I realise my last post must have seemed a tad condescending and prone to generalization. Of course, music magazines do their bit, and I for one have to right away cite one or two that I owe a lot to for introducing me to lots of great music.
In France, Crossroads and, to a lesser extent, Rock & Folk (included mainly for their excellent special edition dedicated to Punk about 5 years ago - otherwise they seem torn between being a French Wire or a French NME, and far too often lean towards the latter) deserve praise. Crossroads' staff's single-minded dedication to celebrate the music they cherish, even if it means disregarding a lot of the mainstream and dramatically reducing their sales, is commendable. They never compromise, and have probably gone a long way towards introducing quite a large number of French people to the best of American roots music that most would never have even noticed otherwise (France has a strangely negative view of The Blues, Country and Folk). Plus, their editor, Christophe Gofette is a truly friendly chap, and always replied to any e-mails I sent him, even though few could have been very interesting. He even printed something I wrote once. Talk about above and beyond the call of duty!
In the UK, I have already mentioned The Wire (check out their recent excellent interview with Gudrun Gut for a brilliant insight into Berlin's underground scene; also their retrospective on Henry Cow was a delight). Mojo also probably deserve a mention, especially for their "special issues", which allow them to cover ground the pursuit of sales and the current dumbing-down of modern music just won't allow most of the time. They're certainly better than the NME and Rolling Stone, and I will be unrelenting in my criticism of those two vapid, lowbrow and simple-minded wads of toilet paper. Not that they care,I guess.
So, the music is out there, and to be honest, it can't be that hard to find if a lazy cunt like me managed. Hell, that book, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, as mainstream as it is (something like 5 Björk albums yet no mention of Neutral Milk Hotel or Godspeed You! Black Emperor! What is the world coming to? I mean, I like Björk but for fuck's sake!) still introduced me to The United States of America's sole, self-titled masterpiece, and it's one of the most out-there pieces of manic psychedelia ever made, so there's proof that you can mix mainstream tastes with a love of all things weird, rare and obscure.
And here's a first message to all you music junkies out there: the nineties and noughties don't suck! Well, of course they don't, but truth be told, they're not even that far behind the seventies and sixties in terms of adventure, innovation and artistic merit. But, surprisingly, you do have to look that much harder.
The nineties and noughties have been defined by very specific genres that appealed to mass audiences. There was the Madchester scene, coupled with Techno, Britain's great rave. Then there was grunge, a last hurrah for middle-class morosity similar to that of eighties goth and cold wave. That was quickly superceded by the all-out party of Brit-pop, which also helped revive Madchester and Techno. And since then it's been all about "Indie" (after a mildly dull pop interlude from 1996-onwards), as well as chart-friendly power-pop (plus r'n'b, dance and hip-hop). Amusingly, although the charts now feature more diversity than probably ever before, the divisions between audiences remains immense. But, that's a discussion for another day.
But, the main interest of the nineties and noughties album (and occasionally singles) charts could be the odd presence of quite random artists like the afore-mentioned Björk, Sigur Ros or Beck, artists that play with genres and styles and deploy singularly idiosynchratic approaches to pop music. Sadly, all have struggled to sustain such adventurousness and Beck in particular seems just tired to me these days, whilst Björk's music gets weaker as it gets weirder. Sigur Ros, meanwhile continue to haunt, but not with the consistency that defined their first masterpiece, Agaetis Byrjun.
So, by now you will have realised my propensity to ramble, and duly browsed away. If you haven't - thanks! The point is that artists like the three above took a pop framework and, taking their inspiration from a lot that went before, moved into new and exciting areas. And somehow were successful commercially on top of doing pretty darn well artisically. For me, this just led me to cast my gaze even further!
The modern pop artist's main problem is always going to be that so much has already been done. Originality is thin on the ground, and hard to find. So, what the best tend to do is elaborate rather than innovate. And it can be just as good. It's actually been the modus operandi since the mid-eighties, when the likes of Cocteau Twins and The Jesus and Mary Chain took the punk structure and turned up the saturation and noise; and pulled back the voices to create a new brand of frenetic rock. That it wasn't really original hardly mattered. It was still new. To my mind, in fact, little of any tangible originality has been made since the early days of synth-pop and industrial music in the late seventies. But it hasn't stopped truly marvelous music being created. And in fact, as things like the CD and then of course the Internet made music that much more available, before long genre boundaries were blurring, more and more sub-genres were appearing, and at the same time more music was being created and more bands were flocking to their different totems. It has now become a gold-mind for people looking for new sounds because, whilst never ground-breaking, music has become more varied. And the digital age has made it easier to make as well, meaning that a minuscule sub-genre such as "dark neo-folk" can include hundreds of bands with easily accessible outputs. A lot will be shite, but there may be a few diamonds in there as well.
So, I could look at things like Grunge and Brit-pop and the rave-rock scene. I could start relaying thoughts on which of the "The" bands is actually the best. There are great things available in the mainstream, from Bloc Party to The Arcade Fire. But I shan't. There are loads of people who have done this better than I ever could. But I might put my two-pennies worth in to sing the praises of the genres and artists and bands that don't quite get quite the same recognition. As the mainstream and the rest became more divided,
several genres were thrown up, almost in reaction to the 90s VH1, MTV and NME avalanche. They were called shoegazer, neo-metal, stoner, americana and slowcore, to name just a few, and all to me, even up to 18 years later, sound so different to all that went on back then, and all that goes on right now. Not original, but so satisfying. So, this is my hommage to nearly two decades that many of us rock snobs disregard (I'll get to the 80s later), but that actually contain quite a few not-so-hidden treasures. And so back to 1991. The band is an Irish one that's not U2. The album is a pink slab of hazy, noisy, ethereal guitar rock called Loveless.
