The GB Album Club Presents... What's Your Hottest Music Take?

Duders!

Normally this is the day of the week we'd post the new album post and throw up the thread for this week's discussion. However, we're all human beings and we failed to get our shit together! We will get back on track next week, but this week, we're asking a simple question because, as we all know, there's not enough pettiness and negativity on the internet: What is your hottest music take? Or music takes? (Or whatever you interpret the general nature of the question to be.)

Is there a band you find overrated? Or maybe an album? Maybe there's a whole genre you hate, or maybe an instrument. Maybe you just fucking hate the oboe, or the entire woodwind family! Or maybe there's something that's considered bad that you love for some strange reason. Here's your space to unload! (Sorry mods!)

And since we're being petty, I'll get things rolling with a mild one (though I'll return later with a proper one): SayingThe Beatles or Nirvana (and/or Nevermind) is overrated is not only wrong but that's also not an interesting opinion! Dig deeper, duders. Search yourselves, find that music hot take, and share it, unbridled, unaffected, and free.................

Country music is totally decent

@sombre: Lol

Country music is less a genre than it is a series of cultural affects and gatekeeping.

Country music doesn't have to be bad. It is, however, bad the vast majority of the time because it's filtered through an industry and an insular business model that's resistant to change. Or anything interesting.

I’m sure this isn’t my most absolute scorcher but Future & Zaytoven’s Beast Mode was a (barely) better album than To Pimp a Butterfly in 2014.

@nodima: I was going to write my thing today, but instead I listened to Beast Mode just to respond to this lol.

Granted I hadn't listened to Beast Mode before, but I saw that comment, and I drew my knives. It's not because I'm a Kendrick stan so much as I'm a To Pimp a Butterfly stan, as that album is basically my taste summed up in one music release. Or at least all the music that made me realize that I'm going to spend the rest of my life loving this art form with every fiber of my being. The Soulquarian era hip hop influences, the jazz, the soul, etc. My attachment to To Pimp a Butterfly is as non-rational as non-rational gets.

That said, having now listened to it, Beast Mode's reeeeeeeeeaaaaaally good.

I don't agree it's better than To Pimp a Butterfly and I think I'm more of a DS2 fan only because I got to that one first. But there's something about Future's particular brand of bad vibes that truly does it for me when it's at its most affective. So I'm not mad at you anymore, I just respectfully disagree.

EDIT: I think I accidentally implied that TPAB is my favorite album, which it's not. But it's probably a contender for a top five or ten slot.

Yes, especially modern country, which has ditched most of the folk and bluegrass influences of old country and is instead basically generic pop music but with a certain vocal inflection and about specific subject matter. That's not even getting into bro-country, which is basically all of the worst aspects of modern country cranked up to 11.

Alright, some hot takes

-Rock fans are, or maybe they were, the most destructive force in music discourse

Qualifiers: Of course, not all rock fans. Of course, I'm talking about the loudest and most obnoxious forces on the internet and the history of music. Of course, I am not talking about you, dear Giant Bomb user. But a question: Why do you like what you like? Or more specifically, why do you consider what is good to be actually good in the first place?

For some, it's because you're open-minded and you've explored what music has to offer and that's the aesthetic that speaks to you. For many, it's because they're trapped in the membrane pulled over their eyes by the forces that have created the music canon. AKA white dudes who like rock music.

This isn't an attack on rock music or rock music fans. I love rock music. But there's a reason that it's the only kind of music most people have ever been exposed to and what they consider great. And they've done a considerable amount of harm for the betterment of music and people's tastes by pointlessly narrowing the definition of what "good music" can be. It's why, among other reasons, it took so long for us to embrace pop and why "rap is crap" and some dipshit in a Led Zepplin t-shirt told you that disco sucks.

Open-mindedness and the exploration of other genres good. Allowing your genre to die because you wouldn't let it evolve bad.

- I don't like The TalkingHeads

I know I'm wrong. I know. I know!!!!!!

I don't have a good reason to give you us to why. Or at least not one that I know how to articulate, and honestly, my inability to do so feeds into why I don't like them on some level. (Because that's their fault!!!!!) But yeah, it just never clicked. Objectively, they're great. But yeah, I just don't know.

- I can't pick Travis Scott out of a line-up

For the fellow hip hop fans.

