They’re wrong of course, but I know what people who are fond of cliches mean when they say ‘it’s all about the tune’.
If they were right, if music was a purely formal thing, if stuff like politics, image, the backstories and reputations of artists, historical era, hype and the like really were irrelevant, then we wouldn’t in this decade of surface-noise and celebrity have had to put up with such obviously context-over-substance horrors as The Libertines, Amy Winehouse, and Razorlight (the flipside to this, of course, is that we’d also be without music that is interesting largely by virtue of context – Bowie’s perennial aesthetic reinventions, the pathos of Closer’s lyrics in the wake of Ian Curtis’s death, Fleet Foxes’ timely summary of American popular music in the year of Obama, etc).
But even so, I don’t think I’m being over-optimistic in thinking that, now as always, a significant portion of music that ‘connects’ with the listening public does so because of the merits of pure form, because of all those minute musical details that are difficult to analyse, but that make the songs themselves worthwhile entities quite aside from the external/worldly side of things.
In the last ten years no one did musical formalism like James Mercer of Albuquerque’s The Shins, and never so well as on the masterly ‘New Slang’ released in 2001, a tune that, as far as I can make out, achieved widespread popularity almost exclusively off the back of an utterly self-justifying, evocative, life-affirming melody.
