#ernest baker

[notbbyaj]

tech for style up studios

[sweetersmiles]

mood forever

[theyearofglad]

[apieceofstrange90]

We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man 

[jeremyhechtsblog-blog]

Blog 4

“be yourself, work hard, stay humble”

That’s the advice that my favorite music writer and massive inspiration, Ernest Baker gave to me after I asked him, “any advice on how to take over the world and inspire others along the way?”

How was I able to talk to my favorite writer? I slid into his DMs on Twitter..

I just told him how much his words and his new book mean to me and how much he has inspired my ability to be one hundred percent comfortable with who I am through his art.

But I think that his advice rings true. For this blog I want to focus on number one.

1)    Be Yourself

I think this is the hardest thing for people to come to terms with, including myself. Everyone has inspirations, insecurities, flaws and skills that make up who they are. All of these things usually add up to people trying to be someone that they are not.

I remember back in the day I had a super high voice. I would literally try to deepen my voice when I would answer the phone at home or when I would talk to girls. Everyone thought I was my dad on the phone.. I was just embarrassed of my voice.

I used to be embarrassed of enjoying some of the things that I liked the most. I wouldn’t mention them in conversation or I was shy about them. Whether it was enjoying the Bachelor, mentioning to the boys that I liked a girl (this happened a lot from 6th-8th grade) or the fact that I make music, I would always hide things that meant something to me because I was scared that people would judge me or wouldn’t like me for who I am. But recently I have been trying to be one hundred percent me, and the results are wild.

Even when I first introduce myself to people, I am smiling, making weird comments or jokes, talking about what I like, and before I know it we are having a personal conversation about their life story. It’s not a coincidence that my best connections come from starting things off on a genuine note. I think sincerity is something that people can instantly sense and it’s something that I have gravitated towards. Whether you like sports or don’t, like hip-hop or pop, watch the bachelor or criminal minds, own your shit. Be who you are. I don’t want to talk to people who only like exactly what I like, I want to talk to someone who is comfortable in their own skin and their own unique story.

Whether you are in a job interview, trying to talk to the cute girl sitting next to you in class, meeting a new friend or talking to people you have known your whole life, be yourself. It will pay off like crazy.

Update: 5 of the last 8 girls I have talked to and was interested in have boyfriends and last night two women showed me wedding rings when I tried to hit on them. Lady luck has not been on my side, but I will keep you updated on the search for my Cali wife. Love you

[themusicwordprocessor-blog]

Can You Be “Proven Wrong” About Music?

“Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” --The Dude, The Big Lebowski

By Brice Ezell

Music writing is, inevitably, a game of opinion-stating. However,”opinion” is a word too often used as a pejorative, connoting a lack of seriousness or relevance. If someone throws out the accusation, “That’s just your opinion,” s/he is really saying, “This is bad.” (Though I don’t have specific evidence, I have a suspicion that the same people who toss around “That’s just your opinion” are the same folks who will co-sign any opinion they agree with. Confirmation bias being what it is, I’ll avoid any further conjecture.) Of course music writers are writing their opinion; it comes with the territory. What good music writing ought to be, though, is the artful presentation of opinion. Giving a positive review to an album isn’t the music equivalent of a scientist presenting a research paper; there are no numbers to crunch, no data sets to unveil. A writer hears an album, forms some thoughts about it, and writes those thoughts out in a manner that s/he thinks will be interesting to an audience. After that, things are up to interpretation and debate. The proper response to the “Well, that’s just your opinion” claim is, “...and?”

Because I’m a believer in spirited and informed debate, I was struck by a piece written by Ernest Baker for Grantland in 2013, entitled “What If You Don’t Like Beyonce’s Album?”, which deals a lot with what it means to agree and disagree about an album. Having discovered the piece well after its December 2013 publication, I was first taken by just how soon it was written after Beyonce’s release: a mere week. Just seven days after Beyonce was released to an unsuspecting world, the positive response to it was so overwhelming that Baker thought to ask the question, “What if you don’t like Beyonce’s album?” The dissenting crowd, small as it was (and, it appears, still is), was already clearly partitioned off from the unanimous majority. 

