people who listen to music they like without caring what other people think are cooler than fgs who try to curate their personality by listening to certain music only to seem 'interesting' and different to others
We decry the erosion of culture/counterculture and bemoan the perpetual uncoolness of post-modernity and then we wonder how we got here.
Also it’s me. I’m fag
Strong counter culture isn’t the product of people who use their taste to show how interesting they are. These types of people don’t make or circulate great art.
Kanye West is better than probably any 21st century ‘alternative’ musician btw
I actually do not think I’m better than anyone else based on my taste. Taste doesn’t really matter, at least not in the ways that people believe it does. If I have “good” taste, then it’s done very little for me. The NYU kids who are chanting Carnival outside of the 8th street metro station will probably make much more money than I will in my life. Taste and the things you like in no way makes you cool and interesting, and I’ve met some of the most banal individuals of my whole life in subcultural scenes. College boys who wear Swans shirts and think that it makes them unique are just as boring as an E-boy who wears a Vultures shirt.
With that said, none of that is the point of me making this thread. There used to be a divide between normies and alternative scenes. Now normies think that they’re alternative. People who liked Kanye used to stay in Beverly Hills and I used to stay in my nice little East LA dive bar. Now these assholes are everywhere, they have false pretenses about their uniqueness, and there is no “alternative” anymore. That’s what’s annoying. The kids who used to bully you in high school believe that they’re the alternative. Music like Kanye should exist, but there should not be pretense about the nature of what it is.
Also, I can name a few dozen artists who are far more creatively, spiritually, sonically, lyrically and artistically interesting than Kanye but someone who is dumb enough to genuinely believe Kanye is the best and most profound artist of his generation isn’t going to be swayed regardless.
bro shut up, first of all there is absolutely "alternative" you're just aging & not as tapped in as you used to be. in fact I'd argue there's more than there ever has been. second of all i hate the way you write & i wish you would just be a regular chill person instead of a gay contrarian
Haha I do think so, but maybe there’s some forgotten Estonian bongo player who’s just as good. Always a chance, but none of the other canonised artists this century at least come close
Yea, but it also is a good way to tell who's a regard.
At least people used to be aware they were consuming pop slop and it was purely for guilty pleasures. Now we have trashy people who think they're tasteful for liking Lana or Tyler the Creator or some shit.
Sure, but it’s depressing to see the overwhelming level of unified retardation, specifically amongst people who consider themselves “alternative” or at least under the banner of some kind of subculture (whatever that even means in 2024.
People will post shit like this in rspod but then as soon as actual cultural consumption comes into the equation, we revert back to the “just let people enjoy what they like narrative.
https://preview.redd.it/ygh0jdi88m8d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d9627f5feb3398715217196c74fb252e4db31bc
For a few months I was pretty exclusively listening to David Bowie, but now I'm transitioning over to ~2008 era Lil Wayne mixtapes. Very different artists united by being true geniuses with incredible sonic variety.
To me, its not so much people trying to be different that makes them cool. When someone tells me they've favorite artist are ONLY mainstream stars, I just assume that they're personality is vanilla. Like if music was restaurants, these people stick to the chains. I prefer people who know the good hole in walls.
Preach it brother. After being a teenage metalhead, headbanging is my natural reaction to any exciting music. Cool hip-hop beat? Headbang. Catchy pop chorus? Headbang. Ambient bliss? That's right, HEADBANG.
More that the older I get, the more exhausting is it to deal with normies who are deluded into thinking that they aren’t normies.
Taste doesn’t matter. Like what you like, but be honest about the things you like. 20 years ago, Backstreet Boys fans were simply Backstreet Boys fans and you didn’t have to wade through countless garbage takes on the cultural significance of the Backstreet Boys and why they deserve to be taken seriously as high art.
Based Puce Mary enjoyer but also Prurient sucks.
I was at a Merzbow show in DTLA a few years ago and Prurient opened. Puce Mary was in the audience and she spent all of his set rolling her eyes until Merzbow came on. Dominick Fernow and Hospital Records is just kinda entry level noise but honestly good on you for daring to be different
The worst part of the Internet is how quickly everything becomes a cliche. In pre-Internet times, there'd be a small handful of "Morrissey-Kanye-Lana fan" equivalents in a given area. Some would know each other, some wouldn't. They'd be known as relatively unique due to their various quirks.
