The Decade In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My enormous Pitchfork piece on "The Decade In Pop" is up: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7703-the-decade-in-pop/

Spotify playlist to go with it here: http://open.spotify.com/user/freakytrigger/playlist/6cudPLlniOyOrpX5M5Dnnz

Comments

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Busy right now but suffice to say [this is good].

I judge this...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

... very nicely done; seems very strong on one swift skim. Wish I'd been able to read it before completing MJ: there's a bit where I got lost in abstract generalised flail about repetition and invention, which you nailed nicely concretely.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah I loved reading this - stylistically I love how you make a massive 3-page essay sound so concise! So readable and never a hint of tl;dr.

I have studiously avoided hearing anything other than the original "country" Taylor Swift songs and your description of the "pop mix" makes me glad for that :/ (btw, I recently heard the original country versions of a few Shania Twain singles for the first time - and really enjoyed them! The UK versions I appreciated as catchy pop but in practice they made me flinch a little.)

OTM re: the best tracks on Nelly F's Loose! I'd be willing to bet that "Say It Right" eventually proves her most enduring single, actually.

As per Twitter I love the Hilary Duff para: an unfortunate by-product of amazing production being a gateway into pop for people was that pop (and R&B and hip-hop) judgment was reduced to "cool sounds: y/n?" for too many.

Kind of a depressing conclusion! Pop needs to reinvent its relevance right now, and spearheading this is...Lady Gaga. Oh.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh how annoying I had a reply and it vanished.

Anyway yes thanks - might post the pop mix on Tumblr, it is a mess!

The ending was as upbeat as I could make it: I think Gaga has sort of cracked everything about being a successful, media-relevant pop star EXCEPT the "making amazing music" part, and the fact that she's so successful without that is kind of miserable but perhaps not unexpected (there have been pop stars w/o amazing music before, and will be again). I mean, her latest thing of doing a special "monster edition" of her album so she can dress up as vampires etc - I really like that, the implicit acknowledgement that nobody's buying CDs so why not do silly limited editions for publicity. But the music is for the most part feeble (very difficult to pick a track for the spotify list).

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The funny thing about Lady Gaga is that when she pulls her various "wacky" stunts like wearing a gimp mask to a press conference (UGH), no one goes "oh isn't Lady Gaga crazy", they go "oh isn't Lady Gaga clever". Her real angle isn't "art" or Warhol, it's business - ie doing exactly what eg PCDs do, except their business model is outdated and flailing while Gaga's new models are cannier.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

'EXCEPT the "making amazing music" part'

this is a key thing for me and particularly frustrating having done a 'Just Dance' mashup just before it was a (finally, sheesh) massive hit year that works so well for me but would be of little interest to most others. for many it's not just a case of 'she needs more "interesting" music for me to like her/the songs' but in my case that's pretty much enough esp. as i can decide what alternative context i am more willing to hear her reasonably-good-pop/dance-songs in and just do it (and i suppose i feel she is malleable in this way whereas someone like Taylor Swift really isn't).

in the case of 'Just Dance' it was just desire to make it all sound both harder and more epic and the song was strong (thanks to her voice) yet light enough to survive re-editing.

i'd like to think this aspect of listener (or even 'user') choice will thrive more in the 10s (aside from or in spite of the de-trendification of mash-up concept). there's a 'remix 'I Gotta Feeling' context on Beatport where you have to buy the track's parts to enter - i would probably have a go if i liked that track well enough!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

This is traditional! The Boy Looked at Johnny, Julie Burchill's legendary "where we at" radpoptimist treatise, ends with a rousing cheer for the Tom Robinson Band, who had basically already invented worst-case indie eight years too soon...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

and plus my 1992 wire essay on pranksters and troublemakers brings us to the present with Fabulous (http://www.geocities.com/retropalace/fabulous.html), d'oh!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

pop (and R&B and hip-hop) judgment was reduced to "cool sounds: y/n?" for too many

Guilty as charged, but (i) I think we all were at some point, not just those going through this alleged 'gateway', and (ii) it's not a bad critical tool to employ though I agree a critic shouldn't stop there.

[koganbot]

I've never heard the "pop mix" of "You Belong With Me," but from Tom's description it sounds more like a rock mix, which may mean it's aimed at Disney. I've given up on Radio Disney, so I wouldn't know. The mix Disney played a couple of years ago of "Teardrops On My Guitar" had a bit more guitar and some extra vocal stuff tracked in, but wasn't fundamentally different from the original.

