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

[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.