A musical decade
So I was thinking about writing what looks like being an annual piece about the last 12 months in music - blah blah female electro LadyLaRouxMachine yadda yadda - when the thought struck me that we’re near the end of the decade and I’ve not seen any definitive musical recaps of the noughties yet (which will be the last time I use that word, you’ll be pleased to know). So, written mostly from hazy memories and with very little in the way of research (which let’s be honest is no different to what the majority of these pieces will be like when they hit the newsstands), here are my brief reflections on popular music over the last decade.
The 2000s seem like a slippery bugger to pin down. Now we’re at a safe distance from the 90s, a convenient middle-class rock journo shorthand has been developed - they started with NIRVANA! (with SUEDE! holding the flag for Brit guitars) then came OASIS!/BLUR!/RADIOHEAD!, then the latter two went weird, Oasis went down the drug dealer’s, The Verve died, Pulp, Suede and the assorted Britpop acts faded, and music went a bit shit for a few years.
Partial responsibility for this early 2000s “shit period” must belong to the likes of Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Papa Roach and their half-whiney rock, half-lamebrained rap ilk, who at this time really were among the most popular bands in the world. I always thought nu metal to be an utter load of bollocks and nothing has ever happened to change my mind. Apart from that pretty decent Mission Impossible theme tune, and that was only any good because of Wes Borland, who always played the Tortured Guitarist role and quit the band soon after to concentrate on his own unlistenable noodling (I imagine). Nu metal lyrics rarely rose above the level of self-indulgent sixth form poetry. And on a related note, the Libertines will be mentioned later.
Meanwhile, British guitar music at this time was dominated by the likes of Coldplay and Travis - “music for bedwetters” as Alan McGhee so succinctly put it. Coldplay are a strange one - I know people who loved the more low-key Parachutes and hated their subsequent ascent (descent?) to U2-dom, whereas other friends despised them at the beginning yet now enjoy their bland bombast. I’m proud to say I’ve always considered them depressingly average at best and ear-bleedingly offensive on occasion, and however nice a bloke Chris Martin may be, his vocals remain limp and anaemic.
Even if you loved such bands, this was hardly a creative golden age for guitar music. Maybe this was why The White Stripes and The Strokes (above) were embraced with such pant-wetting enthusiasm in 2001. Garage rock, and the Stripes themselves, had been around for ages, but such was the rock scene’s desperation for something to happen these bands were duly anointed as the new messiahs. Now, any old chancers like The Datsuns could knock up an album of rudimentary noise and get a record deal on the back of those bands’ success. This ridiculous hype couldn’t be maintained for long, and whilst Is This It? was a genuinely great record that deserved its glowing reviews, when average follow-up Room On Fire got similar notices, inspiring everyone to buy it and simultaneously experience grand-scale disappointment, the game was up. Jack White has managed to carve himself a successful career out of it and fair play to him, although his canonisation has never really convinced me (I hear he’s devastated).
While so-called “proper” music was floundering, dance music culture was huge. Sub-genres such as trance and UK garage were taking it in turns to dominate the charts, with more traditional forms of pop hardly getting a look in. Dance culture had gone mainstream in the 90s and the boom was still going strong at the beginning of this decade, but rather like the housing bubble it was never going to be sustainable. Eventually the superclubs began to close and the most of the superstar DJs lost their auras.
As a strictly non-dance fan I shed few tears about this - maybe had I been born a few years later then I’d have been caught up in the whole oi-oi Ibiza routine, instead it was a different world. My only ever superclub experience was somewhere in Birmingham, where I seemed to be the only person not pilled up to the eyeballs, judging from the bar fridges being packed with water and there being hardly any alcohol to speak of. I remember dancing next to a girl in a baby-gro complete with dummy in her mouth and feeling very old.
