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]

"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."