Decade's End II: This Time It's Serious
Nov. 21st, 2009 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotAll right, if all goes well I'm writing a decade's end music essay for the LVW, though this endeavor will have a breath-taking finish given that, for some reason, Las Vegas ends its decade on December 4 rather than December 31, which means my drop-dead deadline is probably the 1st, if not earlier. And I'm going to be on planes for part of the time between now and then. And I have something else due on the 2nd.
One thing I want is for the essay to allude to the multitude of such essays that my essay could have been but isn't. So you can help me by posting in the comments what you think the story of the decade in music is. Just list one.
In situations like this I wish I did Twitter. If those Twitterers among you wish to ask the question and paste in the answers here, please do.
One thing I want is for the essay to allude to the multitude of such essays that my essay could have been but isn't. So you can help me by posting in the comments what you think the story of the decade in music is. Just list one.
In situations like this I wish I did Twitter. If those Twitterers among you wish to ask the question and paste in the answers here, please do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2009-11-22 04:15 am (UTC)The arc of pop music is long, but it bends toward weirdness. We started the decade with relatively neat 'n' clean stuff from 'NSync and Britney and the like. And then we had this movement toward messiness -- Avril and Ashlee and their rebellion against "cookie cutter" pop, Pink and Christina making grabs for credibility/authenticity/etc. with their confessional rock and assless chaps, Britney working with the sonically out-there Neptunes. 'NSync randomly teamed up with rappers and then split so Justin could get all staccato with Timbaland and JC Chasez could release stuff like "Some Girls (Dance with Women)." B'Day happened. Missy Elliott was in there somewhere. Fall Out Boy and their long-titled ilk became the new teen pop. It became all about the clever, the quotably bizarre -- a line you could put on your Twitter, stuff you could reblog. See: Black-Eyed Peas, The. See also: Racist, Das. And even now, on its last legs, the decade just keeps pushing toward the aggressively unique, the aggressively personal. Lily Allen. Katy Perry. Britney's last two albums have been thinly veiled references to how fucked up she is. Rihanna's latest is a not-at-all veiled reference to how her boyfriend beat her up before the Grammys. Lady fucking GaGa.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 04:35 am (UTC)Just one? I have three, but okay
Surely you should write a full essay yourself, on lj if nowhere else, though if possible it should be somewhere that pays you and where lots of people will read it.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 05:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 05:23 pm (UTC)Near the end of "Love Me For Me," John gets away with nearly upending it by introducing a new orchestral riff and then throwing Ashlee's chorus back on top of it, the two not quite meshing but not so at odds as to fall into cacophony.
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Date: 2009-11-24 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 10:59 am (UTC)Would be interested to see these albums compared to previous, pre-internet "dark, personal" albums: Madonna's Erotica, Janet's Velvet Rope. I don't automatically hear those as related to specific shit going down in Madonna's or Janet's life at the time, because the pop culture gossip network just wasn't as all-seeing as it is now, but they definitely sound aggressively personal.
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Date: 2009-11-24 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 04:23 pm (UTC)Probably holds more for the last two (too late to run the experiment), but I don't think it applies to Autobiography. Didn't see the reality show until a couple of years after I heard the album, which came across strong without it. The only background you needed was "kid sister of a star" to get that one; the album told its own story, and seeing the show several years later didn't add a lot (so what if the guy in "Pieces Of Me" is Ryan?), though was gripping in its own right. This doesn't mean it didn't have the interplay you talk about, of course: a couple million people who got the album did see the show before buying the record, after all, and without the show the rest of us might not have heard the thing - though I expect Chuck would have championed it and gotten it reviewed anyway, and it'd have become a rock-critic cult album... which is kind of what did happen, ultimately. Chuck, by the way, has never seen an episode of The Ashlee Simpson Show.
