[solved]and I hate modern music, disco boogie and pop

Well, nothing is.

Hmm I'm inclined to read y'all indulgently but if I wasn't, some of those posts would sound some kinda whitesplainy, as in, Professor Chinstroke explains "aspects of blackness" to Beyonce. I think all this talk of intent (which sounds like coded authenticity judgments "but you didn't protest racism the right way") and technique is missing the point of a zeitgeist moment where the artist's statement is bigger than them as an individual and any imperfection in execution is probably irrelevant. And I can respect treating that zeitgeist with skepticism in the modern fast take garbage think piece era but anecdotally the eumelanin-endowed-double-x-chromosome people I've seen have been very consistently strong on this Beyonce moment so I'm inclined to take it pretty seriously until I hear a way stronger criticism of it. [/removesdeejhat]

I'm very receptive to the argument that the song is meant as a rallying cry for women and people of color, and it shouldn't diminish the statement in any way because it doesn't speak to me directly as a white male.

But it was also dropped at the Super Bowl, which is just about the most mainstream venue you can find. Is there not a message there for the trucker-hat wearing Coors Light drinking crowd?

It's basically a Catch-22 of the modern media landscape. You can be targeting a specific audience, but there are so many channels by which your message is broadcast to people you weren't even speaking to. I'm sure Beyonce didn't have Rudy Giuliani in mind when she was recording this shit. But even if she did want to speak to a core audience of women and PoC, she is still a big pop star and had to drop it at the Super Bowl and had to try and sell as many records as possible.

That contradiction makes me feel strange.

You're definitely right though re: whitesplainin'. I'd probably temper a few of my earlier statements, walk away from some of the broad "cultural commentary", and speak more to how this stuff makes me feel personally.

jasperness wrote:I'm very receptive to the argument that the song is meant as a rallying cry for women and people of color, and it shouldn't diminish the statement in any way because it doesn't speak to me directly as a white male.

But it was also dropped at the Super Bowl, which is just about the most mainstream venue you can find. Is there not a message there for the trucker-hat wearing Coors Light drinking crowd?

It's basically a Catch-22 of the modern media landscape. You can be targeting a specific audience, but there are so many channels by which your message is broadcast to people you weren't even speaking to. I'm sure Beyonce didn't have Rudy Giuliani in mind when she was recording this shit. But even if she did want to speak to a core audience of women and PoC, she is still a big pop star and had to drop it at the Super Bowl and had to try and sell as many records as possible.

That contradiction makes me feel strange.

But that's half the point, right? Unapologetical blackness on display from a mainstream artist on the biggest stage in the world. This is the mainstream now. And when people call it radical, I think that's what they mean.

Can someone just explain to me what exactly whitesplaining is?

Duff... wrote:But that's half the point, right? Unapologetical blackness on display from a mainstream artist on the biggest stage in the world. This is the mainstream now. And when people call it radical, I think that's what they mean.

Yes

jasperness wrote:It's a pop song that makes allusions to the pop culture moment. Broadly, it could be seen as an important thermometer for the culture--if Beyonce feels like she can make these statements, it says a lot about where pop culture is. It means that certain aspects of blackness are more mainstream, which is a victory. But it is not a radical step--it reflects (perhaps radical) changes that have already happened.

I'm not sure what I think about all of this but I do know that the Grammys are really boring and so is Adele.

jasperness wrote:

Duff... wrote:But that's half the point, right? Unapologetical blackness on display from a mainstream artist on the biggest stage in the world. This is the mainstream now. And when people call it radical, I think that's what they mean.

Yes

jasperness wrote:It's a pop song that makes allusions to the pop culture moment. Broadly, it could be seen as an important thermometer for the culture--if Beyonce feels like she can make these statements, it says a lot about where pop culture is. It means that certain aspects of blackness are more mainstream, which is a victory. But it is not a radical step--it reflects (perhaps radical) changes that have already happened.

Oh. OK.

Ҩ wrote:I'm not sure what I think about all of this but I do know that the Grammys are really boring and so is Adele.

Kendrick is all sorts of magic though!!
Really really looking forward to him channeling these songs debuted in mind blowing live performances into a top notch 2016/2017 album.

When are the Grammys, this year?

jasperness wrote:

Duff... wrote:But that's half the point, right? Unapologetical blackness on display from a mainstream artist on the biggest stage in the world. This is the mainstream now. And when people call it radical, I think that's what they mean.

Yes

jasperness wrote:It's a pop song that makes allusions to the pop culture moment. Broadly, it could be seen as an important thermometer for the culture--if Beyonce feels like she can make these statements, it says a lot about where pop culture is. It means that certain aspects of blackness are more mainstream, which is a victory. But it is not a radical step--it reflects (perhaps radical) changes that have already happened.

I dunno nothing is going to seem very radical if you set aside that kind of context... Those aspects of blackness not just in the mainstream but in the Superbowl, America's ultimate shrine to mass culture, is the radical part. The medium is the message. And Beyonce's celebrity was instrumental to making that happen. Obviously a tiny fraction of people care if the exact same song is released by Abra or Janelle Monae or FKA Twigs or whoever (taking nothing away from less famous artists).

God, I wish more than like 12 people had actually watched Kendrick on the Grammys.

raj gibson wrote:Those aspects of blackness not just in the mainstream but in the Superbowl, America's ultimate shrine to mass culture, is the radical part. The medium is the message. And Beyonce's celebrity was instrumental to making that happen.

