What the h... is wrong with music today?

[Happy Maudlin]

You don't think Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter, Beirut, Battles, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Islands, Joanna Newsom, and St. Vincent sound original? Please clarify. And of course there's still modern rock radio, in every major US metropolitan area. It's a dying breed, but "mainstream rock" still exists, unfortunately.

Decent music exists. But it is exactly Qvist was talking about prompted me to move away from musical restrictions and basicly musical snobbery. I listen to Abba. I'll listen to BeeGees, Hall and Oates, Lady Gaga (one blasted song mind you), or anything that tickles my fancy at the moment. But what I noticed with myself and musical tastes in general is the fact that I am so excepting of pop hits from previous eras, but not not so much 2009 music. I don't like unsigned indie today because it no longer the music of the future, it a jumbled nostalgic mockery of the past. Why do you think an 80's retrograde and synthpop? (which was once treated with suspicion and maligned with a vengence among rock purists and still is) Because the level of originality, even in unsigned indie artists is non-existent and or low. I think decline in originality happened around 2005. The artists aforementioned are okay according to my tastes.

 

[Worm]

^^

Sounds like a good read, and a logical thesis in this fragmented day and age.

Somehow an incremental swarm doesn't seem nearly as romantic as a sudden wave. The meme is replacing the grand gesture; I guess it had to happen.

If it's just a web meme, I'd be disappointed.

It could be more like the recent Iranian protests, although that might've been a case of "the usual demonstrations" plus Twitter.

Anyway it's still too early to predict where this will take us. Considering various developments in postmodernism, field theory, and technology I think we may soon see a Copernican shift into an entirely different conceptual model of life. In this new model the swarm could be far more effective than the grand gesture. Who knows? It's almost impossible to imagine from where we stand in history.

Can you imagine what would happen if voters rejected the "grand gesture" of Barack Obama and instead focused on their Senators and Representatives-- or even their local reps? "Think globally, act locally" is the related slogan, I believe. They ought to think that way; Obama isn't drafting the health care bill, Congress is. There's a conceptual stumblingblock in there somewhere.

But now we're getting OT.

 

[Qvist]

I'd like to step back a little from the issue of Grand Pop Music as a potential instrument for social and political change, and how it's becoming less possible today, because I think it's not the point. Perhaps it's never been more than a pipedream. What the Sex Pistols for example changed in a key and dramatic way wasn't society, but the way people thought about music. Indeed, politically speaking the whole punk and post-punk phenomenon revealed itself to be an anachronistic non-entity in that regard - mired in essentially hippie values, it ushered in the era of Thatcherism, its very opposite. It affected music and art, politically it was largely irrelevant - and it was Wham! rather than The Pop Group or The Jam which was in tune with the broader spirit of the age, the essence of which was a rejection of 70s style radicalism as a form of government, a type of political ideal, and an esthetic. I seem to remember the anti-70s mood as downright compulsive, a more or less automatic instinct that applied with equal force to politics and pants.

(As an aside - can you imagine a figure more tragicomically mired in limbo than Paul Weller during the eighties, desperately trying to couch a radical message in music seemingly designed for shopping malls? In a final act of irony, Shout To the Top were later to be used in a commercial for exactly shopping malls in post-communist Eastern Europe, with the lyric changed to "Shop 'till you drop" - which must have sounded a lot more appropriate to the music than the original text ).

In these regards, the musical avantgarde was anything but avantgarde -despite the widespread rejection of hippie vapidness amnong post-punk luminaries, it is obvious in retrospect that the distinction in general outlook and basic values was marginal and as such it was the rearguard of a political outlook the eighties would consign to the dustbin of history with finality.

In short, the napoleonic ambition of musicians didn't result in political change, but it resulted in great music. And this is what I'd take as the point of departure - not "is it possible to make music that will shake society to its foundations?" but "Is it possible to make music that truly matters, to more than a particularly interested few?". In the extension of that - "Is it still possible to make music that is so good that it makes music seem like one of the most important things in the world?".

And I simply don't see why it shouldn't. The world may have changed fundamentally, or it may not (personally I suspect well-educated people steeped in the academic primacy of postmodern theory may tend to get a little carried away in that respect). Mankind however hardly has. Passion is still pretty much passion, so is love, hatred, alienation, anger, heartbreak, desperation, hope and the plethora of other phenomena that constitute possible points of significance in the reception of any art form, including Pop music.

Furthermore, I think there's ample evidence over the past two decades that the fundamental possibilities are not radically changed. I didn't think it was much of a jump to go to playlist-based playing of individual songs by acts I might or might not like in general, that was also exactly how the majority of music was played when I grew up and had to rely to a large extent on music taped from the radio and perforce mainly from mainstream shows. For my own part, I also didn't find it much more difficult in the nineties to find bands I would follow from album to album with the same kind of dedication I knew earlier - Current 93, Stereolab, And Also The Trees, Motorpsycho and more. These were bands who did not sound like a pstiche of previous acts and who showed that the possibilities opened up by Folk, Krautrock, Post-Punk and Indie were far from exhausted.

