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.

[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.

[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]

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!

[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.

[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.

[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.