Poptimists Review of 2006: Genre Of The Year

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What was the sound of 2006? That's what we're asking in the second of our end of year polls, discussing the genre of the year. Contenders - drawn from your nominations - include...

Teenpop: Teen confessional and pop narrative (a la High School Musical) drove the genre on in '06 - more teen than ever.
R&B: From Bouncy's hi-gloss dramas through Ciara and Justin's takes on the Prince legacy to Cassie's minimal precision.
Electro: Still the sound of the clubs in 06 (like I'd know) and with big high street traction too.
Emo: The comment box's friend and the parent's foe - whatever it is, it's selling.
Nu Rave: A shot in the arm for indie or a lame NME concoction? 2006's most enigmatic genre.

(A special note: I didn't put "POP" in cos it's all pop, innit. I went for Teenpop as a more specific option, and one picked by as many people.)

[Poll #891678]

You can still vote in yesterday's poll - and still nominate in the remaining 8 categories. Final results collated in the new year!

Tomorrow I'm at home, with YouTube access, which means it's a good day to do the Video Of the Year poll.

Comments

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Nu-Rave doesn't exist yet. I reckon it will be a fully functioning genre by this time next year. Seriously. It only needs a few kids with GarageBand/Reason to realise they could do a whole lot better than the Klaxxons et al at actually making actual rave and Bob's your considerably monged out uncle.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

because it's not dead? both pop and rock sectors of the music press may have decided to ignore it but it's been responsible for just as much brilliance as ever this year - TI, Chamillionaire, Lupe Fiasco, Rasheeda, the whole hyphy thing, Kanye and Fiddy permanently up to something or other...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Also nu-rave bleeds into proper dahnce quite often anyway - 'Hustler' by Simian Mobile Disco was a pretty big bridge this year.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

No, emo doesn't either. But if we're casting about to describe 2006 as "the year of" I hardly see R&B as a viable candidate.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

loads of great Southern rap, that clicky stuff, lots of great records generally and all sorts of interesting things happening - it's right up there with R&B for me. I was tempted by the teenpop option, but an uncertainty as to whether Marit Larsen really belongs in that category made me ignore it (plus quiet years for major favourites like GA, Sugababes). Electro I like, nu rave is rubbish so far, emo is consistently appalling.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

ok of course i didn't mean it quite so literally. and i meant talking about 'the "death" of hiphop/rap' rly i suppose. the whole grammy nominations thing spawned a few articles, and there was some discussion end of last year i recall about its general decline in the way it dominates music culture esp in the us. jsl

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There's been some talk over the fact that there hasn't been any monster selling rap albums, too - mind you there haven't been many monster selling ANYTHING albums.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Watch out for "shemo" (a name I hate but it gets the job done), female-fronted music that's closer musically to emo than (most kinds of) teenpop -- Paramore, Meg and Dia, Flyleaf. Solves several problems I have with a lot of emo, e.g. dudes CAN'T SING, sound whiny and awful, etc.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

HSM was sold almost exclusively to Disney kids, and its impact was felt there the most. To the extent that Disney has monopolized a major teenpop demographic (6-14), it was a huge deal. But I'm almost certain not a single song has gotten any significant airplay (or ANY airplay, for that matter) on any station outside of Radio Disney.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I would have mentioned minimal house as I've been listening to an awful lot of it this year, but my top ten singles are all pop, electro or rnb. By this I am counting Ellen A & co as electro, btw. Minimal = best dancing this year :-)

[koganbot]

But hip-hop for so long was seen (at least by me) as the engine, the forward motion, of a whole hunk of modern music, and when r&b was really coming across as contemporary it was hitching itself to hip-hop. I don't know. That last statement is an exaggeration, and maybe Destiny's Child was considered as contemporary as anything. But now it feels as if to hit, hip-hop has to hitch itself to r&b. This doesn't mean that there are no interesting directions in hip-hop, just that hip-hop doesn't seem nearly as dominant. Another interesting trend is some material that's clearly r&b (JoJo, Rihanna) doing better on the Top 40 stations than on the hip-hop/r&b stations.

Teen confessional tanked this year

[koganbot]

Unless you see Aly & A.J. as teen confessional - I think their music is very personal, but they're not playing the role of singer-songwriter taking you on their emotional and intellectual journey through relationships and poetry and stuff - teen confessional tanked this year. The mediocre Cheyenne Kimball had mediocre numbers on Radio Disney, though she did get a little play on Top 40. There's the promising Jordan Pruitt, but she's only had a couple singles and they didn't put up good numbers either, and it's not clear what direction she'll go. In the teenpop market, Ashlee's fading and Lindsay's nowhere. The new Avril got 12 Disney plays in its first week, and I don't see it rising far ('cause it's not very good). Right now Disney movie and TV tie-ins are the big thing: Hannah Montana and High School Musical stars, w/ Aly & A.J. maintaining their presence and a really interesting story - that I've failed to get any of you to pay attention to - being the non-Disney-contracted boy-rock-band Jonas Bros., whose cover of Busted's "Year 3000" has been the song that's most consistently challenged Hannah Montana at the top of the Disney charts over the last half of the year. And meanwhile, their album got perpetually delayed by Columbia, who then dropped the band shortly after the album was released.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

That essentially, the teenage record buying market just wants someone to understand their angst. I am a teenager and so can say this with authority.

bim bom bim bom bim bom bi-i-m, bim diddle diddle diddle diddle bom bim bom

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

for year to be nicked from i shd have sed = 1320!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was tempted to tick emo but I think 2006, despite most electro releases I've been listening to having come out in 2005, was when electro really got thought about- it's even been the rise of emotronica with Panic! At The Disco and other scamps with keyboards running around all over the place. R'n'b's current electronic angle is also interesting and a lot of the minimalist leanings in other genres this year are, I think, borrowed from electro. (Cassie springs instantly to mind here but there's also the rise of Gym Class Heroes, who are quite stripped back in a lot of places and with Bloc Party cropping up again, minimalist indie is flitting around a bit)

Emotronica may actually be the sound of 2006, to be honest. I feel like I should have ticked emo still, because nearly everything I've said also applies to emo and it's hard to conceive of being able to look back on 2006 without thinking of Gerard Way and his Chemical Romances (or lack thereof- get back on the drugs, boy!) who can, by no stretch of the imagination, be called 'minimal.' They are a bit electronic occasionally.

