Is it important that music is "relevant", and what does that really mean?

again, though, I'm not even sure what I mean when I say "relavent"

No, generally I don't think it is (necessarily that) important to be relevent in terms of whether one as a listener appreciates something, especially if it comes from a specialist milieu; what I've heard of that Cale record sounds very good, for example. Irrelevency becomes a problem whenh something is positing itself explicitly as being relevent to things other than itself and it's direct contemporaries, or when somethign exists in a genre which is fast moving and requires relevency to 'keep up' (i.e. pop, dance, hip hop, maybe indie).

Yadda yadda yadda.

I can see how artists can be irrelevant in a pop culture context, especially if they've previously been relevant - i.e. they've moved from shaping/being heavily involved in key trends to being pretty much ignored. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, I can accept that what e.g. Pet Shop Boys or Tori Amos are doing now is less 'relevant' to pop culture than what they did in their glory days, but it's not any worse for that.

(To take oasis as another example - "be here now" was hugely relevant, a major talking point - but also their big mistake).

Hmmmm. Interesting.

So do you think "Be Here Now" was actually in some way intrinsically "relevant" (and if so how and why?) or was it's "relevance" wholly / mainly because of the cultural significance of Oasis at that time?

Does being culturally significant automatically at any given time make anything a band / musician releases "relevant", or can a band / musician be culturally sigificant and yet their releases be wholly "irrelevant"?

Unfortunately I haven't heard the Markie or Jayhawks records so can't comment on their relevance.

So you don't believe it's possible to come up with a valid new permutation of an an old musical / artistic form; or to use an old musical / artistic form or "an archaic language" to express a valid, relevant or even (heaven forbid!) new view-point that might warrant inclusion in this catalogue?

As far as I'm concerned this merely indicative of our current society's shallow and fickle obsession with brands, labels, marketing and style-over-content - and makes me wonder whether we'd actually recognise "validity" it if wandered up and punched us in the face.

Style = a least as important as content. In fact maybe the two can't be split. 'How you do it' is as important as 'what you do'. Remember punk, Stewart?
All content and no style means you end up like Neil Young or someone. And nothing good comes of that.

personally, i can think of LOTS of bands that are irrelevant to me - from slipknot through to girls aloud - they say nothing to the way i live my life and slip away without touching me. but clearly to SOMEBODY they're relevant, cos they're selling by the truckload.

of course, that isn't a guarantee of quality - but then that's a whole other discussion. is it arrogant to say a record is poor quality? perhaps, but that doesn't stop me from doing so. does it stop you?

even the likes of damon albarn's 'stare at my own navel' solo wibblings are relevant to damon albarn.

and i don't like 'not relevant to society' as a description, either. lots of things that I like aren't liked by society as a whole.

to me, 'irrelevant' is a more arrogant type of dismissal than 'poor quality'. but both imply that your subjective judgement can be extended to the Rest Of The World.

are you kidding? i really hope so. i just walked to work through oxford to an uber-oxford place of work, surrounded by r3 and r4 listeners with naice se england middle class accents (like mine). on my minidisc: jay-z, ludacris, nerd. do i identify with these lyricists? not much in any literal sense. so fuck relevance!

Oh, completely because of Oasis' cultural significance at the time, which is why I would be hesitant to use an artist's "relevance" as a measure of their worth - certain artists' releases are guaranteed a certain amount of relevance (for a certain period of time at least) because of what went before (without the actual quality or content making it relevant).

Oasis' relevance stopped *after* Be here Now (ie. when "Be Here Now" was released, people talked about how crap it was for quite some time afterwards, when Standing on The Shoulder Of Giants was released, people listened to it once, said "meh" then never played it or spoke of it again).

"re: Hobosapiens - I don't actually care if it's relevant or not (and I doubt that John Cale's really all that bothered either); I just love it"

aye. as a personal example - i listened to canibus' "2000 BC" a lot this year - yet I can't think of a less relevant album (began his descent into obscurity, subjects matter is largely personal feuds that are now old news due to the album being released 3 years ago, nothing particularly new or exciting in the production) but I can still enjoy it for the beats and hooks and wordplay.

Indeed, and - particularly where the music is overtly reactionary - I believe it can feel relevant to that audience regardless of whether or not it actually has any real relevance to them.

For example, when I heard Stiff Little Fingers singing about Belfast and Ulster in 1978: I was aware that what they were singing about was "relevant", although it had very little real personal relevance to me; and yet it neverthless somehow came to feel relevant to me because of all the times me any mates sang along to their songs and went to their gigs.

