The New York Times says that 2011 was the year when rock just spun its wheels. The Guardian calls it the year of boring music.
And while “beige against the machine” is a cute and retweetable one-liner, it’s nothing more than a cheap shot based on a faulty premise: that something went wrong with music in 2011. That musicians gave up en-masse and just made safe, ineffectual and dull music.
There are quite a few problems with that idea. I’m just going to mention just three here, but you’ll no doubt think of your own too.
1) You can’t complain about a dull year in music if all you do is report on the pile of CDs that ended up on your desk as a result of public relations and major label marketing. If you were looking for urgency, relevance and innovation in that lot, you’ve misunderstood the process. No matter how much you shout “Challenge me!” at your stereo, it’s not going to oblige if you keep putting Coldplay CDs in it.
2) Even if you are looking outside the pile, chances are you’re still looking in the wrong places. Things that sound like (or aspire to sound like) the music that did make it to the minor landfill of compact discs cluttering your desk are not likely to be any better. After all, it’s no longer the job of rock music to be urgent or important. And it’s certainly not the job of mainstream rock music. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but guitar, bass, drums and vocals is no longer by default a counter-cultural lineup. The same can be said for R&B and mainstream hip hop. It’s possible to do radical stuff in those musical domains, but it’s certainly not the norm.
3) IF IT’S BORING, DO NOT WRITE ABOUT IT. In fact, write that on a post-it note and stick it to your laptop screen. Writing about boring is contributing to the boring.
The guiding question for interesting music journalism needs to be “Yes, but what else is out there?”. More than ever before there is the opportunity (even the need) for major publications to employ investigative music journalists and people with genuine curiosity. We all know what can happen when people with these kinds of qualities are given a decent platform.
John Peel-ism should be the norm by now.
Music journalists and radio programmers have the opportunity to lead us toward these rich seams of wonderful music lying just beyond their morning jiffy-bag mail pile and inbox of press releases. Their refusal or reluctance to do so suggests that it’s not popular music that is the problem.
Never before has there been a greater opportunity for music journalists to be tastemakers and discoverers of exciting talent. Never before has that opportunity been so resolutely rejected.
But in defence of boring, perhaps what people want or even need from their mainstream media consumption right now is reassurance and comfort. Yes, the last time things were this bad economically and politically (certainly in this country), popular music was the voice of popular dissent – but now popular dissent has its own voice. We may not need to all rush out in a buying frenzy in response to famous people singing revolutionary songs. We’re a bit busy having a revolution.
And while there is an insidious relationship between mass-pacification (X-factor anyone?) and consumerist culture – the very thing at the heart of what the global revolution is supposed to be about in the first place – what’s encouraging is the fact that the audience is beginning to leak at the edges as people go in search of things that speak to them of their own lives.
Trust me – there’s no shortage of amazing out there. We’re just all going to find it in different places. And part of its amazingness lies in the fact that it is amazing for us personally, and not for an undifferentiated mass or a simple marketing demographic.
But the thing about amazing, important and compelling music that every journalist and music programmer should know: it needs a champion. Someone with integrity and credibility who will find something good, and play it to us. Someone to say “No – you HAVE to hear this. It’s phenomenal.” I suspect that it is not our musicians that have let us down, but our champions of music.
So if your job is to report upon popular music and you are unable to find ten incredible things in the past year to share with those of us who still read what you have to say, then that makes you a failure. I’m sorry – but there it is. You’re a lazy, complacent, boring failure.
Happy new year. Do better in 2012, yeah?
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Problem: the Guardian’s main whinger about the new boring is Peter Robinson aka Mr Popjustice, who writes very specifically about pop and the music destined for the charts. He does way more than just consume the PR and major label output. Peter absolutely knows what’s phenomenal and amazing – he writes about it on his blog almost daily. He’s just justifiably delusioned with what is actually popular – Adele, the Mumfords, et al. And for sure you can make a socio-economic-cultural justification of this – it’s still worth at least a minor whinge.
Great observation that could apply to any decade.
Popular music should become so out of merit, rather than force feeding.
I should emphasise that, by popular, I mean that you and your mates “get it”, you can share that new “find” and, by osmosis, it becomes “popular” – it’s loved by more than one person. because it’s good.
Any music journo who fails to find any merit in any specific time frame is an idiot.
The world is alight with creativity 24/7, new ideas are born every nano-second and new bands every minute.
