Jake

Idle Thumbs 185: Beppo's Hole

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That of course doesn't mandate anyone to listen to said criticism.

 

"Ugh, as an old person I'm skipping through all this pop music discussion."

 

*skip skip skip*

 

SEAN: "—the new Dota II—"

 

*skips until the podcast reads zero*

 

EDIT: Old Grumbly Person Starts New Page

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I am constantly on YouTube and Twitter though and the only reason I know about Taylor Swift's new album is because I follow the guy who directed the Blank Spaces video.

 

EDIT: I guess it's different if you are in school? Like, if you are high-school or college age you probably have exponentially more day-to-day interactions with your peers than I do as a 26 year old. I feel like my pop culture awareness sharply plummeted in 2006, as soon as I graduated high school and didn't go to college.

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So much of it reads as either gatekeeping (this isn't REAL music by REAL musicians, because she has co-writers)

But that is exactly the problem. I think you are directly referring to me, but I'm not just blowing smoke by saying that, I check the credits of anything I listen to and wikipedia has easily opened up the lurid pop world of basically 5-10 men who write and creatively control all of this branding and another 5-10 men who cycle through all the production work. Just click some names, they do everything and create this homogenous trash and they have for nearly two decades now. These aren't bands doing anything creative, this is pure capitalism made by large corporations with puppets. All of these people are autotuned in the end whether they like it or not because that's what the label demands, they all have to have a certain amount of loudness to hit for radio play and to have the standard song construction for pop hits. If anything this Taylor Swift "evolution" is pretty much standard for any young attractive popstar besides the weird underage sexual overtones people kicked off in the 90s. Yeah I guess that sounds like teenage rebellion, but there's so much other music out there that is not owned by Universal or whoever the hell that is done by people who actually have to make an effort to build music from the ground up with people they trust and learn all of this process on their own. Anything branded with just someone's first and last name, you can almost be sure they are just a product of this machine.

 

For me, it has nothing to do with whether or not she's a woman or is marketed towards teen girls, in fact I prefer pretty much only women singers if I'm to listen to someone singing, unless it's like Jarvis Cocker or something. This process is the same with whatever attractive male name is next on the list as well. It's just Taylor Swift, Universal, and ClearChannel (or rebranded Iheartradio now, 'cause they really love radio) have more than enough attention and money for everyone to keep paying attention to this stuff.

 

Meh, if everyone wants to brand me as an anti capitalist "sheeple-saying" type, I supposed that's fair. I don't ever say sheeple though.

 

You make a really great point. I too went through an anti-pop star phase in my teens that is embarrassing to think about. It's created a lot of doubt in how I react to this music now, where I never feel fully confident that I dislike pop music because it's just not to my taste or if it's because of the waning influence of my shitty teen years.

I think probably everyone does. I don't know I didn't start liking some pop music until my later teens, although it tends to be a lot of older stuff where pop music is very well crafted in the days where often it was a group of people given a budget by a label and they are supposed to deliver, maybe with some meddling producer, instead the overwhelming way it's set up now.

 

Also I kind of bummed because I like Lorde, but I'm pretty iffy on whether she'll be a part of this usual machine, especially since the new Yellow Flicker Bear single is produced by Paul Epworth which sucks. I suppose it was all Joel Little before, but at least it was just her as the writer and Joel Little as the music solely. Maybe Lorde is actually forever supposed to be those two how Goldfrapp is always Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory no matter what.

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I check the credits of anything I listen to and wikipedia has easily opened up the lurid pop world of basically 5-10 men who write and creatively control all of this branding and another 5-10 men who cycle through all the production work. Just click some names, they do everything and create this homogenous trash and they have for nearly two decades now. These aren't bands doing anything creative, this is pure capitalism made by large corporations with puppets.

 

This is really gross and removes agency from a strong female pop star who, by everyone's account, very strongly controls her output and image. There are going to be producers and all that fine tuning it and doing the mixing and everything else that a piano and guitar based singer/songwriter just won't be able to do in pop music, but Taylor is very open about her songwriting process -- the copy of 1989 that I have has 3 tracks at the tail end that are exclusively about where 3 of the songs on the album started, and it's all just very obviously the same song without the polish. Taking that agency away from her -- along with trying to intellectualize what's essentially a statement of "I don't like this" by trying to interpret Kant by way of Adorno and Horkheimer -- just rubs me the wrong way.

