drunken mini-essay about the year in music

Keep in mind my opinions on music that any sort of a wider population might have heard in '02 is limited to the 20 minutes or so per week I allowed my students to watch M2. (my personal choices for music, if made after '59, were along the lines of the Deadly Snakes and the Dishes.)

I'd like to know more about what you think this new template, this potential new canon that you detect taking shape, is? Is it some kind of new brutalism?

Personally, I'm tremenously enthusiastic about a whole slew of new stuff I'm seeing emerging in France / Japan (it's one country, not two): Hypo, Gel, Discom, Shinsei, Domotique, O.Lamm, dDamage...

I think our world is such--the availability of music and "information" of all kinds on the web, the ability to easily reproduce anything and everything--that it's easier to form opinions of music than to listen to it. Maybe that is part of the malaise you are feeling.

Implicit in your little essay is the idea that there is a musical "vanguard" which changes every so often, heading in a different direction, and that it is this you are worried will pass you by. I can see why this kind of thinking would lead to exhaustion. But the sorts of music generally discussed on this board, and evident in your list, is really just a small portion of music made and listened to in the world: generally, music made by urban intellectuals in the West and Japan, most of it made for bedroom listening, and (it seems) much of it with a minimalist inclination.

Perhaps you wouldn't be so disillusioned if you cast your net wider, to find popular musics from around the world--or at least to acknowledge them. That way the genres of music you most admire wouldn't need to bear the burden of standing in for Music. The musics you listen to are (again, generally) good at expressing certain truths, certain states; but woefully bad at expressing others. I have never felt the kind of edgy euphoria I hear in dancehall reggae, but just listening to the music reminds me that there are more emotions to be felt, more experiences to be had.

If what you are feeling is just one manifestation of another kind of anxiety, though, casting your net wider might just exacerbate the problem. There does seem to be an anxiety at the root of yours and Momus's vanguardism, a productive one maybe, but it gives me pause.

P.S. Neko Case seems to be the odd woman out, stylistically, even as she sits atop your list. What struck you so much about this album?

I like the idea of 'fantastic marginalia'. The music I like these days is a kind of microscopic marginal doodling, desperately avoiding the crassness of any sort of ambition to be 'a masterpiece' or 'a comment on life and the world'. In fact it's all about texture and detail, yet if you're willing to follow it down to the grain of sound, you'll find all the secrets of life encoded in there.

...something in me just wants so much more now. It is this thirst that sends me searching far beyond the fringes for music I'll enjoy.

That's a good description of indie's 'founding gesture'; the gesture of a consumer who, with that strong feeling of the shoddy inadequacy of what's out there, goes further, seeking the cultural products that should exist, thereby creating the possibility of their existence. It is a gesture which makes the world radically better.

I don't feel like my journey was especially fruitful this year

So you 'still haven't found what you're looking for'? That means that your search will continue, and if it's true that that search itself constructs the value it finds lacking ('in the end soul itself is the longing of the soul-less for redemption' -- Adorno), then let's hope you never find 'the fruit'.

I can feel the world of music changing. I feel like my notions are antiquated. I want albums, I want symphonies, I want novels and oceans of sound. But I don't feel like that's where music is headed anymore.

The world -- let alone the world of music -- is changing. I detect a new Brutalism, a sense that Liberalism is dead and an individual life doesn't mean much, emerging. And it seems clear that the art this Brutalism will bring with it will be a) MTV-Darwinian body art (I am young, I am hot, I flash my teeth to show I'm fit) and b) the flipside, nihilistic body horror art like that on display in last night's Channel 4 documentary about young Chinese artists, who use dead babies etc in their work.

As for 'the world of music', it will continue, I think, to go in several (related but opposing) directions at the same time. Rock will take refuge in the liberalism / hedonism of the past (60s values as the new, if impotent, orthodoxy, hedonism as the new conformity), pop will head in the direction of body fascism (MTV music as mating ritual), indie will become ever more marginal, microscopic and formalist as it tries to make sense of the remaining fragments of the digital / drug / globalist Utopian optimism of the 90s...

Personally, I feel that the toughest thing to be now (and I mean tough in both senses; difficult and admirably abrasive) is tender-minded. In the face of the new brutalism, tender-minded is the thing to be. During the ascendency of marketeers, imperialists, brutalists and fascists, we have the luxury of our utter marginality. We should use it for research, young Montag.

(beth gibbons solo could be interesting... thanx for the tip! =)