Nothing says yesterday like the hits of today
Essay - Simon Reynolds (New York Times)
PDF here
Once pop music was something by which you could tell the decade, or even the year. But listening to the radio now is disorienting, if you’re searching for a sound that screams “It’s 2011!”
Take the year’s biggest hit, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” It is 1960s rhythm-and-blues with modern production. Everything about it - its melody and lyrics, Adele’s delivery, the role played by the backing vocalists - gestures back to soul singers like Etta James and Dusty Springfield.
Then there’s Cee-Lo Green’s “Forget You,” which is steeped in the ’70s soul of acts like the Staple Singers. Recent smashes by the Black- Eyed Peas, LMFAO, Kesha, Pitbull, Taio Cruz, Jennifer Lopez and Brit- ney Spears recall the “hip house” sound of hitmakers like Technotronic and C&C Music Factory, or mid-’90s trance anthems by Paul Van Dyk and BT.
The resemblance between Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was widely noted on the latter’s release this year. “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the Black Eyed Peas references Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” while their song “The Time” borrows from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life.”
Until the 2000s pop decades always had epoch- defining sounds. These musical styles usually build on the past, but they always took their sources in fresh directions, accompanied by a distinct fashion element, new rituals and dance moves, and so forth
The ’70s generated heavy metal, punk, disco, reggae. The ’80s, hip- hop, synthpop and Goth. The ’90s had grunge and the techno/rave/ electronic explosion. But the following decade has produced - well, what exactly? Hip-hop and R&B have built incrementally on where they were in the ’90s. Emo is a melodramatic merger of pop-punk and Goth. True, various underground genres can claim relative freshness: grime and dubstep in Britain, the post-indie sounds of Animal Collective. But their effects on mainstream pop have been minimal.
The fading of newness and nowness from pop music is mystifying. In the last couple of years a concept has emerged that at least identifies the syndrome. Coined by the founders of cyberpunk fiction Wil- liam Gibson and Bruce Sterling, “atemporality” is a term for the disconcerting absence of contemporaneity from so much current pop culture.
A prime example is the fad for photography apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which digitally simulate pictures taken in the ’70s or ’80s. Instant-nostalgia snapshots are part of a fascination with outmoded technology and “dead media” (Mr. Sterling’s term).
Mr. Sterling sees today’s pop as a side effect of digiculture. A curiosity of futuristic-seeming in- formation technology is that it has dramatically increased the presence of the past. From YouTube to iTunes, from file-sharing blogs to on-demand Internet streaming video, the volume of back catalog music, film, TV and so forth is astounding.
Atemporality has not just jumbled up the decades, it has eroded the barriers between genres. The iPod shuffle is the era’s defining music technology: a restless drifting that nevertheless stays within
defined taste limits. The iPod and similar devices have a contradictory result: they erode the historical divisions between kinds of music, but they also enable fans to avoid music they don’t like.
If there’s a modern equivalent to the distinct sound of specific periods, it’s the superhumanly perfect vocals featured in so much current pop and rock thanks to Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction processor made by Antares Audio Technologies.
Take away the Auto-Tune’s digital gloss, though, and there’s little about hits by Lady Gaga, Taio Cruz or Kesha to indicate when they were made.
Auto-Tune is the date stamp of today’s pop. In the future it might well be embraced by early adopter hipsters who will hunt down “vintage” Auto-Tune plug-ins in the same way that they currently collect antique synthesizers and old-fashioned valve amplifiers.
PDF here
Once pop music was something by which you could tell the decade, or even the year. But listening to the radio now is disorienting, if you’re searching for a sound that screams “It’s 2011!”
Take the year’s biggest hit, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” It is 1960s rhythm-and-blues with modern production. Everything about it - its melody and lyrics, Adele’s delivery, the role played by the backing vocalists - gestures back to soul singers like Etta James and Dusty Springfield.
Then there’s Cee-Lo Green’s “Forget You,” which is steeped in the ’70s soul of acts like the Staple Singers. Recent smashes by the Black- Eyed Peas, LMFAO, Kesha, Pitbull, Taio Cruz, Jennifer Lopez and Brit- ney Spears recall the “hip house” sound of hitmakers like Technotronic and C&C Music Factory, or mid-’90s trance anthems by Paul Van Dyk and BT.
The resemblance between Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was widely noted on the latter’s release this year. “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the Black Eyed Peas references Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” while their song “The Time” borrows from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life.”
Until the 2000s pop decades always had epoch- defining sounds. These musical styles usually build on the past, but they always took their sources in fresh directions, accompanied by a distinct fashion element, new rituals and dance moves, and so forth
The ’70s generated heavy metal, punk, disco, reggae. The ’80s, hip- hop, synthpop and Goth. The ’90s had grunge and the techno/rave/ electronic explosion. But the following decade has produced - well, what exactly? Hip-hop and R&B have built incrementally on where they were in the ’90s. Emo is a melodramatic merger of pop-punk and Goth. True, various underground genres can claim relative freshness: grime and dubstep in Britain, the post-indie sounds of Animal Collective. But their effects on mainstream pop have been minimal.
The fading of newness and nowness from pop music is mystifying. In the last couple of years a concept has emerged that at least identifies the syndrome. Coined by the founders of cyberpunk fiction Wil- liam Gibson and Bruce Sterling, “atemporality” is a term for the disconcerting absence of contemporaneity from so much current pop culture.
A prime example is the fad for photography apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which digitally simulate pictures taken in the ’70s or ’80s. Instant-nostalgia snapshots are part of a fascination with outmoded technology and “dead media” (Mr. Sterling’s term).
Mr. Sterling sees today’s pop as a side effect of digiculture. A curiosity of futuristic-seeming in- formation technology is that it has dramatically increased the presence of the past. From YouTube to iTunes, from file-sharing blogs to on-demand Internet streaming video, the volume of back catalog music, film, TV and so forth is astounding.
Atemporality has not just jumbled up the decades, it has eroded the barriers between genres. The iPod shuffle is the era’s defining music technology: a restless drifting that nevertheless stays within
defined taste limits. The iPod and similar devices have a contradictory result: they erode the historical divisions between kinds of music, but they also enable fans to avoid music they don’t like.
If there’s a modern equivalent to the distinct sound of specific periods, it’s the superhumanly perfect vocals featured in so much current pop and rock thanks to Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction processor made by Antares Audio Technologies.
Take away the Auto-Tune’s digital gloss, though, and there’s little about hits by Lady Gaga, Taio Cruz or Kesha to indicate when they were made.
Auto-Tune is the date stamp of today’s pop. In the future it might well be embraced by early adopter hipsters who will hunt down “vintage” Auto-Tune plug-ins in the same way that they currently collect antique synthesizers and old-fashioned valve amplifiers.