 

I mean, there's a valid statement to be made about culture industry and the way that it robs groups of agency by creating an environment that encourages them to produce art objects within a certain paradigm of what beauty is, but applying that same theory to an individual just doesn't feel right.

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I really don't know anything about either of these people and am not prepared to offer a strongly held opinion about them, but in a very general sense, they are both not just "being a girl", they are broadcasting an image of how to be a girl out to millions of people, including other young girls. So while I don't personally have the knowledge to know if either of them is doing something worth publicly criticizing (which is why I didn't really chime into that discussion on the air) I think that conceptually it is completely within rights to consider whether a performing artist is putting forth a worthwhile message. We consider plenty of male and female artists in that context, certainly (authors, filmmakers, video game designers, and so on). That doesn't mean such evaluation can't be done poorly, or in a misogynistic way, but I do think that when you're a massively successful cultural force you are implicitly open to criticism for what your art tells people, especially if you are disproportionately targeting young people who we all know are a lot more impressionable. (I sure was.) That of course doesn't mandate anyone to listen to said criticism.

 

Oh, I think they're both completely eligible targets for criticism, absolutely (I particularly agree with some of the commentary about cultural appropriation on both of them).  And even how they structure their image should be part of that.  But I'm unconvinced that the image that Swift portrays to her audience is any healthier or better than the image portrayed by someone like a Cyrus now (or a Madonna in the 80s or a Joplin in the 60s).  And yet in analyses of pop stars, it's rather consistent that you'll see women like Swift praised for their more wholesome image, declaring they are doing it right, while other women are condemned for being risque.  And I'm someone who is often quite critical of the sexual objectification of women.  But I think there's also a fine line between sexual objectification, and a young woman owning her own sexuality and portraying it the way that she wants to.

 

To me, the cultural angle on some of this criticism is that rebellion by young women is almost universally condemned.  Because teen and young adult rebellion are often viewed as going hand in hand with sex, using booze/drugs, risky behavior and going against cultural norms.  And these tend to be decisions that young women are far more condemned for than young men are.  So a Cyrus gets criticized for challenging cultural norms, while a Swift gets praised for upholding a more traditional vision of femininity. 

 

If anybody wants to go down a bit of a bigger rabbit hole on this, I was pretty fascinated by the response to Cyrus around the release of Bangerz, and how wildly vitriolic it was.  I think part of the reason for that reaction actually had to do with Cyrus' look not just being sexualized, but being sexualized in a way that people are uncomfortable with.  There's an element of genderqueerness going on.  Wrecking Ball is drawing on some lesbian kind of imagery (throwing gay slurs at her became pretty popular on social media around that time).  She didn't violate any cultural norms because of her nudity or sexuality, it's specifically that they were presented in a way to challenge how young female celebrities are typically sexualized.  So a phrase like "go full Miley" is actually carrying a lot of meaning about needing to adhere to a bunch of different cultural norms, the norms that Swift embodies. 

 

My opinion is that its fine to have pop stars who represent a range of images for their fans, from someone like Swift at one end of the spectrum to women like Cyrus and Gaga on the other end whose image is actually pretty challenging to traditional femininity.  But I was frustrated with what I took to be a very un-nuanced view of sexuality and image in regards to the current wave of pop stars when this was all brought up on the 'cast.

 

 

*minor side note, I took a more than hour break while writing this to watch a ton of videos by Swift, Cyrus, Gaga, Madonna and some other female pop stars.  I kinda shifted track a little bit after that break, but hopefully it still makes sense.  Also, I haven't watched any of Gaga's videos for awhile.  Fuck those are good.

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And that's one of the reasons I love this podcast. It's educational. Not only did I find out that Taylor Swift is not a specific model of golf club, but a singer, but later in the show I had to discard my assumption that it was Bieber 2 after finding out that in this case Taylor is a girl's name. More interesting, though, is the thorough discussion about the state of pop culture image, the music industry and role models.

