Will there ever be a new best ever album? - Music

SuedeSwede

Ognoo

Gender: Female

Age: 27

Location: On a cloud

bcmandude wrote:

I'm aware. I just think it's silent majority is 'overall more sexist than BEA'.

I'm not sure you can quite possibly pin down that the users contributing to the "silent majority" are truly sexist, but a nice quick look at how females are represented in charts and then trying to extrapolate that onto presumptuous claims about communities rather than structural issues founded deeper within society that reflect on smaller things such as what sort of albums become acclaimed and the balance of men to women pursuing musical careers.
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mickilennial

The Most Trusted Name in News

Gender: Female

Age: 37

Location: Detroit

bcmandude wrote:

You must be very closed minded then. By "innovative" I don't mean "was influenced by nothing; exists in a vacuum". I simply mean that they've carved out a new sound that hasn't really been touched before. "Give Up" is basically the reason Owl City exists.

That’s Satie’s point. Those albums were crafted out of things that existed as a precursing influence, and none of them have a sonically unique identity. Back to Black was just the most commercially successful out of a soul revival scene that already existed in the UK at the time, The XX were just expanding on post-punk revival sounds with a more minimized scale, Give Up was again an expansion of the sounds that came from the indietronica scene of the time with Gibbard's flare for the dramatic on play, and those are just three examples from your “cutting edge” albums. This implication completely ignores that being INSPIRED does not equal INNOVATION.

Last edited by mickilennial on 02/15/2016 18:26; edited 2 times in total

bcmandude

Gender: Male

Age: 28

Gowi wrote:

That’s Satie’s point. Those albums were crafted out of things that existed as a precursing influence, and none of them have a sonically unique identity. Back to Black was just the most commercially successful out of a soul revival scene that already existed in the UK at the time, The XX were just expanding on post-punk revival sounds with a more minimized scale, and those are just two examples from your “cutting edge” albums.

Well by Satie's standards, "innovative" is a term that cannot apply to 100% of albums. Metal came from rock, rock came from blues, blues came from jazz, jazz came from African music and European classical music, those musics came from somewhere etc. Everything builds upon something at least a little bit. But there is a large difference between 'influenced' and 'throwback'.

I never said "cutting-edge" so you can't put that in quotation marks like it was something that I said.

Last edited by bcmandude on 02/15/2016 18:24; edited 2 times in total

Satie

bcmandude wrote:

You must be very closed minded then. By "innovative" I don't mean "was influenced by nothing; exists in a vacuum". I simply mean that they've carved out a new sound that hasn't really been touched before. "Give Up" is basically the reason Owl City exists.

I share your definition and completely disagree. Outside the annals of indie rock cultural hegemony, none of those albums are very interesting. Spending even a cursory amount of time with '80s and '90s music (a lot of it even from the rock canon) renders most of those completely redundant. You're free to enjoy whatever you please, but excuse me if I don't really hear sonic innovation in synth pop retreads or soft indie rock with excessive preciousness and ornamentation.

bcmandude

Gender: Male

Age: 28

Satie wrote:

I share your definition and completely disagree. Outside the annals of indie rock cultural hegemony, none of those albums are very interesting. Spending even a cursory amount of time with '80s and '90s music (a lot of it even from the rock canon) renders most of those completely redundant. You're free to enjoy whatever you please, but excuse me if I don't really hear sonic innovation in synth pop retreads or soft indie rock with excessive preciousness and ornamentation.

Point me towards some 80s/90s songs that have the all of the same sound, feel, song structure and instrumentation of "Digital Witness", "Nothing Better", "Boyz", "White Flag", "Feel Good Inc." k thanks.

Satie

bcmandude wrote:

Point me towards some 80s/90s songs that have the all of the same sound, feel, song structure and instrumentation of "Digital Witness", "Nothing Better", "Boyz", "White Flag", "Feel Good Inc." k thanks.

On my phone and don't care to look up the ones I can't recreate in my mind to think about, but a general note I'll make is that the slightest variations in pop music timbre do not innovations make to me. Unique atmospheres and textures or bold concepts interest me. Having some sort of amalgam for the sake of amalgam where we do s verse-chorus-verse pop song but with instrumentation stolen from this or that scene is not really interesting to me. None of those artists, to my recollection, really carve out a unique sound so much as apply new polish to some very well-worn influences. Their commercial reach and production values also tended to be higher than their forebears.

I think MIA was one of the exceptions to my statement, to be fair, though her production does derive a fair clip from a lot of dub and dancehall music which would have been a huge influence on any London-based producer in her epoch. I concede that they weren't trying to bring in more eastern instrumentation as the source material for their instrumentals or anything, but MIA's sound world is not completely alien to those movements.

I really don't know what you find new about "Feel Good Inc." Is it the fact that there's a bridge that kind of deviates from the rest of the song's sound? Is it the, again, dub-indebted production? The only truly novel thing about the song that I hear is Damon Albarn's insipid breathy sort-of rapping.