At 08:35 PM 8/26/2009, Alan Rudy wrote:
>THIS is interesting... it seems to me, after developing my musical taste in
>exactly that 1977-1987 era (and this is what I teach in my Pop Culture
>class), the problem - jargon aside - is the post-modern condition.
>
>Its not only that pop has no clear center - as the majors have discovered
>and not recovered from - its that there is no central or even set of
>alternatives. The micronichification of music, combined with the relatively
>indiscriminate cafeteria of tastes my students have, mean that we largely
>live in a post-genre world. The beauty of this, especially when combined
>with e-commerce - is that almost anything goes and pretty much all
>integrative assemblages and playful syntheses of genres gone by are
>imaginable (a mild, leftish, case is Manu Chao, no?).
>
>The horror of it is that, since pretty much anything goes, everyone can find
>multiple, frequently sonically and culturally incommensurable, microniches
>where they can hang but to which they have only short term strong
>allegiances. I know some young folks deeply deeply deeeeeply committed to
>underground indie-metal (that I can't stomach [that I can't ear?!]) and they
>are super tightly micronetworked across the mid-west - but there are about,
>say, 30 of them, total, in all of Michigan and, of course, they're all
>spread out.
>
>By comparison, being into Television or Joy Division or The Replacements or
>The Feelies or The Fall or The Minutemen or The Dream Syndicate or The Dicks
>or Gun Club or even The Windbreakers or Bad Brains or Public Enemy or The
>Beat Nigs or... man, that tied you to an identity, dubious white and male it
>might have been but - despite its sonic and all sorts of other incoherences
>- it all pretty much meant the same thing... you listend to college radion
>and had seen and loved Diva.
>
>All that's gone and for good reason but, as you note, perhaps quite
>unfortunate consequences.
>
>-A
>
>
>On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:54 PM, joel schalit <jschalit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If only kids were interested in pop music, like boomers and 80s-90s
> > youth were. I worked in the music business for fifteen years, both as
> > an artist and eventually as a label manager. The decline in youth
> > interest in music in general was clearly discernible starting in the
> > late 1990s.
> >
> > To be fiercely into music, such as became the case during the
> > indie/punk period that began in the US during the 1980s, is now a
> > generational hallmark, rather something indigenous to contemporary
> > youth culture. Music is enjoyed more as part of larger cultural and
> > technological ensembles than on its own.
> >
> > So, you get the song with the video game, etc, or the album is
> > complementary to your phone or ipod, not the center of it, like the
> > pictures or the movies you add to it too. or the actual hardware
> > itself, which is its own fetish object, like albums once were, albeit
> > more expensive.
> >
> > Joel
> >
> >
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