So Bill and I were on Midmorning w/ Kerri Miller this morning, talking about all manner of musical things that we probably didn’t have nearly enough time to correctly address — such as the questions of whether or not indie rock is “too white,” whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that there’s no more top-40 radio or Ed Sullivan show to create mega-bands and “mass shared experiences” like The Beatles and The Stones anymore, where protest music went between the sixties and today, and yes, even the perpetually unanswered “is the allbum dead” topic. All of this was spurred by an op-ed piece (behind subscription wall) in the New York Times by David Brooks that followed up on two earlier articles lamenting the supposed increased “stylistic segregation” of pop music over the past decade, written by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker and Carl Wilson in Slate. My personal reactions to these pieces were that they each contained some kernels of truth (in order or total kernels: Wilson, Frere-Jones, and Brooks in distant last), but that at any stage of the game they could be debunked as well.
There really were too many topics covered on Midmorning to cover again here, but I wanted to jump in on one that was off-topic enough (certainly from the above articles) that it got the least amount of time, but I think deserves its own thread: as I said, we touched on “protest music” and wondered (very briefly) where it went between the end of the 60s and today. My take (get ready) is that it is directly tied to the political and economic context of the time, both (but differently) in America and England (which, for the sake of some economy, are the only two countries we’ve been talking about for this entire discussion anyway). Disillusion in the early 70s snuffed out most of it on the largest scale: first RFK and MLK are killed, Nixon and Vietnam squash all remaining hope, disco/cocaine-oriented hedonism take center stage, and then, finally, punk brings it back — except now it’s a niche experience, rather than a mass one (despite their influence, The Clash and their brethren never create an audience that rises to the critical mass of the Woodstock-era consciousnes-raising experience); and it never really happens again. Despite exceptions (and there are always exceptions), the 90s continue to be about music that is personal rather than political. So when 9/11 and the Bush Administration happen in the early ’00s — two things that might have in a different environment yielded and immediate political result musically — music is still inhabiting a different place, and furthermore, we all remember the tremendously chilled environment we existed in for several years after 9/11 to “watch what we say,” as Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer ominously warned the American people. After all, who wanted to be Dixie Chick-ed or Bill Maher-ed? (certainly, an artist such as Ani DiFranco never ceased speaking precisely what was on her mind, but I’m talking about the stage of mass American consciousness — which, sadly, Ani is still not on). Finally, protest-politics returned to the repertoire of mass-appeal artists, and today Bruce Springsteen strides around the stage of the Xcel Energy Center decrying the erosion of civil liberties and enshrinement of torture as an American value without worrying that he’s going to be booed out of the house (I’m not saying he was afraid to before — I’m just saying that there was a period of time where all of us, and I imagine possibly Springsteen too, wondered for a few bizarre years whether or not reality had turned upside down and we were suddenly all living in Oceana with Winston Smith).
Anyway, that’s my facile and surely grossly oversimplified take on it. I would love for all of the gaps in my narrative to be filled in by you. But as I said at the top, we also covered about twenty other topics on our jam-packed hour too, so if you want to get to any of those, we could do that as well (and Bill is also lurking around here somewhere, so feel free to direct question to him too).
From: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/