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

[(Anonymous)]

Tal here. There's a lot going on in this thread, but there are one point I'd like to address directly: girlboymusic's about pop getting weirder and more confessional.

The weirder/more confessional axis doesn't seem quite that clear or linear to me, especially because on the weirdness front Missy Elliott blows GaGa, Britney, and every other female artist before or after her out of the water. And one could say that Timbaland is the majority of that weirdness, but then if you go listen to *Miss E...* or *This Is Not a Test* then one could pick out any of Missy's lines and there's some sort of weirdness there. Plus, there's R. Kelly, who made tons of weird public and musical moves ("Trapped In the Closet" wins the gold medal for audacity and weirdness) that I would also say pale in comparison to even GaGa or Britney, although Britney probably takes the cake for weirdest public evolution.

Maybe the better way to phrase this is that the weirdness within the confessional became weirder, but even then I don't think that's exactly right, since weirdness in confessional music is all over the place in pop music in the '70s. Off the top of my head: Van Morrison's *Veedon Fleece*, the first three Fleetwood Mac albums with Buckingham-Nicks, a couple Steely Dan albums, and then that doesn't even cover soul music, so Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder come into the conversation. And then there's Prince and Michael Jackson and Madonna and I just can't see how contemporary confessional weirdness is all that less weird than what came before it. (The weird confessional music argument goes a long way back; at the EMP Conference a couple years ago J0dy R053n did a great presentation on Eva Tanguay, who was a huge vaudeville star who constantly gave very frank and odd details about her personal life)

In response to Frank's question, my answer would be that pop is much more disposable, which in a way ties into what skyecaptain said earlier. I think exposure is greater than ever, the biggest indication to me being that everywhere I go I catch kids with phones or mini-stereos playing music quasi-privately, but loud enough for people to hear it (this is especially true on the subway, but I also live in a city, so my perception could be radically different). But to get back to my main point, the MP3 is inherently disposable, since we don't have any tangible attachment to it, therefore I don't feel as bad about getting rid of it as I would a record or CD. And then when you bring ringtones and commercials and podcasts into the equation, songs seem to be reverting back to simplicity because audiences need a simpler hook to absorb, then to get rid of it and move onto something else. The volume of music necessitates an increased reliance on distinction within simplicity for it to be a success.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I just want to clarify that when I say weird/personal/unique, it's not the same as confessional. I don't think I got the point across in my original comment, because a couple of people seem to have taken my use of "personal" to mean "emotionally intimate," but what I mean is "specific to a person."

Only one of the first three B/N Fleetwood Mac albums would fit the weirdness I was talking about: Tusk. And what's interesting to me about this decade is that that kind of music-making -- it was thought of as "out there" and risky, a flop compared to the cleaner and easier Rumours, it was a calculated swing away from the mainstream and toward the sounds of less popular bands -- has actually become the mainstream. You're taking more of a risk now if you don't release a total WTF of a single/album/video.