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]

The reason I asked you about the lyrics to "Come Clean" is that the the verses describe stories that aren't working, then the chorus brings us an intervention.

Still don't get why, upthread, people assumed that auteurism would focus us on the singer.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think it's more the confusing confluence of two different conversations: did anyone out and out say this? i certainly don't think it -- if anything auteurism should pull us away from the actor to the colour of the curtains or the way the edits work, or at least put them all in dialogue, or multiple monologues; my argument is that it's writers, being somewhat shy of the various logics and languages of music in ways the musicians and producers and indeed singers are not shy, tend to order their discussion so that the singer is the focus of the story, or the producer when the singer seems to be too flimsy to hold the writer's preferred kind of story -- when the singer is the curtains, in fact

this is a shyness that doesn't arise in film-related auteurist crit, really: except maybe films where the inner logic of music is a dominant character, which is very few films that i can think of, certainly -- it's specific to the oddity that so many pop- and rock-write ppl are all but musically illiterate, some of them proudly... you're not unmusical, in the sense that you used to be in bands and made music, but, while i think this has honed your ear in various ways not available to many, you almost never discuss things from an openly musicianly perspective

[koganbot]

Ah, right, I am sort of conflating two things: Tom in his post seven months ago said "Strand 2 was the emotional argument: you should like pop because its content is rich and affecting. This put the focus back on the performer. A typical Strand 2 argument would praise records like Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography or the first Marit Larsen album." So he didn't mention auteurism. (I find the word "emotional" odd; not that the argument is unemotional but generally there isn't a lot to say about feelings.) And then Dave, writing from memory and thinking that Mike had said it, not Tom, wrote: "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)." So emotion turns into ideas, and he adds "auteur," but with qualifications.

I don't remember if I told you about my "Thomas Magnum" variant on auteurism. My idea is that the auteur of Magnum P.I. is the character Thomas Magnum, rather than the actor Tom Selleck or the producer Donald Belisario or the directors or scriptwriters or set designers or setting. Obviously all the others played a role, but the character and his way of being and his interactions jelled so quickly and solidly, and the characterizations and the way those characters generated what the actions had to be (four main characters, good people but something unformed or stunted in each, and then a pushy messed-up guest star who runs Magnum in circles and exasperates and involves him, leading to danger and action through which all the main characters transcend themselves [I had a post about this, damned if I can remember where]) pulled something persistent and good out of the people who worked on the show (actors, writers, etc.) that they'd not have achieved otherwise. And in I want to say "Ashlee Simpson" the character as 19-year-old-on-the-cusp draws something out of John Shanks and out of Kara DioGuardi and out of Ashlee Simpson the singer, and maybe "Ashlee Simpson" is one of the auteurs of Rolling Teenpop 2006 and of my Bob Dylan article for Paste. But Ashlee the performer had to jettison the 19-year-old girl, and her reinvention has a way to go now.

I really have trouble bringing the music into the discussion; aural is a lot harder than visual or verbal. The reason I cited "Death Rock 2000" is that I actually was able to use the form of the music as a metaphor for what the music was doing socially.