RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: ANDY DUBBIN
Relevancy

Back in 1999, this guy Lou Bega had sort of a smash hit with “A Little Bit of Mambo.” My dad approved and bought the album in the impulse buy of the century (and mind you he purchased the virtually inoperative Christie Brinkley/Chuck Norris-endorsed “Total Gym” that same year). Anyways, fast-forward to August 2006 and Bega is back with this single “Bachata,” and I’m all over it. I pitched it as a [Pitchfork] track review, procrastinated a lot, and ended up writing a little ditty after school one day on an hour of sleep. It was posted and pulled between 4 and 6 the next morning; an issue of “relevancy” was allegedly the culprit.

I don’t take a lot of personal offense, but the disconcerting thing to me is how the possibility that dredging up a late ‘90s one-hit-wonder would throw a few readers was enough to just expunge a legitimate piece. It’s reasonable to assume that a lot of Pitchfork’s demographic and future are kids around my age that had the same kind of experiences with Lou Bega, and reminiscing on stuff like bar mitzvah songs that went “a little bit of (insert name of bar mitzvah boy here) all night long” is pretty sublime; also to some extent my generation of attention deficit thrives on irrelevancy.

It was great to have the opportunity to write for Pitchfork for those couple of months, and I was always enthusiastic about writing for them. But doesn’t a policy of “sprinting with the flow” and dealing only with trends as they’re pertinent in the MTV sense and scrapping old news for a shitty VH1 decade recap kind of cheapen the things that should matter more to us? Kids have enough to worry about without feeling unfulfilled because they haven’t heard all fifteen new Ryan Adams raps; the occasional reminder that “hey, that Islands album was pretty good” or “you were once ten and loved Mambo #5” or “there are only seven payments left on your total gym” is really refreshing.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006