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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | Re: The Next Big Thing IS ... |
| Date | Fri, 25 Apr 2003 13:15:04 -0500 |
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> Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 14:17:32 +0000
> From: "Jeff Tolle" <jwtolle@hotmail.com>
> To: audities@smoe.org
> Subject: The Next Big Thing IS.....
> Message-ID: <Law8-F194tB800Wm33X00007c50@hotmail.com>
>
> The only thing is - when will power-pop be the next big thing. We have
> been
> on the brink for so long, but Grunge, Rap-Metal, Teen Pop, and now Emo
> always seem to stifle the big breakout.
>
File this in the "Be Careful What You Wish For" folder. Audities
seems to have this same old "When will power pop make a pop-culture
comeback?" discussion every few months, and every time it does I think to
myself that if the comeback ever did come to pass it would wind up producing
a lot of brickbats rather than hosannas from Auditeers. We'd hear a lot of
"too overproduced", "too glossy", "too much this", "too little that", and
all of the other myriad complaints with which the pop-music cognoscenti
typically dump on major-label releases. The hot new meal tickets would
inevitably be compared to the tenured artists of the pop underground who are
so beloved on this list, and guess who would suffer by the comparison? It's
an inevitable process: Musical subgenre develops indie-level cult following;
said subgenre suddenly becomes the flavor of the month in the wider musical
world; subgenre cult disowns the popular new breed. It happened with punk
because punk's dogmatic DIY and anticommercial ethos was violated by the
very act of a band's signing a major-label contract, and by the implication
that the nonconformity of punks had been co-opted by the legions of the
normal. And it happened with metal in the eighties because the faithful
thought that the so-called hair bands sacrificed aggression and integrity
for appearance and calculation.
Another problem is that power pop, like rockabilly and garage rock,
is a classicist subgenre. In a large sense the basic forms of power pop have
been frozen in amber since 1965, which gives the subgenre a very specific
template and subjects it to the common hazard of producing cookie-cutter
music. Given modern tastes and modern production techniques, it's likely
that any next-big-thing bands would either run afoul of the power pop cult
by coloring outside of the lines or engender a lot of comments such as,
"Well, they're OK for what they're doing, but they're not really power pop."
And the common complaint that, once one band breaks through every other
major label out there has to find three more bands just like it, would be
offset by the fact that power pop is just as vulnerable to being stamped out
of a mold as is whatever's hot at the moment in the Top 40.
I think that Audities would fare better than most specialty lists in
this regard, since (warning: group pat-on-the-back ahead) there are a lot of
discerning music fans on this list who are more concerned with discussing a
song based upon its own intrinsic merits than in judging it by its
popularity, its authenticity re: the *Rubber Soul* holy grail, or by the
public image of the performer. But I still think that there would be some
trouble with letting go of our collective "ownership" of power pop, and
perhaps an air of hypercriticality based upon the connoisseur ethos of
Audities if it came to evaluating any such major-label power pop trend.
And we can't disregard the notion that there might be a feeling of
letdown or abandonment when, as is typical, the masses move onto the next
Next Big Thing and leave power pop behind once again as old hat.
> Oh well - I guess I'll have to revel in my obscurity, and the wierd lokks
> I
> get when I go off on Fountains of Wayne or Jellyfish or The Posies at a
> party.
>
That's the flip side to the feeling of ownership that the power pop
cult has regarding the subgenre. As much fun as it is to be a connoisseur of
musical esoterica (and let's face it, that's what an awful lot of us are),
there's also nothing quite like being a part of a mass audience in terms of
tastes and sympathies -- especially when you're younger and connectedness to
your peers means so much to you. I love my power pop. But I sometimes feel
like the old immigrant who drives the neighborhood crazy by playing opera
arias on the gramophone all day, or the eccentric professor who refuses to
listen to anything but recordings of prewar Japanese koto music.
Gregory Sager
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