apple music top 100

[Corpsey]

I wouldn't trust any new music being made by people over the age of let's say... 25 anyway.

 

[IdleRich]

I dunno, one of the advantages of faceless inhuman machine music is that you don't know who made it - young, old whatever, even ugly or fat people can make popular music.

 

[IdleRich]

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

I used to DJ at this place called The Pleasure Unit on Bethnal Green Road - it was owned by this mod bloke who called himself Nigerian Nick, I think he thought (and he was far from the first to do so) that he could sell his company and open a cool bar where he would be a proprietor like Rick in Casablanca, benignly presiding over the hippest joint in town, casually impresing women as ace bands played and money poured into his coffers faster than he could count it. Alas it was not to be, the bar scene was far more cutthroat than he'd anticipated and he quickly abandoned all pretensions of doing something good in a desperate attempt to make money. His main tactic was to put on as many bands as possible and pay them as little as he could get away with based on a sliding scale calculated from the number of people they brought.

So he booked as many bands as he could find, demanded they brought as many paying guests as they could (when you paid entry you had to say which band you were there to see) and had a strict rules of absolutely no guest list whatsoever under any circumstances - oh and he paid some poor sap (me) the least amount possible to DJ, deducting money from his wage any time he deemed him to have made a mistake.

Anyway, a long build up there, but I mention this cos he thought the opposite to you - his theory was that actual band practice in the studio was an asocial activity. He reasoned that good bands had spent too much time in the studio rehearsing to make many friends and thus he deliberately booked bad bands whom he insisted had formed a group and started making music so that people would think they were cool and, if they spent enough time in bars giving it the big one, might even suck their willies. Such people would have more mates who would come along to the gigs, pay to get in, and stand by the bar drinking and ignoring all the shitty bands (and the awesome DJ) he'd booked

 

[shakahislop]

Travelling a long way again and getting stuck into the Spotify Global Top 100. It’s so appropriate for the present moment isn’t it - I suppose how could something like popular music not fit into the present moment, that’s what it always does - the way the computers have totally taken over. It’s weird listening to 90s stuff and despite all the production, which is of course a kind of fake-natural, an appeal to the idea of people playing instruments and so on but still very much processed in various ways into quite a consistent set of sounds and signifiers, despite all of that it is still a lot closer to sounding like people playing instruments and singing in a room. Even all the hiphop drums that spread throughout all kinds of music in the 90s sound like a drum set even if they are a preset. All the popular stuff sounds fully synthetic, no pretence of anything, computer music, apple mac music, moving sliders and ctrl-c and ctrl-p music. Everyone doing backing vocals for themselves.

I’m not coming at this from a rockist perspective, I don’t have any particular love for ‘real’ instruments or anything like that. It’s more a case of noting how comprehensively the computers have won. It’s not even like it’s 808s or 90s electronica sounds or synths or apex twin that have won, it sounds nothing like any of that, it just sounds like DAIs.

Strangely in the Spotify Global Top 100 the one thing that does endure is the acoustic guitar on ballards, even by people like SZA. Somehow it still seems to convey emotional sincerity (which is obviously what’s off-putting about to me as well, it’s a fake old trick that’s absolutely transparent)

Separately it is kind of amazing that Drake is still so popular and his sexual and relationship unease / uncertainty resonates with so many people. Possibly says something about the way that love and sex work for people in their 20s now, the kinds of situations and difficulties that everyone runs into.