old skool ones are. there is some quality discussion mixed amongst the lols and zings on that thread.

t's like any discussion however interesting is, for many, incidental to the more important Establishing Of The Numbers

I try to see it as a case of the poll serving as a door crasher to stir up fresh discussion about an album/band. It can feel as though there are multiple C/D & S/D for virtually every band in existence, and there was a perception that endlessly reviving those threads to re-start those old discussions started to feel like boring repetition. But now, somebody can start a thread about a band that already has like ten threads in the archive, because everything old feels new again thanks to the poll.

Aren't we starting polls because we've used up "Classic or Dud?" and "Taking Sides" threads and want to continue the discussion on a fresh page? I don't give a damn either way. Poll threads can be interesting when someone chooses to discuss why they picked one song over others. Some posters are better than others: if the album's at least good I find it almost impossible to pick one song. But I like following the discussion.

(and I see NoTime made my points for me)

er, xpost with tipsy mothra as well, who wrote basically the same thing as we did

My favorite polls ran in the summer of 2007, when xeddy, swoods, KJB, Eric H, and I, among others, posted really thrilling exchanges on the Pazz & Jop winners. You don't always get that level of participation and thought, but one always hopes.

the only thing that's really annoying about polls is all the 'omg how could everyone not vote for MY fav [whatever]' posts that kill conversation dead when the results come in.

Everyone bitches about the rolling threads, but those are the ones where the high-level discussion seems to be happening lately.

but those particular polls--started by i don't know whom--were exactly the sorta thing that inspired Dom & co.'s ire back then, as i recall. some like, some don't. big fuckin' deal!

xp to Alfred

poll threads are quick and easy for the casual reader. rolling threads involve a lot of backtracking, though yeah discussion tends to be better there. some folk just ain't 'ardkore enuff

the best rolling threads (metal & country for me) are brilliant, full stop.

xp

Everyone bitches about the rolling threads, but those are the ones where the high-level discussion seems to be happening lately.

Especially if "lately" means "for the past five years."

Yeah, pretty much. Although I suppose you could make a causal link between the "drying up" of high-level discussions on non-rolling threads and the really knowledgeable people in certain genres confining themselves to said rolling threads.

I try to see it as a case of the poll serving as a door crasher to stir up fresh discussion about an album/band. It can feel as though there are multiple C/D & S/D for virtually every band in existence, and there was a perception that endlessly reviving those threads to re-start those old discussions started to feel like boring repetition. But now, somebody can start a thread about a band that already has like ten threads in the archive, because everything old feels new again thanks to the poll.

― NoTimeBeforeTime, Saturday, February 7, 2009 2:20 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ this. also interesting and creative poll ideas are i think as key as interesting and creative thread ideas, it's all in how you use the format.

but those particular polls--started by i don't know whom

We salute you, JN$OT! And we don't hear enough from swoods.

there're poll threads with interesting discussion on them...but even the best ones die pretty quick once the results are in, which is completely weird.

Not weird in the least. The discussion has already happened. And the fact that the poll threads die quickly after the results are in is evidence that number crunching, stats, whatnot have much less, if anything, to do with polls than people think.

we don't hear enough from swoods

Agreed, though I've been happy to see him pop back up here a few times in recent weeks. And if you haven't, y'all should maybe consider checking out his blog project, where he's been going back and re-listening alphabetically to every single that Greil Marcus recommends in the apppendix in the back of Stranded. This has been pretty great so far:

http://sm-woods.livejournal.com/