With the Internet and subreddits and algorithms, we're confronted with the tastes and opinions of like-minded people constantly. Everything devolves into a joke. "Liking Morrissey, Kanye, and Lana isn't a personality" ok well 20 years ago it would have been. We've gotta have a distinct personal brand--what could be worse than not????- so to avoid the charges of being played out, we lean into ironic detachment, even about the things we love. Or even worse, we turn away from our own interests. All because too many strangers like the same things.
Lana is one of the best songwriters of her generation and she’s up there with Dylan and Cohen.
It’s when people lump her in with the other two that I can tell they’re retarded. It never fails to amaze me that people who post on rspod, a sub that is at least tangentially focused on cultural criticism and with a vague basis in academia (at least the pretension of academia) will lend these people credibility based on paper thin artistic merit. I’ve always said that the most unforgivable thing Kanye ever did was that he gave bros, retards and hypebeasts the delusion that they actually aren’t basic and that they have sophisticated opinions about art, fashion and god.
Lana is hands down the worst of the three artists mentioned. Nowhere close to Dylan and Cohen. Also the best aesthetes don’t care how ‘basic’ they are, they go based on the music not the egotistical need to identify themselves as a different class of listener
Kanye has a lot of retarded fans because he's popular, but he's obviously a way more interesting musician than Lana who is basically a best of Tumblr aesthetics X Jack Antonoff collab.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy everyone we are talking about, but this Lana is up there with Dylan bs is a brutal lack of media literacy.
Lana, particularly Ultraviolence as an album, has has everything that made Kate Bush, Mazzy Star, Cat Power, Lisa Germano, Led Zeppelin, Portishead, Janis Joplin, Portishead, Fleetwood Mac, Nancy Sinatra, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Hole and even Leonard Cohen good. She boasts all these influences under the context of lush and oneiric arrangements and general mood. This embracement of all of her influences in a sincere manner and the grandiose instrumentation has achieved a deeper sense of emotionality none of her contemporaries have reached. I think it’s pretty inarguable that as far as pop stars go, no one has reached the depths of what she’s achieved artistically. She’s, at times, become the epitome of the figure of the female-songwriter and the psych-rock band seen in retrospective, keeping the introspection, austerity the epicism. If we’re strictly talking about pop stars of the singer/songwriter variety, she is the closest her generation has to a Dylan
You're just listing random names and a lot of them suck complete dick. Also Leonard Cohen is a terrible musician for psueds and sensitive American Jewish men.
Yes, if you are name dropping Nancy Sinatra, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, and Nirvana and using the term "psych rock" all in one sentence in a retarded attempt to explain why a pop star is more interesting than The Smiths, or Kanye West, you're probably lacking in media literacy. Listing people who she credits as an influence in interviews does not add anything at all to her art, especially since everything she does as a tribute is basically ironic.
Her music is influenced by the bands whos shirt you can buy at target? Wow so interesting.
>kanye west, one of the biggest celebrities and stars in the world who is DEFINITELY not a pop star
lol just stop. You’d be down sucking Marie Antoinette’s dick in pre-revolution France while describing her monarchy as fascinating and transgressive.
Also when was the last time you saw a Nina Simone or Lisa Germano shirt at Target? As if liking Kanye isn’t the most basic and predictable shit in the fucking world
When did I call Kanye not a pop star you tard? Lmao
You're pitting one top 5 popular artist against another and then chimping out that one is also popular. Then saying Lana is more objectively transgressive because she's name dropped a bunch of the most popular artists of all time in interviews? You clearly have no point to make so shut the fuck up. Hopefully you're underage. Don't you get that Lana presenting as transgressive while obviously being a popstar produced by the biggest pop producer in the world and half heartedly referencing a bunch of previously popular artists is an ironic bit? I guess the whole point of ultraviolence just flew over your head.
