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

[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.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I don't see it as a bad thing. The alternatives are not taking an interest in at all or everybody reacting to and thinking about the music in the same way and I'm glad there's more than one way or a best way to appreciate this stuff.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It's not "appreciate the cool sounds" vs "appreciate the feelings" ffs - ideally they should work together anyway! It's that only judging on a "cool sounds y/n" basis is a really shallow way of listening. It's kind of like taking only half an interest.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

it sounds shallow when described that way but it can be deeper esp. if the 'cool sounds' resonate more than whatever feelings are being expressed in other ways.

there's nothing necessarily wrong with only taking half an interest (or just being able to identify what you do and don't like about it...not to the extent where you rule out any prospect of changing stance, you can only go by experience) but then as a dilettant i would say that.

[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.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Don't necessarily disagree that women country singers have been able to stretch more into certain pop and dance production areas; just don't think the equation is as unbalanced as Frank suggests -- certainly Phil Vassar, Toby, Alan Jackson (Like Red On A Rose), Brooks & Dunn (one song by whom Frank compared to Londonbeat!), Tim McGraw, Colin Raye, etc, have recorded songs or even entire albums that veered anywhere from smooth-jazz quiet storm to new wavey '80s dance-flirting AOR (John Waite's "Missing You" actually seems to be a fairly frequent sonic signpost in '00s country, and everybody thought Waite in turn wanted to sound like the Police at the time) to (obviously) old-school hard rock. So nah, come to think of it, I'm not sure I agree with Frank at all here.

As for Rodney Atkins' album, I admittedly overrated it when it came out (or at least right now I think I did, since all three singles have irritated me more than grabbing me on the radio), but when I first listened to it (and liked it quite a bit, on first couple listens, at least), I (maybe willfully, who know?) heard as much early '80s Night Ranger-style proto-hair-metal and Cougar-style Stones rips as audience pandering. (Though who also knows, maybe by now those sounds are audience pandering. Though I get the idea that Frank is referring to the lyrics here, more than the music. Favorite track, either way: "Chasing Girls.")

[koganbot]

Yeah, I was referring to the lyrics on the Rodney, but the music didn't grab me nearly as much as his previous music did either, though I don't think that was owing to stylistic choices so much as not pulling the music for best impact (not that I've got anything useful to say about where the music goes wrong for me). I certainly didn't think the music was bad. Did like the song where he goes fishing and meets the G.I. on leave. And "worst 15 minutes of my life" does make me smile when I think of it.

I myself referred to Toby's "That's Not How It Is" as "quiet storm" in my "Quiet Desert Storm" piece. I think even as I was writing my post it was unraveling in my mind, but I decided to keep it anyway and let you come along and contradict it. I do remember on one of my country ballot comments making a crack about LeAnn and Faith roaming the world while Toby tended the home fires, but then LeAnn and Faith were the ones beaten down for it, so this doesn't exactly help my thesis.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Well, Toby's certainly got songs where he doesn't tend to the home fires, or maybe he tends to fires in somebody else's home ("Stays In Mexico," "Time For Me To Ride," "Brand New Bow," "Who's Your Daddy" -- as I said in my Voice piece last year, for a supposedly happily married guy, he's certainly not afraid of one-night-stand songs), and there's also guys like Dierks Bentley whose whole persona is about roaming the road and not staying tied to one place. So again (which I guess you're sort of acknowledging), the dichotomy's not as simple as one might think.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It's similar to the various global iterations of Shania Twain's big album - the original country version for the US, a "pop" version for Euro markets (with obvious country signifiers taken out and dodgy electro beats put in), and...a third version, which I can't remember right now, but it may have been something MENTAL like salsa versions for the Latin market.

Anyway yeah it's because record companies are stupid and think Britishers are terrified of country and hip-hop signifiers *stabs something*

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Actually, though, the '00s country sonic gender difference may well stem to something as simple as how, in the '90s, Shania's mega-hits maybe tended to lean slightly more toward borderline-dancey post-Cars/post-Abba Europop, and Garth's mega-hits tended to learn slightly more toward AOR and hair-metal and heartland medium-hard rock. So the women and men who came later just followed suit. Still not sure, though, how one of those options is more Not Country than other (and I honestly don't hear how Toby is any more of a country purist than Taylor or Jamie or Faith.)