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Is Robert Christgau the worst, most overblown popular music critic in existence?


bikehorn

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1. It's not music, it's cleaverly disguised white noise manned by annoying fanboi's who have no idea on what basis to critisize music except what pitchfork tells them to listen to. Cause pitchfork is God.


2. "indie" and "hipster" genre's are the least original thing I have ever been forced to listen to, or experimented with, every band sounds almost identical at points. At least in metal theres 10000 sub genre's, at elast jazz has different eras, indie's just not original enough to have anything more than clean, slgithly out of tune guitars doing a lot of slides and boring whiny vocals.


3. The real music community are people that can accurately judge music for what it's worth, and are msuicians. I have yet to meet anyone i consider part of this community that doesn't frind hipster/indie music a complete waste of time musically. This applies equally from people I play in Orchestras with to guitar teachers, to the guy that runs the Bass store.


4. I don't mind them being different, when you have to put up with legions of society touting Radiohead as gods and people e-felating Sufjan Stevens with their own pathetic attempts at looking smart on the internet I'm going to call a spade a spade. Man up, delete that idea {censored} from your computer, break all those CD's, and get some real music (which is effectively any other genre other than hipster or indie)!


5. This thing called Neo'Folk is also not a genre, the only neo-folk worth listening to would be folk metal. Jonanna Newsom should give up music.

 

Debating with complete idiots is much harder than debating with graduate students.

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Having a greater selection of music to choose from does give you more influences...

 

Dude, it takes a lot to get a band to be heralded as the next best thing. And plus, that is a rather {censored}ty sweeping generalization to loop all the "hipster bands" into, imo. Anyways, the indie genre really came out of the DIY mentality. They didn't want to sign to a big name label, they wanted to keep making music even if that meant not having a jet. Most of these bands arise out of guys just getting together and making music in an apartment, that's how my bands came together. They don't have stars in their eyes. They work from the ground up, but never really aspire to be more than local heroes. It seems to me that the people who want to be big time rockers are the guys who set out to do so. I mean, sure, these guys need to make money. They have to market, that's part of their job.

 

So does greater selection mean better quality? I say no.

 

The education thing is an apples/oranges argument, so I won't argue it. Basically, I say yes. There's a {censored}ing hell of a lot more going on, and that hell of a lot more music is becoming a hell of a lot more accessible to people like you and i vis a vis the internet. The internet is the most powerful marketing tool the capitalized world has ever seen, ESPECIALLY with music. If it weren't for the internet, no dice I would've discovered like 75% of my musical collection. But instead, I have a really big musical library and it's seriously changed my life for the better. But that's not to say it's all good. It's pick and choose really. It just boils down to subjectivity, that's all. That's all. But like we said in the Boss pedals thread, there's some good, some great, some bad, some absolute {censored}. So this, in my view, is a moot point.

 

The point I'm trying to make is that the mainstream/left of centre music in the mid 90s was a hell of a lot more progressive and diverse than the same equivalent now.

 

I don't know about that dude. You could make the argument that music is becoming more and more influenced by dance music or electronica, but there is still a lot going on. A lot. Like the neo-folk thing. Music today is constantly expanding in all directions at an ever increasing rate.

 

I'm not going to debate those this band that band points as there's no way that I can convince you of them. Subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity.

 

The rise of technology and the ease with which one can create a track means you don't need a great understanding of music to produce some fairly sophisticated sounding stuff...

 

That musical/production prowess will always be the deciding factor between mediocre, good, great, and amazing music. After all, if it sounds good to YOUR ears, what does it matter?

 

What do you mean by the "retraction" of the dance scene?

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I don't think he's arguing against independent music and DIY.

 

I think he's just saying "music used to be better."

 

I think it is a slightly narrow way to view things but it isn't far from the truth.

 

The 50's had countless rock and roll and rockabilly musicians

 

The 60's had the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Pink Floyd, countless psychedelic garage bands

 

The 70's had Bowie, Iggy Pop solo, T. Rex, Led Zeppelin, WIRE, The Clash, Roxy Music, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Television, the Ramones and countless punk and post-punk bands

 

The 80's had Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, Rites of Spring, Minor Threat, Big Black, Naked Raygun, the Misfits, Scratch Acid, Slint, The Pixies, the Jesus and Mary Chain and countless bands on SST, Homestead, Touch and Go, K Records, and Dischord.

