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

[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.