Decade's End III: This Time It's Alpha Centauri

[koganbot]

People keep adding interesting answers to my Decade's End question, if you want to go back and look. In the meantime I've gotten another response via email, which I'm putting into the comments. The question is:

What do you think the story of the decade in music is? Or what was the story of the decade in music for you? I said "Just list one" last time, but I've kind of added a second question here in adding that "for you" bit, haven't I? So if you answered one of them last time ("what the story is") and the other ("what the story is for me" ["me" being you]) is different, you're invited to answer the second one here in the comments. (And you can comment on the last comments in these comments if you want, lj's "use-by" date being so frustratingly quick.)

Comments

[koganbot]

This is from my friend LizKhatt (a.k.a. LizCat, a.k.a. the Elizabeth who used to write for Radio On), disobeying my instructions:

Geez. I don't know if I can identify what the last decade in music has been "about". I don't listen to current radio or watch MTV or anything for years now, so I just kinda stumble across stuff by accident, and on recommendations from other folks. I gravitate to stuff that really speaks to me about my life currently, or makes me insanely happy for some reason (Lady GaGa comes to mind) or that is important to other people I care about and we bond over it. (That's one of the great things about music, right?) Sometimes I start trawling around on You Tube for one kind of music and discover it's hooked up to something else, and get all excited about whatever that was. Most of my posts to Twitter and Facebook are links to music I want people to hear that I'm enchanted by at the moment. The soundtrack of my life for the last year or so, has been, in no particular order, mostly from these folks: Feel free to lie and say this is what I've been listening to for a decade instead of just mostly the last year:

Jonathan Coulton
Ben Folds (both solo and with The Ben Folds Five, and the college group a capella versions of his stuff....I can geek out to a capella forever)
Tim Minchin (HUGE in the Skeptic community, and he's awesome)
Gogol Bordello
Lady GaGa (doing it better than Madonna, IMHO, but I missed the torch passing ceremony)
Steely Dan (a fixture, always)
Lotsa Punk (XTC & Propaghandi, mostly, but others too)
Jr. Walker & The Allstars
Sondheim Musicals (mostly "Company" & "Sweeney Todd" in various versions)
Man of La Mancha original Broadway cast
The Fantasticks original Broadway cast (though there are interesting variants online on YouTube, I got re-interested because my friend was in it and I went to see it)
Jamie Cullum
Lee Presson & The Nails (I saw them live at the DNA Lounge, gawd they are so great)
Brian Setzer Orchestra (I have tickets to the Xmas show at the Great American Music Hall!!!)
Thelonius Monk and other Jazz standbys
Lotsa Ragtime, by Scott Joplin but also others. Check out a pianist on You Tube called "Bach Scholar."

Hope that helps even remotely, though I've prolly forgotten something.

[Of course one of the stories of the decade is that rockcrit writer types etc. are less sure of a decade's story as more stories from more people push their way to attention. A subtheme of LizKhatt's response is that any music recorded anywhere is potentially available, and can be part of your present even if it wasn't part of your past.]

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

My musical decade story is very simple:

Indie ---> Pop

Where Indie means 'v narrow subset of guitar music', and Pop means 'absolutely anything' with the ultimate goal being 'absolutely everything'. When I think about all the music I instantly dismissed in 2000 (without even listening to it) it makes me want to hide under my desk in shame.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

For me the story of music is the
story of rockwrite and that story I'm slowly sketching out on the blog. The bottom line though is
that rockwrite transformed from an individual practice to a conversation. There are always conversational and social elements of individual writing but more frequently these days when someone wants good rock criticism I think immediately of back and forth participatory writing before published pieces. I think it's a shift that's 80% me and 20% the decade.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

My personal musical decade story comes down to electro, really, and the concurrent realization that canonicity/critical value in music was cyclical/mutable/debatable and not absolutist, and therefore I didn't always have to be outside of it (but me being me am never comfortable in the centre, either).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, my impersonal story of the decade was that there's no clear center!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Haha, as soon as I'd posted that I was like BUT THERE IS NO CENTRE but decided to leave it as is (because in the absence of an objective centre, wherever I subjectively locate the centre is wherever I'm uncomfortable being at any given time. XD;;).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah my phrase was "the center spreads" and another way of saying that might be "the center is a feeling," or at least "the center is contingent on our agreement of center." Which is why to me The-Dream can feel "center" without having a ton of critical or popular catchet -- he has some of both but is only truly central to a relatively small bubble.

[koganbot]

X is central to Y.

E.g., the sun is central to the solar system, but the solar system is not central to the universe, nor is anything else - although universes can have population centers, I suppose, just as continents can, though the former is probably contingent on relatively rapid intergalactic travel, which may be impossible.

My story of the decade, by the way, is Ashlee Simpson, but she (or that) is at least three stories for me: (1) I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep... I'll walk a million more to find out what this shit means, a.k.a. The Sixties Never Died a.k.a. the mainstreaming of romanticism a.k.a. Girls Rock The Boys a.k.a. the ongoing feminization of the romantic quest for self and for the overthrow of self in favor of new selves and of the glimpse of new worlds as alternatives to this one [right, that's probably more than one story]; (2) alienation as disaster as well as opportunity, so the attempt to simultaneously move beyond the world as given (her family as given) and reconcile with that world/family (reconcile with her own character); (3) making the complications and mundanities of her lovelife (lovelives) and the various quests therein quite beautiful in her telling and singing of them (her = Ashlee, Kara, John, and sometimes Shelly and some of the people on Bittersweet World too). If I were to make Ashlee the center of my piece - but I won't - I would actually concentrate on #3, but since I'm doing decade's story not just Frank story I'm going with #1 as my theme, with Ashlee just one of the players, probably more space given to the not-yet-as-romantic-as-Ashlee Taylor.

My Decade's Story Of The Decade rather than personal story of the decade might actually run counter. It's that there was always a multiplicity of stories with less of a center than there seemed, and the contribution of the Internet is to make the multiplicity of stories more visible, and to enter more of them into the historical record. The stories that are being made more visible are the responses by a broad number of people who might not previously have been considered creators (and for whose response there isn't much of a market, or didn't used to be)... their responses to songs, that is, to stars, and so forth. (Responses to Elvis, Beatles, Sex Pistols already part of the official story, but the stories of many of the responders to the first two, especially the girls', wasn't usually individually noticed or recorded in the way that you can e.g. notice fan vids on YouTube now.)(And of course fans of the esoteric and the nonstars can enter the record as well.)

If I were to

[koganbot]

That last "If I were to" is stray. Maybe "If I were to" is the story of the decade.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

A story of the decade for me (not the only one but, looking back, probably the most important) is the idea that nothing is ever lost anymore. All my favourite records of the last few years are reissues or first-time-commercially-available recordings from the pop's past. The internet has obviously helped unearth long-forgotten things too, things that didn't get much of a chance at the time or were simply out of their time.

The story here isn't so much that everything's available now. This is almost true - though you'd be surprised at how much stuff reissued in the 90s and early 00s is now OOP again and impossible to find even in digital form, and besides there's now too much "stuff" out there, more than any one person can ever get to grips with. Rather, the story is that I'm having re-think my view of the past as each new nugget is dug up and brought back into the light. In other words, my (main) story of the 00s is actually the re-writing of my stories of the 60s and 70s... and if I wanted to be argumentative about it, everyone's stories of those decades ought to be re-written.