'00s to be chewed over

[koganbot]

Supposing I were to write a Decade's End essay, what would you like it to be about?

The correct answer is "Taylor Swift," of course, but you should make other suggestions as well.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

How poptimists has changed everyone's lives for the better :)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

or: how poptimists were on the winning side anyway (for economic and internet reasons) and needn't have fought so hard.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

what did poptimists win? And was it worth the so-called fight?

[koganbot]

Alan, your statement needs a lot of elaboration before I'll understand it. Who were the "poptimists" (certainly you don't simply mean "people who post at the poptimists community), what did their being "poptimists" consist of, what "side" were they on, who or what is on the other side, what were they fighting, why were they fighting, what did the fight consist of, what are the economic and Internet reasons for the victory, and, as xyzzz__ asks, what was won? The word "poptimists" is used in a number of ways and it doesn't explain itself, and my understanding of the conversations or arguments or battles that you may be alluding to will be very different from yours, and I can't know what your understanding is unless you tell me.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'm curious as to the answer too, and also what the question means - what did poptimists win? Can't think of anything specifically. Popular music goes in cycles regardless of what people argue, the critical argument has been lost if anything (or at least it's been ineffective)...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

hey alan I still hope you're going to expand on this point!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

this is going to sound weak, but i really didn't mean anything specific by it at all, and idly wrote a title to create a fictitious narrative to cover 10 years. bad me.

sorry. i was surprised to find these responses, and am only back here cos lex linked back to it again.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Why Music Is Awesome (to counter-act generally *sigh, this decade* attitudes coming out of the 00's) and Why Everyone Writing About Music Sucks (and how this has nothing to do with the decade, but with the people in it)?

[koganbot]

I think the '00s produced quite a lot of good writing about music - better than the '90s by a whole lot, I'd say. The basic problem with '00s music writing is no different from what's been wrong with "rock criticism" all along since it emerged among Nelson and Goldstein et al. in the early to mid '60s, which is that music critics simply don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. By this I mean there's a fundamental unwillingness or inability to truly communicate with each other, a fundamental unwillingness or inability to understand each other, and no follow-through, so ideas aren't tested, questions aren't answered, holes in arguments aren't fixed, contradictions aren't examined, objections aren't answered, and so forth. Another way of putting this is that what's fun for me isn't fun for enough other people, so conversations often end up with me being the only person in the room, or one of the few.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think the '00s produced quite a lot of good writing about music - better than the '90s by a whole lot, I'd say.

It's good to hear this. The second part of my subject was somewhat facetious, important point being that if there's a problem, it's not a "decade" problem -- but honestly I'd just like your general take on the decade in awesomeness, which I think will look very different from other top lists.

[koganbot]

Well, a lot of the best didn't go for awesomeness or towering achievements but for the individual idiosyncratic taste or smell of this or that fairly ordinary growth experience, or a little doohicky or whirrr that could become the backbone of a song. Off the top of my head here would be my lists, though I'll do official ones at some point (at least they'll be their own separate post): 1. Panjabi MC f. Jay-Z "Beware Of The Boys," 2. Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz f. Ying Yang Twins "Get Low," 3. 50 Cent "In Da Club," 4. Hilary Duff "Come Clean," 5. Missy Elliott "Get Ur Freak On," 6. Jay-Z f. UGK "Big Pimpin'," 7. Eminem "The Real Slim Shady," 8. Kelly Clarkson "Since U Been Gone," 9. ATC "Around The World," 10. Kelly Clarkson "Because Of You," and ack! that leaves off the Veronicas' "4ever" and Paulina Rubio's "Don't Say Goodbye." Five nonsingles could be 1. t.A.T.u. "Kosmos," 2. Margaret Berger "Robot Song," 3. María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser "Duri Duri," 4. Fannypack "Smack It Up," 5. Lindsay Lohan "Nobody 'Til You," except maybe Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" should be there instead. 1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography, 2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On, 3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color, 4. Britney Spears Blackout, 5. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP, 6. t.A.T.u. Dangerous And Moving, 7. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother, 8. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday, 9. Paris Hilton Paris, 10. Various Artists Global Hits 2000, and ack! that leaves off the Bring It On soundtrack and Scooter's Jumping All Over The World. I also want to honor Cansei De Ser Sexy for being generally adorable and to honor Alizee's "Moi...Lolita" and Lil Kim's "Aunt Dot" f. Lil Shanice for being the best songs I've discovered so far through the poptimists Best Songs Of The '00s polls, and also Aaliyah's "More Than A Woman" for being a song whose greatness only now hit me via the polls.

