The Music Fan’s Lament #4: Decreasing Quality
Well the series bumbles on into its final installment. I am writing this from Vancouver Airport, waiting for a connection to Portland, so what better way to fill the time than with needless blathering about things I don’t really understand. It’s taken a while to post, but I thought I’d finish this off before getting into all the Portland stuff and forever banishing the whiff of leeks from these pages. Well, maybe not forever, but erm, well… oh never mind.
Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.
And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Quality
#4 Decreasing Quality
Reading JC’s article in particular put me in mind of this common complaint, and some of the commenters pushed the point even further. Modern music is shit – where are the great bands? Where, in particular, are the next Smiths, for example?
I can’t, and won’t, argue that there is a current band that I could honestly describe as the new Smiths. But then, there wasn’t an old Smiths either. You are talking about the very cream of the crop – that sort of band come along maybe once a decade, don’t they? Radiohead for the 90s, I suppose, and erm, who for the noughties? I really am not sure, so I can see where he’s coming from in that respect.
I don’t, predictably enough, agree entirely though. One of the things JC seems to be doing, as do a lot of the people who criticise a living music scene by comparing it unfavourably to the past, is ignoring the fact of hindsight. It’s easy to tell that the Smiths were something special, because we can look back on anything and everything that was around at the time and evaluate them in a relatively dispassionate way – something we just can’t do for anything current. The Stone Roses first and the early Radiohead albums stand up very strongly in retrospect, but as we get closer to the present day how can we tell how good the bands are that we’re listening to now?
A couple of the groups mentioned in the comment thread on JC’s post are DeVotchKa and Calexico, but these bands are both a good solid handful of albums into their careers by now. Think back over the last couple of years and the records that made real impact: LCD Soundsystem, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes – all these bands have pretty broad appeal, but only the White Stripes are more than a couple of albums into their careers, and we just don’t know who is going to be remembered from this era yet. If the Arctic Monkeys continue to peter out, then maybe they’ll be forgotten about altogether. It would just take one more brilliant album from any of these groups to cement their reputation as one of the really key bands of the first decade of this century. Do we really think that the riff from Seven Nation Army is going to be less memorable in ten years than Johnny Marr’s equally iconic performance on How Soon is Now? I know there’s more to genius that a few memorable riffs, but I think the more general point still stands.
The other question is this: who even remembers the Kasabian of the 80s anyway? We can look back on the 90s now and identify bands like Blur and Pulp, Radiohead and early James as iconic and brilliant. But how many Menswears and Kula Shakers are we consigning to the dustbins of forgetfullness in order to do so? If no-one gives much of a fuck about the View now, then their memory may not survive the next full moon, never mind twenty years worth of rosy-tinted nostaligia.
Then again, as popular entertainment has made ever-greater inroads into the world of indie, having realised that there was a sizable market out there that their dancing karaoke whores were not capable of suitably exploiting, it seems that the world of indie is being over-run by preening, prancing piss-artists like the Hoosiers, Joe Lean and the Short Tight Pants, that one who’s pumping, er… Kate Moss. Whoever they are. They’re shit, anyway. This is indie rock as commerical product, but it must be remembered that in no meaningful way is it actually indie. It’s a branch of the celebrity industry, approached as such, and does not deserve our attention. The bands are in it for the fame, the coke and the floosies, the music is fucking dreadful, and the marketing spend in proportion to investment in the actual ‘product’ is repellently high. This last one is always a good metric to use when considering whether or not something might just be fucking rubbish.
At the other end of the scale, there are a lot of piss-poor bedroom bands reaching out using MySpace and the like, and we have a lot more contact with them than before because they can reach us directly. They don’t need the middle-man, who might just have pointed out that they are shit, and so our MySpace inboxes are clogged with shit by groups that barely deserve to call themselves bands, nevermind command anyone’s ears.
If you’re used to listening to all this stuff because you want the buzz of that one exciting discovery, then you really do have to stop moaning and just accept it. The people who got to be the arbiters of what was and wasn’t worth our time before the internet all had to wade through this stuff, so if we want to liberate ourselves from being told what to like, then we have to do the work that goes with it. With great power comes gr… er, sorry, wrong speech. The other option is to quitchabitchin and just find a few bloggers and a couple of radio stations that you trust and let them do it for you. If you want to participate, you are just going to have to put the time in to listen.
So although I wouldn’t say that there are fewer great bands out there, I would certainly concede that we have exposure to far more really shit ones. But as for greatness, I just don’t think we can tell right now what is going to be remembered in twenty years. And I also think we conveniently forget all the crap that there was milling about on the airwaves at the time we thought the Smiths were so great. I can see how you would get full, too. After thirty-odd years scouring the country for great new bands, like JC has, there must come a point where you’re just full up. There is a limit to the amount of music we can really find special, because if there was more of it then it would by definition be less special, but I really don’t buy the argument that bands then were better than they are now.
And as Mrs. Toad is whispering in my ear, great bands tend to be born into times of economic hardship – it’s what makes the release all the more euphoric – so you never know, we could be on the cusp of great things over the next five years or so.
The Smiths – How Soon is Now?
Blur – Clover Over Dover
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Arcade Fire – Intervention
I don’t know if it will ever be possible for another band to come gain the kind of devoted cult status Radiohead and the Smiths have.
Of course, anything is possible, but the internet has dispersed the musical tastes of everyone so well. Anyone can listen to any band at any time. It would be difficult to get people to people to rally around only several bands.