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This is really gross and removes agency from a strong female pop star who, by everyone's account, very strongly controls her output and image.

Whose account? Generally the crew for the "pop circuit" (as Gwen Stefani coined her foray into producing extremely vapid shit when she was away from No Doubt), is not talked about and stays behind the scenes. Press doesn't need to consider that because they, like everyone else, is marketed this image of this one extremely talented, attractive person, just as any normal popstar. Again, if you think Max Martin just stands around, I don't know what you think he's paid for especially when songs written or produced by this small behind the scenes group are terribly homogenous, Taylor Swift included. I mean yeah, she could be a LOT worse, but is that merit?

 

There are more than enough solidly strong female musicians who deserve more attention and create their stuff from the ground up and don't have video producers, photographers, magazine covers, and major labels writing their lines and helping their image. Why waste time talking about Taylor Swift?

 

trying to interpret Kant by way of Adorno and Horkheimer --

I don't understand any of these words, so I guess you win?

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Whose account? Generally the crew for the "pop circuit" (as Gwen Stefani coined her foray into producing extremely vapid shit when she was away from No Doubt), is not talked about and stays behind the scenes. Press doesn't need to consider that because they, like everyone else, is marketed this image of this one extremely talented, attractive person, just as any normal popstar. Again, if you think Max Martin just stands around, I don't know what you think he's paid for especially when songs written or produced by this small behind the scenes group are terribly homogenous, Taylor Swift included.

 

There are more than enough solidly strong female musicians who deserve more attention and create their stuff from the ground up and don't have video producers, photographers, magazine covers, and major labels writing their lines and helping their image. Why waste time talking about Taylor Swift?

 

By extension of your logic, we shouldn't be talking about anyone who's signed to a label. All labels have producers and PR people that work with their artists, so what's the point when their artistic output is tainted by third parties?

 

I'm not going to come out and say that Britney Spears was anything more than a marketing masterpiece, but I think Taylor Swift is a fairly unique case. She works on a large enough scale that she has a lot of people helping her behind the scenes, but she also just produces good things because she's a talented individual. Something about the rejection of the idea that she has no input on what she creates is just... wrong. It's still a collaborative effort, of course. Taylor Swift probably doesn't know much about equalizing or producing electronic music, I'm sure. If you asked her to DJ, she'd probably fuck up the beat matching. That doesn't mean she doesn't come up with a lot of what goes into her songs or act authentically in interviews.

 

Kant wrote about beauty, saying that a taste judgment should be made only under certain criteria -- something about being purposive without purpose (continental philosophy is full of dumb and impenetrable phrases), being necessary, a thing being pleasurable because it's beautiful and not the other way around, and some other things I can't remember. Adorno and Horkheimer drew on this critique of judgment (and a lot of other things) when they came up with their theory of the culture industry -- that there is a capitalist industry now that dictates what should be considered beautiful, and only acts made independent of that industry should actually be judged for their beauty. Judgment of that system is perfectly valid. Taylor Swift is a talented woman, but everything she makes is very strongly influenced by the thought, "How will this sell? How will this affect me as a brand/product?" She commodifies herself and her artistic output to an insane degree, which is a fair criticism when it's contextualized as being about Taylor Swift as a product of the industry that she works in, but it doesn't feel right when it's framed as being a criticism of Taylor Swift as an individual.

 

Now that I type that out, it's super nitpicky and dumb, so nevermind.

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Guys the only real music is made by people who can't afford to do music all the time, everyone else is being fed to you by a machine that wants to feed music to you

 

Andre Rieu is the Machine

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By extension of your logic, we shouldn't be talking about anyone who's signed to a label. All labels have producers and PR people that work with their artists, so what's the point when their artistic output is tainted by third parties?

Obviously not. Not everyone signed to a label is given a team of song writers and producers to fill out their hits. Like I said, usually you'll see this when it's just one person credited. Bands don't often have to go through this when they sign unless they suck or don't make a money. When a producer is signed to a band it's not them gathering the session musicians (if needed) or putting all of the music together themselves unless of course they suck. Often the best musicians are the ones that sign to the label late in the game after establishing themselves to gather more fans and then quit later after the album contracts end and go back to an independent label and rake in more dough with a new found audience. Taylor Swift and just about all of these damn pop stars were in this system since day one, often just because they are attractive and that sells.

