Confusing Them With Mountains

It took me about an hour to read this – Pitchfork crashes my browser, so I was having to grab screenprints in double-quick time – but the reward was absolutely worth the struggle. I’d only take issue with you on Lady GaGa, but we can save that one for Popular in several years time…!

“Xenomania digression” — haha this reminds me of my notes to myself: “insert critical history of dogs and clocks and medieval asian crime here” (yes this IS a review of a TV comedy about indie robots, WOT OF IT)

then there was “bubble!”

Having an “American bent” is all very well when you’re writing for a US publication, but not to include anything by Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens on that Spotify playlist is simply criminal.

Great article tom. but i’m not sure about the end, at least US-wise. It feels like maybe nobody has a real grasp on what’s going on, with the stagnating charts, hip-hop’s anti-pop turn (except for kanye really, who is the height of producer->superstar popwise, and would have really rounded the article out), today’s stars being yesterday’s stars and so on. The new transparency (exemplified i think by trl -> it’s on with alexa chung) is maybe Fake (Real-Fake) [or Fake (Fake-Fake)] which raises an interesting question — is there an algebra of realness? i.e. is fake distributive and does Fake (Real-Fake) === Fake-Real Fake-Fake? We know it isn’t commutative. [note to self: “semigroup digression”].

despite trying not to, of course, the article gets a bit lost in critical vs. popular takes on pop, and i think maybe what happened more broadly is that pop moved from pretending to be about the people but being about the music to pretending to be about the music but being about the people, the reason for which being, maybe, tied to mp3 culture, or maybe the re-regionalization (and mini-pop-ization) of hip-hop in response to the pop/hip-hop/r&b fusion that sort of solidified a certain type of royalty, and hip-hop’s inability to escape such even as new acts/scenes broke and disappeared/were swallowed.

i.e. the dominance of the studio machine is more complete, which in turn means that the profits and production of the studio machine dwindles, do you SEE?

ok. enough of this or now.

Great article Tom, studded throughout with so many insightful gems.

The Idol/Mariah thing is interesting – it took her ten years to get anywhere near the street-smart collaborative performer we saw at the start of the 00s. If she was her young naive self she’d have been the exact sort of contestant Idol would have lapped up. With no Idol in the late 80s she succeeded in winning one of the internal Idolesque “competitions” all major labels undertook in the search for new vocalists. It’s her career journey that brought us the artist we now know, not what she brought to the table to begin with.

And it’s kind of ironic that just as her more urban, collaborative street-smart output appears to be stalling on the charts, she is going back to an Idolesque ballad as her next release thus completing her own pop circle. She’s chasing the sort of worldwide commercial success the UK-Idol hewn Bleeding Love achieved, spawning a series of imitations in its wake (such as half of the last Beyonce album).

Pop, forever chasing its own tail.

ok new thought, inspired by looking at the threads in popjustice. the weird thing is that america doesn’t really have pop in the same way that britain does. so america briefly did have pop, and it was massively important, but then america stopped having pop, and that’s why trying to talk about pop is odd at the moment. we have pop culture of course, but not pop music, and that has everything to do with race.

lex: that’s sort of what i meant by “this has everything to do with race.” millennial pop music was distinguished by how white it was, even as everything it did to “adult” up was to move towards black performers. there’s a social pull of genre and genre construction that doesn’t leave a great deal of room for pop as such, and the excitement of that period was maybe because the categories were briefly more up in the air than usual.

Tom,

It’s a very good article. The moment I read it I was as puzzled as Pete regarding the US-centric nature of the article, but I assumed it was pretty much indicative of its audience (Pitchfork IS a US-based website) but also, and maybe more importantly, the moment it’s being written at, considering these days chart music in the US seems to be much more interesting than any of the things going on in the UK top 40.

However, DO NOT underestimate the power of the UK as a force in the pop music scene all over the world based on the fact that not many of your pop acts didn’t make it in the US. The world is larger than that; I’m from Argentina, a pretty remote country, and acts like the Sugababes may not show up in magazine covers, but it’s pretty easy to hear “Push the button” or “Too Lost in You” when you walk down the street, and believe me, that’s a lot more exposure than anything “Get Ur Freak On” will ever get. McFly has become huge with teenagers here, La Roux is (sadly) getting airplay in AOR stations, Robbie Williams has always been huge here (he’s a way bigger than Justin Timberlake here, for instance), Daniel Bedingfield scored some hits…They may not be the best of the bunch (“Come and get it”, “Chemistry” and stuff like that did not have any impact beyond the local blogosphere), but the number of hits you scored here is a big one.

Hi Rob –

I think BEP themselves aren’t sure how to explore it further! The END as it stands is a really sprawling record (I haven’t steeled myself to play it all the way through, and I quite LIKE the BEPs) so the idea of further add-ons etc isn’t especially appetising. There’s all sorts of things you could do with the idea of an album as perpetually unfinished: they might say, right, here’s some new tracks, now vote the old ones OFF, but I’m not sure what the point would be.

I guess in the CD era we got towards the idea of the album as unfinished document with CD issues featuring bonus tracks – I can only think of XTC who actually interpolated the bonus stuff through the album proper though. And the format for CD reissues seems to have settled on original album + bonus disc now.

The idea of an album as a period of time rather than event has a long and happy life in the marketing department, of course: this was a fine art in the 80s in terms of what to release as the second, third, fourth single, when to release them, when to tour, etc etc.

Hi Tom

Thanks for the response.

I should clarify: I’m interested in the idea not for artistic purposes but for critical purposes, i.e. as another means for making sense of music. As you say, the idea of an album as a period of time is one means for making sense — critically, industrially, etc. — of music, as is the idea of album as event. And there’s also the idea of music as object (Cf. Harvey’s Pitchfork piece on the mp3), and a certain conception, simultaneously related and unrelated to the conception of music-as-object, of music as timeless, eternal. This idea of album as stream seems ripe for further thought, for consideration not just as a means of describing a singular accomplishment (the BEP album) but also for thinking about the production, distribution and reception of music more generally. It’s certainly an apt metaphor, given the widespread use of internet streaming as one among a number of means for distributing music today.

I’m interested, then, in knowing whether this idea of album-as-stream is something that just occurred to you when faced with the challenge of describing the BEP album, or whether it’s an idea you’ve seen used elsewhere to talk about that album or any other albums. Does Will.i.am or the likes explicitly talk about the album in that way? have other critics picked up on and run with the idea, perhaps in relation to other artists/albums, etc.?

Cheers

Ah, cheers.

Moving from “flow” to “stream” makes sense — so much so that I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection myself. Kinda ironic, too, given the use of “flow” to describe (US) television in the 70s/80s, which of course is currently going through a process of intensified “objectification” via DVD boxsets, etc.

Thanks.