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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Death to intellectuals! Art is not worth analyzing! Let the free market decide everything!
Bravo - you are the perfect Republican consumerist dupe.
It is nice that there are snarky dopes whose whole lives revolve around dissecting the minutiae of every true musical 'artiste' who is supposedly misunderstood and ignored by the music buying public. But some of us have REAL LIVES. We like to pop in some decent sounding music that sounds nice to us and that does not sound self indulgent or way too clever for its own good.
MUSIC WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THE SOUND. Music is supposed to be about enjoyment.
It is like with every field. One can be decent about it, enjoy it, then walk away and do something else.
But there always has to be a fringe element that ruins it for everyone by overanalyzing every last poopie being excreted by some obscure nobody who they swear is the Second Coming. Like the whole Bob Dylan cult for instance...
I got this Brit Box today, bought it from a reseller via German Amazon for half the price that it's being offered on amazon.com for. I find it a pretty party compilation, although I must warn you that the articles in the accompanying booklet are far more outraging than any review written about this Box. For instance, I really don't know what Andrew Perry, who wrote one of the articles for the booklet expects from music. But there he opines that there was basically no good British music between The Beatles and The Smiths and wonders how British pop music could get from Sex Pistols to Spandau Ballet in only 4 years. Ahem... Statements like these are like a slap in the face of many grand British artists from the time between The Beatles and The Smiths like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Roxy Music - to name but few. Except if you're, like obviously the people who worked on this compilation, not into that kind of music.
But then the question is - what kind of music ARE they into? They want indie, but they ignore the crucial years in the development of the British independent scene - those between 1978 and 1984, when this compilation starts. They want pop, but they can't get over the loss of punk and find Duran Duran embarassing. They think that Kurt Cobain is the major reason for the downfall of the British influence on music in the early 90's, whereas the early 90's gave birth to the best known and most influential Brit-Pop bands like Blur, Oasis, Radiohead, Supergrass, Pulp...
I think that the major problem of many British music journalists is that they have this picture of The Beatles in their head and are stubbornly waiting for some new Beatles to come miraculously and fulfill their latently nationalistic, colonialistic dreams of musical world domination. But Beatlemania was not based solely on talented musicians and good songs, it had a lot to do with good timing and circumstances that just can't be repeated anymore. Blind to all the great artists that have been and are emerging from Britain even now almost continuously in more varied genres than these journalists seem to know, they keep wondering what ever happened to British pop music. What? Nothing ever happened to it, its contribution to the global pop scene has been constant over the past 40 years or so.
What makes most British music magazines a very boring read is their constant search for "the next big thing" while big things are happening all around them. Whose fault is it that they only don't seem to fit THEIR idea of good pop music?
reminds me of New York City music writers and their willful blinders. Many NYC writers continue to tout the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, the Ramones, Velvet Underground decades after these bands are no longer relevant or important.
Meanwhile, they ignore a whole world of new great music being born elsewhere. One egregious example in particular is their ignorance of West Coast music achievements and trends.
Decades after Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen, Red Hot Chili Peppers and tons of other West Coast bands redefined pop and rock, New York music writers still flog their marginal, fruity, irrelevant, shopworn New York bands.
Comparing the 80s pop groups of Britain (Smiths, Cure, etc.) to the US underground bands of the same period is unfair and totally misses the point.
Anyone in Britain could have turned on pop radio and heard a song by Echo & the Bunnymen. In the US, however, Husker Du and Black Flag dominated a momentary corner of college radio.
A fairer comparison would be to stack the Brit-pop bands of the period to the US-pop bands that dominated the airwaves (Van Halen, etc.).
Suddenly, Brit-pop sounds radical and dynamic.
In truth,The only thing really more sophisticated about British popular music is that the freaky sounds of the underground have a place at the table of mass popular culture.
America may have the most dynamic unpopular pop on the planet, but we're not really listening right now. Or ever.
Since they have gone to the trouble of identifying my BBC-steeped demographic and our fondness for androgynous musicians in black eyeliner, you think they'd clue into better distribution. This same demographic bought most of the songs two times or more - on tape or LP in the early 80's, replaced with CD later on, and perhaps even later with a download.
If they did it right, I'd be able to go to iTunes, uncheck the songs I already own, and download the rest at a reasonable package price.
The music blogs are already posting their suggestions for "missing tracks", fans of the genre should look around online to discover more music than they will ever find in an amusing phone-booth package.
It's interesting how many readers have taken to side or disgress with Reynolds, on the grounds of a supposely in depth analysis of the box's time frame; but at the core I can only see his dislike for the genre (page one of the article), serving as a rule to judge every song as not hip-hop like (or black enough).
Maybe on a future review we can enjoy another journey into his mind -which is fine, but should find it's way to the article's title or first line blurb- or rather, a judgement based on the merits of the songs themselves, but not for what they are not.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