Maybe 2006 was actually something of a restoration of glam, now I think about it. Well, this was inconclusive.

But where confessional might be breaking big...

[koganbot]

But where confessional might be breaking big is in country, where women influenced by Jewel and Sheryl are making their mark. My attention to country being sporadic and relatively recent, I don't know how long this has been going on (need to track down the first two Deana Carter albums, from the '90s). Stay tuned for the Wreckers and Taylor Swift (hitting big) and Ashley Monroe (struggling for airplay; "Satisfied" is by far the best of her two singles).

The Wreckers, if you don't know, are the duo Jessica Harp and Michelle Branch, both ex-teenpoppers; Michelle Branch's "Everywhere" from 2001 was the first big teenpop singer-songwriter hit and set the template for much of what was to follow from Avril and Ashlee and the like. The Wreckers' two hit singles are only so-so, but the album has some really nice personal-angst slush in the middle, with instrumentation and sound that's only nominally country, if even that. The Wreckers' sound is more interesting than their words, but Taylor's got great words, and she's a much smarter singer, has a smart sense of when to hold back. Also, her big hit is about looking back with bittersweet memories at an early love, a fairly common theme in country since Deana's "Strawberry Wine," but usually done by someone in her twenties or thirties, not by a sixteen-year-old. And there's an aggressive subtext: "When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song," can mean "I hope you have warm memories of me," but also can mean "I hope I haunt you, fucker, the way you haunted me. Sincerely, your discarded girlfiend, Taylor."

I'm curious...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

...about people's reasons for picking the years they did in answer to Tom's question, unless they were mostly just joshing. I seem to have mindmelded with Frank, but I suspect we might have different reasons for giving our answers. Mine was partly perversity, partly a feeling that people don't actually spend much time going 'which bit of the past to plunder' since this seems like a bog-standard rock-crit approach rather than a way anyone actually makes music (although the two can mix), and partly a sense that whatever is happening this year in music, it's happening away from the spotlight, and there's maybe a whole load of things in incubation, ready to blow up bigger: also we're about due for some hybridity which isn't 'crossover'.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

it is on bbc over xmo so you can watch it and Report Back.

[koganbot]

R'n'b's current electronic angle is also interesting

Indeed! But I'd say that this derives from the Dirty South and Miami bass and dancehall. Of course, Southern hip-hop has always had way more interplay with club music than Northern hip-hop has, so the South's current commercial dominance just means that more people are aware of the electronics, not that it's new. But its use in a big way in r&b may be relatively new. Or maybe not. I'll have to think.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

What about the teenagers who buy 50 Cent and Pussycat Dolls and Sean Paul records though?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about US geographical genres but I was thinking the northern stuff has had a bit of an electronic injection, with Timbaland's current work relying a lot on synths and stuff? I dunno, maybe he is Southern.

I was trying to think of a way to articulate the fact I feel this says something about the rise of the south in US sociological whatsits overall, what with the current Republican politics seeming to accuse the North of not being American but I think that's probably just some kind of horribly flawed observation caused by not being from/living in the US.

Re: Boys on one side, girls on the other

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't like to alarm anyone but I know quite a lot of boys who think 50 Cent understands their angst. Pussycat Dolls are basically the Spice Girls, only more obvious thus lots of teenage girls feel some kind of resonance, even if it's not per se understanding their angst.

Does anyone in the UK really buy Sean Paul records?

Re: I'm curious...

[koganbot]

You're on the money. For instance, the fact that the Ciara album samples "It Takes Two" and references "S.U.P.E.R.S.O.N.I.C" doesn't mean that she's going '80s but rather that r&b has fully absorbed the hip-hop strategy, which is that you pilfer everything. Back in my Drunken Tiger review I'd said that the basic hip-hop aesthetic is that "Less is more, and more is more too," which means that you can build a track around a real simple element, and then pile everything in atop this element. But that goes back to disco, too. One thing I'm noticing is that over the last decade hip-hop, especially through crunk, has been using sonics from the Euroromantic orchestral palette. But his doesn't mean that hip-hop is going back to the 19th century, but rather that Lil Jon et al. listened to the music on suspense-film soundtracks. (Which isn't necessarily to say that he doesn't listen to Euroromantic composers. But even if he studies them assiduously, that doesn't make his music a throwback to late 19th and early 20th century Europe. I mean, I study Macaulay's sentence forms, but my writing style belongs to the present. At least I think it does. Maybe people are just too polite to go up to me and say, "Oh, Frank, you're so 1840s!")

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha I always thought of it in reverse - at least starting from the late 90s, when the Timbaland/Neptunes juggernaut (plus Shek'spere, Rodney Jerkins and so on) was primarily manifested in r&b hits rather than hip-hop hits - and at some point, maybe when crunk hit the mainstream, it switched, with virtually every r&b hit now featuring a guest rapper, with its themes leaning more towards the gangsta than ever before.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Power Metal was robbed :(

The Internet is killing music!