It’s interesting music ngl they got got a few songs but most of that s*** is unlistenable to me.

The fans are usually pretentious as f*** too

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog

Been known that this grew into an alt-right dogwhistle lol

Are these fans in the room with us right now?

Come on dawg. We gonna pretend like a good chunk of their fanbase aren’t from fantano

Go on

Why would that make them inherently pretentious?

Most hardcore Fantano fans I've met are college-aged nerdy white males. A few of them can be annoying but most of them are just nerdy, decent people lol

It's unironically way more pretentious to arbitrarily write off an entire band and fanbase because they're "not real hip hop" or are "too weird", let alone judging the physical appearance of their fanbase to estimate how good or "authentic" their hip hop music is, as if suburban white people aren't the #1 consumers of hip hop across the board

I feel bad for the guy

He probably just wanted to draw a fun little frog guy

I'd love to see the average white, "middle class" KTTers imagination of what "real hip hop" fans look like

Baudrillard would have a field day lol

I've been to a Jpegmafia concert a few years back and thank god it was nothing in this realm of cringiness. There was this one dude with a backpack that irritated me but thats that.

how does Baudrillard relate to this? you’re speaking of his simulacra concept im assuming?

Is that still the case tho? I remember people used it that way around 2016, but now I exclusively see it used as a regular meme. The same way a spongebob gif would be used, or a KTT emote

Most needledrop viewers are extremely pretentious in my experience. Especially when it comes to hip hop and r&b.

Most of them come from other genres so they s*** on music that doesn’t fit into whatever boxes they see as “real art”. Someone on here, I forget who said it perfectly recently when they said fantano and his viewers review the music without taking the culture into account.

Not only that I remember seeing a fantano viewer circa 2015 spouting off about how there is no true 10/10 rap album. Illmatic is only 9/10 and it is the best.

And that isn’t even the worst. I’d throw RYM users in this hat too. Very pretentious fans

Oh and to add on to this it has nothing to do with them being white or suburban.

Yeah they’re still on twitter with Nick Fuentes types, but it’s used on twitch pretty heavily by people that aren’t wrapped in right wing politics.

"dressing up as children" got me chuckling for some reason

Amongst other aspects of simulacrum theory, Baudrillard proposed that "simulation" is created in capitalist societies to, using images (simulation theory being largely built from the foundation of Debord's "spectacle" theory), effectively "cover up" for the absence of something.

In the context of people's perception of "hip hop fans" vs "Death Grips fans", the absence in both, in terms of who is putting money behind the merch and going to shows in the largest concentrations, is black people lol. But because the spectacle needs the public to believe that hip hop is still economically rooted in "black culture" to give it some sort of commercial and cultural authenticity, when the rigid binary of "this is what black people listen to" vs "this is not what black people listen to", an entirely imagined stereotype, is broken, a lot of people have to resort to the "logic" that fans of X genre have to either be "pretentious" or "white", because DG aren't conventional hip hop and break down stereotypes and preconceptions of what black art can be, who it can appeal to, and how white people can help in the creative process of black art and art forms

In essence, these folks who buy into this latest simulacrum believe that "Death Grips are for white people" because the image of what they think hip hop as a commercial entity is doesn't match to what Death Grips' represent aesthetically, artistically, and even as a social movement. The charade of it all is that this simulacrum is meant to cover up for the fact that, whether it's Death Grips, Future, or Kendrick Lamar, there is a huge absence of working class black people who are economically participating and even demographically represented in their fanbases lol. It's mostly suburban white kids, because suburban whites have the strongest purchasing power relative to their percentage of the population, in a white supremacist country. It's all an illusion thinking that any commercially successful rap act has a majority-black, working class, "non-weird" audience. Most rap consumers of any kind of rap music are suburban white people

those sites(more specifically their reviews and comments) are echo chambers of self-gratification

Are these people you've met in real life, or through Internet interactions

Is death grips fan base just 4chan?

Great for database purposes

Community, while having its strong moments, is generally wack lol

Just don't take it too seriously and you'll be fine. I love RYM but I just use it to document what I've listened to, make lists, and talk to a few other lefty Memphis Rap fans I've met on there lol. The site's improved a ton since I first joined as well

yep i see those sites the same way as i view wikipedia when writing essays: use them as a foundational base to get an idea of what you're getting into, as opposed to taking everything at face value

rym genuinely leading the way in the decolonization of music criticism

It's still got a looooooooooong way to go but they running laps around Pitchfork, Allmusic, etc

Other than TND, Fact Mag, and RYM, decolonization of music criticism culture is basically not even happening outside of non-white, non-rockist circles. Fact is GOATed and TND/RYM have a long way to go but at least they're trying. Pitchfork's been embarrassing itself trying to reach "urban" demographics for like a decade now and Rolling Stone is the most washed up s*** ever

Yeah it's also a phenomenal way to find new music

The best way out there tbh