Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

2008: A WEAK YEAR FOR MUSIC

Well, it’s that time of year again, and I’m not talking about presents and pie. I’m talking about Best Music of 2008 Lists and MP3s. If you’re an incurable, opinionated audiophile sociopath like myself, then this truly is the most exciting time of year. The days when Billboard was actually meritorious are long gone, but such pipe dreams are no longer necessary with the advent of the internet, which is why year-end lists are so meaningful to us.

In December, every short-sleeve plaid-shirt, horn-rim wearing trendsetter with a quirky domain name and a serious mean-on for music compiles a year-end list. This serves several purposes: to generate hits, to inspire rancorous debates in the comments section which will generate hits, and to add their name to the popular consensus. This is very important to us, getting our story straight.

Although we feign dispassion for popular acceptance, your average alt/indie/anti-corporate music fan craves some kind of recognition as a legitimate subculture, but not for the reasons you’d typically expect (ie, daddy never loved me, mommy was a hophead), with the exception maybe of vinyl fetishists. No, we want some respect for the monkish labour we perform, tirelessly cultivating our awareness of artists, being the wage-spending, concert-going bulwark of a “non-commercial” shoestring art-form, and for generally keeping the homefires burning until the Vikings that continue to plunder radio and television get in their ships and sail away. It’s hard work. Trust me.

In the past ten years, music blogs have detonated all over the place. For someone like me, who as a kid, would spend hours upon hours making mixtapes amid towers of 45s and LPs, it’s been pure heaven. There’s been much ballyhoo about music piracy, so I’d like to set the record straight: the majority of reputable music bloggers are not pirates, nor are their readers. As a music lover, there comes a point where you will deplete every popular and peripheral commercial artist in the spectrum. It’s like using up all the natural resources on Earth, yet you know that there are superclusters of music out in space. This is where the blogs come in handy. The music blog's aim is to inform you of the existence of an artist, enhance your knowledge of their work through well-researched commentary, and lastly to encourage you to search out and buy their work with an MP3 sample. It’s academic, it’s vital to music preservation, and it’s a far cry from sending money through some shadowy Russian network so you can download T.I.’s last two singles for nine cents a piece. I mean, you can’t just walk into Wal-Mart and tell them you’re looking for Flying Nun bands that really capture that Dunedin Sound, now can you?

All of this opinionating and posting over the years has created an interesting D.I.Y. counterculture and alternate discourse to, say, Rolling Stone (the People magazine of music). And in terms of supporting a genuine movement, I think we’re winning. (I can’t help but think of the gutted out Tower Records that used to be across the street from New York’s preeminent record store, Other Music in the East Village.) For example, when Pitchfork, which has pride of place among music blogs through sheer size and daily updates, unveils their year-end lists of Best Albums and Best Tracks, you can be sure that the internet will heat up by more than a few degrees. It’s like our December Super Bowl versus the other team’s February Grammys, or something.

Not long ago, Pitchfork ran a story called “Grammy Nominations Surprisingly Relevant”, and aside from the snarkiness of the title, it points out that the Grammys, in embracing acts like Lil Wayne, M.I.A., Hot Chip, Danger Mouse, Adele, Radiohead, No Age, Justice, and others, are clearly feeling the pressure of the digital age, and implicitly the impact of something like Pitchfork. (I can’t help but smirk at the idea of 2007’s “Paper Planes” being up for Best Song of 2008. Does this mean that Ladyhawke's current hit "Paris is Burning" may finally earn recognition in 2010?)   

At any rate, year-end music lists make a statement and, according to David Cantwell at Living in Stereo, “foreground an argument.” If they don’t get at the heart of a larger issue, Cantwell writes, then “they’re just lists, at best rough drafts for an argument no one is willing to make, at worst an exercise not even in trivia but in randomness and arbitrary subjectivity.”

So, it’s important to take these lists to task and evaluate what they are trying to say. For my money, I feel that 2008 was a pretty weak year for music—too much Bonnaroo Beta-Male Beard Rock and aimless "bleepy bloopy" (to borrow a phrase) and not enough engaging hooks. (Although, Two Cow Garage, The Hold Steady and Gaslight Anthem appear to be keeping the rock torch aflame, and I can’t deny the innovations of Radiohead’s In Rainbows or The Dirty Projector’s Rise Above.)

I’m not going to compose a list, but I will make the prediction that Deerhunter takes the blue ribbon: Bradford Cox just has a longer stride than most. Happy Hunting.  ~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: greefus groinks (via Flickr)