I’m listening to a really good session with Plump DJs on Proton Radio. What is leaping out at me and demanding attention is an observation I made this summer while landscaping with Neil. We had the radio on The Zone. I couldn’t help but notice that the electro resurrection started almost single handedly by Fischerspooner has penetrated all the way through pop music and back into house. You can’t miss it. Every song on the Zone all summer was dripping with 80s disposable charm and now the same SFX are muddled deep into every track the Plumps are playing.
What does all this mean? Is it a flashback to simpler, more naive times? Is it a hearkening back to an age when our values were more wholesome, our lives more meaningful? Maybe so… maybe so…
My own theory is a little more stripped down. Not nearly so romantic. But it does bring me every bit as much hope for the human league.
We are tired of three giant labels telling us what music we like. A dirty dozen old guys in suits have been buying record labels and radio stations and even movie companies so they can create, mold and control the material girl’s market. We have been slowly and carefully trained into good little music consumers over the last fifty years or so. Sometimes, though, we show a little mainstream resistance. The best example of this is the retro fad. If music labels were meeting our actual needs we in the mainstream wouldn’t raise our heads above water. We’d dociley continue eating what we are given.
Pop, it would seem, is eating itself.
When radio stations repeat songs every 44 minutes (and more when chart and request shows interrupt the regular programming) we get sick of songs that would otherwise have legs for years, and they’d know how to use them. Instead we chew them up and spit them out a couple months later because we hear them so much. I like a couple of Kelly Clarkson’s songs. I like a couple of Britney’s and I like a couple of XTina’s. But only because I don’t listen to the radio. Anymore.
We like to think we have autonomy when it comes to our musical taste but we don’t really. Not very.
So when we all turn passionately to the glory days of disposable pop and New Wave and gritty dark stuff like the Cure and Depeche Mode we aren’t necessarily hearkening back anywhere except away from today’s forcefeeding.
The commercial result of this is a New Next Wave, a resurgence of 80s synth and pop culture lyrics.
On the whole I can’t say I object. In fact I spent most of the last decade wondering what had happened to lyrics. Like, where did they go? Where, in fact, did our love go? So I’m enjoying a certain amount of validation.
You too?
Basically, numbers are finally showing that while pop sells records, they’re net losing money by continuing down that path. They gained a large teen market, but now more and more 20somethings simply stopped using the radio. We use iTunes, we buy older CDs, we go out and buy only good newer bands. Effectively, the market they targeted doesn’t have nearly the disposable income that the 20somethings are willing to drop on GOOD music. Not rehash of House music #37, or Cute Jailbait #734, we’re looking for our new Cure. There were a few successful rock bands in the past 2-3 years that basically foiled all the logic that we stopped buying music because we could pirate it. We stopped buying music because it all sucked.
I doubt teen bands will die soon, but there has been an increase in the number of people who actually write lyrics, and play songs.. instead of repeat what would qualify as a chorus for the entire song, and just make sure it’s 10 words or less, about how much of a sexpot the singer is, and make her hot. That recipie doesn’t sell music to people who grew up listening to decent tracks.
Heck, the the most recent album on my player right now is APC – Mer De Noms.
COMMENT:
Two things I don’t miss: radio and cable television.
The Internet does great things for music. It allows some genres to sidestep the toils (and spoils) of mainstream and the hoops one jumps through to be in it. You may never sign with Virgin, but your album is out there and people can get it if they’re so inclined.
Of course, mainstream is like a cliquey group of trend-chasers who follow the free food to any party, so it’s tricky to pin down what exactly is “mainstream” anymore. I listens to whats I likes because I likes it. Without cable or radio, it’s tough to find a large booming voice telling me what music I should be liking. I’ve been forced to choose for myself.
omglolz