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

[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.