Or from an entirely different angle, take Oasis. Now, we may not consider them a particularly great band, but like it or not - in the mid-nineties they mattered. Their first two albums have increasingly established themselves as an indisputable part of the critically acclaimed canon (such as that may be), and in the mid-nineties the press were in all seriousness discussing whether they or The Beatles were the most significant British band in the history of rock, incredible as that seems now. They did this despite the fact that their music had no originality, their lyrics had no content and Liam Gallagher was a monumental asshole who nobody even wanted to try to identify with. What they did have was continent-sized ambition and a passion that suffused their music (at least on those first two albums). And good tunes. That was enough. It still would be.

The Smith on their side underline that important music does not necessarily need to be formally innovative nor be bound in the iron grip of the general technological, cultual, financial or demographical factors that shape the music industry at large. They weren't especially innovative, musically speaking - they drew on the potential of folk and 60s pop, married to a sort of punk sensibility. They consciously eschewed all the things that normally went into making a career in those days (sticking to the predefined criteria of appeal to specific segments, major label deal, flashy clothes and haircuts, a good video director), and still got through. The reasons seem to me basic. One, pure talent and extraordinary musical ability (in the case of Marr). Two, the ambition and ability to forge something distinctly their own, even without doing it through formal musical innovation. Three, the conviction that they had something important to convey that didn't depend on your demographic profile, or on being present in that precise period of history for that matter. And they were right, it sounds as relevant today as ever. Why, exactly, should something like this be fundamentally so impossible today?

In short, regardless of if and how the world has changed, making important music presupposes ultimately the ambition to reach wide and deep, and the conviction that you have something to convey that matters to everybody because it is human. Universal appeal as an accomplished fact is illusory and always has been, but that is no reason to jump to the opposite extreme of limiting ambition to becoming the darlings of a limited group of people whose needs and tastes you exactly match. Great music doesn't match tastes, it changes it. I fundamentally disagree with you David that insularity is anything else than a negative characteristic. A lot of music I love has a highly insular following (well, nearly all of it, now that I think of it), but I have never regarded this as a good thing. As far as I can see, it must mean either that a lot of people are depriving themselves of or going ignorant of something that could have enrichened their lives if only they made the effort (which is a sad waste), or I like them merely because they appeal to some idiosyncracy of mine - and to affirm that as a positive would seem to me a rather sorry sort of narcicissm that treats music as little more than a prop to one's own enjoyment. Needless to say, I tend to assume that the former is the case.

cheers

 

[Superhans]

Loads of great music still being released, look and you will find it. Old people refuse to accept this because they hate that they are too old to enjoy modern stuff. Losers.

 

[Qvist]

Loads of great music still being released, look and you will find it.

I am looking. But I'm not finding much of it.

Old people refuse to accept this because they hate that they are too old to enjoy modern stuff. Losers.

Really? Not much point in looking then, is there?

And anyway, at least we've grown out of the habit of making silly and simplistic assumptions about what goes on inside other people's heads. Possibly because we're too preoccupied using our own. Perhaps one day you will too.

cheers

 

[Superhans]

Calm down, Grandad. Jeeze, looks like I hit a nerve. Anyway, I'm off to find some great new music because I can appreciate it still...then I might go and play football for a while. Oh, to be young.

 

[anon x]

Oh, to be young.

It doesn't last.

 

[Anaesthesine]

In short, the napoleonic ambition of musicians didn't result in political change, but it resulted in great music. And this is what I'd take as the point of departure - not "is it possible to make music that will shake society to its foundations?" but "Is it possible to make music that truly matters, to more than a particularly interested few?". In the extension of that - "Is it still possible to make music that is so good that it makes music seem like one of the most important things in the world?".

And I simply don't see why it shouldn't. The world may have changed fundamentally, or it may not (personally I suspect well-educated people steeped in the academic primacy of postmodern theory may tend to get a little carried away in that respect). Mankind however hardly has. Passion is still pretty much passion, so is love, hatred, alienation, anger, heartbreak, desperation, hope and the plethora of other phenomena that constitute possible points of significance in the reception of any art form, including Pop music.

A few decades ago, it felt like music was on the verge of being reinvented yet again - the musical underground was wildly in love with emerging technologies. There were new ways to express emotions, with sounds that hadn't been heard before. The excitement came not only from the scope of technological progress, but from the resistance to it.

When I started making music, we were still using analog synths and huge patch bays - you needed miles of cable and a big space to set up and record. Soon afterwards the technology started changing rapidly - it was this development that triggered a sound revolution that was terribly exciting, from an artistic and a conceptual point of view. Pop music was on the edge of a technological shift that allowed people to express themselves in previously unimagined ways. The Sex Pistols did all they could to reinvent attitude, and the next conceptual leap came with the maturing of the electronic revolution presaged by people like Brian Eno.

Passions haven't changed, but the sonic terrain has. We are compressed, filtered, digitized, pitch-corrected and midi-synched to the point where everything has a uniform sound. The problem with pop music today is an overcrowded, homogenized landscape, where ideas and sounds are disseminated at lightning speed, before they have a chance to mature.

The Smith on their side underline that important music does not necessarily need to be formally innovative nor be bound in the iron grip of the general technological, cultual, financial or demographical factors that shape the music industry at large. They weren't especially innovative, musically speaking - they drew on the potential of folk and 60s pop, married to a sort of punk sensibility. They consciously eschewed all the things that normally went into making a career in those days (sticking to the predefined criteria of appeal to specific segments, major label deal, flashy clothes and haircuts, a good video director), and still got through. The reasons seem to me basic. One, pure talent and extraordinary musical ability (in the case of Marr). Two, the ambition and ability to forge something distinctly their own, even without doing it through formal musical innovation. Three, the conviction that they had something important to convey that didn't depend on your demographic profile, or on being present in that precise period of history for that matter. And they were right, it sounds as relevant today as ever. Why, exactly, should something like this be fundamentally so impossible today?

