has hip hop been "aesthetically brutalised"?

you're a real hard man, patronising me on the internet.

i'll be up in cambridge in a couple of weeks' time. fancy saying that to my face? and see what you get in return?

Rachel Verinder said:

goodbye troll.

Click to expand...

"Start showing me some proper respect. it's about fucking time people here did."
 \

Rachel Verinder said:

you're a real hard man, patronising me on the internet.

i'll be up in cambridge in a couple of weeks' time. fancy saying that to my face? and see what you get in return?

Click to expand...

Sure, it's a date, I love meeting egomaniacal journalists with a ludicrously over-inflated sense of self-worth.

Better bring a baggy for yo' teef.

goodbye troll. my man will show you to the door.

yeah, right. you're probably about 58 years old, 4 ft tall and 6 stone. but i'll come up and open your face anyway. you've been asking for it long enough.

Rachel Verinder said:

yeah, right. you're probably about 58 years old, 4 ft tall and 6 stone. but i'll come up and open your face anyway. you've been asking for it long enough.

Click to expand...

Actually, I'm heavily pregnant with quins and wear glasses. You brute.

has this thread been "aesthetically brutalised"?

no, just ruined

stelfox said:

no, just ruined

Click to expand...

And I thought dissensus was meant to be above the stupid fighting of internet personas. I kind of expected RV to be above this kind of crap, but I am clearly wrong. Can you take the petty squable elsewhere, as this thread was, at one point, pretty interesting.

if people don't want an argument then don't fucking try it by insulting me or people i work for. fair enough?

Rachel Verinder said:

if people don't want an argument then don't fucking try it by insulting me or people i work for. fair enough?

Click to expand...

Im not having a go here - but did it ever occur to you that people here may not even know who you are, what you do, or who you work for? And that perhaps those few (fairly mild) criticisms of Time Out had nothing whatsoever to do with you, and that youve overreacted to them in an ugly and ludicrous manner that simply invites more mockery?

Perhaps, in the future if you think someones attacking you (or your employers) personally, then you should contact them with a private message, or email and ask them directly - and not indulge in a public hissy fit as that just pisses more people off...

I dont like the way this thread has disintegrated.

I don't think it reflects the values of mutual respect and congeniality which have always been central to Dissensus' substance, style and personality.

Let's not turn heated discussions here into personal attacks.

Let's not turn reasoned debate and defence of a point of view into chest-beating self-aggrandisement.

Can I request that the more heated participants on this thread reflect on what they've said and consider how they might want to reposition their comments in light of the values of Dissensus, please.

hear hear

the fact is, you were slagging off journalists who write for time out. i'm a journalist who writes for time out, therefore you're slagging me off. i don't like people making criticisms of places and situations they know nothing about. am i supposed to nod ruefully and agree with these barbs? you're doing exactly what you slag off hip-hop haters for doing.

you've got no idea how time out works. it's not a specialist hip hop magazine. deal with it and get over it.

mutual respect by definition works both ways. respect what i do and i'll respect what you do. disrespect me and you'll get disrespect in return.

right i'm saying no more about this. that's it. let's get back on topic.

There's a serious point to be made about Time Out. It’s a London-based magazine that only represents a fraction of the musical cultures and scenes in this city. And I think criticizing it on that level is justified. Its clubs and pop music coverage is safe, narrow and boring.

London as a city is a world centre for music. It's a beguiling and mesmerizing place with hundreds of unique subgenres and scenes, and I've always had faith that if you wrote about them interestingly people would read about them. But still we get MOR interviews, pop fraff and the same limp indie bands as OMM/Q did the month before.

Let's be honest, people buy Time Out for the listings and those listing represent a diverse selection of events. Why can't the editorial reflect that?

i did, if you can read as well as you can write (the quality of *your writing* is not in fucking dispute, you grumpy old twat - and i *still* happen to quite like you when you're not being like this, btw, so it's probably best not to disrespect me anyway), say that being at the bleeding edge of everything is not time out's job, didn't i? if it wanted to it could, as martin sets out, be a great magazine full of incredibly vibrant music from all over the world, using london as the jump-off (hey, immigrants live here too, not just smart middle-class white people), but as it stands it has claimed a place around about where the OMM is. if it's working for this demographic, which i accept it is, then i'm happy to say that it's doing a pretty good job at it - this still doesn't alter the fact that it could do something way better than it is.

sorry dave, when i said "you" i wasn't actually talking to you, i was referring to the people who'd slagged off TO. i should have made that clear.

but really...