I don't see how the country "You Belong With Me" could be made any more pop than it already is anyway. Seems to be that on Fearless Taylor only barely goes through the motions of trad country instrumentation, and - unless I'm forgetting something (haven't listened to the alb in several months) - there's nothing in the lyrics that suggests pickup trucks and diners and a rural, working-class setting. But this hasn't hurt her with the country audience at all. (Compare to the beatdown given LeAnn and Faith earlier in the decade.) I think this is because she's so powerfully and distinctly Taylor that there's immediate recognition of her, a girl that everyone likes going through the romance wringer that anyone can identify with. And since the country listeners have already accepted her as the gawky kid sister who's keeping the genre relevant to the kids, the boundary patrol leaves her alone. The genre doesn't want to expel her.

Domestic melodrama has been at the core of a lot of country anyway, and in this decade the women usually are given more sonic freedom than the men in their exploration of it. Toby's still going for the country growls, whereas Taylor Swift and Jamie O'Neal can explore textures and timbres without anyone thinking of them as not country. (I hope.) (Not that Toby doesn't have plenty of timbre. Chuck to thread to tell me about all the male orchestral lushness I've totally overlooked. Country guys have been singing blue-eyed soul for decades without anyone raising an objection. Maybe all I'm reflecting is how really pissed I am at this year's Rodney Atkins' album, where an excellent narrative story teller has reduced himself to flinging audience-pleasing signifiers. And so I'm projecting my disappointment with that onto the gender as a whole. But it's been my impression for a while that country women get more sonic freedom than men, though I've never systematically tested this idea.) (By the way, did anyone other than Moggy listen to the Jamie O'Neal that's in the current best of 2001 heat?) What got LeAnn and Faith in trouble was for going for Flashdance-era dance-oriented rock (LeAnn) and MOR world-dance like reggae and stuff (Faith), which specifically registered as Not Country. Big & Rich got away with defiantly Not Country elements like funk and hip-hop by pairing them with super-hick country banjos and acoustic guitars and daring you not to call it country.

"blognoscenti"

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

100 Internet Points to that man!

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

It seems great, but one thing that struck me is that there is (micro/)blogging breaking down barriers and there is backroom wizards making their way to the front but there is no Kanye?

The thing about Lily Allen is that even though people think they know the Real Lily Allen and that the one in 'The Fear' isn't her, the response to a room of people being played it is still a room of people dancing (amusingly, this is also the response to being played Lady Gaga, up to the point that they realise what they're listening to).

Re: Justin and the BEP: I think he's kept his options open - what people will have seen him on this year, apart from the SuperSerious Dead and Gone (and the Madonna single, which I think everyone on the planet is willing to forget) is his work with The Lonely Planet. I don't know that a spot with the Black Eyed Peas would be such a surprise (though I may be saying that just because I'd really love to hear it)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

re Kanye - I thought that there would be a decade in hip-hop essay, so I left him out (same with Eminem). He was in that very sentence about the backroom wizards moving to the front, in fact.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A very fair criticism of the piece, in fact, would be to say that pop in the 00s basically WAS hip-hop and this other stuff is a lot of interesting niches. Certainly I'd really want to read a thinkpiece on hip-hop in the 00s which dealt with how it coped with being dominant.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"Room of people" - you will have to specify which people! I have been in many, many rooms of people where the response to Lily Allen would definitely not be to dance. Um, even though I kind of like her now, I'm not sure I'd dance to any of her songs either.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

Really nice read and not as long as ppl made out (it doesn't seem as big as Eric H's mp3 social history thing which I also liked of course).

Annoying pedant moment: Lily Allen's famous Dad connection was surely as much a part of her success as the MySpacing, opinions4u etc.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Outpedanting the pedants: Robin Hood didn't start until she was already famous, most of her fans would have no real idea who he was.

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

"But I think a really big element was that the early-00s attention paid to pop production meant even pop-friendly listeners cared more about how the music sounded than how it might feel."

You've caused much discomfort on the home front with this! A nagging concern of mine, most of the decade, is that I'm turning into a modern day equivalent of the seventies power pop critic -- albeit one who's never lost interest in the music of the present -- constantly on the lookout for the right sounds that thrill, failing (and at times not even necessarily feeling the desire) to make any better sense of it than that. I've more often than not felt strangely disassociated from the world most of the music I've loved this decade emerges from (incl. much of the attendant discussion around the music), and yet... I don't feel I love the music any less -- I've sure listened to some of it a lot -- though I do probably love it somewhat differently.

Anyway, excellent, sprawling piece... hard to absorb on a single spin.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

See, what's interesting to me is how much I recognize in this piece but how little of it I see in myself, if that makes sense. But then I'm one of the creepy Radio Disney critics!

