Trends

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Lets talk about TRENDS.

In fact, let's talk about the EXISTENCE of trends - on the Lex's LJ in a recent post dubdobdee said he basically didn't believe in them, or at least found them harmful as a way of thinking about stuff (dunno if he was specifically referring to music or what). Boyofbadgers agreed.

I am interested in this perspective - do you think that thinking about music in terms of trends is useful? Do you think the ebbs and flows of musical fashion as documented by journalists has any relation to real life experience? If anyone else likes it, is it a bonus? (Or a PENALTY?)

Am I being too vague?

Comments

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

Am I being too vague?

Yes.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

To some extent the post is just a nudge to dubdobdee or lex to come and talk more about this stuff. Failing that I'll try and firm some ideas up myself.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I agree with the argument that the concept of trends is unhelpful and ofter counter-productive. Firstly, there's a suggestion that the majority of people are highly attuned to a vast range of cultural nuances with no awareness of that, which is tricky enough. Secondly, and for me far more problematically, it removes a great deal of the autonomy of the individual, by saying "I know you think that you have chosen independently to like x, but actually you're just a faceless prole in a great mass of trend-followers". It's an idea usually used to describe what an author thinks *other* people do - they follow trends, I am an individualist - and while this is far from being consistently the case, I still believe that the hierarchical overtones which typically seem to inform dialogues about 'trends' are an unreasonably classist approach to analysing people's musical preferences.

Of course, I would distinguish this from discussions of actual movements, where there is a conscious choice of the part of participants to belong.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

That said if I look back over my own listening history I can totally see times when I was highly influenced by, and followed, a trend - Madchester being the obvious one for me.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm really bad at assuming certain trends exist with little or no evidence! However I think they can definitely be useful, even if just as a theoretical benchmark by which you can describe what people are ACTUALLY doing/thinking instead (e.g. "Judging by trend X we would expect group A to do B, but actually half of A are doing C and half are doing D and totally ignoring both X and B, WHY IS THIS SO" etc).

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

My take is not that there aren't trends in the broadest sense (stuff does change after all), but that obsessively cataloging and second guessing every potential cultural microtrend is not a useful or even very interesting thing to do. This applies doubly when the trendspotter in question is (as is all too often the case) x-random metropolitan journalist who has half-noticed a minor change amongst their immediate friends and then extrapolated this to the entire bloody universe.

With regards to music writing, there's nothing wrong with going 'blimey, huge pile of bands doing x suddenly, this is interesting' when it's actually happening, it's when the searching for that blimey becomes the be-all and end-all of what you are doing. See six-grillion NME invented movements over last two decades.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes otm to all of this. Also I find that actual real trends, micro or macro, are only ever visible in retrospect.

(The exception to all of this is the FASHION WORLD - as this is ENTIRELY PREDICATED on seasonal trends it makes complete sense to talk about them there)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't think they're visible in retrospect - they're visible as they happen - but it's rare to actually predict where one is going with any degree of insight.

(& also you can predict "oh there will be an 80s revival" and then eventually there is hurrah but in the meantime there have been 25 failed ones)

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

This is true - a trend is a trend if it's visible as it's happening. It's the difference between the musical and related fashion trends that exist (emo, nu-rave maybe) and those that don't (any of the top down imposed made up NME genres of the last 15 years).

This feeds quite interestingly into Tom's FT post from a week or so ago, that perhaps the NME has become more successful in associating itself with trends because it's as much about following them from bottom up as imposing them from top down (or rather, following them from bottom up while pretending to be imposing them from top down). Also yer Myspaces and whatnot make it much easier for them to quantify and identify emerging trends and get onto them at just the point where they threaten to trouble the mainstream.

Essentially, there's less guesswork involved now - the chances of a Terris or Gay Dad emerging now seem a lot smaller. Whereas no one would even have thought to take a punt on eg Enter Shikari until it was too late.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

Re: Enter Shikari example, I meant that, if they'd emerged 10 years ago, no one would have thought to back them until it was too late. Leaving them looking like bandwagon jumpers instead of bandwagon starters.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the things that's really gone missing now there's only the NME is the sense of music papers OPPOSING trends - "yes this is happening but it's stupid, stop it now kids" used to be quite a regular stance when I was a teen (and it usually meant that the Melody Maker or Sounds were backing whatever it was). Though I guess emo is an example of the NME not really knowing what stand to take on something clearly big happening.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Nu-rave is a great example because (from my distanced perspective) it's like a hybrid of a top-down and bottom-up trend - something was happening and the NME essentially packaged and branded it and in the process almost certainly changed its direction - one of the problems with trends is that identifying one also involves freezing it and distorting it a little.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hollyoaks = way better than the NME at recognising teenage trends! Cf their current emo characters squabbling with lass who likes r'n'b, both factions then also loathe the nu-indie band kids busking in the street trying to pass off Sonia songs as their own...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah it's about drawing the borderline between a fad or meme and a 'trend'.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in them from both sides of the fence really: having been on the journalism side it's obvious that massive amounts of it are total bullshit (in the nicest possible way! I don't begrudge anyone filling time/space by opining that "cupcakes are the new techno" or whatever), and then obv actual real life experience - even, especially among people who are supposedly the exact people setting the trends, rarely ever matches up to what's written. A lot of trend-talk seems to be a somewhat contrived effort to fit a pre-existing theory on to a reality which sort-of-but-doesn't-really correlate, ie just because a lot of people are doing something doesn't mean they're all having the same reactions to it or doing it for the same reasons, and merely pointing out that they're all doing it tells us next to nothing about them or it.

