apple music top 100

[shakahislop]

Well isn't this cos you're allowed to say anything you like now, no need to ask for a hotdog for your roll, just call it Ram Your Dong In My Cunt and you'll be good. As always there is a tension between the increased possibilities of relaxed rules, and the fact that allowing absolutely anything removes the need for subtlety and also arguably a lack of illicitness can remove thrills.

its a real development of the past decade i think, on the female side at least. never used to hear anything as direct as this.

 

[IdleRich]

Was gonna say My Neck My Back was a while back and that was massive… but maybe if it came out now it would be named less coyly something like Lick My Pussy and My Crack.

 

[shakahislop]

Was gonna say My Neck My Back was a while back and that was massive… but maybe if it came out now it would be named less coyly something like Lick My Pussy and My Crack.

i don't know if it applies to the UK really, but in the US there's a weird thing where the porny lyrics are only acceptable / popular if they're spoken by non-white and non-asian people, ie basically they have to be black or south american. or at least, that's the only people who i ever seem to come across doing it. i find this totally obvious.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Is cardboard box by Flo in this top 100? I heard a few little 5 second snippets of it on the news the other day cos they've won some award and the chorus is firmly lodged in my head. Haven't even heard the whole song yet but I'll have that as my tune of the year I reckon, unbelievably catchy and very late 90s early 2000s rnb sounding.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Apparently it's a massive tiktok hit which makes sense cos you only need to hear 5 seconds of it

 

[william_kent]

i don't know if it applies to the UK really, but in the US there's a weird thing where the porny lyrics are only acceptable / popular if they're spoken by non-white and non-asian people, ie basically they have to be black or south american. or at least, that's the only people who i ever seem to come across doing it. i find this totally obvious.

Isn't this to do with racist notions that "raw sexuality" is only a possession of people with melanin? Like "white people" are too "civilised" to indulge in displays of sexuality? Why Greek statues only depict guys with tiny dicks ( no body shaming! ) because anything else would be "animal"?

you've opened a can of worms!

 

[shakahislop]

Isn't this to do with racist notions that "raw sexuality" is only a possession of people with melanin? Like "white people" are too "civilised" to indulge in displays of sexuality? Why Greek statues only depict guys with tiny dicks ( no body shaming! ) because anything else would be "animal"?

you've opened a can of worms!

yeah, i mean i have to overcome how totally sick i am of thinking or listening to deconstruction of racial tropes in culture, I mean its a necessary thing but I feel like I've been bombarded with it for a while and I feel like i) it's a bit depressing and ii) everything has been said, but yeah that is what i assume is going on.

there's a whole seam of conversation to be had i think about how hip hop and so on have a huge non-black audience in the US. that had blindsided me until i moved here although i guess its obvious. i'd always assumed that it was black people making music for a black audience plus a few random nerds and so i thought, ok, there's a load of stuff in here that i find a bit nasty, but i guess this is a reflection of some kind of black culture that i don't understand anything about. but with a lot of the mainstream stuff and the stuff that pitchfork champions that isn't really what's going on i think, the assemblage includes black but also white audiences (not to mention these class divisions within black america that i had no idea existed). and part of what is going on i think is middle-class white and black people getting a thrill out of someone else expressing forms of sexuality and violence that are considered beyond the pale among their own peers.

that's something that's going on in addition to these obvious long trails of seriously old racial tropes that you mention, although obviously they overlap

@forclosure will have something to say whenever he shows up again

 

[shakahislop]

i'm not particularly making a moral point here, i just think that's something that's going on in rap that was previously obscure to me.

I like City Girls, i found them immediately striking, i like the beats and the words, it's a pop-rap thing that rap nerds hate and i like. they're a good example of this kind of thing i think. the skirting the edge of sex work lyrics, or at least lyrics that bring money into sex, are part of that outsider looking in fascination i think. they're clearly southern, well floridian, as well so that's another layer of thing going on for probably at least some of the audience (the association being that people in the south are stupid uncivilised and unsophisticated)

 

[william_kent]

(the association being that people in the south are stupid uncivilised and unsophisticated)

it's a complicated subject...



years ago I read this book, by a white author ( Dirty South - Ben Westhoff ) and, as far as I can remember, there was a whole rant about 'minstrel rap' that as far as I can recall castigated southern rappers and their white audience for both being complicit in perpetuating harmful stereotypes, particularly concerning sexual mores.. like I said, it's a whole can of worms...