What I'd say about the '00s angst girls versus the '60s angst boys I grew up on is that the '00s girls are about reconciliation, because alienation for them is much more a disaster than an opportunity, though the disaster-versus-opportunity dialectic holds for them just as it held for Dylan and Lou and Iggy but those boys were about the universe is irrevocably fucked which frees us hurray to go into total despair and let's party! Whereas the Ashlees and the Kellys are more about working the disaster into and working it through and out of the regular old furrows and plows and brows of your spilled-coffee-and-shared-toothpaste regular life.

But whom I'd most likely want to write about because they're in my mind and in my Right Now are Taylor Swift and Rihanna, Taylor with the specificity of her almost-diary lyrics but also a vast and varied palette of a girl's sighs and quavers and resolve and pissiness, all this in a womanly romantic quest for self by way of her difficult relationships with males - and Rihanna suddenly a wild card with her soul searching about who she is and why she'd behaved the way she had, and what her role as a public figure calls up for her. Not sure how this will play out on her new album; she's already done darkness as a trope, I think she's starting to get co-writer credits, so does she unexpectedly become a singer-songwriter angst girl too, but with Ne-Yo and The-Dream and Tricky Stewart providing the urban soundscapes? The risk is that "darkness" and "expressing oneself" can fall into cliché very easily: oh we're dark, and darkness is seriousness! But if the most important figure in the last three years of the decade in country music can be a teen girl doing girly-girl singer-songwriter diary-excerpt self-expression, maybe the same thing can happen in r&b, the most important figure being a young woman barely into her twenties who's got powerful reasons to be estranged from the romance cycle that dominates pop songwriting. Taylor does the sort of princess pop that drives her to say "I'm not a princess"; Rihanna is in the sex 'n' love urban landscape, and she's just said "Eff love!" and so what's next? What's there to sing?

[koganbot]

Conrad Flynn writes:

I don't know if it's encompassing enough for the end of the decade essay, but I'd love to see you do a comprehensive essay comparing the teen idols and the music styles of 60s pop (esp. pre-1965 teenpop) with the pop talents and trends from this decade. Some Lesley Gore contrasted with Ashlee Simpson, Skeeter Davis compared with Taylor Swift (David Cassidy v. Zak Efron?), and what do you think were the complications in being a tween or teenager in the 1960s compared with what they are today? What contraints have been lifted, what's been imposed since -- for both the teens and teen pop singers and songs? I'd love to have you write something from that field.

My response was:

"I have compared Ashlee and Taylor to '60s teen idols, but the ones I compared them to were Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, etc. Which isn't to say that there can't be some comparison to the Shangri-Las and Little Peggy March and so forth."

And Conrad said in reply:

I was aware that you've done similar comparing before but I think you could do a really good comprehensive article on, say, being a teenager and the pop scene circa 1963 v.s. being a teenager in this decade. I guess I'd like to read an article that would allow you to summarize and build on a lot of the things you've noticed while following pop and youth culture this decade, and an essay on pre-counterculture teen pop and teen life v.s. this last generation could be great.

E.g., the last generation before the sixties got started vs. the generation that was raised with post-modernism and the internet (the kids in American Grafitti v.s. the kids in Superbad). The last generation before the culture wars got heated vs. the first post–culture wars generation.

