when swordsmen of different styles connect

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forclosure

Well-known member
@shakahislop and lastly this feeling of newness it doesn't just apply to "current" music it's also a feeling you can get from listening to old music that is new to you

and the more you listen to that the more you realise how cyclical it all is and you figure out what songs they're making refferences to through samples or quotes etc you'll get past that and its more about how do they reinterpret this old stuff in different and surprising ways which has a longer much longer life span than just chasing after that which is current because it can lock you into a kind of tunnel vision much like the same conservative rap fans you get glimpses of via friends and social media.

all that talk of what rap should sound regardless of whatever corner of rap fandom is all rooted in the same kind of reactionary impulses anyway i gurantee you there's people out there wondering how we went from having rappers like Lil Ugly Mane and Zelooperz to now having rappers like Tisakorean, Tony Shhnow and Babytron

and i think Lil ugly mane and Zelooperz are TERRIBLE
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
WebEschatology said:
This is why me Third and Crowl got so aggravated with Barty when he kept trying to say Migos were singular pioneers in ATL rap because if anything they're more at the arse end of rappers who came up from within that scene and world and while they did put out some solid tunes if anything they were the rappers you bring up around your friends who swear that trap is terrible but admit that they at least like bad n boujee lol

But he didn't wanna hear that because that got in the way of his "vision" that he was trying to put together and having to engage in that would result in him having to do more work in that space and rewire how it all fits together
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Tbf to Barty I think he liked Migos and thought that Crowleys obsession with the cool kids was a weird affectation, which it probably was
 
luka

luka

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One of the things thats quite curious about you and crowl is that you advocate for music you don't like. And it's not easy for outsiders to work out the logic
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Perhaps that you see it as significant in some sociological way. But it's quite eccentric
 
luka

luka

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I like both of you, I've spent hours talking to Crowley, less so to you, but you've been round my house I consider you a friend. But I don't fully understand your way of engaging with music. It's a mystery to me really.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
I like both of you, I've spent hours talking to Crowley, less so to you, but you've been round my house I consider you a friend. But I don't fully understand your way of engaging with music. It's a mystery to me really.
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You engage with music sociologically as well though. When we are talking about music none of us are talking of it in purely musicological terms, which would be unutterably dull. It's about where we want things to go, a kind of presentation, a passion. With barty, despite being the same age bracket as me and webbie, he's got very little sense of historical time. for him jungle, miles davis, migos all blur into one. Which in a way I admire but it's also not very systematic, and I like to be systematic. It's a different way to consrtructing a filing cabinet. You might do it by letter, or by style, or by artist. I tend to do it by years, groups of years, movements. In my head, that is. In a way barty's internet everything approach doesn't really have the same kind of mental mapping that I'm used to making in my head. Not to prioritise the superiority of one approach over another, but it's just the way it is.

Also, I can't speak for Crowley, but I am the cool kid. People will be agreeing me soon that romantic warrior by return to forever is a great album. I'm thinking way ahead.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
to be the leader of the cool kids, you have to endure ruthless censure, condemnation, being spat upon, shat upon.

It's why I was bigging up all those crazy cologne acid records in 2013-14, people telling me i should have been getting with whatever bandcamp new age house or whatever, when techno was quite slow, and when the kids started to make the techno more aggressive, they never followed my vision, because they wanted to dilute it with trance or whatever. But by then I had long since moved on.
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
luka said:
I like both of you, I've spent hours talking to Crowley, less so to you, but you've been round my house I consider you a friend. But I don't fully understand your way of engaging with music. It's a mystery to me really.
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you wanna know why we advocate for that its because a big part of talking about music IS discussing stuff that you don't like and not only that but social media makes you have to come up close and direct (at least as close as it can do for you) with people for who this stuff has meaning and personal connection for where even if you fundamentally don't like it you're force to sand off your edges and slightly listen to it.