It didn’t happen overnight, but it seems that whenever one genre fades another always leaps in to replace it, and R&B very quickly became the music of choice for your average late-night high street establishment. Leaving aside all the indignation caused by a term which used to signify down-and-dirty rhythm’n’blues becoming a byword for overproduced and mostly soulless pap, modern R&B has become impossible to ignore - to the point where the vast majority of mainsteam pop songs now bear its influence.
Just look at the three longest-reigning number one singles of the decade: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, Umbrella by Rihanna (which holds my personal record for time elapsed between initially hating a song and eventually embracing it) and Where Is The Love by the Black Eyed Peas. The latter, who began as a far edgier proposition before devolving into a watered-down kiddie pop act have, according to Rolling Stone “made a kind of spiritual practice of recording dumb songs”, embodying the spirit of the decade better than just about anybody.
Now that genres are fragmenting into ever-smaller pieces and seeping into one another, this kind of music gets harder and harder to classify. In my world hip-hop and R&B both come under the “urban” banner, with the former rapped rather than sung, although lately Kanye and other rappers, assisted by the dreaded autotune, have been having a go at the singing lark too. We know what Jay-Z thinks about that, and at the close of the decade “Jigga” is still arguably the biggest rapper on the planet despite Mr West and his gigantic ego’s best efforts. Z’s 2008 Glastonbury set (above) will go down as a landmark, as much for the “not ‘avin it” brouhaha as for the event itself.
Whether this will open the floodgates for more black Pyramid Stage headliners is a moot point - hip-hop as a genre seems to have faded badly, with career longevity very hard to attain. 50 Cent’s music was everywhere when he first broke through, but nowadays he’s spending more time “acting” in films and video games than rapping. Eminem failed to recapture past glories with his latest record after a long lay-off, and someone like Lil’ Wayne who is apparently the new star of the genre has considerably less mainstream profile than those mentioned above.
The main reason pop music is in no way at risk from being entirely subsumed by urban stuff is arguably the reality show boom. There have been manufactured acts going back to the year dot, what we never used to see was the behind-the-curtain process of auditioning the wannabees and ruthlessly moulding them into well-oiled pop machines. All that changed with Popstars, which was a genuinely revolutionary piece of TV at the time, however hard to believe that seems now in a world saturated with such fare. I remember trying to write an assignment in our student dining room when I heard gales of laughter emanating from the living room next-door. I poked my head through to see what my housemate was wetting himself about, saw some auditionees murder a song and get roasted by the judges, and I was immediately hooked.
The formula was steadily refined over subsequent series. Pop Idol introduced viewer voting (kerching!) and live shows. Popstars: The Rivals is somewhat forgotten nowadays, but only because it spawned the most successful UK pop band of the decade who far eclipsed their humble beginnings. And now Simon Cowell is the small yet unfathomably powerful neutron star at the centre of the black hole of destruction that is the X Factor, or something. Getting a bit bored of wossername on behalf of whom you ruined your phone bill last year? Don’t worry, another batch of wannabees will be along next year, attempting to dementedly oversing their way to the guaranteed Christmas #1 spot.