What you are talking about is an incredibly rare phenomenon - the kind of transcendent musical genius that only occurs a few times in a generation. I think it is as possible today as it was in the past. Of course, great bands are as much about luck as skill: Lennon has to meet McCartney, and Morrissey has to meet Marr. Somewhere, this could well be happening.

In short, regardless of if and how the world has changed, making important music presupposes ultimately the ambition to reach wide and deep, and the conviction that you have something to convey that matters to everybody because it is human. Universal appeal as an accomplished fact is illusory and always has been, but that is no reason to jump to the opposite extreme of limiting ambition to becoming the darlings of a limited group of people whose needs and tastes you exactly match. Great music doesn't match tastes, it changes it. I fundamentally disagree with you David that insularity is anything else than a negative characteristic. A lot of music I love has a highly insular following (well, nearly all of it, now that I think of it), but I have never regarded this as a good thing. As far as I can see, it must mean either that a lot of people are depriving themselves of or going ignorant of something that could have enrichened their lives if only they made the effort (which is a sad waste), or I like them merely because they appeal to some idiosyncracy of mine - and to affirm that as a positive would seem to me a rather sorry sort of narcicissm that treats music as little more than a prop to one's own enjoyment. Needless to say, I tend to assume that the former is the case.

I have to disagree. Making great music presupposes nothing about the potential size of the audience, or the scope of an artists reach. A great artist is driven by an irresistable internal vision. A transformative musician must express themselves by being true to an internal voice. The ambition to reach a vast audience, or change society as a whole, or convey a universal human truth is incidental to that initial artistic impulse.

I don't think anyone intentionally limits themselves to a cult following; pop insularity is not the result of a decision on the part of an artist, it is a decision reached by the audience itself.

When the underground went mainstream sometime in the '90s, it presaged something very good, and something rather sad. The good part is the increasing tolerance and sophistication of the general pop audience. The sad part is the loss of an artistic incubator - an unseen, isolated place where new sensibilities can develop away from the maddening crowd.

 

[Qvist]

Calm down, Grandad. Jeeze, looks like I hit a nerve. Anyway, I'm off to find some great new music because I can appreciate it still...then I might go and play football for a while. Oh, to be young.

Yeah, you did hit a nerve, my aversion to brash stupidity. Here's a piece of advice - you can be a loudmouth and you can be an idiot, but it rarely works well to be both at the same time. Enjoy your football.

Oh. Wait. You were joking?

cheers

 

[Worm]

Great post, Qvist.

I'd like to step back a little from the issue of Grand Pop Music as a potential instrument for social and political change

I can't really argue with your account of the history of those years. What you've said seems pretty close to the truth. However, my position would probably focus on a couple of things which would integrate the fertile period of the late 70s with the horrors of the 80s ("the sudden menace of Spandau Ballet", as Paul Simpson put it recently) instead of saying one replaced the other. First, even the lonely, "pure" artistic voice can shape larger movements, even when those movements are entirely commercialized. Simon Reynolds did a great job in "Rip It Up And Start Again" of bringing to light how a few new voices with a few new ideas altered the landscape of pop, even if the final version morphed out of control into Thatcher/Reagan-friendly shopping soundtracks. Second, I don't think it's fair to characterize punk and post-punk as having "ushered in" the era of Thatcherism. As we're seeing here in the States at this very moment, intense right-wing politics occur as a reaction to a threat from the left, and you can be sure that the more hysterical the right-wingers are behaving, the more menacing the left must have been to their worldviews. In my opinion, Thatcherism (and Reaganism over here) did not obliterate or roll back the artistic and social gains of punk/post-punk, they simply barged in as a counter-weight. In both the U.S. and U.K., there are two parallel histories in the 1980s, not one. Punk/post-punk provoked a reaction that pushed them further to the margins without destroying them.

(As an aside - can you imagine a figure more tragicomically mired in limbo than Paul Weller during the eighties, desperately trying to couch a radical message in music seemingly designed for shopping malls? In a final act of irony, Shout To the Top were later to be used in a commercial for exactly shopping malls in post-communist Eastern Europe, with the lyric changed to "Shop 'till you drop" - which must have sounded a lot more appropriate to the music than the original text ).

Tragically hilarious-- and fitting. Weller wasted himself for many years.

And this is what I'd take as the point of departure - not "is it possible to make music that will shake society to its foundations?" but "Is it possible to make music that truly matters, to more than a particularly interested few?". In the extension of that - "Is it still possible to make music that is so good that it makes music seem like one of the most important things in the world?".

Exactly. In my original post I said the same thing. Ultimately politics are secondary to the music. The Smiths and the other bands I loved did seem universal. "Universality" is indeed illusory, as you say, but there was more to it than my subjectivity. Just by the nature of the marketplace music was made by, and for, "gangs" of people (as Johnny put it in '84). If you showed me your record collection, I could probably guess who your friends were and what you did for fun; similarly, if I knew who your friends were and what you did for fun, I could most likely tell you what records you had in your bedroomm.

