kids: DON'T GO TO COLLEGE OR YOU'LL TURN OUT LIKE THIS

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/

as i recently warned, pitchfork has put up their top 500 songs of the last ten years (which comes out to roughly one song for every week). and yes, the "list" (such as it is) is pretty silly, with basement jaxx and robyn getting quite a bit of attention, with a top 20 cracked by such mainstream non-artists as rhianna and justin timberlake, and more animal collective on hand than freshman orientation.

but that's not really important. to put together an accurate list of 500 songs is about as easy as putting together an accurate list of the top 500 restaurants on the east coast. it's part fool's errand, but its true purpose mostly is to give a handful of arrogant people a platform to wax educated about media and culture and stuff.

each and every song gets a paragraph. the examples of purely god-awful writing are too numerous to be chronicled. from some guy's belief that Joanna Newsom meant to invoke "whores" when she said "horse", to ridiculous overuse of the gerund, to the fact that anyone who wrote a song about new york was really singing about 9/11; the writing is just hackery. i mean, how many times can you publish the phrase "it goes without saying" before it starts looking like a red flag?

but even that's not really important, at least not to me right now. what i wanted to write about (i got distracted; don't like it? continue not reading.) was the way in which almost all of these writers discuss "what happened in music". the passive voice is used a lot. some bands "were never heard from again". some songs "are indellibly associated" with certain years. aside from being poor writing, this betrays a deep lack of appreciation for the critic's role in the whole process. it's YOU that chooses to notice something or not, to like it or hate it, not some invisible modernizing, culturizing force. a band that pleases one person consistently shouldn't automatically be recast as a band who "has longevity". an artist hasn't "dropped off the face of the earth" just because you haven't written up his last three albums. it's the pools from which the list was drawn that are pre-selected. they have already manufactured taste, now it only must be prioritized, and explained as the result of a mystical, natural process. UGH.


one more thing: marc richardson says, "If the songs on this list were chosen solely by how they captured the zeitgeist in independent music, 'Losing My Edge' would be an easy #1." and i'm afraid i agree with him. a comfortable, computer-owning music appreciator throws together a garage band beat, each new layer being introduced at perfectly predictable intervals, with all the depth of a casio demo-beat; meanwhile the computer-owner talks about cool things he likes, and he's being ironic, but he really kind of isn't, but really he is, but honestly he's lost his edge because he's not cool anymore, but he's actually the sole arbiter of what's cool.... etc.

i don't blame the song for sucking heartily, nor do i blame those who disagree and think it doesn't suck. i blame the critic, the person who says it "captures the zeitgeist in independent music" thus defining the boundaries of said zeitgeist without actually making a creative contribution. i'm not sure about you, but in my zeitgeist, we're not sitting around, pawing at our bald spots, wondering how being middle class and having impeccable taste simply hasn't made us more attractive.


one one more thing: white people have just gotten through "revolutionizing" dance music in the same way that columbus "revolutionized" the americas. when columbus arrived, a whole mess of people were already there, yet still there's a lot of talk about his "discovery".

THE DECADE IS OVER! THE DECADE IS OVER!

well, kind of. i mean, the decade will be over, in seventeen months, five if you don't count right. whatever, the decade is over. do you people even know what that means?

it means soon we get to find out what were the best albums, tracks, and music videos of the last ten years. we'll surely get to find out what some writers think the decade "meant" -- lots of long essays about mp3's, about how online distribution is SO FUCKIN AWESOME!

one thing's for sure: the current crop of pitchfork writers is probably starting to get nostalgic for their college days. consequentially, look for smarmy indie dance bands to be extremely well represented (you know, fast guitar music with no backbeat [whites gotta dance, too]), competing most directly with smarmy indie folk bands (sweet christ on a cracker, i hate those woodland brooklynites who seem to practice their instruments as frequently as they shave).

expect certain TITS bands to be erased down the memory hole (black kids, arctic monkeys, clap your hands...), and expect the editorial staff to show diversity of taste by including a bunch of hip-hop records that they never bothered to promote.

i won't miss the 00's (pronounced "oooohs"). it's kind of been a militarist corporatist nightmare of a decade. if there's one thing we can learn from it, it's that dystopian writers like Huxley and Orwell weren't as imaginative as modern-day republicans and democrats.

musically? general taste has been eviscerated by the atomization of the public, corporate sponsership of music is UP (sales are, of course, DOWN), and brittney spears had more fight in her than the beta band.

while pitchfork has presided over the death of anything like counter-culture, many of us just last november participated in the untimely death of political activism. the next decade's movers and shakers need to survey the wreckage, and realize that being king of the mountain now means only that you reach the peak of a pile of rubble.

something on the internet has bothered me

these days, your average pitchfork review ends with a link to the relevant group(s) myspace page. it's nice of them to do this. for instance, a band called "lemonade" has just had their self-titled (debut?) record reviewed. the album gets an 8.3 and is "[recommended]". aside from saying that one song goes on too long, there isn't a single negative word about the record, which must make that song pretty fucking long.

but i digress (frequently). what's important is: it's another douchebag indie dance record. after my last post, in which i asked what's so damn special about yet another kind of electronic folk/pop, the experience of listening to lemonade's myspace songs presents an almost spooky parallel. another group of white kids makes another record that recalls the eighties. the songs aren't terrible. to me, though, they aren't even particularly memorable. i've heard so many fucking indie dance records that i can no longer tell one from the other.

noentheless, pitchfork sees lots that i don't. it would seem that the songs are "rife with rhythmic density and intensity." the band employs a "muscular, aggressive approach to dance music." one song has "a pounding 4/4 beat that would go over both in Williamsburg warehouse parties and Dubai super clubs." (does the spectrum you've just been given leave you any hints as to which social class is being marketed to?)

my point, again, is: so the fuck what? they've rejuvinated 80's dance music? again??? but -- WHY?

if what you want is an enless march of "muscular, aggressive" dance music "rife with rhythmic density," [DENSITY?] you've certainly had your desires met in the last decade. you were a pig in shit in '04. but for the rest of us (those of us who don't see the point in rehashing genres that have already been resurrected, co-opted, and pastiched all over again), these cracker-ass indie dance bands are getting rather tiresome.

what's the appeal? why does this shit continue sticking to the wall? i have a theory.

reviewer sez: "As the [final] track fades, it's overcome by a chorus of sampled voices all uttering the same statement: 'we're all having a good time.' Given Clendenin's cryptic, fragmented approach to singing, you can't fault Lemonade for using these dying seconds to state the obvious." after hearing the song in question, the line is clearly an ostentatious attempt at irony, which seems to be entirely lost on the critic. regardless, this is what music means to these people. they want their bands to have a good time, they want to be reminded of good times they temselves had in high school, they want simply to forget that the last twenty years even happened.

what better way to escape the desolate creative landscape that corporate media has fashioned for this american generation? the critic wants to hear that record that reminds him of his first blowjob -- a simpler time, before critics and the internet destroyed american cool music with their solipsism.