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: MATT LEMAY
The Idea Of Ideas

2006: The year indie rock sinks so far into self-clowning that the American Apparel store should start carrying red noses and floppy shoes. Why does every overblown one-sheet read like an instant backlash kit? Why are we pretending that so many debut albums are so much better than they are? Why are pop singers getting serious consideration as career artists, while independent bands are getting skewered for not “living up to their hype” by the very people who generated that hype? I think we’ve hit the horrible flipside of participatory media – suddenly EVERBODY is interested not (just) in music, but in what it means to the culture at large. Indie rock record reviewers now self-identify as “cultural critics.” Dudes with internet journals argue very, very seriously about who liked a band first. And somehow, the onus is always always always on the musicians, not to explain their art or develop their sound, but to justify their position in a vague and ephemeral cultural construct. When did Colin Meloy really claim to be an authentic anything-other-than-a-creative-writing-major?

2006: The year that indie rock reduces itself to aesthetics in the broadest sense, big and vague gestures that loudly announce some kind of readily discernible difference. Suddenly, all the people who got excited about Beirut because it didn’t sound like that same old indie rock are pissed off because Zach Condon isn’t an “authentic” Middle-Eastern Balkan European Gypsy Or Whatever. (Incidentally, the band’s new song “Elephant Gun” reminds me of “authentic” Out Of Time-era REM, in the very best possible way.) The joy of thinking about music musically – of burrowing as deep as you can into something, losing yourself to it, making sense of it – has been replaced by an endless and joyless process of systematic skimming and incorporation, fitting the broadest outlines of a record into a social self-image or a broad cultural “idea.”

Pop and hip-hop artists have always been WAY more conscious of their place in the aforementioned construct, more willing to incorporate and exploit it. Which is not to say that these forms are bad, or corrupt, or anything even remotely like that. But I wonder if we’ve fallen too hard for the idea of ideas, at the expense of paying attention to how they’re expressed. A lot of great indie rock has stubbornly insisted on the personal over the cultural, on transcendence and transmission, on being that one disc in that one weird guy’s discman, and I’m not ready to give that up.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006