Does 'pop' music date?

[soundslike1981]

And in response to your second post...

I'd argue that the search for something 'new' doesn't have to trample all over the past, and crucially, can last, in precisely the manner in which you appreciate post-punk.

I think perhaps analogies with architecture (as interesting as they are), might be a little troublesome here. Music's attempt to be 'new' should reach for lasting qualities, ideas passed down through generation after generation. Similarly with buildings. Evidently, post-war, the desire for the lasting quality aspect of that was kinda neglected.

Oh, trust me, the apparent disconnect between what I love in architecture/the built environment and what I love in (less "functional" art such as) music is something I'm constantly evaluating. It's not an analogy I like to push very far, because I sincerely believe architecure in an important sense should not be art, and that certainly the criteria for evaluation must be very different from music because of the very practical and social concerns which ought to be on the mind of a responsible architecte, which don't as much burden a "fine" artist. But I still think some of the same futurist shortsightedness which can be disasterous in architecture informs some tendencies in music (albeit with much "safer" consequences).

In fact, the need to literally displace/destroy the past in modernist architecture is the primary way in which I justify my "inconsistent" approach to music and architecture. Stockhausen didn't demand all Mozart's folios be incinerated. Corbusier, if he'd had his way, would've razed central Paris; and his American progeny often suceeded in nearly that scale of destruction in order to validate their perversions of "progress" born of their own egos. If Cage had been an architect, I'd probably hate him ; )

I love all kinds of weird shit, and any music-obsessed-geek like us will surely find it hard to really tie a bow around how/why they appreciate what they appreciate. I hate the architectural equivalents of Reich, if there are such things, but I love Reich. I don't mean to act as though I have some unifying theory. I guess I just find something dangerous in the pejorative connotations in a word like "dated".

 

[tatarsky]

I trace the start of the looping process back further than i think you're interpretting it - i.e. back to mid-90s probably. There was plenty to suggest a revival of post-punk asthetics was a good idea. The problem was it was exectuted tremendously badly, as you so rightly state, as it was done in such a superficial manner (i.e. ripping off the sonics/tonality without any of the stuff that made it good in the first place - diversity in particular, cross-pollination with dub, funk, disco, etc - and the IDEA of doing such a thing, which was forbidden previously - we all know what we're talking about here...).

On criticism, I agree with you that over-criticising something can strip it off it's visceral punch. At school, I always hated English, precisely because it seemed to ludicrous that the way to enjoy whatever book was to regurtitate whatever some high and mighty professor had written about the literary techniques employed. Its far more fun if you're left to do that on your own, but i suppose that was what they were encouraging me to do. didn't work though, i barely read a book at all at school, and then got to university and suddenly realised what i missing out on.

The way I approach this over-rationalisation thing now is to recognise that there IS some process going on which is making me like this stuff, and that i can work it out if i like, or i can just get on with enjoying it. Some stuff seems more ripe for intellectual consideration. For example, I absolutely love Rachel Steven's Come and Get It . It took me a while to actually admit that to myself, but when i did, i found it all the more easier to just get on an enjoy it mindlessly. Having said that, I'm pretty sure at the essence of it is this idea of the 'good song' again, which happens to be represented and produced so well by Richard X, but it's not really worthwhile stewing over for too long, else the bones will be picked dry.

Also, criticism of the purest essence of what currently constitutes a 'good song' is pretty much impossible, in that it is very hard to identify what aspect is making it good, unlike with other musical aspects, sonics, texture, rhythm, lyrics, etc. where it is relatively easy. This is why with stuff like Rachel Stevens, I give up on any attempt to intellectualise it too much, and admit that i just, you know, like it. A good song is a good song, it's hard to say much more. But, again, that 'good song'ness is very much defined by its context.

I guess the word 'dated' does have a perjorative meaning... but only when applied to current output, in my opinion. I.e. we should knock something from 1981 for sounding dated. We should expect that and enjoy it on its own terms. But stuff produced today that sounds like it could have been done very easily in 1981 (in a purely musical sense, rather than an attitudinal one) may be rightly mocked for being dated, probably for same reasons that we found the post-punk revival so disappointing.

What I find slightly strange, is that I very much identify my own type of modernist agenda to be similar to that of post-punk proper. How do you appreciate PP without this attitude? (Hmmm.... I suppose FF managed it)

After all, if i look at the records I've enjoyed from this year - Burial, Hot Chip, King Biscuit Time, Junior Boys, Battles, Dubstep in general, all can be argued to be doing something in some sense 'new'. It's pretty clear to me that this is what i value. What records have you been enjoying this year? Could you say the same thing?

 

[soundslike1981]

After all, if i look at the records I've enjoyed from this year - Burial, Hot Chip, King Biscuit Time, Junior Boys, Battles, Dubstep in general, all can be argued to be doing something in some sense 'new'. It's pretty clear to me that this is what i value. What records have you been enjoying this year? Could you say the same thing?

Haha that's the game, isn't it--we almost have to have criticism which takes Serious Positions Rather Seriously in order to keep the game rolling (esp. re: academia) but in the end, we have to admit that "somewhere in the middle" is the truth. And I'm fine with that, if we admit that the productivity of the process of intellectualisation of art is that it keeps us from solipsistic fundamentalism, keeps us on our toes--and as long as we admit that at some point the process ceases to have this worthy, protective effect and becomes a bit of a pretense, an arrogance that imagines we can Know It All and explain it all.