There's more interpenetration with Britney/Rihanna, though my guess is that in thirty years a newbie listener with a paragraph-long artist's bio in hand would get the knowledge she needed. But that's 'cause the albums are especially powerful. But as things are, a lot of us did go into the albums with emotional commitments based on what we knew or thought we knew about Brit's and RiRi's lives.
(I read somewhere that "Stupid In Love" was written three days before Chris beat up Rihanna. My guess, by the way, is that consumers take a wait-and-see attitude towards Rated R. It opens with a few hundred thousand but then idles, while the singles do or don't stimulate more interest. It's a new Rihanna sound that may take a while to penetrate, if it ever does.)
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Date: 2009-11-22 04:22 am (UTC)"So, what have you been listening to?" I asked.
"Not anything in the last three days. I've been too busy grading papers." He's a philosophy teacher. "I think the last music I listened to was the Stooges."
Both his and my all-time favorite album is Raw Power. It came out when I was 19, which is five years before he was born. It still sounds thrilling whenever I listen, though I really ought to come up with some other official Greatest Album Of All-Time. Raw Power's not warm enough. "Not warm" maybe is the wrong term, like claiming that dynamite isn't warm enough. But not enough emotional vulnerability, or empathy, though I certainly empathize with it. But can I find a warmer album that's as compellingly thrilling?
I ruminate on the conflict between warmth and thrills here: "Having a loving perspective on the tornado storm and being the tornado storm are not mutually exclusive."
(Btw, I and Google can't find working links to Idolator's 2007 poll. I know that some glitch had erased the 2006 poll, but 2007 ought to have been fine. Also, old Pazz & Jops seem to be disappearing from the Voice's site. My Eminem essay in Pazz & Jop 2000 is no longer there, that I can find. Add in the Paper Thin Walls server literally melting, and I fear a plot to eliminate me from the Web.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 10:55 am (UTC)- Fragmentation of everything and death of music industry => throw-it-at-the-wall-see-if-it-sticks desperation of pop trends (related to the weirdness Erika mentioned)
- "Authenticity" (or yeah, aggressive personal shit is probably a better way of putting it). You could never launch the Spice Girls now the way you could in '96: people could never, ever buy into eg Posh Spice. People know more about artists' personal lives than their music now. Which isn't to say there's no room for dissembly in pop, but the dissembly has to be...even weirder, maybe?
- The erosion of any meaningful boundaries between mainstream and underground, with crossovers happening seemingly at random and out of nowhere, exacerbated by the use of borrowed signifiers on all sides (the indie rock explosion: I am not sure that too many involved in this realise, or admit, how mainstream they are) (and did the indie rock explosion happen b/c the kind of nerds into indie rock basically worked the internet out first?)
- X Factor and American Idol have to be in there somewhere; maybe something interesting in how they're one of the few remaining offline hubs of pop music?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 11:59 am (UTC)there is a huge generalised question about "who gets to be gatekeeper (and why and indeed if we need gatekeepers)", which i think is nearly at boiling point in american and european politics* as much as in rock or pop or hiphop
*doubtless elsewhere too, but the world is big and my detailed knowledge of it tails off quickly
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 01:56 am (UTC)Is this your answer to the question posed in my post ("what you think the story of the decade in music is. Just list one.")? If not, you should try to answer my question, even if "just list one" seems impossible. It's an interesting exercise.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:16 pm (UTC)There's the impact of The Ashlee Simpson Show (modeled I assume on her sister's earlier reality show) and Lizzie McGuire mid-decade, one of them nonfiction on MTV the other fiction on Disney, but both featuring/creating characters for a fan to care about. And everything has an online adjunct, acts working both MySpace and YouTube. But I think that Erika has made the most important point, which is that whether offline or on the story has tended towards personality and the personality has tended towards mess, though I'm not sure if "mess" is quite the right word. Kelly C's mess is in her words, but that doesn't spill over into what the public sees of her behavior. But also, as I was writing a decade ago and I still think is true, mess is more a white (or a rock thing, anyway, or pop-rock thing) than a black thing (r&b thing). Rihanna's behavior, once her mess got her onto the tabloids, has been to try to seize control of the story, to take it back, not to come across as an ongoing soap. And white crossover guy Eminem did a better job than, say, DMX of making his mess central to his art and making it good art - strong, with crack emotional timing in his delivery and his words, for the first two albums. I don't know where ODB would be here, though. And maybe Lil Wayne is also a counter-example, though his being lackadaisical still comes across as a form of cool, hence control. Yeah, and the third Kanye alb. Not sure about T.I. et al. You might have more to say about them than I. The point is making the mess part of your art. (Plenty of messes have been in control onstage, and when they lost control their art went down. Sly Stone, for instance.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:05 pm (UTC)What I've been thinking about recently is the idea that nothing's "popular" any more (in the enormous way things 'used to be'). I am fairly positive now that this is wrong, and instead people don't know what being popular 'means'. Apologies for the vagueness of this thought, I'll worry at it publically later, since I want to do a column on it.
