2nd
Can't Log in
For some reason, I can’t log in to comment on Idolator even though I have a log-in and password, etc. I wanted to respond to this thread about my post from earlier today, but I’ll just put the comment I wrote for the thread right here instead.
I know the beginning of that post is kinda whiny, but it’s venting a lot of very sincere frustration. I feel that I had to include that preamble, or I would not effectively explain what I was trying to do with the series. Basically, the idea is that I’m presenting older songs that ought to be considered as potential jumping-off points for contemporary musicians of whatever genre. As I said in the piece, I don’t want people to clone the songs, and I would prefer that people have their own identity. My modest goal is that maybe some people would read these posts and think about what I’m pointing at in these songs, and go “hey, maybe I can apply that to what I’m doing” instead of recycling the same old tired things. From this point onward, the posts will just be a way of spotlighting old songs and going “hey, what about this?”
I also know that the concept is kinda arrogant and obnoxious, and I actually put off doing it for a while because of that. But really, I just came to this conclusion: Why SHOULDN’T we be encouraging people to do better, and to make more distinctive and interesting art? Critics on and offline have spent the better part of this past decade patting people on the back for giving us pale imitations of a handful of canonized bands from the 80s, so is it any shock that we’ve got so many new acts who don’t seem particularly motivated to be at all interesting? No one is asking any of these people to try, so why not give that a shot?
In that thread, Al Shipley left a rather depressing comment:
Do you really think that if someone who’s playing in a mediocre shoegaze band puts away the delay pedal and tries their hand at bombastic synth pop, the results will be closer to “Miss You Much” than “we’re playing cheap Casios, lolz 80s!”?
I think it’s kinda missing the point — Shipley’s grasp of what I wrote seems a bit shaky, especially since he seems to be under the impression that I was in some way suggesting that people did not know Janet Jackson’s music — but he’s still right about that. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to be optimistic, and I don’t think the sort of people he describes are necessarily who I’m reaching out to in the post.
Remember back in the late ’90s, and you had some critics and reissue labels going on about post-punk/punk-funk/leftfield disco, and then within a couple years, we suddenly had a wave of bands doing that sort of thing, and some of them were really quite good? There’s a lot of times when that sort of thing has happened. I definitely noticed a lot of indie types from around the world doing deliberately chart-pop type stuff after the whole “poptimist” thing set in around 2002/2003. I have no idea whether anything I’d put out there at this point in time would stick with people, but I think it’s definitely part of a critic’s job to influence working artists, and a lot of people have forgotten about that.
