Why are rock music threads on ILM so boring?

Hey this band has a new album
I like it
Eh I don't like it
OK

Feel like all the ILM threads on new rock music are pretty short and cut-and-dried. Meanwhile the hip-hop and pop threads, while more contentious, have much more discussion about the actual music, what works and what doesn't, why people like things, etc. I don't even really listen to a ton of hip-hop but I read a lot of those threads because I like to read involved discussions about music.

So why is this?
a) rock music is boring and old and has been talked about a lot already
b) the people who always post about rap and pop have more to say/like arguing more
c) none of this is true, there are good rock music discussions on ILM
d) something else

I think it may be a sign that rock is no longer at the forefront of cutting edge popular music. I have heard murmurings of such things among the more forward-thinking ilxors.

are you including metal in this formulation

so a) basically

I don't know, am I? I delve into the metal thread(s) occasionally and generally it seems like lists of bands/albums that people like without much in-depth discussion but I don't read them consistently so I may be missing interesting stuff

Often not boring:

Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

(Also about old music, so it may support some of your points.)

lots of the threads about older rock are full of lols and/or great critical reappraisals etc

new rock? eh, I dunno. it's such a diversified genre at this point, with basically no wider cultural impact, I'm not sure what there is to say besides stuff like "it's great/it's terrible/this internal rhyming scheme is TOTALLY STUPID etc"

seems like in re: to hip hop there are more "event" albums than rock these days, like, i don't know, Kanye. i'm a rock fan, i guess, but if there are "Event" rock albums in this day and age, i don't really care about them.

well the Chinese Democracy thread was pretty funny

so the problem is that the entirety of new rock music is boring?

no, just the posters

I don't know, am I? I delve into the metal thread(s) occasionally and generally it seems like lists of bands/albums that people like without much in-depth discussion but I don't read them consistently so I may be missing interesting stuff

I can see how the rolling thread, populated by crits getting advance copies, can be like that, but not always. Individual threads are definitely not like that. If you want big carcrash arguments like in the other threads you mentioned then read poll results threads!

agree to a point w/the notion that "rock" is diversified/fragmented to a point of having no real core fanbase who would identify as "rock fans"...but ILM has never really been a rock-centric board. I mean, this was "debate on rockism" central for many years, and though there does seem to be a lot of love for certain indie rock, and lots of proto-indie rock stuff from the 70s and 80s, I just think it's just a matter of not being the main music listening thing for most of the people who post here. For lack of a better term, I would classify ILM as being a board about pop music of various flavors-- and not just because I want to get called out for setting up a rock vs pop duality. ;)

However, maybe what I'm really saying is that straight out rock music doesn't really hold the same pop culture share as it used to. What if this place had been around in the 90s? Or better, what if there was an ILM in 1975? Would it have been a lot of "i just heard the craziest thing, and it was called DISCO!!" threads, or "TS: synths on The Joker vs DSotM"?

oh man to a point twice in 10 words

However, maybe what I'm really saying is that straight out rock music doesn't really hold the same pop culture share as it used to. What if this place had been around in the 90s? Or better, what if there was an ILM in 1975? Would it have been a lot of "i just heard the craziest thing, and it was called DISCO!!" threads, or "TS: synths on The Joker vs DSotM"?

^^^ding ding. A fair amount of people here like to ruminate on the larger implications of music - what it means for the culture at large, for the music's given genre, how it impacts the audience, it's place in the media landscape, etc. - and since rock currently doesn't have the sizable cultural cachet that really enables that kind of debate, conversations about it are sort of more restricted.

Yeah, in seriousness I think that there's just less cultural energy and critical excitement around rock music right now, like there's still good rock music being made and plenty of people who like it, but there's just not a feeling that it has the same significance it once did or that certain other genres do now. And I think that's doubly true around here as a result of all the rockism debates, "guitar bands are boring" threads, etc.

deej doesn't post in the rock threads

I think ILX in 1975 would not be very pro-Disco.

UNBAN PAUL EDWARD WAGEMANN

this isn't as good a clusterfuck thread as the one gr80 started

I never understood why people care about "cultural impact" or if an album is an "event". fuck that. If the music is great then that is all that matters. Whether it sells 100 copies or 10 million.

I don't think most posters here would make any overt claims about a particular album being an "event" or having "cultural impact", I just think that certain hip-hop and dance music has more of that feeling to it and in turn generates more excitement in discussions.

I never understood why people care about "cultural impact" or if an album is an "event". fuck that. If the music is great then that is all that matters.

does greatness exist in a vacuum

sometimes?

in space, no one can hear you rock

the vampire weekend thread was kind of a clusterfuck, as was the animal collective one

Yeah, that's basically the Now rock that people still argue about.

I don't think most posters here would make any overt claims about a particular album being an "event" or having "cultural impact"

I cant remember who it was, but I definitely recall seeing it mentioned a good few times on ILM the past few years. Almost certainly not on a rock thread though.

i guess i don't really buy that rap or dance music are inherently more exciting or innovative or whatever right now - rap has been around for like 25 years. obviously it's been progressing/changing and it still is, but if that's true, then I feel like rock music has to still be progressing/changing in some ways that are equally interesting. writing all this makes me feel like an old old man yelling at a cloud though so maybe you all have a point.

I think it was about Rihanna last year
xp

duh make that 35 years sorry

the vampire weekend thread was kind of a clusterfuck, as was the animal collective one

this is pretty emblematic by how wide the definition of "rock" is these days

emblematic OF

all the search results for "cultural event" on ILM come up with the Kanye thread, lol.

I don't know, Shakey, if you go back to the 60s, the range of what was called rock was already pretty broad.

this might be it The 2009 Magazine Albums Of The Year Thread For Posting Lists and Discussion.

Of course the Rihanna album's going to appeal and hold personal cache to many people, same as MPP, but they're still very specific niches

the rihanna niche is just that bit bigger than the other one, which is kind of what qualifies her album and its attendant campaign as an actual cultural event noticed by people who aren't necessarily invested in her

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 9 December 2009 15:26 (1 year ago)

I don't even know how you would currently define the genre of "rock". I made the point on some other thread that all pop music subgenres have more or less dissolved into one amorphously defined blob composed of the following elements: "hip hop" drum loop/pattern (altho hey for variety, sometimes a house beat), R&B crooning on the choruses, some rapping for the verses, and maybe a rock signifier or two like a distorted electric guitar. The consistency with which this formulation hits the charts - nominally as country, as R&B, as rap, or as rock, or just "teenpop" or whatever - is mind-boggling, even moreso since the template's been around since the early 90s. The stuff that gets released these days that can be considered a cultural "event" in any quantifiable way doesn't really belong to ANY genre for the most part, they're always this weird mishmash of people trying to show that they can do it all, with a million cameos/collaborations and a million different genre signifiers all tossed together.

xp

bill magill gets mad at ppl about black sabbath sometimes

maybe one thing is that hip hop and dance both seem to have valid "undergrounds" - artists that come out of nowhere but are doing something exciting that captures the imagination of a broader spectrum of listeners. rock underground seems more focused on being deliberately obscure/unlistenable and/or recycling their ideas of old rock sounds (and i like a lot of that stuff). you don't really hear many new young rock bands who seem interested in doing something different but at the same time appealing to a broader audience

and the dance underground nowadays isn't like that?

Xpost There's always BrokeNCYDE

I don't know, Shakey, if you go back to the 60s, the range of what was called rock was already pretty broad.

that doesn't mean it didn't get even broader.

what is "rock" about Animal Collective, for example?

i think part of it is that newer/pop/hiphop stuff tends to attract a lot of the ppl on here that are actively working as critics or bloggers or both, so more beef and long posts going back and forth

the classic rock threads tend to be just fans enthusing about stuff they like man blue oyster cult rules, right? yeah bro

Animal Collective are definitely not "rock" anymore.

otm yeah (to matt)

what is "rock" about Animal Collective, for example?

― fuckin magnates, why don't they work (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 14 December 2010 00:18 (43 seconds ago)

wite ppl

i dunno i haven't heard their latest stuff but i have sung tongs and that's kind of a hippie type folk rock bongo drum circle weirdo vibe to me

for the purposes of this thread, four middle class people from edinburgh or portland making tuneful synth based pop inspired by phil spector, timbaland and new order is probably 'rock'

you don't really hear many new young rock bands who seem interested in doing something different but at the same time appealing to a broader audience

I think in most cases "doing something different" with rock at this point basically means "does not appeal to a broader audience"

xp

People also have fun talking about outsized personalities who are all over the media like Kanye, and there aren't really many rockers like that these days -- also the ones who do exist are often annoyingly self-serious (Jack White, Bono, etc.)

why?
xpost

xac

closest thing i ciuld think of 'seem interested in doing something different but at the same time appealing to a broader audience' = the new puritans

who aren't exactly huge

I can't remember exactly what Animal Collective sound like, to be honest. But I remember them being sort of amorphously psychedelic, but in a way that seemed rooted in rock. Maybe I'm imagining this. I didn't especially like them, so I'm not enthusiastic about listening again for the sake of this argument.

also the ones who do exist are often annoyingly self-serious

lol unlike Kanye or Gaga right

holy shit @ "Looking For Love"

i'd guess if radiohead, pavement, the pixies etc made a new album you could get a 1000+ post 'event' thread with people actually interested in it, but the 00s gen of gapdy/arcade/tvotr don't interest ppl in the same way

i've seen serious discussion in rock-oriented threads, at least on an occasional basis. remember some long attempt to pull apart the lyrics to cheap trick's "surrender", and yeah, there's always the odd vampire weekend clusterfuck. but it's true that there isn't much general ILM interest in rock talk. this is true even on the fan threads, like rolling punk and metal. most posters seem content to drop a name and a few words of enthusiasm or indifference before moving on to the next thing, which sometimes bums me out.

i don't think it's merely that rock has lost its grip on the culture. lots of culturally marginal stuff gets a fairly good talking out, often moreso than the biggest hits of the moment. ofwgkta being a recent example. personally, i think its that this board is passively biased against rock music, perhaps with good reason. i often encounter the suggestion, not always subtle, that it's a genre with little left to offer. which is fine, everyone's entitled to their opinions and tastes, but i suspect that this baseline disinterest limits the rock discussions to a small crew of people who are not only aware that few others share their interests, but who all too often see eye-to-eye.

also the lengthy 'common people' thread

but there rly isn't any rock or quadi-rock that can occupy a similar cultural place to kanye etc.....it's either peripheral or inoffensive

~quasi-rock~

we can throw up examples/counterexamples of what "sounds" like rock but it's all bound to be a bit vague and pointless unless we can identify what the common tropes in rock are in this day and age. In the 50s/60s (ALLOWING FOR VARIOUS EXCEPTIONS PLEASE DON'T JUMP ALL OVER ME FOR THE GENERALIZATION THAT FOLLOWS) you could point to the basic instrumentation (emphasis usually on smaller, electrified combos - guitar/bass/drums/vocals, maybe some keyboard or a backing orchestra etc), the song structures (verse-chorus-verse-bridge etc), often blues based (usually in terms of rhythm but also chord structures), song-based (usually under 3 minutes). And it could be readily distinguished from other genres by what it was NOT - it didn't feature a lot of the instrumentation prevalent in country, it didn't feature long solos played on horns or standup bass, it was louder and more raucous than the singer+orchestra mainstream pop confections, it was not long-form compositions played by an orchestra, etc. All of these walls broke down over the years, and the walls have continued to breakdown - basically there are no walls at all now. In concrete terms what differentiates Animal Collective from Lady Gaga? They use the same technology, the same instrumentation, compositionally maybe Gaga hewes closer to standard song-form (I honestly have no idea), maybe they have slightly different reference points but otherwise what's the big difference? the way they're marketed and positioned in the media culture, I guess? The minor differences like the quality of their voices or synth presets or whatever? I don't know.

xp

a) rock music is boring.

so shaky are you saying the problem is that new rock music doesn't exist? I have no idea what point you are trying to make (not trying to be a dick, just confused).

I'm saying I don't know how to answer the question because I don't even know what rock music is anymore lol

maybe part of it is that mainstream rock long ago lost its swagger & wildness, along with its interest in self and audience-challenging experimentation, so there isn't much left to talk about. no fun, no insanity, no terrible lapses in taste on the scale of kanye's latest, no fucking with fashion & celebrity like gaga - nothing but the production of familiar sounds, "rock-style coolness" and all too often, a terrible, unselfconscious earnestness.

i sort of think that at the point where bands like the darkness and the white stripes exist as the primary representatives of popular rock music (i.e., early 2000s), then the genre is all but dead. i love the white stripes, but there was always something stultifyingly "museum quality" about them, and about that whole "real rock" era. at the time, i was a big garage rock fan, spending most of my time with bands like the dirtbombs, lost sounds, hunches, a-frames, white stripes and so on, and even i was aware that there was something marsalis-like about their garage purism. if the best a genre can do is to freeze its finest moments in amber and repeat them indefinitely, it is, by definition, moribund. since then, popular rock music only become more diffuse, anemic and marginal.

or so it seems to me. there's still lots of great stuff happening beneath that tedious surface, but you have to be willing to dig around for it.

well I don't know if this is taking the thread into an area that I'm not really interested in but while genre is partially about how the music sounds, it's also about self-definition (ie AC would probably tell you that what they play is, in some part, derived from rock music) and background (they play(ed) rock venues and festivals, I assume they came out of a rock "scene") and probably other boring stuff too

then I feel like rock music has to still be progressing/changing in some ways that are equally interesting
roughly speaking since 1977 talk about "rock" and "progress" (progressive rock boo!) has been uncool. since 1977 a guitarist say or a drummer being awesome has been uncool. (metal excepted, of course.) hard to get around decades of anti-ambition and -effort ideology. also, one of the main topics in hip hop is how awesome the MC in question's verbal skills are. i can't even imagine a thread getting going devoted to discussing syd's lyrics versus roger waters', or like britt daniel's take on modern urban romance

it's fairly easy to nail down what rock is - not by defining it and then by looking at what falls within the bounds of that definition, but by looking at those things that are undisputably rock and from there working up to a definition that's more web of associations than walled-in room. fallout boy are rock, by and large. as are titus andronicus, my chemical romance, vampire weekend and the arcade fire. most metal & punk bands are easily described as rock bands, too, some more than others. christian mistress are obviously a rock band, sunnO))) perhaps less so. instrumentation is obviously a big part of it, as are certain sounds and rhythms, a relationship with a musical history & culture.

i just don't think it's that hard to nail down, especially if we don't tear our hair out trying to square our definitions with outliers like radiohead and animal collective.