Now, this may seem illogical, but my musical memories now get hazier the closer we get to the present. This is basically because I was still at uni/college for the first couple of years of this decade and had far more time to listen to the radio and read up on music. Maybe looking at the best British Band/Male/Female Brit Award winners from the last 10 years will shed some light on how things developed (starting from the 2001 show, which covered the year 2000). And by “best” they of course mean “most successful”:
2001: Coldplay/Robbie Williams/Sonique (Sonique?? Robbie wins 3 awards in total)
2002: Travis/Robbie/Dido (Travis also won in 2000)
2003: Coldplay/Robbie/Ms Dynamite (she, Coldplay and Eminem all won 2)
2004: The Darkness/Daniel Bedingfield/Dido (Darkness win 3 total)
2005: Franz Ferdinand/The Streets/Joss Stone (although Keane win best album and breakthrough act; Scissor Sisters - treated like a Brit band - win big too)
2006: Kaiser Chiefs/James Blunt/KT Tunstall (Kaisers win 3 total; Coldplay win album and single)
2007: Arctic Monkeys/James Morrison/Amy Winehouse (Arctics only act to double up - best album too for debut)
2008: Arctic Monkeys/Mark Ronson/Kate Nash (Take That win 2)
2009: Elbow/Paul Weller/Duffy (Rockferry wins for album/producer)
2010: I'm guessing it'll be Muse/Dizzee/La Roux (who's not actually a solo female but everyone thinks she is. If not, then probably Florence)
One thing that leaps out straightaway is that bands aren’t the be-all and end-all anymore - although there were solo artists of note in the 90s (Bjork and Paul Weller spring to mind), during the rose-tinted Britpop glory years it was all about the collectives. Since the “bedwetter” genre died down though, there hasn’t been an all-conquering guitar genre to take the mainsteam by storm. The Libertines certainly had a huge impact amongst dedicated indie fans (though some of us still prefer to see them as the third-rate Clash imitators that they were), but only Pete “call me Peter” Doherty became a household name, and for purely non-musical reasons. They were undeniably influential though and arguably helped to spawn The Arctic Monkeys, who as a critically-adored band who still shift large numbers of records and look to be in it for the long term are a genuine anomaly.
On the other hand, Franz Ferdinand struggled to live up to the hype after a successful debut and this was very much the pattern. It doesn’t just apply to bands, but its more noticeable with them because pop acts have traditionally had shorter lifespans in any case. The most extreme example is The Darkness (above), who rode a tsunami of hype to go from opening the bill at 2003’s Glastonbury to selling millions of records by the year’s end. Sadly, the insane levels of press coverage were in inverse proportion to their actual talent, and their wretched second album was a case of shutting the stable door long after the one-trick-pony had bolted. People got bored and moved onto the next Next Big Thing while the band disappeared up their noses. Next!
Hype, marketing and cynical cash-ins,cornerstones of the music industry from its inception, now seem more prevalent than ever. One label creates a monster-seller such as James Blunt (considered a singer-songwriter despite all his big hits being “collaborations”, ie largely written by other people), then next year we suffer a rash of James Morrisons, Paolo Nutinis and Daniel Powters, and those are just more the successful ones. Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson deliver a smash-hit record? Along come Duffy, Adele, Paloma Faith et al, while Ronson’s production sound suddenly becomes ubiquitous. The Streets and Lily Allen have spawned inferior imitators too - I’m looking at you, Just Jack and Kate Nash. Although Mike Skinner himself has singularly failed to keep a tight hold on his own quality control.
Finally, let’s talk so-called Landfill Indie. A quote from a flyer for a band called Outside Royalty (whom I recently saw supporting the increasingly walrus-like Luke Haines), says two of their songs are “superior to anything created by Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Razorlight, Kooks, The View, The Fratellis, Bloc Party and Keane in the last couple of years.” Many would argue that this is not setting the bar all that high. The overexposure of such bands, and even more average peers like The Pigeon Detectives and The Wombats, has arguably created an even wider schism between the mainstream and everybody else. In fact, when even an utterly abysmal shithouse of a pop band like Scouting For Girls got called “indie”, the term effectively lost all meaning.
The paradox we have now is thus: imaginitive new sub-genres splintering off from each other in all directions, leaving behind an ever-shrinking, ever more homogenous mainstream. Today’s charts are mostly dumbed-down fare (another horrid phrase to describe a horrid process) and although the odd genuinely clever and interesting stuff can still sneak through, beloved cult bands such as Arcade Fire can build up huge groundswells of support and yet still be completely beneath the average tabloid reader’s radar. Kings Of Leon successfully made the jump from high-profile gig circuit act to genuine arena rock superstars, but only by sanding off every last one of their rough edges. An utterly appalling musical snob would say that chart music is now exclusively for thick people and/or those who listen to their music in the background, with everyone else heading further afield. Which is exactly what I’ve just said. Bugger.
