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]

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.