Its funny that you don't get it because you're frequently the same man who every other week declares all music terrible and ammounting to window dressing and how you get "bored of your own taste" and try to assess why
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
WebEschatology said:
also like @shakahislop if you're just gonna focus on that particular level of rap in that manner you're both gonna miss out on alot of good interesting music that doesn't fit in those margins and frankly never will and this is how alot of johnny come lately rappers who make more approchable versions of particular sounds end up being hailed as pionners and "singular visionaries" who get talked about like they're something other than rappers when they're clearly not it happened to young thug it happened to Future and it happened to Carti

cause what matters in rap like every other industry right now is output and the law of deminishing returns is very real and Sturgeon's law if anything holds more importance now than it did when he first coined it

and i ain't gonna lie part of me just feels like you're overthinking it i'm no poptimist but a good song is a good song regardless of whether it sounds new or not this track 5 years ago was the biggest tune in the world even one or two punk people i know who wouldn't claim themselves as rap fans loved it and i don't think anybody would say its pushing things forward
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do you really think that carti isn't something new? i'll all aboard the barty train with that one.

i do think that making an approachable version of an existing sound from the margins counts as something new. i don't think there's any justice in that, as some geezer monetizes the scenius or whatever.
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
like look i don't like My Chemical Romance and its especially alienating cause now people in my age group are being targeted with nostalgia tour shit the way they parents did with Ratt and Motley Crue and all dem bands there. I suppose my equivalent was the grime nostalgia stuff but it feels like that period of music got completly submerged under the shift to rap and drill aswell as all the emo/pop punk nostalgia shit(not to mention Americans losing interest as soon as Drake got away from it)


but anyways i bring that lot up cause i remember when Bowie died somebody i knew said they couldn't understand why and if anything he was their Bowie, i get that makes easy sense to me it still rock shit at the end of the day but it makes sense.
The other instance was when i tried to relisten to some Mars Volta album in one last attempt to try to like them and i hated it my tirade of everything i hated about the album made one guy take a break from going through the Jethro Tull discography(not kidding) to actually listen to it and he adored it, great change of pace from what he was doing

@luka i think part of it is because in the last decade+ sort of similiar to you and Future alot of rappers that i don't like (ilovemakonen,lil peep,Yung Lean/Bladee,Spaceghostpurrp if you want to be generous Salem) have themselves become "influential" on rap in ways that some people didn't cause they wrote them off as bad or just weak immitators of rappers prior and ontop of that i've been around and talked with said people who were or still are deeply into them it looks weird for you because you haven't had to engage with them in the same way that me and @CrowleyHead and if anything so you end up having these frequent discussions about these people who you have no interest in and as a result start learning about them and their fans in a way that you don't do frequently on here.

and like fuck it i get it in someways it could be that my tastes just run completly to the opposite of the kind of sounds and current trends that these guys do and one thing i always make sure to do is to dislike them for the music first rather than fashion interviews etc and i gravitate towards rappers who have their own specific individual style/personas within whatever type of rap their working with rather than the type of rappers who work more in broad gestures and not only that they tend to not have much humour/bombast in their music compared to some of the rather outsized stretchable cartoon characters that populate alot of rap now (not to say that some of my favourite rappers aren't hilarous though)

you're far more populist than i am in that regard despite all your lapses into misanthropy, your dislike of clubbing and "clever" music despite the fact that your the most "me wet cunt, Zebedee and Tommy got completly slossed on 68% wine and went absolutly mental down Shoreditch on the way back from the QPR/Crystal Palace match" lad here and we've got our own reasons for that.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
WebEschatology said:
and i ain't gonna lie part of me just feels like you're overthinking it i'm no poptimist but a good song is a good song regardless of whether it sounds new or not this track 5 years ago was the biggest tune in the world even one or two punk people i know who wouldn't claim themselves as rap fans loved it and i don't think anybody would say its pushing things forward
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you might not be surprised to hear i like this tune. that gucci mane verse is so fucking ugly though, not in a good way
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
do you really think that carti isn't something new? i'll all aboard the barty train with that one.

i do think that making an approachable version of an existing sound from the margins counts as something new. i don't think there's any justice in that, as some geezer monetizes the scenius or whatever.
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nah i don't and making an approachable version of an existing sound isn't new either. I'm not a fan of alot of Young Thug's "sons" (lil baby,gunna,recently deceased lil keed etc) because what they all do is take one aspect of a sound that he engaged with and make that their whole thing, which can produce one or two decent singles but album times tend to be hit n miss.

