One actually quite good thing about the current spate of ‘best of the decade’ lists, once you get past their irritating ubiquity, is the almost laughably basic fact that they’re forcing people to engage seriously with the realities of the epoch. Musically, the two great evils of the last ten years were those perennial bedfellows, retro-pastiche and consumer-hedonism – both of which are malign forms of escapism seeking to remove the listener from a meaningful interaction with his/her surroundings, to put ‘the times’ on the back burner. If such soul-searching analyses are a little late in coming, at least they’re forcing people to think soberly about what will matter in the 2010s, a nice contrast to all the obfuscating millennial hysteria of Y2K, and the mood of dippy relativism and near-suffocating political apathy that we’ve been suffering under ever since.
So what will matter in the next decade? What the hell is going to happen next?
To be honest, I’m pretty sure it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Last week Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk) ended his brilliant article in the New Statesman on noughties culture with the following quote:
But if bohemia can rouse itself from defeat and depression, the cultural terrain seems open for contest in a way that it has not been for a long time. Perhaps soon we will be able to look back on the Noughties with a shudder and think: how did things ever get that bad?
This sort of rallying cry is one we’re more than ready to echo here at The Grain. However, the skeptical part of me would like to ask: how exactly is this ‘rousing of bohemia’ going to take place? At the moment, this sort of development seems far from imminent. People of our generation just weren’t born with the politically active gene, and that’s a plain fact.
Eventually (the other, more optimistic, part of me responds) we will see some sort of revival of radicalism, perhaps as a reaction to the inevitable widespread horrors that will follow the return to power of an odious-as-ever Conservative Party. But what sort of musical world will a new radicalism have to integrate itself with? Indie guitar music in the old sense is pretty much completely dead in the water, totally lobotomized by the corporate mainstream, a soulless professionalized finishing school for music-school graduates, the bands of which are not really very different in kind from all those X-Factor-style cabaret acts in the pop sphere (and invariably a lot more musically conservative). Dance music too is looking pretty limp and idea-less right now, in the UK at any rate. True innovation seems like a completely outdated concept in all sectors. Grime and dubstep have been the much-trumpeted organic success stories of the decade, but how far did their popular reach really extend outside of metropolitan London?
Perhaps more importantly, all of the above genres will have to cope with the stark fact that the mere idea of selling records will very soon become a total impossibility. Perhaps herein lies the window of opportunity for an alternative resuscitation: eventually the bottom will fall out of the industry, leaving the way open for small-scale collectives, online networks, an almost primitive, pre-industrial, folk-ish climate in which music becomes something produced and distributed amongst friends. Musicians will no longer be able to count on the double-edged sword that is the record deal, and maybe being freed from the obligation to fulfill financial/contractual obligations, members of bands will take stable, long-term day jobs outside the industry allowing them a degree of artistic freedom impossible in the era of label authoritarianism and blackmail. Maybe we will to remember that music and life are twin sisters, but not the same thing, stop seeing a music-incorporating hedonistic lifestyle as the guiding principle of existence. That’s the hopeful outcome.
Alternatively, the tide of individualism will continue, and musical culture will head down a path of total meaninglessness – the volume of musical production will become just too vast too make any kind of consensual sense of, and music will become like a sort of auto-erotic computer game, with the individual listener able to trigger whichever aural cocktail is capable of granting the maximum amount of short-term pleasure. The whole panoply of genres, sub-cultures, communities, movements and such will be replaced by music as pure individualized, hyper-accessible self-entertainment. I’m less keen on this outcome, I think.
Perhaps only a massive global catastrophe will really shake things up, or maybe things will just carry on pretty much as they are. Maybe I will get a job as a waitress waiting tables at a diner in some remote city down the highway.
I really don’t know.
Maybe all we can do is tell over and over again the story of what pop music means to us, what is so important about it, and just hope that at least one other person hears, and understands.
Where does Grizzly Bear’s superlative 2009 single ‘Two Weeks’ fit into all this? God knows. I’m just telling you that it matters very much, to me, and that it will continue to do so in the years to come.
AN