 

The 90's had Pavement, Polvo, Sonic Youth, Shellac, The Jesus Lizard, My Bloody Valentine, Guided By Voices, Don Caballero, Modest Mouse when they were good, and a ton of stuff.

 

The 00's:

Mission of Burma reunited

Sonic Youth

Deerhoof

TV on the Radio

Polysics

Shellac

Liars

 

Shellac was active in the 90's, Mission of Burma the 80's (and late 70's too actually), and Sonic Youth in the 80's and 90's.

 

Take out those bands and you have the best band of the 00's being Polysics. Now as much as I love Polysics, they don't compare to Pavement, Polvo, Sonic Youth, The Stooges, etc.

 

Of course there are thousands of bands releasing stuff every year, so I'm probably overlooking a few that are of that caliber.

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So did American settlers in the West, my friend. There still are laws on the books from the past supporting the murdering of natives in a few states out there (of course ignored for the better today, like the "6 or more Indians together is considered a raiding party and it is legal to shoot them.").


Sorry for hijacking, I just get ticked when everyone points at Europe for the "command and conquer" attitude when it really occurs everywhere in history. Remember Atilla the Hun? Oh, and look up "Gnadenhutten" on Wikipedia. There's something you don't hear about in history books.


Alright, I'm done.

 

 

Oh i'm quite aware that invading of other people's land has gone on throughout history and continues today by people all over the world... by "Europeans," i meant people of European decent, which includes the settlers who pushed west, and that's got to be one of the most dramatic examples of invasion in history... while colonialism is to a great extent over in African and Asia, people of European decent still control North America and Australia... though, I don't know much about Asian or African history, so there may be larger examples there that didn't involve Europeans that aren't coming to my mind... ok, back to the music debate...

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Oh i'm quite aware that invading of other people's land has gone on throughout history and continues today by people all over the world... by "Europeans," i meant people of European decent, which includes the settlers who pushed west, and that's got to be one of the most dramatic examples of invasion in history... while colonialism is to a great extent over in African and Asia, people of European decent still control North America and Australia... though, I don't know much about Asian or African history, so there may be larger examples there that didn't involve Europeans that aren't coming to my mind... ok, back to the music debate...

 

People are brutal to each other everywhere.

 

Read about the things that warring native American tribes did to each other. They'd do absolutely brutal things.

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Debating with complete idiots is much harder than debating with graduate students.

 

This isn't a debate in case you haven't worked it out. If you like indie your opinion is not valid hence I do not recognise you as human, therefore you cannot debate this topic, I have already won any 'debate'.

 

 

Indie is not a reference to independant labels, rather the monotonous, terrible attempts at music also known as hipster, you will know it and hate it when you hear it, if you don't do the world a favor and hang yourself.

 

Arcadesonfire - you officially forfeited your membership to the human club.

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This isn't a debate in case you haven't worked it out. If you like indie your opinion is not valid hence I do not recognise you as human, therefore you cannot debate this topic, I have already won any 'debate'.



Indie is not a reference to independant labels, rather the monotonous, terrible attempts at music also known as hipster, you will know it and hate it when you hear it, if you don't do the world a favor and hang yourself.


Arcadesonfire - you officially forfeited your membership to the human club.

 

:rolleyes: In designating indie as hipster and hipster as somehow inherently bad, without explaining either why they're connected or why either is necessarily bad, you're not really coming off as two clever, or even making much of a coherent argument. Hipster is a stupid term that was revived by an ad agency in the '90s to sell something or other. Lots of indie music is good. Lots is bad. Lots is mediocre. There's a hell of a lot of it out there.

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This isn't a debate in case you haven't worked it out. If you like indie your opinion is not valid hence I do not recognise you as human, therefore you cannot debate this topic, I have already won any 'debate'.



Indie is not a reference to independant labels, rather the monotonous, terrible attempts at music also known as hipster, you will know it and hate it when you hear it, if you don't do the world a favor and hang yourself.


Arcadesonfire - you officially forfeited your membership to the human club.

