Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

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well Tom Ewing has been mentioning a lot lately how his way of getting indie ppl into pop is pointing out the production and stuff and with Timbaland and then the Neptunes, it really was a point in time where pop production was really showy and when the lionisation of the producer finally made a kind of authenticity for manufactured pop.

terrific piece. one question, tho: "white-belt metal"??? what it is???

metal bands from america's "white belt" (kansas, iowa, north dakota)

To be honest, I don't think that "big rap on indie" necessarily had a ton to do with pop at first. Imagine a person who spent the 1990s listening entirely to indie/rock and ignoring pop: toward the end of the decade, it'd be completely plausible to start feeling like the popular indie stuff was drifting in the direction of the quaint and "nice" and ambitious, etc. Plenty of the earlier complaints seemed to come from people who just enjoyed their indie a bit more rock, more noisy or thrashy or trashy. (I also remember feeling, toward the end of the 90s, that things like garage-rock felt sort of ghettoized and marginal, both in the "indie" world and on the punk side.) Consider the reaction that greeted bands like the Strokes, Hives, even like Black Rebel Motorcycle club -- even from deep within the ranks of people who mostly listened to indie, there was a reaction to these bands that was sort of like "oh right, rock stuff." And it seems really telling that those bands were not super-rocking, or anything!

In any case, the "big rap on indie" seemed to come from all different sorts of discontents -- there was the pop thing, yes; also the broadening and eye-opening that came with people getting out and talking on the internet (especially since I think "indie" types have traditionally, by necessity, sorta been big find-a-space-to-talk-about-music types); there were people who'd been in those garagier "ghettos" or listening to Estrus records or who'd always been repping for old skronky-guitar indie the whole time; I can't speak with much authority about punk stuff but I think there were certain fragmentations going on over there that pushed some listeners more over toward the "indie" category (that whole era of very indie-type "emo" has a role here, I think) .... like with any hegemony, I think the popular-indie "status quo" at that point had discontents of all different sorts, for all sorts of different reasons.

My only quibble, nabisco, is with your point of emphasis. In my experience it wasn't so much "Crazy in Love, "Hey Ya," etc that caused the shift in sensibilities as the Internet and its democratizing effect (which you pointed out). I'm pretty sure that "One Sweet Day," "Bedtime Stories," "Un-break My Heart," or any other huge pop hit of the nineties would have penetrated the indie carapace had blogs and websites promoted them.

- sarahel, I agree with you about arm-folding, but the idea was somehow so often used back then that it seemed an appropriate shorthand for that complaint
- sorry for being opaque about belts: white metal-studded belts, once popular in the "emo" constellation, used here to refer generally and vaguely to "emocore" and/or metal from within what they call the "scene," etc.

xpost - yeah Alfred, I totally agree, as above -- I do think the "big rap on indie" was really an issue of self-definition, not that pop got so great it penetrated. (though it certainly helped that pop was, at the time, doing really good stuff in ways that would appeal to indie listeners -- e.g. that point about interesting and auterish electronic production.)

I don't think that's true for the reason I said above, that the producer getting pushed forward and becoming a visible creative entity at the same moment that US pop productions were getting really showy and futuristic made a kind of narrative that indie fans could latch onto that the big pop of the 90's didn't really provide because it didn't break from the "they don't even play their own instruments" narratives

xp to alfred

Really, Alfred? "Unbreak My Heart"? I mean, that's a pretty standard-issue Diane Warren/David Foster pop ballad. No one in indie-world is repping for stuff like that even now. What got indie kids into a song like "Are You That Somebody" is that a) the beat was not straight-forward (like whatever IDM acts they were then listening to) and b) dude sampled a baby crying (like Beck or Cornelius or Cibo Matto).

Where's the evidence that indie kids like songs because they admire what the producer's doing? Just curious.

Pitchfork

Really, Alfred? "Unbreak My Heart"? I mean, that's a pretty standard-issue Diane Warren/David Foster pop ballad. No one in indie-world is repping for stuff like that even now

I was going to pair this with "We Belong Together," which did much to make Carey credible with the kids (to me they're both good ballads; I can't hear what makes one more sonically adventurous or whatever).