At first, Baker wasn’t part of the crowd cheering Beyonce on. Not but a week after 13 December 2013, when Beyonce became one of the iconic “surprise release” LPs, Baker writes, “Well, I was one of those [who didn’t love Beyonce]--emphasis on was--and I don’t know if I’ve been brainwashed, or simply come to my senses.” Baker’s experience with the record is one that many critics have with any number of albums: an experience with an can drastically change, whether it be over a week or months. There’s no reason why a critic should be expected to have a definitive grasp of a record over a limited window, even when deadlines are beckoning. (My PopMatters colleague Zach Schonfeld addressed this, rather brilliantly, in his 2014 piece “The Year of the Overnight Release: How Much Time Should a Critic Get?”) Had Baker simply detailed his experience from finding Beyonce a “standard type of good” into the top-tier work he now thinks it is, his Grantland piece would have been an interesting read, particularly for those who know what it’s like to pull a complete 180 on their opinion of an album.

In his Beyonce piece, however, Baker doesn’t just give an admission of his changed opinion. He also interrogates anyone who doesn’t like Beyonce. He answers the article’s titular question in the second paragraph by writing, “No, there probably isn’t any place for people who dislike this album.” While he “understand[s] how one can arrive at that notion initially,” after spending more time with the LP he discovered just how “huge a moment in pop culture” it really is. He came to realize that Beyonce is “giving us the exact type of commitment we so often demand out of our artists.” The concluding paragraph of the Grantland piece opens with the interrogative, “If you don’t like the new Beyonce album, reevaluate what you want out of music.”

Now, there are two important things to note before approaching that bizarre sentence. First, Baker’s piece is in large part an account of someone who simply didn’t listen to Beyonce meaningfully, as he admits: “I was wrong to say I didn’t like the Beyonce album after two days. I had barely experienced it... Remember those 20 times I listened to Beyonce? Those were passive listens.” To some degree, Baker’s claims have to do with how he didn’t give the music the time it needed, not that it was impossible for him to not be wowed by it from the first spin. Second, Baker does rightly point out: “Beyonce is great, and it’s not groupthink to acknowledge that.” Even in an age where hype and promotional cycles relentlessly cloud online spaces (see Taylor Swift--more on that later), it is still the case that liking a critically and/or commercially acclaimed album is not an admission of drinking Kool-Aid. Much of what Baker says about truly engaging with Beyonce (such as his spot-on observation about the “thump” of “Partition”) is evidence of actually listening to an album, rather than adopting the buzzwords and catchphrases of social media. I have no doubt that Baker genuinely enjoys Beyonce on his own terms.

I also have no doubt that there are people who genuinely don’t enjoy Beyonce on their own terms. That’s what makes music such an elusive force: no matter how revered or canonized a piece of music, there will always be dissenters. Some people don’t think that highly of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Not everyone has the Beatles catalogue memorized by heart. (Well, save for the people responsible for Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.) And, you know what? That’s okay. Divergence of opinion is what makes music and music writing such fun enterprises: there’s always an argument to make. I, along with many contemporary critics, love the music of Philip Glass. I could listen to it for hours. I could explain what it is that makes his style of repetition so enthralling, getting down to the level of theory. Yet I have encountered people who find Glass’ music invariably boring, a kind of sonic wallpaper. No matter how much I wax poetic about Glass, there’s no criteria by which I can say those individuals are wrong. They have their opinions, and that is alright.

I happen to be of Baker’s opinion about Beyonce: it’s a fine album in my view. But unlike Baker, I don’t view myself as in an epistemically privileged position above anyone who disagrees with me. When Baker asks those who don’t like Beyonce to “reevaluate what they want out of music,” he is saying, “The burden of explanation is upon the person who doesn’t like Beyonce.” After finally being “brainwashed” or “brought to his senses” to the record, Baker still “understand[s] how one can arrive at that notion initially,” with “that notion” being that Beyonce is not great. Here, Baker’s language takes on the tone of the scientific proof: Beyonce’s greatness (or lack thereof) is a “notion” that can be proved or disproved, and in Baker’s view, if you give the album “time to set in,” you cannot help but admit that it is great. 

