Paul Simon isn't Paul Simon because of Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints. He is Paul Simon in spite of them. See, he used to be in this groundbreaking duo called... oh nevermind.
Can we
please get through a thread without kow-towing to the Smothers Brothers?
I went to hear... I can't even remember their name... oh, She Wants Revenge (I didn't choose that gig, someone else did) and had to laugh. The audience was full of relatively-intelligent looking young people who were really into the music--music that sounded like you took Depeche Mode, Joy Division, and early-to-mid-Cure and mixed them in a blender. Their pastiche is so well-researched that the lead singer affects a British accent while singing. They're from LA. The audience was enthralled. They don't know the difference. I had more fun watching the kids in the audience than listening to the music.
Ironically, the word "revenge" has additional echoes of a certain second-rate New Order knockoff-- Peter Hook's "Revenge". She Wants Revenge thus sounds like a
third-level imitation.
One thing about your anecdote: you liked the music, right? Nothing you'd drive your car over a rug of newborn kittens to get to, but it wasn't bad, right? Music you enjoyed?
Anyway, I think we need to intsitute the Jack Black test. Jack Black is a fiend for rock and roll, as we all know. Even granting that a lot of it is a character he plays named "Jack Black", the guy seems genuinely, rabidly, incurably passionate about rock and roll. The Jack Black test would simply be, could you imagine an imaginary, ideal, Platonic Jack Black wigging out, playing air guitar, snarling fiercely, and worshipping at the altar of, say, Arcade Fire or The Killers or The xx or She Wants Revenge or Grizzly Bear?
And do I hear the lineage and nuance of influence between various 60s bands? No, not really. I grew up hearing them all mixed together on "oldies" stations.
The word "oldies" is supercharged with scorn, isn't it? Just like the word "hippies". "Oldies stations" were like those Time-Life "Sounds of the Sixties" compilations you'd see on VH1 commercial breaks. I used to hate them passionately, especially the two awful wannabe Cheech & Chong hippies selling box sets out of the back of a plastic VW bus parked in a TV studio in Burbank. There weren't enough bullets in the world for those two idiots.
Now, when I saw those guys, it was the middle-80s, maybe 1987. I was wrinkling my nose at music made about 20 years earlier: The Byrds, for example (a cool band I now have a moderate liking for, by the way). That music was so remote to me it might have been made by little green men on Mars. Inbetween the hippie Sixties and my time the world saw the outbreak of metal, glam rock, disco, punk, post-punk, rap, and that glorious wave of "tuneless Euro fags" who flooded America in the John Hughes Eighties. At the time I was already into The Smiths, who seemed like a reaction against all of that and a new chapter in the history of music. Being confronted with The Byrds, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane felt like picking up Virgil after a year of reading William Burroughs. Remember the notion of "hoary rock dinosaurs"?
I don't think I was unusual in my dislike of the past. It was a silly youthful prejudice, I admit; the fact that later on I would like some of the bands I hated as a snotty teenager isn't the point. The point is that my attitude was pretty common among every generation of music fans. The new was better than the old, and the old felt like another world entirely.
To put that in perspective, then, for a 15-year old kid in 2010, that would mean that, say, Nirvana or Depeche Mode (in "Violator" heyday) would have about the same historical distance as The Byrds once had to me. "Live Aid" would be what Woodstock was for me. The ludicrous fashions of '82 and '83 would be comparable to the disgusting hippie attire of the Sixties. That early-synth sound would ring in the ears like mono acoustic guitars rang in my ears.
I think it's obvious today's 15-year olds don't have that kind of prejudice.
In fact, you could very easily see how today's 15-year olds are
more sophisticated. Instead of sneering at the past, they embrace it. They're listening to four or five decades of rock music, without prejudging it, picking and choosing the best of the best. One week they can explore 60s garage bands. The next they can get into early New York hip-hop. The next it can be the vibrant Norwegian black metal scene. The next it's the music of the Harlem Renaissance. All of this can be done almost instantaneously, too, with the magick of downloading.
The question is, what kind of music are these 15-year olds going to make? Can we listen to the music of the last ten or fifteen years and start to get some idea?
What seems to be a possibility-- I'm not saying this is a fact, only a possibility based on a lot of what I've heard-- is that newer artists are making quality music that feels more like the work of museum curators rather than passionate artists. It's not "big" music that's pushing pop into new realms, but rather re-hashing the past, even when there are brilliant results. The xx and Micachu and The Shapes, for example, sound like that to me. Good music, cleverly done, obviously put together with taste, brains, and love of art. And for all that it still sounds trapped in the past, almost a hypnotic enslavement to the history of music.
From this one could re-visit my statement above about the supposed "sophistication" of our imagined 15-year old and perhaps conclude that this "sophistication" is a mistaken interpretation made by an older observer. To me it looks like the knowledge and tastes of the younger generation are much wider and more intelligent than mine. But what does it look like to them? We touched on this idea yesterday: I can put together a playlist of my favorite Morrissey tracks, as Qvist does, because I have listened to and absorbed his entire back catalog in a particular way. The situation is quite different for a listener who has not heard the entire back catalog and, for various reasons, ends up picking out the obvious highlights and lets the rest slide into oblivion. It is extremely hard for us to imagine what it's like to encounter this music from the perspective of someone who grew up with computers, iPods, MP3s, and so on.
It's because I can't see out of their eyes and listen out of their ears that I've tried to analyze the current music scene with as much objectivity as possible. I realize there's no way to 'win' the argument-- in reality, the only way I can be proven right is to wait until 2019. By then, when the "Best of the Decade 2010-2019" lists are full of bands that sound exactly like the "Best of the Decade 2000-2009" bands, it will become obvious that we've got a problem on our hands.
Anesthesine's posts are always so excellent.
They certainly are!
