Billie

[line b]

So its not pure sentimentality to me like you say, the same way kenny g or michael bolton arent sentimental. its not a slick enough simulation

 

[sus]

I think youre the second person to ever post a billie eillish thread. the other was a person who got banned for I shit you not literally being a pedophile.

Did you see the post in the "Labrinth" thread where I smack down luka I think I got him really good, didn't even get a response, that's how good it was

I "took his soul" as the kids call it

 

[thirdform]

Hey, the chorus has pathos, no question

This Ellen Willis quote on "pop optimism" seems relevant

Well, she's right about pop optimism as a stupid cultural position for hothoused brats and pathologically hyperemotional hysterics, but wrong in the sense that all needs are by definition alienated. Neither the pop optimist or the radical optimist need are genuine, as if genuineness could exist in a society based on commodity exchange. I.E: the only ethical imperative of marxism, so far as it is said to exist, is contrasting, compared to the mechanical materialists, the contradiction of the organisation of happiness with objective irrationality. I.E: human sociality, and the organisation of happiness is limited, not merely by such a nebulous concept of will, but the actual mode of production as such. So, for instance, one takes Freud, and yes, his ethics are materialist in this sense, they do not resort to religious cosmology, but they remain at the level of the psychological individual — the individual who is traumatised. Which, is fine as it goes if all that is wanted is to work and love. In a real sense, however, Freudians cannot totally explain neuroses or pathologies, because they are unable to see that sciences (and psychology has a pretence to science) are part of the ideological matrix, insofar as we talk about production and reproduction of immediate life.

 

[thirdform]

the reason why critics hate techno and electro is precisely because it commands you to dispense with this phantom of genuine needs. even the way in which you defecate and eat breakfast is in large part determined by the global organisation of market forces, an organisation, moreover, which is irrational when looked at in the way a surgeon looks at the body.

The hunkering for the unmediated genuine, in a society which is mediated from top to bottom often leads into becoming fellow travellers with fascists, because the enemy is mistaken as a purported liberal decadence, without realising that liberalism itself contains its fascist other. Nina Power, for instance, wouldn't have nearly screwed up her mind like this if she became a partisan of the totalising communist revolution. Unfortunately there was always far too much residual parliamentary debris in Alain Badiou — her area of expertise. Nearly making a case for the obliteration of academia.

 

[forclosure]

Hey, the chorus has pathos, no question

This Ellen Willis quote on "pop optimism" seems relevant

i mean Dianne Warren is the queen of making those kind of overblown weepy ballads which makes it all the more fascinating that she describes herself as a cynic when it ccomes to romance

but that chorus is still awful

i mean i can see where that Willis quote is coming from but considering the out and out rejection of poptimism these days you can how a quote like that can be completly manipulated right?

 

[forclosure]

I'm ambivalent on Eilish personally I dont think the music is bad per se but its got too much of what I was describing in my landmark sfx post- she sings like someone who formed their conception of 'good singing' entirely through watching teenage girls with ukuleles do sentimental covers of top 40 rap songs on youtube.

i just hear Lana Del Ray when she sings, that "breathy post-radiohead date rapist voice" as your man out of Godspeed you black emperor described has been the dominant style of singers for quite a while now.

Thom Yorke and Bjork are the originators of it as far as i'm concerned

 

[luka]

Did you see the post in the "Labrinth" thread where I smack down luka I think I got him really good, didn't even get a response, that's how good it was

I "took his soul" as the kids call it

Sorry I didn't actually notice. I'm sure it was very good though.

 

[thirdform]

i mean Dianne Warren is the queen of making those kind of overblown weepy ballads which makes it all the more fascinating that she describes herself as a cynic when it ccomes to romance

but that chorus is still awful

i mean i can see where that Willis quote is coming from but considering the out and out rejection of poptimism these days you can how a quote like that can be completly manipulated right?

That and this nonsense binary split between legitimate and illegitimate needs, which no anti-poptimist has ever really championed. The problem with poptimism is that true poptimists are by nature incapable of being fanatics, which is probably what made Willis have to adopt this strawman position.

 

[Slothrop]

Infantilizing: The burger joints you get where the bun is some fancy brioche and there's heirloom tomatoes and Scandinavian gherkins and blue cheese, selection of beef patties from Argentina, Brasil, Japan etc, and the restaurant is semi up market looking, but with little presentational flares tapping into your inner child by way of graffiti style writing and 90s pop culture references in the item names etc. Boiled down, it's basically McDonald's Plus™.