Music would be extremely boring if it worked this way. There is no “being proven right” or “being proven wrong.” Even if one comes around to a different opinion than she initially had about a record, it is not that she was “proven wrong”; rather, her experience with the music has changed. Quite often, a reversal in opinion has little to do with the acknowledgement of facts about the music, but instead about the time and place of one’s life. An embarrassing example: as a budding guitar player, I was really into the music of Dream Theater. That band’s obsession with technicality and intricacy are like crack to a young guitarist trying to explore the fretboard. Years later, *surprise surprise*, I find that music a little more than excessive, but I didn’t “prove” anything in the process. Hell, there are still some Dream Theater tunes that I find really rewarding. As a pre-teen learning an instrument, Dream Theater made sense to me. As an adult who has listened to a lot more music, it doesn’t anymore. Looking back I know there’s nothing I could tell my 12 year old self that would “prove” Dream Theater to be a “bad” band.

The ethos of Baker’s Grantland piece, however, is that with albums like Beyonce, the only thing you need is time. Baker’s experience with Beyonce--a snap judgment later overridden by a thorough listen--is one thing. By asking listeners to “reevaluate what they want out of music” if Beyonce doesn’t do the trick, Baker implies that the music will eventually win everyone over to the “right” side. As a take on the Infinite Monkeys theorem, this reading of Beyonce is interesting, but as music writing, it’s pretty boring. Baker correctly rubbishes the notion of groupthink, yet his piece sure reads like a reinforcement of it. He writes that there is “probably no place” for those who don’t like the record, as if even the vaguest notion of dislike for the record is impossible to picture.

Moreover, it is of note that there is not a single place in the Grantland piece where Baker considers legitimate reasons why people might not like Beyonce. The only reasons he addresses are (1) the hype surrounding the LP, and (2) the high standards of perfection Beyonce herself is held to. Admittedly, those are actual issues in the music world: the aforementioned hype cycles do complicate the whole music writing enterprise, especially considering the short timeframes writers are expected to churn pieces out. But neither of those reasons have to do with the actual music of Beyonce. They are the clouds that overcast listeners and writers when Beyonce first came out. In Baker’s characterization, if one waited until the skies cleared up, she would definitionally come to love the album. But Baker doesn’t talk about the very different things others might see once the clouds have cleared; as it is with any other work of art, there will always be someone with the opposite experience.

This straw man by omission is something that crops up in another piece of Baker’s (for ILLROOTS), in which he declares, without evidence of any kind, “90% of the anti-Drake contingency needs to admit that they hate Drake for purely selfish reasons and stop holding onto the notion that it’s because he’s Bad For The World or whatever stretch of the imagination they came up with today.” In that piece Baker talks a lot about Drake hatred, but fails to mention a single member of “the anti-Drake contingency.” He cites no pieces that espouse Drake hatred, although it is quite plausible to read his own piece as a thinly veiled response to Meghan Garvey’s Pitchfork op-ed “I’m Breaking Up With Drake,” which was published a day before his ILLROOTS post. This tactic, fallacious as it is, does make his argument sound mighty strong at first pass. By framing dislike of Beyonce as something that needs to be “proven wrong,” Baker makes any dissent to the critical consensus sound like someone saying, “So, I don’t really think E = MC squared, you know?”

This “consensus-as-fact-generating” crops up a lot on writing about Beyonce. She is not the only one to receive such treatment, however; Taylor Swift is probably the biggest recipient of critical gatekeeping in the present. A Buzzfeed headline declares, “You’re On the Wrong Side of History If You Say Taylor Swift Can’t Sing,” as if that is a legitimate standpoint that anyone other than the most irrational of online trolls actually holds. Corban Goble’s Pitchfork review of Carly Rae Jepsen’s E*MO*TION concludes with a kiss-off that sounds like it was written by Swift’s PR people: “E*MO*TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name.” The classic “pitting women against each other” tactic is here met with the lowkey mantra that Swift is the bar by which other female pop stars ought to be judged--as if, like Beyonce, her greatness is something one can be “wrong” about. 