AC would probably tell you that what they play is, in some part, derived from rock music) and background (they play(ed) rock venues and festivals, I assume they came out of a rock "scene")

see I don't think either of these things are true. They came out of more of a noise/experimental/dance music scene. they're biggest heroes are like Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance iirc.

i think gang gang and black dice are rock bands, basically

they came out of a folk/experimental scene, but they embraced electronic music and are very different to what they were.

but by looking at those things that are undisputably rock

what is indisputably rock

black dice started out a rock band, though. a really fucking noisy HC one, but much more squarely rock than anco ever were. the visible surface of the providence scene has always been pretty rock-oriented, along with the taste for noise, art & experimentation.

what is indisputably rock

― fuckin magnates, why don't they work (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, December 13, 2010 4:51 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark

oh, you know: chuck berry, jerry lee lewis, the early beatles, the stones, the stooges, AC/DC, motorhead, the ramones, the clash, joan jett, white stripes. i mean, that's some super narrow essentialist streak, but it's the spine of the genre. around that you have a body of more weirdly fruited bands & artists like led zeppelin, jimi hendrix, the beatles, big star, heart, queen, the cars, the cure, U2 and REM, nirvana, etc. i don't think there's any point in suggesting that any of these aren't rock, though they may be other things, too.

Sleigh Bells rocks

whats your point, contenderizer

you don't really hear many new young rock bands who seem interested in doing something different but at the same time appealing to a broader audience

Eh, they're out there in spades, they're just at the bottom of triple bills so it's hard to catch them from home.

"most posters seem content to drop a name and a few words of enthusiasm or indifference before moving on to the next thing, which sometimes bums me out."

so sad for you! if people want to pay me i'll talk about new rock all friggin' day on ilm. did it ever occur to anyone that the rap and pop threads are so filled with talk because the people on there don't do anything all day long! they are on the dole or something. or possibly they have trust funds. some of us have to work for a living you know!

i've been faux-cranky all day. it'll pass. but, anyway, yeah, everyone on the money, animal collective suck shit.

(I mean, n/a, your terrific band fell into that category, and there are others out there) xp x 2

the rap and pop threads are so filled with talk because the people on there don't do anything all day long!

hahahaha don't wanna assume anything but this seems like a truth bomb to me

and there are tons of metal bands doing interesting things and who have commercial appeal but they are on tiny metal labels and big labels are too fucking dumb to sign them. (and metal bands are rock bands, fyi.)

lol scott. i think generally the premise is wrong. there have been good, and thoughtful, rock-threads over the past few years, e.g., destroyer's rubies; radiohead's in rainbows; the no-age threads. whoever said part of the problem is fragmentation of the audience is also right. some of the most interesting discussions occur on the rolling indie threads, but it's a patchwork conversation taking place between a subset of the thread participants.

i will admit to not reading this whole thread (sorry) & maybe someone already said this, but one thing about the rap & pop threads is that i think the community for those threads is smaller & also less fluid, and we're all used to conversing with each other & are pretty well aware of each others' tastes & how we feel about certain things etc, so that might have something to do w/ it

So then you're implying that we need more intimacy with each other to be more conversant about a genre.

if i want to talk about rock music i'll head over to ILV tbqf.

I wish I was more expressive when it came to describing what I hear. I'd love to be able to write like some of the professionals around here but I'm guilty of the "There's a new album coming out" and "It's really good" posts. I'll endeavor to post up to a higher standard.

artists like...the cure...and REM...i don't think there's any point in suggesting that any of these aren't rock
fallout boy are rock, by and large. as are titus andronicus, my chemical romance, vampire weekend and the arcade fire

Lots of music on Rolling Country way more "rock" than these bands, fwiw.

So then you're implying that we need more intimacy with each other to be more conversant about a genre.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 13, 2010 7:46 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, not at all -- just that, aside from throwing all these ideas at the wall about "what is wrong with rock" or w/e, i'm just saying that, as it pertains to ilm, the familiarity & history b/w posters on pop/rap threads (and dance!) and rock threads is a difference that might have something to do w/ it

it's probably true for the country & metal threads too (altho i don't read those)

I keep meaning to follow the rolling underground/punk/non-indie rock thread but I just can't click on it. how is it?

fragmented & boring

incorrect

fragmented yes, because "non-indie/punk/underground" rock brings in anything new that could be construed as punk based on as much on attitude as on sonics--i don't hear Eat Skull and think "punk" for example, but i wouldn't say they arent, they might beat me up--, but not in a million years would i call that thread boring. it's just really broadly curated. markers isn't in there making best new music jpgs for his favorite tracks, which frankly is a shame.

i think that markers comment was supposed to be a joke, i don't really understand what happened there.

that accurately describes markers' posting style

could somebody dream up a list of, say, ten things that have been happening in 'rock' in the last five years? i.e. where the action that might stimulate critical discussion would come from?

-animal collective
-"the postpunk revival"
-sufjan stevens (look it happened deal with it)
-arcade fire
-"the springsteen revival"
-"freak folk"

thats all i got

-Kid Rock/Scott Stapp bonersextape

the vampire weekend thread was massive but a large portion of that was str8 trolling from burt_stanton, may he rest in peace

xp chillwave obv

internet has done weird things to rock music

rock music has done weird things to the internet. it's 'real music rawks' facebook groups this, 'rage against the machine for xmas number 1' that. was never like this when i was a lad.

the vampire weekend thread was massive but a large portion of that was str8 trolling from burt_stanton, may he rest in peace

the real reason why all these threads are boring is because 75% of the interesting people have, over the years, been banned.

what did ethan & dom have to do w/ rock threads?

Instead of trying to figure out what constitutes rock music in 2010, it might be helpful to know exactly which rock music threads are being used as yardsticks here.

That said: I get the sense that a lot of hip-hop fans are very invested in the overall State of Hip-Hop and how particular artists fit into the genre, what is being advanced, etc. This is possibly also true on a smaller, more fragmented scale for dance fans, who might think that way about specific subgenres/scenes like dubstep. But it's really hard for me to imagine someone thinking in those terms about rock, or even "indie rock." With a few minor exceptions, there just doesn't seem to be a similar sense of community, much less a relationship between artists as constantly responding or reacting to each other. Which is perfectly fine! But it means that we often evaluate rock albums on more limited terms.

what did ethan & dom have to do w/ rock threads?

did those guys really get banned?

Actually, though, now that I think about it, one major development in rock music in the past 10 years is the mainstreaming of emo. Even though I don't necessarily love a lot of the music, the emergence of bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic at the Disco and Fall Out Boy seemed genuinely interesting about five years ago.

For reference, here are the genres mentioned in Whiney's The Decade in Music Genre Hype article:

underground hip-hop
glitch
the return of the rock
electroclash
mash-ups
dance-punk
grime
freak-folk
hipster metal
hyphy
blog house
lo-fi
glo-fi

(Also: ghettotech, microhouse, folktronica, New Weird America, schaffel, crunk, trap-rap, post-metal, screw, baile, Baltimore club, snap, nu-balearic, moan-wave, grindie, deathcore, nu-rave, juke, wonky, skweee, dubstep, kuduro, jerk, hypnagogic pop, crabcore.)

-animal collective
-"the postpunk revival"
-sufjan stevens (look it happened deal with it)
-arcade fire
-"the springsteen revival"
-"freak folk"

thats all i got

― aka the pope (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, December 13, 2010 6:56 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

a few more:

metal in general
drone metal
"shitgaze"
amrep revival
black lips/king khan
psychedelic everything

Once there's a reductive term for something, the fun of talking about the band goes away versus wtf-is-this.

what did ethan & dom have to do w/ rock threads?

did those guys really get banned?

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Monday, December 13, 2010 10:22 PM (24 minutes ago)

wait who the hell are YOU talking about then

we can throw up examples/counterexamples of what "sounds" like rock but it's all bound to be a bit vague and pointless unless we can identify what the common tropes in rock are in this day and age. In the 50s/60s (ALLOWING FOR VARIOUS EXCEPTIONS PLEASE DON'T JUMP ALL OVER ME FOR THE GENERALIZATION THAT FOLLOWS) you could point to the basic instrumentation (emphasis usually on smaller, electrified combos - guitar/bass/drums/vocals, maybe some keyboard or a backing orchestra etc), the song structures (verse-chorus-verse-bridge etc), often blues based (usually in terms of rhythm but also chord structures), song-based (usually under 3 minutes). And it could be readily distinguished from other genres by what it was NOT - it didn't feature a lot of the instrumentation prevalent in country, it didn't feature long solos played on horns or standup bass, it was louder and more raucous than the singer+orchestra mainstream pop confections, it was not long-form compositions played by an orchestra, etc. All of these walls broke down over the years, and the walls have continued to breakdown - basically there are no walls at all now.

Once you get past 1965, let's say, just looking at 1965-1972, I'm not sure how well this holds and I don't think it's just a matter of "exceptions". Fairly major canonical works such as Pet Sounds or many famous Beatles songs already problematized nearly every one of these criteria by the mid-60s. (We can argue now that these were "pop" and not "rock" but they were commonly classified as "rock" in writing from the time. If anything, they were often seen as emblematic of the maturity and sophistication that distinguished "rock" from "pop" or "rock and roll".) By the early 70s, singer-songwriters, electronic prog artists, heavy rock artists, artists who would be considered "country" today, etc all seem to have been grouped together under "rock". If anything, the definition probably became narrower, focusing on the harder-edged g/b/v/d band, since the late 70s, at least going by the writing that I've read.

I actually agree that the definition right now seems to be stretching too though. Tbh, I think many people would describe MPP as "electronica" or "indie" before just calling it "rock".

However, maybe what I'm really saying is that straight out rock music doesn't really hold the same pop culture share as it used to. What if this place had been around in the 90s? Or better, what if there was an ILM in 1975? Would it have been a lot of "i just heard the craziest thing, and it was called DISCO!!" threads, or "TS: synths on The Joker vs DSotM"?

Threads about disco being the new and crazy and hot thing in 1975 would have seemed a bit strange, considering George McRae, Hues Corporation, Carl Douglas and Shirley & Company had already had huge worldwide disco hits then.

Once you get past 1965, let's say, just looking at 1965-1972, I'm not sure how well this holds and I don't think it's just a matter of "exceptions". Fairly major canonical works such as Pet Sounds or many famous Beatles songs already problematized nearly every one of these criteria by the mid-60s. (We can argue now that these were "pop" and not "rock" but they were commonly classified as "rock" in writing from the time. If anything, they were often seen as emblematic of the maturity and sophistication that distinguished "rock" from "pop" or "rock and roll".)

In this case it was not so much about harder edges vs. soft edges as it was about some other qualities, i.e. what used to be known as pop had developed into rock by adding more themes in the lyrics (not just ordinary heterosexual love lyrics), more influence from classical music and jazz and a generally more "arty" approach. Thus, the term was used in a completely different way from today when "rock" usually means something that rocks a bit harder than pop. I suppose this is also why prog rock has been defined as rock even though a lot of the most famous and popular prog of the early 70s (Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd) is musically soft edged enough that it probably has more in common with what is today described as pop. At the same time, more pure rock bands of the 70s such as Free, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Feet, Allmann Brothers Band, Bad Company etc. probably defined more or less what the rock term would later contain (then, not including heavy rock, which was always being established as a genre through acts like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep etc).

My point? I think "rock" as a big description of virtually all kinds of guitar based genres has, for the past 30 years or so, largely used by those who don't like guitar based music much at all. First and foremost fans of hip-hop and electronic dance music although it may also have been used by fans of synthpop/new pop back in the 80s.

(And perhaps also by disco fans in the 70s, given the anti-disco movement mostly consisted of fans of the more classic form of rock)

A lot of the popular "prog" had more in common with pop than rock, it's true.

You;d have been beaten up if you'd said so at the time tho.

Threads about disco being the new and crazy and hot thing in 1975 would have seemed a bit strange, considering George McRae, Hues Corporation, Carl Douglas and Shirley & Company had already had huge worldwide disco hits then.

Ah, yes. Back then, I loved all that Disco.

Then the Bee Gees came in and ruined it all. Not with "Jive Talking", that was alright, but the whole SatNtFever bobbins.

I think in most cases "doing something different" with rock at this point basically means "does not appeal to a broader audience"

Surely you can argue that 1997 is not today anymore, but by adding a big bit of prog - a genre that had been taboo since 1977 - to "OK Computer"'s influnces, it sure helped the album to cross over and appeal to a lot of people.

They made even more different music three years later on "Kid A", but at the same time starting to lose some fans over being too different (i.e. losing me because of the tunes being too minimalist and repetitive and cyclic, and using a lot of trad rock fans because of too few guitars)

Ah, yes. Back then, I loved all that Disco.

Then the Bee Gees came in and ruined it all. Not with "Jive Talking", that was alright, but the whole SatNtFever bobbins.

This was about the same time Giorgio Moroder, made it much more interesting by adding lots of synths though. :)

A lot of the popular "prog" had more in common with pop than rock, it's true.

You;d have been beaten up if you'd said so at the time tho.

Particularly if you had added that Slade, Suzi Quatro and Sweet (seen as throwaway teenybopper music by prog fans at the time) actually rocked a lot more than Genesis or Pink Floyd had ever done. :)

1) Yes, it wasn't all downhill there was a fair bit of good around.

2) Absolutely.

Heck, I wasn't really around at the time (well, I was, but not into anything else but nursery rhymes), but I suppose even David Bowie might have been seen as a throwaway teenybopper in 1973 by some people.

Not exactly, he was that "strange bloke" for those "strange people"..

There were a few bowie freaks, they'd dress up for the school disco, etc, but mostly so they could get into fights with people who looked at them 'funny'. An extension of the old "did you spill my pint" thuggishness, but for school kids.

Actually, thinking about it, there was "Jean Genie", and "Block Buster" which basically had the same riff, one was alright and cool, and one was seen as "Throwaway"...

Not exactly, he was that "strange bloke" for those "strange people"..

There were a few bowie freaks, they'd dress up for the school disco, etc, but mostly so they could get into fights with people who looked at them 'funny'. An extension of the old "did you spill my pint" thuggishness, but for school kids.

Sounds a lot like a description of 14 year-old Emo kids today. :)

I think "rock" as a big description of virtually all kinds of guitar based genres has, for the past 30 years or so, largely used by those who don't like guitar based music much at all. First and foremost fans of hip-hop and electronic dance music although it may also have been used by fans of synthpop/new pop back in the 80s.

