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2006-02-06 23:23:01
From: Blinny
(Chicago)
I was struck months ago by a comment in a James Murphy (of DFA and LCD Soundsystem fame) interview, when he said of the modern music scene:
"There's just so much more to know. Like when I was a kid, there wasn't that much to know. 1985. You had 60s rock, whatever. Easy to get your head around, unless you really wanted to get into, like, Gong. But there were fewer avant-60s bands than there are noise bands now.
There were fewer records to buy. If I wanted to, I could buy anything from the Beatles to, fucking, the Deviants. If you wanted to do that now, you'd get sunk. You get lucky. You get David Bowie, you get T. Rex, you get Suicide. Probably the cream of the crop of rock with very little work. And if you had six friends and they were all kind of into the same music, some of them had older brothers and sisters, you could get a good handle on what music was. I knew who Iggy Pop was as a kid, I was a big Iggy Pop fan, run around singing "Dog Food" when I was eight years old. Like, this is what we listened to. And I also listened to 10cc and Sweet and Journey, you know what I mean? It wasn't all good, but it was well-rounded. Now if you just wanna get your head around hip-hop, you spend your whole life chasing. I think it's difficult, I think it's a lot more music and people forget that."
I've only seriously gotten into music within the last 2-3 years, so I really can't say if this holds up over time. But his point seems to be reflected in the incredible turnover of Big and Important bands that sweep through the blogs and webzines and paper equivalents several times a year. A couple EPs or maybe a nice single or two will cause massive buzz and some sold out small shows in NYC or London. Drop a debut, then tour across the country riding a month or two of hype. Before you know it, it's over and a new group is entering the cycle. If your album was truly great, or a slow burner, you might get another big tour out in that year. It's a fast vicious cycle that, if you're lucky, repeats when you issue your sophomore album. If you hit three good releases, you're damn near an elder statesmen band and you have to start touring with the latest group of underground rock legends to reunite (my bet is on My Bloody Valentine within two years).
And I know I get swept up in this. I was amazed when I saw M.I.A. near the top of the Pazz & Jop survey, since it had been months since I'd listened through her album (like all the cool kids, I much preferred my copy of Piracy Funds Terrorism). And it's not just the hippest band of the moment that you're expected to know. Every MIA review worth its salt name-checked genres like grime, bhangra, crunk, reggaeton and baile funk. So, apparently, if you wanted to understand the somewhat new thing in March 2005 (she had been around since like September of 2004, so it was damn near old news), you'd have to be familiar with: a London rap scene that had only released one widespread album (Hint: The Streets isn't grime) and a moderately known compilation; Punjabi rhythms best known for backing a remix of the Knight Rider Theme; umm... crunk, which you are familiar with (if you're American); a Carribean form of rap rarely seen outside DJ /rupture mixes (oh yeah! N.O.R.E. was huge!); and a Brazilian version of Miami Bass brought to foreigners by Diplo, who isn't even well-known in the first place!
Are people honestly expected to know all this stuff? Is it fair to expect everyone who wants to read a new Post-Punk record review to have the 1979 Factory Records artists memorized? When did there start being so much canon in the world of music?
| 2006-02-07 16:31:45: Eric B.
(Urbana, IL)Is music culture accelerating?
First, it's probably prudent to clarify that by "accelerating", we mean acceleration to a higher degree than what might naïvely be expected - i.e., we mean that the supposed acceleration of music culture is of a higher degree than simply some constant fraction of the acceleration of the population growth of the planet (or rather, of those in situations sympathetic to musical creativity, which, if we assume that the urge to create music is universal, closely approximates the total population).
Second, we should make the important clarification that we're talking about the acceleration of music _culture_, not about the acceleration of music _theory_ or music _production_ or even just music as an entity. If you agree with Kundera's observation that "the history of music has ended" (he gives a compelling case for this in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"), then some of these other music-related enterprises have at worst stopped altogether, at best accelerated no more than what we might naïvely expect.
Now that we've more clearly defined what we mean by the question "Is music culture accelerating?", we can finally begin to answer it. I think that music culture is either accelerating or casting the illusion of acceleration via some power function of fragmentation.
I'll first propose an example of the latter - that of illusory acceleration. Consider reggae. According to the current Wikipedia article on reggae, a few of its "subgenres" are roots reggae, dub, lovers rock, dancehall, ragga, etc. By definition of "subgenre", the set containing "reggae" contains dub, lovers rock, ragga, etc. as well. So a subgenre of reggae is merely a more specific form of reggae - ragga, for example, is really just reggae using primarily electronic instruments.
Music reviews that name-drop such heretofore obscure subgenres, then, perhaps don't imply so much an acceleration of music culture as a general increase in pretense among music reviewers. The same review that compares an album to "reggaeton" may, sacrificing only a marginal amount of specificity, keep the same level of accuracy and greatly increase its accessibility by using "reggae" instead. What we might conclude, then, is not that music culture is accelerating, but that the fractionalization of music's genres is increasing as it has for quite some time and that the pretentiousness of music reviewers is what is actually accelerating.
Are music reviewers pretentious, though? In order for us to consider them pretentious, they must be showing off - they must be disgustingly flaunting something at us, something we don't have (because if we did, to flaunt it would be absurd rather than pretentious) and something we really don't care to have: their knowledge of music.
Now, music reviewers, it can be safely assumed, are likely to know more than the average person about music. They are probably more knowledgeable. So what they're allegedly flaunting is indeed something that we don't have. We're halfway to being able to call them pretentious schmucks! But is their knowledge of music something we don't care that much about? Apparently not: Paper music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin have seen their readership growing lately, and online music review sites like Pitchfork and Cokemachineglow have seen nothing but growth since they began. So it seems people do care about music. And unless the majority of people are masochists who enjoy being made to feel stupid by reviewers who flaunt their immense knowledge, we can assume that most review readers are either reasonably well-informed about music culture or are reading the reviews with a desire to learn more - or both. Either way, we can no longer paint music reviewers as pretentious.
If music reviewers aren't pretentious, their pretentiousness can't be accelerating, can it? And if the pretentiousness of music reviewers isn't accelerating, then music culture itself must be what is accelerating. We've shown, by deduction from a few simple observations, that Yes, in fact, music culture is accelerating.
(Of course, realistically, a lot of music reviewers happen to be pretentious jackasses. I blame this fact chiefly on self-selection - i.e., the types of people who would have the audacity to feed thousands of strangers their own opinion as gospel tend to be pretentious by nature. It's important to note, however, that such jackasses are likely just as or more pretentious in other realms; that is, they're not particularly more pretentious when it comes to music, and so we can discount their influence on the question of whether or not music reviewers, as a whole, are pretentious about music.)
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