Retromania: Pop culture's Addiction to its Own Past. (New Simon Reynolds book).

"Shouldn't you applaud this?"

no

So you're simply not going to get this kind of dramatic hivemindy fanaticism as you once might.

lol someone obviously not familiar with insane internet stan culture

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:11 (45 seconds ago) Bookmark

Keyword here is: internet. Of course you're going to find kindred spirits on the internet.

Maybe it was just the schools in my area, but I remember VERY strong (and rather childish) tribal alignments that could lead to serious social repercussions if crossed.

thing is beneath that layer of super-dedicated types you have a whole bunch, indeed "most listeners", who like and purchase music but aren't actually that fussed about dedicating themselves to a genre or subculture or whatever

its very hard finding people in the real world into grime

"Shouldn't you applaud this?"

no

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2),

Tribalism has its uses, but not when it turns parochial and snobbish (lol high school)

it took me a while to not hate rock music and the fans

fyi it's not actually for you to decide, but instead of focusing on adele why not focus on the obvious precursor to her, a canonical album with as much cross-cultural impact as any of the examples you've listed, ie amy winehouse?

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:13 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

Really? Really? I know she's just died and everything, but...

xp SR doesn't make that mistake though. He's talking about a particular period, not the entire history of music.

let's just call each other assholes

i think you are wilfully refusing to see things you don't want to see at this point, dog latin

what cross cultural impact did she have? the reason shes big news is cos shes a celeb draw and sold a lot of records, ie a big (if unlikely) pop star. and she influenced a lot of terrible artists into being (or influenced labels into bringing those artists into being). other than that i dont really see it. great records but shes just a great original, not someone with wider impact.

x-postage:

FWIW my teenage son just came back from three weeks @ camp w/kids from around the USA and said "everybody was into this music called dubstep"

I think you have to define wider impact, titchy and dog latin. I don't see why Back to Black doesn't qualify.

xp SR doesn't make that mistake though. He's talking about a particular period, not the entire history of music.

― Strictly vote-splitting (DL), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 3:21 PM

This is a fair point i agree...not sure why I typed that, was meaning to say something slightly different re:SR!

Matt DC are you saying nevermind had no cultural impact in the UK or the US? cuz if you mean the UK i guess i'll have to believe you if you say so

but if you're saying the US, you are straight up crazy.

i get the impression that dog latin is way too invested in his flimsy, simplistic and blinkered argument because it'd make him feel better about the fact that it applis to HIM, individually, but i wish he'd stop speaking on behalf of "us" or "society" or "everyone"

i think you are wilfully refusing to see things you don't want to see at this point, dog latin

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:22 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

nb i was 9/10 when nevermind came out and heavily into the charts starting from 1991 but i somehow completely missed "smells like teen spirit", the first nirvana song i heard was the following year, and i had no idea when SLTS sounded like until the late 90s

it was shit

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:15 (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

thing is, yeah pop music will have always have wider impact, its a great era for pop, pop is still big numbers, and a big event, anything thats not so big and mass market however, wont have quite the same cross cultural impact like it previously would have had the chance to.

i think matt's saying that you only get to see which the canon records with cross-cultural impact that inspire millions of copycats are in retrospect, not on the day of release, otherwise the hysteria over something like gaga's album this year would qualify

I've definitely noticed a shift in the last 10-15 years where, say, rock kids wouldn't have any problems delving into electro or drum'n'bass or dubstep or hip hop.

Shouldn't you applaud this?

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:16 (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

I'm def not saying it's a bad thing. I went through hell in secondary school because of that kind of territorial bullshit.

For me, cover art is still very important even if it's only a thumbnail in your Spotify window.

xp But we're not talking about 2011 releases alone. Nevermind was impactful almost right away - you don't need a decade to see which records have cultural weight.

Hope listening services like Spotify will eventually allow for more art from individual releases somehow.

its like dizzees first album, everyone knew instantly it was significant

The mysterious "everyone" again.

http://www.factmag.com/2011/06/20/five-minutes-with-simon-reynolds/

“There does seem to have been a long moment when music had a particular prestige and and it does feel like that moment has passed. Music was a sort of sovereign zone: it demanded the listener’s complete immersion, you were subjugated to the temporality of the Album. Now music is much more about being at our disposal, it’s become convenient, a backdrop to other activities, a space-filler. Music is ubiquitous today in a way that it actually wasn’t in the Sixties and Seventies. It’s in the soundtracks of games and movies, it’s in TV commercials, it’s piped out as Muzak in supermarkets and cafés. We take it wherever we go with our iPods and iPhones. Yet this omnipresence and superabundance has ultimately led to a depreciation in music’s value."

