“For all the talk of the MySpace-assisted success of Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen, it’s hard not to think that one of the web’s biggest effects might actually be the opposite of the kind of will-of-the-people surge that powered those artists into the limelight. Instead, the net might have made music a more scattered, microcosmic experience, where a wealth of blogs and messageboards mean that anything, no matter how recherche, can find an audience – just not a stadium-filling, platinum-selling one.” Read on traveller
In this feature, The Guardian’s Alexis Petridus uses a “parlour game” to give perspective on how music can change over a decade, or in the case of the noughties, how it didn’t change. What changed instead was the industry and the technology. But why not the music?
At a guess I’d say the internet is to blame (as usual). It makes old musical movements easy to peer into. People can enjoy a large range of songs that hark back to specific time periods which have to be interpreted as best we can, with many re-inventing sounds and fashions that align with their personalities the most appropriately. In our constrainingly self aware times, pop music, like a Tarantino film, is a cultural pastiche.
