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

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Everything comes back to the internet, I think.

- 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?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the "offline hub" idea is terrific -- i'm not sure i'd say "only' (there is a world full of non-anglophone music churning along), but yes, exactly

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

[koganbot]

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

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.

[koganbot]

I wouldn't be surprised if one thing that increases the impact of X Factor and AI is that each performance-plus-judges'-response fits into song length and is perfect, therefore, for a YouTube clip. (Except that this year Idol undermined this by only allowing substandard or song-only-without-visuals clips online, no doubt because they wanted to shunt viewers towards versions that contained advertising. But I wonder if this lost the show some attention. In any event, it lost me the opportunity to suffer along with Kara being - I'm told - agonizingly, aggressively insecure week-in and week-out.)

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.)