Понедельник 11 Янв 2010, 23:52
Note: This is a repost of a journal deleted last week by a renegade Nexus 6 spambot. The original post included some comments, but I don't know if they are ever coming back. If you want to repost anything you already said, please do.
The question of which decade produced the best music is ultimately a matter of taste, but Simon Reynolds has come up with an interesting angle on the topic. In an essay primarily concerned with the fragmentation of popular audiences during the oughts–really part of a longer process of subgenre formation that began a long time ago–Reynolds makes a fascinating argument:
I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it'd be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it's just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call "importance" or "greatness".
Reynolds is not making the lazy argument that "music was just better when I was a lad": earlier in the essay, he compares the profusion of excellent recent music as "a flowerbed choked with too many flowers." And I think he's absolutely right, at least for the first half of his claim. It's a simple structural argument: if there is a lot more music than there was before, chances are that, in raw terms, there is more high-quality music around than there used to be. That can be true even if you want to argue that the overall percentage of good music has diminished relative to the whole.
The second half of his case moves from an implied mathematical logic to the slipperier ground of an aesthetics complicated by what might be called critical or cultural agreement. Here, I am less ready to follow his lead. Can we rely on cultural consensus to carry that much weight? Does true greatness depend on that consensus? What if we are wrong? Does a later generation of critics emerge to correct us? It's an interesting idea, and the fact that so many "best" lists resemble each other is evidence that this is how critics actually operate, reaching for consensus unconsciously. (Actually, I suspect that a Platonic ideal of any "best" list is to be both idiosyncratic enough to be interesting, and ordinary enough to maintain the critic's credibility.) There is no reason for me to think I'm any different, despite my efforts to judge each song on its merits. I doubt that can be actually done by anyone immersed in culture.
However, I'm not so sure that "greatness" tracks as well with "importance" as Reynolds assumes. Is it not possible to be important without being great, and vice versa? The "choked flowerbed" is only a problem if you are worried about missing out on some of the prettiest flowers. That's a shame, but isn't it better to have such an abundance of beauty that no one can agree on which flower is the prettiest? I agree more with Patti Smith:
We're in a very democratic era of rock 'n' roll. It's not an era of rock gods. You don't have the, you know, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Grace Slick – there isn't really the pantheon of rock gods and goddesses that we had in my time. But we have something equally as interesting, and that's the fact that rock 'n' roll is really, more than ever, the people's cultural voice.You go on MySpace or different websites, and there's thousands and thousands and thousands of people making their own music, expressing themselves, exchanging files and deciding how they want to hear music and how they want to distribute music. Everything is changing, and I think that's fine. Rock 'n' roll was a revolutionary cultural voice that was people-based, and I think the people have taken it over.
A Few Words, and a Little List, About the N/Oughts
I am long out of the business of ranking albums, and there are plenty of decade-ending lists for you to peruse all over the Web. That said, here is a short chronological list of the records that meant the most to me in the past 10 years. Not necessarily the "greatest" or "most important," just the ones that sunk the deepest roots in my personal flowerbed. A few of these are from the end of the 90s, because there's no good reason to exclude them. Commenters, please feel free to add your own.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea–Neutral Milk Hotel (1998)
69 Love Songs–Magnetic Fields (1999)
Black Foliage–The Olivia Tremor Control (1999)
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea–PJ Harvey (2000)
The Sophtware Slump–Grandaddy (2000)
The Lemon of Pink–The Books (2003)
Untrue–Burial (2007)
Book of Bad Breaks–Thee More Shallows (2007)
Microcastle/Weird Era Revisited–Deerhunter (2008)
The Top Fourteen Songs at 3:43
1) Plus Ones–Okkervil River
A data point for the argument that music has not gotten worse this decade. The lyrical hook of adding one to canonical pop music numbers (100 luftballoons, 8 Chinese brothers, 17 candles, etc.) is one that I wish I would have thought of, but I would never in thousands of tries have been able to write a song this terrific using it. So in retrospect, it’s better for all of us that Will Sheff thought of it first.
Sheff is as good as anybody at internal rhyme, and this song is full of ‘em (“no one wants to hear about your 97th tear”).