And I don't like talking in terms of trends because it reduces everyone to a bloody demographic, categorising and pigeonholing everyone with the ultimate aim of being able to predict everything they do. It turns everyone into a cliché basically!

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure you have pointed out a few trends in, say, house music, in your time young man. Trends don't have to be top-down imposed, often they're visible and quantifiable by looking at, for example, what the most popular producers or doing or which way the punters are voting with their feet.

I'd go so far as to say that trends, and either wanting to lead or follow them, are necessary and desirable, to prevent artists from becoming complacent and things from stagnating.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"Trendy" doesn't have much to do with "trends"! "Trendy" just means that certain people are doing a thing, there is no claim that EVERYONE is doing it.

But the thing I have against "trends" is that "most popular" are "which way the punters are voting" tells us so little - which punters? how to extrapolate any meaningful conclusions from this totally nebulous situation of eg one club being more popular than others - never mind that there might be different people there each week, that they could all be there for different reasons, that it might be only a small part of what they do and where they go...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This seems to be at the root of some distaste - yours and friend_of_tofu's, for instance - the idea that trendspotting is an attack on individual agency. At a business level trendwatching is very much concerned with motives and reactions as well as specific actions, incidentally.

I'm pretty unbothered about this - I've followed trends in the past, knowingly and unknowingly, and also I think 'individuality' in a behavioural sense is made up of a series of preferences each of which will be shared with vast numbers of others. The combination of these preferences is likely to be unique, but that's not important when talking about specific preferences.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

Defining trends seems the easiest way to distinguish generations (and factions within) from each other. I think it's useful for thinking about culture rather than music itself, altho maybe short-sighted in any case.

It gets problematic when critics exaggerate the popularity or indeed realness of a trend! Mythology > Schmacts etc. Hard to see how this can be avoided tho - hype is all.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Stevem it is yr turn at Scrabulous. Now THAT is an actual trend. I love it.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

sorry i was busy at work writing my first post on Freaky Trigger in a Madonna's age!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I come into contact with the idea of 'trends' a lot at work. Generally this means either finding quantifiable large scale patterns in consumer data and working out which are the most important, or it means someone trying a spot of "coolhunting" and trying to pick up on a "street trend".

The latter is almost always disasterous, because in order to do it well you need to be i. an actual expert in what you're talking about and ii. prepared to report on what is happening not what you'd like to be happening. In my perhaps jaded experience, most non-full-time "coolhunters" (I haven't worked with the real pros, if such there be, just researchers and planners trying it out) are well-off late-twentysomethings and report that the world is getting altogether more comfortable for other well-off late-twentysomethings. One 'trend newsletter' I was given to edit had one 'thinkpiece' which was basically a list of the writer's favourite designer handbag shops, for instance. You need to have a fairly pitiless eye for your own obsolescence to do it properly, I guess, and most writers don't.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

This is one of my beefs with the sort of trendspotting stuff you get in the mainstream media: the typle of people who do it are from precisely the same narrow demographic. Hence the ridiculous 'having babies and settling down is the new all night rave' articles that pop up every few years.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

ha ha ha surely we are due that very article on Freaky Trigger any day now.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Believing that most trends pitched by the media are either dreamt up, a product of misunderstanding or – as boyofbadgers so accurately points out – just the result of a certain age group going through very standard life stages (hence the "babies - wow!" pieces, or the Guardian's traditional "I was a vegetarian for xx years, now I'm not"), is not the same as believing we don't live in a world of trends. Look at the ups and downs of the financial markets – it's all "Dude, everyone is getting out yen and into kroner, I better get with it"; the smart thing (what's making Goldman Sachs so smug this week) is knowing when to buck the trend.
And is anyone actually claiming that four years ago one-third of the women walking around Hoxton spontaneously decided to wear vintage T-shirts proclaiming their allegiances to classic rock bands?
As for the sudden outbreak of folk music in ads for unlikely products like phones and glasses, is that great minds thinking alike?
The fact that there are more false trends that real trends (Grazia claimed that fashionable women everywhere were going to be wearing DM boots this autumn – anyone seen one?) does not disprove the existence of trends. It just means they are tougher to spot than many assume.
Also, sitting around a magazine office trying to invent a new movement is fun! I've done it lots.