Q: How many muso-hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: It’s a pretty obscure number, you probably haven’t heard of it.
Recently I’ve been suffering from pop-anxiety. I realised that the contents of my iPod, although indicating my excellent and eclectic musical taste, includes very little new music. How can I consider myself a well-rounded cultural consumer if I don’t listen to the latest bands? I’m old, but I’m not that old, and I’m not quite ready to settle into a diet of Abba, The Eagles, and music that might be used in an episode of Top Gear. Surely I’m a little bit cooler than that…
Pop music has long been an arbiter of cool, more than any other art-form. To varying degrees, it affects the way we dress, the things we say, the way we style our hair, our politics, and the general attitude with which we deal with the world. If you listen to James Blunt, you’re not cool. If you listen to the latest garage-punk-breakbeat-nufolk-metal band (a growing subgenre – there was an article in the Guardian Guide about it), you are.
Listening to music is a complex business these days. Because most modern pop music is a mish-mash of stuff that’s gone before, identifying trends has become nigh on impossible. Genres have multiplied, mutated, and melted into one another. And there’s a whole raft of new criteria to consider: Is it too derivative? If so, is it derivative in a good way? Is that 80s handclap effect used because they genuinely think it’s good, or are they being ironic? Are they trying to sound like Paul Simon circa Graceland, or have they just not heard the album? It’s clearly crap, but is it intentionally crap?
This last question is the one that troubles me the most. I often listen to BBC 6Music, which despite being easily the best radio station available, is to close next year so the BBC can make a few more episodes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. 6Music is like a vast buffet table where you can sample not only the latest sounds, but pickings from the entire history of pop music. I like the fact that the playlist is so varied, so weird and so eclectic that for every piece of music I love, there is one that just leaves me baffled.
There’s a thin line between ridiculousness and genius (as any Dylan or Bowie fan will tell you), and it’s difficult to say whether the latest album of beeps and clicks by a pair of Scandinavian anorexics is selling because it’s actually good, or because they happened to have a particularly good publicist who is telling everyone that this is the next big thing. But it begs the question: do people listen to it because they like it, or because it’s cool? And how are we supposed to tell the difference?
People are possessive about music, and there is a large breed of music geek who only like music that nobody else likes – and as soon as it becomes popular it also becomes passé. True, there is a particular pleasure in discovering an artist and sharing it with your friends, but refusing to like something solely because it’s popular is the stuff of psychosis. That’s where genuine enthusiasm about music fades, and the desire to be cool takes over.
Anyway, for the record (pun emphatically intended), the new albums I bought on my new music splurge are Contra by Vampire Weekend (brills), Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons (also brills), The xx by The xx (jury’s out – beeps and clicks territory, although I think it might be a grower) and The Courage of Others by Midlake (slightly less good version of Fleet Foxes). I realise that some of these albums aren’t particularly new, but hey, I’m just not that cool.
