The Pop Open Group E: RESULTS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Here are the results for the violence group - I'm putting them all up at once because I may be summoned away from my PC (or I may equally faff about on it all day long).

First Place: Motor - "Black Powder" (Track 1, 8 1st place votes, 30% of total points) - katstevens wins.

Second Place: Pizzicato Five - "One Two Three etc Barbie Dolls" (Track 5, 4 1st place votes, 23% of total points) - skillextric qualifies.

Third Place: Loretta Lynn - "Fist City" (Track 2, 5 1st place votes, 21% of total points) - lisa_go_blind qualifies.

Fourth Place: Speedy J - "Patterns (Remix)" (Track 4, 4 1st place votes, 19% of total points) - freakytigger is OUT.

Fifth Place: James Kochalka Superstar - "Monkey Vs Robot" (Track 3, 2 1st place votes, 9% of total points) - jel_bugle is OUT.

Congratulations to Kat, who gets to pick which group she is in for round 2 - there are still - IIRC - places in 50s and Before, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. She also gets to pick which lisa_go_blind lands in, and then skillextric's fate is determined by the Randomiser.

Thanks to all voters, especially those discerning individuals who voted for track four.

This week's group is RELIGION, and is up tomorrow with results next week. Then the Pop Open goes on vacation until mid-September, giving the 24 players in Round Two a month to get their tracks in (and me a chance to go on holiday myself!). We'll fill the orgafun gap in some yet-to-be-determined way. I'll also put up a special post of POPOCRYPHA - the tracks people sent in for Round One but then changed their minds on.

Comments

[koganbot]

OK, I shouldn't have projected my own negative connotations of "indie" onto what you were saying. But I don't see how P5 are not part of the sound of today (well, the sound of the 1990s, which is when I'm guessing this track was recorded). "Alien to the sound of today" may well be the sound of a particular day, if a lot of people are playing styles that signify "alien to the sound of today." But I don't feel that that captures P5 either: the whole copy, refer to, sample-the-sound-of-the-past thing was a part of international club music during the time of the band's existence. Plus (I just checked this to make sure) P5 were best sellers in Japan in the '90s, which makes them the sound of today [their day] whether they want to be or not. And actually I still believe that my examples are more apropos than one might think. That is, only by hitting big did Backstreet Boys, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters get to be the sound of their day. Your phrase "loving recreation of a fiction" might pinpoint the different sensibility. But then, with the Stones and Dylan and several others, there wasn't a sound of the day that they were integrating into; it was a sound that was created by their success.

By the way, I'm not trying to knock down your idea. I feel that it's heading in the right direction. "Indie" might be the wrong word for P5, and P5 may be not so relevant to "indie pop" or "indie dance," not because of P5's commercial success but because its natural home would seem to be in the dance clubs. (Whereas indie dance's home would be in the indie clubs. This is assuming I know what I mean by indie dance, which I probably don't.) Am I wrong about that? That's where I imagined Arling & Cameron, whose music was sometimes called "club pop." There is something bohemian-sounding about P5, so maybe "indie" is appropriate, but I don't think I'd want to label the bohemian wing of dance "indie."

I think what I'm balking at is the idea that what P5 were doing necessarily makes them not pop. It might make them cold or overstudied or irritating (all of which are adjectives I've applied to them in the past, but I might be willing to rethink P5), but why can't there be pop that's cold and overstudied and irritating? And I don't see why a band like that couldn't have a Rolling Stones-like impact on popular music. (More likely to be a Rolling Stones-like impact than a Backstreet Boys-like impact, because it's more likely to appeal to hipsters.)

[It's also hard to argue that indie isn't to some extent the sound of today, and isn't to some extent pop. But I can understand why someone here might want to resist calling The Automatic "pop." So I seem to be talking myself in circles.]

[cis.livejournal.com]

Right. I think I've scooshed about three different things together: I'm trying to make some kind of general unified point when the situation's not that simple (or at least it needs to get complex before it can become simple). So: it's not all indie I'm describing, here, it is mostly the "perfect pop" strain of indie.

I think there are three basic recreations-of-past-sounds at work here:
Type 1, which attempts to capture a previous sound and style, in aspic if at all possible. This is "perfect pop": which I consider to be representative of an indie sensibility, and which I think describes the P5 project very well, regardless of how well their records sell. (and I doubt their sales were a patch on, say, Namie Amuro's when she was queen of avex! everyone was a best seller in nineties japan!)
Type 2, which draws on older styles to produce an amalgam, either of various older sounds or of older sounds with the current sound. all your examples belong, I think, here.
Type 3, which adopts signifiers of a previous sound, but within the context of its own established sound, so that-- that Spoon song is recognisably Motown if you understand the language of indie rock enough to be able to filter it out and just hear the Motown flourishes (which someone who regularly listens to Spoon and similar bands, a 'native speaker' if you like, will do without thinking). A lot of sampling falls into this category, I think.

Your 'backstreet boys' example is completely apropos for me, because the BSB sound wasn't a loving recreation of a specific sound, it was an amalgam: it mixed the previous Boyz II Men r'n'b with a certain Europop sound. In fact, the thing is that I believe quite strongly in the presence of some kind of "sound of now", a noise common to records from a certain period that we don't notice at the time, being immersed. It might just be a change in technologies: the compression on records, the way a guitar is amplified, the noise of a synthesised note (stuff made nowadays that's aiming to sound 'eighties' doesn't, you know? I imagine synthesised notes from the eighties were made out of moulded plastic, they're solid, analogue: the synthesised note of now sounds both more digital and more organic, grown in petri dishes from fractals. nb this may be fanciful talk that bears no relation to real sound).