 

Kant wrote about beauty, saying that a taste judgment should be made only under certain criteria

The most I'm ever going to know about Immanuel Kant is that he's a real pissant who was very rarely stable. I'm good.

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This has gotten a little too acerbic for me (on my behalf even, which I apologize for), so I'm just gonna bow out. Hate on Taylor if you want. I mean, haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

(I couldn't not)

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Embarassed admission:

 

When you guys were having the conversation about Taylor Swift on the cast, up until the moment when Sean actually said "go full Miley" that's who I actually thought you were talking about, and I was really fucking confused.

 

 

I loved the bizarre mashup of promo spots at the end of the cast.

 

You guys seem to be part of the same ad network that does Bombcast ads. Does that mean that next week you'll be telling us about Crunchyroll?

 

Following this line of questioning, when in the 'cast process do you guys do ad reads? Before/after/during? No reason to ask except to satisfy my curiosity and get a glimpse into the sausage making.

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I loved the bizarre mashup of promo spots at the end of the cast.

 

You guys seem to be part of the same ad network that does Bombcast ads. Does that mean that next week you'll be telling us about Crunchyroll?

 

I was thinking of how the Thumbs would sell it, but then I realized the obvious answer is to drop in a clip of Steve Gaynor pushing cyperpunk anime, promo code SCOOPS.

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I was thinking of how the Thumbs would sell it, but then I realized the obvious answer is to drop in a clip of Steve Gaynor pushing cyperpunk anime, promo code SCOOPS.

 

I'm sorry, but do you really think that Steve Gaynor is the Thumb most associated with cyberpunk these days?

 

I can't even read the word "cyberpunk" anymore without changing my accent.

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I'm sorry, but do you really think that Steve Gaynor is the Thumb most associated with cyberpunk these days?

 

I can't even read the word "cyberpunk" anymore without changing my accent.

 

Until those Junior Mints have a laser beam and some cords coming out of them, I'm going to let Steve's forum icon speak for itself.

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I respect that there's a deep, adult-friendly game in Pokemon, but I'm probably never going to actually get into it. For my collecting-and-training needs, I've tended to opt for the Shin Megami Tensei games, which don't seem analogous on the surface, but tend to have a surprisingly similar core loop. The difference for me is the trappings. SMT spins often quite intriguing tales of reality bending, apocalypses, death timers, theology and morality etc and substitutes classical demons and other mythological figures (or very Japanese versions thereof) for your adorable tiny monsters. This aesthetic just does way more for me than Pokemon's grade school adorability and very lightweight narratives. I'm not actually sure which franchise has deeper mechanics, though. I would have said SMT (or at least, one or two of them somewhere along the line), but then tegan held forth on breeding and my brain about exploded. So I dunno!

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Does look Far Cry 4's villain look just like Julian Assange to anyone else or is that just me?

 

Also, never having played a Pokemon game nor currently owning any consoles, are there any good Pokemon-likes on PC?

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Also, never having played a Pokemon game nor currently owning any consoles, are there any good Pokemon-likes on PC?

 Ya know... other than the online pokemon battle things people have built, I don't actually recall any PC RPGs where you draw your party members from the things you fight.

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In a time where people earnestly worry about their personal brand and how they, as a person, appear as a branding effort, I think it's overly cynical to be completely unforgiving of someone for presenting a version of themselves to the public. It's not inauthentic if you're simplifying your self for consumption. It's just capitalism.

Late to the party here, but I think there's a massive difference between someone making a personal decision to present themselves a certain way, versus someone being presented by a multi-billion dollar corporation in a specific way that they have previously determined will make them the most money on top of their existing fortune.

I think basically any time any creative work is created in a way that takes financial viability into significant account, that sucks and is bad. Something like a Taylor Swift album is the most extreme possible example of that, and as such it is extremely sucky and bad.

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