That the 2000s has seen more summations and analyses than possibly any other decade so soon after it ended is indicative of the massive shift in the power of communication we have seen. Liam McLaughlin talked to music critic Simon Reynolds about how this has affected music, and what it might mean for the future. Read more »
There is a famous possibly apocryphal quote, variously attributed to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Miles Davis, which says that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. Indeed, no matter how flowery the language used to describe music, it is impossible to convey the actual experience of it with words alone. No amount of elaborate metaphors or similes can recreate the sound of music or the depth of feeling it gives you. But then, those guys probably didn’t read anything written by Simon Reynolds.
Since the mid 80s, Reynolds has been writing for a wide variety of music publications about a wide variety of music, including indie, r ‘n’ b, jungle, hip-hop, grime, techno, dance and dubstep. His lucid and erudite insights into the world of music serve as an enlightening companion to the music itself, but it is his contagious enthusiasm for it which actively encourages you to get out of your armchair and into the shops. Applying academic structure to vibrant and passionate writing, I could think of no better person than Simon Reynolds to question on the legacy of the 00s and what it can tell us about the future of music.
I could think of no better person than Simon Reynolds to question on the legacy of the 00s and what it can tell us about the future of music.
The 00s is the first decade where I have been consciously aware of the whole thing. I remember hearing Kid A, Boy In Da Corner and Funeral when they were released; I remember not bothering to go to see Lily Allen for free before she got massive and I remember when I downloaded my first song from Napster. Many of these landmarks of the 00s have been the results of revolutionary changes which have taken place in the wider world; think MP3s, blogging, MySpace and accessible recording facilities. So why, when there was a massive increase in the amount of music produced during the 00s, does Simon think that, as he wrote in a recent Guardian article, compared to the 60s, the 00s saw far more good music, but far less great music?
“The idea started with a thought I had when running my eye over the Pitchfork ‘Top 200 Albums of the 2000s’, which was that once you got past the top 30 or so of the list, and went further down, it started to seem like a subtle indictment of the decade. Like you could take those albums as evidence in the case for the prosecution of the 00s. But it wasn’t because the music was bad; on the contrary a lot of it was very good, and every so often one of my own favourites would pop up at Number 61 or Number 137. It was more to do with a sense of inconsequentiality. In an equivalent list of the top 200 albums of the 60s or 70s, I think far more of the records would have seemed consequential in the sense of having an impact on the times, or defining the times.”
I agree and it seems to me that the most obvious reason for this fall in the relevance of music is that the stuff released during the 00s hasn’t had time to become significant as the media are so intent on glorifying things as soon as they come out. Consider the hyperbole surrounding The Strokes in 2001 or The xx in 2009; with no retrospect, how can anything being lauded as great maintain the level of hype and success it initially received? With this added pressure along with touring commitments and record label demands, many bands who ‘make it’ on the first album can end up being panned for the rest of their careers like Interpol or The Killers. Simon’s take on why music’s consequentiality seems to have disappeared is far more detailed than my own though.
“There are all kinds of reasons you could speculate on for why this has ceased to be the case. Maybe it relates to the reduced centrality of music in popular culture, the fact that it’s not the leading edge or power spot, or that it’s simply been around too long; become too familiar. Or that all the most striking stylistic and formal leaps were made, necessarily, in the earlier decades, and now we’re well into a phase of consolidation and recombination. But the one I focused on in that Guardian post was the idea that music’s just spread too thin; there’s too many people making it, there’s people from the preceding generations/eras who have hung on in there, and more and more younger people coming forward, and as a result it’s simply harder for any given band/record to pull around itself an audience substantial enough where the group’s journey – the trajectory from record to record to record – seems to be consequential.”
This vision of musicians struggling to carve a niche in an overcrowded area is weirdly tragic. The effects of populist movements like punk and grunge have finally manifested their adverse repercussions on the generations who grew up listening to them. Opening the floodgates of music seemed a great idea at the time, but now with the musical saturation we’ve seen during the 00s, its value is being lost in the depths of the flood. No wonder bands are becoming more and more esoteric in an attempt to stamp their uniqueness onto reams of mundanity. Despite the proliferation of good music, Simon is right; there is much less great music around now, and the volume of ‘good’ music, whilst of course being ‘good’, has simply by virtue of its sheer quantity, carved an overarching 00s legacy of unexciting and lackluster music that I hope won’t be carried into this decade.
But then again there are other genres of music which came to prominence in the 00s which have arguably achieved greatness and are definitive of the times, whether that is due to ingenious pioneering or simple novelty. Two particular styles which come to mind are the underground British movements of dubstep and grime. As a longtime champion of both genres since they were in their embryonic stages, I ask what Simon thinks explains their social-class defying success over the past decade, especially when fighting against the sheer volume of music that’s out there. “That’s rather a big question! Well, have they defied class? Grime had to really tone itself down to get to the top of the charts. Dizzee (Rascal) pretty much had to separate himself from the grime scene and from grime sonix to become the big mainstream pop star that he is now. For most people in the UK, grime in its pure form is a bit too abrasive and too much a reminder of a segment of urban youth they find scary. Gangsta rap from the States can seem exotic because it’s so far away, but grime reminds people, I think, of hooded youths on buses playing noisy distorted music on their mobiles. It’s a little too close to home.”