By the same token however, I think music can assume a personal "relevance" (or would "resonance" be a better word here?) because of those personal connections, without it actually having any real intrinsic relevance at all (which I rather suspect is what happened on a massed scale with Be Here Now!)

well grime is obviously not jungle in 94, two differences off the top of my head-grimes focus on lyircs, jungles use of breakbeats. what i'm talking about is when people try and recreate a musical language which has fallen into disuse. the examples i gave were all good ones. grime can't be accused of doing that by any strech of the imagination.

yes but luke what about people - not artists - who think a lot about the past? who's responses to life are based on things that happened in the past? people don't live their lives in a constant state of 'present-ness', in fact i reckon a great deal of the total mental activity of people on the planet concerns the past. if art is cataloguing responses to life shouldn't it reflect this?
-- pete b. (littlebopet...), January 8th, 2004.

ok, this is fine and this is true and this is where we have to make a few distinctions i spose. people playing trad jazz or trying to make a record in 2004 which could have been played on kool in 94 don't necessarily think a lot about the past. their musical activity doesn't necessarily represent a response to life but may represent a rigid beleif about what represents 'proper' music. it may be that a trumbone player was able to get a job playing trad jazz in greenwich pubs and took it. now admittedly that could be viewed as a direct response to economic realities, and i do actually think that kind of thing is interesting, and ultimately everything is a genuine valid response becomes like map that covers the terrirory it depicts but we're trying to draw disinctions here and the encyclopedia.
(also why should thinking about the past result in an appropriation of historical forms? )
i don't think any attemot to capture the lived experience of a given individual or group of individuals is ever going to adopt an anachronistic form, regardless of how much time they spent listening to old records and reading history books.

I like the encyclopaedia theory of art but don't you think music is a wider thing than 'being art', there's such a huge social element (not just in the going-to-raves/gigs/listening with mates sense but music as an identifier of social groupings) that reactionary music can feel hugely relevant to its chosen audience.
-- Tico Tico

sure sure that fine but i was trying to come up with a more rarified definition of 'relevant' artisitcally relevant rather than socailly relevant or something along those lines. as social phenomenem most things are interesting and everything is relevant as data.

Indeed I do Doc: but wasn't Punk (and it's demise) the perfect example of what happens when the "style" takes over the "content" gets lost?

"I'm full of content.... ment" (J Lydon)

Well, that's certainly how it ought to be....

"you could think of it as a big conversation"

FAL! What, like the one King Tony's planning to have with his subjects, you mean?

Shame on you Phoebe! Tony's relevance is beyond question!

Whether the electorate have any is relevance another matter entirely....

(then again, sadly Coldplay are "relevant" to an awful lot of people, aren't they?)

(of course I could recycle this post in a year's time and substitute Keane for Coldplay, heheh)

another way to be irrelevant would be to say something that made no sense in the context of the discussion. so, to submit a scientific treatise on the refraction of light to a thread concerning the beach boys would be deemed irrelvant. it is nigh-on impossible to think of a musical equivilant for this however.perhaps debates concerning the musical validity of the most severe minimalism/noise stuff centre around this question. also language and sound poetry from a literary point of view.

also questions of relevancy are going to involve ideas about progress and originality. Verdicts on a conversation's health and merit are determined partly on whether or not it moved foward. a conversation which starts with an exchange of comments about the weather is expected to move on to embrace other subjects in due course. a conversation which founders is deemd a failure. so remarks in a conversation are judged partly on whether they serve to propel the discussion foward, whether they open up further topics for discussion, whether they engage fully enough with the preceding remarks and follow on from them in a satisfactory way and so on and so forth. it is permissable to take issue with the preceding remarks but if this is done in a way which narrows discussion, which fails to provide serious objections to those remarks it takes issue with may be deemed irrlevant. it is a hinderance to the discussion not a furtherance of it. it is fairly easy to provide musical parrelells to these examples.

whoa! are you quite sure about this? i mean, i think they have the internet, possibly even radio in norfolk. who here is deciding what 'events' are more 'significant' anyway? i don't think that the paradigm of grime necessarily predicts the future anyway; if it does, in what sense? and you're probably right about the NZ act, but on the other hand might there not be some common ground between new zealanders and s londoners? in the same way that LA rap was popular in london despite the two cities' obvious differences.

well sure but 'world events' (whatever they may be) tend not to be new white labels, but, like, world events. where i live (not london) grime is as relevant as, say, french movies, ie relevant up to a point, and only cos i want it that way.

1-immigration. the way immigrants are absorbed into the host culture and how, in the process, thney bring about changes in that host culture.

2-the globalisation of the drug market and the impact of that on specific communities. the rise of crack in innercity areas for example.

3-attitudes towards crime and punishment in great britain.

4-the creation of an urban culture that stelfox was talking about. one motored by black culture but not belonging to it exclusively.

all of those things are of relevance to you nick, in some sense. perhaps not relevant to you as a boy from devon, but as relevant to you as it is to me in that you're a member of a western society in 2004. but it's not important that you listen, anymore than it's important to read the papers. it's just for people whos interests lie i that direction. if there's another angle you prefer to approach music from, aestheitc, political, theoretical etc then you just do that and leave the relevance game for those who wish to play it.

Well, hold up, surely this isn't quite true. Not wanting to be kneejerk or anything, but...

I mean when UK garage first started out you had the intersection of like, three trends:

- brit producers developing their own take on the traditional new jersey garage sound, which had always been retro, and was particularly retro at the time

- the revival of the old-style 'rolling' jungle bassline on ice-cream records type tracks

- a revival of mc-ing. British mcs being based on the Jamaican model established 30 years earlier, as opposed to the more recent hip-hop model

So you've got a movement there founded on three retro trends, while at the same time jungle is still going and is going through an aggressively 'futurist' phase and talking to the same constituency. But most people at the time (and now) would argue garage was more 'relevant'.

