Decade's End II: This Time It's Serious

[koganbot]

All 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.

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Just one? I have three, but okay:

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.

[koganbot]

This is so right. Also completely refutes the notion that AutoTune, computerized drums, etc. are cleaning up the rough messy pulse of music.

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.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

More like surely I should stop taking on additional responsibilities when I'm already responsible for 3 features and 2 fact-checks every month.

[koganbot]

Paradoxically - or, not "paradoxically," that's the wrong word, though I don't know what word would be right - the people who made this music had a strong sense of order, regarding beats and bridges and rhymes and themes etc. As you've pointed in regard to the lyrics in "Love Me For Me," it's because Ashlee (or Ashlee-Shelly) knew with complete certainty the fundamental conflicts in "Love Me For Me" that she could toss in contradictions and contrariness and be wildly, raucously all-over-the-place funny within the framework she'd established. As opposed to the Avril song you were comparing it to (I forget the name) which wandered around flaccidly, not knowing what it was about.

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.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

The Avril song was "Runaway," the original conversation about it is here.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Kanye's 808s and Amy Winehouse's...entire career for the aggressively personal angle too.

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.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you know, the other idea I was kicking around was that music (and everything else, really) became a multimedia experience. I mean, sure, you can listen to Autobiography or Blackout or Rated R and enjoy it even if you haven't watched the reality show, or read the tabloids, or seen the interviews. But they all make more sense if you have a supplementary stream of information from television and the Internet. The press used to comment on the music; now the music comments on the press. But maybe that's not a separate idea from my first comment at all.

[koganbot]

I mean, sure, you can listen to Autobiography or Blackout or Rated R and enjoy it even if you haven't watched the reality show, or read the tabloids, or seen the interviews. But they all make more sense if you have a supplementary stream of information from television and the Internet.

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.)