― You're Twistin' My Melody Man! (Geir Hongro), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:00 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

disagree. a tendency to identify points of distinction between "rock music" and other genres has been around at least since the late 60s, and the boundaries between rock & these genres have been policed by rock fans more aggressively than anyone looking in from the outside.

also, the point you make about suzi quattro et al being seen as "teenybopper music" by prog fans is OTM, but as i understand it, the problem wasn't that suzi's music was seen as non-rock. rather some saw it as trivial, not worth hearing.

i would argue that the definition of rock has always been in transition. this was true in the earliest days of rock 'n' roll, as it quickly shifted from a regional black & "hillbilly" form to the mainstream pop of a generation of white teenagers across the US. during the late 60s and early 70s, the term became extremely fluid, largely due to widespread & radical experimentation by bands who'd started out playing traditional forms of rock 'n' roll. i don't deny that, but by the late 70s, it had once again settled down, leaving us with a form that's very open to manipulation, but which can't be satisfactorily defined simply as "all melodic guitar-based music."

^ why rock threads are boring

disagree. a tendency to identify points of distinction between "rock music" and other genres has been around at least since the late 60s, and the boundaries between rock & these genres have been policed by rock fans more aggressively than anyone looking in from the outside.

However, as a fan of what I would define as "classic pop", I would occasionally see hip-hop/R&B fans describe, say, Crowded House or Jellyfish as "rock music", which is something a fan of actual rock (i.e. music that "rocks") would never do. That is, Crowded House are white guys with guitars, thus they are rock. And this is a kind of categorization that rock fans (or fans of classic guitar based "white" melodic pop for that matter) would never use.

Well, not about Rock music, possibly.

Whereas they would categorise rap/hip-hop/R&B as one or the other, even though they are often diametrically opposed (to each other)

see, but i don't know about that. i'm a punk & metal listening "real rock" fan, and i'd happily grant that both crowded house and jellyfish are honest-to-god rock bands. they don't sound like chuck berry or led zeppelin or whatever, but they're in line with an ongoing rock tradition that grew out of the 70s and into the 80s/90s. they're not hard rock, but nor are they totally divorced from the genre's roots and subsequent evolution.

one way to look at it is to say that a genre's boundaries will sometimes temporarily expand to accommodate the growth of artists that began their careers playing safely within its established confines. but the initial boundaries will have a tendency to reassert themselves over time, especially when experimentation becomes radical. talk talk, for instance, remain a rock band in our memory largely because they started out as one, not because their decidedly un-rock-like eventual direction wound up reshaping our fundamental conception of what "rock music" means. i.e., their experiments may have stretched our collective sense of the genre's possibilities, but in the long run, our sense of its core identity is defined primarily by the threads that have run through it since its earliest days.

I miss guitar driven music outside of Alternative, Metal and Indie, it sort of dried up after 09. I'm also tired as hell of ragging on the current Dance craze, it will pass eventually.

c) none of this is true, there are good rock music discussions on ILM

the whole "but what is rock?" thread of this discussion is so boring and irrelevant to its main point imo

lots of the threads about older rock are full of lols and/or great critical reappraisals etc

having spent the last day going over the springsteen threads (no-one is more surprised about this turn of events than i am) i would agree with this.

suspect that for new releases, the music just aint touching the same number of people (lack of interest due to point a) above/death of the major record label), so passion for/against is rarely expressed to the same level.

you don't really hear many new young rock bands who seem interested in doing something different but at the same time appealing to a broader audience

I just wanted to reiterate that The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and The XX all generated a shit-ton of conversation when they came out onto the scene and they all seem to satisfy the basic parameters laid out.

I think some of what is being seen is defensiveness; rock is still seen as the baseline everything else must react against, the venerable old man at the top of the mountain. A lot of the conversation is a perhaps subconscious attempt to build up an alternate canon/pedigree to take its place.

I think I'm just not looking for the same things at ILM that n/a must be looking for.
I find it really easy to ignore the stuff that doesn't interest me.

it doesnt sound like hes complaining about not being able to ignore something

the whole "but what is rock?" thread of this discussion is so boring and irrelevant to its main point imo

That's why I said it might be helpful if you gave examples of rock-music threads that you considered boring (or not living up to their potential or whatever) and we could maybe determine what it is about those specific bands that leads ILM to not discuss them in depth.

I just wanted to reiterate that The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and The XX all generated a shit-ton of conversation when they came out onto the scene and they all seem to satisfy the basic parameters laid out.

Like I think this is probably true -- and let's not forget the famous anthologized Strokes thread! -- so I have to wonder if it's all rock music you're talking about, or just certain bands or whatever.

("you" = n/a, not DJP)

oh god The Strokes

I have spent 9 years successfully pretending they never existed, please don't ruin things for me

no, those all count as rock music to me, but that's like four/five interesting discussions over a four/five-year period

xpost -- Can't wait for the tenth anniversary reunion tour oh wait.

you get the same hit rate in the hip-hop and dance threads, too

so dan, you think rock music is discussed with as much passion and intelligence on ILM as dance and hip-hop?

Yes, basically. Well okay, not dance.

There are so many new bands all the time, I like to look at the rolling threads just to get references. I have a radio show so I like to cast a wide net on stuff that interests me for my show (psych and punk, mostly).
With older rock (like The Byrds, Springsteen, television, to name just a few threads that I've contributed to) I find I have more to say.
Why don't you stop reading it?

I don't stop reading ILM because there's lots of good music-related discussion on it! I just get jealous because the rap and dance discussions seem more interesting but I don't really have much to contribute there due to a relative lack of knowledge.

Nick, there's something about the thread premise that does ring as intuitively true to me, I just feel like it could be broken down a bit more.

^^^yeah otm

i've been trying to break it down! that's the whole point of the thread!

The most prolific writers on the board do not have a vested interest in talking about rock music, be it by virtue of personal tastes, aggressive tastemaking, or a combination of the two.

Does that work?

it rings true to me, but there seem to be plenty of posters on this thread who think the issue is rock music itself

i think its been touched on upthread, but since 'rock' is pretty catholic, it makes it harder to have discussions about 'what works' and the like. what constitutes 'real' dance/hip-hop/metal can range all over the place, but it's still easier to stake out the borders, you know? i dunno i've always detected a rhetorical subcurrent common to a lot of ILM's non-rock threads, like there's a sign above the door reading "real heads know." it may not be the lynchpin of everyone's argument, some may flat-out reject it, but it's still pretty common to see ppl reject certain stuff because it's not tru-kult or because it's pussy backpacker shit or because it is so not noize or w/e. the ability to pigeon-hole a certain music into a genre facilitates discussion because it lays some groundrules that can at least get the ball rolling. plus, as has been suggested upthread, some of our more vocal posters tend to feel more strongly about certain genres than others (goons and metalheads in particular), and can be relied upon to engage in discussion or, at the very least, get entertainingly butthurt.

pop is an exception here, and could be thought of as being as numbingly broad as 'rock' as a genre, but with an important exception: millions and millions of people listen to pop music, which lends it a cultural import that an animal collective record will never, ever have. that fact alone can provide fertile ground for discussion, imo.

good post

talking about music is dumb

it rings true to me, but there seem to be plenty of posters on this thread who think the issue is rock music itself

Well, that's part of the personal tastes/aggressive tastemaking thing, isn't it? If you aren't a big rock person, or if you have a vested interest in placing yourself as someone who Helped Define The New Canon, you're going to point towards flaws in rock when asked why you don't talk about it in as much depth as your favored ground.

think about psychedelic rock---i check in on some of the rolling psych threads not just because i like the music, but because it's interesting to see what crops up as psychedelic music. if ppl were just posting up individual album threads, i'd never read them because who the hell is ______ and why should i give a shit about their new album? the problem with our rolling threads, though, is that they're just sorta musical stock tickers, and don't drive discussion. even on the goon thread if someone posts up something that isn't well-received the most you'll get is a dismissive 'ehhhh.'

narrower genres mean that more ppl are more likely to all have heard the same thing, and have opinions on it. it's tough to get into it about a band with few fans because who are you gonna talk to?

(didn't really bridge those two grafs well, but basically rock fans can easily listen to whatever suits their fancy and are more likely to encounter like-minded people on ILM threads than dissenters. the haters will have taken a couple listens, thought 'ehhhh', and moved on. ppl invested in a genre are more likely to listen something they don't like that much because there's motivation beyond just "do i like this as a musical thing to listen to," there's also the question of whether or not it works as _____. imo)

but if it's so specialized, shouldn't it lead to the "real heads know" mentality that you think facilitates discussion?

the reason the kanye thread is such a cluster is because it's a perfect storm of rap goons, poptimists, and casual listeners of both who are just checking in because the album is ~so important~ and why won't everyone just shut up about it

xp you mean psych music? sure, and i think it would if there were enough ppl on ILM that gave a shit, and that trafficked primarily in psych music, and if psych music was as robust and as active a 'scene' as metal or hip-hop. but it isn't. plus most psych fans are easy-going stoners, so

or: you can't JUST have rolling whatever threads, though they're often a way to gather up a shitty little algonquin round table that can be relied upon to lay the groundwork for any discussion you might like to have about something.

gbx OTM. staking out genre territory/defining the genres is what drives a lot of the more in-depth discussion on the dance, rap, metal threads etc. this dynamic is missing from rock. which was the whole reason I brought up "what the hell is rock anyway" to begin with.

xp

I mean take that whole recent clusterfuck Wu-Tang solo album poll thread that devolved into arguing over deej's theories about the evolution of rap personas over time, as an example. the root of that discussion was how has a narrowly defined genre changed and shifted over the the last few decades. Rock is too large a genre/pool of references to even make that argument, because it encompasses so much. Picking out any dominant trend is kind of impossible unless you narrow the criteria sufficiently.

it's too bad that the internet has eroded the 'local scene' as a testing ground/incubator for new sounds in rock music (but not, say, hiphop). if there was an identifiable commonality to the music of, say, minneapolis, i'm sure that'd provide a little kernel to build discussion around, you know? part of what drives good discussion, imo, is that ppl you might disagree with will nonetheless have listened to and absorbed the music you're discussing. fertile local scenes have ppl showing up to shows just cuz, and ppl might end up seeing bands they don't like several times because, they're opening, or are between two bands they actually like, or w/e.

cf politics threads---i can choose not to listen to BrokeNCYDE because who the fuck cares. i really can't ignore bad policy because, you know, i live here

You guys have spent 165 messages discussing this stupid topic. We don't discuss current rock music on ILM, unless I missed all the Avenged Sevenfold and AFI threads on here...?

theories about the evolution of rap personas

^^^this is a perfect example of what i'm talking about. it assumes a handful of basic genre conventions that would seem silly to impose on 'rock music', but is still broad enough to allow multiple opinions. if you tried to have a conversation about the evolution of frontman personas or w/e you'd have to clearly narrow things down to keep it interesting, just because the rock and roll frontman as a thing isn't a necessary component of rock music, like, at all.

yeah, who was the last real rock star? it's been the trend since 00 for rock musicians (esp indie) to be as boring and normal as possible, which played out in the music imo.

we need a new Ziggy Stardust

Jack White tries pretty hard

i'm sorry but none of these bands look very interesting. they need swords or something...

Yeah I think there's an issue in that nothing new is being added to the rock canon.

Something like the Keith Moon vs. John Bonham POLL thread was really interesting, esp with musicians chipping in, but once you exhausted talking about legendary 60s/70s drummers what's to be said about rock drumming in the 21st century?

good thread i have nothing to add to

also guessing that a new white stripes album would probably generate a couple thousand posts

i was gonna say maybe ilm needs some tim f.-type analysis of the appeal of kings of leon or something but when you get right down to it who the hell wants to spend a lot of time trying to understand the appeal of the kings of leon? and i feel that way about a lot of modern rock.

it assumes a handful of basic genre conventions that would seem silly to impose on 'rock music'

but doesn't rock music have many genre conventions itself? but it doesn't quite like admitting to them? like, the stuff that makes it a genre.

but doesn't rock music have many genre conventions itself? but it doesn't quite like admitting to them? like, the stuff that makes it a genre.

not anymore. would love to hear your theories on what they are tho

We don't discuss current rock music on ILM, unless I missed all the Avenged Sevenfold and AFI threads on here...?

why are you still in 2004

sure, they're just so much broader than other genres at this point that they're sorta meaningless. unless you're talking to geir

xp

let's not talk to geir

AFI will never go away. shit is timeless.

oh ok! i obviously don't know much about rock or whatever but i'd have said pretty basic things like arrangements, vocal styles (that kind of cathartic/yearning grain to a rock vocalist's voice) etc. the kind of thing that make me mentally categorise an artist as "rock".

there's no catharsis/yearning in R&B vocals?

like, really?

it's a different kind! idk how to describe it really without thinking about it a bit more, but, y'know, i'm sure anyone can distinguish between the catharsis/yearning expressed by courtney love or karen o and the catharsis/yearning expressed by mary j blige or r kelly

People be listening to Avenged Sevenfold as well, AFAIK... Seriously though - Rock music is one genre barely ever discussed on ILM save the token Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy thread.

and you wouldn't be wrong, lex. it's just that shit like animal collective and vampire weekend don't do those things but are also generally accepted as 'rock'

Yearning Grain would make a great name for a midwest rock band actually.

arrangements is kinda vague (and I refer to my earlier post about how vast swathes of pop - be it of the country, hip hop, R&B, or rock variety - are composed of the same readily identifiable elements, so much so that they're indistinguishable from one another in a formal sense)

i'm sure anyone can distinguish between the catharsis/yearning expressed by courtney love or karen o and the catharsis/yearning expressed by mary j blige or r kelly

white girls sing like THIS

that is not the only kind of rock xxxpost 2 dog latin

dog latin, the non-rock threads have better trolls, dude

also yeah Belle and Sebastian are a rock band, right? or Mazzy Star? that is some of the flattest/least yearning/cathartic singing possible. one example among billions.

xp

i'm also picturing scott stapp's head poking out of a box of wheaties for some reason.

hopefully on the end of a stick

and you wouldn't be wrong, lex. it's just that shit like animal collective and vampire weekend don't do those things but are also generally accepted as 'rock'

animal collective, really? why on earth? i guess i think of that kind of indie as its own aesthetic - a lot of acts i'd think of as rock, esp from the 90s (nine inch nails, tori amos) wouldn't fit alongside them at all. i am sort of out of my depth here :/

not really....i mean, its interesting that both you and dog latin (i didn't realize you were being serious dude sorry) compartmentalize rock more narrowly than i'd expect. maybe it's a UK thing? cuz "indie" to me is just short of "indie rock" and is less an actual genre than it is just a flavor

xxpost So when we're talking about "rock" we're talking about any act with guitars then?