But dubstep is surely more adept at crossing class boundaries? At raves you can see middle class private school girls dancing with working class wideboys; the music linking their disparate lives for a few hours of sweaty partying. Simon immediately disagrees though. “Dubstep was always I think more of a middle class and white scene than grime, so it’s success – which isn’t pop success but becoming this internationally established hip sound with outposts all over the world – is easier to understand. Being instrumental and lacking grime’s MC element (on the records, as opposed to in the clubs, where there often is an MC) also helped it spread. It can be enjoyed as this atmospheric, home listening music.
I think of the dubstep audience (originally, in terms of the people who started the scene circa 2002) as the more middle class, white types who got into jungle and drum’n'bass, especially the more techno-y stuff with people like Photek, and then converted to garage/2step when that also got quite dark and minimal (people like El B, J Da Flex, the latter-day Dem 2, Groove Chronicles), and they wanted to keep on making music that maintained their own tastes in drum’n'bass and the darker side of garage: so it was minimal, dark, atmospheric, a bit clinical and techno-y, with that roots reggae influence. And then dubstep got a whole new contingent joining it circa 2006 onwards, who picked up on the bass drops and the wobbly, low frequency oscillation basslines, and actually got quite rowdy. It went from being a bit of a somber, serious scene to being a bit lairy and lumpen; quite ravey, albeit without the manic tempo of 90s rave and jungle. And that wobble yob mentality seems to have driven away most of the original dubstep people into all the wonky and post-dubstep directions.”
Another genre which contorted and evolved during the 00s was hip-hop, which arguably saw its zenith in the early half of the decade. However, since then it has seen a qualitative downturn and I wonder how much the ‘hubris of hip-hop’ has to do with the ever more extreme incentives in hip-hop to earn hard cash. “Well hip hop has always been about making money” reasons Simon. “There’s never been that bohemian hang-up about selling out or making dough that you sometimes used to get in white rock circles. What’s changed is that they got a lot more shrewd as businessmen, and made sure that they got the money as opposed to the record business. Rap record deals in the early days were often very unfair to the artists. Puff Daddy was one of the first to make himself the mogul but you also had Jay-Z, forgotten figures like Master P the guy who did No Limit Records one of the first big Southern rap labels, the Cash Money guys in New Orleans. These are all people who realised the way to really clean up was to own their own record label (which then entered into partnership on much stronger terms with major labels), but also to diversify into all these other areas: merchandising, lines of clothing, sideline ventures (Lil Jon with his Crunk energy drink), sponsorship and endorsements, movie appearances. And they wouldn’t just have their own career, they’d have protégés, or a whole crew they’d bring up behind them, with each member having a solo career. It didn’t always work out as planned but to be a rap star in the late 90s and the 00s meant also being a businessman, a transmedia operator, a brand manager and a career strategist with MC-ing only being a relatively small area of one’s focus. That might explain the deterioration of the art form! Now you have people, as the rap music business goes through the same crisis as the rest of the industry, who are building careers in a more do-it-yourself, grass roots, bottom-up way again, with the mixtapes and the steady flow of material to a more compact fan-base.”
This idea of hip-hop coming full circle back to its street genesis with a focus on music instead of money could signify a change in incentives and accordingly, quality within the genre. But money isn’t the only thing which has affected music during the 00s. It seems like the changes in communication have also had an effect on people’s need to engage in a collective musical experience. As a result, we’ve seen the destruction of the record industry and an increase in the amount of artists trying to have a shot at the big time, but also inversely an increase in artists struggling to make a living from music. MySpace, blogs and MP3s, whilst initially created to increase communication and sharing, have actually destroyed collectivity by atomising the distribution and experience of music.
“In an odd way, connectivity has been the enemy of collectivity” Simon agrees. “We are all much more connected and aware of each other’s business (on account of the social networking and display of taste via the web), yet the possibility of real collective shared experience through pop seems to have been badly eroded. This is partly to do with fragmentation, the replacement of public arenas of mass musical experience (in the UK that would once have been Top of the Pops, Radio 1 or the weekly music press), with a plethora of niche markets and narrowcast channels. Occasionally there will be the old-style flashes of a mass media event that everyone is aware of…like Kanye and Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Awards, and these probably reach even more people because they can be YouTubed and seen by people who wouldn’t bother to watch the show itself. But it seems rarer and rarer.”
With faster broadband and an ever increasing amount of ‘zines, bloggers and YouTubers voicing their own opinions, it would be naïve to expect that music will recover the central position of success and renown it held in popular culture throughout every decade from the 50s up until the late 90s. However despite the diffusion of opinion on net-based media, big music magazines’ popularity still remains, as does their influence. I ask Simon if he thinks the music press innately hold a hegemony over general musical opinion and consequently affect people’s tastes and perceptions of music through the repeated use of buzzwords and buzz-bands.