I know I'm not giving you a concrete thesis but I hope you feel, if not see, what I'm talking about and how you could build off what you've written about over the years with something like this.

A problem here might be that I was only nine in 1963 and my psychological world was very much a boy's world of Hardy Boys adventures and sports and John R. Tunis's sports moral tales and earnestly sober crime and western TV shows like The Defenders and The Virginian, so I was hearing "My Boyfriend's Back" and "I Will Follow Him" at an anthropological distance (though Skeeter Davis hit me a lot harder, maybe 'cause end of the world metaphors hit the right dramatic note); maybe that's why I jumped to folk music in mid '63.

But what 1964 brought on a supermass level (which isn't to say it wasn't already deep in the culture) was high romanticism in popular form. Maybe one reason the whole discussion of postmodernism passes me by is that romanticism seems just as romantic and in place now as it did in '64, whatever the change in music distribution and sampling and reference and recycling the past and so forth - "romantic" here meaning The Romantic Quest For Self not a candlelight dinner for two, though what the Dolls did was yoke those together, the desperate passionate pre-counterculture Ronettes 'n' Shirelles 'n' Shangri-Las married to "Like A Rolling Stone," the sounds and feeling of Roni and Shirley and Mary but the story of Miss Lonely in the existential night. Of the post-'63 stuff I've heard and loved, the stuff that is fundamentally not countercultural and that therefore reminds me of pre-'63 teen music is disco and freestyle, but it's probably wrong to say that they're not countercultural; adopted for different subcultures, more like.

[koganbot]

Roni = Ronnie

a topic for the naughties

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what is it that is causing us to talk past each other?

a: needs nice rich solid naughties example of such talking-past, such as (of course) summarises the decade (as doubtless exemplified by community-forming on the internet: such as summarises the decade...)
b: needs exploration of possible reasons, from the "mental illness" and "poor reading/reasoning ability" of individuals to broader social or economic or political or cultural lacks, distortions, failures, misconceived institutions and practices (which presumably also beg explanation), which -- at miminum -- fail effectively to challenge or transform or even much help the poorly accoutred individuals

Re: a topic for the naughties

[koganbot]

1. There's an example right here on this thread regarding the word "poptimists," and if someone were to say "Frank, I'm not getting your quick comments in regard to 'boy's worlds' and 'high romanticism in pop form' etc." and I were to refuse to elaborate, that would be another example - though to elicit the most useful response from me, the comment or question would need to be specific in its puzzlement, e.g., "Sober-sides adventure from some old TV shows I never heard of is at a distance from 'My Boyfriend's Back' how? 'If I were you I'd take a permanent vacation' seems plenty dramatic to me, after all, even if it fails the sobriety test."

And of course if we're looking for examples, our friend SR is a feast of false issues and refusals to understand and failures to follow-through, though down that quagmire wise men might well refuse to go. As regards MS and FK, I wonder why it took so long for you to elaborate on your comments about "rockism" and "influence," given that once you did elaborate it became quickly clear what was on your mind. And the Mark Sinker model of AoI - even a bare sketch of such - to replace the obviously inadequate Harold Bloom version and to be applied to rockwrite has never been seen by my eyes, though my strong critique of Bloom is still there for your use, should you decide to use it. Also my (to my eyes) clear and simple, even simplistic, critique of arguments against transcendence - or more pointedly, my critique of arguments against gods or transcendental signifieds etc. as conversation stoppers - has never gotten a direct and clear response from you or Alex T., either along the lines of "No, we're actually not making an argument against transcendent conversation stoppers, what we're doing is ________" or "actually, arguments against transcendence are relevant to reanimating conversations, and this is how and here's an example" (my simple critique being about relevance: that the discussion of transcendence is itself the wrong conversation, since Transcendent Conversation Stoppers aren't what cause actual good conversations to actually peter out, and the lack of such Stoppers has nothing to do with why bad conversations keep rolling along).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

^^^Total conversation stopper

[koganbot]

(I keep planning a post on unintended conversation stoppers and exclusions.)