(I assume yes)

In which case the original argument is nonsense. Plenty of decent discussions about Pavement, Of Montreal, B&S in the past. This sounds like yet another anti-rock thread to me, which is the boringest kind of thread on ILM.

of = for

lex do you see "indie" as being separate from "rock"? (i'm asking as I've always thought that in the past 20 odd years Indie is seen as more pop (of the alternative kind) in the UK, whilst in the USA it seemed to be more indie rock.)

The big problem with Kings of Leon is that they wrote one decent song and then proceeded to record about a bazillion inferior versions of it, leaving you with not very much to discuss.

Say what you will about Vampire Weekend (or, *shudder*, Arcade Fire), you can't really say their songs lack ideas.

And yes, separating "indie" from "rock" is kind of crazy.

not really

hah i think GBX proves my point about the US indie

plenty of indie music is def not "rock"

my god

Dan, i don't think it's crazy if you are from the UK and do it. The NME has always tried to say its indie acts are pop.

lex do you see "indie" as being separate from "rock"?

sorta...yeah, i think i'd have used to say it was short for "indie rock" but i think the way the indie aesthetic has headed away from what i instinctively think of as rock values* means that it feels weird and senseless to consider them the same thing

*more electronic, more detached, less cathartic, to be reductive

indie rock IS rock, at least in the US. major label rock and indie rock basically occupy similar market share, level of exposure, size of audience, etc. at this point. there's maybe still some aesthetic divisions to be made here and there, but in a lot of ways when people are discussing "rock" on ILM they are not exclusively referring to acts with guitars/bass/drums/vocals on a major label.

xp

The NME has always tried to say its indie acts are pop.

I blame Rough Trade for this nonsense

(was recently reading Rough Trade coffee table book lol)

that is not the only kind of rock xxxpost 2 dog latin

The bands dog latin mentions are amongst the most popular guitar rock bands though. There are many circles in which AFI or 30 Seconds to Mars albums would be 'event albums' as much as Vampire Weekend or Kanye West albums. Back when I bothered keeping up with new releases, I mostly just gave up on discussing those albums here because of the relative lack of interest. I do think that e.g. the metal poll threads are great and have introduced me to lots of music that I consider quite interesting and creative. I also think of a lot of alternative jazz, esp guitar-based music such as Frisell/Ribot/Cline, as an extension of rock music and do find it vital and innovative.

xposts Trying to decipher the semantics of "indie" is also a spaghetti junction you just don't wanna drive through though. IMO "indie" is a prefix that can be attached to rock, pop or dance to indicate it is perceived to be outside of the mainstream.

also i mean, crystal castles, the knife, AnCo, a lot of chillwave

not that this is relevant, but: i've definitely moved away from "rock" and into more genre-y stuff in the last few years, mostly out of interest but also cuz i was bored with rock music. metal/hip-hop/dance/weird-shit-off-leonardo has dominated what i've decided to investigate. haven't heard the new arcade fire (liked the first one, second was boring), and just DL'd vampire weekend, partially out of a feeling that i ought to at least keep up.

the fact that people on this very board can legitimately argue over whether or not AnCo are an "indie dance" band or a "rock" band - and be genuinely confused as to what the difference is - tells you a lot about how amorphous the term "rock" has become.

The bands dog latin mentions are amongst the most popular guitar rock bands though. . There are many circles in which AFI or 30 Seconds to Mars albums would be 'event albums' as much as Vampire Weekend or Kanye West albums.

30 Seconds To Mars I buy, but not AFI or Avenged Sevenfold, at least not in the past couple of years.

Looking at Billboard's top 200 album list for this week, you have to scroll down to Florence and the Machine to encounter anyone with even a passing connection to rock as opposed to Christmas, hip-hop, R&B, pop or country. The rock song top 10 has Linkin Park, Saving Abel, The Black Keys and Godsmack in it.

honestly even though its foreign to me, i think the UK contingent might be sorta right to partition "indie" from "rock"? i've got friends (mostly younger, i feel inclined to note) that gobble up stuff like, say, the knife and twee folktronica shit who would have to hold their nose to listen to Pavement, and who would consider 90s indie rock to fall squarely outside their listening tastes.

i think if yr old enough (and american, apparently) to trace the progression from 90s indie rock to current "indie" it's tempting to think of them as being under the same tent, but maybe that's not really the case anymore

the fact that people on this very board can legitimately argue over whether or not AnCo are an "indie dance" band or a "rock" band - and be genuinely confused as to what the difference is - tells you a lot about how amorphous the term "rock" has become.

Animal Collective have changed massively over their lifetime, though; they have releases that make sense to call rock records and releases that do not make sense to call rock records.

the fact that people on this very board can legitimately argue over whether or not AnCo are an "indie dance" band or a "rock" band - and be genuinely confused as to what the difference is - tells you a lot about how amorphous the term "rock" has become.

or that they just belong to a third category "indie"

this seems easy

I was always more an indie rock guy in the 90s than indie pop (possibly because i preferred noisy or heavier rock/alt-metal, but a) i thought it was a great time for indie rock (still do) and b)music mags/critics seemed to be more open to it. the 00s indie rock seemed to pale in comparison, just like 90s indie seemed pale in comparison to those who grew up with 80s indie.

or that they just belong to a third category "indie"

this seems easy

― plax (ico), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 5:24 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

you think defining indie is easy

the fact that people on this very board can legitimately argue over whether or not AnCo are an "indie dance" band or a "rock" band - and be genuinely confused as to what the difference is - tells you a lot about how amorphous the term "rock" has become.

― from the lowly milligeir to the mighty gigahongro (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:18 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, and more to the point of the thread, if you're inclined to think that animal collection and the black keys are basically in the same club, but like one and loathe the other, it's gonna be tough to engage in discussion that goes too far beyond "yeah well i just don't like it, it doesn't suit me." but if you're a RAP FAN, eg, that isn't enough, you're practically required to engage the finer points (cadence, lyrics, beats, whatever).

yah keep up

I'm getting the feeling that some people define "rock" as "stuff ILM doesn't talk about", which renders debate a bit irrelevant. Restricting the term to a particular instrumental/compositional palette can make life easier in some cases but it ignores things like lineage and fanbase that also affect how we think of "genres"; it also restricts the amount of development that is "allowed" before something becomes non-rock.

(soon enough this thread will merge with the "dubstep-qua-dubstep" derail on the juke thread)

Also: "dance" is a pretty wide term encompassing many disparate styles, just as "rock" is.

he rock song top 10 has Linkin Park, Saving Abel, The Black Keys and Godsmack in it.

this is an interesting list insofar as it's pretty hard to parse what all these bands have in common. Guitars? but loads of stuff in the generic Billboard Top 200 has guitars - including country, hip hop and R&B songs.

30 Seconds To Mars I buy, but not AFI or Avenged Sevenfold, at least not in the past couple of years.

Tbf, I was going back a few years with AFI. I kind of assumed n/a was talking about longer-term trends on ILM. You're probably right about the pop music market right now.

Also: "dance" is a pretty wide term encompassing many disparate styles, just as "rock" is.

similarly when people try to break down dance subgenres for me it all seems inscrutable and silly and arbitrary

like in dance music you can actually distinguish subgenres by BPM and keyboard presets

cmon no genre is totes self-identical but u can trace its outline against the morning light iugwim

ehhh, plax, i dunno. "indie" music as you seem to have defined it seems more to do with signifiers/fan base than it does with the music itself. rap/country/metal/etc can actually be roughly defined in ~musical~ terms, which kickstarts discussion of their, uh, manifestions as music, which is what n/a was concerned with.

xps

the answer is because ILM has seriously skewed musical priorities, end of story

welp i think we're done here, thanks lj

Tbf, I was going back a few years with AFI.

lol so was I! hence the "why are you in 2004" joke

(there are at least three AFI threads in the archives and I know discussion of "Miss Murder" happened, so it's not like ILM ignored them)

xp: oh good LJ is here

maybe the rock fan people here are a little less argumentative than other people here, too? that's what makes a lot of those threads "interesting," right?

nah

many xposts
Someone mentioned this upthread, but I think it's almost safe to say that we're getting to a point where these boundaries are ceasing to exist any more. Animal Collective have been pushed into indie, psychedelia, dance, folk and noise throughout their careers when I'm sure they aren't consciously trying to fit themselveas into any of these categories. Salem is another example - is it crunk, industrial, house, dubstep, rock etc? A lot of hip-hop sounds more like dance music with rapping to my ears nowadays, and acts like Outkast happily straddle multiple genres within one song. As for dubstep, it's splintered so many times so quickly that one would be at a loss to try and describe a style that encompasses James Blake, Horsepower Productions, Girl Unit, Caspa and Zomby.

"Rock" has undergone the same kind of renaissance, splintering into many many factions, a number of which have turned the trappings of said genre on its head - hence Belle and Sebastian's non-confrontational feyness, AC's lack of traditional structuring etc.

Maybe it's just me, but when I think of "rock" music, I think of Aerosmith or Neil Young & Crazy Horse or Nirvana or something. With this in mind, this is very reductive (quadruple-formation, amplified instruments etc). I don't really think of "rock" as a relevant concept to music any more. It's an anachronism, save for bands I mentioned above (AFI etc) who manage to be heavy without being metal, indie or punk. Weirdly "rock'n'roll" seems preferable to describing a certain music that insists on being guitar/bass/drums/vocal with distortion/amping. I'd call Kings Of Leon a rock'n'roll band.

not really, none of those are primarily concerned w/ traditional "rock" values or "dance" ones either. emph is on style and synthesis of other genres. like i pheel like indie is hella postmmodern and always articulates itself in relation to other genres which is why stuff like alt.country exists and why there ARE so many prefixes. like the condition of indie is quotation not tradition.

like in dance music you can actually distinguish subgenres by BPM and keyboard presets

― from the lowly milligeir to the mighty gigahongro (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:29 PM

Lots of metal and punk genres have super specific genre defining characteristics, too.

lol I just felt like sayin'

I'll read the thread later and give a proper response :) although I said some stuff on the British Sea Power thread earlier gername to this discussion

Avenged Sevenfold sold 160,000 copies of their latest the first week - their first #1 record. People I know were talking about it in a major way. Not my bag, but they're still pretty damn big on the rock landscape.

bazillion xposts

for all the bombast and hard-blowing you might get in a goon thread, there is actual discussion of the music as music going on.

xp to tylerw

Do you all in general see metal as rock or do you think of it as being out on its own?

lol I had no idea AS released an album this year

xp: I definitely see most metal as rock, at least up until you get to things like grindcore

Polvo and Bottomless Pit are definitely two current (again) rock bands I'd be happy to analyze with anyone.

yeah, true xp to gbx

grindcore sorta eveolved from hardcore punk rock though, no?

Avenged Sevenfold sold 160,000 copies of their latest the first week - their first #1 record.

man, what makes #1 is so nonsensical. Vampire Weekend's latest hit #1 in it's first week and they sold only a quarter of that, 28,000.

Someone mentioned this upthread, but I think it's almost safe to say that we're getting to a point where these boundaries are ceasing to exist any more. A

that was me. this is my whole point - the larger, older genre definitions (country, R&B, rock, hip hop, dance, etc.) are basically meaningless at this point. what we have now are a billion microgenres. But trying to shove things under these larger outdated definitions just seems pointless and irrelevant to me.

grindcore sorta eveolved from hardcore punk rock though, no?

yeah sure, it's just that the resulting sound is kind of divorced from anything I would conceptualize as "rock music", which still implies some semblance of tune to me

it isn't so much that grindcore ISN'T rock music as it is that grindcore is not what I think of when I think of rock music, but Iron Maiden would be

ILX probably just lives in its own world just as many publications do. Pick up an Alternative Press magazine for example...

not really, none of those are primarily concerned w/ traditional "rock" values or "dance" ones either. emph is on style and synthesis of other genres. like i pheel like indie is hella postmmodern and always articulates itself in relation to other genres which is why stuff like alt.country exists and why there ARE so many prefixes. like the condition of indie is quotation not tradition.

― plax (ico), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:34 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

hmmmm, i can sorta get with this. so why is this (is it?) corrosive to discourse, per the thread's question, then? (open q, not saying that that's what you're asserting)

xp i've always felt that metal is distinctive enough, and self-policing about what it is, to be considered something different from rock. like, four guys can stand onstange with guitars and amps and be a country band, a metal band, or an indie rock band, and those are different things. and if they try to be all those things at once i guess i just chuck them into the "rock" bin because it's what's most convenient for me

i've always felt that metal is distinctive enough, and self-policing about what it is, to be considered something different from rock.

I might have agreed with that before seeing what everyone nominated for the ILM metal polls.

Is Mastodon metal or rock?

prog.

oh, so they sound like Kanye

exactly

but i guess i still would like someone to challenge my point upthread: i maintain that even as broadly defined as "non-rock" genres may be, their critical apparatuses (on ILM, at least) still have an interest in evaluating their music with an eye to whether or not that music actually IS rap/metal/etc. or, rather, certain assumptions about a given work's actual musical character are made before even getting into the finer points of "what works," and so on.

I might have agreed with that before seeing what everyone nominated for the ILM metal polls.

― "Kiss Players♥" (DJP), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:43 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

and you know what happened? ppl got pissy about it

lol so was I! hence the "why are you in 2004" joke

Ha, missed that the first time.

I have no problem saying that metal is a kind of rock (call it "metal rock") and that it's very different from the default music associated with the term "rock" (call it "rock rock"). Seems the least interesting aspect of this debate imo.

but i guess i still would like someone to challenge my point upthread: i maintain that even as broadly defined as "non-rock" genres may be, their critical apparatuses (on ILM, at least) still have an interest in evaluating their music with an eye to whether or not that music actually IS rap/metal/etc. or, rather, certain assumptions about a given work's actual musical character are made before even getting into the finer points of "what works," and so on.

I'm not gonna challenge it, I think that's definitely the case

I listen to rock rock

i like the idea of calling stuff like animal collective just plain old "indie". because i really like rock music. and i can't listen to animal collective for a minute. so there MUST be a difference.