 

[version]

its a real development of the past decade i think, on the female side at least. never used to hear anything as direct as this.

 

[IdleRich]

Veering away from the race topic (sort of), I had that song All U Pussy MF (which is how it's spelled in the title for some reason - probably cos they couldn't be arsed to write out "motherfuck" in full rather than from any desire to avoid offence I'm guessing) stuck in my head (and it is an awkward one to keep accidentally singing out loud in public) after hearing it played the other day and I was thinking about how lyrics have changed since my parents were young. It's often mentioned how there are many genres that people who grew up in the 60s or whatever wouldn't recognise as music at all - but I don't know how often it's specifically said that someone who grew up in the 60s wouldn't recognise modern lyrics as lyrics. As far as I can tell All U Pussy MF doesn't even make a complete sentence, it seems to be just purely childish glee in putting together swearwords like a five year old going "poo willy" - in fact it reminds me of Butters' novel in South Park The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs. A huge contrast with the rhyming love poems - often childishly simple doggerel admittedly - structured with verse, chorus, verse of days of yore.

Have you ever seen that meme which contrasts Bohemian Rhapsody with (I think) Girls Run The World? It points out that the former has several sections and complex lyrics and probably skilled guitar-playing or some such shite yet it was written by only four people, whereas the latter only has one line repeated countless times and yet somehow required ten writers and fifteen producers and so on. I can't work out if the creator of that deliberately missed the point or if they really think that they couldn't think of another line to go with the title and that the fact of its repetition means it is clearly and objectively worse than its famous predecessor.

 

[shakahislop]

had Wire's 2022 top 100 albums on shuffle over the past couple of days, walking around in the cold. the thing that runs through all these compilations of music is the predominence of computers in everything. if there's one major musical trend of the past decade or so, it's been the culmination of the slow trend that started in the 80s or whatever, where computers and computing power have been more and more involved. it's more common now in these compilations to hear sounds that were generated entirely in the computer than sounds from instruments. its where all the action is. i'm not complaining.

 

[shakahislop]

the one thing that remains predominently 'analogue', although that doesn't sound like the right word, is people's voices. lots of processing and chopping yes, but still coming from a human source. human beings using thier voices seems to be the last thing that we'll turn our back on.

 

[Corpsey]

I wonder if at some point there'll be a reaction against electronic music from the yoof and there'll be an explosion of bands.

Doubt it, of course, since it costs a lot less to make tunes on your computer.

 

[IdleRich]

This is something people talk about a lot - and, cos of the sheer number of bands it would be possible to find, say, twenty such and write about them claiming it was a movement, but I find it hard to believe it exists in a significant way. And I bet (with no evidence at all) most people into that sort of sound are oldies hankering for the real music of their youth. Let's see if that sound can convert people who have grown up on machine music.

 

[Corpsey]

I wonder if making electronic music used to appeal only or mainly to weirdos who would be into computers and sitting in their bedroom for days on end. Whereas now everyone uses computers and sits in their bedroom for days on end.

 

[Corpsey]

That's the other thing about being in band, you have to meet up somewhere to practice and write songs.

 

[Corpsey]

Interesting to consider this cos club music is seen as sociable music for obvious reasons but making club music is much less social an activity than making RAWK music

 

[shakahislop]

This is something people talk about a lot - and, cos of the sheer number of bands it would be possible to find, say, twenty such and write about them claiming it was a movement, but I find it hard to believe it exists in a significant way. And I bet (with no evidence at all) most people into that sort of sound are oldies hankering for the real music of their youth. Let's see if that sound can convert people who have grown up on machine music.

guitars were at the forefront for so long because of what you could do with an electric current and pedals. a major part of the development in pop and rock music from the 60s to the 00s is the development in guitar technology. even something as basic as distortion created so many possibilites. adding that set of endless possibilites to an instrument which is cheap and fairly easy to play resulted in all kinds of great music. but why would you do it now. that guitar + pedal thing has been surpassed in every way by what you can do in a laptop, and everyone's already got a laptop. personally i get a lot out of the unpredictable chance of string vibrations, as opposed to the natural rigidity of copy and pasting dots on a computer screen etc. but we are living in a different assemblage now.

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah I struggle to see a reason beyond nostalgia - that's why I'm saying that I won't believe in such a movement until it comes from people genuinely new to that sound. Otherwise, even if it's dressed up as a backlash against the inhuman or similar, I'll assume that's just a smokescreen for people seeking a comforting return to the music of their youth.