The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far (Paste Magazine version) • Page 3

I think it's referring to this more than anything, and also just the dismissal of other R&B more than the gravitation to alternative R&B and how it matches the newer artsy version of "I listen to REAL rap" that ignores a lot of hip hop as a genre altogether

 

Could go on for a while about it but I am not the most eloquent

 

Hyperbolically put: it takes the same people to think CTRL is so, so much better than, say, Confessions to think that Damn is the best rap album of the last 25 years.

 

Yes, exactly.

 

yeah this makes sense

 

There’s also the poptimism version of this that prefers Ariana Grande’s Max Martin slop to Ariana Grande’s legit R&B, but that’s another gripe of mine lol

 

This is all bringing back flashbacks of the great year end NF debacle of a couple years ago

 

Since we’re already at it: I would add that that “artsy version of I listen to REAL rap” thing is part of it, and definitely the one that applies more to R&B, but another thing is that “these people” also lack context. There recently was this list by Rolling Stone or something with the 100 best rap records or something (it was a thing in the Hip Hop Thread, you know what I’m talking about), and they had the first Cardi B on there and some random Lupe Fiasco album and stuff like that. I like Cardi just fine, I championed her way early, but someone/a group of people (and this mostly applies to media obviously) saying that her album (as an example, like I said the list had a lot of wild picks, which makes individual questionable picks harder to excuse) is one of the 100 best rap albums to me just demonstrates that they have not heard many of the rap albums that they should have heard to have any kind of authority on the matter.

 

Exactly, it comes across as an overcorrection by people who are not invested in the genre.

 

I mean I think you can chalk a lot of that up to either attracting a younger audience (an audience that doesn’t necessarily look far back in music history), and the need to attract clicks and ad revenue, like we’re STILL here talking about this friggin list hah

 

I look at it more like: the list is genuine and based on the preferences of the writers, and the order of said list is the clickbait aspect

But the younger audience aspect is something to consider for sure. That's where we see the recency bias come to play (which I think you mentioned on the first page of this thread too)

 

You can write about rap without having a lot of context (though, if you wanna be a music critic, maybe make an effort to know as much of it as you can), but you shouldn’t be putting out statements like that without having a lot of context. I mean you can obviously, but you’re annoying if you do, haha.

 

As a white guy with a keyboard sometimes I wish I could understand the confidence of a white guy with a keyboard

 

Exactly. Also it’s an overcorrection that then takes on a life of its own.

 

Appealing to the youth is such a new and weird concept for lists like that. When we were younger, even the Rolling Stone list felt like the set in stone canon. I was intimidated by the amount of artists I hadn't heard, but that was a good thing. It's weird that people get like...mad that their flavor of the week favorite artist isn't high up on the list, and it's even weirder that the sites do seem to be pandering to that group rather than building what they view is a new canon.

 

I remember a pretty “big on Twitter” music writer (primarily rap, which makes this even worse), that wrote for all kinds of places, including like even Complex and stuff, maybe also Pitchfork - this must have been like 2015 or so - saying that you can think about Drake what you want, but that you have to give him that he invented “rap singing” or something like that. I mean, this was barely 10 years after Nelly and Ja Rule megahits. That’s not even going back to say Brand Nubian or Bone Thugs or whatever. That’s when I radicalised concerning this topic lol

 

Ugh those people who think Drake invented “rap-singing” are fkn idiots. Or I guess just incredibly ignorant.

 

I brought back R&B classics because I am still heated

R&B Classics: Mariah Carey - The Emancipation Of Mimi • forum.chorus.fm