Meanwhile, trends come and go as ever, and 2009 has had “electro” stamped through it like a stick of rock. But that’s another story.
The 2000s seem like a slippery bugger to pin down. Now we’re at a safe distance from the 90s, a convenient middle-class rock journo shorthand has been developed - they started with NIRVANA! (with SUEDE! holding the flag for Brit guitars) then came OASIS!/BLUR!/RADIOHEAD!, then the latter two went weird, Oasis went down the drug dealer’s, The Verve died, Pulp, Suede and the assorted Britpop acts faded, and music went a bit shit for a few years.
Partial responsibility for this early 2000s “shit period” must belong to the likes of Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Papa Roach and their half-whiney rock, half-lamebrained rap ilk, who at this time really were among the most popular bands in the world. I always thought nu metal to be an utter load of bollocks and nothing has ever happened to change my mind. Apart from that pretty decent Mission Impossible theme tune, and that was only any good because of Wes Borland, who always played the Tortured Guitarist role and quit the band soon after to concentrate on his own unlistenable noodling (I imagine). Nu metal lyrics rarely rose above the level of self-indulgent sixth form poetry. And on a related note, the Libertines will be mentioned later.
Meanwhile, British guitar music at this time was dominated by the likes of Coldplay and Travis - “music for bedwetters” as Alan McGhee so succinctly put it. Coldplay are a strange one - I know people who loved the more low-key Parachutes and hated their subsequent ascent (descent?) to U2-dom, whereas other friends despised them at the beginning yet now enjoy their bland bombast. I’m proud to say I’ve always considered them depressingly average at best and ear-bleedingly offensive on occasion, and however nice a bloke Chris Martin may be, his vocals remain limp and anaemic.
Even if you loved such bands, this was hardly a creative golden age for guitar music. Maybe this was why The White Stripes and The Strokes (above) were embraced with such pant-wetting enthusiasm in 2001. Garage rock, and the Stripes themselves, had been around for ages, but such was the rock scene’s desperation for something to happen these bands were duly anointed as the new messiahs. Now, any old chancers like The Datsuns could knock up an album of rudimentary noise and get a record deal on the back of those bands’ success. This ridiculous hype couldn’t be maintained for long, and whilst Is This It? was a genuinely great record that deserved its glowing reviews, when average follow-up Room On Fire got similar notices, inspiring everyone to buy it and simultaneously experience grand-scale disappointment, the game was up. Jack White has managed to carve himself a successful career out of it and fair play to him, although his canonisation has never really convinced me (I hear he’s devastated).
While so-called “proper” music was floundering, dance music culture was huge. Sub-genres such as trance and UK garage were taking it in turns to dominate the charts, with more traditional forms of pop hardly getting a look in. Dance culture had gone mainstream in the 90s and the boom was still going strong at the beginning of this decade, but rather like the housing bubble it was never going to be sustainable. Eventually the superclubs began to close and the most of the superstar DJs lost their auras.
As a strictly non-dance fan I shed few tears about this - maybe had I been born a few years later then I’d have been caught up in the whole oi-oi Ibiza routine, instead it was a different world. My only ever superclub experience was somewhere in Birmingham, where I seemed to be the only person not pilled up to the eyeballs, judging from the bar fridges being packed with water and there being hardly any alcohol to speak of. I remember dancing next to a girl in a baby-gro complete with dummy in her mouth and feeling very old.
It didn’t happen overnight, but it seems that whenever one genre fades another always leaps in to replace it, and R&B very quickly became the music of choice for your average late-night high street establishment. Leaving aside all the indignation caused by a term which used to signify down-and-dirty rhythm’n’blues becoming a byword for overproduced and mostly soulless pap, modern R&B has become impossible to ignore - to the point where the vast majority of mainsteam pop songs now bear its influence.