The other thing you're talking about is a bit more what Hestor Blumenthal and that whole generation of lauded celeb chefs have been up to for a bit longer than the burger thing's been around, where he's taken peasant food and raised it to luxury dining and served it on a sheet of slate in lush surroundings and you're supposed to be wowed by how quirky an idea that is. Not to mention all the remixing he did like bacon flavored ice cream etc.

Different to the burgers, but still on a similarly childish delusional plane where the creativity is fairly banal and imo demeaning to you as a customer.

I don't actually buy either of these as infantilizing to be honest, it feels like skewing the interpretation of what's actually happening to shoehorn it into an argument. Burgers are less coded less as childish and more as lowbrow, cheap - food you get from service stations or when you're drunk or from catering vans on industrial estates. And the language around them tends to wallow in that - "dirty" "messy" "sloppy" "smashed" "loaded" etc, and the adjacent foods tend to be stuff from a gap-year tour of world street food - bao, burritos, falafel, arepas, banh mi etc. It's more about the hipster urge to eat stuff that your parents wouldn't recognise or wouldn't consider respectable than any sort of wallowing in childishness IMO.

I honestly don't know where I sit on this tbh - a lot of the cultural baggage is annoying as fuck, but at the same time I support the basic impetus to avoid ringfencing only certain foods (based quite concretely on the opinions of a bunch of posh French people) as being proper, high-class food that's worthy of serious attention. Also practically speaking it tends to be pitched at a price point (cheap to middling) where most of the other options are pretty bad.

 

[pattycakes_]

I don't actually buy either of these as infantilizing to be honest, it feels like skewing the interpretation of what's actually happening to shoehorn it into an argument. Burgers are less coded less as childish and more as lowbrow, cheap - food you get from service stations or when you're drunk or from catering vans on industrial estates. And the language around them tends to wallow in that - "dirty" "messy" "sloppy" "smashed" "loaded" etc, and the adjacent foods tend to be stuff from a gap-year tour of world street food - bao, burritos, falafel, arepas, banh mi etc. It's more about the hipster urge to eat stuff that your parents wouldn't recognise or wouldn't consider respectable than any sort of wallowing in childishness IMO.

They're a symptom more than a cause. So Infantilizing was the wrong verb. More a sign of the times or product of the process or something like that. When you bring the fashion sense into the equation, eg the rejuvenation of classic Nike Air Max, all the remixes, customizations, Hypebeast drops and on and on, to me it feels like my generation is being resold it's youth, where not only do you get everything you dreamed of as a kid, they're all souped up with extra twists and breaking of the 4th wall via bold moves such as removing the Nike swoosh, flirting with high fashion etc. And the younger generations are into it too. Eilish's fashion sense fits right in to this aesthetic. There's a resistance to growing up & becoming an old stiff baked in... imo! Which in many ways I totally get and agree with, but I wonder what things will look like 20/30 years time when we're in our 50s and 60s.

But you said 'whats actually happening' and I'm curious how you see things.

I honestly don't know where I sit on this tbh - a lot of the cultural baggage is annoying as fuck, but at the same time I support the basic impetus to avoid ringfencing only certain foods (based quite concretely on the opinions of a bunch of posh French people) as being proper, high-class food that's worthy of serious attention. Also practically speaking it tends to be pitched at a price point (cheap to middling) where most of the other options are pretty bad.

And yes of course, snobby culture which looks down on this stuff is not something I'd want to align with. As I said I've eaten and enjoyed all of this stuff. I just think it's worth paying attention to and trying to understand.

 

[wg-]

In fact, the pop industry was made by teenagers for teenagers... the idea that it would grow to be seen as culturally important and that ancient wizened old men in their 30s and 40s would be listening to it, taking it seriously and even analysing its meaning would have seemed crazy to most people at that time. So we do have to be a bit careful when we describe songs about young people as all paedo stuff.

The problem with culture now is that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties aren't willing to accept they're getting older and should actually change their lifestyle accordingly so as not become the weird old man in the club that we all saw in our teens.

The perpetual juvenility in western culture is almost celebrated now, hey it's cool that you're 39 and really into Stranger Things and know about tiktok etc.

Well, it isn't really is it. You should leave the kids stuff to the kids and do stuff with other adults

That's what i think anyway. Unless hes making money off it or his kids listen to it, a grown man should not really have an opinion on Billie Eilish other than "turn that shit off"

Im sure there are a couple of good tunes here but i am not clicking on them

 

[wg-]

Burgers are fine though

 

[IdleRich]

The problem with culture now is that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties aren't willing to accept they're getting older and should actually change their lifestyle accordingly so as not become the weird old man in the club that we all saw in our teens.