Today that's not the case. When I spoke of "ambition" I meant ambition within pop music, which includes politics but only within a wider arena of fashion, art, social values, and so on. Whether it was Morrissey wearing a hearing aid on Top of the Pops or Wham! wearing "Choose Life" t-shirts, I think the fundamental basics of the culture fostered a belief in upcoming bands that they could come out with a flashy statement and unite a large section of the populace toward a common goal. Let's be honest, usually that goal was to put cash into the pockets of the musicians. I don't for a second believe these ambitions weren't tainted by greed, stupidity, and folly. The point is that pop's power to unify was taken for granted. Maybe the unity wasn't literally universal, but certainly there were a plurality of tribes each unified by a strong aesthetic and social code. We've lost that. And though talking of society and culture sounds too abstract, I do believe that ultimately the shift is reflected in the music.

Mankind however hardly has. Passion is still pretty much passion, so is love, hatred, alienation, anger, heartbreak, desperation, hope and the plethora of other phenomena that constitute possible points of significance in the reception of any art form, including Pop music.

I disagree with this but don't see any need to blab further about it.

I grew up and had to rely to a large extent on music taped from the radio and perforce mainly from mainstream shows.

But there was still a bottleneck shaped by critical taste or the conditions of the market. You had a playlist on your cassettes but you were still seated in front of your radio, tape deck rolling, along with a few thousand others listening to John Peel or whoever. Similarly the expansion of your record collection relied on reading the music press, listening to radio, going to gigs, and sometimes physically walking to a record shop to browse the aisles (or you got tips from friends who did these things). Your consumption of music wasn't prescribed or monolithic, but it still revolved around the central hub of the music industry. It's grown much more diffuse and compartmentalized now.

Also, I think the very form of MP3 files has changed consumption. Music, already pretty disposable, is much more so now. But again maybe that's outside the purview of the present discussion.

Or from an entirely different angle, take Oasis. Now, we may not consider them a particularly great band, but like it or not - in the mid-nineties they mattered.

Isn't Oasis a pastiche of previous bands?

Oasis was a simulation of a good band, not a good band. I know, I know: spot the difference. They released good material and, yes, for a time they "mattered" in the 1990s. No denying that. It was just indie rock's Indian summer, that's all-- we've gotten more Indian summers since then and we'll have more still. The fact common to all these bands is utter sterility. To me, Oasis made some decent records, but when I think of true artistry they are not, in my opinion, much different than The Jonas Brothers are now. They appropriated the looks, gestures, noise, and attitudes of previous bands in order to satisfy the demands of the marketplace for "rock and roll" music.

Again, don't misunderstand me: I like some Oasis songs and I wouldn't run screaming from the room if they came on at a party, as I would with the Jonas Brothers. I'm talking solely about the animating creative impulses behind the bands. Noel Gallagher has real talent, sure, but ultimately his shrewdest skill was curating a living museum exhibition in which his brother was merely the most lifelike of rock and roll props. Oasis does not illustrate how empty and vapid the current scene is. Rather, they illustrate how agonizingly close the current crop of bands is to the great bands of the past. No matter how good they are, something's a little off.

Why, exactly, should something like this be fundamentally so impossible today?

Excellent description of The Smiths.

I don't know if it's "impossible" for such a group to exist today, but I think it's very unlikely. There are many reasons for this, but first and foremost might be the exhaustibility of the form. How much can you do with guitars, bass, and drums in today's world? How many different combinations can you come up with? How many ways can you mix your influences together to make "new" music? The Smiths came along at a time when it sounded fantastically fresh to merge punk, 60s pop, and folk. To sound so fresh today, after The Smiths-- and after the bands influenced by The Smiths-- is much, much harder for any band that still uses traditional instruments as the basis for their sound.

What we've seen is that the "traditional" indie bands burst forth and flare brightly for about an album or two and then vanish into the night. The Strokes, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and so on all more or less fit the bill. My point is not that these bands are bad, necessarily, merely that they can't sustain themselves creatively as older bands once did. They're the pop music equivalents of fruit flies: born in the morning, dead by the evening. Ten years from now we'll be able to scrape together about two dozen absolutely cracking numbers from this decade from all the bands I mentioned-- but we will not have the great bands or the great albums we had in the past.

As I keep saying, I don't know if that's a bad development. The listener of today and tomorrow might be more like Morrissey-- people with highly sophisticated, catholic tastes who can cherry-pick their favorite songs from the entire history of music, popular or not. Each listener forms a gang of one (thanks Bradford!) instead of joining another gang. Perhaps this is healthier and we no longer need pop groups to unify us. Perhaps we do. But here we get back to questions of human nature.

 

[Superhans]

Yeah, you did hit a nerve, my aversion to brash stupidity. Here's a piece of advice - you can be a loudmouth and you can be an idiot, but it rarely works well to be both at the same time. Enjoy your football.

Oh. Wait. You were joking?

cheers

It's definitely got to you a lot, you bitter old man. It's quite sad to see a fully grown adult get so angry over such little things. It's almost as sad as a person who constantly lives in the past and thinks that everything was better 'back in my day'.

Oh and putting 'cheers' at the end of each post is a bit weird. It doesn't really make much sense does it?

 

[Worm]

Another great post. This thread has spawned some good ones!

Passions haven't changed, but the sonic terrain has. We are compressed, filtered, digitized, pitch-corrected and midi-synched to the point where everything has a uniform sound. The problem with pop music today is an overcrowded, homogenized landscape, where ideas and sounds are disseminated at lightning speed, before they have a chance to mature.