 

:rolleyes:

 

Indie doesn't classify any one kind of music. You can be indie rap or indie metal. Around the turn of the millennium it started being used as a genre title to define a certain sound. Which is ridiculous. Punk didn't necessarily mean bands that played fast power chords at the end of the 70's. It also embraced bands like Television, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, DEVO, and a bunch of other stuff that sounded nothing like the Sex Pistols.

 

All of these following bands are considered Indie:

 

[YOUTUBE]150yyU3i73o[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]jdMDcG3zAEI[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]_PVB7TqS9Gw[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]2T4BsnXmJaI[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]DVl-doNlOsQ[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]73qBnuzrjx0[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]zN9x6zckn18[/YOUTUBE]

 

They musically all sound very different from each other. And none of those bands sound like the corporately raped version of indie.

 

Dashboard, Death Cab, and Postal Service do not define the sound of indie rock no matter what you may hear.

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:rolleyes:
In designating indie as hipster and hipster as somehow inherently bad, without explaining either why they're connected or why either is necessarily bad, you're not really coming off as two clever, or even making much of a coherent argument. Hipster is a stupid term that was revived by an ad agency in the '90s to sell something or other. Lots of indie music is good. Lots is bad. Lots is mediocre. There's a hell of a lot of it out there.

 

It's all bad, sorry for not coming off as TOO intelligent, this is the internet, intelligence is irrelevant. I don't care if it's a stupid term, if it communicates what I'm trying to communicate than it works, if it doesn't someones comprehensino is failing or they've never been aurally raped by the experience that is indie/hipster music.

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:rolleyes:
In designating indie as hipster and hipster as somehow inherently bad, without explaining either why they're connected or why either is necessarily bad, you're not really coming off as two clever, or even making much of a coherent argument. Hipster is a stupid term that was revived by an ad agency in the '90s to sell something or other. Lots of indie music is good. Lots is bad. Lots is mediocre. There's a hell of a lot of it out there.

 

Totally. Hipster is a stereotype for young fashionable people who like indie rock, whole foods, ipods, H+M, vans shoes, have liberal leaning politics, like ironic humor, etc.

 

It has a negative connotation, even when used by fans of alternative/underground/independent music.

 

I'm just a tall guy with a beard and messy hair. I like music that I find to be artistic and moving- whether it is rock music or classical music. I generally like artsy, dissonant, noisey stuff, and abrasive stuff but I have an appreciation for pop as well and I enjoy bands like Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, and Polvo that can pull off both. I think organic food is a pretty good deal, I'm liberal, I like Wes Anderson, Woody Allen, Michel Gondry, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and Spike Jonze movies. But I also like Kubrick, the Coen brothers, Hitchcock, and Sergeo Leone films. I think Bill Murray is a really good actor. I think Scarlett Johannsen is hot. I'm poor. I play noisy fuzzed out guitar in alternate tunings. I like cities. I think H+M clothes is made like crap, and I don't dress metro. I wear very drab clothing- dark colors. I've probably spent 2 hours total in my whole life shopping for clothes. I think Pabst Blue Ribbon is god awful and I refuse to drink the stuff. Trucker hats are retarded, and I hate Ashton Kutcher. I feel delay is an incredibly over-rated effect. I thought Little Miss Sunshine was a god-awful movie. I liked Juno and Me, You, and Everyone We Know. I like foreign film. Amelie, Run Lola Run, City of Lost Children, Goodbye Lenin!, Alphaville, Seven Samurai. I like sports. I own several hockey jerseys- Detroit Red Wings, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Chicago Blackhawks. My glasses are not your tortoise-shell rimmed and very Ward Cleaverish as opposed to the stereotypical Rivers Cuomoish. I find Bukowski, Dostoevsky, Roald Dahl, and Phillip K. Dick to be intriguing writers. I don't dye my hair, I don't have any piercings, I don't have any tattoos. I'm a carnivore. I'm a privately practicing Christian and draw my philosophies heavily from Descartes.

 

Am I a hipster? I don't think so. You might. I do what I like, not what I think is fashionable. If I wanted to be fashionable I'm completely barking up the wrong tree. Most of the people I know are punk/hardcore or into math rock.

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It's all bad, sorry for not coming off as TOO intelligent, this is the internet, intelligence is irrelevant. I don't care if it's a stupid term, if it communicates what I'm trying to communicate than it works, if it doesn't someones comprehensino is failing or they've never been aurally raped by the experience that is indie/hipster music.