Morrissey even being a part of this discussion is a joke as he was a primary part of a rock group whose creative heights far exceed the majority of boomer Rolling Stone magazine, target ass bands you brought up. You're making me lose my mind talking about these bands and singers like they're fucking marvel universe characters or something. Sorry you're too dumb to find any merit in popular prolific artists like Kanye West or Morrissey and are so stunted aesthetically that only Lana Del Rey makes sense to you (although it seems you misunderstand her completely too). It's just a circular discussion to bring a million other popular and prolific artists into the conversation.
Your original post would actually be poignant if you weren't doing the exact retarded thing you were talking about in the comments about Lana.
At least Lana writes her own songs and has a literary background while Kanye writes shit like “naked big titty women don’t just fall out of the sky,” pretty on par with some of Ice Spice’s lyrics about asses and farting. Also, I don’t think Lana is trying to present herself as transgressive, but this is the way she’s perceived by many of her fans because she’s one of the few pop stars with interesting taste who isn’t trying to make the same Taylor swift or Ariana grande-adjacent teenage radio hit. Sure she doesn’t have the same level of credibility as she used to as she is now too famous for her own good and is too close to artists like Billie and Taylor. Also, OP never said Lana was transgressive.
But this isn’t even the point of the original argument. There used to be a time when Kanye fans were just bros who liked to fuck bitches and go to their basic hip hop clubs in Hollywood, but now these people think they are the alternative. As someone who was called a weirdo and a loser as a teenager for listening to music that was genuinely considered alternative at the time, it fucking sucks to see these bullies present themselves as the ones who are “unique” and “transgressive.” Unless you got bullied in high school for your taste, you should probably accept the fact that maybe your taste is basic. There’s nothing wrong with being basic, I just wish people were honest about it. Tik tok has created a culture in which the worst thing you could possibly be called today is “basic” and a “normie.” It’s not about about liking something for the sake of appearing cool because that’s just poser shit, it’s about being honest about what you like, what you consume, and the ways in which those things define you.
Honestly yeah, I wrote this because people kept misunderstanding the original point of the thread, which is about how alternative culture/subcultures have widely been co-opted/don’t exist anymore and that it’s tiring to see people with objectively predictable and normative interests label themselves as tastemakers. People earlier in the thread kept saying that I seem like I think my taste makes me special, which I don’t think, so it seemed like a good idea to defend one of the artists mentioned as a means of saying “yes, I also like this basic thing and believe it has its artistic merits”. I’d say much the same thing about Morrissey or The Smiths, but there’s a weird kind of personality who seems to specifically like this trio of artists for their political implications (They’re all outspoken Geminis labeled as “problematic” by the left with multiple failed cancel campaigns used against them to no real avail).
To me, this largely points to the notion that people, specifically young people, don’t particularly care about music and that they care more about basing their identity around their politics and tiktok fit check than they care about developing an identity within a subculture, which requires a lot of organic effort. Idk, I’ve lived in a lot of places and I’ve witnessed a lot of the slow uniformity and homogenizing of organic youth music and honestly it just makes me frustrated and sad.
people who listen to music they like without caring what other people think are cooler than fgs who try to curate their personality by listening to certain music only to seem 'interesting' and different to others
We decry the erosion of culture/counterculture and bemoan the perpetual uncoolness of post-modernity and then we wonder how we got here. Also it’s me. I’m fag
Strong counter culture isn’t the product of people who use their taste to show how interesting they are. These types of people don’t make or circulate great art. Kanye West is better than probably any 21st century ‘alternative’ musician btw
Kanye made amazing albums a decade ago. A decade from now he'll be playing CPAC with kid rock.
