Where is the love?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

So we're all resigned to a bit of a slump in pop and teenpop, but... am I imagining it, or is everyone getting spikey about music in general? I know "I Love Music" has rarely lived up to its name in the last 5 years, but it does feel like a lot of stuff (new stuff) is getting ACTIVE dislike more than seems usual (or healthy, to me).

Is this because things are "on the move" and people are trying harder to be "taste makers"?

Or perhaps I am just imagining it, and no explanation is needed.

Settle my mind, or solve my conundrum.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

lots of new stuff is great! i spend well over half my time listening to new stuff. lots of new stuff is horrid but as long as it stays out of my way i don't mind...

i am positive and gushing on ILM far more than i am spiky.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

though today it seems all i've done is defend a) being the other man/woman and b) paris hilton...

[pot80.livejournal.com]

It's because everyone there is getting older and as people get older, they tend to get more reactionary and/or set in their ways. The peak of ILM came at a point when people were more willing to get excited together, and now we're at a point in the cycle when people are more eager to define themselves against other people, or by what they dislike. It's lame.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

yes. tbh, many of the threads on ILE (on non-music subjects) seem unpleasantly "oh that's shit and you are an idiot for thinking otherwise"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't immediately recognise this I have to say. Was there anything specific bugging you?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

nothing specific, nothing i can put my finger on. this has sort of spun around in my head for a few weeks now.

i am fully expecting that it is just me.

it's not music...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

.. it's the war

("I've been Ben Elton and Alexa Chung thank you good night")

A possible explanation

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

In terms of getting to hear music there's a kind of pyramid of motive viz

1 I've heard this without trying to (i.e. on the radio/in a club etc.)
2 This sounds bad but I want to see what the fuss is about.
3 I'm interested enough to give this a go.
4 I am really keen to hear this.

As access to music becomes easier (and more often free), #s 2 and 3 expand enormously. That's what's been happening: more people able to hear and offer opinions on music they wouldn't otherwise have bothered with. A lot of them aren't going to like it so the opinion-giving trends more to negative. And there's no much music being discussed that there's not many people bothering to qualify or explain there judgements before hopping onto the next thing.

Re: A possible explanation

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Bah my long post was eaten. Basically #2 and #3's lives are also made easier by YouTube, which is an order (or two) less fiddly than P2P and doesn't bother The Man much because you can't easily extract things like you could with the brief experiment with embedded mp3s (which survives mostly on amazon pages now) and even if you can it's an enormous flash file most of which is quite shitty video. And even non-single stuff without a video will be the soundtrack to someone's home footage: I had the urge to hear The Mountain Goats' Game Shows Shape Our Lives, and now I'm listening to it while someone's dog cavorts about in an unseen tab of my browser. From thought to listening in about 10 seconds, it's the internet the way that people not on the internet thought it worked (or for that matter how some people on the internet thought it probably worked Further In and Higher Up).

I realise this isn't the most original observation ever, but I'm particularly feeling over the last month, as restrictions on the web in work have relaxed == I can now actually hear what people are talking about on the "this week" polls.

Re: A possible explanation

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah I was thinking of YouTube more than P2P!

For some reason the unseen fan video shit happening on a tab under what I'm doing creeps me out though :(

Re: A possible explanation

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Again with the obvious statement, but what Youtube is to P2P, Spotify is to Youtube.

Re: A possible explanation

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Except I can't get Spotify through the company firewall :(

I have started a Poptimists collaborative playlist which I will post tonight, though.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think the music industry is undergoing a revolution in production and distribution at the moment, which means:

a) there is no stable basis for massive innovation in sounds, and much rock-crit discourse is built on demand for innovation in sound.

b) tastes are separating out into niches, even if people will happily enjoy more than one. But there is less emphasis on combining or crossing over in order to achieve mass appeal, and this is where one source of innovation comes from + then see comments in a) about rock crit discourse.

+ [possibly not directly linked]

c) some odd things are happening in the mainstream in the UK, which I blame on the BBC, but this is short hand for dictatorship of certain ideas of what constitutes tasteful music.

i.e. revolution in ways of making, selling / obtaining and listening to music BUT not in types of music. But someone else will tell you different at a micro level perhaps, and there is possibly a quite extensive reshuffling going on underneath the radar of concerned-but-not-fanatical listeners.

There's also a definite age thing, i.e. no-one is producing anything which sounds radically dissimilar to what I've heard before; but I'm discovering that loads of things I thought were new back in the day just sounded like older things (e.g. post-rock was just prog / kraut rock coming round again).

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

But given that ILM is both typical (of the kinds of ways people think they ought to talk about music in public) and not at all typical (because overly jaded, aware of talking about music in public) I wouldn't draw too many conclusions based on observing it. More than ever I feel that it represents an alternative observation post on the 'centre', at the point where everything is happening at the margins. Most people on ILM speak from the disappointed middle, rather than as passionate advocates of their particular localism. (e.g. they are the old Marxists rather than the new social movements, and we await a Foucault of music-talk to think it out (or rather, pay more attention to Chuck and (sort of) Frank)).

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"tastes are separating out into niches, even if people will happily enjoy more than one"

i think this is what i am feeling when i say things are "on the move". and perhaps this is as much my own insecurity as things move on.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

There's a kind of aggressively impatient eclecticism on ILM which manifests most frequently in the idea that arguments about rockism / popism are over (i.e. historically out of date, not over because they're boring) but also as a kind of narrow consensus, if that makes any sense. At the same time there's the bloggist call of 'Next please' all the time, in which the whirling succession of new stuff ends up looking dreary compared with the (apparently, but not actually) stable canon of Good Old Trusty stuff.

I suppose a counterargument to mine would be that this is a time of tremendous change really, and that those are the times when people most insistently look backwards for assured value.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

...and get most irked about not finding it in the new stuff.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

obv I am speculating wildly and welcome someone to come along and go 'nonsense'!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I do wonder sometimes if the fact that I'm *so much* more interested in the outcome of the shift in production/distribution than any shifts in music is a function of me being lazy rather than it being where the action is!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I can imagine that that might be true of me -- CDs I can currently see on my desk = Associates, Sulk & Fourth Drawer Down; Donna Summer, Bad Girls deluxe edition; Judy Collins, Wildflowers & Who Knows where the Time Goes; freebie Word magazine sampler CD; Wire Tapper 17; Infinite Livez vs Stade, Art Brut Fe De Yoot. I wonder if the fact that old music is so much more available in shops than it used to be is also a factor? i.e. this is stuff I have picked up browsing except for the one 2007 album, which I had to order off the interweb as it is not for sale in any Edinburgh stores. But this is basically because old CDs are cheap, new music I get off of emusic or naughty d/l.

I guess that law of diminishing returns for my own listening has set in -- i.e. new stuff sounds a bit dull, because always like something I've heard before. But then, this ain't necessarily so -- some of the post-techno stuff sounds great and fresh, if not exactly new.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

ILM is full of people not really telling us what new stuff they actually do like and are listening to, for sure. and if they do it's just listy 'X is good' stuff. ZZZZ.

i do what i can tho, Track Of The Week thread etc. (oh noes i don't think i have a track for this week yet been too busy with PROMOZONE wooo)

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

ILM is probably the place to (not) discuss this, but I still attribute this to the fact that new people, full of enthusiasm about whatever (usually NOT something that's just appeared) get immediately hit by a round of "we've already discussed this," if not snippier zingers. This discourages all but the heartiest new blood, both in general, and in particular from developing the habit of engaging discourse.