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

[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).