An Essay and Thought Experiment on the Major Touchstones of 00s Music (Part 1)

In putting together a list for the last decade in music I reflected on the vast changes that have altered the media landscape as we see it today. It is due to these shifts and ruptures that my interest in the music of the last ten years has not been one of hierarchical structures but one of ontological relations. There are two precise reasons for this.

First, much of what was called “new” in the last decade, in reality was a fusion of older phonic components as opposed to the “invention” of new ones. This is not to say there were not exciting things that happened in the last decade in music — there was and there continues to be — but this was more in the realm of amalgamation as opposed to the radius of creation. Music now increasingly resembles the nature of fractals, self similar repetition patterns with attenuated variations. It is this “attenuation” or “slightness” in the whole that produces the illusion of pure novelty to the untutored ear.

Secondly, new technologies in the last 10 years have decentralized the monolithic influence that major record labels, radio, and magazines had on listeners, and as a consequence of that, critical consensus is in a sterile recursive back loop. We live in a world that is too fractured, solipsistic and specialized for albums to have the same weight and importance to “everyone” as they did from the 60s through the early 90s. For this reason it is a misguided project to try and assert higher status to certain “top-tier” albums in dissimilar genres over others, especially in a music landscape like the one we live in now where micro-niches are born by the minute. We are in a place where trying to establish these musical hierarchies are as useful as discussing why the color blue is better than the color black.

A different schema altogether is needed in the discourse about music, one that sees relations, influences and function as a barometer for what is truly innovative. With that in mind, correspondence between sets (styles, artists and producers) has more utility for helping us understand how music evolves and changes versus seeing music as a pecking order structure that resembles a strict pyramid scheme. In these pages and in previous essays I have made the argument that the most advantageous way to look at music in the 21st century is to see its statistical confluences and phenomenological possibilities in the dialectic nature of a venn diagram. Therefore, this is not a “best of” list in the traditional sense, it is first and foremost meant as a taxonomy of bands/artists/movements in previous decades that had the most influence on the music of this one.

Editorial Note:

There is no way to cover every single genre of music in such an essay, so I have limited myself to ones with a personal categorical interest.

Joy Division

Even when Tony Wilson (label manager and founder of Factory Records) first enthusiastically signed Joy Division to his then fledgling imprint and hailed them as the future of modern rock, he had no clue as to just how far that influence would travel into futurity. In this last decade we have seen a flurry of groups imitate much of what Joy Division accomplished over 30 years ago. Everything from Ian Curtis’ hollow dystopian vocals — suggesting a sort of Eliotesque view of the modern age (Ian was in fact a devotee of Eliot’s poetry) — to Peter Hook’s infectious bass lines and Stephen Morris’ propulsive drum rhythms have had major importance to bands and artists in the last 10 years.

England’s Bloc Party, She Wants Revenge, The Editors, The Liars, (a band who took the grey metallic production of M. Hannett and laced it with swaths of noise and bristle) and the now cold-wave sound spearheaded by Blank Dogs et.al. all drew from JD; but the most notable example from the early part of this decade was Interpol — a quartet from New York whose first record Turn On The Bright Lights is the most realized conflation of Joy Division’s influences. The correspondence between JD and Interpol was both thematic and musical with lyrics that express post-modern themes of alienation, dislocation and dread, the slippage of love and desire, coupled with the sub-ocean sonics that came from a close study of Martin Hannett’s engineering techniques. More overtly, Paul Bank’s voice sounds like a carbon copy of Curtis’, a veritable ghost from the dead.

New Order

When Joy Division disbanded, New Order was born. New Order took the same problems of love and desire that populated Curtis’ vision but eschewed his overt melancholia. New Order instead fashioned themselves as arch-romantics with lyrics that articulated erotic remembrance in such a way that appealed to the masses.