2) Higher Ground–Stevie Wonder
In best-decade arguments, few people ever stump for the 70s, but I remember the early 70s as an unacknowledged pinnacle of great top 40 radio. As an eight-year-old, I had no idea that stuff like this mid-career Stevie Wonder song was extraordinary, because it was on all the time. Sure, there's probably some nostalgia at work in that assessment, but just look at this list. Yeah, there’s some crap on it—just as there is in any year. And you won't have to read for very long before you find the crap, heh heh. But behold also the awesomeness, and tell me that top 40 radio in 1973 wouldn’t still be a blast to listen to.
I mean, c’mon: Superfly! Dr. John! Cisco Kid! Little Willy! Dueling Banjos! Sly Stone!
3) Just What I Needed–The Cars
Along with "My Best Friend's Girl," two hits of exactly the same length back-to-back on a debut album, both deploying the same neat trick—the dry staccato plucks of rhythm guitar acting as a subtle carrier of melody. If I had to pick one–and for the purposes of this exercise, I did–it’s "Just What I Needed," because of the wonderful and unexpected way Ben Orr swoops in to sing harmony on “your hair.” That still gives me a nice blush after thirty years. Following up on a recent discussion, do these get played on classic rock stations, or are they too pop?
4) Holiday in Cambodia–Dead Kennedys
We remember SoCal punk as aggressively leftist and reliably anti-Reagan, but those bands didn’t have much affection for comfortable liberal pieties either. The guy in the first verse who listens to “ethnicky jazz” doesn’t strike me as a Reaganite; he’s more of a wannabe-swank Playboy Club hipster. Ultimately I suppose the politics in detail matter much less than the snide commentary on an actual genocidal regime in power contemporaneous with the release of the song, and the bracing horror-punk ride it takes you on.
5) Go Your Own Way–Fleetwood Mac
The titillating partner-swapping Fleetwood Mac story has been done to death. In any case I was never aware of that stuff as a preteen, hearing these songs when they were hits—so I suppose the backstory doesn’t really matter. Or at least not as much as the lovely balance between the rough electric rhythm guitar and bright mandolin, backed by a clean and insistent beat. Am I hallucinating a little bit of proto-R.E.M. in this song?
6) Tokyo–The Books
A song that would not have been made in the 60s because the technology to make it didn’t exist. They had tape manipulations then, to be sure, but not this precise. The technology allows us to think of different things—or rather express different things. I imagine Johns Cage and Lennon (for example) may have thought of this kind of thing, but they couldn’t do it. Critics of electronic/computer-aided music claim that it’s cold; here, snippets of conversations, announcements, and cut-up violin sound dessicated and experimental in theory, but wind up warm and human in the execution.
7) Girl From the North Country–Bob Dylan
Dylan and Cash, two guys who “can’t sing,” singing beautifully together in full-on croon mode. I’ve always loved the sound of Cash’s voice, and while Dylan’s croak is more hit-and-miss, his Nashville Skyline work is my favorite.
8) Clubland–Elvis Costello & the Attractions
I try to stay out of the discussions about who and what is under and overrated, but it seems to me that Trust is underrated even by Elvis fans. As with "Clubland," Costello's music is getting more sophisticated, but it doesn’t lose the immediacy of his early work. A few albums later he would get out of balance with some pointlessly ornate production, but this effortless complexity is hard to find fault with.
9) Blood On The Bluegrass–Th' Legendary Shack*Shakers
The “Natural Born Killers” of jittery, caffeinated murder ballads.
And speaking of pointlessly ornate, I wish this band would standardize how they spell their name. It's different every record; last.fm seems to have settled on the spelling that is hardest to type.
10) Bright Yellow Gun–Throwing Muses
The Muses never made a great album, but their best songs are spiked sweet treasures. Yes, I know this comment is a weak addendum to a pretty good song. Sorry.
11) Pocahontas–Johnny Cash
Cash adds dignity to everything he sings. There is absolutely nothing psychedelic about this cover, except for the underlying psychedelia of Johnny Cash singing a song about hanging out with Pocahontas and Marlon Brando at the Astrodome. One of the best Neil Young covers.
12) Dance On–Prince
A good friend of mine—a bigger Prince fan than I am—said he didn’t like this song because he thought it was nothing but electronic guitar gimmicks. I guess I have a higher tolerance for electrogimmickry, especially when it is attached to such a wicked groove.
13) 867-5309 (Jenny)–Tommy Tutone
The 80s’ most outstanding singalong song based around a phone number.
14) Down on the Street–The Stooges
The missing link between Space Truckin' and Rock Music.
So, does Reynolds have a point? Or do you lean more toward Patti Smith's hippie utopianism? Looking forward as always to your comments.