The Golden Age: Rambling on a Decade in Music
*MP3: Thom Yorke - “All For The Best”
The idea of year-end and decade-end lists coming out as soon as they do nowadays is, outside of our current era, absurd. Realistically, it takes years after an event in the public consciousness to fully register its effect. But we are not outside the internet era. Rather, we are, increasingly without choice, fully connected participants in the snap judgments and quick reads of our time. We have to diagnose on the run, refuting, accepting, or canonizing immediately so that the flow of information stays constant. Life is recorded in real time, its feelings and attachments pinpointed and archived for immediate digestion, and we have it all here in red, blue, green; in red, blue, green.
“Put your hands on the wheel,” Beck implored us in 2002, “let the golden age begin.” Looking back, Beck’s breakup recordSea Change can be viewed in the public consciousness as exactly that, teetering as it was on the precipice of the post-9/11 world. It was as slow and single-minded as the music world after it refused to be. It ambled and pondered while the rest of the world moved to distract itself with streams of information, rising from its long sleeping place to move about, categorize, and quantify.
And so the lists have become compelling. The flow of information is gratifying and addictive because it correlates to the first and still most powerful judge, jury, and archivist supercomputer, the human brain, with all of its strange and still misunderstood machinery swirling, sparking, and driving on logic and creativity and curiosity. And since it is known that the calculative parts of the brain respond to the stimulus of music, it might be no surprise that, in a decade that was supposed to be one of the worst for logic and reason, both the most praised album of last year, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, and that of the decade, Radiohead’s Kid A, both occupy opposite ends of the aughts and exist almost entirely through computers. Both albums were leaked on computers, the first with consternation and Napster, the latter in the good graces of the band and in the new order of the post-In Rainbows era.
Kid A lived for years in a jewel case, while Merriweather Post Pavilion’s psychedelic stripes gleamed and sold well in 128-gram vinyl sleeves in a format resurrected from the dead.
In an ailing, bitter, sarcastic, cynical, and angry world politic, not even hipsters or record labels or global unrest could dam the flow of renewed creativity in music. Kid A and Merriweather aren’t even fair indicators of it all. It came spilling out from everywhere, in new forms and rejuvenated old ones. Hip-hop, in the estimation of many, saw its simultaneous peak and low point, its forward and backward thinkers waging surgical war on its flatlining commercialism, even while other genres appropriated and distilled it in new ways (Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca). Indie rock stratified, spread out, and flexed. Arcade Fire blew down doors while Sufjan and Bon Iver whispered and wailed through keyholes. ‘Twee’ came back into the English lexicon, The Shins and Vampire Weekend lived by it, and Jack White chopped it down and cut from it a new kind of blues with his mighty ax.
The ultimate story of the decade, of course, is the decline of the music industry, or at least the model that had been in place since Buddy Holly died. The industry’s unwillingness or inability to acquiesce to natural change left it harangued and confused. It wasn’t the internet, because even the lowly musicians figured out how to use that to their advantage. No, it was hubris, stubborn and persistent ignorance, and unimaginative thinking that left the dinosaurs behind. They aren’t extinct yet, and they are slowly learning the folkways of the new music listener, but like many in this decade who have found their hubris trampled by reality, they too have been forced to give ear to their constituents instead of shouting over them.
Writing about music has changed. This blog exists and has a readership. Opinion is no longer the province of the few and compensated. People write of their own volition and passionate love for music, where it has been, and where it is going. Online publications like Pitchfork spearhead niche’s movement to mainstream, while print dies and Rolling Stone passes into dubious irrelevance. Ten years on from the beginning of the 21st century, no on seems to know what “rock” is anymore, or the meaning of “rhythm and blues,” and no one seems to care. 2009 was a year when this notion became codified, Grizzly Bear’s ornate arrangements and obscure lyricism and Animal Collective’s freakish and explosive compact symphonies joining the dark and gauzy pop of Lady Gaga and the familiar sauntering of Jay-Z’s cadence atop the charts—charts which are themselves becoming obsolete.
“We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust,” Win Butler and company screamed in Arcade Fire’s finest lyrical moment, “I guess we’ll just have to adjust.” Wake up. That’s what music did. Music woke up and found that it was strong in the aughts, even when the world fell to old weaknesses. Adjust, and be rid of that world, said artists like Radiohead, who in their quietly intelligent way became the model for a newly structured musical landscape. A month before the end of the decade, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien spoke about the band’s new direction and collective purpose. “What we’re trying to do now is make art without fear,” he said. “We feel it in our bellies as we play—we’re on a big move here.” Sigur Ros felt it too. So did Arcade Fire. So did Justin Vernon. So did Brother Ali. And so did this decade in music, the warm heart pumping blood through an ailing body. Don’t look back in anger. Look forward with trust and belief and music. Let the golden age begin.
(Erik Martz)