I think the fact is that rock (and metal) keeps evolving (despite what people outside these circles seem to lazily accept) and mutating and absorbs other genres and have splintered off into many sub-genres (in metal sub-genres have their own sub-genres now) . This makes it all harder to pigeonhole and sell to the masses. But as long as it's resulting in good music then who cares. It's all out there if you dig a bit for it rather than relying on pitchfork or radio/mtv/x factor.

gbx, I wrote this waaaaaaay upthread:

I think some of what is being seen is defensiveness; rock is still seen as the baseline everything else must react against, the venerable old man at the top of the mountain. A lot of the conversation is a perhaps subconscious attempt to build up an alternate canon/pedigree to take its place.

Perhaps the takeaway in relation to your point is the idea that rock is the baseline, ergo talking about what is or isn't rock doesn't make as much sense?

i don't have the pomo chops that plax does, but it seems to me that critical discussion of eg metal is pretty self-policing, and self-aware. i could nominate Vampire Weekend for a best metal of 2010 poll but no one would take me seriously. at some point shit ISN"T metal.

and since we don't have similarly defined conventions for, say, AnCo, it's a little tough to get past "ehhh I don't like it." not saying you CAN'T, but, here, on ILM, which is what this thread is about, it's a lot harder. ppl have to do a lot more heavy-lifting at the get-go

xp i can see that, djp, for sure

i think one of the ways its corrosive is bc u end up having ppl on this thread saying things like "well anco *have* made rock albums" but u get this thing in indie where their stylistic grounding is not necc. rooted in a traditional genre so that there are bands making their country album and their electronic album. the auteurial coherence is based on a diff set of values. i mean this is not wholly unique to indie but i think its the defining characteristic. its also y its so bound up w/ hipster culture in the 2ks i think. i mean irony man.

Irony Man, are they some indie metal band

xp to Plax: Hmm...maybe. But lots of uncontroversial indie bands make the same album over and over again, while some metal bands make "ambient" or "shoegaze" albums.

on which alt-rock/metal albums have crossed over in 2010? no-one seems to be able to answer the thread titles question. is 2010 lacking major selling rock albums then?

I don't buy that as a definition of a musical genre (and is perhaps symptomatic of why a lot of modern music discussion frustrates the shit out of me; people aren't actually discussing music, they are discussing motivations and band history and personalities and aesthetic values and practically everything else that can be considered except for the actual music made).

Like, I don't particularly care that you can't take Animal Collective's entire recorded output and put it into one well-defined genre; you can't do that with Rod Stewart or David Bowie either, but no one goes into paroxysms trying to discuss his music in terms of what genre a particular song/album falls into.

yah its not wholly unique. matias aguayo and matthew dear are giod eg.s of a dance equiv. (similarly theyve been sortof embraced by indie)

("that" = plax's definition of indie)

lol bowie is so proto indie tho

^^^I'm on Dan's side here. it's the materialist in me.

xp

u get this thing in indie where their stylistic grounding is not necc. rooted in a traditional genre so that there are bands making their country album and their electronic album. the auteurial coherence is based on a diff set of values. i mean this is not wholly unique to indie but i think its the defining characteristic.

right, fine, i can get with this. but, again, n/a was asking why discussion of the actual nuts-and-bolts musical stuff that's happening seems less fecund in "rock threads" than it is in, say, hip-hop threads, and i think you've sorta pointed to why. because talking about 'the musical stuff that's happening' relies a lot more heavily on trad'l genre conventions, whether or not you're an indie band making their country album or just a country band making another country album.

and i still think that ILM's best commentators on music seem to have vested interests in certain genre conventions, and pay attention to what's happening with them, even when it's shit they don't like. and, importantly, they'll talk to you about it. if a hipster band who's post-genre makes a country album and then a metal album, that alone is gonna mean that some ppl are gonna show up in one thread and not another.

Looking at Billboard's top 200 album list for this week, you have to scroll down to Florence and the Machine to encounter anyone with even a passing connection to rock as opposed to Christmas, hip-hop, R&B, pop or country.

I just looked at this chart. To be pedantic, Kid Rock is at #13, Bon Jovi at #32 (GH album though), both ahead of Florence and the Machine. Kings of Leon and MCR are just a little lower than F&tM. (On the Canadian chart, Eric Lapointe is at #8, with Bon Jovi at #9.) Tbh, though, the point has been made but I see no reason not to include someone like Taylor Swift as a rock artist, by any classic definition.

The most important discovery, however, is that Christmas with Boney M is the #31 album in Canada this week!

idg y a genre def has to be purely formal tho? i feel like genre defs are useful insofar as they work, and i think i know indie when i see it. also thinking of genre in terms of values instead seems to allow for the stylistic evolutions ppl are talking about...

but it divorces genres from the actual music in them, which to me is frankly stupid

and is perhaps symptomatic of why a lot of modern music discussion frustrates the shit out of me; people aren't actually discussing music, they are discussing motivations and band history and personalities and aesthetic values and practically everything else that can be considered except for the actual music made

^^This is why my favorite recent thread is the "moments" one. It's all about what gets to people in the actual music and not extra-musical context.

see, but i don't know about that. i'm a punk & metal listening "real rock" fan, and i'd happily grant that both crowded house and jellyfish are honest-to-god rock bands. they don't sound like chuck berry or led zeppelin or whatever, but they're in line with an ongoing rock tradition that grew out of the 70s and into the 80s/90s. they're not hard rock, but nor are they totally divorced from the genre's roots and subsequent evolution.

They are also not at all divorced from Brill Building pop or Tin Pan Alley/Great American Songbook from that matter. Their roots lie in a certain era in the mid 60s when rock elements were melted together with non-rock popular music elements. The Beatles were known as rock back then, but would have been described as pop had they arrived on the scene today.

the real reason why all these threads are boring is because 75% of the interesting people have, over the years, been banned.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res)

lol no, tbh i think a lot of people just left ilm b/c i think certain posters have not been a particularly welcoming presence here.

geir hongro will never leave though ;-)

i feel like genre defs are useful insofar as they work, and i think i know indie when i see it.

But would you have known it as "indie" 10 years ago? Big genres like "rock", "dance", "hiphop" don't really work outside of a chronological context.

Regarding genre and context, I think largely genres describe stuff that actually happens in the music itself (with a few exceptions like "glam rock" and "emo", terms that don't really give an idea of what kind of music is within at all), but there is also a chronological element. For instance, what was called Britpop in the 90s would have been called indie in the 80s, powerpop in the 70s and probably rock in the 60s.

(And today some might describe it as dadrock or possibly even soft rock in the case of Coldplay etc)

idg y a genre def has to be purely formal tho? i feel like genre defs are useful insofar as they work, and i think i know indie when i see it. also thinking of genre in terms of values instead seems to allow for the stylistic evolutions ppl are talking about...

― plax (ico), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:02 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark

maybe so, but i'm still thinking "shop talk" here, which automatically assumes that the ppl engaged in discussion have agreed to certain conventions. if i ask someone about whether or not a certain wrench is good for a certain bike repair, i don't necessarily wanna hear that it's also good for fixing my dishwasher. i mean, i do, that's interesting! neat! but we're wondering why "genre" threads get more action than "rock" threads, i think genre conventions are useful means to at least get things going. this doesn't mean that you can't slyly point out that post-modernity has messed with what those conventions are, and whatever, it just means that ppl that aren't operating at that level can get into why so-and-so is a good metal drummer and so-and-so really isn't

but it divorces genres from the actual music in them, which to me is frankly stupid

but the thing is ALL popular music is received in a way that goes beyond pure formality and it seems kindof misleading to say otherwise. (that is imagery, fanbase, personality etc.) i feel like the reason yall are turning indie into this chimera is bc ur refusing to actually engage with it on the terms it definez itself with.

a genre defines itself?

huh

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRUBGng9fES5pemMKDcUgby-U29_SSwkiyr70uROnFUD2iJksqM
"we're through the looking glass here people"

xpost Discussing how music makes you feel - which is its main appeal - demands sincerity. Moments thread aside, that's something ILX isn't big on. And quite often when someone tries to discuss contemporary "rock" with any sincerity the deluge arrives of "LOLZ musical reactionary! Get with Nicki Minaj!"

_i feel like genre defs are useful insofar as they work, and i think i know indie when i see it. _

But would you have known it as "indie" 10 years ago? Big genres like "rock", "dance", "hiphop" don't really work outside of a chronological context.

what abt krautrock? i mean sure can are rock but cluster and kraftwerk? maybe what we call indie is a cultural moment or maybe its definition will solidify. the condition for genre is not that it has always existed

i don't have a problem with the terms you've laid out for "indie," plax. it seems interesting, and pretty robust. but i think you can see how it might be difficult, initially, to discuss whether or not a new album "works" as indie, musically, if all you've got to work with are the "values" of the band...which are inherently "indie," cuz it said so. or, rather, if those values can't be made manifest in a musical sense, in actual sounds, and are defined and can only be engaged with in an extra-musical sense (imagery, fanbase, personality), then your point isn't at all salient to the discussion of the music itself. like, ok, AnCo made their polka album, but is it even good polka?? you might say it doesn't matter, and maybe you're right, but there's still the fact that there it is, polka music. and some guys made it, with at least a vague interest in adhering and/or defying the conventions that define polka. some old german guy could listen to it, without knowing who AnCo is, and say "this is great" or "this is shit" or "that guy is terrible at the accordion" and here's why.

its kinda funny that this thread is kinda boring, don't you think? well, i thought it was funny.

anyway, what rock music isn't being talked about on ilm that needs to be talked about at length? or what rock music isn't being talked about in a way that is interesting? i'm still a little confused. i would think that the rolling punk/indie/drone/metal/etc threads would be enough if people wanted to start a good discussion on something new. but maybe not.

I guess it wouldn't be a true ILM thread without someone who doesn't give a shit coming in and dismissing it despite the obvious engagement of the people actually participating.

"Is Cluster rock?" seems a reasonable debate to have. "Is Cluster Krautrock?" is an easy one. "Is Cluster indie?" won't lead anywhere interesting. Indie doesn't belong in the same category as rock/dance/jazz for me, its application seems to be more about externalities than about lineage and convention.

xpost Discussing how music makes you feel - which is its main appeal - demands sincerity. Moments thread aside, that's something ILX isn't big on. And quite often when someone tries to discuss contemporary "rock" with any sincerity the deluge arrives of "LOLZ musical reactionary! Get with Nicki Minaj!"

― Alan Partridge Project (ithappens), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:15 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

bcuz no one likes nicki minaj sincerely

not that ppl are doing that anyway -- but just sayin

really? poor Nicki

she seems like she's trying so hard

yeah i don't buy that. people are sincere all over the place on ilm. sincerity up the ass. and nobody is shy about sharing their thoughts and feelings about music on here! that's crazy.

I caught part of Nicki's MTV show that showed her in the studio recording; my appreciation for her went up by about a bazillion percent.

Still not buying her album, tho

what's good about nicki's mtv show? i haven't seen it.

i <3 nicki but would not recommend her album particularly (though it's both better and more interesting than kanye's)

i have a text document where i've transcribed about 10 minaj tracks/verses, that's how sincere i am in my <3 for her

She was in the studio without her hair and make-up just viciously spitting a verse into the microphone, seemingly oblivious to how increasingly deranged she was becoming. Meanwhile, her friend/engineer(?) was in the control booth going "WHOOOOO!" and "WHAT?" at every other line. When she finished, she calmly took off her headphones and was all "hey, play that back" like she wasn't seriously crazy 5 seconds ago and dude in the booth during the playback was all "Does anything about this sound normal to you?" while looking at her as if he expected a wight to leap out of her skin and eat his eyes.

(no idea what the song was but it was crazy; the punchline shit was integral to the flow and was so rapid-fire and aggressive that it wasn't eyerolly)

xpost not disputing anyone's sincerity about nicki minaj. just that the anti rockism is strong here, and except on specialist genre threads, snarking at conservatism becomes commonplace. and there are lots of sincere people here, but i'd still say snark is the dominant trope, not sincerity.

in fact, how on earth did you get from what i wrote - about rock threads - to assuming no one's sincere about nicki minaj?

She was in the studio without her hair and make-up just viciously spitting a verse into the microphone, seemingly oblivious to how increasingly deranged she was becoming. Meanwhile, her friend/engineer(?) was in the control booth going "WHOOOOO!" and "WHAT?" at every other line. When she finished, she calmly took off her headphones and was all "hey, play that back" like she wasn't seriously crazy 5 seconds ago and dude in the booth during the playback was all "Does anything about this sound normal to you?" while looking at her as if he expected a wight to leap out of her skin and eat his eyes.

Yes... And...? I thought people liked Patti Smith, P.J. Harvey and Liz Phair in here? :)

I know English isn't your first language, but I also know your grasp of it and context are better than what you are displaying here in service of possibly the least amusing "amusing comment" I've read on the site today.

btw I don't really have any problems figuring out which bands are "rock" and which ones aren't so if there are any you aren't sure about, just ask me

dude geir just named THREE WOMEN that actually EXIST! whaddya want from him?

silence

u can't stop the shining

also no one has like Liz Phair for almost 15 years

idg y a genre def has to be purely formal tho? i feel like genre defs are useful insofar as they work, and i think i know indie when i see it. also thinking of genre in terms of values instead seems to allow for the stylistic evolutions ppl are talking about...

