Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

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.

How much of indie's embrace of pop music has been a result of the rise of popism among music critics in the late 90s/early 00s? It seemed like the argument over rockism/popism was everywhere, and critics were talking about a golden age of pop music as early as 1997 or 1998. I don't remember Pitchfork in its earliest incarnation embracing teen-pop (or teen culture), but statements like Ryan Schreiber's seem indicative of a general shift in music criticism that had become prevalent by the early part of the decade. I also think Pitchfork's rising status as a music taste-maker has been one of the defining stories of the decade, and wonder how much of the news coming out of that site and the discussion that surrounded it actually contributed to creating a zeitgeist.

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.

i like everything said here, but "all those splintered options" is something i'm growing more and more skeptical of as time goes on. the indie/blog world might have at first seemed like it was coming from all sorts of directions, with an unprecedented amount of styles covered by different blogs and places, but it occured to me while reading end-of-the-year lists at a bunch of blogs i frequent that by and large everybody listens to the same albums. there's some variation of course; the odd outlier, a hip hop blog here and there, but if things are going to coalesce any time soon it would be nice if they splintered a bit more first. seems things didn't splinter so much as split.

nah I think the fact that you can easily find a blog about any given micro-niche-subgenre is indicative of the splintering, it just depends on what you pay attention to. Personally I'm something of a magpie and am happy to dip in and out of psych rock blogs or dub blogs or hip hop or Pitchfork or Arthur or whatever. Its all out there. And it is an incredibly striking contrast to my (and I presume Nabisco's) youth when you really had to make an effort to kind of connect the dots about various scenes and actually hunt down specific types of bands/music.

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.

― jaymc, Wednesday, September 16, 2009 5:25 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah "Crazy In Love" really came out at the height of super-producer-mania that was in some ways one of the few big songs that wasn't by an established producer -- I'd loved the Kelly Rowland and Amerie singles he did the year before but I didn't really know his name or know who he was until "Crazy In Love." In fact, I remember when it first came out someone on ILM was all "oh this must be Kanye" and it drove me up the wall that like 3 different times Ryan from Pitchfork credited Scott Storch as the producer of the song, it was almost like people couldn't deal with the beat being done by a (relatively) unknown producer.

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.

― plax (I know, right?), Wednesday, September 16, 2009 5:17 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is full of crazy, btw. "Crazy In Love" sounds like what the Neptunes were doing at the time, like, even remotely? Aaliyah was a vanity project for Timbaland and not the established act that helped make him a big deal?

this whole talk of producers becoming superstars in the pop world seems like a follow-on from hip hop, which was the genre where I first really started paying attention to who produced what in the late 80s/early 90s. It wasn't until rap ate hip-hop that this phenomenon of the producer-as-star became mainstream.

I mean in the early 90s I would totally snap up anything that had Prince Paul or Sir Jinx/DJ Pooh/Ice Cube or Premier's name on it

Yeah but indie ppl are big on Spector and Meek too; producer-as-auteur is a very rock-geek thing. So it's a helpful screen through which to view/hear other stuff too.

^^^^^^^^

I wrote a lot of boring stuff on the Electrik Red thread about my own sense of how/why "indie" kids got into R&B so much, with the whole love affair peaking in 2003 and slowly dropping off since then.

To my mind it was a partly about "interesting sounds" geekery, but also a lot about (as I think jaymc mentioning upthread) people being able to reconnect the Neptunes/Harrison/Timbaland circa 2002 sound to the popular soul and funk they liked, and also their own ideas of "golden age" hip hop. Everyone I knew at university owned the first Jurassic 5 album, though mostly not the EP; everyone idolised Public Enemy and De La Soul and they were belatedly catching onto Outkast and had very little idea about any other Southern rap whatsoever. In 2001 a guy I knew was DISGUSTED that I had made Ja Rule's "Living It Up" single of the week in my local paper; within 2 years he was dancing to Snoop's "Beautiful" and Missy's "Work It" and, of course, "Crazy In Love", which was definitely the great unifier of that time in a way that surpassed even "Hey Ya" - I certainly still here it more at parties.

It was interesting to me to note which singles were just incomprehensibly big amongst these types. This guy I worked with who listened to Radiohead and then a lot of folky kinda stuff came in to work one day enthusing about "Milkshake", he couldn't stop singing it. Then of course he fell in love with "Hey Ya", but it was his "Milkshake" obsession that surprised me more.