Yes, he's popular and he's very capable of surrounding himself with good producers. But as far as his style or his point of view or even his voice, I have absolutely no idea who he is or what he's about.

I'll probably think of some more.

@unclejam23: Since you gave such a considered reply, I'll provide a little context.

While I was writing for PopMatters, I never understood the hustle of what it takes to actually get paid as a culture critic (PopMatters is, perhaps far less famously than it should be, a frequently cited critical source that doesn't pay) and so instead of trying to build contacts, I spent most of my free time building a sprawling series of lists on a RateYourMusic account that sought to be malleable, confrontational, personal but even with all that baggage somewhat definitive.

I won't go into the minutiae of how I intended to accomplish that because A) I haven't made additions to it in five years or so and B) you can quickly get to the various lists (or my profile page) that attempt to dilute the convolution from the following link. When I say Beast Mode was (barely) better than To Pimp a Butterfly, I mean barely. Which was part of the argument I was hoping to make with the broader Run That Shit list seen early on that page; especially when I started the project, so much of hip-hop discourse was lassoed to the past that it felt valuable to me to present a perspective where, say, Curren$y could sit next to Boogie Down Productions.

But, again attempting brevity to avoid rambling beyond reason about an abandoned pet project, I love to provide that comment as a hot take because no rational person would see a 9.03 as significantly different from an 8.99. Further, it's vividly clear that Beast Mode benefits from being brief, though you would have to be a little more familiar with my scoring process and review of TPAB itself to follow why the back half weighs it down on that list. If I were just talking to you about rap in 2015, I might say Beast Mode was my favorite album but I'd never actually, actually say it was better than Butterfly.

One of the things I loved about editing those lists at the time was that I couldn't always predict where something would land, and when I was pulling all my 2015 reviews together for a yearly summary I was as shocked as anyone to see Beast Mode at the top. But it also made me really happy because, as you admitted...that little joint knows exactly what it is and serves up an astoundingly pure idea. Not only does it look crazy no matter how long you stare at it...it also makes sense so long as you love rap as much as an art form as an ideological vessel.

A lot of metal fans are the worst kinda of gatekeeper arse holes.

• When British Sea Power dropped British from their name all their talent went with it. And the cool 2000's indie kid aesthetic of wearing military jackets to gigs.
• On that note, The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys never should've got that big. They're shite.
• My Sweetheart the Drunk would've been a mystique-shattering mess of an album. As much as I love Grace, a long and storied discography for Jeff Buckley would've probably sounded a bit miserable.

@nodima:All fair! Honestly, I don't think I was open to an experience like Beast Mode back in 2015. I need to be careful of my wording here. It's partially that I'm going into dangerous waters, but mostly because I don't quite know how to fully explain it. It's just a feeling I had back then. Also, rest assured that I'm definitely not talking about you. (And I guess this sorta counts as a hot take too?)

There was a period where I felt like a lot of white critics, particularly at the super hipstery outlets (cough Noisy and Pitchfork cough cough) loved your Beast Modes and your Barter 6s and other such trap/cloud rap for reasons that made me feel icky. Or maybe it wasn't the reasoning so much as the intensity of their passion. Like a "You really like listening to Future suffer, huh?" Hopefully, you know what I'm talking about because it sounds like you were deeper in the shit than I was.

Also for shits and giggles, I found a top 10 favorite albums of 2015 list I posted on Facebook. Accurate to where I was then. Would do some cutting/re-arranging now. (Slightly altered for anonymity's sake)

@unclejam23: Dude, this was absolutely a thing, and part of what inspired everything I said before.

Thanks to an otherwise really problematic, older neighbor, I both played a lot of N64 NFL Blitz and heard quite a bit of the Wu-Tang Clan's output. However much this guy yelled at his mom to shut the fuck up, he also pretty exclusively listened to everything Clan adjacent, from the main group albums to the exhaustingly rote Killa Beez compilations and solo albums. And because this was happening in the late '90s, it led me to having a remarkably negative opinion of a lot of the MTV era of NYC rap. It was several years before Nas was more than "Oochie Wally" to me.

