As alternative music fell over itself in a headlong dash towards the mainstream this decade, one of the unfortunate side effects was that mainstream pop music adopted some of the worst aspects of the indie sector. In 2009 (which is, remember, all about pop) Britain is rife with artists that combine the pumped-up piety and creative ‘seriousness’ of old indie with the principle-less commerciality and childish simplicity of the lesser pop song. I don’t like to name names, but actually, I will, so here goes: Florence and the Machine, Little Boots, La Roux.
This is an unfortunate turn of events, because pop has always thrived on ephemerality and anti-seriousness, has always benefitted enormously from the celebration of short-lived, attention-grabbing anomalies over album-length pretention. What’s weird about the three artists mentioned above is that they just don’t seem to have any singles worthy of note. In this age of plummeting CD sales, it is, bizarrely, their albums that have been heavily marketed, which looks very much a desperate last attempt by the record industry to appeal to the few people still buying physical copy (ie. twenty/thirty-something Mondeo women).
You get the feeling that if Sunshine Anderson’s ‘Heard it All Before’ was released today, instead of it being a rare, unique, transitory pop gem, it would most likely be positioned in the vanguard of a similarly obvious and cheap marketing strategy. As it is, we can thank our lucky stars it appeared in 2001, just before records by soul/pop-influenced female solo artists started sounding like they were designed by a committee consisting of Bernard Butler, Jo Whiley, and the Chief Executive of one of the ‘cooler’ offshoots of the Universal Music Group. Read the rest of this entry »
