Which artists legacies have improved/worsened during the 2010s?

there was quite a bit of ketamine love in the mid-2000s minimal house and techno days. perhaps not referenced directly in the music, but there was a vibe that the two went hand in hand

'wonky techno' and 'purple sound' dubstep

“my baby does k all day”

I have read a whole bunch of claims that ketamine was the big new drug of 2019 which sorta makes sense both thematically and in terms of what i see going on socially, but is also kinda funny given there was a whole sub-genre of house devoted to the drug about 15 years ago.

In terms of ideas and attitudes that have changed:

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour. Very few music critics seem willing to question the sincerity or level of artistic input that the biggest and most powerful pop stars have in terms of making their music or shaping their image. The weird hagiography of Harry Styles in Rolling Stone recently made this particularly apparent to me, and I guess you can contrast it to how much stick LDR was given for being a phony industry puppet at the start of the decade.

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour.

good, IMO

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour.

it absolutely has not, in fact the pendulum has swung all the way back to "if you like pop music you're a corporate shill"

Is it? What about the very next sentence in that post? It’s kind of like a bunch of discerning foodies suddenly head over heels for Burger King and McDonald’s or reading and believing the romance copy on the side of a Triscuit box without an ounce of skepticism.

Xp

What’s there to be “skeptical” about? If the performer and their music is good, then it’s good... that’s all that matters.

It’s some teenager bullsh**, to be all — “This pop star is so manufactured, man...”

Well, to come back to the romance copy part of the analogy, I guess it depends on how invested one is in the story or identity of the performer that they’re putting forward, which obviously varies too.

I can understand fans wanting to “buy into the myth” to a degree, not sure what harm it does. I definitely don’t think it’s the critic’s role to deconstruct the image, or whatever; just review the album.

it absolutely has not, in fact the pendulum has swung all the way back to "if you like pop music you're a corporate shill"

I'm open to this idea, but it'd be great to see some recent articles that back this up.

I'm not sure if not questioning a narrative or idea handed down to you by a huge corporation that aims to make profit for its enormously wealthy owners and shareholders is entirely harmless. I get the sense that people in music media are getting better at being skeptical about the motives and mechanics behind other parts of corporate America (news media, tech companies and private health insurers, for example). But it seems like huge record companies/music PR firms and the artists that front for them don't face the same kind of scrutiny. I concede that these conditions don't necessarily lead to bad art, but I'd at least like to see more of an exploration of the kind of impacts that record-label-backed-celebrity-image-building are having on honest artistic expression, and on how we end up judging the quality or worth of that artistic expression.

“honest artistic expression”?

If you’re judging quality or worth of music via anything but your ears, you’re doing it wrong, IMO

(If what you’re saying is — “Critics should be interrogating why some pop acts are signed & promoted instead of others” — sure, I guess. But you seem to be heavily weighting the scales by describing pop artists as merely “fronting” for the dreaded enterprises of labels & (*shudder*) PR firms.)

This line of inquiry also tends to quickly turn demeaning to pop artists — some of whom are enormously talented (and many of whom are female) — as well as their fans. “Can’t you see that you’re, like, falling victim to marketing??”

Meanwhile, there are also righteous counter-examples held up — either non-pop acts, or a pop act the writer likes who’s somehow “real” and “does it right.” F that noise!

this is not really a yes/no proposition: mostly what has changed is that people no longer draw a sharp distinction between “faceless” mainstream major label music and its alternatives, but by the same token artists whether mainstream or not are typically held to higher standards of both personal and public conduct.

In 1999 it would not make sense to demand a big young pop star to publicly come out against Republicans, because the idea that the political leanings of a big young pop star actually mattered would not have been widely accepted.

As for sincerity, I think this probably matters as much as it ever has, but it’s judged on a case by case basis rather than by reference to what mechanism you use to distribute your music. I’m not exactly sure how successful that is (I’m not particularly keen on sincerity, in the hard sense rather than in the sense of being a sensation that is evoked by good performance, as a critical barometer), but one arguable benefit is that the reflexive scepticism of major labels had a major side-beneficiary in the form of the white male artists who held onto cred-points by being independent no matter how shitty they were. One thing that is definitely the case in 2019 is that clinging to mid-90s notions of worthiness will not protect you from cancel culture.

I think it's definitely worthwhile to investigate what constraints are in there, some kind of constraints exist for most musicians but some can be changed for the better. If stadium rock bands suffered from certain demands (not sure that fans and critics ever questioned these demands much though) then pop acts probably will.

I'm open to this idea, but it'd be great to see some recent articles that back this up.

it's more of a twitter/Discourse thing but it absolutely is there, and is the unstated axiom behind most articles about streaming/THE BIG BAD ALGORITHMS these days

(for a non-music example, there's that medium article about "nerds taking over the world in the 2010s" -- as opposed to them doing so in the 2000s, or in the 1990s, or any of the other decades nerds have taken over and ruined the world according to thinkpieces)

What podcasts would Genghis Khan, Elagabalus, Socrates, Ching Shih, Helena Blavatsky and Henry 8th be on if they just stuck around a tad longer?
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, August 16, 2019 8:08 PM (six months ago)

Ching Shih would be a good chapo ep
― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Friday, August 16, 2019 8:47 PM (six months ago)

Joan Of Arc will be appearing on Joe Rogan after being cancelled for still being buddies with Gilles de Rais.

ebtg