The eager defending of artists like Swift and Beyonce is a lot of things, but above all else it is confusing. Pieces like Baker’s and the many thinkpieces about Swift play into the lazy narrative of “the lovers versus the haters,” even though by any sane account the former have won out handily in both cases. Dayna Evans smartly sums up the critical consensus on Swift for Gawker: “The reviews of the 1989 tour have been overwhelmingly positive in that cracked-smile way that makes it seem like every writer was forced to write with a gun to his or her head.” The Metacritic profiles for Swift and Beyonce look like this:

Hardly the ratings of people being seriously challenged by haters, no? Furthermore, Beyonce has the rare distinction of having no negative reviews whatsoever; the only non-positive reviews are two “lukewarm” reviews that are still pretty positive. 

Writing for the Washington Post, Chris Richards argues, “Deployed reflexively, [poptimism] becomes worshipful of fame. It treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs.” Whether or not the exultation of pop stars like Beyonce and Swift to the level of unassailability is specifically a poptimist problem is not of note here, but it is true that much of the pieces “in defense of” Beyonce and Swift are fighting a nonexistent battle. Both artists are sitting on millions of dollars given by millions of fans, and also have extensive critical adulation. As if life needed to over-literalize this issue, Swift’s lyrics were used in a recent court decision. That’s right: Swift’s greatness is inscribed in the law of the land.

There are, of course, issues where performers such as Beyonce and Swift will face unjustified social pushback, gender (both artists) and race (Beyonce) being obvious cases. But on the question of “good or bad,” i.e. musical taste, the public, like Baker, has already made its decision on artists like Beyonce and Swift. Despite the prevalence of “right versus wrong” narratives, dissenting viewpoints to majority opinions are rarely given substance in music writing. By and large they are only deployed only insofar as it helps establish a narrative about greatness (that, in the two prenominate cases, is already well established anyways). In Baker’s case, the anonymous listener who doesn’t warm up to Beyonce is told to simply give it time: after awhile, the “proof” will show up. 

So, no, there is no “being proven wrong” about music, at least not in the way Baker characterizes it in his piece. The anonymous haters he alludes to in his piece don’t have possible arguments for why Beyonce is a less than stellar album; for Baker, they are just impatient. Yet if Baker had scrolled through the various critical reviews of Beyonce, he would have found arguments that he is no doubt equipped to respond to. Philip Cosores of Paste writes, “The lack of universality to much of [Beyonce] keeps it from being the great album it wants to be, and some of the fascination seems to stem from 2013 celebrity culture obsession and speaks to the need to disappear from our own lives and become so wrapped up in the world of the rich and famous.” In his review for the Independent, Andy Gill argues, “Musically, it’s the same kind of electro R&B with which radio is already awash.”

Those are arguable claims, claims that are par for the course in the world of music writing. I’d be interested in reading a response from Baker on those terms, but based on his declaration that he was “proven wrong” about Beyonce, I suspect he thinks that those critics will “brought to their senses” in time. These arguments are fun because they will eventually bump up against a contrary opinion, not because they are scientific hypotheses meant to be subjected to tests to be “proven wrong.” Very rarely does totalizing consensus emerge on an album or artist--certain Kendricks Lamar notwithstanding. Instead of treating those one disagrees with about music as “wrong” in a way that needs to be “proven,” one should treat them as music listeners with a divergent experience that is credible in its own right. Perhaps in time an opinion will change, but that change is not inevitable. If it were, then surely an overwhelmingly positive consensus is susceptible to the same principle. 

Music writing as a game of rights and wrongs is dull. Music writing as a game of arguments and shared experiences is a delight. Give me arguments, not proofs. In music, proof is a fruitless exercise. 

[dickiebhee]

How White Girls Can Stop Your Wave

How White Girls Can Stop Your Wave

“For many young men of fashion who would otherwise remain uncultivated mentally, rough in their friendships, without gentleness or taste, it is very often their mistresses who are their real masters, and liaisons of this sort the only school of ethics in which they are initiated into superior culture…” –Marcel Proust

It neither amazes me that some nigga sat down to write a book called “How to…

View On WordPress

[music4thebasshead]

Ernest Baker Boiler Room NYC DJ Set