shudder said:
Of course, this forum is filled with people a little older than me, so I'm probably just ignorant of all kinds of visionary stuff which paved the way for them, etc.. (which Can album do they sound like? I've been meaning to check out can for a long time now...). Still, I can't quite understand the vitriol with which some people (ILM, Dissensus) hate on them. Does it have as much to do with their popularity amongst indie kids as with the music...?
For me, it has to do with the fact that they seem to serve as a blockade against better music, via the terms by which they are described to/amongst young people. I understand the youthful desire to feel that one is living at the pinnacle of human achievement in basically all fields--to be "where it's at". But it's just a general pet peave of mine to hear young people take that contemporist exhuberance and turn it into broad generalisations about the "greatness" of "their" music, especially in making (usually ignorant) ascertations about the relative merit of "their" music within the context of all music that has ever been made. Sigur Ros is a band that I find musically particularly banal, perhaps worse than generic indie rock in that it purports to be/is viewed by fans as being "so much more" (this may well be the beef against Coldplay, as well--I've never heard them). I've had multiple experiences with young people whom I try to get interested in 50 years of advanced/experimental/cool-as-fuck music, whose ears/minds are essentially blocked with the bizarre notion that Sigur Ros represent the zenith of a progression about which they know nothing--and it's left me a bitter old man ; )
Still--I'm pretty certain that if I made a mix of Can and Faust and Reich and Riley and Cage and Red Krayola and This Heat and Eno and Funkadelic and Stockhausen etc. etc. and attributed the tracks to bands mentioned on Pitchforkmedia.com in the last three months, kids would respond to it more positively than if I told them "this is music made before you were born". Maybe I'm just being the ultimate curmudgeon--but I plan to try it. Because the point for me isn't that "it used to be so much better," but rather that it isn't necessarily always "the best ever"
now--and we should, if we care about music, hopefully listen to the best music we can hear, regardless of when it was made.
None of this ire is directed toward you, I hope it's clear. Something just touched a nerve. My references are probably dated by now--but Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor, all this Constellation/Kranky stuff being sold to kids as "really groundbreaking" rubs me the wrong way, because it's so bloody far from breaking any ground (not even to rob the graves of better music).
As for Can---message me on Soulseek at username manireik and I'll hook you up. They may bring a whooooole lot of music tumbling down at you, but it's a fun ride.
