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

[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.