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

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

I need to read this thread, and Tom's essay, and other posts linked to from here much more closely (and probably won't have time to do say today, and by the time I do, as usual, this discussion will be gone and forgotten), but just from my skimming this morning (and probably my misinterpretation of what's being said), what's bugging me even more than the sounds vs. ideas dichotomy (as if sounds aren't connected to ideas -- honestly, I have no idea on which side of that dichotomy I'd land, if
I even bought the dichotomy, which I don't) as this apparent equation of "ideas" with "personas." But I'm totally Rorschaching here, right? Nobody is really saying that, to infer ideas and thoughts from individual songs, you have to rely on how those songs work in conjunction with said artists' entire body of work (or worse, their "real life") are they? I mean, sure there have always been some artists who seem to convey an overall personality in their larger output or on such-and-such album (always have been, and not just in "pop" however that's being defined this week -- it's not the like the '00s are different than any other decade in that respect), and once in a while (once in a very very very great while, in my own mind, but I'm weird), what I read happens in celebrities' lives might impact how I feel about some particular song they do (more often, I just tend to ignore those lives because I've got more interesting things to pay attention to), but it's seems really limiting to somehow pretend looking for a "larger persona" a requirement for appreciating pop (or any other) music. But nobody's actually saying that, and I'm just being paranoid they are, right? Whew!

Though I do have to say that, on one cursory reading (and I could be way off here), the one part of Tom's essay that I found the most problematic was the Lady Gaga part, since it seemed (as do almost all Gaga criticisms I've seen) way more attuned to how she apparently presents herself outside her music than to the music itself (thus the claim - -which Tom seems to admit is a frequent fallback for people who don't like certain pop, but for some reason he doesn't fully explain in this instance the fallback is right -- that her music is somehow incidental to the rest of the package, but there's no specifics (at least none I noticed) about what's supposed to make her music so bad or uninteresting backing the claim up. (Maybe I'm just cranky here because, as far as I can tell, her album stands up to albums by just about any of the other '00s pop artists he's named in the piece. And even if you don't like it, that doesn't mean it's not an interesting failure. But again, I need to read closer.)

As for the "neat sounds" thing, I have to admit that I've often been annoyed by a tendency for criticism of '00s pop songs to fall back on lauding "innovative production techniques" with disregard for whether a song works as, like, a song. In other words, if the production sounds somehow "new" (not "dated", usually from a dance or hip-hip perspective), all other sins are forgiven. But again, this is probably just my curmudgeony selective misreading, right?

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

(Excuse grammatical incoherence/incomprehensibily of the above; I was typing really fast and didn't have time to proofread. But if there are any parts you're really have trouble translating, feel free to ask and I will do my best to edit and/or untangle.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As for the "neat sounds" thing, I have to admit that I've often been annoyed by a tendency for criticism of '00s pop songs to fall back on lauding "innovative production techniques" with disregard for whether a song works as, like, a song.

Well, this is as close as I can get to how this idea of "Strand 1" or "sounds more so than ideas" (I want to be clear that I think the two are inextricable, but you can have both a poor grasp of the whole song and a good idea of specific production techniques OR a good grasp of conceptual ideas, as in reading a lyrics sheet, say, and a poor understanding of how things sound) actually looks like in practice. It pretends that production techniques are an end unto themselves, not a context for the whole song. The "ideas" bit is really just a way of saying that there are more holistic ways of looking at songs. Sometimes this involves following people over the course of the rest of their work (I think that some artists certainly make more sense when you follow the rest of their work) and for some it doesn't -- like, I still like that stupid Filly song "Sweat (Drip Drop)" even though she's completely blank and I don't expect to hear another note from her either again.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess what I find confusing (and I bet I'm not the first person to point that out), is that even those critics who tend to rely almost exclusively on critiquing production techniques and ignoring everything else are responding to ideas, because, uh, production techniques are ideas in and of themselves (or the results of ideas, whatever.) So maybe I'm just arguing semantics.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

A good point. Maybe I could put it something more like "sounds" versus "stories," though even then it doesn't seem quite right. I guess I was just trying to recognize what Tom, I think rightly, sees as a split, and define it more precisely. But the problem is that it's a subtler split than any "this versus this" version of it might suggest. There does seem to be some kind of rift between production-centric and more holistic criticism of pop in this decade, though. I don't know if it's any different than any other decade, but it's still an issue.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well, the version of it I was telling is that the emphasis on production emerged as a tactic and that, like many tactics, it had a degree of blowback.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think you're that far off - I find it very hard to pin down why I don't respond to Lady Gaga's tracks with any great enthusiasm, given that I like the look, I like the genre, etc. It might very well be that I'm projecting blankness onto the music because of the offhanded way she sometimes performs 'being a pop star', her references to Warhol etc.

In the context of the piece, my not liking Lady Gaga isn't that important though - I'd be saying the same things about her performance of stardom, being her fan etc. if I liked her, I'd just have replaced the handwaving about boring music with handwaving about good music.