The perpetual juvenility in western culture is almost celebrated now, hey it's cool that you're 39 and really into Stranger Things and know about tiktok etc.

Isn't this something of a two-way thing though in that (I could be talking out of my arse here cos I haven't seen it properly) I get the impression that Stranger Things is deliberately made to appeal to exactly those people? Not exclusively of course but i got the impression that it was the sort of thing that had loads of in-jokes etc in there that reference things from the 80s and so give a little tingle to 39 year olds that watch it.

So I'm not saying you're wrong I suppose, but instead I am saying that there are two sides to the equation. Old man likes programmes makes for kids, so the programmes made for kids start putting in a few clever ideas or simply old references (I guess an old reference is what you do when you can't think of something clever) for the old men. For example one episode I did see (in the first series) had a scene lifted straight from Event Horizon (and i googled it afterwards and they said it was a straight steal//homage whatever) with a guy going through a hole into another dimension on a rope and then getting pulled in and the rope comes back empty - something like that anyway.

So there is a kind of mutual dance of attraction going on.

 

[forclosure]

The problem with culture now is that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties aren't willing to accept they're getting older and should actually change their lifestyle accordingly so as not become the weird old man in the club that we all saw in our teens.

The perpetual juvenility in western culture is almost celebrated now, hey it's cool that you're 39 and really into Stranger Things and know about tiktok etc.

Well, it isn't really is it. You should leave the kids stuff to the kids and do stuff with other adults

That's what i think anyway. Unless hes making money off it or his kids listen to it, a grown man should not really have an opinion on Billie Eilish other than "turn that shit off"

Im sure there are a couple of good tunes here but i am not clicking on them

i mean even the fact that said grown man is making money off it that has it's own sort of problems doesn't it?

think about all them old horror stories about how Kim Fowley managed the Runaways

 

[wg-]

I assume she is signed to a major and running in stadiums, they aren't ran by children

 

[IdleRich]

i mean even the fact that said grown man is making money off it that has it's own sort of problems doesn't it?

think about all them old horror stories about how Kim Fowley managed the Runaways

Yes but basically old people control everything so boy bands and girl bands are gonna have older managers and agents and stuff, it's virtually inevitable I'd say. Hopefully not everyone is gonna be like Fowley.

 

[IdleRich]

I assume she is signed to a major and running in stadiums, they aren't ran by children

Exactly.

 

[IdleRich]

I remember when The Horrors and Sammy Seven and that were doing those club nights for people too young to go to clubs but Sammy told me that they were not allowed to handle the money part, that had to be done by his dad or another responsible adult (ridiculous phrase if you've ever met Barry).

 

[Slothrop]

They're a symptom more than a cause. So Infantilizing was the wrong verb. More a sign of the times or product of the process or something like that. When you bring the fashion sense into the equation, eg the rejuvenation of classic Nike Air Max, all the remixes, customizations, Hypebeast drops and on and on, to me it feels like my generation is being resold it's youth, where not only do you get everything you dreamed of as a kid, they're all souped up with extra twists and breaking of the 4th wall via bold moves such as removing the Nike swoosh, flirting with high fashion etc. And the younger generations are into it too. Eilish's fashion sense fits right in to this aesthetic. There's a resistance to growing up & becoming an old stiff baked in... imo! Which in many ways I totally get and agree with, but I wonder what things will look like 20/30 years time when we're in our 50s and 60s.

But you said 'whats actually happening' and I'm curious how you see things.

Yeah, I do think a lot of this is true. I went out on a stag do in Sheffield a couple of years ago and was a bit surprised that the default soundtrack of nights out was still late nineties / early 2000s indie, and then I realized that all the places we'd been to were basically catering to middle class 30-somethings and playing them back the playlist from their students union bars.

Although I think the instinct to want to consume stuff according to tastes and patterns you developed in your youth has always been there - look at the classic mid-life crisis things of middle aged men buying motorbikes or electric guitars or whatever. Or the low-key furore a while back when Radio 2 went from playing crooners and easy listening for the silent generation to AOR for the boomers. Or someone was telling me at some point that the food in a lot of London Gentleman's Clubs skews towards a well-executed version of a Public School refectory. It's just that these days the machinery of capitalism identifies this stuff and exploits it a lot more ruthlessly.

 

[shakahislop]

definitely prefer this low key way of doing pop ballads (i guess they count as ballads, i mean 'slow emotional songs' essentially) to their equivalent in the 90s / 00s