that whole session was unreal. the LEAD OUTRO GUITAR ON AUGUST FUCKKKK

the general lack of synth and drum machine fit what i wanted/expected the vibe of the record to be as well

Cool story bro thanks for the recs

Finally watching the folklore thing. Underrated thing about her is her control of her voice. Cardigan has a ton of vocal melody variations and she just... crushes it.

New record out tonight lol

LOLLLLLL

god i would be so upset if corgan announced a sister CYR

ain't sears just a sister to shiny tho

she good but she is no Boris

didn't like it as much as folklore. there were some cool cowboy songs in there with nice drums and guitar instrumentation

still 3000000x more listenable than c y r

It did sort of seem like a collection of b sides upon first listen. Still quite good but not folklore good.

Also feels like something that will grow on me

Tolerate it is v v good

so buzzard asked this in chat:

and i thought it was super fascinating. i said this:

so yeah

i'm watching this hannah montana/miley cyrus tour documentary/concert film thing from 2008. and that to me comes off way more...slick overdone disney influenced, fake pop type of thing. and i think cause it literally is, it's way more corporate

but i'm watching the rehearsals and the actual core of it legit. the guitarist has this gorgeous guitar that i want really badly --> https://www.sweetwater.com/store/det...-classic-ebony

i guess it's like, just a gig for them, you know. there's still real feelings to some degree, but on some level, at least for me i'd be consumed with the idea that it's so engineered and mass marketed.

shit, in college i worked for disney for like 8 hours, on the broadcast crew for an ESPN college football game. it was pretty cool

still better than CYR. they have amps on stage, even!

so buzzard is just all around insufferable huh

what was it that got to you so much about that quote

The dismissive attitude toward anything popular. As if pop music is inherently meaningless. Shouldn’t we have given that up once we turned 17 or something.

Not even getting into her songwriting talents, which are substantial!

But generally speaking it’s the typing a lot and maybe hinting at some semblance of a point but not actually saying anything. Worst form of communication imo.

Oh, I see that Eulogy is hurt enough about being made to look stupid in that other thread that he feels the need to mischaracterize an entirely respectful conversation I had with Ram that Ram himself seemed to have appreciated to the extent that he asked me if I would mind his migrating it to the board.

I much preferred her last one which kind of sounded like Midlake. This one feels like B-sides

Made to look stupid is the exact kind of phrasing I’m talking about. You are evasive and vague so you think you can’t be called out for being a dumbass. It’s very transparent!

I have like 67,000 posts on this board. You aren’t hurting me lol.

My bad it’s only 62,000

Kind of embarrassing either way but at least I can say what I think!

Like what in the hell does this actually mean

My curiosity is whether it's a case of seeing some value in a famous pop act and kind of pulling out the stuff you see as having genuine merit as distinct from those elements that any casual observer might write off as a meaningless pop product or whatever
....or whether it's more of a genuine love for an artist as if it was any other artist and you do just kind of choose to listen to them over everything else in the moment in which you're listening to them


It’s just word salad nonsense which I /hate/

I mean, I have no horse in this race but the meaning seems pretty clear to me? Do you endorse Taylor Swift as an artist of substance full stop or do you see her as someone who creates a mixture of music that primarily feels like a product which has been deliberately designed to appeal to a mass market and music that feels primarily like genuine artistic expression and art for art's sake. Without getting into the issue of whether or not this is a false dichotomy (and to be clear I think it very well may be), it seems like a fair question meant to encourage discussion and asked out of genuine curiosity by someone who hasn't found a way into enjoying similar music.

Is suggesting the existence of meaningless pop product really equal to suggesting that popular music is inherently worthless? That's a genuine question. I'll admit to a strong bias against modern pop music that I've only begun to overcome pretty recently. I like Taylor Swift and agree that she's a talented songwriter but I'd be lying if I didn't say that there are songs in her catalogue that have elicited a strong emotional response from me alongside songs that elicit nothing but eye-rolling and feel wholly insubstantial. And there's nothing wrong with that either. People are allowed to like songs that feel insubstantial just as people are allowed to prefer music that doesn't. Right?

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. And it's certainly possible that, troubling though the thought may be, my thinking is still informed by the biases of my high school years. But I definitely fall into the second category

Like what in the hell does this actually mean

Idk, someone said the song Closure sounded like Adz-era Sufjan, and so I listened to it. The backing track is kind of interesting, and Sufjan's drummer does play on it, but her voice is too loud and imho the lyrics are kind of trite. So I guess I can focus on the elements I like and enjoy the song for what it is, but if I really wanted to listen to the National, I'd put on their actual albums instead of listening to them as a backing band.

But yeah, I don't have anything against Taylor Swift as a person, and people can like whatever they like. I used to think it was a good thing that we'd moved on from the indie snobbishness of the 90s and early 2000s, because in some ways that was a very exclusionary scene. It excluded rap and r&b and all sorts of genres for no good reason. But I think the issue here is that we then threw all scepticism about pop music and big money out of the window; we've kind of allowed capitalism to invade every aspect of our lives. So it's not that I hate Taylor, it's just that I'm kind of tired of the fact she is absolutely everywhere, and she can really dominate our public conversations and our usage of time and resources even when we are not particularly interested.

In a way, this is similar to people saying that the MCU is imperialistic propaganda, and then you have rabid fans claiming you can't criticize the films because superheroes are "the closest thing Americans have to a shared mythology or folklore". But this is such a disingenuous sleight of hand -- identifying the masses with the product sold to the masses, as if a multibillion-dollar IP were the same as the shared ownership of culture.

And I guess this is what I have against pop music, especially at a time when some genuinely brilliant DIY artists are really struggling to eat, let alone to make art. Any bitterness directed at Taylor Swift is really a proxy for all these concerns, where our very culture is handed (sold) to us rather than being created and iterated upon by us.

I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.

This is the exact kind of phrasing that goes to show how truly sad and grasping a little person you really are. You actually appear to believe that putting your time in here grants you some kind of leg up in any disagreement and that's a great example of dumb thinking if ever I saw one. An appeal to a high post count? Wow!

I was having a semi-private and off-board conversation with Ram — identifying him by name as the intended recipient of my enquiry — about his clear passion for an artist with whom I am not especially familiar. As explicitly stated, what I asked him was driven by curiosity and it was entirely up to him to answer as he saw fit. He omitted the last lines of my question that read "...or something else" and then "etc." and I wonder if that's because it was unnecessary when nobody (in their right mind) could take the rest any other way. You will have to be quite specific in demonstrating where it is that I have been dismissive in the quote, particularly when I was so careful to ascribe that very attitude only to the hypothetical "casual observer" and gave it no weight in doing so. Further, there was no need on my part to hint at any semblance of a point and I did no such thing, as I was simply asking another person to enlighten me with their own views. Ram appears to regard this one-on-one conversation that he's since reproduced with my consent as having been "super fascinating," I enjoyed his response to it, and I'm not sure how you could possibly justify your own reaction to any of this.

I hope you'll forgive my exceeding your dream word count, but it's a little hard when you start to complain at the only eighty-nine I unwittingly provided for Ram's quote while spontaneously expressing myself in a live chatroom environment. It just feels silly to have to defend any of this and I'm a little taken aback that you're not more embarrassed about it.

Lol learn to use paragraphs plz

Are you just going to leave it at copping out, then?

No. Again I will respond to a direct question, but not word salads. You didn’t even ask a question in there I don’t think? Typing a lot doesn’t make you smart.