Exactly.

Lennon has to meet McCartney, and Morrissey has to meet Marr. Somewhere, this could well be happening.

It probably wouldn't happen. Morrissey would be a music blogger and Marr would be a DJ. And they'd only have email between them, just like they do now.

I have to disagree. Making great music presupposes nothing about the potential size of the audience, or the scope of an artists reach. A great artist is driven by an irresistable internal vision. A transformative musician must express themselves by being true to an internal voice. The ambition to reach a vast audience, or change society as a whole, or convey a universal human truth is incidental to that initial artistic impulse.

I disagree with your disagreement. Whether the ambition is pure idealism or simply a knowledge of the way the industry works, most artists starting out back in the day had some notion of carving out a wider audience for themselves. They may have thought they'd have to create their own audience from scratch, or steal existing fans, but one way or another they felt their music could reach people and unify them. Of course "universality" isn't an accurate word to use; as I stated in my post to Qvist, it's more accurate to say that there were many "tribes" of fans rather than one mob of listeners.

In other words, maybe these bands didn't start playing gigs thinking they'd break big and sell millions, but they might've thought they'd reach out and capture the loyalty of thousands of fans, at least. To take one example from many, Echo & The Bunnymen and U2 have usually been lumped together in history as "heirs of Joy Division" who came on the scene right around 1980. Yet their careers took wildly divergent paths in 1983. The Bunnymen released a difficult album, "Porcupine", while U2 exploded internationally with "War". The Bunnymen (so they say) didn't care about U2's newfound success nor did anything to court a larger audience. They scorned U2's triumph. Even so, the Bunnymen had and wanted to keep a following of their own, a passionate and loyal fanbase who kept them afloat. Ian McCulloch certainly had his own version of Bono's egotism, as he displayed a year later with "Ocean Rain". All I mean by "ambition" is this desire to reach and unify a group of people within the larger population of music fans. The Bunnymen wanted to sell a hundred thousand LPs, U2 a hundred million: the basic impulse is the same. As I hear them, groups today are content to write music for the individual listening on her iPod.

 

[Qvist]

It's definitely got to you a lot, you bitter old man. It's quite sad to see a fully grown adult get so angry over such little things. It's almost as sad as a person who constantly lives in the past and thinks that everything was better 'back in my day'.

Oh and putting 'cheers' at the end of each post is a bit weird. It doesn't really make much sense does it?

Well, you see, quite a lot of people tend not to find being loudmouthedly and offensively stupid "a little thing". Perhaps you'll realise at some point. but you're right, why get angry? I'll simply ignore you instead. I'll happily spare you the cheers as well.

 

[Superhans]

Well, you see, quite a lot of people tend not to find being loudmouthedly and offensively stupid "a little thing". Perhaps you'll realise at some point. but you're right, why get angry? I'll simply ignore you instead. I'll happily spare you the cheers as well.

Some people can also simply argue against the opinion of another person without calling them 'stupid' or 'loudmouthedly' (whatever that may mean?) but there we are.

 

[Anaesthesine]

I don't think it's fair to characterize punk and post-punk as having "ushered in" the era of Thatcherism. As we're seeing here in the States at this very moment, intense right-wing politics occur as a reaction to a threat from the left, and you can be sure that the more hysterical the right-wingers are behaving, the more menacing the left must have been to their worldviews. In my opinion, Thatcherism (and Reaganism over here) did not obliterate or roll back the artistic and social gains of punk/post-punk, they simply barged in as a counter-weight. In both the U.S. and U.K., there are two parallel histories in the 1980s, not one. Punk/post-punk provoked a reaction that pushed them further to the margins without destroying them.

Thank you for defending the honor of (post)punk.

Only the most egomaniacally deluded rocker would assume that their actions have any direct influence on political events (I'll always love John Lennon for that, always).

Politics doesn't react directly to art, nor can it undo the good that art does.

When I spoke of "ambition" I meant ambition within pop music, which includes politics but only within a wider arena of fashion, art, social values, and so on. Whether it was Morrissey wearing a hearing aid on Top of the Pops or Wham! wearing "Choose Life" t-shirts, I think the fundamental basics of the culture fostered a belief in upcoming bands that they could come out with a flashy statement and unite a large section of the populace toward a common goal... The point is that pop's power to unify was taken for granted. Maybe the unity wasn't literally universal, but certainly there were a plurality of tribes each unified by a strong aesthetic and social code. We've lost that. And though talking of society and culture sounds too abstract, I do believe that ultimately the shift is reflected in the music.

Excellent point.

There are many reasons for this, but first and foremost might be the exhaustibility of the form. How much can you do with guitars, bass, and drums in today's world? How many different combinations can you come up with? How many ways can you mix your influences together to make "new" music? The Smiths came along at a time when it sounded fantastically fresh to merge punk, 60s pop, and folk. To sound so fresh today, after The Smiths-- and after the bands influenced by The Smiths-- is much, much harder for any band that still uses traditional instruments as the basis for their sound.

A common sentiment. This was what I was getting at before, with the digital revolution that many of us have seen in our lifetimes. This was the latest (and maybe the last?) time that a great synthesis of profound musical inspiration and entirely new ways of expressing the resulting sound blossomed.

The next sound is out there, somewhere.

