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

[koganbot]

Also, this is a different point that probably has nothing to do with the discussion, but any critic eventually if he's a sound guy he needs to put the sound into some sort of story - whether music theory or the sound in relation to the song or something. But can one isolate the sound in a way that rebels against the various stories? Here's the sound and it takes us out of the world, even the world of the melody and the rhythm and the rest of the song. (I doubt that this is possible, but perhaps there's a way to take the sound and put it into a story that seems to flabbergast anyone who is in the groove of the stories that are already there.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it's back to my usual thing: the workings of the democracy of everything that's present -- the question isn't so much can you invent a parallel and distinct story for [element x] as what happens to the whole if you treat the story of [element x] as the dominant story, and the seemingly dominant story as minor incidents in it

my shorthand for this is manny farber/termite art/the funny little character actor you only see for a moment

democracy is of course a highly idealised tool of forensic analysis but so is the seignural aristocracy of auteurism: is this one wo/man's dream or the passage of a fellowship?

[koganbot]

"Democracy" seems the wrong word, because not every vote gets to count, and majority doesn't rule. I'd think the Farber-Kogan point would be that while you might have a dominant story, or several dominant stories, those stories don't govern the entire works, which have a potential infinity of associations and tangents, and the main stories aren't immutable, either, as they get pulled and shaped by the little critters nipping around.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the correct word is "harmolodic caucus" but it saves time if i point at this far-off distant thing which people think they understand in the hope that they will be somewhere near the thing i'm actually talking about (that they don't know the name of) when i need them to be :)

[koganbot]

But people won't understand, since "democracy" has too much of a goody-goody-pants connotation, as if we're making the music a better fairer place and the result is good etc. Like, saying that the solar system is a democracy because every asteroid has gravitational influence hardly seems right, and there's no reason we'd want the solar system to be a democracy anyway. What I said in one of my country critic ballots - "in general I like music that overspills its container, though for this to work well there has to be a good container in the first place" - doesn't translate into "democracy" (or "aristocracy" or any other form of making political decisions) in any way that makes sense.