I will reblog this on Tumblr and see if any of the people there have any ideas.
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Date: 2009-11-22 06:31 pm (UTC)I purposely left Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees and Nirvana and AC/DC and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Eagles off my list of Elvis etc. biggies, my gut telling me that they don't belong, even though, of course, their music sold gigantically. And what about Sex Pistols and Slade? And Radiohead?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 01:51 am (UTC)Also included in the discourse about Dylan were ideas of the people around me, of course.
You've framed it wrong by making it individual interpretation versus interpretation by priests and theologians within a hierarchical and authoritarian structure. Rather, the difference is that, post-'Net, more conversations are visible or potentially visible to people not already known to those conversing, and who gets to be "the people around me" gets its def'n changed somewhat. But remember, all this was happening pre-'Net in fanzines, anyway, though the difference in scale is massive. But again, the dif. isn't individual interpretation versus authoritarian interpretation, but rather the visibility of many conversations versus the visibility of not so many conversations - and differences in who hooks up with one another for conversations. (There's no evidence yet that More And More Visible Conversation is producing more good ideas and less conformity and group think, though of course one hopes...)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 02:00 am (UTC)The way I've been grappling with the decade is in what I'm calling the inversion of popular culture as a centralized force -- the difference between Lady GaGa being as popular as (e.g.) Black Sabbath is that one can easily go completely unawares of GaGa in a way that certain centralizing factors -- industrial, critical, social (e.g., perhaps, "outraged parents burning records" etc.) -- made this less (not im-) possible in the previous era.
Which means that one story in criticism in the decade has been the need for critics to go "into the trees," a process of (anthropological? asking questions of the world, anyway) inquiry that's always been available for critics but never a requirement of a good critic. One thing that structural changes in reception and communication has done is, in a way, force the critic to listen to music in the context of his or her life in a way that there seemed to be a "way out of" previously.
Related to all of this -- the increased need for a hard look at how network theory speaks to how pop culture (and conversation about pop culture) works, anthropological inquiry as a mode of criticism, fewer narratives that assume importance or, more basically, assume that there is a story in and of itself in "importance." Importance is, maybe more than ever, in what you can claim of it.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 02:30 am (UTC)I'd say that, if anything, different audiences are more not less aware of what other audiences are listening to than in the past, but that there's less of a sense of what music is central that everyone who writes about music is going to pay attention to (which in the past included people like Richard & Linda Thompson, who were not known to much of the public). And, of course, the def'n of "people who write about music" has changed.
So the value of an "anthropological" approach is more obvious, but as you imply it was always as valuable, just not practiced. And I'll be damned if I see it in practice now, either. But the Internet has made it more likely than in the past that the trees will move into us, without our asking.
If you were to sum up your point in one or two sentences, what would it be?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 03:10 am (UTC)This is certainly true -- I think if you were to extrapolate it, the story is how the "sense of center" is lost in a more wide-ranging way, not just with critics and critic-types but with audiences as well. So my tagline would probably be:
In music, the center spreads and the ceiling falls; in audeinces there's a movement from "outside looking in" to "inside looking at different part of inside."
