Thread by @nyeogmi

when evaluating a feature of a work of art i tend to ask "how good is this?" and "how well-executed is this?" separately

for elements that can be stolen (like chord progression) i often expand "how good?" into "how original?" and "how intentional?"

i think it's good to go feature by feature for this, but some whole-song exapmles:

- a well-executed bad song is I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys (insipid subject)
- a good poorly-executed song is Just Did A Bad Thing by Bill Wurtz (tons of forced rhymes)

i kinda think a lot of people are tuned to look for quality of execution but not originality or intentionality?

unfortunately, flawlessness (esp. flawless production) is p correlated w/ money

i'm not really an exception! pretty much all the songs in my spotify library are songs i think of as well-executed!

i also think that the "good, not well-executed" quadrant is small because most artists who write good music are pretty aware of what they're doing

however, i think that if you come into one genre trying to evaluate the music according to the standards of another genre, you will falsely assess a lot of songs as flawed!

and i kind of worry that mainstream pop musicians sort of colonize other genres by making songs in those genres that are a good match for the standards of mainstream pop listeners

look at uh, BabyJake's "Cigarettes on Patios" for an example of a soul/RnB sorta tune with peppy dance-flavored production and basically meaningless (but sorta fatalistic) lyrics

a lot of people cover "industry plants" (musicians pretending to be nobody who actually have promotion from the mainstream pop industry from the start)

the videos i've seen on this point out lack of authenticity and stuff

i don't think this is really accurate because a lot of the most industry-connected musicians in subgenres like hip hop and punk don't seem to be suffering at _all_

like, kanye fans still think kanye is a person and not a collective of ghostwriters and ghost-producers

i think the main thing at play is that, when pop musicians use mainstream pop tropes and avoid "ugly" production in those genres, their music tends to sound soulless to actual fans of the genre

(even though anything big in any genre is _also_ soulless and corporate)

this pap receives tons of acclaim from critics and mainstream pop fans. especially compared to stuff that was already in the genre

this tends to move the commercial appeal in the genre towards wherever that appeal was in pop

it also tends to boost white and rich artists

there are other ways to boost pap: people devalue music to the point of never, ever paying for it and letting robots decide everything about their taste. that means there's no appearance of a critical consensus or anything

critics are still big outside of music and have really pedestrian taste in media

it's practically a requirement of the job since most jobs in media criticism are about approximating and validating the taste of the average viewer

when i say "validating the taste of the average viewer" --

who really needs a review for a marvel movie or Call of Duty? the reviews exist to soothe and validate people who already bought it. not to sell games.

the tl;dr of the take i'm offering here is that when the most funded people in a mainstream genre find out about a subgenre that is unexplored, they typically replace the sensibilities of that genre with sensibilities that are much more mainstream, conservative, and white

OG viewers see this as inauthentic, even if the thing they originally liked was also inauthentic, because new makers are pandering to the Disneyland audience and not them

the pandered audience, which includes nearly all critics, packs the fuck in. they love this

in a lot of cases this totally kills the original genre. like look at what happened to dubstep. i mean, granted, a lot of old dubstep was really terrible, but still.

i guess in conclusion, my favorite blood type is AB-? nod your head. i'm going to snack on you