Just look at the three longest-reigning number one singles of the decade: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, Umbrella by Rihanna (which holds my personal record for time elapsed between initially hating a song and eventually embracing it) and Where Is The Love by the Black Eyed Peas. The latter, who began as a far edgier proposition before devolving into a watered-down kiddie pop act have, according to Rolling Stone “made a kind of spiritual practice of recording dumb songs”, embodying the spirit of the decade better than just about anybody.
Now that genres are fragmenting into ever-smaller pieces and seeping into one another, this kind of music gets harder and harder to classify. In my world hip-hop and R&B both come under the “urban” banner, with the former rapped rather than sung, although lately Kanye and other rappers, assisted by the dreaded autotune, have been having a go at the singing lark too. We know what Jay-Z thinks about that, and at the close of the decade “Jigga” is still arguably the biggest rapper on the planet despite Mr West and his gigantic ego’s best efforts. Z’s 2008 Glastonbury set (above) will go down as a landmark, as much for the “not ‘avin it” brouhaha as for the event itself.
Whether this will open the floodgates for more black Pyramid Stage headliners is a moot point - hip-hop as a genre seems to have faded badly, with career longevity very hard to attain. 50 Cent’s music was everywhere when he first broke through, but nowadays he’s spending more time “acting” in films and video games than rapping. Eminem failed to recapture past glories with his latest record after a long lay-off, and someone like Lil’ Wayne who is apparently the new star of the genre has considerably less mainstream profile than those mentioned above.
The main reason pop music is in no way at risk from being entirely subsumed by urban stuff is arguably the reality show boom. There have been manufactured acts going back to the year dot, what we never used to see was the behind-the-curtain process of auditioning the wannabees and ruthlessly moulding them into well-oiled pop machines. All that changed with Popstars, which was a genuinely revolutionary piece of TV at the time, however hard to believe that seems now in a world saturated with such fare. I remember trying to write an assignment in our student dining room when I heard gales of laughter emanating from the living room next-door. I poked my head through to see what my housemate was wetting himself about, saw some auditionees murder a song and get roasted by the judges, and I was immediately hooked.
The formula was steadily refined over subsequent series. Pop Idol introduced viewer voting (kerching!) and live shows. Popstars: The Rivals is somewhat forgotten nowadays, but only because it spawned the most successful UK pop band of the decade who far eclipsed their humble beginnings. And now Simon Cowell is the small yet unfathomably powerful neutron star at the centre of the black hole of destruction that is the X Factor, or something. Getting a bit bored of wossername on behalf of whom you ruined your phone bill last year? Don’t worry, another batch of wannabees will be along next year, attempting to dementedly oversing their way to the guaranteed Christmas #1 spot.
* * * * *
Now, this may seem illogical, but my musical memories now get hazier the closer we get to the present. This is basically because I was still at uni/college for the first couple of years of this decade and had far more time to listen to the radio and read up on music. Maybe looking at the best British Band/Male/Female Brit Award winners from the last 10 years will shed some light on how things developed (starting from the 2001 show, which covered the year 2000). And by “best” they of course mean “most successful”:
2001: Coldplay/Robbie Williams/Sonique (Sonique?? Robbie wins 3 awards in total)
2002: Travis/Robbie/Dido (Travis also won in 2000)
2003: Coldplay/Robbie/Ms Dynamite (she, Coldplay and Eminem all won 2)
2004: The Darkness/Daniel Bedingfield/Dido (Darkness win 3 total)
2005: Franz Ferdinand/The Streets/Joss Stone (although Keane win best album and breakthrough act; Scissor Sisters - treated like a Brit band - win big too)
2006: Kaiser Chiefs/James Blunt/KT Tunstall (Kaisers win 3 total; Coldplay win album and single)
2007: Arctic Monkeys/James Morrison/Amy Winehouse (Arctics only act to double up - best album too for debut)
2008: Arctic Monkeys/Mark Ronson/Kate Nash (Take That win 2)
2009: Elbow/Paul Weller/Duffy (Rockferry wins for album/producer)
2010: I'm guessing it'll be Muse/Dizzee/La Roux (who's not actually a solo female but everyone thinks she is. If not, then probably Florence)
One thing that leaps out straightaway is that bands aren’t the be-all and end-all anymore - although there were solo artists of note in the 90s (Bjork and Paul Weller spring to mind), during the rose-tinted Britpop glory years it was all about the collectives. Since the “bedwetter” genre died down though, there hasn’t been an all-conquering guitar genre to take the mainsteam by storm. The Libertines certainly had a huge impact amongst dedicated indie fans (though some of us still prefer to see them as the third-rate Clash imitators that they were), but only Pete “call me Peter” Doherty became a household name, and for purely non-musical reasons. They were undeniably influential though and arguably helped to spawn The Arctic Monkeys, who as a critically-adored band who still shift large numbers of records and look to be in it for the long term are a genuine anomaly.