It’s impossible to dismiss a year or a decade based upon the experience of a single person – a jaded, big headed, arrogant journalist working in the mainstream press.
Instead, forget them, embrace the modern online journo, the small time writer that goes to local gigs, soaks up the experience, understands that music is a personal journey, not something to plaster on the pages of the gutter.
Bands need to be written about, the music needs a publicist, but the publicist needs to be an observer and a participant, not a prima donna.
HIYAA!!!!!
I wrote the original Guardian article.
I do look for good new music all the time. In fact very flatteringly I have either been shortlisted in the breaking music category at the Record Of The Day Awards every year for the past five or six, and peers have even voted for me to win a couple of times. So I quite agree with you that it’s important to look beyond what’s in the charts, or what’s sent your way by PRs. For former is a caricature of the mainstream and the latter is often a caricature of what your tastes are perceived to be. Naturally they all go into the mix, but the most exciting stuff is the stuff you find yourself, or find after following a few leads. It’s not easy to unearth good stuff when your tastes are fairly mainstream (unlike indie music, pop stuff often becomes big without the usual tastemaker intervention), but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The point was not that musicians gave up and made boring stuff. It was the opposite, in a way: a concerted effort was made to provide an alternative to over-the-top colourful shouting-for-attention stuff. The point I was trying to make was that all the Lady Gaga/LMFAO stuff was getting top much, and between them musicians and the traditional pop gatekeepers (radio, print, TV etc) were conspiring to push music in a different direction.
So I guess your premise that the premise was faulty is in itself faulty.
Addressing the three points you make:
1. See above – but I think you’re wrong if you assume mainstream music can’t also challenge and fuck with the rules, and part of what I like about my job is finding mainstream music that does just that. Mind you I also like pop that plays by the rules too. (As a side point you mention Coldplay – they’re actually mentioned in my original piece as being *not* part of this new wave.)
2. This point you half make leads me to suspect you don’t grasp what it’s all about. The idea of the New Boring isn’t about subcultures of below-the-radar activism or whatever it is you seem to be getting at here – it’s about big cultural things like the Radio 1 playlist.
3. Writing about trends (and the artists in, around and anti those trends) is a big part of music journalism. Requesting that people don’t write about trends is a bit like when people say “oh if you don’t have anything positive to say about music, don’t write about it”, as if the world is somehow better when nobody has any sense of good and bad. So no, I won’t be sticking any such Post-It note to my computer.
Regarding what I suppose you consider to be your ‘big finish’, in which it is assumed that anybody discussing The New Boring is somehow incapable of enjoying or championing other music, a list of my favourite singles from 2011 is at http://ppj.st/tEC6HL. Looking at your own albums of the year list I suspect we may disagree on the merits of many inclusions but I’ve been happily championing this music – and plenty more – throughout 2011 and will find plenty more to champion in 2012.
Anyway, interesting blog post, but do better in 2012, yeah?
It’s not exclusive to music journalism.
Very true, but if you are looking to The Guardian and The New York Times to introduce you to new and exciting music I’d suggest that you are wasting your time and energy. You say ” we have to look outside the mainstream for new and exciting music’, but it’s unlikely that anyone is going to write about it in the pages of a national newspaper. Complaining about mainstream writers being boring is the same as them complaining about musicians being boring. Ignore them and look outside of the box.
Interesting point, I agree mostly.
But I wouldn’t say Peter Roinson or Jon Caramanica are the kind of journalists that simply (or only) “report on the pile of CDs that ended up on (their) desk as a result of public relations and major label marketing.”
+1,000,000,000,000….etc
@Peter Thanks for jumping into the conversation. As you saw my own albums of the year, you’ll note that most of them don’t venture too far outside the mainstream. I’m not anti-pop by any stretch of the imagination (though I am anti corporate-consensus music) and I’m certainly not on a crusade to divorce mainstream journalism from mainstream music.
So – I’m not interested here in “below-the-radar activism”, though I would pause to note that a) you’re the radar; and b) you get to set its height. That said, Radio 1 daytime is as much part of the problem and part of my critique, not an immutable natural force that we can only moan about at arm’s length.
I also have no problem with the bad review. But as you suggest – it only makes sense in terms of a contextualisation. If I look to a newspaper to see what’s new and interesting, I don’t want to be told ‘nothing, basically’ – it’s not only false, but it’s unhelpful to readers.
