It's the tunes that got small

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"thebopkids esp.will (rightly) note existence of a actual real live danbcing till dawn community who believed that what constituted indie in (say) 1984 was the same as and would again soon be pop's idea of pop"

sez Mark.

I was thinking the other day that the Poptimist position is kind of like a civil servant's - you have to work with whatever regime the public hands you, however reluctantly. The alternative is a fannish secession as outlined above, keeping alive an idea of 'perfect pop' (cf also Bomp! fanzine in the 80s). You can work out for yourself where this leads.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The easy answer is that the pure pop position was massively delusional – and at many times in the years since I would have agreed without hestitation. Dave Cavanagh's Creation book is good on the apparently unbridgable gulf between what Alan McGee and Jim Reid thought pop was, and what the Radio 1 programmers knew it to be. BUT... history will say that the delusional outsiders do sometimes win, as in the recent BBC4 Tories series, following the tiny groups of extreme free-market economists swimming completely against the tide in 1948 who lived to see income policies and credit controls driven from the earth. Now, the pure pop dream never reached hegemony, but refracted bits of it cropped up in the charts repeatedly over the years – the Primitives, the Stone Roses & the Inspiral Carpets, some of Britpop (although Noel's Pastels obsession never that obvious in Oasis's music), the Thrills (dull & vexing as they are) and onwards. And even the production anti-standards, the biggest factor perceived as having doomed indie's 80s crossover attempts, made it to the mainstream: there's no way that the June Brides or the Loft sounded any tinnier that The Libertines. - Mark M