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

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I have apparently been away from the internet this weekend.

The way I've been grappling with the decade is in what I'm calling the inversion of popular culture as a centralized force -- the difference between Lady GaGa being as popular as (e.g.) Black Sabbath is that one can easily go completely unawares of GaGa in a way that certain centralizing factors -- industrial, critical, social (e.g., perhaps, "outraged parents burning records" etc.) -- made this less (not im-) possible in the previous era.

Which means that one story in criticism in the decade has been the need for critics to go "into the trees," a process of (anthropological? asking questions of the world, anyway) inquiry that's always been available for critics but never a requirement of a good critic. One thing that structural changes in reception and communication has done is, in a way, force the critic to listen to music in the context of his or her life in a way that there seemed to be a "way out of" previously.

Related to all of this -- the increased need for a hard look at how network theory speaks to how pop culture (and conversation about pop culture) works, anthropological inquiry as a mode of criticism, fewer narratives that assume importance or, more basically, assume that there is a story in and of itself in "importance." Importance is, maybe more than ever, in what you can claim of it.

[koganbot]

I think that the phenomenon of significant number of music fans not knowing significant artists was already underway in, e.g., the late '80s - I remember Chuck saying in his Pazz & Jop ballot that formerly he'd been able to pretty much predict in advance what was going to finish in the top ten; now all of a sudden there were a couple he'd never even heard of. The point not being that something was popular he'd never heard of (Martina McBride was popular in the '90s without my having heard of her), but that something in his intellectual neighborhood was popular among his intellectual neighbors without his having heard of it. Of course, now, as far as P&J goes, that's reversed, since you see so many lists in advance, and are aware of the chatter of so many likely voters, that you will know in advance what's going to place. That doesn't undermine your point. But I would put your point differently, since you're vastly underestimating the extent to which the music audience in previous decades was also fragmented. It was real easy for me to have heard the names Journey and Supertramp without knowing what they sounded like (all I had to do was choose to not listen to Top 40, since there were plenty of alternatives).

I'd say that, if anything, different audiences are more not less aware of what other audiences are listening to than in the past, but that there's less of a sense of what music is central that everyone who writes about music is going to pay attention to (which in the past included people like Richard & Linda Thompson, who were not known to much of the public). And, of course, the def'n of "people who write about music" has changed.

So the value of an "anthropological" approach is more obvious, but as you imply it was always as valuable, just not practiced. And I'll be damned if I see it in practice now, either. But the Internet has made it more likely than in the past that the trees will move into us, without our asking.

If you were to sum up your point in one or two sentences, what would it be?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"there's less of a sense of what music is central that everyone who writes about music is going to pay attention to"

This is certainly true -- I think if you were to extrapolate it, the story is how the "sense of center" is lost in a more wide-ranging way, not just with critics and critic-types but with audiences as well. So my tagline would probably be:

In music, the center spreads and the ceiling falls; in audeinces there's a movement from "outside looking in" to "inside looking at different part of inside."

I think this squares with the idea that there's more likelihood of us knowing about other people's music, which is probably true. But I also think there's a heightened sense of "other."