I think this squares with the idea that there's more likelihood of us knowing about other people's music, which is probably true. But I also think there's a heightened sense of "other."
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 02:06 am (UTC)--"Jam bands: Dave Matthews, Phish... then I stopped, just lost music. All of a sudden I stopped dancing... I now put 'Nick Drake' into Pandora, and that's what I listen to." [Infl. of the 'Net!]
--"Hearing the Lord's prayer sung at churches. Singing the Lord's Prayer." ME: I didn't know the Lord's Prayer had a melody. "The melody varies from church to church."
--"Too Hot To Handel: great Christmas show, 'The Messiah' but in a jazzy cool show."
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 08:37 am (UTC)So perhaps an even better question: who has SURVIVED the decade of downloads/chart madness/record label idiocy? How?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 08:30 pm (UTC)The weirder/more confessional axis doesn't seem quite that clear or linear to me, especially because on the weirdness front Missy Elliott blows GaGa, Britney, and every other female artist before or after her out of the water. And one could say that Timbaland is the majority of that weirdness, but then if you go listen to *Miss E...* or *This Is Not a Test* then one could pick out any of Missy's lines and there's some sort of weirdness there. Plus, there's R. Kelly, who made tons of weird public and musical moves ("Trapped In the Closet" wins the gold medal for audacity and weirdness) that I would also say pale in comparison to even GaGa or Britney, although Britney probably takes the cake for weirdest public evolution.
Maybe the better way to phrase this is that the weirdness within the confessional became weirder, but even then I don't think that's exactly right, since weirdness in confessional music is all over the place in pop music in the '70s. Off the top of my head: Van Morrison's *Veedon Fleece*, the first three Fleetwood Mac albums with Buckingham-Nicks, a couple Steely Dan albums, and then that doesn't even cover soul music, so Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder come into the conversation. And then there's Prince and Michael Jackson and Madonna and I just can't see how contemporary confessional weirdness is all that less weird than what came before it. (The weird confessional music argument goes a long way back; at the EMP Conference a couple years ago J0dy R053n did a great presentation on Eva Tanguay, who was a huge vaudeville star who constantly gave very frank and odd details about her personal life)
In response to Frank's question, my answer would be that pop is much more disposable, which in a way ties into what skyecaptain said earlier. I think exposure is greater than ever, the biggest indication to me being that everywhere I go I catch kids with phones or mini-stereos playing music quasi-privately, but loud enough for people to hear it (this is especially true on the subway, but I also live in a city, so my perception could be radically different). But to get back to my main point, the MP3 is inherently disposable, since we don't have any tangible attachment to it, therefore I don't feel as bad about getting rid of it as I would a record or CD. And then when you bring ringtones and commercials and podcasts into the equation, songs seem to be reverting back to simplicity because audiences need a simpler hook to absorb, then to get rid of it and move onto something else. The volume of music necessitates an increased reliance on distinction within simplicity for it to be a success.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 05:50 pm (UTC)Only one of the first three B/N Fleetwood Mac albums would fit the weirdness I was talking about: Tusk. And what's interesting to me about this decade is that that kind of music-making -- it was thought of as "out there" and risky, a flop compared to the cleaner and easier Rumours, it was a calculated swing away from the mainstream and toward the sounds of less popular bands -- has actually become the mainstream. You're taking more of a risk now if you don't release a total WTF of a single/album/video.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 02:17 pm (UTC)Personally, I would throw in the homogenization of urban music theory that you are quick to pick holes in upthread, but then I am interested in the way the means of production and consumption influences the actual output. Is there a cause and effect here? If not, why else is this smoothing-out happening?
(Sorry, reading the above back it reads more like a proposal for a physics experiment than a pitch to a pop critic.)