It probably wouldn't happen. Morrissey would be a music blogger and Marr would be a DJ. And they'd only have email between them, just like they do now.

Oh, you always say that.

In one way, yes, blogs impinge on coffee houses, bars and clubs, but in another way they are bringing like-minded souls together.

Let's try look at the bright side.

I disagree with your disagreement. Whether the ambition is pure idealism or simply a knowledge of the way the industry works, most artists starting out back in the day had some notion of carving out a wider audience for themselves. They may have thought they'd have to create their own audience from scratch, or steal existing fans, but one way or another they felt their music could reach people and unify them. Of course "universality" isn't an accurate word to use; as I stated in my post to Qvist, it's more accurate to say that there were many "tribes" of fans rather than one mob of listeners.

The topic is great pop music, not average pop music. Years in the industry have taught me that most average/good bands form when someone wants to get laid. The notion of being popular and carving out an audience is certainly part of why most people want to form a band. It is not, however, an essential component of pop musical genius.

The greatest pop composers of our time have a voice inside their head that is unlike any other. They draw on the past for inspiration, but that voice is unique and undeniable. They would express themselves if their only audience was a few freaks in a basement somewhere. The ambition to unite an audience is secondary to the formation of timelessly great pop music in my humble, old-school, performance art opinion.

In other words, maybe these bands didn't start playing gigs thinking they'd break big and sell millions, but they might've thought they'd reach out and capture the loyalty of thousands of fans, at least. To take one example from many, Echo & The Bunnymen and U2 have usually been lumped together in history as "heirs of Joy Division" who came on the scene right around 1980. Yet their careers took wildly divergent paths in 1983. The Bunnymen released a difficult album, "Porcupine", while U2 exploded internationally with "War". The Bunnymen (so they say) didn't care about U2's newfound success nor did anything to court a larger audience. They scorned U2's triumph. Even so, the Bunnymen had and wanted to keep a following of their own, a passionate and loyal fanbase who kept them afloat. Ian McCulloch certainly had his own version of Bono's egotism, as he displayed a year later with "Ocean Rain". All I mean by "ambition" is this desire to reach and unify a group of people within the larger population of music fans. The Bunnymen wanted to sell a hundred thousand LPs, U2 a hundred million: the basic impulse is the same. As I hear them, groups today are content to write music for the individual listening on her iPod.

A nice observation.

In other words, music is no longer unifying and "grand" because the ambition of the artists themselves has shrunk, in every way. Formerly we had visions of a great album - a complete collection of songs - that would speak to a large swath of the listening audience about this time and place.

Now we have playlists on ipods, and an artist is consumed one song at a time, lumped together with other artists in a kind of curiosity cabinet of sound, where there is no unifying theme other than passing the time in the subway, or while grocery shopping. Presumably current pop artists look no further than the next three minutes.

I think that may be a little unfair. Someone like, say, Arcade Fire have a great, idiosycratic voice and grand ambition to boot. They are a wonderful, successful pop band. The Decemberists (although I really can't listen to them) are terribly ambitious pop artists as well. Still, I don't think either of them are timelessly great.

The shrinkage may not really lie solely in the ambitions of the artists, but in the ambitions of the audience as well.

 

[fuckfrankie]

Qvist,

great, thoughtful post. it made me feel very nostalgic for the music of yesteryear. ya know, back in the day? Oasis, now THAT was a band that did it's own thing! the mid-nineties....boy, there was a great music scene!

 

[Worm]

Politics doesn't react directly to art, nor can it undo the good that art does.

I think we agree. I tend to side with the belief that art has a big, if indirect, impact on politics.

In one way, yes, blogs impinge on coffee houses, bars and clubs, but in another way they are bringing like-minded souls together.

Oh no! I wasn't bashing blogs. I imagine Morrissey's blog would be as wildly entertaining as Perez Hilton's.

I mentioned Morrissey as one possible ideal model for the new music listener because I've always felt his point of view as a fan was in many ways as revolutionary as his art. To listen to his pre-show mixtape is to receive a glorious education, is it not? In the new dispensation maybe Morrissey writing a blog would send just as many shockwaves through the culture as "Hand In Glove" did in '83.

No, I'm not joking. But I may be referring to a world that doesn't quite exist yet.

The topic is great pop music, not average pop music. Years in the industry have taught me that most average/good bands form when someone wants to get laid.

Haha. Too true. You're right, the big bang we're talking about is the sort that happens in the cosmos, not the back of the van.

It is not, however, an essential component of pop musical genius. The greatest pop composers of our time have a voice inside their head that is unlike any other.

Their motivations are a mix of these and still others we haven't discussed. Wider ambitions to make a splash in the culture may be only one of several motivations, but it's sort of essential. Though it's still round, flat, and doughy, a chocolate-chip cookie isn't the same if you remove the chocolate chips. As I said about Oasis, the difference may be a small one. A band that wants to (in this order) get laid, do drugs, score riches, "rock like f***", write good songs, and change the world is a somehow vastly different, in most cases, than a band that wants to get laid, do drugs, score riches, "rock like f***", and write good songs.

Or, to put it crudely, if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

In other words, music is no longer unifying and "grand" because the ambition of the artists themselves has shrunk, in every way. Formerly we had visions of a great album - a complete collection of songs - that would speak to a large swath of the listening audience about this time and place.