In France, Crossroads and, to a lesser extent, Rock & Folk (included mainly for their excellent special edition dedicated to Punk about 5 years ago - otherwise they seem torn between being a French Wire or a French NME, and far too often lean towards the latter) deserve praise. Crossroads' staff's single-minded dedication to celebrate the music they cherish, even if it means disregarding a lot of the mainstream and dramatically reducing their sales, is commendable. They never compromise, and have probably gone a long way towards introducing quite a large number of French people to the best of American roots music that most would never have even noticed otherwise (France has a strangely negative view of The Blues, Country and Folk). Plus, their editor, Christophe Gofette is a truly friendly chap, and always replied to any e-mails I sent him, even though few could have been very interesting. He even printed something I wrote once. Talk about above and beyond the call of duty!
In the UK, I have already mentioned The Wire (check out their recent excellent interview with Gudrun Gut for a brilliant insight into Berlin's underground scene; also their retrospective on Henry Cow was a delight). Mojo also probably deserve a mention, especially for their "special issues", which allow them to cover ground the pursuit of sales and the current dumbing-down of modern music just won't allow most of the time. They're certainly better than the NME and Rolling Stone, and I will be unrelenting in my criticism of those two vapid, lowbrow and simple-minded wads of toilet paper. Not that they care,I guess.
So, the music is out there, and to be honest, it can't be that hard to find if a lazy cunt like me managed. Hell, that book, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, as mainstream as it is (something like 5 Björk albums yet no mention of Neutral Milk Hotel or Godspeed You! Black Emperor! What is the world coming to? I mean, I like Björk but for fuck's sake!) still introduced me to The United States of America's sole, self-titled masterpiece, and it's one of the most out-there pieces of manic psychedelia ever made, so there's proof that you can mix mainstream tastes with a love of all things weird, rare and obscure.
And here's a first message to all you music junkies out there: the nineties and noughties don't suck! Well, of course they don't, but truth be told, they're not even that far behind the seventies and sixties in terms of adventure, innovation and artistic merit. But, surprisingly, you do have to look that much harder.
The nineties and noughties have been defined by very specific genres that appealed to mass audiences. There was the Madchester scene, coupled with Techno, Britain's great rave. Then there was grunge, a last hurrah for middle-class morosity similar to that of eighties goth and cold wave. That was quickly superceded by the all-out party of Brit-pop, which also helped revive Madchester and Techno. And since then it's been all about "Indie" (after a mildly dull pop interlude from 1996-onwards), as well as chart-friendly power-pop (plus r'n'b, dance and hip-hop). Amusingly, although the charts now feature more diversity than probably ever before, the divisions between audiences remains immense. But, that's a discussion for another day.
But, the main interest of the nineties and noughties album (and occasionally singles) charts could be the odd presence of quite random artists like the afore-mentioned Björk, Sigur Ros or Beck, artists that play with genres and styles and deploy singularly idiosynchratic approaches to pop music. Sadly, all have struggled to sustain such adventurousness and Beck in particular seems just tired to me these days, whilst Björk's music gets weaker as it gets weirder. Sigur Ros, meanwhile continue to haunt, but not with the consistency that defined their first masterpiece, Agaetis Byrjun.
So, by now you will have realised my propensity to ramble, and duly browsed away. If you haven't - thanks! The point is that artists like the three above took a pop framework and, taking their inspiration from a lot that went before, moved into new and exciting areas. And somehow were successful commercially on top of doing pretty darn well artisically. For me, this just led me to cast my gaze even further!
The modern pop artist's main problem is always going to be that so much has already been done. Originality is thin on the ground, and hard to find. So, what the best tend to do is elaborate rather than innovate. And it can be just as good. It's actually been the modus operandi since the mid-eighties, when the likes of Cocteau Twins and The Jesus and Mary Chain took the punk structure and turned up the saturation and noise; and pulled back the voices to create a new brand of frenetic rock. That it wasn't really original hardly mattered. It was still new. To my mind, in fact, little of any tangible originality has been made since the early days of synth-pop and industrial music in the late seventies. But it hasn't stopped truly marvelous music being created. And in fact, as things like the CD and then of course the Internet made music that much more available, before long genre boundaries were blurring, more and more sub-genres were appearing, and at the same time more music was being created and more bands were flocking to their different totems. It has now become a gold-mind for people looking for new sounds because, whilst never ground-breaking, music has become more varied. And the digital age has made it easier to make as well, meaning that a minuscule sub-genre such as "dark neo-folk" can include hundreds of bands with easily accessible outputs. A lot will be shite, but there may be a few diamonds in there as well.
So, I could look at things like Grunge and Brit-pop and the rave-rock scene. I could start relaying thoughts on which of the "The" bands is actually the best. There are great things available in the mainstream, from Bloc Party to The Arcade Fire. But I shan't. There are loads of people who have done this better than I ever could. But I might put my two-pennies worth in to sing the praises of the genres and artists and bands that don't quite get quite the same recognition. As the mainstream and the rest became more divided,
several genres were thrown up, almost in reaction to the 90s VH1, MTV and NME avalanche. They were called shoegazer, neo-metal, stoner, americana and slowcore, to name just a few, and all to me, even up to 18 years later, sound so different to all that went on back then, and all that goes on right now. Not original, but so satisfying. So, this is my hommage to nearly two decades that many of us rock snobs disregard (I'll get to the 80s later), but that actually contain quite a few not-so-hidden treasures. And so back to 1991. The band is an Irish one that's not U2. The album is a pink slab of hazy, noisy, ethereal guitar rock called Loveless.
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