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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the "god role" -- as opposed to mere popularity and also as opposed to gatekeepers -- is a vastly interesting topic of course: the internet has allowed a kind of worldwide protestant revolt to unfold, whereby the nature and shape of god is determined by each soul in direct communication with the deity of their semi-informed choice; the "catholic church" of pre-net media is also in tremendous grab-back ferment, about why its authority matters, and how to retain it...

[koganbot]

Don't think the prot-cath analogy works, since I always could and did determine the nature and shape of Dylan, Jagger, Slick et al. for myself, being well aware that my Dylan and Jagger didn't match up with the Dylans and Jaggers in other people's heads. Also don't know what you'd consider the Catholic Church here, since the general impression I got from the Mainstream Media regarding, say, Dylan in the '60s was of Protest Singer or Protest Singer Gone To Psychedelic Poetry, neither of which matched up with what Paul Nelson or Greil Marcus or Jon Landau was saying, and Nelson and Landau and Marcus didn't match up each other. And there was no sanction for disagreeing with the Mainstream Media or with Nelson, Landau, or Marcus. And it's not like it was easy to find Nelson and Landau; Marcus a little easier since he was in Rolling Stone, but RS wasn't yet the commercial megasaur it became in the mid-'70s. And of course I got to determine the nature and shape of Nelson, Landau, and Marcus, too.

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...)