 

...it doesn't communicate what you're trying to say. To the videos above, I'd add

[YOUTUBE]

[/YOUTUBE]

 

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA1DoMNL3GA[/YOUTUBE]

 

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-r8HWri41s[/YOUTUBE]

 

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ucN4DActxA&feature=related[/YOUTUBE]

 

[YOUTUBE]

[/YOUTUBE]
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It's all bad, sorry for not coming off as TOO intelligent, this is the internet, intelligence is irrelevant. I don't care if it's a stupid term, if it communicates what I'm trying to communicate than it works, if it doesn't someones comprehensino is failing or they've never been aurally raped by the experience that is indie/hipster music.

 

You're totally coming off as someone who doesn't know anything about underground/alternative/independent music and are looking like a total dumbass.

 

There is NO sound that defines indie music, or the music that your hipsters listen to.

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Really? Vile? All they sound like to me are a bunch level headed kids having fun making pop music. I don't see what's so bad about that. They're not wallowing in self pity, pretension or shallow materialism, and actually use a {censored}ing mellotron in their single, these all go in the plus column for them. They're not great, but they're not the sort of things that make me question the fate of Americas youth or intellect.

 

 

Ooooh, they use a mellotron. So did {censored}ing Oasis. Using a mellotron does not make you fabulous.

 

I have no problem with the fact that they're level-headed pop kids who don't wallow in self-pity. I'd question their pretension level given some of their lyrics but I'll let them off. What I object to is that they've raided African music for a few things and lost all the vitality of African music. I don't claim to be an African music specialist but I've got plenty of stuff that I found through listening to John Peel and it absolutely kicks the {censored} out of Vampire Weekend.

 

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/da/68292

 

Is it just Ezra (vox) who
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Dude, it takes a lot to get a band to be heralded as the next best thing. And plus, that is a rather {censored}ty sweeping generalization to loop all the "hipster bands" into, imo. Anyways, the indie genre really came out of the DIY mentality. They didn't want to sign to a big name label, they wanted to keep making music even if that meant not having a jet. Most of these bands arise out of guys just getting together and making music in an apartment, that's how my bands came together. They don't have stars in their eyes. They work from the ground up, but never really aspire to be more than local heroes. It seems to me that the people who want to be big time rockers are the guys who set out to do so. I mean, sure, these guys need to make money. They have to market, that's part of their job.

 

Really?!? It takes a lot?!? The Strokes, Suede, Lily Allen, even Vampire Weekend... one of the comic things that has happened since blogs and the online media came into this world is that the US now gets bands hyped up in the same way we've had for ages in Britain in classic NME/Melody Maker fashion. I'm not sweeping all the 'hipster' bands into one little corner. People who know me know I don't categorise. There's two categories of music with me: Music I like and music I don't like. I don't care on your background, your aesthetic, any of those kind of things. I simply judge the music. So I can state that I feel most of the hip up and coming bands are fairly terrible and lack something, perhaps a certain passion.

 

 

The education thing is an apples/oranges argument, so I won't argue it. Basically, I say yes. There's a {censored}ing hell of a lot more going on, and that hell of a lot more music is becoming a hell of a lot more accessible to people like you and i vis a vis the internet. The internet is the most powerful marketing tool the capitalized world has ever seen, ESPECIALLY with music. If it weren't for the internet, no dice I would've discovered like 75% of my musical collection. But instead, I have a really big musical library and it's seriously changed my life for the better. But that's not to say it's all good. It's pick and choose really. It just boils down to subjectivity, that's all. That's all. But like we said in the Boss pedals thread, there's some good, some great, some bad, some absolute {censored}. So this, in my view, is a moot point.

 

Yes yes, the Internet is powerful. I know all that. You've used it to discover new music. It's inspired you to look further. With a lot of people, it doesn't. They'll go and listen to Paul Simon and think 'Wow, that's African pop' and then not go and look deeper. With all this information out there, people should be finding their own identities. Instead we're stuck in an 1980s revival that's brought back Knight Rider, countless {censored}e metal bands and a glut of vile consumerism and financial practices that threaten to {censored} up several economies. In the Uk at least we have the {censored}e that is Nu-Rave heralded by NME and Klaxons, some rather limp indie, grime seems to have stalled and one of our biggest sellers, Leona Lewis, does nasty 80s ballads. For all the informaiton and new music out there, the re-invention cycle is getting shorter and shorter.

