Friday: '00s Authenticity Fetish
Earnest twee confessional glockenspiel rock from the turn of the century. I know there's been a slew of things, but for me personally, this is going to be the stuff I'll remember typifying this decade the most. Along with French stuff like Air, Daft Punk and Justice and all that square wave loving Groove-/Love-/Party-first beat-centric electronic music from the same place of renewal and raw innocence.
Feist - "Feel It All"
Kate Nash - "Foundation"
Anything by Andrew Bird, The Arcade Fire, The White Stripes, The Decemberists, Scissor Sisters, Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, etc.
Along with the glitteringly generous heart-on-the-sleeve love songs:
"Hey Ya" by Outkast
"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley
"Young Folks" by Peter Bjorn and John
"Umbrella" by Rhianna
"Can't Believe It" by T-Pain
"Paper Planes" by M.I.A. (okay well maybe not this one, but this is a similarly unselfconscious "naive" take on last wave's rap materialism)
and -especially- all the wonderful homemade mash-ups and acoustic covers by fearless creative everyday people on YouTube.
I miss the slick sexy, gothy, romanticist, industrial, pre-millennial tension fin de cybersiecle 90's as much as anybody, and the brooding frenetic lockstep snap-to-grid energy of drum'n'bass and its spawn is still compelling, but honestly, I'll take LCD Soundsystem any day over Lords of Acid and Ministry, and Basement Jaxx over Goldie or Roni Size :P
I mean, yeah... the video to "Head Like a Hole" was cool and all, and "Enjoy the Silence" had some iconic visuals, and "People Are Still Having Sex", and I still have my soundtrack cd to Wipeout XL for the PS2, somewhere...
But all that profundity, dark, jaded and/or adult entertainment, or pristine vectorized "superflat" intelligent artificiality, pales in comparison to this decade's resetting the aesthetic clock back to the simple uncynical uncomplicated childlike joy of watching a real, live actual, messy, organic, wet dog wildly shake itself dry in slow motion. It's thrilling, unusual, alien, humorous, monstrous, sexy, silly, natural, explosive, sublime, everything we try so hard to recreate and reproduce with tools and effort and gimmicks, etc. And it's real. After all that boom of virtuality and artifice, the cutting edge of human art can't reproduce the simple brute miracle of Lovecraftian chaos at work that is the Wet Dog Shaking Itself Dry. It's like, a perfect refutation to 90's futurism. To anything Pixar could ever dream up. "Yeah, that's cool and all, looks expensive too, but dude watch this wet sheep dog in slow-motion." Or more generally: stop, slow down, and experience anything that actually exists, this shit is amazing... the physics engine is incredible, and it's all in high definition <3
I anticipate the day when the only folks afraid to go outside are those close to the Gen-X hump in the bell curve, whose formative imaginative visions of the future are bookended by Neuromancer and The Matrix.
Feist - "Feel It All"
Click to viewKate Nash - "Foundation"
Anything by Andrew Bird, The Arcade Fire, The White Stripes, The Decemberists, Scissor Sisters, Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, etc.
Along with the glitteringly generous heart-on-the-sleeve love songs:
and -especially- all the wonderful homemade mash-ups and acoustic covers by fearless creative everyday people on YouTube.
I miss the slick sexy, gothy, romanticist, industrial, pre-millennial tension fin de cybersiecle 90's as much as anybody, and the brooding frenetic lockstep snap-to-grid energy of drum'n'bass and its spawn is still compelling, but honestly, I'll take LCD Soundsystem any day over Lords of Acid and Ministry, and Basement Jaxx over Goldie or Roni Size :P
I mean, yeah... the video to "Head Like a Hole" was cool and all, and "Enjoy the Silence" had some iconic visuals, and "People Are Still Having Sex", and I still have my soundtrack cd to Wipeout XL for the PS2, somewhere...
But all that profundity, dark, jaded and/or adult entertainment, or pristine vectorized "superflat" intelligent artificiality, pales in comparison to this decade's resetting the aesthetic clock back to the simple uncynical uncomplicated childlike joy of watching a real, live actual, messy, organic, wet dog wildly shake itself dry in slow motion. It's thrilling, unusual, alien, humorous, monstrous, sexy, silly, natural, explosive, sublime, everything we try so hard to recreate and reproduce with tools and effort and gimmicks, etc. And it's real. After all that boom of virtuality and artifice, the cutting edge of human art can't reproduce the simple brute miracle of Lovecraftian chaos at work that is the Wet Dog Shaking Itself Dry. It's like, a perfect refutation to 90's futurism. To anything Pixar could ever dream up. "Yeah, that's cool and all, looks expensive too, but dude watch this wet sheep dog in slow-motion." Or more generally: stop, slow down, and experience anything that actually exists, this shit is amazing... the physics engine is incredible, and it's all in high definition <3
I anticipate the day when the only folks afraid to go outside are those close to the Gen-X hump in the bell curve, whose formative imaginative visions of the future are bookended by Neuromancer and The Matrix.