― plax (ico), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:02 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

but it divorces genres from the actual music in them, which to me is frankly stupid

― "Kiss Players♥" (DJP), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:03 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm a formalist as a listener i think, but there's no separating genre from its social basis. the music does not appear from nowhere out of relationships to other music, its made by people -- living bodies in relationship to other living bodies. you can't escape it. if an indie band makes a shoegaze record, and a metal band makes a shoegaze record, there are probably musical signifiers in production or songwriting or the singing to let you know which is "really" which. but the subliminal musical stuff kinda pales to the absolute obvious answer -- one was made by "indie people" the other by "metal people"

this isn't entirely the same as class or nationality or race, but it's not divorced from those things either. people are situated in a given community for all kinds of reasons, music comes out of lived experience

My actual non-snipey answer to this thread is 'they're only boring if you make them boring' which I'm sure has been said already; there are loads of really interesting threads on rock on ILM, but sadly there's also a dearth of people wanting to talk about it to any great depth, so the threads rehashing the same prevalent artists in the same sorts of way far outweigh those with fresh perspectives or unknown artists.

rock will remain forever. It makes people feel free. People love this feeling.

fuck worthless soulless dance music.

there's also a dearth of people wanting to talk about it to any great depth

compared to other forms of music; people whose interests aren't especially rock-skewed thus end up talking about rock in a fairly shallow way and this becomes the mode of discussion etc etc

however there's a significant portion of rock fans with great depth of knowledge who keep things interesting, so <3 for them

mind you plenty of people, like me, are interested in ALL the musics. even bigger <3 for them. haha!

i'm a formalist as a listener i think, but there's no separating genre from its social basis. the music does not appear from nowhere out of relationships to other music, its made by people -- living bodies in relationship to other living bodies. you can't escape it. if an indie band makes a shoegaze record, and a metal band makes a shoegaze record, there are probably musical signifiers in production or songwriting or the singing to let you know which is "really" which. but the subliminal musical stuff kinda pales to the absolute obvious answer -- one was made by "indie people" the other by "metal people"

That is kind of beside the point, which is that if both albums have enough shoegaze signifiers in them no one in the genre will look askance at you if you describe the albums as shoegaze; if you are defining "indie" in terms of the artists' approach to music rather than the music itself, you are not actually defining a musical genre! It's like saying baroque music is defined by the people who commissioned it rather than the instrumentation and the usage of the fugue.

There is nothing wrong with a band/artist not fitting into only one genre and I don't really understand why people feel they have to make up things that don't actually have any discernible relation to the music in order to encompass a band's output in one neat little box. I mean, Renee Fleming is an operatic soprano known for arias and oratorio performances who has recorded an album of jazz standards and a rock album; no one is going to say either of those is an opera or oratorio performance, and no one is going to deny that she makes most of her living doing opera/oratorio.

I'm with Dan here insofar as when it comes to analysis of the arts, if it isn't represented in the text (or music or film or whatever) than to me it doesn't matter.

i will say that her rock album is probably really horrible!

xp

well yeah, her jazz album was horrible too but that's kind of not the point

and i still think that ILM's best commentators on music seem to have vested interests in certain genre conventions, and pay attention to what's happening with them, even when it's shit they don't like. and, importantly, they'll talk to you about it. if a hipster band who's post-genre makes a country album and then a metal album, that alone is gonna mean that some ppl are gonna show up in one thread and not another.

― kanellos (gbx), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 10:01 AM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark

frankly, i think part of it is that the critics engaged with rock music are no longer really allowed to passionately police the boundaries of the genre, to emotionally ally themselves with it and to defend it against that which they think would threaten or corrupt it. those sorts of diehard gatekeeper stances are a big part of discussions about rap, dance & metal, and the aesthetics and attitudes behind them are at least tolerated in that context. but you'd be unforgivably corny, old and/or rockist to take rock music that seriously.

also, there are a number of people on this board who seem to consider it their job to know just about everything that's going on in those corners of the musical universe they consider relevant/interesting. some even complain about how poor a job other critics are doing at digging beneath the overhyped stories of the moment to call attention to equally interesting music that's going unnoticed. but very few regulars here seem to be engaged with rock music in that sense, like to the point where they'd feel that they were failing in their job if they weren't up everything that was going down in the genre. there may be a "real heads know" sign up over the doors to the rolling metal, hard rock, psych and punk threads, but relatively few people seem to want to take up that challenge.

if you are defining "indie" in terms of the artists' approach to music rather than the music itself, you are not actually defining a musical genre! It's like saying baroque music is defined by the people who commissioned it rather than the instrumentation and the usage of the fugue.

well, it kind of is? you can't separate the choices of which note to put after which (the music-qua-music stuff) from the "bodily" stuff -- who they were, who they did it for, why they did it at all. renee fleming's crappy rock and jazz albums seem on point here! getting it right musically and being "of the world" of those genres aren't entirely separable!

i think plax is otm

contenderizer otm, esp this:

also, there are a number of people on this board who seem to consider it their job to know just about everything that's going on in those corners of the musical universe they consider relevant/interesting. some even complain about how poor a job other critics are doing at digging beneath the overhyped stories of the moment to call attention to equally interesting music that's going unnoticed. but very few regulars here seem to be engaged with rock music in that sense, like to the point where they'd feel that they were failing in their job if they weren't up everything that was going down in the genre

those sorts of diehard gatekeeper stances are a big part of discussions about rap, dance & metal, and the aesthetics and attitudes behind them are at least tolerated in that context. but you'd be unforgivably corny, old and/or rockist to take rock music that seriously.

i think reducing passionate discussion to this is really reductive

good thing he didn't do that!

well, it kind of is? you can't separate the choices of which note to put after which (the music-qua-music stuff) from the "bodily" stuff -- who they were, who they did it for, why they did it at all.

I don't necessarily disagree, but you are still taking into account the instruments used and the form of the piece when you are talking about its genre; you are not talking about the composer as stylistic magpie in the same manner plax is re: Animal Collective. (It helps that the musical palette of the time was more limited, making the connections between different musical forms more explicit.)

My main argument is that "indie" as a musical genre as defined by plax is useless because it doesn't actually tell you what to expect from the music. I think it makes more sense to say they are a band that started out doing rock stuff who have turned more towards synth music than it does to lump everything they've done under one umbrella.

well, tbf, it could tell you what to expect from the music, it's just that plax doesn't really lay out how that might sound, and waves it off as something that you'll know when you hear it. which is kinda pat, but i ~think~ i get what he's saying

i think reducing passionate discussion to this is really reductive

this from the guy whose favorite insult is to call something/somebody "corny"

but yeah, if "indie" can only be defined extramusically (metamusically, metamucilly), then its not that helpful for discussions of, you know, how and why things sound the way they do

^^^ thank you, this is the point I am attempting and failing to make

(and it's not like there's no place for that type of discussion, it's just annoying when that is the prevalent-bordering-on-only type of discussion)

xp also funny because deej, yr dismissal of that quote is....reductive. esp since contenderizer doesn't reduce anything, at all. if it helps, scratch the word "big" from his quote and read it again.

this from the guy whose favorite insult is to call something/somebody "corny"

― from the lowly milligeir to the mighty gigahongro (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 1:48 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i say drake 'sucks' i dont say hes not rap music

xp also funny because deej, yr dismissal of that quote is....reductive. esp since contenderizer doesn't reduce anything, at all. if it helps, scratch the word "big" from his quote and read it again.

― kanellos (gbx), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 1:50 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think our passionate opinions are more about what is good / bad not what is or isnt 'rap'

plz use yr reading abilities, dude, because NO ONE IS SAYING THAT

then youre going to have to break down for me what 'policing the boundaries' actually means

dont know why yr yelling at me really

i do think indie can be defined musically, too. i'm not saying that all other musical genres have clear formal characteristics and indie is just a bunch of social relationships.

deej: if i show up and post an arcade fire video on the goon thread like its somehow relevant you guys would be like gfto w/that....because it's not hip-hop. that is really the only point being made---when ppl discuss metal/rap/etc there's an assumption of boundary policing, and that that is a subtext to all the impassioned opinions that follow. that's it.

this same kind of policing doesn't happen in rock threads because, pick one: a) rock is more catholic in the actual sounds that we deem "rock music" b) ppl are worried about being called rockist or, shudder, being compared to geir c) some other thing

that's kinda it

He is saying, rather explicitly, that gatekeeperism is a PART of the conversation, not that it is the ENTIRE conversation, which is what he would need to do in order for the statement to be reductive.

Whereas my comment about those threads being a breeding ground for alternate canon makers and tastemakers actually IS reductive, but you either didn't read it or didn't disagree.

if i start talking about rick ross in a rap thread, how is that above reproach exactly?

a rock thread i mean

i dont see how gatekeeperism isnt a part of all threads, in that case

im not playing dumb here guys! genuinely don't get it

I want to answer but I am lolling too hard at the Freudian slip

dude geir just named THREE WOMEN that actually EXIST!

And whose vocal style consists of overemotive screaming.

like, if i started posting about nicki minaj in the underground punk indie thread yall wouldnt go 'wtf'??

Looking at Billboard's top 200 album list for this week, you have to scroll down to Florence and the Machine to encounter anyone with even a passing connection to rock as opposed to Christmas, hip-hop, R&B, pop or country.

Albums lists in recent years have largely been dominated by opera pop and other MOR for 50 year-old housewives. Particularly before Christmas.

sure ppl would

xp

lol someone contrarian jerk would probably make some argument that nicki is more punk than anyone else mentioned on the thread. (and they would not be entirely wrong - WHICH IS THE PROBLEM)

xp

There are several different levels to the word gatekeeper; you are focusing on the is/isn't axis to the exclusion of the good/bad (or possibly acceptable/unacceptable) axis. The general reaction to Drake (or "Bedrock", to take a more specific example) very much fits into contenderizer's comment re: reactions against stuff that pushes the genre in terrible directions.

xp: Shakey, mark s hasn't posted here in years

lol someone contrarian jerk would probably make some argument that nicki is more punk than anyone else mentioned on the thread. (and they would not be entirely wrong - WHICH IS THE PROBLEM)

xp

― from the lowly milligeir to the mighty gigahongro (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:06 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xuhxk eddy is hardly representative xxxp lol w/ dan

but yeah in general people would say wtf Nicki is RAP not punk. but this could only be argued because rap is more clearly defined than rock, not the other way around. (which would also be eliding the argument about whether nicki is POP, all the R&B songs she appears on, etc.)

xp

xp: Shakey, mark s hasn't posted here in years

lol

the non-indie/punk thread is about the least confrontational thread on the whole board

other people have now made this point more clearly, but...

deej, i was thinking more of j0hn in metal threads than you in rap ones, but whatever. point is that in articulating what we think sucks and why and how, we are policing the boundaries of a genre, at least to the extent that we identify ourselves with the genre and couch our criticism in claims of expertise and realness. i mean, i've been clowned by you more than once in rap threads simply for coming to stuff late or being "corny" about it. that's the essence of gatekeeping. there are fans who know and fans who don't. artists who are real and artists who are faking it or fucking it up. you may not recognize these stances in yourself, but believe me, they're there, and you seem to care a great deal about them. nor is there anything wrong with this. the ability to provoke that kind of passionate identification is what keeps genres alive.

but how is complaining about hashtag rap any difft from complaining about chillwave

xxxps

the non-indie/punk thread is about the least confrontational thread on the whole board

― in my world of Hmong ppl (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:08 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark

no cuz i said a mean thing about puffy aereolas

BTW I don't think mark s is a jerk at all. That type of contrarian viewpoint, when backed up, enriches discussion IMO; the problem is that most people can't argue it effectively.

Pop may mean two different things. One is simply music that is popular, the other has somewhat stricter boundaries, which excludes a lot of actually popular rock, R&B and hip-hop, but on the other hand includes a lot of very unpopular/underground powerpop.

but how is complaining about hashtag rap any difft from complaining about chillwave

chillwave is rock in what way now...? it's made on computers and synths out of samples mostly by lone guys in their bedrooms. what is rock about this. it's closer to dance music.

deej, i was thinking more of j0hn in metal threads than you in rap ones, but whatever. point is that in articulating what we think sucks and why and how, we are policing the boundaries of a genre, at least to the extent that we identify ourselves with the genre and couch our criticism in claims of expertise and realness. i mean, i've been clowned by you more than once in rap threads simply for coming to stuff late or being "corny" about it. that's the essence of gatekeeping. there are fans who know and fans who don't. artists who are real and artists who are faking it or fucking it up. you may not recognize these stances in yourself, but believe me, they're there, and you seem to care a great deal about them. nor is there anything wrong with this. the ability to provoke that kind of passionate identification is what keeps genres alive.

― phish in your sleazebag (contenderizer), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:08 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think this is really weirdly condescending -- im not sure i see how disliking something in rap is inherently more about policing genres than it is when dudes say chillwave is corny or make fun of kings of leon

again:

also, there are a number of people on this board who seem to consider it their job to know just about everything that's going on in those corners of the musical universe they consider relevant/interesting. some even complain about how poor a job other critics are doing at digging beneath the overhyped stories of the moment to call attention to equally interesting music that's going unnoticed. but very few regulars here seem to be engaged with rock music in that sense, like to the point where they'd feel that they were failing in their job if they weren't up everything that was going down in the genre

'rock,' writ large, doesn't have these ppl on ILM, probably because it'd be such a horrible, thankless task, since 'rock' is so much larger, sonically, when it comes to the question of 'what is or isn't rock'. subgenres like punk or w/e might, but they don't seem to be as active as the goons and the metalheads.

many xps, contenderizer said it better again

chillwave is rock in what way now...? it's made on computers and synths out of samples mostly by lone guys in their bedrooms. what is rock about this. it's closer to dance music.

― from the lowly milligeir to the mighty gigahongro (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:11 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol that no one dances to

~~steps on thin ice~~

no cuz i said a mean thing about puffy aereolas

― phish in your sleazebag (contenderizer), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:09 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is that a band name or a low-blow personal attack against me??

i think this is really weirdly condescending -- im not sure i see how disliking something in rap is inherently more about policing genres than it is when dudes say chillwave is corny or make fun of kings of leon

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:12 PM (11 seconds ago) Bookmark

lol how is that condescending?? hiphop/metal/punk are often very explicitly, in the fucking lyrics, concerned about who is real and who is fake. pointing that out isn't condescending!

well I now know more about M@tt's nipples than I ever wanted to

um i think its a myth that rock isnt just as concerned w/ authenticity

metal and punk are a part of rock

are you just arguing for the sake of it?

my nipples don't fit easily into conventional genre designations

rock that's not metal, punk or indie is now called Country

or sometimes Industrial

or post-industrial neofolk

post-industrial nipplefolk

metal and punk are a part of rock

are you just arguing for the sake of it?

― "Kiss Players♥" (DJP), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:16 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

christ alive

ok then, whatever version of a 'rock thread' we are talking about here!

im not 'arguing just to argue' i just dont see how hip hop is any more about 'policing boundaries' than the crit-rock ppl here are really into. i know its a funny fantasy to imagine genre nerds being so 'honor the fire' about their respective tastes but i really dont think your typical ilm dilettante is above that either, hes just fitting into different genre-policing rules

don't harsh my wave, man.

lol @ nipples

i think this is really weirdly condescending -- im not sure i see how disliking something in rap is inherently more about policing genres than it is when dudes say chillwave is corny or make fun of kings of leon

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:12 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

apologize for the condescension. i knew that post would irk, but hit submit anyway. thing is, lols at chillwave and kings of leon (and salem, strokes, vampy weeks, etc.) aren't typically delivered from an explicit position of troo-rock authenticity. i mean, i agree with you that rock as culture is hugely concerned with that kind of authenticity, but on ILM, there isn't much interest in or even tolerance for diehard "real rock" talk. so far as i can tell...

