No flowers by request

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_10000000/newsid_10004800/10004881.stm

The article is bobbins, but does include this amusingly comprehensive sentence:

"The Rakes, The Twang, The Rascals and The View all returned, or emerged, with new albums and braced the climate or split up."

Comments

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Borderline-irritatingly, I was going to write a thing about this yesterday but got bogged down in navel-gazing over my own old reviews. Me and Mark were discussing it mildly drunkenly in the kitchen a couple of nights ago; it was obvious that all of this would die and my thesis that whatever Radio 1 plays enough to be trendy will sell is sort of proving itself.

Not that most of these bands were remotely independent; the Enemy, in particular, are and always have been signed to a major with a huge quantity of money poured into them. They were my bane when I was writing for Chartblog and they very much represented everything that was shit about these bands, along with Little Man Tate.

Also, proofreader alert:
"Whilst radio stations were chickening out of playing guitar music - Kasabian just came out and said, 'Hang on a sec, guitar is great and always will be and hears a record to prove it',"

I think the concept that there is some form of "guitar music" here is so problematic I cannot describe my facedesking. Guitars are in all fucking music these days and pretty much have been since their invention; Lil Wayne does guitar music, Rihanna very definitely does OVERTLY guitar music and what they're actually talking about here is BORING FORMULAIC MUSIC which somehow everyone tries to go "oh no, look, it's got a guitar in therefore it must be fresh and new and FACEDESKFACEDESKFACEDESK."

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I mean "yes, guitar music is dying, that's why Journey are so far up the charts."

"chickening out of playing guitar music" WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT I mean what is BOLD about playing The View's jangly sixth form pap? WHAT? *apoplexy" I genuinely think I lost a lot of my impetus to write about music when I was having to review landfill indie because there are so few fucking things to say about it other than "this makes me die inside not particularly because it exists, since dodgy Jam cover bands will always exist in some sectors but because of how people are writing about it." The critical "space" of music, particularly because of the internet and because of iPods and constant music presence whereby one's music selections are, if not quite a public thing then a very self-conscious thing have created some sort of immediacy of music criticism which (IMO, although obviously I am 22.9 and therefore probably talking out of my ass with regards to the past) I'm not sure has been as universal before. And that makes the way people describe and present music much more relevant than previously, I think.

...well, I certainly turned THAT paragraph into a mess.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

In that there's no public social-capital cost to listening to The View but possibly some to listening to something else?

Yeah the main thing to take from this article is how absurd the associations of edginess etc are when applied to music this weak. And also what an enormous failure popular British guitar music of the late 00s was. Two, three years in the limelight, selling well, and the most memorable song it came up with was "I Predict A Riot"?

on a point of urgent order

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I think the discussion was actually in the morning before I went to work, so we weren't even "mildly" drunk! (At least I wasn't...)

Re: on a point of urgent order

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

No, it was when we got back from Doctrah B3cky's whilst scientifically proving that drinking water is a TERRIBLE idea.

NEVER DO IT!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha we seem to be continuing to prove this! MEMORY-LOSS HIJINKS ENSUE

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Yes; Lady Gaga far outweighs The View in terms of "proper grown up credibility" currently. The space occupied by these bands was that between the perceived teenagerhood of emo (which I must write something about one day) and the overt sexuality of emergent electro. Not that people are afraid of sex, frankly but there's a perceived sexy scene for these things whereas crucially, landfill indie had no actual "scene," unlike nu rave and other poo trends, which made it much more commercially viable in the sense of its nebulousness making it accessible and equally totally foundationless.

I think "British public in abandoning a trend once it became obvious that clonealikes were ten a penny" is far from a new story; it happened with boy/girl groups and it happened with nu metal and it happened with Menswe@r and a grillion things before that. The emphasis on historical legacy for these bands' credibility (in our insecure soulseek age where everyone can and must have back-catalogues for authority...) is made even more hilarious than it always was by their failure though and there's a lot of puffed-up panicked deflation to ridiculous overarching supposed continuums (where the fuck am I going with this sentence, indeed) between "glory days" rock that has become canonical and these cvnts. There's all this protectionist bollocks about "this is an insult to The Jam!" (who frankly ought to be insulted but clearly have a lot of related emotion investment in, crucially, the oldish demographic that these bands sold to) because of ludicrous proxying of what were basically karaoke artists.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i've just spent five minutes trying to come up with a counter example, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor is pretty much all i've got though...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No, that one's fair enough I think, that's the "legacy song" here.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

as i'm guessing Take Me Out doesn't count as *late* 00s...

I've personally got a very soft spot for generator by the holloways, despite hating it on first listen (NB this may have been helped by emergence of VW, holloways effectively being the link from VW to the libertines)

[koganbot]

"Monster" is terrific. So is "Drama Queen" by Switches, whoever they are.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

but they're calling it "guitar music" because it clearly can't be called indie.

they should say CORPORATE ROCK and be DONE WITH IT.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

lowest common denominator music.