On the other hand, Franz Ferdinand struggled to live up to the hype after a successful debut and this was very much the pattern. It doesn’t just apply to bands, but its more noticeable with them because pop acts have traditionally had shorter lifespans in any case. The most extreme example is The Darkness (above), who rode a tsunami of hype to go from opening the bill at 2003’s Glastonbury to selling millions of records by the year’s end. Sadly, the insane levels of press coverage were in inverse proportion to their actual talent, and their wretched second album was a case of shutting the stable door long after the one-trick-pony had bolted. People got bored and moved onto the next Next Big Thing while the band disappeared up their noses. Next!
Hype, marketing and cynical cash-ins,cornerstones of the music industry from its inception, now seem more prevalent than ever. One label creates a monster-seller such as James Blunt (considered a singer-songwriter despite all his big hits being “collaborations”, ie largely written by other people), then next year we suffer a rash of James Morrisons, Paolo Nutinis and Daniel Powters, and those are just more the successful ones. Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson deliver a smash-hit record? Along come Duffy, Adele, Paloma Faith et al, while Ronson’s production sound suddenly becomes ubiquitous. The Streets and Lily Allen have spawned inferior imitators too - I’m looking at you, Just Jack and Kate Nash. Although Mike Skinner himself has singularly failed to keep a tight hold on his own quality control.
Finally, let’s talk so-called Landfill Indie. A quote from a flyer for a band called Outside Royalty (whom I recently saw supporting the increasingly walrus-like Luke Haines), says two of their songs are “superior to anything created by Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Razorlight, Kooks, The View, The Fratellis, Bloc Party and Keane in the last couple of years.” Many would argue that this is not setting the bar all that high. The overexposure of such bands, and even more average peers like The Pigeon Detectives and The Wombats, has arguably created an even wider schism between the mainstream and everybody else. In fact, when even an utterly abysmal shithouse of a pop band like Scouting For Girls got called “indie”, the term effectively lost all meaning.
The paradox we have now is thus: imaginitive new sub-genres splintering off from each other in all directions, leaving behind an ever-shrinking, ever more homogenous mainstream. Today’s charts are mostly dumbed-down fare (another horrid phrase to describe a horrid process) and although the odd genuinely clever and interesting stuff can still sneak through, beloved cult bands such as Arcade Fire can build up huge groundswells of support and yet still be completely beneath the average tabloid reader’s radar. Kings Of Leon successfully made the jump from high-profile gig circuit act to genuine arena rock superstars, but only by sanding off every last one of their rough edges. An utterly appalling musical snob would say that chart music is now exclusively for thick people and/or those who listen to their music in the background, with everyone else heading further afield. Which is exactly what I’ve just said. Bugger.
Meanwhile, trends come and go as ever, and 2009 has had “electro” stamped through it like a stick of rock. But that’s another story.
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