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know about that dude. You could make the argument that music is becoming more and more influenced by dance music or electronica, but there is still a lot going on. A lot. Like the neo-folk thing. Music today is constantly expanding in all directions at an ever increasing rate.


I'm not going to debate those this band that band points as there's no way that I can convince you of them. Subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity.

 

I already have made the assertion that electronica has influenced guitar music far more than guitar music has influenced electronica. The like of Caribou and Panda Bear are electronica guys who have been influenced by more traditional pop and the results are fabulous. The guitar bands who take on a sort of dance aesthetic... generally not so good. In terms of diversity... I don't know about the US but I imagine it's similar to Britain in that the major record labels have slashed their rosters, cut out a lot of the more esoteric and fringe acts, and most of them have ploughed cash into the big mainstream targets ie. singing talent shows and sub-Amy Winehouse vocal acrobatics. Music as a whole is expanding, agreed.

 

Subjectivity on bands: c'mon, you can't claim Belle & Sebastian are hispters. I heard them on Mark Radcliffe's radio show years ago. On that show, you could write to them via snail mail, send a cheque and get a copy of Tigermilk.

 

 

 

What do you mean by the "retraction" of the dance scene?

 

Well, the fact that dance records aren't automatically top of the charts here in the UK, that places like Ministry of Sound don't have the clout they used to have, that 80's revival bollocks like School Disco trumped a lot of the clubs, the closure in 2002 of Cream in Liverpool etc etc etc. Dance music undoubtedly got caught because it pushed itself as a brand way too much. A lot of people I know turned away from dance music because it was full of DJs who thought their name meant something big, clubs chasing the cash and people flashing too much ego. It's no surprise that the kids growing up on council estates didn't get into dance but preferred grime and ragga and whatnot. Dance music has been overtaken by the global rise in R n' B in Britain.

 

http://brandfailures.blogspot.com/2007/05/tired-brands-cream-nightclub.html

 

 

That musical/production prowess will always be the deciding factor between mediocre, good, great, and amazing music. After all, if it sounds good to YOUR ears, what does it matter?

 

It matters if your standards are low, the standards of your audience are low and the standards of the hype machine are low. That's why mediocre tracks can be heralded as wonderful. Take someone like Richard Hawley, a dude who gets all manner of plaudits coming his way about being like the bastard Love child of Scott Walker, Burt Bacharach and countless orchestral pop singers. It's {censored}. It's fairly predictable, tongue in cheek ballad pop. The expectations of the listening public are low so an artist doesn't have to stretch themselves. Someone like Cat Power falls straight into that area for me. I've never worked out how and why she gets the praise she does.

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This isn't a debate in case you haven't worked it out. If you like indie your opinion is not valid hence I do not recognise you as human, therefore you cannot debate this topic, I have already won any 'debate'.



Indie is not a reference to independant labels, rather the monotonous, terrible attempts at music also known as hipster, you will know it and hate it when you hear it, if you don't do the world a favor and hang yourself.


Arcadesonfire - you officially forfeited your membership to the human club.

 

Yay! Finally, I'm alternative! I'm the alternative to a human race whose members murder one another and steal from one another, each of whom clings to his or her own ways and culture in violent opposition to others. Thank you for validating me.

 

But honestly, you're either just joking now, pushing the envelope for kicks, or you're purposefully illustrating how people dehumanize people of another taste or culture in order that they don't have to consider their arguments, right?

 

Anyway, what kind of music are you into?

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  • 11 years later...
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Guys we should agree that music critics help us analyze music differently(and better), and they definitely help us open our minds, as well as discover tons of music. 

Although I don't particularly like single music critics, I think they're still important to music, musicians, and listeners. Critics all have their qualities and faults, their objectivity and biases. Personally, I think aggregate review sites like Sputnikmusic are better, because although everyone can have different biases and {censored}, and mostly unbiased and constructive reviewers/listeners. Plus, the opinions are compiled into one score which is a great thing about these websites(although of course it compiles all opinion, whether constructive or badly formed, and additionally, majority does not mean everything). 

Basically we are too harsh against everything and not very constructive in this thread.

Also music has objective sides as well as subjective sides.

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