As a part of that seditionist POV, one of my first personal favorite rap songs, probably paradoxically, was Lil Wayne's "Shine" where he said "all of these carats, like I'm a fuckin' vegetarian". When I found my way into OiNK's Pink Palace I spent a lot of my time, like most suburban white kids, devouring the canon of the '60s and '70s but whenever I diverted to rap, it was Memphis and Atlanta that I focused on because (rightfully) those scenes were rejecting the flat, big box store keyboard samples that the poles of LA and NYC were addicted to.

Other than Jay-Z's Blueprint, I missed a lot of what Kanye and Just Blaze were arguing for at that time. I loved the Soulquarian (and adjacent) projects, most notably Black Star, but otherwise I felt like a lot of hip-hop from 1999-2004 was some form of grift, no matter how many awesome singles came out of that era. The albums always sucked - I really loved some of it, and being a white guy from the Midwest in junior high it shouldn't be hard to guess what that some of it was - unless they were from the south. I learned to care less about the lyrical miracles than the overall musicality of a song. In turn, this made a terrible Silkk the Shocker song more interesting than the most mid Jay-Z album cut.

Then Cam'ron's Purple Haze came out. Despite making a lot of this post about my history with rap music, like most of my demographic equals I was devouring Pitchfork's vision of rock music shamelessly and voraciously. Tom Breihan is/was a great hip-hop critic, and his Purple Haze review isn't misguided, but it acted like a sort of malignant but no less propagating cancer on pretty much every venerable online mag, even down to crit-nerd stalwarts CokeMachineGlow and TinyMixTapes. That the album came out just before holiday break in 2004, and thus this review (given the time) was likely published after as little as three months of consideration, only compounds how canyon-esque its influence on critic culture was. This sentence alone wrote dozens of Hell Hath No Fury reviews a year later: "His bored, arrogant voice rolls syllables around until he's hit just about every possible permutation, transforming hard consonants into thrown rocks and idly toying with drug metaphors like they're Rubik's Cubes."

In other words, it suddenly became sport for music critics to twist rappers' art into their own writing, and it quickly became clear that for a lot of people, this was the point. They weren't catching up, they knew all along, the audience was the crew that needed to catch the train to the future. If Nick Sylvester's Pitchfork review of Tha Carter II tastefully got it, many of their and other publications' year-end write-ups from the time (or more importantly, their day-to-day news divisions) centered not only blatantly hedonistic, misogynistic and facetious raps but elevated many of them to a kind of fascinating, Shakespearean poetry that the rappers weren't targeting and the critics (often, not always) clearly didn't believe in. Unfortunately the proof is in a lot of news articles, singles reviews and best of lists I don't have time to dig through and source - or plain can't, as website reformatting beat Internet Archive to the punch and rendered said reviews and lists corpses - but you're very right to perceive that fetishization of sonically mainstream, so-called "outsider" rap.

In fact, for many, many years (particularly when it was nominally my job to not do this) I pretty forcefully ignored, specifically, both Migos and Future because I felt that pressure from Oakland to Sioux Falls (and specifically not Atlanta). I hated Future's first couple mixtapes and never paid any attention to Migos. Not just because I was soaking in the afterglow of the false promise Kanye and Pharrell had offered, but because like you I just couldn't believe some forum friends I used to dissect G-Unit vs. Terror Squad mixtape disses thought these guys were any good. Even more, I used to work with some of these guys and couldn't believe their faith.

(Here's where I say I spent the fall of 2016 negotiating Future's discography, as well as the later winter of 2017 doing the same with Migos only to learn I was being a bit of a gatekeeping ass.)

Because my half-assed and haphazard searches didn't pull up the relevant bullshit, to the few others than you who find this post it'll likely read like a misguided ramble. I'd really thought I could conjure up a couple of less kind examples of how the coverage of mainstream rap music turned on a dime amongst the tastemaker press that inspired me to pursue the work myself...instead I just found a lot of dead links. I'm also not so egotistic as to assume I actually did anything to solve the format of mainstream white guy rap crit - feel free to dig through my archive for examples, and please ignore the unpublished RYM clips from the same time - but I'd like to think your slight acknowledgement of this...thing mostly justifies this ramble.