My broader point is that this is not “the year that rock music spun its wheels” or “the year of boring music”. Rather, the people who get to say what it was “the year of” selected a bunch of stuff that was less interesting than a whole wealth of other stuff, and it utterly fails to describe the state of music in 2011 – particularly since, more than at any other time in my life (I was born the same year Radio 1 came into being), what is considered mainstream is not what is happening in music. And music writers should be more attuned to that than they seem to be.
Sorry to single you out and of course it’s not personal, but your article provided a handy lightning rod, exemplar and shorthand reference point. You’re far from the worst offender. Rather, in this single instance, symptomatic of a much bigger problem.
Hey, Andrew. I’ve got a big, goofy grin on my face over everything you have just said here. As a freelance music journalist who has been plying his trade for one too many years, I think I can shed some light on the situation here:
-There’s a lot of fatigue that sets in, particularly with Old Media types, about what to make of the modern new music landscape. There’s TONS of people yelling at you to pay attention to them, and not enough hours in the day to listen to it all. And some of these people are only just know figuring out how to make heads or tails of tools like Spotify, Hype Machine, et al. So resentment can easily set in, especially when a lot of the music people can randomly take a chance on, if it doesn’t suck outright, isn’t particularly memorable or original. Moving up from the Long Tail straight into the Belly Of The Beast, the processed product selected by the masses is often pretty tame, obvious and unchallenging, hewing closely to the expectations of its target audience.
-Your mention of global conflict and civil unrest in the midst of all of this is quite appropriate. It’s like I say: back in the day, a band used to sell its ass to the major labels. Nowadays, it sells its ass to Coke and Pepsi. Even Pusha T and Tyler The Creator’s last video was sponsored by Red Bull. The idea of a Czech-style politicized youth rebellion fueled by pop music is dramatically undermined when pop music derives a good chunk of the money it now makes from the sorts of licensing deals and corporate sponsorship endeavors that permeate the modern music landscape. As X once sung, the world’s a mess. It’s in my kiss. And the fear and repression is so omnipresent in the culture that we don’t even know it’s there anymore.
(Also, if I can get a little music-snobbish for a minute, these new political movements tend to by and large put out really crappy music – basically propaganda over bland folk or pop backing made in a self-justifying echo chamber.)
-I think the average music listener also suffers MEGO when confronted with modern music – one of the main reasons why you see so many insular tribes nowadays in pop music, be it hip hop or dubstep or rootsy Black Keys-oriented rock or mainstream country or whatever. What sucks to one of these people may be exactly what makes it appealing to another. And if I don’t like, say, the sorts of people that listen to, say, Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, I’ll hate on their music, slur them online -it’s amazing how cruel the language of pop music fandom has become. It doesn’t matter if I’m some screwed-up preteen saying it – I and others like me can now poison the entire well for everyone with my resentment. I think we’re all in some ways suffering from this internet-inflicted PTSD. And music journos see this all on a daily basis.
I personally feel it’s not a problem with music, but a problem with people and community. When people live in an atmosphere of fear and hypercompetitiveness, even the good music loses its ability to impact its audience as strongly as it could. That’s my hope for this decade: for human beings to move towards more equitable community arrangements that simultaneously provide for and challenge us. We wouldn’t be having this conversation, I am certain, if this were the case.
Such a New Zealand investigative music journalist exists but sadly he no longer lives in New Zealand.
His name is Zane Lowe.
Thanks Andrew, that REALLY needed saying.
And, erm, @ Peter Robinson, if you think Radio 1 playlists are ‘big cultural things’ or that ‘big cultural things’ are a useful concept any more (or indeed that Coldplay should not be in everyone’s list of extremely boring things), well that’s a useful bit of context for reading your original article and your response here…
Mainstream or not mainstream is really not an issue in terms of style: there is good stuff in conventional styles, and there is good stuff of surpassing weirdness. The main issue for me is actually that people look en masse to sources like mainstream journalists for ideas on what to listen to, when quite honestly the necessary job they used to do is now redundant. It’s so EASY now to find great new sounds, related to other sounds you like, that for me, mainstream writers telling their readers that nothing interesting’s happening smacks of a deliberate attempt to keep a lid on all the good stuff. Good mainstream music only becomes mainstream because a lot of people listen to it.
The really compelling reason for not writing about boring music is that it’s not very useful to your readers: they want you to tell them about the good stuff that’s out there, the stuff you like and think they’ll like. It’s really neither here nor there if act X has nothing going for it. If the act in question is huge anyway, then your readers will hear it and work that out for themselves; if it’s not, then what reason is there to cover it?
