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| From | Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com> |
| Subject | Re: random first hour Grammy musings - like you care |
| Date | Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:02:08 -0500 |
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At 06:43 PM 2/9/2004 -0600, Michael Bennett wrote:
>2. I would agree with Stewart, to a degree, that power pop has generally
>pretty ossified. But it isn't like power pop is the sole genre with that
>attribute. Garage rock anyone? Ska? I could go on...
I don't hang around with enough ska fans to be able to say anything one way
or the other, but I do count a number of hardcore garage rock fans among my
friends and acquaintances, and for me, the main difference I'd say I see
between garage rock fans and power pop fans is that I never see the kind of
plain, unalloyed disgust that shows up so regularly here whenever a band
that can loosely be aligned with "our" form of music shows signs of
breaking out of the protective bubble. (Yes, WELCOME INTERSTATE MANAGERS
topped the Audities poll last year, but I'm probably not the only one who
remembers how controversial "Stacy's Mom" was in some quarters hereabouts,
as a piece of music, as a video, as a hit record, as a song that caused
interlopers and arrivistes to show up at FoW concerts and finally as a song
that Chris Collingswood supposedly regrets writing and recording.) And I
certainly have never seen a more parochial group than the subset of power
pop fans whose only criterion for new music is that it remind them strongly
of music that they've previously enjoyed, and the more it sounds like an
old Badfinger outtake, the better. And other than the extremely rare like
of complete twats like Jeff Connolly, I know no garage rock equivalents to
the Pop Stalinists, who take that "newness and variety scares and angers
me" mindset to such an untenable extent that they think that anything that
doesn't sound like a 10-generation copy of the Beatles just plain "isn't
music." Years ago, such people angered me. Now I mostly just find them
pathetic and vaguely amusing.
Some forms of music ossify through benign neglect. In some hands, power
pop often seems like it's deliberately chosen to ossify itself.
S
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