Now we have playlists on ipods, and an artist is consumed one song at a time, lumped together with other artists in a kind of curiosity cabinet of sound

Snip!

You were fine up to here.

where there is no unifying theme other than passing the time in the subway, or while grocery shopping. Presumably current pop artists look no further than the next three minutes.

I wasn't suggesting this part. You're right, it would be unfair to say this.

Nobody today records music thinking they want to be the soundtrack to someone's grocery shopping trip. Far from it. What I meant by trying to reach the individual listener is a matter of numbers, not the substance of their goal as artists. It's just more casual now. I think the usual line is something like, "We just want to make music that we like and get it heard by some people, that's about it". That's if they answer you at all. More likely it'd be a bemused shrug. Whereas Paul Simpson once said he wanted to make music that sounded like "screaming gulls falling from the sky with their wings on fire". His latest (excellent) single, "English Electric Lightning", finishes with the line, "All the kingdom's quiet now and I can't stem the tide alone". You will hear no more anachronistic line in pop music this year than a confirmed romantic talking about his despair over not stemming the tide. Most artists today accept the tide without so much as a sigh.

Someone like, say, Arcade Fire have a great, idiosycratic voice and grand ambition to boot. They are a wonderful, successful pop band.

No argument about what kind of music they're trying to make, but I will say they're unusual. As many critics noted, their ambitions made them stand apart (they were channeling the old U2, I read many times). Also, when you say they're successful, I concur in a limited sense-- artistically and commercially they've made it-- but they've had little impact on the culture as a whole. Compare their success to R.E.M., Guns 'N' Roses, or Public Enemy in the late 80s. None of those bands "took over the world", but each drove a wedge straight into the middle of pop culture that couldn't be ignored. So, really, Arcade Fire is an exception to my complaint that no bands are ambitious anymore-- but, then again, they illustrate the larger point about the changed pop landscape in which even a good amibitious band pops like a firecracker instead of an A-bomb.

The shrinkage may not really lie solely in the ambitions of the artists, but in the ambitions of the audience as well.

True. And why have their ambitions shrunk? The're not any less tasteful and intelligent. The world has changed, that's all. This is the crux of the debate: are the changes good or bad? I really don't know the answer.

 

[oye terence]

I am quite pleased with a lot of the new music coming out these days, if I wanted to be cynical or sound my age, I could say it does not give me that same burst of feelings music once had, or that it is nothing new, but I do not.
I could spill out at least 10 or more albums this year that have been released that I love just as much as I loved some album or group I loved when I was 18 (1994).

Then again, I never looked for it to have to really matter in any social way like say music may have in past generations, or be revolutionary, I just enjoy good pop music.

 

[Qvist]

Thanks for interesting points Anaesthesine.

Passions haven't changed, but the sonic terrain has. We are compressed, filtered, digitized, pitch-corrected and midi-synched to the point where everything has a uniform sound. The problem with pop music today is an overcrowded, homogenized landscape, where ideas and sounds are disseminated at lightning speed, before they have a chance to mature.

OK, but why are artists letting themselves be homogenised? There's no law that requires musicians to use pitch-correction, and if they find it stands in the way of their music becoming what they want it to be, what's stopping them from simply dispensing with it?

What you are talking about is an incredibly rare phenomenon - the kind of transcendent musical genius that only occurs a few times in a generation. I think it is as possible today as it was in the past. Of course, great bands are as much about luck as skill: Lennon has to meet McCartney, and Morrissey has to meet Marr. Somewhere, this could well be happening.

Oh, I agree. I don't expect a Smiths every decade. My point was more that the things that made The Smiths great are, as you say, still possible.

I have to disagree. Making great music presupposes nothing about the potential size of the audience, or the scope of an artists reach. A great artist is driven by an irresistable internal vision. A transformative musician must express themselves by being true to an internal voice. The ambition to reach a vast audience, or change society as a whole, or convey a universal human truth is incidental to that initial artistic impulse.

I don't think anyone intentionally limits themselves to a cult following; pop insularity is not the result of a decision on the part of an artist, it is a decision reached by the audience itself.

Isn't the point rather in what the internal vision consists? If their own words are to be believed, more than a few great musicians and groups have set out with a pretty clear and articulate idea of what they want their music to be. Sometimes that idea is purely musical, more frequently it seems, at least in rock music, it has additionally included such things as attitude, politics, social connotations or even (Ziggy Stardust comes to mind) pure theatrical manipulation. Pop music has always been about more than just music, and I disagree that this is incidental to it. In some cases, it has even been the music that has been incidental, to artists who weren't even musicians in the first place and for whom music was essentially just another tool for artistic expression. I'm not talking of a well-thought out marketing strategy or music consciously designed to fit a certain group. A great artist may be driven by an irresistible inner vision, but it is not in fact this vision which constitutes his art. His art is constituted by successfully transforming this vision into something that is accessible to other people, and that process is not after all automatic or purely derivative, and nor does it consist of that inner vision alone. I doubt that great music can be created without its creator having the ambition to make it great, and if he does, doesn't he implicitly also regard it as something that ought to mean a great deal for a large number of people?

Your point about the impact of audience choice is well taken. But I doubt it's a one-way street, and at any rate the only ones who might change it are musicians?

When the underground went mainstream sometime in the '90s, it presaged something very good, and something rather sad. The good part is the increasing tolerance and sophistication of the general pop audience. The sad part is the loss of an artistic incubator - an unseen, isolated place where new sensibilities can develop away from the maddening crowd.