(Oops, I hadn’t finished)
Those accustomed to the old way of doing things are scrabbling to maintain the now thoroughly discredited notion that there is one identifiable, numerically manageable group of artists that represents what everyone need to know about each major strand of popular music. They do this because their living is predicated on that system. Thankfully, it’s all too fragmented now for that to be a tenable idea: even within very specialist sub-genres fans get together and find that, although they have some touchstones in common, they can also introduce each other to completely new stuff that they think of as central to the style. There’s simply too much availability for ‘mainstream’ to mean the same thing it used to.
Hi Andrew, I enjoyed reading this article, as I have often thought a lot of stuff like this myself. I think it is true of so many magazines — maybe not one’s with dedicated music writers — but most fashion mags and mens mags are only reviewing what they get sent to them, and usually they are such short reviews, written by journalists who are usually working in other areas. The same CD gets reviewed a million times over across the world, and not much else sees the light of day.
I do think that their are some great dedicated music reviewers, working in certain areas — some of the music writers for the All Music Guide are very good at picking up new stuff, and looking at it in a historical context.
But I also don’t think enough people are critical of the role of music and how we consume it; it’s either something that is too lofty and written about academically, or its a small voice that just seems too negative to read.
I think you are right, that the thing that voices concerns of the day is always shifting. It might have been music in the sixties, but before that, it might have been poetry, or pamphleteers.
John Peel is a great example of a champion of music; he kept shifting his attention onto new things, and never got too attached to the past. Who would have believed that someone who had championed Tubular Bells, would later be backing Black Dog and Boards of Canada? (who in themselves have become a massive influence on new music).
Re:Peter (and folk). There’s a lot of people who know what ‘good’ is. I mean genuinely. It’s no extra special talent to know this kind of knowledge (about what true quality is in popular music). All this talk about John Peelism… that’s the problem isn’t it, somebody sets a standard and everybody wants to be that standard as a past character. Andrew Weatherall, now there’s a character that ‘fronts’ on many levels… not just a music aggregator but also a creative and a producer. No Peter Robinson, Andrew Dubber or even Zane Lowe can’t hold a candle to that. By the way as a Kiwi myself, there’s no celebration in Zane Lowe, he’s just another British Blagger (essentially).
Good food for thought Andrew. I must confess I found myself reading this and the word “radio” kept leaping to mind as much of this sentiment is arguably as much or more applicable there. The BBC in particular seems to me to fail in its remit in that it has annexed new music to a select few shows aired late at night rather than driving discovery via plays in among the usual crop of pop and playlisted music.
Mind you, as others have pointed out, was it ever different? The only change to me is that we are now in a narrowcasting world rather than a broadcasting one; many smaller media sources rather than those select few huge ones of old. On that note, in chatting about this with a friend he raised a very salient point: isn’t filtered recommendation (e.g. Last FM, but also Echo Nest and the myriad services which spring off them – Pitchify, Trushuffle, Tomahawk, Thisismyjam etc) the “new John Peel”? I must confess that for a long, long time I was almost resentful of the notion that such services could replace human recommendation and whilst I still don’t think they’re 100% there, the fact remains that for those of us with catholic tastes they are now getting more and more useful as a means to find great new music in a seemingly neverending world of it.
I don’t think journalism is redundant – merely that its entire role has diminished as a means to switch people on to new music because it is now one of many discovery and recommendation points where once upon a time there were perhaps two or three (mags, radio, friends?). As someone working in music marketing it is interesting these days in that exclusives in The Guardian or NME no longer light the touchpaper for an artist’s success (don’t say sales!) in the manner they once used to. Peel back to the early 90s (scuse pun!) and a glowing review in NME was a dealbreaker. No longer. Radio is still king in that respect – and that is where I remain continually frustrated that our radio landscape in general (including but not limited to the BBC) is so painfully dull. Some beacons of hope stand out among them but on balance they’re a tiny, tiny minority. To me that’s a massive shame as the whole radio platform remains incredibly strong in the UK for pushing artists both new and established.
If you’re talking about ‘mainstream’ then perhaps we have to look at the audience as a factor in the ‘dull’. We didn’t used to have so many alternatives for more niche tastes to find audio or video content – now that we do maybe the big broadcasters are left with a narrower taste range target, and as this is still a large market, the labels know that the more safe, middle-of-the-road acts are the ones to push to this market?
