The Elephant In The Room

[koganbot]

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and

Comments

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[koganbot]

Of course this is all quite relevant. And, despite my relation to video games and anime consisting of a vast, impressive ignorance, I've nonetheless occasionally written about bits of music relating to bits of video-n-anime-games (the "Lam Suet" remix of "Crayon," something-or-other that Faye Wong did for Final Fantasy, something else by Scooter or someone, and some Russian cod-peasant tune as the theme of yet another video game). This leads me to believe that geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on. But I really don't know. I assume there is some overlap between the Rockwrite and Fanfic and video-geek worlds that'll facilitate this overlap. I should find out if and how much skyecaptain and freakytigger and petronia have crossed into this overlap. I'll post a call for comment to these people and others.

I've long assumed that crunk takes its basic tonal sense from the romanticism of nineteenth and twentieth century "serious" music (rather than say from rhythm & blues, though of course there's no law stopping it from taking from both), but that this was owing to wanting to create the feel of suspense and horror movies - the composers of which were steeped in European romanticism. (Which isn't to say that I've done any research into what Jon, Banner, and Collipark were drawing from or getting at.)

Since critics are people, and people generally are exposed to TV sets and radios and the like, I think the critic is familiar with a huge variety of music, whether or not that variety gets into his or her library.

Another thought: "soundtrack" probably doesn't connote in people's mind quite what is going on - or even remotely what is going on - in TV commercials, almost all of which use music but the music very rarely coalesces into anything like a song or even a jingle. It's almost like: a rhythm, jumpy or not-so-jumpy depending; a daub of rock, or a daub of disco, or a daub of mood; perhaps followed by a wash of something. Back when I lived in San Francisco one of my roommates, a very good jazz musician, was once invited to play on a TV commercial. He said if you'd filmed the session it'd have made This Is Spinal Tap seem like Schindler's List in comparison.