I said I didn't have anything intelligent to say but I'll try my best. The conflation of 'radical' with mainstream is counter-intuitive and personally grinding but I think you're right. But it's not without its problems and consequences. I always think about this question in relation to the historical legacy of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. He has been mythologized to such an extent that I think for my generation it is impossible to disassociate the mythologized conception of MLK from the living, breathing man operating in a world rife with real historical contingencies. Of course, the worry is that it becomes difficult, and maybe impossible, to accurately revisit that time in history and analyze it for both its productive achievements, political missteps, or its eventual repression. (Guys, I've been reading my Roland Barthes lately, can you tell?!)

What's interesting about Beyonce though, especially in her music video, is that she seems self-aware of her position in all of this. On the one hand, she is the ultimate signifier of the black celebrity (hence all the YASS, Queen shit) and she sort of takes that up. She's able to mobilize such a wealth of signs (hot sauce, collard greens, corn bread, Jackson Five nostrils, etc.) that speak to the aspects of her blackness. It's effective and after listening to the song like five times now I think it's also a good track. What distinguishes the Beyonce-as-myth from the MLK-as-myth is that she is still alive and can counteract the distortions of her own persona. But is that actually possible for a pop star to do? Wouldn't that go against the grain of basically her entire career as an entertainer?

I also find the first line super interesting because, and I'm stealing this from Killer Mike, she immediately is engaging with a black audience. I'm not sure what to make of that though to be honest.

Basically I'm still very cynical about it all, which I think makes sense when you are dealing with pop culture. I've been reading that these police officers in Miami who are boycotting a Beyonce concert and I'm interested to see how this might develop and how she might respond to it throughout her tour.

I really feel like "Police unions call for boycott of Beyoncé concerts" should be answer enough to whatever question we're now asking ourselves in this thread.

I agree. When I made my response to Chrono's post, I guess I underestimated how batshit crazy people can be.

Duff... wrote:I really feel like "Police unions call for boycott of Beyoncé concerts" should be answer enough to whatever question we're now asking ourselves in this thread.

Is it? Those "protests" and "boycotts" feel like completely irrelevant clickbait. They whip up some social media frenzy, but are they really indicative of anything? In the past year, police unions have also called for boycotts of Quentin Tarantino and Obama. They appear desperate for any attention. Judging by the number of people that attend these types of protests (next to none), they don't have much actual support.

I think we're all pretty much starting from a place where we all think a) Beyonce is good, b) Beyonce is talented, and c) Beyonce is culturally important. As Raj points out, this is basically a bunch of white people at a roundtable saying "this is how this thing that wasn't designed to speak to me makes me feel". But, because Beyonce is a mainstream artist and the majority of the people listening to her are actually white, those thoughts are still interesting and relevant, though not the ultimate "point" of the music.

I agree with Jasper. All that it proves is that this has pissed off people who were already going to be predictably upset. What happens next though could be interesting but probably will just dissipate into nothing. Either this police union boycotts, Beyonce makes no reference to it during her concert or to the press, and this all blows over. Or she might actually 'twirl all of her haters' and shit could get really fun for a few months!

I guess I don't know what you guys want or expect. "The boycott" has become one of the lamest, ineffective protests moves you can make in our social media age (not because boycotts are ineffective but because we do them wrong), but police unions do have a lot of power, at least in my city, so ruffling their feathers isn't nothing. And perhaps proximity to "GI Joe" Glyniwieczs's funeral has made the support of police on this particular topic outsized in my mind, but again, "Cops Lives Matter" is a sentiment that a lot of people are receptive to in 2016.

Duff... wrote: "Cops Lives Matter"

Saw these people waving a banner on an overpass a couple of months ago and it's not like I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the real tragedy was that it didn't surprise me at all.

jasperness wrote:a bunch of white people at a roundtable saying "this is how this thing that wasn't designed to speak to me makes me feel"

Yes, but also the absence of a message is a message in and of itself, that there are parts of mass culture that aren't directly accessible to white people, which is really the hardest thing for a lot of people to understand about this, I think, because one of the biggest characteristics of mass/pop culture traditionally has been that it's 100% accessible to white people, even the parts of it that are black-created, and a lot of people have huge problems processing that difference as we transition to a majority-non-white country.

http://nesthq.com/shawn-wasabi-marble-soda

i spend a lot of time “crate digging” on soundcloud, youtube, pandora, etc. sometimes i’ll go to shows and put shazam on auto so that it picks up new music to check out later while i’m out and about.

I'm really offended by this for some reason and reflecting on why has turned out to be a lot more troubling than I'd ever expected.

Vaporwave is the worst genre and once you've made a big deal about tagging yourself with it then I probably don't need to listen to your music to know how derivatively shitty it's going to be but sometimes I forget.

Spoiler:

Done with that after 30 seconds. Jesus.

All this time I thought this was a Rihanna song. I guess this explains how Sia (!) got really popular? I remember her being an "artist to watch" back in 2004 or something (along with Regina Spektor and Jem) and now she's like a top 10 solo artist or something isn't she.

I hate this song, it has no place being played in public spaces where background music is solely meant to muffle private conversations. It will wholly impose on your quiet conversation, your personal space, your private thoughts, hijack your complete attention and pummel your temporal lobe like a gang of Delaware schoolgirls. I could go on but why? This song is like 4 years old now so let it go, right? Oh how I wish I could live in time like everyone else, that's never been how it works 4 me.

Spoiler:

undo wrote:hijack your complete attention and pummel your temporal lobe like a gang of Delaware schoolgirls