I wouldn’t say the music today is any less innovative than it was 10 years ago. There are plenty of bands who I think are still doing great things: Earth, Matmos, Girl Talk, Beach House, No Age, Holy Fuck, Explosions In the Sky, Ruby Suns, etc. However, their popularity is somewhat watered down; not by “bad” bands, but the expansiveness of today’s music market in general.
It’s tough to say who will be remembered and who will be forgotten. I don’t think being remembered necessarily makes a band good or seminal. Being remembered is decided by the people’s musical taste, and we all know the general public doesn’t always make the best decisions.
I don’t think there’s a right band are artist to support in particular. What we’re doing now is fine: Discerning the difference between independent and major label artists, and recognizing effort and artistic vision when it’s being made.
What defines a “great band”? Must they be both popular in their own time and influential to those who come after, like the Beatles and the Smiths? And how long do they have to remain influential? I mean, Van Halen were both wildly popular in the early 80s (in the States anyhow) and set the precedent for every hair-metal band since, but I suspect that few people would honestly classify them as a “great band.” Even Radiohead haven’t really had a chance to show yet how influential they’ll be in the long term. And is the influence needed for “greatness” defined by its breadth, or its depth, or some combination of these? Tom Waits is certainly influential, and he has an intensely passionate following, but his appeal is quite narrow, and he’s never cracked the mainstream, nor is he ever likely to. So is he great?
What I look for as a predictor of true greatness is the “WTF factor.” It’s got to be sui generis, not in the sense of having no recognizable influences, but in the sense of bringing influences to bear in a completely unprecedented way while still being immensely enjoyable to listen to. That’s a very small club of true pioneers, and I hope I’ll know the next one when I hear it.
Hmmm, what were we listening to in 1984 when Morrissey was crooning to us “I am human and I need to be loved / Just like everybody else does?” In the US we had nothing but Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Madonna’s Lucky Star, Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon, Prince’s When Dove’s Cry, and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Damn right we wanted The Smiths! We were begging for humanity, for reality, for emotive honesty, for a shred of decency or a glimmer of 20 somethings angst. The freaking sugary sappiness of the 80s propaganda, otherwise known as, everybody’s-making-it-big Reaganomics, was killing us over here and those of us in the working classes were desperate for someone to tell us the truth about our lives. If you were trying to be a nice girl and stop dating all those nasty punk boys, Morrissey and Johnny Marr were your salvation without having to sell out! In other words, the Smiths were not only good music, lasting music, but were also a bridge from one kind of social era to another and led us musically from one kind of “indie” genre to the next. And you have a great point, yeah, it wasn’t just about ONE BAND, the Smiths, and looking back, I listened to all that crap alongside the Smiths and partied to it all together at once. But it’s the Smiths that evoke in me now the angst I felt then, not Cyndi Lauper or Madonna. For Fuck’s Sake, go to concerts, buy albums and listen to music and enjoy it and figure out in ten years what it makes you remember, you never know. There’s no such thing as intrinsic value to it all, is there? I only know that I immediately recognize crap, and sometimes it takes a while for the good stuff to sink in LOL.
this is a very difficult topic because the smiths give me the boke.
Erm, what’s a “boke”? Is that something like “the willies”?
A boke is a pre-cursor to a pavement pizza. The dry, gurgling anticipation of a vomitory heave that strikes when confronted with sudden manifestations of the ugly or putrid.
The willies is a mere frisson of distate and is for GIRLS (literally as well as figuratively)
Basically, he’s nay likin thae fuckin Smiths by the way big man.
For other Scottish quaint sayings delivered in song, try this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scNLfr1EP08
As a disclaimer, that is what we call a Weegie and a Ned and not to be confused with any fine upstanding Edinburgh sorts.
So the “boke” is simply the rising of the gorge? Wow, you Brits have a word for everything. What is your language called again?
But you’ll never match the Nicaraguans. My wife is Nicaraguan, and they have a word for the slightly nasty smell that lingers in a room or on one’s fingers after exposure to raw chicken. The word is “chiquije” (approximate spelling), and is pronounced Chick-WEE-Hay. As in, I need to go wash my hands to get rid of the chiquije. Just thought I’d share.
Yeah. We have a word called “Chick-Wa-Hey!”
It means something completely different over here.
Are there any fine upstanding Edinburgh sorts?
I’m a Dundee gadge.
)
And yes – I’m nae liking the fukin smiths.
Back in the 1990s, when Q magazine was worth reading because it was written and edited by worldy music journalists – as opposed to the team of chimpanzees who seem to be in charge nowadays – the magazine was well known for it’s witty photo captions.
One of my favourites was for a huge double page spread portrait of The Smiths, for which the caption read:
Andy Rourke, Mike Joyce, and the other two.
I thought that was brilliant.
I’m sure I’ve seen that somewhere too – brilliant!
I think a tart might be onto something as well, because there is so much arch, knowing stuff around at the moment, and so much artifice, that someone playing hard, bare, real music could be in a position, after a couple more years, of having a very contrived scene to explode into. The Stripes and their ilk did that to the arse end of Britpop, to a degree.
I’m with Euan on the Smiths, (although as a soap dodgin’ weegie I should be offended by the poncy east coaster) they were overrated, for sure they were better than most of the shite at the time, however Roddy Frame was a better lyricist than Morrissey and a far superior guitar player than Johnny Marr. I don’t know if their is more dross now than then as I seem to remember an awful lot of crud during the 80′s. But who needs new music when the Fall are still around anyway.