And that probably makes life dull for a mainstream critic/broadcaster.
“The key moments in making music in 2011 so, so dull” isn’t a strapline which accurately covers what is talked about in the Guardian article. “A selection of highly unrepresentative moments making music in 2011 appear so, so dull for this post”
Regardless, really interesting post, Andrew – totally agree that there wasn’t much wrong with 2011 – just depends where you’re looking.
Thanks for such an interesting Friday afternoon read, Dubber. Some excellent comments already on show here too.
Speaking of music journalism more generally, it seems that journos are moving further out of the PR bag, and onto more familiar terrains for inspiration and recommendations in the form of blogs, websites, Twitter and discussion forums.
Looking at the end of year round-ups that have been inescapable over the last four weeks, it’s remarkable how, in a time where new music has never been so multitudinous, or so readily available, the same albums and singles kept cropping up in every list. Now, although I do like PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, I fail to believe that the quotidian appraisal displayed in such spaces hasn’t been the poorly veiled by-product of horizontal nudging.
Nothing new, I think that the idea of lazy journalism is an inwardly mutating and self-serving one. Of course, there is nothing really wrong or unnatural about being influenced by the others (after all, this is the basis of such blogs) but it does make one think that some could be casting their nets a little further and make the breadth of music writing a little less harmonious.
Plenty of interesting music out there but it seems the music is getting more and more full of lovely posh guys and gals who, whilst beautifully trained, exhibit little emotion as life has been generally an easier path than others from the past which gave them that all-important edge or soul. It has all become rather nice and nice people then report on it and nice friends with large groups of nice friends groups then like it and make it big for like five minutes until the next big pair of shoes, err, I mean band comes along that is shiny and sparkly. All contributes to the dullness bu thankfully beneath the surface of this, kids who can’t afford guitar and piano lessons, and PR or social media agencies are crafting sounds on their laptops and getting their breaks the hard way, thus giving their music the required soul to sound like its genuine and not just a cool job to have when mummy and daddy would have preferred they had a career as a civil servant. Rock is dying because the really cool kids have moved on while the dinosaurs struggle to keep up.
this is a good article, it pisses me off so much when people say music is shit now and all good music was made ages ago, that’s bullshit, you just got to actually make an effort to find it instead of just listening to the radio and stuff. It’s funny that a lot of hip-hop heads only like golden age, but I guarantee in ten years or so people will be looking back on 2011 and going “man, I wish I was into the scene then, would have been cool to be around when Danny Brown and Black Milk where just starting, before they sold out, those where the good old days” people need to fucking enjoy the present instead of looking to the past
Agreed that whenever a catchy word comes in, it speaks more of the journalist’s ambition to make a mark than it does of the actual music he or she is speaking of. The “new boring” thing, is well, about the journalist.
I have to say, and I may have arrived very late on this, I recently read the sales figures for Pitchfork’s 50 albums of the year and I was flabbergasted. The woman EMA, who’s had tons of online and press attention, including Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” sold 1,500 records. The gap between edgier music and music that actually sells is getting much wider.
You know what, most people – the record-buying public that is – don’t care about what’s on the blogs or what’s “new” and hot. And that is the core of it for me. I am tired of the old Adele-bashing. There must be a deeper reason for people to be buying that sort of music, and maybe it has to do with it not being the “new” and the “hot” disposable band with gimmicks. Keep in mind that my favorite music of 2011 was probably ASAP Rocky’s mix tape but there is something really disgusting about putting down the tastes of the overwhelming majority as just a sign of the inevitable dullness of the masses. The press no longer have the overwhelming power to mold what will become relevant to the majority of people out there. It should try journalism more than opinionism.
Peter Robinson’s point about radio is quite valid but it does ignore and deride the actions of the record-buying public. BBC plays a lot of things that don’t have the same level of chart success. May
While I totally agree with the three points you made in the post, the optimistic second half is really just wishful thinking. If you’re saying that the masses need “tastemakers and discoverers of exciting talent” – presumably because they can’t do it for themselves – you automatically end up with this system of major label marketing of bands and records which all sound the same. All this PR wouldn’t exist or be effective if it wasn’t for the existence of a music journalist caste that they cater to. ‘Professional’ music journalism is the problem, not the solution.
@Peter Robinson: Peter, you are absolutely right.
