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Comment by msephton | Hacker News Reader

I got caught up in this hype when this album hit number one of the year so far on rateyourmusic (think of it as letterboxd but for music).

So I downloaded it, converted it to a format I could add to Music.app and play on my iPhone (for this reason alone it's not the future of music), listened to it, was distinctly unimpressed, so deleted it. It sounded too derivative.

Since I've heard new music by other artists that did a lot more for me.

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> Since I've heard new music by other artists that did a lot more for me.

Feel free to drop names. I'm all ears (ha ha).

My favourites of the year so far...

album: Yo Irie "Love Affair"

single: LAGHEADS "Your Light"

most anticipated album: Hazel English

A playlist from last year: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/12/31/japanese-music-re...

See, all of those sound "derivative" to me. Absolutely nothing against Japanese yacht rock/soft funk, but it's silly to blame musicians for using genre conventions when those are inherently part of the musical language IMO. Particularly given Cindy Lee works with 1940s-60s pop genre conventions of girl groups and also performs in drag, it's inherently a kind of music that repurposes familiar elements to say something new.

I've been a fan of Cindy Lee's work since before they started the project and were in the band Women, who're a sort of your favourites' favourite artist. Part of the hype around Diamond Jubilee is the context of that band, and the development of successor bands since.

But part of the hype is also that it comes from a very sincere place - it's a full-on auteurist work, the antithesis of "lo fi chill hip hop beats to study/relax to". It can aesthetically or artistically be your thing or not (it very much is mine), but it's a breath of fresh air to have such a fully-realized artistic statement that isn't a focus-grouped, try-hard Event get the acclaim it deserves.

I'm really happy for you, honestly. It must be amazing to have followed a band for so long and see them "make it", so to speak, like this. I remember feeling the same way having followed Phoenix for years and years before they hit the big time.

I don't have much affinity for 1940-60s pop, outside of The Beatles, Motown, and the Phillu Soul we refer to as Northern Soul here in the UK. Which I guess is probably why Diamond Jubilee doesn't do it for me. It's purposefully derivative, which is fine... it's just not to my tastes.

So I'm keen to hear specifically what you think the Japanese tracks are derivative of, that'd probably be more my style.

I mean, like he said, it’s kind of alright, but not what I’d call great music (I’m listening now and I’m going to have to try really really hard to call it good).

Here’s some great bands/artists to check out (not saying they are in whatever category Cindy Lee wants to be):

Islands (Nick Thorburn/Nick Diamonds/The Unicorns/Mister Heavenly)

The Growlers

Blonde Redhead

Bill Callahan

Cat Power (the older stuff especially)

Molly Nilsson

Lady Lamb

Big Thief

Andrew Bird

Chastity Belt

Thao

WHY?

Mark Ribot y los postizos cubanos

Intergalactic Lovers

Felice Brothers

Goran Bregovic

Kevin Morby

Hurray for the riff raff

Cherry Glazerr

Michael Kiwanuka

Hamilton Leithauser

M Ward

Khruangbin

I favourited this a few days ago to have a listen through on the weekend and some of this is really great, thanks for sharing.

Marc Ribot and Los Cubanos Postizos in particular

Since you're going older, you missed Grandaddy and Jason Lytle's solo stuff.

Also Luluc, Courtney Barnett.

I'm in my early thirties and grew up in the midwest, so i feel that plays a bit into my music tastes but Petey has been my favorite artist lately. both of his albums are fantastic front to back, but i'd start with USA.

> for this reason alone it's not the future of music

The opposite - it is a future that your platform hasn't caught up with yet.

I mean I can play FLAC on my iPhone if I want to...but I'd rather just drop some files that I don't have to post-process in some way onto an app and have them magically appear on all my devices. That's the future and we have it today.

Even Bandcamp figured this out and gives me the option to choose the type of download that best suits me, and I buy much music from there. If Cindy Lee had put this album out on their Bandcamp page on a Bandcamp Friday, with the included choice of formats, it would be better for everybody. But of course that wouldn't have garnered any press about an unorthodox method of distribution.

All that to say: a zip of FLACs on a no-frills website is definitely not the future of music, regardless of "platform".

>All that to say: a zip of FLACs on a no-frills website is definitely not the future of music, regardless of "platform".

It sounds pretty good to me. It would be better, however, if they used 7z instead.

that would be worse imo

flac is already compressed so you don't gain anything from 7z's better compression

you just make it less compatible

tar ball with zero compression, surely? Regardless, all of these are user-hostile ways to distribute an album.

> a zip of FLACs

If at least it had been FLACs – it actually was raw WAV files, so a bit of wasted bandwidth and no included tagging on top, too.

Well, WAV files can easily have metadata, it's just that most people don't bother to add any

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