Guardian article on non-futurist pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2060953,00.html

Bands be borrowin'.

This is under discussion elsewhere on the interwebs but I thought I'd tap the wisdom of the Poptimist crowd.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

This is basically why I don't like British pop 07. Except the Winehouse.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

You see, I think Winehouse (the songs I've heard) are quite good, but I am kind of bothered that she's *such* the knockoff of an earlier era. I kind of wish she'd put the talent to "better" use. (In other words, better than [i]Swing When You're Winning[/i] only because I like soul better than swing.)

[(Anonymous)]

"My yardstick about modern records," he says, "is does it sound as though it could only have been recorded in 2007? If it does, great; if it doesn't, boring."

Hmmm.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the whole article yet, but I also went hmmm at that bit.

When I was 21 I would have been very adamant about the need for pop music to be constantly moving forward, like a shark, or it would be dead.

Nowadays I'm less bothered. As koganbot is forever pointing out in posts to this Community, a large part of the history of pop is people attempting to borrow from something else that has preceded it but fucking it up and creating something new (and sometimes as interesting) in the process.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

and FWIW I don't hear Mika or Amy Winehouse as carbon copies of what it is they are supposedly imitating. In fact they do feel more like the sound of '07 than the sound of '67 or '77 to me.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

absolutely. the only regressive thing in the article is the attitude that the article takes up.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My take is that I don't mind retrogressive, ersatz artists - I love Winehouse! - but to have the market so filled with different types of retro, to have very little sense that somewhere someone is moving forward like a shark, is dispiriting.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

"Doing so, he thinks, makes Vincent Vincent and the Villains "perhaps the most forward-looking, adventurous band out there. I feel like I'm presenting something new, something different that people haven't thought about. An English rock'n'roll band of now."

but surely...Tom Vek?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I was going to post this this morning too - odd coincidence coming after your question earlier this week.

One problem with this article, I think, is that while the Pipettes, the Puppinis, and Vincent Vincent are [i]around[/i], I hardly think they're representative of the pop scene. Only Winehouse is charting, right? If we went back ten years or whatever, wouldn't we also find various acts here and there that we clear throwbacks to earlier styles/genres?

Moreover, was there anything so blindingly original about those golden years of 1999-2001? We liked Xtina and Britney and *nsync and Backstreet because they were really really good, not because there was anything groundbreaking about them. Right?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There was a sense of innovation but at the time - even when writing about them - there was also a sense that "innovation" was a trojan horse to make people receptive to this stuff that might not otherwise be.

The R&B coming out of that golden age really didn't sound like anything much else before, as far as I know. The Trojan Horse thing applied there too, a bit - a real revelatory moment was on ILM when I suddenly realised that ALMOST NOBODY was talking about the emotional content of any of this stuff: the troj. horse had become a smokescreen.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

yes, and also how the innovation was good not just because it was innovation but it was innovation geared towards creating/enhancing the pre-existing emotional content...

[koganbot]

The r&b/hip-hop that was charting big in 1999 sounded very exploratory and experimental while also being absolutely willing to draw on the past. My case in point would be Destiny's Child who were absolutely willing to jump across measure bars and show off their new-fangled difficulty and reference older versions of difficulty like the Manhattan Transfer and reference old-style rhythm and blues from like 1940, e.g., Louis Jordan. And in the big piece I wrote at the time I was saying some of their shenanigans were ways of dealing with ongoing problematic issues that had been set into the music back in 1965.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

And they mention Selfish Cvnt as well! Are Selfish Cvnt even together anymore? I thought Martin had moved to Belgium or something. Certainly no-one I know is bothered about them. I have a feeling the writer has just mentioned bands that she managed to get quotes from.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I am glad that this article failed to mention 'new' rave anywhere. However I've heard these points in one form or another a billion times over. Stop complaining about it and start solving the problem! Follow your own advice in the last paragraph and go out and discover something new on the internet, or heaven forbid, make something yourself! The recycling argument bores me beyond belief.

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

"I've heard these points in one form or another a billion times over"

Exactly how I feel every time I read one of these things, and they crop up with such aching regularity. Last time I went home I read (for some reason) the liner notes to one of my father's Faust records, which basically consisted of articles written about the band. One of these, dated nineteen seventy-two, began with several paragraphs of complaint about how nothing new ever happens and that music is essentially dead and you may as well stop reading and go back to your houses.