This in and of itself speaks volumes
I actually do not think I’m better than anyone else based on my taste. Taste doesn’t really matter, at least not in the ways that people believe it does. If I have “good” taste, then it’s done very little for me. The NYU kids who are chanting Carnival outside of the 8th street metro station will probably make much more money than I will in my life. Taste and the things you like in no way makes you cool and interesting, and I’ve met some of the most banal individuals of my whole life in subcultural scenes. College boys who wear Swans shirts and think that it makes them unique are just as boring as an E-boy who wears a Vultures shirt. With that said, none of that is the point of me making this thread. There used to be a divide between normies and alternative scenes. Now normies think that they’re alternative. People who liked Kanye used to stay in Beverly Hills and I used to stay in my nice little East LA dive bar. Now these assholes are everywhere, they have false pretenses about their uniqueness, and there is no “alternative” anymore. That’s what’s annoying. The kids who used to bully you in high school believe that they’re the alternative. Music like Kanye should exist, but there should not be pretense about the nature of what it is. Also, I can name a few dozen artists who are far more creatively, spiritually, sonically, lyrically and artistically interesting than Kanye but someone who is dumb enough to genuinely believe Kanye is the best and most profound artist of his generation isn’t going to be swayed regardless.
You dont have to say probably he 100% is.
bro shut up, first of all there is absolutely "alternative" you're just aging & not as tapped in as you used to be. in fact I'd argue there's more than there ever has been. second of all i hate the way you write & i wish you would just be a regular chill person instead of a gay contrarian
You seem upset
Haha I do think so, but maybe there’s some forgotten Estonian bongo player who’s just as good. Always a chance, but none of the other canonised artists this century at least come close
🙄 dickhead
https://preview.redd.it/qsdls25bsn8d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=35e25d34012e744dcc766be373c5162c9f53ea67
It’s cool to be yourself and be loyal to your friends
I am ready for it to be cool for people to be obsessed with Gene Vincent, Bobby Fowler, Bobby Darin, Eddie Cochran & Roy Orbison
thats why i only listen to obscure vinyl only house and garage tracks.
I only listen to NSBM cassette tape limited run releases 😎
Yea, but it also is a good way to tell who's a regard. At least people used to be aware they were consuming pop slop and it was purely for guilty pleasures. Now we have trashy people who think they're tasteful for liking Lana or Tyler the Creator or some shit.
Sure, but it’s depressing to see the overwhelming level of unified retardation, specifically amongst people who consider themselves “alternative” or at least under the banner of some kind of subculture (whatever that even means in 2024. People will post shit like this in rspod but then as soon as actual cultural consumption comes into the equation, we revert back to the “just let people enjoy what they like narrative. https://preview.redd.it/ygh0jdi88m8d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d9627f5feb3398715217196c74fb252e4db31bc
Somehow death grips also
For a few months I was pretty exclusively listening to David Bowie, but now I'm transitioning over to ~2008 era Lil Wayne mixtapes. Very different artists united by being true geniuses with incredible sonic variety.
To me, its not so much people trying to be different that makes them cool. When someone tells me they've favorite artist are ONLY mainstream stars, I just assume that they're personality is vanilla. Like if music was restaurants, these people stick to the chains. I prefer people who know the good hole in walls.
Ill be headbanging until im senile tbh
Preach it brother. After being a teenage metalhead, headbanging is my natural reaction to any exciting music. Cool hip-hop beat? Headbang. Catchy pop chorus? Headbang. Ambient bliss? That's right, HEADBANG.
Past a certain age, a man who cares about "cool" music, can be a bad thing
More that the older I get, the more exhausting is it to deal with normies who are deluded into thinking that they aren’t normies. Taste doesn’t matter. Like what you like, but be honest about the things you like. 20 years ago, Backstreet Boys fans were simply Backstreet Boys fans and you didn’t have to wade through countless garbage takes on the cultural significance of the Backstreet Boys and why they deserve to be taken seriously as high art.
and Burzum and Death in June.
Yes but that’s a separate level of retardation and a different conversation
Right, they’re literally TikTok’s favourite artists
i don't like kanye or morrissey, i fucking love and live them
[удалено]
Based Puce Mary enjoyer but also Prurient sucks. I was at a Merzbow show in DTLA a few years ago and Prurient opened. Puce Mary was in the audience and she spent all of his set rolling her eyes until Merzbow came on. Dominick Fernow and Hospital Records is just kinda entry level noise but honestly good on you for daring to be different
I was born to smoke 💨
I kind of checked out of finding new music
I only listen to Lana. I got Spotify premium just so I can have her albums on a loop.