I think your insights are right on, and it echoes something that, IIRC, dickmalone said in re: the "two types of poptimist critics" or whatever, #1 being the "sounds and producers" type and the other being the "ideas and auteurs" type (auteur being the closest shorthand I can get to a less-distancing idea of "persona," or "artist-object" or something). But I've always been firmly in camp 2, because to me it's a lot harder to have an intellectual conversation about sounds. They interest me, but only as a gateway to conversation -- they so rarely are the focal point of the conversation, even if it's not impossible. I think there's plenty of, e.g., instrumental, dance, and other music that facilitates deeply intellectual conversations; but tracking production teams through their minimalism, e.g., just doesn't strike me as being all that much fun. Hence the focus on CASSIE, or the Cassie-idea, over Ryan Leslie's production, or on ASHLEE, or Ashlee-Kara-John, over the guitar sounds (or whatever); these (the guitar sounds) deserve more ink, and I've only tried to get at them somewhat vaguely, but it's not really where the STORY is. The beat in "Come Clean" remix (it sounds like pop-rock because the original was basically a guitar-rock tune!) sounds perfunctory and pre-programmed (it probably is); the interest is a combination of melody and performance, the realm of the auteurs -- the songwriters and singers, not producers. (The guitar line in it perhaps holds a middle ground; like John Shanks's guitar, it's part melody and part production.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

'Course there's nothing mutually exclusive about great sounds and great ideas. The-Dream has great sounds AND great ideas, and they feed each other. But I guess the difference between a #1 and #2 type is that they're translating sounds into ideas, putting sonic revelations on the same footing as conceptually interesting facets of a song -- performance, lyrics, feeling. So they're part of what I'd call the "type-2" conversation, a full intellectualization of what may start as visceral enjoyment. Simply tracking evolutions and following the sonic trends doesn't necessarily pass the threshold into type-2 conversations, though often it can, and often it does; this is just something I've noticed in the nature of pop conversation, I guess.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The #2 type is translating sounds into ideas, I mean. And see above, where 1 and 2 feel more like "modes" than actual attainable stances or ideologies -- we can tend toward 1 more than 2, but can't actually separate the two? Something like that. (I think that #1 strikes me more as the aesthete's appreciation and #2 strikes me more as the intellectual's appreciation; both have something to offer but many tend toward one while incorporating ideas of the other?)

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

"Nothing mutually exclusive about great sounds and great ideas" - true, but what I'm saying is I, the listener, has (for reasons I can't grasp) brought to bear an exclusiveness on these intertwining streams (awkwardly worded... sorry). Not entirely, of course, that would be impossible (of course I think about what some songs are saying even as I think I'm just tapping along to their beats). But when I think of some of the key pop figures of the decade -- Beyonce, Britney, Justin, and I'm going to add Paris because I think she is key based on the wars that erupted -- they mostly functioned for me as vessels. I don't expect to care about what Beyonce is like in her personal life, but I don't think I even care that much about Beyonce within her own music. And yet -- I totally love a few Beyonce songs!

sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i don't care terribly much about "private life" -- it's not a guide social context anyway, because it all manifests in tweakable media, it's better to think of it as "part of the work", lady gaga style -- but really do care about sound: and choices made in respect of sound... in lots of ways i think this is the big nervous unspoken in what dave's calling the "pop-auteur critic" mode of discussion: it focuses on the interplay of voice and word, and treats the rest as inflection or colouring, backdrop basically

but it isn't just this for everyone, not at all: in fact, the quasi-autonomy of this "backdrop" realm seems as important to me as the "pure musicianship" autonomy of "proper" musicians, establishing a territory they can communicate without being bossed about and diagnosed and dissected by the verbally adept: a key to the pull of all music in the modern world is that those who are good with words, and thus a bit too cosy with the administrators and bureaucrats and legalists, don't get to boss it around, to pre-plan or second-guess it -- there's an unspoken comity between the semi-inarticulate listener and the semi-inarticulate drummer/guitarist/producer which cuts out the bloody preening singer and his/her smug pal the critic with his bloody all-purpose eloquence, just a for while, sometimes...

i like this!

[cis.livejournal.com]

there's an unspoken comity between the semi-inarticulate listener and the semi-inarticulate drummer/guitarist/producer which cuts out the bloody preening singer and his/her smug pal the critic with his bloody all-purpose eloquence, just a for while, sometimes...

Re: sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[koganbot]

But my James Brown analysis in "Death Rock 2000" is auteurist to the hilt, and I don't get why auteurism would necessarily focus you particularly on the singer, anyway - in my version, it doesn't even have to focus you on this or that author, so I'm one ahead of everybody: well, seriously, the fundamental idea of auteurism - any auteurism, even it it's an archaeologist facing a pot fragment or a homicide dick trying to figure out who done it - is that music (and everything else cultural as well) is the result of choices, sound X is here rather than sound Y, beat W instead of beat U, etc. - and by coming to understand what difference the choices make, you understand something about the world that makes it. The Cahiers auteurists were trying to come up with a way of talking about the whole setting rather than just the explicit plot or what the main characters were saying, etc. And Americans like Ferguson and Farber expanded the setting to the world, not just what's on screen.