In comparison to that, I think the "oh wow this Timbaland production sounds like Mouse on Mars" thing was an earlier and much smaller-impact phenomenon, if only because, well, how many indie types even were that into Mouse on Mars?

Nabisco, I thought your piece seeded things well - appropriately "up" in tone and energy at the start, which is warranted for a subject with no clear answers and an impossibly over-invested audience - but you retreat into equivocal/rhetorical observance, and that (always drives me nuts but who cares) excuses you from having to really say anything. E.g. "I'm not here to make predictions." You have the tools and the knowledge to make predictions, editorialize, invest yourself, even direct dialog, yet shy away from any clear stance. Loved the second graf and the sophisticated boom-boom one (*ahem*), but I want more life, fucker.

some italicized profanity, at least

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.

― plax (I know, right?), Wednesday, September 16, 2009 5:17 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is full of crazy, btw. "Crazy In Love" sounds like what the Neptunes were doing at the time, like, even remotely? Aaliyah was a vanity project for Timbaland and not the established act that helped make him a big deal?

― --nicci mane (some dude), Thursday, September 17, 2009 12:40 AM (15 hours ago)

I should clarify because what I said comes across as more retarded than what I meant, I think that the producer vanity project does seem to echo a lot of the sentiment espoused by Timbaland at the time about Aaliyah being a "probe" or whatever. I'd be the first person to disagree that this is actually how it worked at the time, but I get the feeling that the producer/singer relationship he was describing is definitely one that Rich Harrison was trying to get at with Rich Girls (I mean, he called them after himself). Also I think those sweaty over stuffed retro-futuristic Neptunes sounds were definitely a precedent for Crazy in Love (but yeah, Kanye and Scott Storch moreso)

I didn't really notice Crazy in Love being this big epoch defining thing, mainly because I liked Work It Out way more and Crazy In Love just sounded like watered down version to my ears (this is probably why I'm overciting the Neptunes as an influence on CIL as well)

by the way as someone who was concurrently listening to Black Dice, Prefuse 73, the Books and top 40 RnB/Pop, jaymc is consistently hitting the button on the head for me, and I think around 2003-4 I was prime Pitchfork real-estate so... (I didn't have the internet at the time tho..)

I dunno...in 2003 the Neptunes were just starting to flirt with horns and more overtly 'live'-sounding production, but it was still a pretty far cry from the big brassy sample-driven style of "Crazy In Love" -- I mean, compare it to the Beyonce single they did a year before, "Work It Out," which is technically kind of a retro funk/soul thing but is still so stiff and wonky and thoroughly Neptunes, in some ways worlds away from "Crazy." Funny thing is, Kelis was probably as much or more a 'puppet' of her producers -- in terms of who wrote the songs and all the lyrics on her early records -- as Electrik Red or Rich Girl, but she stamped enough of an identity on it that most people never really looked at her that way.

xpost ha

xpost Yeah, more than six years later, I'm still trying to figure out how much of my own suddenly revived interest in Top 40 in early 2003 was because my tastes were naturally widening as I got older (i.e., I no longer felt compelled to define my musical identity as narrowly as I had in college), how much was because I happened to discover ILM that year (and encountered surprisingly intelligent defenses of pop), and how much was because of all this general sociocultural stuff we've been talking about.

I just want to clarify that I don't think Kelis is more or less a puppet than the Rich Girls either, just that the terms of the narrative seem derived from some of what Timbaland was saying a few years ago wrt Aaliyah which would also appeal to indie fans as has been pointed out because it does echo the whole Brill Building production lines of sixties pop that are basically indie pop's old testament.

The dynamic I find interesting here is the one nabisco singles out: a return to pop as a reaction to the "niceness" of mainstream indie. There's a lot wrapped up in that, including racial stuff of the typical kind in the history of pop music (r&b as "other" and hence "rebellious"). But it's not just that: nabisco rightly points out that it's not just pop that's contrasted with the "nice" indie, but also the noisier indies. And that's interesting because it was this was in the early 90s too, though even then the noisier indie had niceness at its core in a way that the newer noises don't seem to. I'm thinking of Superchunk and Dinosaur Jr. which were arguably folk rock bands who could still rock the fuck out in a way that the Byrds never pulled off; of the fact that Smashing Pumpkins got just as much play on Headbanger's Ball than 120 Minutes in the Gish era at least, but still covered Fleetwood Mac.

