every song that sounds like this ever made

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Yes there's like a poise and tastefulness to them. I mean tastefulness as a bad thing. You know like when you go round someone's flat and everything is really *nice* but it's unnerving too. It all coheres to present a very carefully - too carefully- put together picture of the Good Life.

I think this quite a new thing? I hated them at the time but Oasis and that lot were never tasteful. Fuck even Fatboy slim wasn't tasteful. But this sort of stuff like Mgmt is.

I think the modern sense of "curating" things is also important here

the internet allowed for this democratising curation thing to happen the way it has. it's become the talent. that's why the 90s held a certain integrity that's been lost and has so many of us yearning. it took a bit more to pull it off and the big characters made it all the more magic. but the internet came along and empowered anyone who wanted to become a connoiseur. all you needed was enough tenacity to nerd out and do all the research. full access to the the once heavily guarded annals of all cool culture just from trawling blogs, discogs, tumbler and youtube. i did it myself. this meant that people who would have been consumers or bedroom musicians at most were now clobbering together collages like LCD Soundsystem. playing to crowds of likeminded culture vultures. i'm losing my edge as the ourboros. the conservative meek inherited it because they were the ones with the right mindset. add on to that the fact that it was all happening around the time daft punk and electroclash were crossing over and bringing rock audiences into the club and thus bringing ecstasy into the mix. it's like inevitable music or something,
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
the internet allowed for this democratising curation thing to happen the way it has. it's become the talent. that's why the 90s held a certain integrity that's been lost and has so many of us yearning. it took a bit more to pull it off and the big characters made it all the more magic. but the internet came along and empowered anyone who wanted to become a connoiseur. all you needed was enough tenacity to nerd out and do all the research. full access to the the once heavily guarded annals of all cool culture just from trawling blogs, discogs, tumbler and youtube. i did it myself. this meant that people who would have been consumers or bedroom musicians at most were now clobbering together collages like LCD Soundsystem. playing to crowds of likeminded culture vultures. i'm losing my edge as the ourboros. the conservative meek inherited it because they were the ones with the right mindset. add on to that the fact that it was all happening around the time daft punk and electroclash were crossing over and bringing rock audiences into the club and thus bringing ecstasy into the mix. it's like inevitable music or something,
And curating talent has done a complete revolution. Taking whatever is farthest from the cool and capitulating it to it's image is a talent- the more cheap, inauthentic and synthetic the refuse the better. We do that on here, and you saw it in mass culture with all the talk of 'poptimism' years back.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
it takes effort to do it. true cool is done effortlessly. not to mean it's easily achieved, but done without forethought. things in an apartment that are accumulated over decades, reflecting unrelated things you were into at different times, as opposed to tightly curated from the past half-year's copies of wallpaper* (can't forget that pretensions fucking * at the end) or whatever hipster Tumblr/instagram account.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
Yeah it's interesting this cos in a way "bad" music isn't really bad anymore.

Like my immediate reaction to that Martinez brothers thing is that it's awful. But it's not awful in the way that, for example, Brandon Block was awful. Lots of the tunes the Martinez brothers play in that set are pretty good tunes. But they cohere together into something that seems tyrannical in its niceness, its tastefulness.

So we've traded good old fashioned honest shitness (Brandon block) for a more slippery notion of something being shit even though at the micro level it's generally pretty good. There's nothing "wrong" with it and yet there's everything wrong with it

I don't think we have the full aesthetic vocabulary for this shift yet. Or I don't, anyway
 

Leo

Well-known member
does it pass the blindfold test: if you had no idea who it was, would you like or hate it? the second we see the name on the YouTube title, we've probably already formed 75% of our opinion before even hitting play.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Things being as they are I have to mention this one I guess


Also had a lot of friends who were into Miike Snow (why the extra I?) - dunno about adverts but it was the theme to Friday Night Dinner

 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
There's kind of shades of Yacht Rock to all this, I think. Can we say Yacht Indie? Or Indie Yacht?

Mundanely, doesn't it all probably traces back to that late nineties early 2000s post-punk / disco-punk hype / post-Oasis backlash? Maybe crossed with the impact of uncanny valley surgical pro-tools post-production reconstruction a la The Killers.
 

luka

Well-known member
The rapture thing sounds all spiky and angular angsty post punky but I take your point about the production methods and technology.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think we've established that no one here has paid any attention whatsoever to the indie-pop of the last ten years. I suppose that's as it should be.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
The rapture thing sounds all spiky and angular angsty post punky
I was thinking of The Rapture (and DFA, and whoever else) as antecedants rather than an example. Like, the indie tastemakers in the weeklies start getting excited about angular twitchy disco punk no-one really buys it but then a few years down the line the slick drivetime version is on in the students union bar.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
the thing that seperates the unlistenable MGMT and Empire Of The Sun from an actually good band like Cut Copy is the difference between being really into weed and being really into ecstacy
 

Leo

Well-known member
yeah, I actually don't mind cut copy because they've written some classic catchy pop melodies. the first MGMT album has a couple of ok tracks but seems more contrived. calculated faux psychedelic dance pop.
 

luka

Well-known member
the thing that seperates the unlistenable MGMT and Empire Of The Sun from an actually good band like Cut Copy is the difference between being really into weed and being really into ecstacy

What are some good cut copy songs please? I don't know anything about them
 
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