It seems like you are missing the entire point in favor of focusing on a detail that you are parsing as a personal attack.

The argument is that no one is particularly passionate about the type of music being discussed in this thread; you are focusing on a facet of that type of passion which is universal to all passionate music fans regardless of genre and treating it as if everyone thinks you are a mean person.

if thats the case dan, this thread is asking a dumber question than i thought -- 'why is there no passionate discussion here about music that no one here likes." i assumed that we were talking about music that actually had fans here

um i think its a myth that rock isnt just as concerned w/ authenticity

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:16 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

patently untrue, if you are talking about ~sounds~

...which is what this thread is about, remember. "rock music" as it is generally understood includes belle and sebastian and black sabbath. both are recognized as "rock music," but there def people who will hate the former and love the latter. these people are not likely to make the effort to listen and evaluate why they came to those conclusions, they're just gonna go ehhh i don't like it. rap/metal, having more constrained sonic blueprints (as of this writing), also have fans that will listen and evaluate music they might not love just because it's rap/metal. which is why you get "better" threads---the ppl contributing have a wider range of opinions. a lot of 'rock' threads are as n/a described because the haters don't bother and the fans don't go a lot further than 'i like this'

in that case the issue is that 'rock' is too broad a genre to ask this question about & its purely about semantics

welcome to the beginning of this thread, I'm glad you could join us

speaking of condescending

then why were we discussing 'policing' at all

anyway, like someone else said, the lethargy about rock is probably post-rockism hangover blues combined with the seeming exhaustion of the genre. not by any means a lack of fans.

gbx has a good point, too. at this point, all the big battles have already been fought in rock. there's almost no ground left to protect, no perversion that hasn't been happily accommodated. no one has to really struggle to get into or out of camp. punk yes, metal yes, but rock no. the umbrella genre has low standards.

if someone says 'i listen to a lot of metal' i already have a really good idea of what their living room ~might~ sound like if i went over to their house. if they say 'i listen to a lot of rock music' i'd have no idea what to expect, since they could mean blink 182 or they could mean acid mothers temple. it also means that i'll have a better idea of what they might want to talk about it, because someone who's into metal has probably heard of mastodon, say. someone who's 'into rock' may or may not have heard of deerhunter.

xp we were talking about 'policing' because it is precisely that 'policing' that keeps the genre conventions of rap narrower, you dork

welcome to the beginning of this thread, I'm glad you could join us

― "Kiss Players♥" (DJP), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 3:39 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

tbf this thread is fairly worthless without some more boundary-setting or some examples

My main argument is that "indie" as a musical genre as defined by plax is useless because it doesn't actually tell you what to expect from the music. I think it makes more sense to say they are a band that started out doing rock stuff who have turned more towards synth music than it does to lump everything they've done under one umbrella.

well is it? i mean yeah animal collector albs have been all over the place stylistically but ive been a fan consistently since here comes the indian. i mean there is a coherence and maybe its more similar to what unites indie than the formal systems of genre def others are proposing.

i think id go beyond goole on this bc i mean why not. for me its impossible to ever think of anything in purely formal terms bc forms are also signifiers, i think indie foregrounds this maybe?

it also might explain why the fuzzy division b/w indie and rock causes such gatekeeperism bc of indies magpie approach to genre and utilisation of genre as signifier rather than parameter. i mean maybe thats y u get this hyper contextulol discussion around bands like anco and vampy wknd that u dont get w/ others that are all about like politics of "using" afrobeat etc.

ehhh if someone tells me they listen to a lot of metal i have no idea if they're a black or doom metal fan like me or if they're into like motley crue and shit--same prob, smaller scale

i brought up scene policing because it does exist elsewhere, just not wr2 rock on ILM, and it's often a big part of what drives passionate, expert-level discussion about music, here and elsewhere

...and narrower genre conventions make it easier to dispense with questions of authenticity (sonically, here), and move on to the quality of the music itself.

xp well yeah, CAD, sure, and you could say the same of hip-hop. the scale is the ish here

it sounds like you're actually just arguing that the rock umbrella got too big for ppl to police its borders as a whole

still doesnt explain why ilxor punk fans or indie fans or whatever dont have passionate discussions

shouldnt rock micro genres operate the same way as rap

i guess i wasn't sure that scale was the ish? that maybe it was a knottier problem than that?

it also might explain why the fuzzy division b/w indie and rock causes such gatekeeperism bc of indies magpie approach to genre and utilisation of genre as signifier rather than parameter. i mean maybe thats y u get this hyper contextulol discussion around bands like anco and vampy wknd that u dont get w/ others that are all about like politics of "using" afrobeat etc.

yup, exactly--and a lot of that gets at why "indie" even became a genre term and who made "indie" music over the years and etc.

ultimately "who makes the music" is the easiest and most useful way to define "indie" and i've always felt that way.

still doesnt explain why ilxor punk fans or indie fans or whatever dont have passionate discussions

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:44 PM (39 seconds ago) Bookmark

sure it does: rap as a genre simply has more ppl that want to talk about it on ILM than microgenres of rock. also, the identifiable microgenres of rock are pretty small, when you think about it, with most of the rest still vaguely defined as "rock" and lacking the passionate, informed fans that are gonna keep up on all of it. except like markers and bee ok, i guess

i'd also say that you could blame lack of passionate discussion abt punk or abt stuff hewing close to a traditionalist strand of rock on the fact that nothing new or interesting is happening in those genres and hasn't been for years.

plax OTM about indie. indie started out as the subversion of american punk, the utilization of punk/HC tools (loud guitars and often harsh sonics; a rhetoric of opposition, anticapitalism and nihilism) to redefine or at least to push at punk's formal parameters, to break it out of hardcore's straightjacket. so it was always, in essence, something different-from: an expansion upon and a reaction against. it came to have a formal identity of its own, but its core identity has always been more conceptual than formal. this makes it extremely slippery and adaptable as a genre-defining term, but not useless or meaningless.

well is it? i mean yeah animal collector albs have been all over the place stylistically but ive been a fan consistently since here comes the indian. i mean there is a coherence and maybe its more similar to what unites indie than the formal systems of genre def others are proposing.

I don't know that being a fan of someone through their stylistic shifts means that everything they've done belongs in the same genre.

i think id go beyond goole on this bc i mean why not. for me its impossible to ever think of anything in purely formal terms bc forms are also signifiers, i think indie foregrounds this maybe?

it also might explain why the fuzzy division b/w indie and rock causes such gatekeeperism bc of indies magpie approach to genre and utilisation of genre as signifier rather than parameter. i mean maybe thats y u get this hyper contextulol discussion around bands like anco and vampy wknd that u dont get w/ others that are all about like politics of "using" afrobeat etc.

Others disagree with me but there isn't anything about either VW album that would make me say they aren't rock albums. I don't even see how that would enter into the discussion, tbh; they're veering back and forth between NYC pop-art punk and Graceland Pt 2. Animal Collective, as I said before, started out doing a lot of rock stuff and are doing things that I consider more in the dance bucket now. I don't find it useful to have an ur-genre that describes the magpie tendencies behind the music but doesn't really tell you where they're pulling from if you want to talk to somebody about what the music sounds like or you want to recommend similar artists to someone else.

a lot of indie fans have been clowned off ilm for being infantile pussies iirc, isn't that what happened? i mean aren't indie fans folks who are afraid to grow up and are clinging to their sweaters from fourth grade?

see i always thought 'indie' was just short hand for 'not on a major label.' and that once punk/hardcore became associated with tightly confined sonic templates and not just a way of going about making music, 'indie' got brought in as a way to describe independently-produced music that wasn't punk/hardcore.

i'm kidding since yeah i'm pretty big into indie but i am certain i've seen comments skewing close to that thinking...

"it also might explain why the fuzzy division b/w indie and rock causes such gatekeeperism bc of indies magpie approach to genre and utilisation of genre as signifier rather than parameter."

--- this is good, should point out that this is what rap does too -- the only common connection is 'rapping', you can rap over damn near anything but it still retains the genre of 'rap'

basically what keeps indie -- and dance too for that matter -- going at this pt is magpie post-modern approach ... not sure this helps explain 'passion'

'indie' also short hand for 'obscure garbage' and 'tiny weenis' iirc

deej: right! which is why it's usually pretty easy to say "nope, that's not rap...there's no rapping!"

less easy to say "nope that's not rock, there's no...." rocking? hated rockists might argue that, but, on ILM at least, "rocking" is not at all necessary for something to be called "rock"

tiny peni are prevalent amongst purveyors of indies from what i hear, and they're also nerds.

they're all so wan and frail, and their glasses are insufferably chunky

lol

I guess where I'm coming from in terms of this minidiscussion is that "indie" is not a genre; "indie" is a qualifier on a genre.

also, trucker hats

now you're leaving "indie" and getting into "hipster"

i always thought 'indie' was just short hand for 'not on a major label.' and that once punk/hardcore became associated with tightly confined sonic templates and not just a way of going about making music, 'indie' got brought in as a way to describe independently-produced music that wasn't punk/hardcore.

― kanellos (gbx), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, but most 1st gen american "independent" rockers explicitly identified as and with punk, considered their music punk, too, at least at first - just not confined by punk/hc scene rules. thinking here of the likes of mission of burma, sonic youth, replacements, buttholes, flaming lips, big black, scratch acid, dino jr/sebadoh, beat happening & K rex folks, unrest, etc.

I definitely agree that "indie" used without qualifier is generally understood in the US as an abbreviation of "indie rock".

i'm actually coming around to "indie" being something that isn't "rock," fwiw. i have a friend who, if pressed, would probably describe his tastes as "indie" and really that is code for "anything that isn't too loud and aggressive." i gave him a mix that had stuff like the detroit cobras and boris on it and he was like "why on earth did you think i would like that?? you know what i'm into" (you're welcome, btw, dick)

he's also really into his feelings and wears cardigans and scarves and smokes a fucking pipe, so

ess easy to say "nope that's not rock, there's no...." rocking?

I lol'd

like i said upthread, dan, i think considering "indie" as short for "indie rock" might be a sign of age---the young ppl of today might really think of it as a thing that explicitly does not include pavement and sonic youth

jesus christ guys welcome to TEN YEARS AGO

^^^a young person

hahahah

is he from the world of young ppl

FUCK YOU I HAVE NO SIGNS OF AGE, I AM ETERNALLY YOUNG

NOW GET OFF OF MY LAWN *angrily waves walker*

deej: right! which is why it's usually pretty easy to say "nope, that's not rap...there's no rapping!"

less easy to say "nope that's not rock, there's no...." rocking? hated rockists might argue that, but, on ILM at least, "rocking" is not at all necessary for something to be called "rock"

― kanellos (gbx), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:58 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

so basically the problem is that 'rock' does not exist

there isn't anything about either VW album that would make me say they aren't rock albums. I don't even see how that would enter into the discussion, tbh; they're veering back and forth between NYC pop-art punk and Graceland Pt 2. Animal Collective, as I said before, started out doing a lot of rock stuff and are doing things that I consider more in the dance bucket now.

but deej is right. in keeping gate, you don't accuse things of not being of the genre, you accuse things of sucking wr2 commonly agreed-upon "real head" genre standards. like the argument would be that vampire weekend are a debased and unworthy perversion foisted on rock by people who just don't get it. nobody wants to make those claims. god knows i don't.

well tons of people do, they just don't post here

sounds like Alex in NYC tbh

huck berry, jerry lee lewis, the early beatles, the stones, the stooges, AC/DC, motorhead, the ramones, the clash, joan jett, white stripes

tbh i may just use this as my working definition of "rock" from now on

because i don't really like any of this stuff and i could say i don't like rock

so basically the problem is that 'rock' does not exist

do I need to point you back to my first post on this thread or what

tbf contenderizer, the comment of mine you quoted was less in the context of gatekeeping a genre and more in the context of plax using them as an example of the genre "indie"

whoever said that "rock'n'roll" conjures up a meaningful sonic blueprint was otm, imo.

cad i'm okay with that def, tbh

the young ppl of today might really think of it as a thing that explicitly does not include pavement and sonic youth

Yeah, it kind of blows my mind sometimes to think back to when being at an 'indie rock' show meant there was a good chance that people in the room would be familiar with Daydream Nation. 'Indie' as a label now virtually guarantees that a record doesn't contain noisy guitars, right?

seems that way!

the problem, deej, isn't that rock doesn't exist (that's not what you were right about), but that it's very loosely defined and accommodating, with 50-some years of artistic evolution at the center of western pop behind it.

maybe the biggest problem is that the word "rock" was ever invented. in dance music, every subgenre has its own distinct name. there's overlap here and there, but it's not like every dance genre has to have the word "dance" or "disco" in there somewhere. the fact that this one big word stuck to all rock subgenres has tended to make the music seem more general and universal than it really is. chuck berry and the beatles' more "baroque" extremes never really had much of anything do do with one another, not to mention slayer or neu! by dragging this one word down through the ages as though it satisfactorily defined and found common ground between all these disparate things, we've lied to ourselves about what rock really is.

maybe the biggest problem is that the word "rock" was ever invented. in dance music, every subgenre has its own distinct name. there's overlap here and there, but it's not like every dance genre has to have the word "dance" or "disco" in there somewhere. the fact that this one big word stuck to all rock subgenres has tended to make the music seem more general and universal than it really is. chuck berry and the beatles' more "baroque" extremes never really had much of anything do do with one another, not to mention slayer or neu! by dragging this one word down through the ages as though it satisfactorily defined and found common ground between all these disparate things, we've lied to ourselves about what rock really is.

― phish in your sleazebag (contenderizer), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 3:18 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
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i think this agrees w/ me saying that there is no 'rock' really

its a discursive fiction

so basically the problem is that 'rock' does not exist

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 4:09 PM (20 minutes ago)

:-(

'skipping 339 messages'

I guess I'm going to skip this thread

thank god

*sigh of relief*

AFAICT, "rock" mostly just meant "newer styles of popular music" in the mid- to late-60s, right?