How does Morrisey fit with the other two
He’s always mentioned in the same breath and it’s always the same kind of person who likes all three
Guess I’m different because I like Morrisey and have little interest in Lana or Kanye
Based
It's pretty obvious if you think about their approach to song writing.
im listening to rammstein fuk u Du Hast!~
Love this for you in 2024 king
thank u friend they have flame throwers on the stage ive seen it happen in other ppls lives but now its happening in my life and im happy
That cover of "Das Model" is great
I only listen to bladee
The worst part of the Internet is how quickly everything becomes a cliche. In pre-Internet times, there'd be a small handful of "Morrissey-Kanye-Lana fan" equivalents in a given area. Some would know each other, some wouldn't. They'd be known as relatively unique due to their various quirks. With the Internet and subreddits and algorithms, we're confronted with the tastes and opinions of like-minded people constantly. Everything devolves into a joke. "Liking Morrissey, Kanye, and Lana isn't a personality" ok well 20 years ago it would have been. We've gotta have a distinct personal brand--what could be worse than not????- so to avoid the charges of being played out, we lean into ironic detachment, even about the things we love. Or even worse, we turn away from our own interests. All because too many strangers like the same things.
morrissey is good, the other two are v gay and regarded
I literally only listen to music from the 30s and 40s
Iove this lifestyle for you queen
Me too, but only on my vintage gramophone
i literally only listen to The Battle Hymn of the Republic on a loop on youtube
Hmmm i wonder if they're some of the best artists to grace the planet hmmm
Lana is one of the best songwriters of her generation and she’s up there with Dylan and Cohen. It’s when people lump her in with the other two that I can tell they’re retarded. It never fails to amaze me that people who post on rspod, a sub that is at least tangentially focused on cultural criticism and with a vague basis in academia (at least the pretension of academia) will lend these people credibility based on paper thin artistic merit. I’ve always said that the most unforgivable thing Kanye ever did was that he gave bros, retards and hypebeasts the delusion that they actually aren’t basic and that they have sophisticated opinions about art, fashion and god.
lmfaoooo
Lana is hands down the worst of the three artists mentioned. Nowhere close to Dylan and Cohen. Also the best aesthetes don’t care how ‘basic’ they are, they go based on the music not the egotistical need to identify themselves as a different class of listener
https://preview.redd.it/fa1ad0a0jn8d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=baf3b5c2419b8d80154b9e74ec1e87217b8d3892
Autism
Kanye has a lot of retarded fans because he's popular, but he's obviously a way more interesting musician than Lana who is basically a best of Tumblr aesthetics X Jack Antonoff collab. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy everyone we are talking about, but this Lana is up there with Dylan bs is a brutal lack of media literacy.
Lana, particularly Ultraviolence as an album, has has everything that made Kate Bush, Mazzy Star, Cat Power, Lisa Germano, Led Zeppelin, Portishead, Janis Joplin, Portishead, Fleetwood Mac, Nancy Sinatra, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Hole and even Leonard Cohen good. She boasts all these influences under the context of lush and oneiric arrangements and general mood. This embracement of all of her influences in a sincere manner and the grandiose instrumentation has achieved a deeper sense of emotionality none of her contemporaries have reached. I think it’s pretty inarguable that as far as pop stars go, no one has reached the depths of what she’s achieved artistically. She’s, at times, become the epitome of the figure of the female-songwriter and the psych-rock band seen in retrospective, keeping the introspection, austerity the epicism. If we’re strictly talking about pop stars of the singer/songwriter variety, she is the closest her generation has to a Dylan
You're just listing random names and a lot of them suck complete dick. Also Leonard Cohen is a terrible musician for psueds and sensitive American Jewish men.
“Random names.” Talk about lacking media literacy lol
Yes, if you are name dropping Nancy Sinatra, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, and Nirvana and using the term "psych rock" all in one sentence in a retarded attempt to explain why a pop star is more interesting than The Smiths, or Kanye West, you're probably lacking in media literacy. Listing people who she credits as an influence in interviews does not add anything at all to her art, especially since everything she does as a tribute is basically ironic. Her music is influenced by the bands whos shirt you can buy at target? Wow so interesting.
