“It’s not my idea, I heard it somewhere years ago.”
This quote has two-fold significance for this post. Firstly, the quote is my comment on the main point of this post. The premise of this post is not my idea, and if inclined I could probably find some academic articles that have made this point before me (see my last post about the value of academic writing about music: http://millie3120.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/music-journalism/). Perhaps that’s even where I heard it, but I can’t be sure because I can’t remember.
The second reason this quote is significant is because it could probably be truthfully said by many musicians and songwriters today, about their musical style and sound. But of course, contemporary artists wouldn’t say that would they? They wouldn’t admit to making something unoriginal. Instead, they’d list their ‘influences’, and claim to have somehow artistically appropriated the sounds of their favourite artists, while adding (they claim) their own spin on an old idea, to make something (allegedly) new. This was going to be the central idea to this rant, but then I thought about how such artists even get to a stage where we care who their influences are, and where we read about who their influences are. This lead me back to the music press.
So this is the new central idea to this rant (which is of course actually an old idea that I heard somewhere, as I proclaimed at the start): music journalism is obsessed with nostalgia.
It’s not entirely the artists’ fault if they sound like their favourite bands from thirty years ago, but with better instruments and more computer-aided mixing and engineering. For this post, anyway, I’m going to blame the music press.
An example I found is from the January 27th, 2007 issue of New Musical Express. The article was titled: ‘1977 – the year punk broke’, and was justified by the fact that it had been thirty years since 1977, which the article claimed was “the single most turbulent year in rock history”. The bulk of the article is a month-by-month recount of events in the history of punk, with particular attention to The Clash and The Sex Pistols. The tone is generally one of celebration of the anarchy in the UK caused by both of these bands, and the way in which they flouted the rules of the time in many ways, the least of which was the sound of their music.
A few years before this, on the US front, The Ramones were bursting onto the scene with a similar attitude towards the music of the time: “We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard in 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed music like it used to be before it got ‘progressive’. We missed hearing songs that were short and exciting and… good! We wanted to bring back the energy to rock & roll.” (Joey Ramone, quoted by Billy Altman 1988).
My point is that while it’s great that these bands were rebelling by creating a new sound thirty years ago, the music press seems to celebrate such innovation so much that thirty years later, everything is, as Joey Ramone might put it, tenth-generation AC/DC. This kind of music journalism suppresses innovation by not allowing for the possibility of truly new sounds to be celebrated.
Heath J
lilen23 Said:
on May 21, 2008 at 7:06 am
Heath:
You say in your post:
“My point is that while it’s great that these bands were rebelling by creating a new sound thirty years ago, the music press seems to celebrate such innovation so much that thirty years later, everything is, as Joey Ramone might put it, tenth-generation AC/DC. This kind of music journalism suppresses innovation by not allowing for the possibility of truly new sounds to be celebrated.”
While I do see where you’re coming from, I can’t say that I’m entirely sure I can agree with this point of view. There seems to be a lot of generalisations regarding the mainstream press in this comment. To say that music journalism suppresses innovation by not covering new artists is (in my opinion) incorrect. There is a whole range of “mainstream press” that covers a variety of genres – in a lot of these there is a huge celebration of new acts. If you’re going to talk about pop music for example look at the Rolling Stone’s coverage of new acts such as Joss Stone and Lilly Allen.
I think the argument here is that the excessive (and sometimes exhaustive) coverage of acts can hinder people’s ability to discover new music – not the press’ failure to cover new artists. I agree that coverage can be very minimalistic – particularly magazines that obsessively cover top 40 artists, but I don’t ALL mainstream press is ignorant towards new music.
Just an opinion,
Lilen
heathj Said:
on May 21, 2008 at 8:53 am
I’m not sure you’re getting me. Maybe my post lacked a bit of eloquence, or maybe my opinion has changed just a little since I wrote that.
“To say that music journalism suppresses innovation by not covering new artists is (in my opinion) incorrect.”
This isn’t what I’m saying. You kept saying ‘new artists’. My argument isn’t that new artists aren’t getting covered my mainstream music press, but that the press is so obsessed with the past that even new artists are only thought of in terms of how they fit into the history of music that has come before them, and it’s this (perhaps unconscious) refusal to accept truly original sounds that discourages innovaiton.
I think that makes a tad more sense. Please feel free to tell me I’m wrong again.
I’d also like to add an observation that as with everything in music, this changes over time, and it’s very likely that a truly original artist who’s receiving hardly any coverage now, will come to be accepted and celebrated later in the history of music as their influence becomes more widespread. I don’t currently have an example of this, but maybe you can help me out with one. Maybe an artist is only accepted and recognised as ahead of their time (ie truly original) once other artists have tried to imitate them and achieved success (in the mainstream market) in doing so.
This also fits in with my theory about alternative / pop being a cycle, not a linear scale, as what’s alternative and uncelebrated now will become the pop of the future as other artists imitate this sound and hence raise awareness of it.
-heath
I’m not a puppet, I’m a real fan! « This is Not ‘Rolling Stone’! Said:
on May 22, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] easily identify with. This is exactly how punk developed (see my post ‘The good old days’ : http://millie3120.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/the-good-old-days/ ). My theory is that this then becomes popular and perhaps then takes a further turn towards being [...]