The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis reminds me why he’s one of my favorite music critics. This month he’s decided to take every CD released — or at least every on the record labels will send him — to get the pulsebeat of popular music today. The idea is to cut through the glib generalizations about pop music that one hears:
For the first time in 40 years, the album is under threat as the primary means by which artists communicate with their audience. The rise of the digital download and the iPod genuinely seem to have changed people’s attitude to music, in a manner unthinkable even five years ago. A new music magazine, Rip and Burn, was recently launched under an anti-album manifesto: “Download culture promotes the song, not the album. We are no longer content to sit through noodling filler tracks, which is why our reviews only shout about the very best songs.”
…All this talk of change, and yet sales of albums actually rose in Britain last year. It’s confusing - but then so is everything else about rock and pop music at the moment. The media is full of conflicting reports… Depending on whom you listen to, 2004 has either proved a golden era or an unmitigated disaster for the British urban scene. Manufactured pop may be destroying music as we know it, or it may be the most vibrant and exciting genre around. Record labels are either signing nothing or they’re signing anyone who has ever shown even the vaguest interest in being in a band. So what’s going on? One way to find out seems to be to hear a massive chunk of music in a short space of time, in the hope that we learn something. Hence the idea of listening to every album released this month.
Maybe, it’s empiricism gone awry, but I rather wish the folks at the Globe’s music desk would be able to discuss the music industry and music subculture outside their own generalized preferences.
Petridis’ verdict? A) The amount of music released today is overwhelming; B) generic diversity is increasing to the point of taste balkanization; and C) the reissue is the single most dominant industrial trend.
Oh, and he also gets a good dig in at the Buggles.
I am listening to a CD reissue of The Age of Plastic, the debut album by Buggles. In case you don’t remember, Buggles were a duo featuring the famous producer Trevor Horn on vocals. They had a number one with Video Killed the Radio Star, then vanished. It isn’t so much the album itself that is the problem, although it has a song on it called Astroboy (and the Proles on Parade) and is awful beyond measure. It is the idea that someone, somewhere in a record company had bothered to reissue it. At 3am, that decision suddenly seems symbolic of everything bad that people say about the music industry: it’s wasteful, it’s stupid, it has no interest in actual music.
Funny, I recently felt the same thing about the new Kajagoogoo reissue. I mean, of all the things in the world, someone had to devote the time and resources to remaster that?
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