It's just as bizarre an assumption now as then to assume that Progression Has Stopped -much like my theory that Panic! At The Disco signal the end of popular music because they make it painfully obvious that we're running out of names for bands.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I remember getting very grumpy over the popularity of SUEDE and felt that they represented This Sort Of Thing and should be stopped. I wrote a lengthy essay (on a TYPEWRITER!) about the Death Of Indie when they released "Stay Together" arguing that the incredible tide of indie innovation had now been DAMMED by this mincing fop.

Luckily it was never published even in a fanzine. Also I quite liked Suede at the time so I think I was just being a knob.

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

You were not necessarily an entirely incorrect knob though -- although I'm having some troubles remembering the incredible tides of indie innovation of 1992.

Also lol TYPEWRITERS i miss the bastards somewhat and actually earned my living selling them a couple of years!

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

Oh god I turned back as soon as I read the words "Lucky Soul". SOrry.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

it's just another passing current of style, like bands with long clause-like names. it doesn't MEAN anything. that some bands are making more overt refs to earlier sounds is not the death of all innovation. and innovation, while welcome, is a part of what people will always want to do - there's no need to worry about it dying out. "erosion of progress" my arse.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

If I was the sort to indulge in spectacular suicide, I might well find some method of beheading myself 'Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul'-style to a Puppini Sisters song. Purely on a vengeful basis, obv. and also because their music does invoke quite a 'KILL ME NOW' urge in me.

Pop music now is retro and slightly rub because no one wants the rest of the train carriage to hear them listening to something embarassing on their iPod and the things from which the music derives are generally establishedly cool? That would be my take on it, anyway. However, as katstevens pointed out, there is plenty of music out there beyond the iTunes top ten.

IMPORTANTLY!

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

Keiran McFeely (simple kid), quoted in that article was previously in the Young Offenders who were a complete Bolan rip-off! OH THE IRONING!!!

actually i swear they just publish pieces like this so that we have something to argue about on a friday...

ALSO!!

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

morley rly has lost it, right? whilst he still has the writing chops he just doesn't understand the young person's music anymore does he? i can see him slipping onto a greil marcus-esque world writing more and more detailed books about exactly why the art of noise were the apogee of all humang creation...

Re: ALSO!!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

His OMM piece about the Arcade Fire, which I found in the bathroom yesterday and proceeded to try and procrastinate about cleaning the sink with, is one of the most singularly absurd things I've ever read. Out of touch doesn't even begin to really touch it.

Re: ALSO!!

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

well "absurd" is hardly a new element ot his work ;)

[koganbot]

The Guardian piece seems a mess and I suspect it doesn't do Savage or Morley justice.

At the end of the this other humongous piece of mine, from 2002, I've got this paragraph:

Rock had once laid claim to the future ("Hail hail rock 'n' roll, deliver me from days of old"), and not even the retro rockers are trying to be traditionalists. Whatever Mooney Suzuki, the Greenhornes, the Gore Gore Girls, et al. are doing, it's not traditionalism. (More likely they want to stay true to some spirit or reanimate an ideal, as well as find musical forms to play with.) But basically, since the Recombinant Dubsters - particularly in hip-hop and techno - have usurped the official role of Conveyors Of The Future, this frees rockers to evolve in all sorts of directions without worrying about which way is "forward." The forward spot is already occupied. (And the rock bands that do make a point of their modernity - the industrial acts like Wumpscut - always sound like they're playing catch-up, anyway.) So metal especially can mutate and reconfigure itself all over the place while still being a subcult rather than a "trend." I won't generalize as to whether being free of the future is good or not. It's safer, and safety can free up some people and make others lazy. But at the moment, the space is wide open and everything's for the taking.

Since then, hip-hop has lost some of its sense of being the future, which of course doesn't stop hyphy, for instance, from sounding futuristic.

But the idea of there being a particular direction that represents the future was something that fizzled out in the '70s. I mean this in a broader cultural way. I do think that over the last quarter century, the U.S., which has been pushing forth its music all over the world, has lost its sense that it's the country leading the world into the future, and that it knows what the future entails (more freedom, more equality, more money).

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Oh ironing etc: are Morley + Savage doing just what they criticize in music ie applying (say) 1979-style aesthetics?