I'm thinking of Superchunk and Dinosaur Jr. which were arguably folk rock bands who could still rock the fuck out in a way that the Byrds never pulled off;

what??? dude neither of these two bands are "arguably" a folk rock band.

In fairness, anything can "arguably" be anything else as long as your argue strenuously enough; accuracy has nothing to do with it.

yeah but both translate surprisingly well to acoustic mode, which i guess counts for something? (xpost)

hmmm. yeah, but i'm trying to think of any band that plays electric guitars who if they played their songs on acoustic guitar wouldn't translate well? a good song is a good song

MBV? (lol)

well my emphasis was on the "surprisingly well" part, don't think i would've been into the idea of Superchunk acoustic versions or J Masic solo acoustic stuff until i actually heard and enjoyed them

In fairness, anything can "arguably" be anything else as long as your argue strenuously enough; accuracy has nothing to do with it.

in response to this, everyone can look forward to this afternoon, when i shall start a thread suggesting that Justice Scalia is really a woman under those robes

what??? dude neither of these two bands are "arguably" a folk rock band.

"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Louis Armstrong never heard Animal Collective, did he?

I think that stuff like MIA, Gang Gang Dance, Dirty Projectors and Discovery are definitely the product of the 2003 crossovers. I read an interview with the guy from Discovery where he talks about how when he went to college, everyone in his dorm had subwoofers and you just had this real novelty with big basslines, it was also with you know, napster that ppl didn't have to pay for big pop singles which a lot of ppl would have thought beneath them, but that doesn't mean they couldn't blast Justified in their dorm rooms (I used to go to an indie club in college that still plays Ignition remix every night).

Like, I know that that Crazy in Love thing was pretty short lived as indie's love affair with the mainstream, but its influence has definitely lived on and introduced a lot of sounds into indie music that might not have crossed over otherwise.

"Crazy In Love" was probably just the apex of Beyonce happening to have a huge huge impossible to ignore career, though. Even Pitchfork reviewed The Writing's On The Wall years before that!

I just can't see that particular song "introducing a lot of sounds into indie music," or into anything really, though. It's just an uptempo R&B song with driving percussion and horn blasts! There have been dozens of hit songs like that for decades!

That was also the same year as Justified which was making a lot of indie magazine's top ten lists and also 2003 was the year of Sound of the Underground which got a lot of cred on this side of the pond and Girls Aloud seemed to make their manufacturedness seem subversive, also Slave 4 U and Dirrty in the preceding two years meant that the three disney club members were getting all growed up and adult and it seemed to make pop this dirty tarnished thing for adults as well (also, pop wasn't just stealing producers from the hip hop world but also some of its music video imagery)

I just can't see that particular song "introducing a lot of sounds into indie music," or into anything really, though. It's just an uptempo R&B song with driving percussion and horn blasts! There have been dozens of hit songs like that for decades!

― cee-u-en-tee (some dude), Thursday, September 17, 2009 5:25 PM (51 seconds ago)

I just meant, that that moment of awareness kindof made it more acceptable to cop some moves from the mainstream

Yeah there was definitely some degree sea change right at that moment -- I'd loved the R&B-leaning songs on the last 'N Sync album and was really anticipating Justin's solo stuff, but when he showed up on the '02 VMA's doing "Like I Love You," all my college friends I was watching it with were kind of mocking him and snorting derisively; a year later I was at a party with most of the same people and we were all listening to Justified and loving it.

well i was snorting derisively because of his usher-urkel dance moves

in the context of where R&B had been prior to 2003, and why it had garnered critical plaudits for YEARS before that, "crazy in love" was not notable for its production at all: R&B had had so much written about how hyperfuturistic and cybermodern blah blah blah it all was, and smack in the middle of this comes this unashamedly retro blast which seemed more designed to imprint beyoncé's personality & pipes on the public. this is in contrast to songs like "addictive", "oops (oh my)", "what about us?" etc - obv i think truth hurts, tweet and brandy are all unique and distinctive artists in their own right, it was very easy for non-r&b fans to dismiss them as anono-divas (and certainly in the case of tweet and truth hurts, their career bore this out).

the way Justified was received as this proper album was funny especially as looking back now it seems really patchy.

Yeah I mean -- I felt embarrassed for the guy, it was not a very good debut performance for the song or his solo career. But I was rooting for him, my friends weren't. (xpost)

i loved all of justin's singles from the off, pretty much, but the moment i was completely won over was when this emerged:

http://i.rollingstone.com/assets/rs/11/3861/images/00316226_lg.jpg