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

[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.