I think the amplified instrument angle had a lot to do with that. that was really the biggest dividing line for the first couple decades of r'n'r

those sighs are really making me want to contribute to this thread

let me break rock music down for yall

tapping out now

step one: you can have lots of fun

step two two two there's so much you can dooo

put your hands on your hips

I just need to find a flow chart maker and I'll break down rock in 1 measly post

yeah, i was gonna type "so, deej was right about there being no such thing as 'rock' after all," but then went out for coffee instead.

but that's not quite true. "rock" defined an era/culture and does have use as that kind of umbrella term, or cultural mile-marker. it's not defined by its function like dance music or pop, or by its formal character like rap or jazz, but by a history of cultural progress and association. still, as a coherent musical genre, i'm gonna have to agree that rock is a discursive fiction. it makes the most sense when applied to a cluster of pop forms that emerged in the US & UK during the late 60s and pre-disco/punk 70s, but isn't terribly useful outside that.

otherwise, it's probably best to use "rock 'n' roll" as the throughline descriptor for that which must, by definition, rock (berry-stones-AC/DC-ramones-nirvana-stripes), and to use subgenre labels to talk about what's going on in the more clearly definable corners of the garage: indie, metal, punk, prog, psych, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XG2jAtXdVc
why does young people not want to rock?

so basically, n/a needs to narrow the scope & ask why certain rock subgenres arent as discussed as rap & whatever else. gbx implied its cuz there are fewer ppl concerned with those subgenres in which case the answer is just ... there arent enough ilx punk fans

(would he consider the R&B thread full of passionate discussion? its maybe not as contentious, but its a lot of the same ppl as swag cru)

Why are rock music threads on ILM so boring?

I'll cut to the chase. The Velvet Underground

so basically, n/a needs to narrow the scope & ask why certain rock subgenres arent as discussed as rap & whatever else. gbx implied its cuz there are fewer ppl concerned with those subgenres in which case the answer is just ... there arent enough ilx punk fans

(would he consider the R&B thread full of passionate discussion? its maybe not as contentious, but its a lot of the same ppl as swag cru)

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 4:13 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

I don't think I've ever read the R&B thread.
I could just ask why none of the rock subgenres are as discussed as rap! I mean, some of them are self-explanatory. The punk/underground thread is based entirely on discussing very obscure music (discussion of the OFF! EP collection was banished because Pitchfork reviewed it, even though it has members of the Circle Jerks, Rocket from the Crypt, etc. (though this might have been facetious, I couldn't tell)) so when you limit yourself to the obscure, you're, by definition, going to have a very small number of people able to talk about it.

But based just on the number of people who regularly post on that thread, there is a decent amount of ILM posters who are interested in punk/noisy rock music in general

i don't really think any of the rolling threads (that i read) are full of passionate discussion - they're full of heads-up and youtubes and offhand, casual impressions - but they're obv a springboard to taking all those things into other threads (eg specific artist/album ones)

i'm pretty sure the off! ban was kidding around

Why are rock music threads on ILM so boring?

I'll cut to the chase. The Velvet Underground

― ZOUNDS? (CaptainLorax), Tuesday, December 14, 2010 5:16 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

OTM

I think a lot of rock is really boring.

The most important discovery, however, is that Christmas with Boney M is the #31 album in Canada this week!

Really?! Wow, has everybody lost their copy in a snowbank or something? That album's ubiquitous this time of year!

the most intriguing discovery to me upon reviewing the billboard top 200 was that Enrique Iglesias albums are still selling

"why does young people not want to rock?"

i started an ILM thread on herpes this year! i like that band. i wanted to know if there was other good stuff out there like that. so there IS some new rock i like.

hipster interest in everything is on the wane.

― Mr. Snrub

discussion of the OFF! EP collection was banished because Pitchfork reviewed it, even though it has members of the Circle Jerks, Rocket from the Crypt, etc.

what do u want ppl to say about the circle jerks in 2010?

the circle jerks are touring in 2011! not sure if that's news or not. i got an email from a theater in denver that said "come to circle jerk"

Uh I thought there might be an interesting discussion in Pitchfork bestowing a "BEST NEW MUSIC" crown on the heads of old punks essentially playing hardcore music but
a) this isn't really relevant to my point (which was that the punk thread is deliberately obscure), and
b) it was probably a joke anyways

i want to hear the OFF! record both due to and despite the pitchfork recommendation, but i haven't heard it yet, so...

old ass men playing vintage hardcore music is better than most of the best new music on pitchfork

i think discussion on rolling punk is slow (relative to, like, rolling rap) because you actually have to buy records instead of just extracting .zip files & it costs money and sometimes you have to wait for them to show up in the mail or at your record store.

also (& i didn't read this thread so sorry of this is redundant, probably is) the dynamics of rap are a bit more easily penned into narrative and less abstract, & thus lend themselves to more concrete & complex discussion than rock. any given rap song you might discuss

-who produced it, are they a good producer, is there something about their sound that complements the rapping, have they been producing good beats lately, have they been producing shitty beats lately
-the career of the rapper, their reputation, whether their album is going to suck b/c of major label bs, have a bunch of corny blogs written them up yet or are they still cool
-the guest verses: are they good, do they "outshine" the others

among a million other things. in comparison there isn't really that much to say about rock, especially like underground rock or punk where there is really 0 chance it breaking out. "this new homostupids record is good, i like the production on it, rr/t put out some good records this year" is not rly a platform for much further discussion. also if you read like termbo for example, which has considerably more discussion of "rock" than ilm, a lot of those people are A) huge dicks, and B) the members of bands/heads of labels. so it gets a lot more heated if someone says some band sucks

all said & done i really like rolling punk non indie underground. sweet thread, great dudes, cool gals, always good recommendations, nice atmosphere

The Off! record is fucking great.

scott I only know about HERPES because of you, so hats off to you

it was on my mind because I'm in Berlin this week

but it's also living proof that there is good new rock music being made by younger people etc.

Liturgy, Dope Body, Pissed Jeans, Hunx and His Punx, Bloody Panda . . . i could go on

have you ever heard this guy? um, not rock, but he played in my basement a month or two ago and it was really great. from canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJFYWmn0ZYo

best rock show i saw all year was in my basement. and i'm not bragging its just true!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0OLQiKVP-w

This rock music thread is good. I like it.

okay, so i conceded deej's point about rock basically not existing, or being a discursive fallacy or w/e. but no. one of the problems in argumentative discussion is that the ground tends to shift around under you if you're not paying attention. i granted the non-existence of rock so as not to get sidetracked, but in retrospect with i'd pressed the point a little further.

rock obviously exists. it's not easy to pin down, but that doesn't make it unreal. it merely makes it complex and even self-contradictory: a wide net. when we talk about "rock", we're talking not a about a specific sound or approach or even an aesthetic, but a tradition, a culture. and that's fine. pop and metal can be just as hard to define, just as nebulous and home to an equal number of seemingly irreconcilable oppositions. this doesn't mean that they aren't real or can't be sensibly discussed as a whole.

you could maybe say that hip hop, the phrase, is analogous to rock. like what about j dilla's donuts? is it a rap album? no. no one raps on it. it's hip hop. but what's hip hop, as a musical genre? it seems to include but not be limited to rap. though it can be broken down (these kinds of beats & samples, mostly, these BPMs, mostly, and so on), it isn't necessarily limited by what it has traditionally been. when hip hop artists push the boundaries, the genre makes room for things that lie outside its conventional parameters. same is true of rock. i suspect that when hip hop has been around for nearly 60 years, its definitions will likewise have become a bit hazy, but this won't make it nonexistent.

i mean, think about jazz. in the 60s and 70s, jazz too had its boundaries battered all to hell, to the point where a mind-bogglingly wide variety of music could claim to be jazz in one form or another. we can even find so-called-jazz that isn't even improvised, is fully notated. in the end, the only thing that really unifies all the musics we call jazz is the jazz tradition, the culture of jazz. this makes it much like rock, much like hip hop.

I think canonical rock fans are by far in the majority on ILM (given the numbers on the July Madness polls - look at the last eight: The Rolling Stones - 87, Can - 66, The Beatles - 92, Bob Dylan - 61, The Velvet Underground - 101, Stevie Wonder - 52, Prince - 84, Brian Eno - 69) but there isn't much to be said of Beatles/Stones/Velvets that hasn't already been said - though they still have lengthy threads for reissues or best/worst tracks.

Niche rock genres will have lower traffic because they're, well, niche.

If you look at the reaction to the July madness polls you'll maybe see why canonical rock fans remain something of a silent majority - the usual and expected "more boring white guys with guitars" invective. I think it's got to a point that even white guys with guitars don't talk about white guys with guitars.

southern strategy imo

Was thinking about this thread.

A lot of the time what is framed as "border policing" in other genre threads is something slightly different, it's people saying "I don't like the idea of this particular music standing in for the broader notion of a genre." Deej was saying this yesterday about e.g. Lil B and rap. I would do this kind of thing a bit in the funky thread and people would get pissy at me and accuse me of saying "x record is not funky", which was not my point, my point was more that I think that what funky means is still open to being redefined by virtue of particular records being championed, written about, held up (even if unconsciously) as a microcosm of (or metonym for) the entire genre, while others are sidelined.

Rap is now more impervious to this but not entirely - the discussion of that Boston Phoenix rap list in the end of year thread is a good example of something held out as a list of "the year's best rap" while in its actual selections putting forward an aesthetic vision more narrow than rap per se.

Dance music offers some interesting examples here: neither Resident Advisor nor FACT (the two biggest internet dance zines at this point) explicitly cop to covering a smaller beat than dance music or electronic music or etc but nonetheless there's definitely a recognisable "aesthetic" for FACT - less so RA now since it started aping FACT somewhat, but four years ago RA was basically "minimal and related". In each case they still cover a decent amount of stuff outside their primary aesthetics, such that what is implied is a notion of dance/electronic music which is broader than the key aesthetic but for which the key aesthetic can stand in. Mixmag do the same but with more of a big club/Ibiza focus.

Which can seem perverse given that dance music has as much of a long tail effect going on as rock. I always find it interesting to pick up an issue of Mixmag or similar and turn to the genre-specialist track/singles reviews sections: the ordering of the various sub-genres and the space given to each tells you a lot about what the editors consider to be the hierarchy of importance of those sub-genres at any given point in time. It also reveals that some stuff like say hard house simply refuses to die. But you also see those entire sections being reshuffled and redrawn based on subtle shifts in values that filter through the critical reception of all the genres covered.

What I think this points to is not that hip hop or dance are stylistically more uniform than rock, but rather that there's still a belief that the discussion of these supra-genres can be held together, or even move together, that what particular dance music or rap music that is championed will affect the entire discourse surrounding those genres to some degree.

When was the last time rock (as opposed to "indie") was like this? Presumably grunge/post-grunge in the US and britpop in the UK witnessed the last time that magazines like Spin and NME respectively could kid even themselves in thinking that their favourite patches of land were the "ruling seat" as it were. Whereas I don't think that a magazine like Kerrang conceives of itself as performing the same function.

People upthread have said that "all the battles are over" with respect to what is or isn't rock. I don't think this is the issue. Indie is arguably more stylistically fluid than "rock" (or at least rock that is invested in the "rock" part), but obviously inspires a lot of passionate/snarky conversation over what is championed and what is not. But this is because the conversations about indie are a lot closer to the dance (or hip hop) model. Pitchfork, say, performs the same function for indie that FACT say does for (um) indie-dance: it offers up a notion of hierarchical structure where what is championed and what is not has implications for the entire body of the genre. It matters for the genre what is successful and what is not.

On critical terms at least I think this is less true for non-indie rock because people are no longer participating in the one broader conversation, and perhaps they no longer consider that there is anything at stake which they share in common.

Currently rock music is hugely more inventive right at its outer perimeters, which is why the post punk revival/revival of post punk methodology is by far and away the most interesting thing about the genre to date. But out at the edges things are blurred and hard to pin down, hence there's not much in the way of through lines between, say the xx and Oneida. Metal (currently), conversely, is more inventive right at it's very core, the retreat away from massive interaction with other genres is one of its great strengths.

Also, more importantly, rock music is like John The Baptist. Metal is like 80ft tall solid bronze mecha-Christ walking amongst us killing demons by firing neon coloured drill bits out of his flaming eye sockets. I need new metal. I don't need new rock flavoured rock; I have ACDC and Black Sabbath why would I need Airborne?

When I say to date I actually meant currently.

I still have a problem with this idea that only being right in the edges and refusing to sound like anything that has been is the only way to be inventive. IMO, the way The Byrds combined a cover of a Bob Dylan song with an old Bach theme, Beatles harmonies and the rhythm guitar from a Beach Boys song is exactly what made it one of the best cover versions ever. None of the elements were new, but combining them still created something new and exciting.

TBH, my actual favourite rock bands work within very rigid boundaries (even if these boundaries are sometimes hard to describe) and do so with heroic results: The Fall and NOMEANSNO.

It was punk that revived "rock and roll" and began applying it in the old TAMI Show sense--youthful, energetic music that's fun, but with an edge, never mind the genre or instrumentation. Rock and roll is a feeling and ideal. Watch the documentaries and read the books and you begin to sense it as a kind of energy carrying forward into everything, hip hop included. It's all rock and roll.

Separate from all that is the guitar/bass/drums/distortion/riffs/chorus/songs tradition that produced some of my favorite music of all time, but has somehow disappeared from the new music I love. I know I've been out of touch, but it's still a shock to realize that there's basically one rock band with maybe two other live groups at all among the 42 artists on my year-end mix.

I don't know that this is a decline, but I do wonder when every rock band besides like AC/DC decided it needed to sound "lush" with an orchestra, electronics, acoustic instruments, etc., a 0 x 10 = 0 situation that I guess could apply to a lot of new rap as well.

The punk/underground thread is based entirely on discussing very obscure music

yeah, that is pretty much true -- so, like, because someone else on that thread has actually heard and likes some of the obscure stuff that i like, i am less likely to initiate a beef with them about a band or an album or a song that they like that i don't, or vice versa. Like M@tt H and I know and like quite a few of the same obscure bands, I don't want to spoil it by attacking him over our disagreements about the Luttenbachers. Basically, I want to avoid the narcissism of small differences on that thread.

do wonder when every rock band besides like AC/DC decided it needed to sound "lush" with an orchestra, electronics, acoustic instruments, etc., a 0 x 10 = 0 situation

attention shitty indiepop singer-songwriters: learn to play/write for one instrument before you start playing/writing for twenty

Ha. So wait, sarahel, no one's equating attacking with interesting. I think congratulations just meant arguing: making the case for disagreement. There's nothing more boring to me than personal swipes requiring familiarity with the posters or their history on ILX, except maybe displays of attitude based on consensus without any argument at all.