“Not really. From my point of view it would be nice if you really could shift opinion in this way. Perhaps if a whole swathe of professional opinion actually manages to cohere around one figure, it would have some affect on the artist’s profile or sales. But it seems less and less common for consensus to form like that. It used to also be the case that there was a kind of climate of opinion and sensibility that would form around music where, as you say, buzzwords and just the language of praise used by journalists would make certain kinds of sounds seem attractive. But I’m not sure even that goes on anymore, except in quite small niche areas, as with the whole glow-fi/memory-blurred aesthetic in mostly American indie this last year or so.
I think people have become more immune to these kind of influences because they’re so buffeted by opinion on every side – the amount of professional pop media is much, much bigger than it was when I grew up, but now we also have all the blogs and message boards, etc. mouthing off too. It’s a cacophony of opinion, and almost as a structural effect of people wanting to differentiate themselves and have a more interesting, cooler take, there will be full spectrum of opinion on any given thing. Everything will have its detractors no matter how good, and everything will have a defender, no matter how crap it is. It is hard for an artist or group to achieve full spectrum dominance in the way that the Beatles did.”
It could be that the grassroots media of blogs and ‘zines are actually adding to the musical overkill rather than preventing it. Perhaps it’s not even that there are too many artists around, it’s just that there are too many people giving exposure to the most inconsequential of them. But if these artists are getting exposure and even ending up in Pitchfork’s ‘Top 200 Albums of the 2000s’ list, it makes me wonder whether music taste is purely subjective or can be swayed by reactionary writing which lauds style over substance. I’m talking Pete Doherty’s heroin addiction making his music more appealing than the music itself or perhaps The xx being hailed as genius when they’ve only been in the public eye for a few months.
“I don’t think music taste is completely subjective, and personally I can think of certain pieces of critical writing that opened up my ears to something and created a new taste for something in me. But I don’t think that people can be swayed to like music that is totally crap, purely by writing. There must be something in there that actually connects with them. Nearly everything that’s successful or popular has something in there. In the Libertines’ case the music had plenty of things going for it, and the whole back story and the off the rails chaotic charisma of Doherty made for a perfectly plausible package in terms of the media going for and the punters going for it too. It was the predictability of it that put me off them for so long, it was like the oldest story in rock; the druggy fuck-up. But I suppose at the time they came long you hadn’t any real sense of chaos in your music stars for a while, so Doherty and Amy Winehouse probably seemed like the genuine article in that respect; exciting throwbacks to a wilder, less careerist time. Of course it helped their careers because it gave them that authenticating stamp and kept them in the media with lots of column inches. With Doherty it was actually rolled out as part of the promotional campaign for the second Libertines album, the fact that he was in prison. What I wonder with both is whether there was a willed element to it, like they chose to become fuck-ups because they yearned to have some kind of authentic equivalent to the blues experience, even that they had to work at it. Someone said that white middle class musicians could only access the blues type worldview through drug addiction.”
If Simon is right and there is a willed element to self-destruction, then music is more cynical than I thought; especially if record companies and the media use it as a promotional tool. And I’m still not convinced that people don’t buy into the whole style over substance thing anyway. If the Libertines’ music did have something attractive about it, then was it simply the image? I’m sure in many cases, the ramshackle charm of the music came later because fans had already decided the Libertines were good based on Doherty and Carl Barât’s antics reported in the media. Unsubstantiated these accusations may be but I can’t help being a cynic having seen the confused state music is in right now.
Indeed, the 00s was rife with confusion; indicative of the dominion of concessionary, commoditised art and the ever widening gulf between the good and the great, in part due to the things which in theory should have lessened it – blogs, MP3s, YouTube and MySpace. These individualised media tools widened the spectrum of general opinion and praise, but also that of criticism. As an inverse result of all the truths being spouted, the 00s had no galvanising truth and the disparity of musical quality and style is a result of this. With no sign of slowing down in the atomisation of the music community, it could be a while before we hear more music of universal relevance and greatness.
However, it also follows that artists can’t be wholly implicated in this. Social atomisation, as Simon emphasises, gives us – the audience – much more of a stake in music’s success and greatness too.
“Greatness/importance isn’t just an integral component of the record, it is partly conferred by an audience, and that becomes a cycle of amplification in so far a band responds to the fact that the audience is out there waiting on what they do. And if they know that, and also know there’s going to be wide ripples from whatever it is they next do, they respond by raising their game. I think musicians and bands in the 00s were responding, unconsciously, to a creeping sense of inconsequentiality. More and more of the most interesting musicians (the ones I like anyway) seem to be more about pursuing these idiosyncratic, almost solipsistic paths”
Whilst the 00s saw the power of communication expand rapidly and diffuse down to every person with access to the internet, Simon also points out that there comes a responsibility along with this – to support artists and respond to their music in a positive, enthusiastic way. Whether this is possible or not in a time where the gap between the good and the great is getting larger remains to be seen, but movements like grime and dubstep, along with defiantly brilliant artists like Radiohead, Panda Bear, Talib Kweli and Four Tet, prove that there is hope yet.
Nevertheless, remember that the future is, at least in part, in our hands.
