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

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I am all decade-d out - I stand by the stuff I said in my Pitchfork essay by and large.

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.

[koganbot]

Well, I think that people nowadays tend to overemphasize how popular performers were in the past, and whom they were popular with. Simon & Garfunkel were more popular than the Stones in the late '60s, but their popularity somehow isn't part of the story of music in the way that the Stones' is. I'm sure that Lady GaGa is at least as popular as Black Sabbath or Hall & Oates or the Ronettes ever were. Conway Twitty may have been as popular as those I've just mentioned (well, maybe not as popular as S&G), and his popularity held on for two decades, but no one outside of country knew him. It skews things to take Elvis, Beatles, Stones, Dylan, MJ, Madonna, Springsteen as our models, though the current lack of such figures isn't meaningless. Britney is famous but then so is Liz Taylor. Don't know how much her fame has translated to people knowing much about her music. Same, actually, with Stones and Dylan in their time, I'd say.

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?

[koganbot]

But what we might be missing now is people in the God role (which is kind of where you get people like James Brown). This isn't the same necessarily as popularity, since you might have only a limited audience for your divinity, whereas not all people with large audiences get to be deities at all. That might be why my previous comment was so confused as to who was in and who was out when it came to popularity. I forgot to mention Def Leppard (nondieties, outsold Guns N' Roses) and Guns N' Roses (deities, didn't outsell Leppard).

[koganbot]

Also can't make up my mind how to spell deities.