I seriously doubt that indie-sters loved "Crazy in Love" because Rich Harrison produced it.

I have a theory that a star like Beyonce was omnipresent, thanks to the internets, in ways that even the likes of Madonna wasn't in HER heyday, so resisting the power of a "Crazy in Love" is pointless, but I won't go into it here.

Since our inception in 1995, we've focused primarily on covering indie music, but over the past few years, we've found ourselves liking a fair bit more pop music. One reason for this might be that hip-hop has all but taken over the charts; another is that the recent prominence of several major innovators (Timbaland, Neptunes, Kanye West, Just Blaze, SK1, Swizz Beats, etc etc etc) has forced competition amongst producers. And that's not only given the sound of the music a complete overhaul, but caused them all to keep fresh, lest they fall out of demand with artists. In short, we feel like there's some overlooked value on the pop charts right now, and we're not feeling much of a need to discriminate-- if the shit's good, it's good.
--Ryan Schreiber, August 2003

It was easier to ignore even a massive hit like "Vogue" because it wasn't shoved into your earhole as a ringtone, YouTube clip, etc.

Rockists! (xpost)

vulva eyes? for some reason I find this phrase disturbing

And if YOU do, imagine me.

sarahel, I agree with you about arm-folding, but the idea was somehow so often used back then that it seemed an appropriate shorthand for that complaint

oh, totally ... this local noise board I'm on had this clusterfuckish thread a while back when someone complained about arm-folding at noise shows. He was a total troll, but it still elicited a response.

Crazy in Love is kinda post-tipping point though, Crazy in Love sounds v. Neptunesy and I remember indie magazines doing Neptunes profiles at the time, which is a very post Timbaland thing. I mean I don't really know what most of the big pop producers of the 90's looked like, but now we're in a position where Like terius and tricky and rich harrison are able to start their own vanity-girl groups, which to me has these echos of Timbaland and Aaliyah and I definitely think that a precedent was set on at least that front.

also stuff like Black Dice's first full length coming out on DFA, and other labels like Warp that were very identified with a very particular strain or scene picking up acts like Broadcast and Grizzly Bear. (I think ppl looking up Label's websites for music clips was a big thing a few years ago and there was a definite peak in label awareness a few years ago, indie labels like Domino getting very eclectic with stuff like Four Tet as well as the Kills/RTX)

I have a theory that a star like Beyonce was omnipresent, thanks to the internets, in ways that even the likes of Madonna wasn't in HER heyday

Beyonce may be more omnipresent (if such a thing is possible) than Madonna, but Madonna captured much more of the public imagination in her heyday, precisely because there was no internet. Unlike today, people didn't have infinite options, thousands of blogs promoting micro-genres, hyper short attention-spans and severely splintered fanbases. Not sure that takes anything away from your broader point. Just sayin'.

Daniel otm

I seriously doubt that indie-sters loved "Crazy in Love" because Rich Harrison produced it.

I don't think that they knew who Rich Harrison was, but I do think that a big part of why indie kids dug it was the big horn-driven soul sample; for as much they ignored a fair amount of contemporary mainstream R&B, they always liked old James Brown and Jackson Five songs.

I don't disagree! But it was easier to tune her out -- that's the paradox. I had plenty of friends in high school and college who had no interest in Madonna and, because they neither watched MTV nor listened to Top 40 radio, heard not a note.

there was also an early decade self-conscious shuffle-ad eclecticism of liking x AND y, whereby two supposedly conflicting elements of ppls taste implied quirkiness or something (hi dere mashups)

Nabisco, how much of indie's popularization do you think was just part of the larger social trend of everybody trying to find and show-off their own niches and quirks? You were touching on it a bit in the article, and I think its worth further thought (maybe in a future piece), is the fact that indie music was part of the larger explosion of a class of people all looking to find and showcase their social status. From Starbucks culture to the Us v. Them Mac ads to, eventually, the "status update" and social networking et al, indie rock seemed to be an accessory to the much larger trend of trendiness.

x-post daniel otm

I'm dancing around it, so I'll just say it: I'm partially reacting to the implication that pop music was suddenly so glorious and producer-driven in the early noughties that Pitchfork just had to sit still and wait so that the marketplace adjusted to IT. I know no one has said this, but that's my suspicion.

i think that led to a reaction against indie where the pick and choose eclecticism that indie seemingly had, now just seemed to take from every other genre and homogenise it with its indieness

I just can't think of any producer more than Timbaland who RIGHT FROM THE START made themselves so visible and I think that that definitely was a turning point.