There's something in what you said about something today sounding like something in 1981 that makes me feel ambivalent. On the one hand, whether by training or instinct I imagine even if I heard something that *absolutely spot on* captured the sonic sense of possibility I hear in post-punk--as opposed to some superficial semblances, a skittery bit of guitar, a "disco" beat--I might still be a bit of a snob toward it and reject it as copy-catting. On the other hand--maybe not? For example, I really think the Ex have kept their shit together, managed to retain whatever exciting facets of post-punk they embodied twenty years ago, whilst expanding and even possibly "improving" their sound. Their record from 2004 "sounded" like 1981 in a way, but it didn't bother me--it's a fine line between the aesthetics and the nebulous purpose of the aesthetic that differenciates (in purly sonic terms) aping from embodying, isn't it? Or maybe that's unfair, because the "were there"--well, then I'd say I love the mid-90s output of Dog Faced Hermans, who certainly "sound" post-punk, but had a vitality and excitement that made them seem anything but trendy revivalists (ignoring the fact that it wasn't yet trendy). I guess my ambivalence is this: I'm not convinced that there's something inherently bad about working in an idiom that is ostensibly "out of time," nor is there anything inherently good about newness as avoidance of oldness. In fact, the latter seems fairly immature and, dare I say it, reactionary (even as it purports to be anti-conservative).

Not to take it back to architecture--but to take it back to architecture, I always find it a strange supposition--and it may be the fundamental supposition of everything from the avant-garde of the 10s through today's banal American strip malls--that old forms somehow naturally die. Certainly our technology has changed, our communications have changed--but to put it a bit to simply, we ourselves have not all that radically changed. Our brains are not radically evolved; our emotions are not incredibly different; our bodies still orient themselves vertically when we walk. So the idea that something as ancient as shelter--or music, the rhythm, the sound--should be rendered obsolute if it was created before whatever Year Zero to which we subscribe--it's simply absurd. You're not taking it so far as that, you're not proclaiming "death to all that came before the year I was born"--but the thing is you don't have to. That sort of modernist assumption is now the dominant tradition---and an anti-traditional tradition is innately funny, is it not? That's the thing about fixating on newness--it's exhausting, and all faddishness of 13 year old girls aside, it's not really all that natural. New experiences help us grow; novelty simply keeps us distracted.

So the assumption that anything that is in spirit and form quite a lot (of even "literally" as the modernist architects like to pejoritively say) like something 20 or 70 or 500 years old is innately feeble and slavish and irrelevant--I just don't buy it. We as individuals may see on a scale of limited time; but I don't think the collective human endeavour of civilisation should. Do we really exhaust the full potential of genuinely moving/functioning aesthetics/philosophies so quickly that they should be refreshed every few years, like a coat of paint? Doesn't that render the whole effort rather superficial?

Modernist architects love to talk in terms like "architectonic" and "underlying principles," which unsurprisingly every few years someone/some movement has newly "discovered," unashamed of the irony that such fundamental, essential qualities apparently differ so often. Whether you're talking aquaducts or skyscrapers, orchestral composition or drill'n'bass'n'glitch'n'step, technology can only be a tool, an enabler--it is never the whole story, the subject of the object. And so I just don't think the fact that our tools rapidly change should mean that our attribution of meanint ought to "keep up". In musical terms, it's less dangerous that we may try to "keep up," largely because soundwaves and seconds are not nearly as zero-sum as finite as urban land supplies. But even if it's not the end of the world in music as much as in the built environment--why newness above all else? Or maybe better point, why anti-"oldness" no matter what?

If something came out now that "picked up" where Can "left off" in 1973 or so, and did it just as well--why not? Are those sounds dead, or useful only ironically or self-consciously? I believe in innovation--but I don't really believe there's really such a thing as invention.

I guess we're not so much debating the criteria by which "good" is judged--we both concede those are far too varied and nuanced to boil down--as we are perhaps differing on the criteria by which we determind not-goodness. In a sense, to say that something is "new" is not so much to describe its particular qualities, as it is to say that it is somehow not like other things. And for me, originality is not in and of itself positive," nor is continuity inherently negative. It's not that I don't believe in progress--it's just that I think in architectural terms "progress" was abandoned in favour of the pretense of "newness," as though ex-nihilo. Music has done a better job of being in some way continuous, even if the links are not the aural equivalent of neo-clacissism. Progress is not, and maybe can't be, revolution--if "breaking off" from the past is the central concern, progress is impossible.

As for what I like this year--I'll be honest, I haven't been paying especially close attention. I guess because I've reached a point where the only "new" that matters is "new to me," in terms of my own listening, I'm not especially concerned with what is undeniably just a tiny sliver (even if the "cutting edge" as it were) of the whole 100+/- years of recorded music (and thousands of years of documented/transmitted music). I'll concede I haven't heard anything recently that really excites me, and I don't have the Popularists/Danceist's supply of faith to help me find "the good" in whatever happens to be offered up right now. I'm sure there's great stuff being made--and I'm sure I'll find my way to it sooner or later, since that's sort of what I do: search. But I sincerely believe that I won't really care whether it's "new" when I hear it.

The reasons behind whatever the hell makes me like the music I like are not anything I'd try to defend on some ethical grounds, as I might my concepts or architecture and the built environment. Again, it's a matter of significance beyond self: the music I like/make/buy doesn't much matter because I'm pretty much the only person who *has* to deal with the choices; lots of people have to live with what I do architecturally.

Holy shit is my mind an unsharpened blade. . .