And this would have to be in the musical, rather than societal sense too, because in those days despite the 'gangster garage' tag, there wasn't exactly a lot of social commentary going on, unless you count sampling "we are e" or whatever.

And, similarly, there are plenty of distinct demographics that at some point or other pick up on a specific retro trend and it ends up becoming something new. In fact nearly all supposedly 'relevant' music arises out of the 'irrelevant'.

Irrelevant --------> Relevant
Disco House
US Garage UK Garage
Miami Bass Southern bounce

etc.

All it is, is there are ideas. And ideas can be expressed any which way, in music or society. And somebody expresses an idea one way, and its suddenly relevant, but eventually everyone gets bored of it. Until somebody expresses the idea in a different way, and its relevant again. But its still the same idea. The 'newness' in the expression is completely arbitrary because it depends on some bullshit collective consciousness which doesn't exist.

Given time, some things hold their relevance, others don't. And that's down to the quality of the expression of the ideas, not their newness.

Conversations are never 'resolved' except in bad movies, and musical 'questions' never get answered. There's always something more to say, and some value in retreading an old comment, so long as its done in an interesting way. Surely relevance is just code for 'quality' ultimately, in much the same way that a cliche is just a truth told in a boring way...

Given time, some things hold their relevance, others don't. And that's down to the quality of the expression of the ideas, not their newness.

-- Jacob (jwrigh...), January 13th, 2004.

you get points for expressing yourself confidently. it doesn't make sense as far as i can tell, but it's certainly confident. there are not just ideas, there are also experiences, sensations, intimations etc etc and not only are there ideas and sensation there are also COMPLEXES of ideas and sensations. it is the combinations which allow something to be knew. it's all about combinations, not an orderly roatation of preexisting ideas. as you say, you have three retro trends in amalgamation but a)its the first time those particular threads have been comboined b)combinging them in that way gives birth to something new, its more than the sum of its parts

I agree with what you're saying here. Music does consist of complexes of ideas, sensations and techniques. The fallacy of progress in music is that you can isolate any one of these things and construct a narrative out of it.

Every single piece of music is a 'first time' for something. And every single piece of music contains some element that is derivative. So if you want to develop some concept of relevance based on innovation you eventually fall down the po-mo hole because its impossible to state which innovations are significant.

Similarly in society. Violence, sex and love are not new. So in a sense, any piece of music which deals with any of the above is 'relevant' societally. So which piece of music is more relevant to East London in 2004 - a country song which is hugely evocative of violence, or a garage tune about phone-jacking?

Maybe I've just heard too many people try to make their stupid product 'relevant to a youth audience' or whatever, but I think the whole concept stinks.

hear, bloody hear! misreadings of poststructuralism have made it all even worse though!

unfortunately, as a writer in the us, this doesn't do me a lot of good, since most american's haven't shared my experiences with this music, which leaves me able to "describe it" in the blandest terms possible.

anyone care to disagree with this formulation then?

haha x-post.

But on the other hand what I guess I mean is that concepts like relevance only make sense when you consider them in the context of the opposite (but positive) quality. So its not just relevant versus irrelevant, its relevant versus universal.

Relevant on its own means nothing.

And maybe its semantics or whatever, but isn't what Gareth is talking about more to do with something like 'grassroots' rather than 'relevant'?

What can American music possibly say to me? I'm not from America. It can never touch or document my life the way Suede or Pulp can. It's impossible.
-- C-Man (cma...), January 8th, 2004 5:20 PM.
But anyway; this is the reason C-Man pisses people off; because he is so unwilling to engage with any kind of argument or idea, to the extent that he feels the need not to ignore but rather to interject and try and throw-off everyone else.

If American music cannot speak to you because you are not American, how can Pulp speak to you? As you are neither clever, charming or observant either?

-- Nick Southall (auspiciousfis...), January 12th, 2004.

Fuck you Nick, you don't know nothin' - you only me as the guy that winds you easily wound up pencil monkies on ILX.

yo, peep that sentence structure, dog.

i think theres a definite geographical basis to all this, especially with scenes like bounce or gogo, that were very tied to one city.

at various times over the last 10-15 years you can tell records made in london, frankfurt, detroit, rotterdam, koln, by the sound. and if they are not, theres a pretty conscious attempt at replicating that sound/feel

Ie. "revelance", which may as well mean exhibiting the characteristics of an inarguable "truth" in the process of being at least partially revealed, vs. "relevance", an assertion of a claim to validity grounded on an arguably definable range of co-ordinates.

"Relevance" situates itself as one point relative to its similarly significant others, "revelance" appears to explode from a singularity.

However revelance is always, cruelly and mercifully, carried over into relevance, and hence to the graded scale of redundancy ...

Living Colour prefaced one of their albums with a Malcolm X speech about "talking right down to earth in a language that everyone can understand", which sounds like a threat - no possibility of misunderstanding here! All relevance, no fun!

But I don't swing that way, so stop your perverse and lewd emails. Ta.