They also built upon their earlier template with JD by adding synthesizers and dance rhythms, a move that catapulted them to stardom in the 80s (Blue Monday is said to be the biggest selling 12′ of all time). There are scores of groups in the last decade that are heavily indebted to New Order’s innovations (every single electro-pop group of the last 10 years, Adult, Fischerspooner, loads of techno, electro-house and commercial dance-pop, really the list is endless), but the artist that elevated that influence to something truly iconic was LCD Soundsystem.

LCD is the solo project of New Yorker James Murphy, an artist who through his own experience as a product of punk, avant rock and early rave culture changed the tenor of modern rock music. His ascendance has come through his own oblique and sometimes direct appropriation of tropes from the late 70s and early 80s, and this includes the work of New Order. For many, “Sound of Silver” is his most fully realized work to date, a record that took much of the electronic pop trappings of New Order and infused it with the similar nostalgia inherent in their work but updated with the anxieties of our own generation. Off that record, “All My Friends“, is the type of anthemic tome that depicts the angst associated with the loss of youth, and did so in a way that spoke to both critics and listeners alike. All the New Order elements are in place: a surging keyboard mantra that seems to stretch and rise simultaneously, lyrics that are simple and emotionally direct, perhaps even naive, but the kind of naivete that is given with a wink, and a rhythmically driven bass line with a fuzzy melodic guitar riff that seeks not technical artistry but bespeaks yearning.

Something interesting occurred in the 00s in relation to the Beach Boys influence on popular music. With regards to Wilson and co. even the most prophetic music journalist could not have predicted the absolute avalanche of Beach Boy-isms that cropped up in every corner of rock as a direct homage or appropriation of their sound. The sunshine-surfer harmonies coupled with the intricate production techniques of Brian Wilson dominated underground rock music in the 00′s, everything from the freak-folk movement to the most notable examples in the last few years being Animal Collective‘s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Panda Bear‘s Person Pitch. Both albums topped most critics best of lists and juxtaposed a Brian Wilson B-Side aesthetic sense with the sonic tonalities of contemporary techno.

There was also the hypnagogic pop movement (an execrable term), that included groups like Ducktails, Julian Lynch, Pocahaunted, Sun Araw et al (but really were launched by Ariel Pink) that took the Beach Boys influence and interposed 80s synths to conjure the feelings of a generation peering back towards their adolescence as a form of inner redemption. In many ways the hypnagogic “sound” that used this approach of reaffirming some encased mythical adolescence (clipped samples from Spielberg and John Hughes movies, 80s tv shows and similar pop culture paraphernalia along with sing-songy surfer harmonies that recalled lost mixtapes from AM Radio) did so in such a way that it conjured a two headed beast; an enclosed emotional solipsism coupled with a knowing irony. What we are talking about here is suspiciously similar to many of the loose tropes that populated indie rock in the 90s but just dressed in new garb.

Giorgio Moroder

The man behind the disco-pop hit “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer had a critical influence on musicians in the last decade. Giorgio Moroder was a German-Italian producer, engineer and songwriter who took the 70s by storm with his unique brand of arpeggiated electronic dance music, and after a string of film and club hits, he became the apex of the disco mania. Moroder’s vision of disco was unlike anything that most mainstream society associates with the genre (i.e. Saturday Night Fever and The Village People). No, his vision of disco was futuristic, propulsive, sleek, minimal.

Not only did we see disco rise in music circles via the embracing of the sonic palette, what we also saw was the “idea” of disco being adopted by artists. Bands who had originally never donned any of the disco signifiers, were now adding the word “disco” to their monikers, adopting the fashion, and touching up their rock music with the excess and glamour associated with the era. On our side of the globe The Italians Do It Better label is a good place to see Moroder’s vision in the 00s, including acts like Glass Candy, The Chromatics, Farah, and Johnny Jewel, while on the other side of the globe it was Scandinavia who led the charge with the critically acclaimed works of Hans Lindstrom and Prins Thomas. The Scandinavians took the same futuristic vision of Moroder but added a touch of bohemian retro as informed by the work of 70s Kraut-producer Conny Plank.

Part 2 …