I'm struggling to get your point here, or at least I'm not sure that I do. Do you mean that by getting too much attention too quickly, musicians fail to develop?

cheers

 

[Qvist]

Great post, Qvist.

I can't really argue with your account of the history of those years. What you've said seems pretty close to the truth. However, my position would probably focus on a couple of things which would integrate the fertile period of the late 70s with the horrors of the 80s ("the sudden menace of Spandau Ballet", as Paul Simpson put it recently) instead of saying one replaced the other. First, even the lonely, "pure" artistic voice can shape larger movements, even when those movements are entirely commercialized. Simon Reynolds did a great job in "Rip It Up And Start Again" of bringing to light how a few new voices with a few new ideas altered the landscape of pop, even if the final version morphed out of control into Thatcher/Reagan-friendly shopping soundtracks.

Funny you should mention Reynolds' book, because reading and thinking about that has probably had a fair amount of influence on my line of reasoning here. I did not mean to juxtapose post-punk and 80s pop fundamentally. As you say, there were a few new voices but the reason i named Wham! was that they weren't one of them.

Second, I don't think it's fair to characterize punk and post-punk as having "ushered in" the era of Thatcherism. As we're seeing here in the States at this very moment, intense right-wing politics occur as a reaction to a threat from the left, and you can be sure that the more hysterical the right-wingers are behaving, the more menacing the left must have been to their worldviews. In my opinion, Thatcherism (and Reaganism over here) did not obliterate or roll back the artistic and social gains of punk/post-punk, they simply barged in as a counter-weight. In both the U.S. and U.K., there are two parallel histories in the 1980s, not one. Punk/post-punk provoked a reaction that pushed them further to the margins without destroying them.

Sorry, that was clumsily expressed of me. I simply meant that what followed 5-6 years of mostly intensely left-wing post-punk was it's exact antidote. This was in no way The Pop Group's fault, rather I think it signifies that while these bands captured the spirit of the age musically, they were politically anachronistic in the sense that the spirit of the time in society at large was clearly moving in the opposite direction. Frankly I doubt that it played any significant role whatsoever in provoking the turn to the right.

Exactly. In my original post I said the same thing. Ultimately politics are secondary to the music. The Smiths and the other bands I loved did seem universal. "Universality" is indeed illusory, as you say, but there was more to it than my subjectivity. Just by the nature of the marketplace music was made by, and for, "gangs" of people (as Johnny put it in '84). If you showed me your record collection, I could probably guess who your friends were and what you did for fun; similarly, if I knew who your friends were and what you did for fun, I could most likely tell you what records you had in your bedroomm.

Today that's not the case. When I spoke of "ambition" I meant ambition within pop music, which includes politics but only within a wider arena of fashion, art, social values, and so on. Whether it was Morrissey wearing a hearing aid on Top of the Pops or Wham! wearing "Choose Life" t-shirts, I think the fundamental basics of the culture fostered a belief in upcoming bands that they could come out with a flashy statement and unite a large section of the populace toward a common goal. Let's be honest, usually that goal was to put cash into the pockets of the musicians. I don't for a second believe these ambitions weren't tainted by greed, stupidity, and folly. The point is that pop's power to unify was taken for granted. Maybe the unity wasn't literally universal, but certainly there were a plurality of tribes each unified by a strong aesthetic and social code. We've lost that. And though talking of society and culture sounds too abstract, I do believe that ultimately the shift is reflected in the music.

We have the same understanding of "ambition" then. You put more emphasis on the social aspect of music than I do, and you're probably right to. Growing up out in the sticks in Norway, that part of it wasn't really available.

I disagree with this but don't see any need to blab further about it.

OK, so maybe passion isn't still exactly the same in some senses, but the main point is that great pop music has always engaged essential human needs, and essential human needs exist today just as much as they did 30 or 50 years ago.

But there was still a bottleneck shaped by critical taste or the conditions of the market. You had a playlist on your cassettes but you were still seated in front of your radio, tape deck rolling, along with a few thousand others listening to John Peel or whoever. Similarly the expansion of your record collection relied on reading the music press, listening to radio, going to gigs, and sometimes physically walking to a record shop to browse the aisles (or you got tips from friends who did these things). Your consumption of music wasn't prescribed or monolithic, but it still revolved around the central hub of the music industry. It's grown much more diffuse and compartmentalized now.

I see your point, and it fits within your general theme of the disappearing unity. But you know, I still find that the expansion of my music collection relies on browsing aisles, reading and getting tips from friends. There are so many more resources available of course, but has it changed that fundamentally? I don't really think so. And again, also the old conditions fostered, at least in my case, a mode of listening to music that revolved to a large extent around a few tunes of diverse origin that didn't necessarily imply any particular dedication to the acts in question. If anything, the restricted availability encouraged it. If you found a tune you liked, you couldn't afford to turn your nose up at it just because it was made by Billy Ocean or whoever.

Also, I think the very form of MP3 files has changed consumption. Music, already pretty disposable, is much more so now. But again maybe that's outside the purview of the present discussion.

Well, a C-60 tape was pretty disposable too. But all in all, you're right of course. I just wonder if there's a danger of ascribing too great a significance to such factors.

I've been called long-winded before, but this time I actually managed to break the maximum post length. The rest to follow in separate post.

cheers