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]

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.)