In brief (or TL;DR) there was a moment nearly 20 years ago when fairly standard (if incredible) drug and poverty references became fetishized by various publications that would rather cover an Oasis b-sides collection than a Chamillionaire album. This led to a proliferation of flowery descriptions of beats and raps that were A) often deceptively traditional and B) often felt performative (though credibly prescient) as a response to mixtapes going digital. I absolutely relate to and understand why the coverage of Future and artists of his era felt a little mythological, because I entered into the business and exited it feeling largely the same way.

Which I guess is the punchline of this whole diatribe, even though I gave it away 500 words ago - turns out, I like most of that shit, no matter how much I recoiled at the occasionally yawping coverage of it.

Hot Take #1 - The last good band was Tchaikovsky.

Hot Take #2 - Video game music is vastly more varied and interesting than any crap that's played over the radio/"streaming service of your choice"/whatever the kids are into these days.

Modern pop music to me is basically the audio equivalent of Call of Duty - a homogeneous, indistinguishable mess that inexplicably sells a ton of copies despite being exactly the same thing year after year. I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between one song and another. It quite literally all sounds alike to me. Then I looked into it more and it turns out I was right. Modern music is bad. It's science.

Of course, this is all coming from someone who refused to believe that Billie Eilish was the name of a real person the first time one of my friends brought her up, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Top 40 radio pop has been is a bizarre place for a long time. There aren't really any profoundly original pop acts in the top 40 anymore (sometimes neat acts sneak in for a week or two but they never last) as, like everything else corporations control, the people in charge hate risk and would rather promote safe, derivative acts. It also doesn't help that the same producers are producing basically everything now. It's always Max Martin, that Bleachers guy, that guy from The National who did those Taylor Swift albums, or a select few others.

I guess my related hot take is I don't understand the popularity of Olivia Rodrigo. She feels like the quintessential example of record companies picking and choosing who becomes popular and basically brute forcing that person/group's popularity by putting them everywhere. Her claim to fame prior to being a musician was being on Disney shows like High School Musical but aside from that she had no back catalogue of old music to listen to and no real musical identity. She went from nothing to top 40 pop star instantly. The album she put out in 2020 was aggressively derivative of other music. Paramore's "Misery Business" was viral on TikTok at the time so of course Rodrigo's first hit was an uncomfortably similar song that was basically custom tailored to fit into the radio pop aesthetic. It's been telling that several times she's been required to go back and acknowledge the influence of other music acts on her work since not doing so would have basically made her look like a blatant plagiarist since many of her songs borrowed the structure and chord progressions of other songs.

Anyway, if you go a step or two below top 40 pop though there's still tons of great music out there. That boygenius album from a few months ago was fantastic for example. There's tons of good new indie groups right now.

The people that are into BTS are absolute weirdos

Nickelback wasn't bad, they were just generic. I've never met anyone who didn't talk shit about Nickelback, yet their albums always sold insane amounts. I'm not saying that everyone who hates Nickelback is lying. I am saying that at least some of those people are lying.

Taylor Swift is unfairly maligned for doing what every other popular musician has done: singing about their own relationships. No other artist, and particularly no male artist, gets nearly as much shit as Taylor Swift does for making music about this. Taylor Swift's best music is when she embraces and pushes back against this, like with Blank Page or the entire Reputation album.

If you want to say that hip-hop or rap isn't for you, you should at least try to listen to some of the stuff that doesn't get radio play. Yeah, a lot of it is about parties and drugs and violence. But there's a whole side of the genre that is music of protest, of anger, of demanding a better world. And some of that stuff even comes from artists who used to make "gangster rap."

You can acknowledge that music which isn't new or unique or groundbreaking can still be fun.

K. Flay is the most underrated female artist today.

Football terraces have the best cover versions.

@nodima: Forgot to hit respond to the thing I wrote a few days ago.

So around that time period we're talking about, I was following music websites and blogs (RIP blogs) just enough that I understood everything you said but I wasn't in it enough to have ever been able to put it together myself. So thank you for taking the time to write all that.

If I had to guess what that "it" was before your explanation, I would've given you some unsubstantiated babble about white Millennials and the younger members of Gen X not wanting to cop to their age and pretending to like what they think black teens like. Or that they're overstating their enthusiasm for the same reason. I never worked in the music review space, but I did go to a liberal arts college and spent a lot of time observing these kinds of people in their natural environment and I can confirm that's how they act. But your reasoning makes a lot more sense/isn't fueled by pettiness or joke logic.