A half-formed thought

[meserach.livejournal.com]

So a big part of the story of 00s music was the 80s influence, which has reached some kind of a peak/avatar/godhead status with Lady GaGa I suppose.

SO the logic transition for the 2010s, whatever we end up calling them, is 90s retro, right? Presumably there should already be 90s retro stuff happening now, bubbling under the mainstream but ready to explode out over the course of the next decade.

New Britpop? Another grunge revival? A eurodance/rave-culture revival? Riotgrrl 2?

My thoughts here were prompted by the Blcak Eyed Peas's video for Imma Be/Rocking That Body, which at 10 minutes long and repetition-riffic seems to represent something of a transitional form between 80s-tinged electronica pop songs and dance epics. The BEP seems like a good cultural barometer at the moment.

Anyway uh /braindump, I clear floor now for cleverer people than me to say words.

Comments

[askbask.livejournal.com]

90s revival is def happening, the whole of Alphabeat's new album is just that.

[spazhammer.livejournal.com]

i'm noticing a lot of people going mad when i play old rave and acid house music. maybe its what the kids were being made to listen to when they were babies by their parents...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Gaga is as much 90s as 80s - slamming eurodance beatz and there's even a Human Resource hoovernoise sample lurking under "Bad Romance"

All dance ex-genres exist in states of perpetual suspension in the rave bloodstream but some of the 90s revivalism is REALLY flagrant - "Where Were U In 92" by Zomby, post-dubstep that sounds more than a bit like Warp-era IDM...

Definitely alt.rock revivals happening - more so than strict 'grunge' I think, more Dinosaur Jr than Soundgarden. Or so my contacts inform me, I haven't listened to any of this stuff.

Britpop's clammy clutches have barely loosened or so it feels to me, I'd give it a few more years.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

BTW that should be a semi-colon not a comma between Zomby and "post-dubstep": Zomby is post-dubstep (I think!) but I'm not trying to describe his record in that second clause.

[koganbot]

I have a feeling that I'll be very bad at picking up the signifiers as what counts as '80s and '90s anyway, esp. since '90s British dance music was something I only got smatterings of here and there, not something the unfolding of which I lived through. Also, there's a difference between drawing on something and coming across as a revivalist. E.g., GaGa doesn't come across as a revivalist, even if some of her influences are clear. In '62, '63, '64 Britain a lot of performers were blatantly drawing on mid '50s America, while mixing it into early '60s America. These performers (Beatles, Stones, etc.) didn't come across as revivalists.

I didn't get a strong sense of sociomusical forward motion in the '00s, which means that hearing something now with a Destiny's Child or an Aaliyah sound (for instance) won't necessarily make me think, "Oh, that's from back then," since it won't necessarily sound as if it'd had been superseded or out of play. Or am I wrong? With dance pop in particular, very few people in the target audiences are going to give a damn one way or another what year and in what circumstances the beat and textures apparently originated. When Britney's "Womanizer" came out only a small subset of its audience made much of a thing about the blues-swing-boogie-glam-shuffle-schaffel rhythm it used. (Or am I wrong about that, too?)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Good point on revivalist vs drawing on - even when Gaga is doing actual pastiche, like "Sleepless", she's not coming across as 'reviving' anything in the way that the Zomby album was. But there's a lot of 1990s in the pool of material she's drawing on.

I heard a couple of singles last year and the year before where I very strongly thought, "OK, they're trying for a turn-of-the-00s Destiny's Child sound" (production-wise not so much vocal-wise - something about the hi-hats and the thin harpsichord-y sound DC had on some Writing's On The Wall tracks). Frustratingly I can't remember what they were - one of the Keri Hilson tracks? A teenpop thing? Argh.