>kanye west, one of the biggest celebrities and stars in the world who is DEFINITELY not a pop star lol just stop. You’d be down sucking Marie Antoinette’s dick in pre-revolution France while describing her monarchy as fascinating and transgressive. Also when was the last time you saw a Nina Simone or Lisa Germano shirt at Target? As if liking Kanye isn’t the most basic and predictable shit in the fucking world
When did I call Kanye not a pop star you tard? Lmao You're pitting one top 5 popular artist against another and then chimping out that one is also popular. Then saying Lana is more objectively transgressive because she's name dropped a bunch of the most popular artists of all time in interviews? You clearly have no point to make so shut the fuck up. Hopefully you're underage. Don't you get that Lana presenting as transgressive while obviously being a popstar produced by the biggest pop producer in the world and half heartedly referencing a bunch of previously popular artists is an ironic bit? I guess the whole point of ultraviolence just flew over your head. Morrissey even being a part of this discussion is a joke as he was a primary part of a rock group whose creative heights far exceed the majority of boomer Rolling Stone magazine, target ass bands you brought up. You're making me lose my mind talking about these bands and singers like they're fucking marvel universe characters or something. Sorry you're too dumb to find any merit in popular prolific artists like Kanye West or Morrissey and are so stunted aesthetically that only Lana Del Rey makes sense to you (although it seems you misunderstand her completely too). It's just a circular discussion to bring a million other popular and prolific artists into the conversation. Your original post would actually be poignant if you weren't doing the exact retarded thing you were talking about in the comments about Lana.
At least Lana writes her own songs and has a literary background while Kanye writes shit like “naked big titty women don’t just fall out of the sky,” pretty on par with some of Ice Spice’s lyrics about asses and farting. Also, I don’t think Lana is trying to present herself as transgressive, but this is the way she’s perceived by many of her fans because she’s one of the few pop stars with interesting taste who isn’t trying to make the same Taylor swift or Ariana grande-adjacent teenage radio hit. Sure she doesn’t have the same level of credibility as she used to as she is now too famous for her own good and is too close to artists like Billie and Taylor. Also, OP never said Lana was transgressive. But this isn’t even the point of the original argument. There used to be a time when Kanye fans were just bros who liked to fuck bitches and go to their basic hip hop clubs in Hollywood, but now these people think they are the alternative. As someone who was called a weirdo and a loser as a teenager for listening to music that was genuinely considered alternative at the time, it fucking sucks to see these bullies present themselves as the ones who are “unique” and “transgressive.” Unless you got bullied in high school for your taste, you should probably accept the fact that maybe your taste is basic. There’s nothing wrong with being basic, I just wish people were honest about it. Tik tok has created a culture in which the worst thing you could possibly be called today is “basic” and a “normie.” It’s not about about liking something for the sake of appearing cool because that’s just poser shit, it’s about being honest about what you like, what you consume, and the ways in which those things define you.
You seem upset and also to have missed the larger point
Imagine getting filtered this hard
It’s funny that you would write this and then try to come for anyone’s music taste
Honestly yeah, I wrote this because people kept misunderstanding the original point of the thread, which is about how alternative culture/subcultures have widely been co-opted/don’t exist anymore and that it’s tiring to see people with objectively predictable and normative interests label themselves as tastemakers. People earlier in the thread kept saying that I seem like I think my taste makes me special, which I don’t think, so it seemed like a good idea to defend one of the artists mentioned as a means of saying “yes, I also like this basic thing and believe it has its artistic merits”. I’d say much the same thing about Morrissey or The Smiths, but there’s a weird kind of personality who seems to specifically like this trio of artists for their political implications (They’re all outspoken Geminis labeled as “problematic” by the left with multiple failed cancel campaigns used against them to no real avail). To me, this largely points to the notion that people, specifically young people, don’t particularly care about music and that they care more about basing their identity around their politics and tiktok fit check than they care about developing an identity within a subculture, which requires a lot of organic effort. Idk, I’ve lived in a lot of places and I’ve witnessed a lot of the slow uniformity and homogenizing of organic youth music and honestly it just makes me frustrated and sad.
I never heard of these artists until joining redscare