Cunga's otm too.

maybe it wasn't the music itself but the narrative definitely changed and I think its a bit much to suggest that the internet suddenly meant that ppl heard to 40 stuff

I just had flashbacks to Christgau at 2008's EMP Conference -- "I miss the monoculture"(rueful headshake).

there was a definite peak in label awareness a few years ago

Huh, I would've said this was bigger before this decade -- pre-Internet, one of the easiest ways to filter all the music out there was to get into a particular label, like a Matador or a Kill Rock Stars, and trust that most of what they put out would be pretty good. Now that's obviously not as necessary, and I'd wager that one reason you have a band like Grizzly Bear on Warp is precisely because labels are no longer invested in maintaining a distinct genre-specific identity.

That's true.

that's probably a case of reading my own viewpoint into this, I kinda read the ipodclectecism thing into GB being on Warp, like "hey, we only like super difficult electronic stuff and we get why this indie band is great so there must be something else going on" (this is what I get a little out of the dubstep dropping around the xx too)

That Schreiber piece is a good example, because it's basically him explaining/defending/justifying to an indie audience why a certain type of pop music is worth paying attention to -- if I remember correctly, he also compares "What About Us" to Bjork, which I think gets at what Jaymc is saying. This was a few years into a period where "pop" -- which indie types had previously written off as bland and toothless -- was pretty thoroughly replaced with a form of hip-hop/r&b whose production could be appreciated in a way not so different from listening to IDM records. (Hence the comparison to Bjork, who paired the same kind of thing with vocals.) So yeah, I do think the production was a first draw for plenty of indie types who much more gradually got into the vocal elements, or the different ways to think/talk critically about pop stars, etc. (Another reference point here that's kinda interesting is the first Prefuse 73 record, which got a lot of notice in "indie" circles and was 100% about an auteurish IDMish producer type controlling hip-hop/r&b sounds; interesting because you could listen to Timbaland tracks in similar ways, if you were so inclined.)

One thing I probably should have gotten into in the article is that the idea of mainstream/monoculture has been somewhat splintered (partly because of the internet) during a period where "indie" as a super-flexible category has kinda coalesced even further in certain ways (partly because of the internet). And also that the kind of "discernment" that used to go into finding/liking indie stuff is now a bigger and bigger part of how just anyone finds things to like among all those splintered options.

xpost - yes, exactly, Cunga, totally!

Good article on indie music, BTW. Pitchfork's "decade-in-music" series has been very, very good.

I just had flashbacks to Christgau at 2008's EMP Conference -- "I miss the monoculture"(rueful headshake).

wow was wondering how long it would take someone of prominence to just come out and say this

if I remember correctly, he also compares "What About Us" to Bjork

Yes, and (I just noticed this) "Cry Me a River" to DJ Shadow. Not sure whether that was before or after Alex Ross in the New Yorker called it the most polyphonic pop song in history.

(Ross obviously approaching it from a slightly different perspective, i.e., here's why CLASSICAL fans should care about pop music.)

And was also a total snot about it -- what was that line about Timberlake probably not owning a pen?

Actually, backlash to that article -- in Slate and elsewhere -- epitomized how many walls were tumbling in 2003.

I'd like to think that SFJ's Slate response basically won him the job at the New Yorker, since it demonstrated how insufficient it was for the magazine to rely on its classical critic and on Nick Hornby to write about pop music.

I just can't think of any producer more than Timbaland who RIGHT FROM THE START made themselves so visible and I think that that definitely was a turning point.

Puff Daddy surely (dunno if Dre counts)

that wasn't pop tho

in what world is Puffy not pop

Spice- ?

think Combs became successful and mainstream enough to be able to redefine pop and occupy its territory as much as Timbaland did later, not just by taking hits from the 80s. plus he was more of a pop performer than Timba, what with the dancing background. that shit with Jimmy Page and Foo Fighters tho, yeeow.