There's a serious point to be made about Time Out. It’s a London-based magazine that only represents a fraction of the musical cultures and scenes in this city. And I think criticizing it on that level is justified. Its clubs and pop music coverage is safe, narrow and boring.

London as a city is a world centre for music. It's a beguiling and mesmerizing place with hundreds of unique subgenres and scenes, and I've always had faith that if you wrote about them interestingly people would read about them. But still we get MOR interviews, pop fraff and the same limp indie bands as OMM/Q did the month before.

Let's be honest, people buy Time Out for the listings and those listing represent a diverse selection of events. Why can't the editorial reflect that?

Click to expand...

rather than a serious point, this just sounds like sour grapes and envy.

time out is a london-based magazine whose listings (note the plural please) not only represent a diverse selection of events, but whose purpose is to cater for a diverse selection of readers.

you talk about its pop music coverage being safe, narrow and boring and in the next breath make a sarky comment about "pop fraff" (whatever "fraff" means, did you just make that up?). actually TO's music writing when set against the capsule drivel churned out by the monthlies is, i find, witty, original and interesting. read john lewis on charlotte church and anita baker in this week's issue, for instance. or me on evan parker or girls aloud in previous issues. you won't get those views in OMM.

the subtext of your spite is, i think, that TO's music coverage isn't 100% grime/desi/hip hop/whatever else dissensus talks about in its hermetically sealed world. i suppose we could do it. then we'd lose 90% of our readership and end up with a cabal of wire readers - the sort of people who talk to themselves at bus stops.

but we're here for all our readers, not just you, and you have to accept that. like it or not, it's a market out here, with its own stipulations and limitations. REM go on the cover because REM on the cover sells the magazine.

if you are unsatisfied with that, then i suggest you start your own magazine to cover everything you imagine we're missing.

the fact is, you were slagging off people who wrote about time out. dave's a person who wrote about time out, therefore you're slagging him off.

in Australia, a Time out is a chocolate bar, and quite a nice one at that (even if it does look suspiciously poo like):

My own views on hip hop are well known. Here are some reasons why I don't like it any more:

1. Black indie. Yes, yes, hip hop is very diverse from a certain POV, but the same case could be made for indie. The reality is that hip hop, like indie, is in the main massively conversative and inertial. Like indie, it serves a consumer base who will be loyal to it no matter what. The difference is that no-one would be mad enough to pretend that indie is cutting edge, whereas ppl still, ludicrously, make that case for hip hop.

2. Tedium. Unlike Tim F, I have no interest whatsoever in guns, hos and booty. I find them boring. Hearing actual ppl talk about such things would be extremely boring, why does it become interesting over a breakbeat? (And it really isn't the case that I 'thought that about hip hop before I was into it' - I really did like hip hop in the 80s, when it was a modernist force, not a complacent cartoon.) Hip hop keeps black males in blackface.

3. Ethics. A logic that can only be called racist excuses all this. If white males were engaging in misogynistic, violent discourse, they would presumably be condemned. The licence given to the black males of hip hop reflects what? A sense that this is 'all that can be expected' of them? Or a 'liberal' causal argument that this is the effect of their social conditions etc? Either way, the message is that less can be expected of black males than of other groups.

4. Masculinism. Consider the posturing of the hip hop male - that frozen swagger, the conspicuous refusal to engage with others except from a position of imperious hostility. It's ugly and unpleasant, and what it represents is FEAR, not confidence. I have to deal with the consequences of this behaviour on a day to day basis. It contributes to a situation in which black males achieve much less than almost any other social group in education, with obvious knock-on effects for life chances, employment etc.

5. Contracted horizons. Hip hop produces a double trap for the underclass black male. He is already trapped at the level of the social, marginalized, unemployed or underemployed; but hip hop also traps him at the level of fantasy. Hip hop's utopia is only a grotesque hyperbolized version of capitalism; in his dreams, the hip hop male still acts like a slave (to the reality principle). In other words, hip hop is Capitalist Realism.

6. Fashion. Hip hop has a HORRIBLE effect on male fashion.

(btw, did anyone see Ekow Eshun's piece on Biggy Smalls as his hero in the Independent the other week? In a year replete with rubbish journalism, that nevertheless stood out for its embarrassing cluelessness...)

i'd say "black heavy metal" rather than "black indie" given the overstated machoisms (as with macho metallers, you can't help feeling they're HIDING something) and also the similarity in contemporary hip hop album cover design to those of metal albums - very much a fenced-off hive(mind). you go into a record shop now and look at the new hip hop releases and i get the same sinking/bewildered feeling i used to get from looking at new HM releases.

i saw that ekow piece in the indie - it really was head in hands time as far as i was concerned.