Mr. Dubber and many of the responders miss your point and the point Mr. Caramanica makes in his NYTimes piece. There’s always a valid journalistic, reportorial reason to write about mainstream music and its mainstream delivery systems (mainstream radio and mainstream record labels). That said, since mainstream anything sucks – because, to make money, it has to pander to the lowest common denominator – the journalist upon whom it’s incumbent to report such things will ALWAYS say that mainstream everything sucks. It’s like the annual story about How To Treat A Hangover After New Year’s Eve. Okay, so moving on.
At the end of the day, then, because journalists – music writers and political writers – are paid to reflect back what they see in popular culture, it’s up to us, the consumers. to do the rest of the work: Consume, make informed decisions, and then act. Or not.
But “not” act is not an option. Find and support great rock. Occupy Music.
“IF IT’S BORING, DO NOT WRITE ABOUT IT.”
Nice one. And I think that applies to meta-criticism as well.
Better to just point to something and say “Wow I really like this!” And just give up on the cultural studies tedium and acclaim the numinous where you find it. That said well done on gracious follow-up to Peter Robinson.
For the sole purpose of doing just that I jumped into the “look at me dammit” fray with my own music blog. *yawn* But there are some things that I want to share because “Wow I really like this!”
jaebberwocky.blogspot.com
@Peter Robinson:
Jeez Peter…to each his own but I went through your list, and in the sampling of 10 or so that I heard there wasn’t a human drum pulse to be found. Nor any beats that escaped bubbles on the dance floor regularity.
“Charli XCX – ‘Nuclear Seasons’ the main reason it’s allowed on the list is that it is extremely good.” Dear God. This evinces little evolution from early 80′s Madonna.
@dubber: Hi Andrew, thanks for that reply and for explaining a couple of bits. I do still think we’re arguing quite different points here so I am not sure how much more we can discuss it…
I think it’s interesting that you say you look to a newspaper to see what’s new and interesting, because I do that too but I also look to newspapers (well some of them anyway) for a certain degree of analysis, or for them to be making sense of what’s happening. I guess that’s true across current affairs just as much as music. And the original thing I wrote on this topic was, I suppose, an example of that sort of article. I thought it was a trend that was new and interesting, and I thought I would be able to write about it in an engaging way. I’m not sure how much I succeeded on the final point but I don’t think it fits your description of being ‘unhelpful to readers’. (Particularly as The Guardian would have also carried plenty of other music coverage on the same day – it’s not like picking up a copy of NME and finding “NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!!” printed on every page!)
As I said above, a lot of my time is spent writing about new music that I find exciting, and it’s hard to do that without noticing certain trends. Some of them are natural trends and some of them are just labels chasing whatever they think might get them onto the Radio 1 playlist, but joining the dots between new releases, established successes and recent failures is interesting (to me at least) and important (to get an idea of where pop is right now).
One other thing I should add is that my field of expertise – though I’m interested in other areas – is mainstream pop. And this was by design an article about a mainstream trend. I think it misses the point a bit to criticise it (as some of your commenters have done) for not taking into account the fact that someone in Berlin has thrown a comb at a goat and achieved 480 Soundcloud downloads of the ensuing racket.
In the original New Boring article I think I referred to the movement as a tidal wave. Obviously undercurrents are what get waves going in the first place and I wouldn’t suggest that mainstream pop should replace the thousands of genres that don’t trouble the charts any more than I’d suggest my own journalism should replace the thousands of voices who’ve all got something important to say about their own favourite musics. But I do think in this particular case what I was talking about was an example of a mainstream response to a mainstream event, ie chart music gets too overexcited and noisy, so chart music calms itself down (or is forced to calm down by those who dictate what it is).
I seem to have banged on a little more than I intended. Basically, I think the article succeeded in saying what it set out to say, but that doesn’t mean I think there isn’t more to music. It’s just that the other stuff wasn’t pertinent to the article, or at least not in a way that my 1200 word limit would have permitted…
@Dirk Diggler:
The argument that you need to have been a drug dealer/lived on a council estate/have no musical training/etc. to make interesting or ‘edgy’ music is so incredibly lazy.
Do you only listen to music that comes with a street cred certificate or a sticker saying ‘Was financed by selling the singer’s semen to a sperm bank’? I’d bet half of those ‘kids on their laptops’ come from perfectly well-off households, and I’m positive that about half of those will make interesting music. To say that ‘uncool people’ are responsible for a lack of interesting music is ridiculous.
Bravo, everybody.