i thought WLR was ok neither a paradigm shift that some make it out to be or an utter failure. some of the sounds he's pulling from come from specific soundcloud rap scenes (tread,plugg music) which some of the people in those scenes got vex about when the album came out and were saying how he was claiming the word "vamp" when Jim Jones did that first or whatever, i'm not gonna pretend like i know the deep inner workings and personalities in those places because i only signed onto soundcloud couple months back and tend to use it for mixes rather than keeping track of microscenes but also these same scenes haven't been written about or documented so there's alot of this music and personalities who don't get coverage and when a rapper like say a Carti or a Yeat comes along most times people don't know how to talk about them or they think that they're bandwagon riders to a scene when really they came up through the ranks and worked with some of the important names in them and vice versa.

Future whose on the album is his biggest forebare and the other rapper that i know he loves is Curren$y so in that regard his style makes sense, not only that probably to shut down the criticisms of him just being a ad-lib rapper he went in a more "lyrical" direction and using the baby voice and all the punk/rock star shit too.
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
you might not be surprised to hear i like this tune. that gucci mane verse is so fucking ugly though, not in a good way
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i don't think its ugly but he just got out of jail and not only that because he lost all the drug/lean weight his enunciation and diction sound alot less mushy compared to how he sounded on his best work.

Fucking Jay Z's first number 1 was Empire State of Mind and NOBODY who considered themselves a longtime fan of his thinks that's his best song, it just happens like this man
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
@shakahislop
the guy who made this beats imo is pivotal to understanding WLR and why it got some of the response it did. he's worked with rappers like Lucki, Black Kray(one of two people who i could pin down as being the creator of "emo rap" the other guy being the son of Tommy Hilfiger) and is part of the production collective Working on Dying big definer of the "tread" sub genre which i gurantee you barty knows fuck all about because he's not on soundcloud like that and probably doesn't wanna be on there for really pigheaded reasons.

Wouldn't surprise me if some of that is because it involves these rappers/producers being influenced by certain sounds that don't fit into his Neon signs vision but also largly to do with the overall aesthetics of it looking like 2000s nu metal "mall goth" shit.

you live in NY shaka despite the fact that we don't have any Hot Topics here because Americans overwhelmingly populate the internet i know all about it, the kind of people who should(and honestly shouldn't shop there) the kind of bands they promote the big blocky platform boots etc etc as far as i know this isn't what its like now but its what largely defines this music
 
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F

forclosure

Well-known member
but certain rappers making more accesible versions of microscene/regional sounds really isn't new nor is the other version where one rapper from that particular scene is cherrypicked to be the representitive of it.
E-40 is still the first rapper to comes to mind for people when they think of Bay Area rap and hyphy (despite tell me when to go being produced by Lil Jon and having none of the mania that the hyphy of the time sounded like), Twista and especially Common for the longest time were who people thought of when it came to Chicago rap.

If you've ever listened to Atmosphere, what Macklemore did when he was the white rapper of the moment was just the diet version of that i mean shit even Young Thug and Migos if you've heard Rich Kidz(jose guapo and skooly in particular),Travis Porter J-Futuristic and Ca$h Out you'd know exactly what those guys are building off of and some of these guys either because of crimes they did or because they didn't blow and tastes changed or were too ahead of the game as their fans like to say.

@shakahislop is especially frustraiting now because it goes to show just how social media and the internet have only reaffirmed a particular hiarachy of which rappers get talked about over which and because some of these people don't have a big co-sign or a collaboration from a rapper they know of they hold them in the same regard as youtube freestylers, so when i tell you this isn't new it REALLY isn't new
 
F

forclosure

Well-known member
and this is also timely because to go back to a figure we've talked about before this is a large reason why alot of people from difference scenes in different countries cannot stand Drake

you would like Sauce Walka,shaka
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
thirdform said:
to be the leader of the cool kids, you have to endure ruthless censure, condemnation, being spat upon, shat upon.

It's why I was bigging up all those crazy cologne acid records in 2013-14, people telling me i should have been getting with whatever bandcamp new age house or whatever, when techno was quite slow, and when the kids started to make the techno more aggressive, they never followed my vision, because they wanted to dilute it with trance or whatever. But by then I had long since moved on.
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Crazed visionaries are not necessarily cool kids, the latter tending to be quite popular.
 
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