"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

nabisco, I sincerely mean no offence by this, but this is often exactly how I've felt when reading or talking with people who come from what I'll crassly class as soft-indie/Britpop/goth/80s/new wave backgrounds, including yourself. This is one of the things that drew me to FT/ILM in the first place though.

Anyway, I was listening to Three Cheers the other day and it's glorious non-stop pop energy. I don't know or care if it's this generation's Nirvana.

("Helena" did OK in the P&J singles poll FWIW.)

I do know kids in high school that were fans of MCR's 2002 debut (which was underground to an extent), and four years later the same kids are hardly following any of the mainstream trends, i.e. listening to non-pop music.

This isn't to say that all critics have to understand everything -- that would be pointless -- but there's no reason to go out of your way to avoid engaging stuff.

I kinda have to come back to the professional point here again, which is what Nabisco brought up and which makes sense *for that kind of professional,* and even that professional finds themselves in more limited amounts these days in terms of 'traditional' media. If the majority of music writers out there are (like, dare I say, me) less interested in a full-time job/freelance life than in a participatory but less temporally-invested approach to writing about music, then the active need to 'engage' drops off. It ain't my life to keep up with everything, bluntly put.

I have a hard time believing that any rock act - emo/hc-inspired, whatever - could be this generation's Nirvana. It would be difficult to overcome the advantage hip-hop has in sales and listeners.

*hears MCR*
"Huh. Bleah."
*time passes*
THE PRICKINGS OF MUSICAL CONSCIENCE: "They're mondo huge!"
"Good, very good."
THE PRICKINGS OF MUSICAL CONSCIENCE: "Which means you must listen to them again to better get a sense of things."
"I'll get back to you on that.")

Well yeah, Ned, note my wording throughout: "career journalists" and terms like "would do well" or "it would behoove them." Nobody has to pay attention to anything. And nobody's going to get very far paying attention out of duty. But there's a level on which we make decisions about what we want to investigate, and how receptive we're going to allow ourselves to be to it, and in this case it seems like a bad strategy to go putting up walls.

I also said it's fine if people find it wanting -- just that it might turn out useful or interesting to them to know the stuff. I found it not-worth-attention for a while; then I made a conscious decision to start listening to some and figuring it out; and no, I didn't get all that far, really, and still find loads if wanting -- but I'm certainly glad I know that little bit more about it all. Maybe that's just me, and others find nothing there at all.

The xpost part -- that dialogue involves two very different things, though! The initial reaction was to the music, deciding to be uninterested. The latter pricking is more about trying to figure out how exactly the music is functioning, and what people are getting out of it and what it'll do -- which is, yeah, more ethnomusicological than just critiquing the music, but it can totally totally be of use.

(*) Now this is just an outright lie, because I did have that curiosity, and bought various hardcore albums and just never listened to them BUT STILL.

Yes, except WHY IS THERE ALWAYS ONE WITH A SHITTY PERM??

What I was getting at earlier is that "this generation" has to refer to today's teens -- I still don't really buy the whole "Nirvana : teens of 1990s / MCR : teens of today" argument though.

I just hope she realizes that before long, IT WILL HAPPEN TO HER.

So just to talk about the kind of music under discussion here more generally, here's the thing about these bands. They're the biggest group of white-people guitar bands in recent decades to combine three things -- actually let's say four things. All of these terms are used advisedly, because they're not quite accurate, but let's give it a shot:

- fashion
- earnestness / stylized torment
- hard rock (relatively)
- grand pop ambition

There are a lot of exceptions here -- exceptions to the idea that we haven't seen that combination in a while -- but most of the ones that spring to mind (for me, anyway) seem like some of the main influences on lots of today's bands: Smashing Pumpkins, NIN, etc.

Maybe people should listen to music instead of spending all their time placing it in some historical social context.

It's interesting how on ILM instead of having arguments about a band's authenticity we have arguments about the audience's authenticity.

http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/Nine-Inch-Nails-banned-out-from-MTV-Movie-Awards-2.jpg

http://www.andiemarkoebyrne.com/2005/my%20chemical%20romance325.jpg

Kee-rist, man. Can we not do both?

Kee-rist, man. Can we not do both?

Absolutely not, there's a law against that.

We can do both, but I find the "next best thing" idea to be a bit infantile. Don't you? Isn't this topic basically older guys living vicariously through the rock heroes of today's kids? It's one thing to have idols when we're teenagers, but to look for idols when we're supposedly adults is a bit odd to me. Does it matter what rock band becomes the next Nirvana to the kids today?

From a sociological or cultural perspective, this might be interesting. But I can't imagine mustering more than bland, neutral pleasure from trying to experience it as kids today do.

Anyway, I'm calling MCR = this generation's CCR.

people have niches, that's fine, but niches age too. if MCR falls in your particular row to hoe and you ignore them in favour of similar bands from 10 years ago, that's your prerogative, but you will likely find that the audience for your writing will rise in average age, as well as steadily decrease in size.