It’s OK. Pop music isn’t broken.
by Everett True
I just want to pull out everything Lucy says in the comments and run it in BLOCK CAPITAL LETTERS across the brows of a thousand dullard male indie music ‘critics’. FUCKING YES! The following is taken from the commentary around my rather facetious ‘statistical’ analysis of why Arcade Fire are crap.
Lucy Cage: I refer you both to Hannah Golightly’s excellent and kick-up-the-arse-y article about getting re-illusioned with modern music on this site. There’s loads of extraordinary and extraordinarily varied music being made now: oh my god, it’s SO much better than the dreary, laddish 90s! And crap sold out Wembley then too, only it was crapper crap. Crapper crap even than Muse. Yes, really.
This talk of reverence and inheritance worries me. The idea that you should shut the fuck up because your progenitors haven’t yet been accorded their rightful due is so damn paralysing. You mention punk ethos, but punk was never nostalgic. Or overly bothered about what was owed or deserved.
C’mon, these are exciting times! Teenage indiekid hearts are being lost RIGHT NOW to the soundtrack of 2011, to Braids and Cults and Lykke Li and Deerhunter and Metronomy and TuNe-YaRdS (shit, I did that wrong, didn’t I?) and Austra (pictured above) and Let’s Buy Happiness and probably even Odd Future. They will hold that music as dear as you held yours, and rightly so.
It’s OK. Pop music isn’t broken.
That Austra link, incidentally, leads to just about the finest piece of music criticism I’ve read this year.
And there’s another one, too. Taken from the response to Wallace’s passionately argued Odd Future article.
Lucy Cage: Nah, we like the arguing, thanks. I think the point is that there are blogloads of hipsters out there creaming themselves over these kids and their shock tactics, the same hipsters that the kids are quite consciously baiting and mocking. It’s not the band themselves that the original article is taking issue with, it’s the fawning acceptance by (predominantly white, middle-class) music writers hoping to hop on the bandwagon, and the fact that nothing, not even songs about violent rape, is shocking or offensive anymore.
I dunno, but that seems like an interesting state of affairs, doesn’t it? Isn’t worth at least having a debate about?
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