“The other thing is that music had a privileged status where it wasn’t just one option in a range of entertainments, or merged with them in various transmedia combinations. Music was rather the central prism through which all other fields of culture were seen, a glue connecting various disparate zones of progressive culture and politics. Just look at how important rock in the late Sixties/early Sixties sense was to Martin Scorsese – music ran through all his films, with The Last Waltz he created a memorial to an entire era as it was fading out, decades later he did the Dylan documentary. Or look at how the New York artists of the late Seventies were all in bands and saw rock as the power spot of the culture. Rolling Stone was defined by its founder Jann Wenner as being a magazine not just about the music, but all the things and attitudes that music embraced and was about. There was a long moment when there seemed to be hardly any limits to the things that music could be about."

That is completely contradictory and incoherent.

i suppose this is the point i just admit to being old

Basically everyone, from Lex to Dog Latin to SR, is writing their own versions of history, when there's actually a million different histories.

How is it incoherent? It's hardly controversial to say that pop music used to be front and centre of cultural change in a way that it isn't now because there are other equally (or more) exciting, relevant and innovative artforms and technologies competing for that role.

I think the "central prism" thing is more to do with genre fracturing than with any change in depth or impact.

I think there's a bigger vote-split these days (websites, video games, DVDs, multiple TV channels), true, but I don't think music was ever quite the ONLYT thing that defined youth cultures / cultural change. There's always been cinema, fashion, football, etc etc etc (well, as long as there's been recorded music).

It seems a lot simpler just to make the argument that musics value has declined because it is now cheaper..but its a reach to talk about omniprescence and the rest of it (I dont think music is omnipresent at all - and think of people who have for decades have had the misfortune to be hammered over the head with music radio at their places of work for decades)

xpost
and also that now the mainstream is only really host to stuff that fits with the status quo, theres little that challenges it getting in

And singles were WAY more important than albums in the 50s and for most of the 60s.

All you have to do is go back and look at previous decades to see how significant - even revolutionary - pop music was felt to be - how it seemed like the great 20th century popular artform with resonances in cinema, fashion, visual art, literature and so on. It does not hold that position anymore. That's not to say that listener x's experience is going to be any less joyful or fulfilling but SR's interest isn't listener x.

The omnipresence is a side-issue - related but not the cause.

Although having had the misfortune to work in a place with music radio one the other week it certainly felt omnipresent

i suppose this is the point i just admit to being old

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:43 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Uh huh. I guess you could say there's only a relatively tiny moment in the average music fan's life where one has the right to commentate on the musical zeitgeist (if such a thing exists) - between later high school and university* - simply because one has access to the opinions and attitudes of a large number of music consumers. After this people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture. Which is one of the main we seem to be bickering ITT.

*and even this will vary from uni to uni, social group to social group...

The golden age of rockism type stuff always seemed to me to be kind of racist.

xpost what is going on with my grammar/typing todee?

people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture.

dedication to what? dedication to impressions of the musical climate at large?

All you have to do is go back and look at previous decades to see how significant - even revolutionary - pop music was felt to be - how it seemed like the great 20th century popular artform with resonances in cinema, fashion, visual art, literature and so on. It does not hold that position anymore. That's not to say that listener x's experience is going to be any less joyful or fulfilling but SR's interest isn't listener x.

The omnipresence is a side-issue - related but not the cause.

― Strictly vote-splitting (DL), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:50 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

It always surprises me when people are into fashion for fashion's sake. I'm no fashionista and know little about the industry, but I always felt that fashion should be a reflection of oneself - and part of that is the music one listens to. Was the link between music and fashion (and indeed cinema and other artforms) so much stronger before? Has fashion always been this sort of fancy-dress thing where "the rock chick look" will go in and out of style regardless of whether the wearer listens to rock music at all? I guess the cynical view might be that these days a fashionista having a rock star on their arm is the equivalent of a rock star dating a model chick back in the '70s.

I mean going back upthread this is what I don't get why you want things to have some definable cultural impact. Adele has 2.6 cultural impacts and Nirvana had 4.9 cultural impacts?

people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture.

dedication to what? dedication to impressions of the musical climate at large?

― post, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 17:06 (30 seconds ago) Bookmark

General dedication to music. I'm not talking about ILMers here, but how many people do you know whose CD collection stops around the same time they left university?

I mean going back upthread this is what I don't get why you want things to have some definable cultural impact. Adele has 2.6 cultural impacts and Nirvana had 4.9 cultural impacts?

― post, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 17:07 (54 seconds ago) Bookmark

Not lobbying or wanting for anything - this is just the way things seem to be.

Being into music and giving a shit about wider cultural impact are the same thing now?

no, they're getting further and further away, possibly.

I just think that music culture - whatever that is - is more global and less governed or shaped or framed by elites. Of course some people are going to have adjustment problems with that.

no, they're getting further and further away, possibly.

― Post-Manpat Music (dog latin), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 4:12 PM (1 minute ago)

i hope so!

xp Speaking for my racist, elitist friends, I want to say thanks for clearing everything up so eloquently.

post - it's amazing to me that you wish music to live and breathe in such microcosmic isolation. honestly - i have serious trouble getting my head around this, unless all you listen to is the most minimal of minimal music.