I turned 50 in 2007, so I'm practicing curmudgeon-like behavior by stressing, "whatever it is, I'm agin' it!" Call me anarcho-syndicalist or progressive, except I think most anarchists and progressives are as annoying as neocons. I like to point folks to way-outside-the-mainstream literature and music, while grumbling about everything else.
Let's not be like the Roaring 1920s jazz babies who practiced collective amnesia about the 1918 flu epidemic at the end of World War I. The 2020 Covid pandemic had real-word effects on the deliverability of physical music, the ability to host live concerts, and the loyalty of fans to Zoom, ConcertWindow, Kickstarter and Patreon environments - and some effects are still with us today!
Covid-19 hit touring musicians with a speed that startled everyone.
Tours were moving into high gear again in February 2020, just as initial
reports of lockdowns in Wuhan were expanding into stories of cruise ships being
quarantined. There was a general feeling that the spread of the virus might get
serious by late spring. Suddenly, the NBA and NCAA basketball seasons were
being cancelled, a local production of “Hair” in Colorado Springs halted all
performances, and by the middle of March, many urban areas in the U.S. were on
lockdown. Wire’s tour of the U.S. and Torres’ tour of Europe were cancelled so
quickly, the bands were stuck in mid-tour as international flights were halted,
leaving few options for bands to get home.
Because the Zoom
video-conferencing app had been gaining popularity prior to lockdown, it did
not take musicians long to realize that they could sponsor home-based informal
concerts that fans often pay for. But during the early weeks, revenue streams
were not a high priority. In one of the first “festival” uses of Zoom, dozens
of musicians gathered remotely to honor John Prine, who died of Covid
complications early in the pandemic. The two-day Zoomfest was one of the first
such events to brighten the homebound. Soon, musicians from Ben Gibbard to
Jonatha Brooke were planning regular series of concerts Zoomed from home. (While
NPR has collected its “Tiny Desk Concert At Home” series for an interested
audience, it seems we are only in the first stage of the pandemic-era Zoom
concerts being compiled together, both by artists and in a multi-artist
“festival” format.)
Supplies of physical products
were reliant during early lockdown days on Amazon and independent mail-order
outlets. Among the artists whose releases were planned near Zero Day were
Waxahatchee, Pearl Jam, The Weeknd, The 1975, and The Strokes. In some states,
some music releases might be offered at large general-purpose stores like
Target. But in those states with the most severe restrictions, a customer could
only go into Target or Walmart to get groceries, and other parts of the store
were literally walled off in access. Here in Colorado, we had a mixed bag. One could buy music releases in Denver and Colorado Springs big-box stores, but not in Summit County, where the Target no pasaran bars looked like police tape. Here, the lockdown was brief
enough so that by the time mid-May releases from Perfume Genius and Nap Eyes
hit the streets, record stores already were open again. But in New York and
other dense urban areas, strict lockdowns lasted well into late summer.
Because it is impossible to
gauge the reality of a counter-factual, we can only guess which trends were
initiated and which were aggravated by the pandemic. In the realm of the
decline of physical products, it seems safe to say that the slowdown preceded
the lockdown by several quarters. Rappers Kanye West and Chance the Rapper
already announced late in the decade that they would stop releasing physical
products. The wholesale shipping and distribution tightening of late 2019 and
the Apollo Masters lacquer plant fire of February 2020 both preceded the March
lockdown. But the utter collapse of supply chains in multiple manufacturing
realms that hit in mid-2020 made a bad situation for LP and CD delivery far
worse.
The edgiest element of
pandemic performance was the occasional live protest song emerging from the BLM
actions in the summer of 2020. A few such songs became local anthems, though
few were recorded until John Craigie’s Greatest Hits….Just
Kidding, Live, No Hits included ‘Summer of 2020’ when it was
released in late 2024.
In remote live performances,
musicians had made a few faltering steps in the latter half of the 2010s to
offer customers in remote areas “live online” concerts that many would pay for,
but the enforced work-at-home regimes and the lack of touring possibilities
drove Zoom and its smaller competitors like ConcertWindow into the stratosphere
in 2020-21. In the late summer of 2020, innovators were trying new options for
truly live concerts, such as live house concerts and pod-based remote live
concerts in stadiums, but successive waves of Delta and Omicron variants of
Covid killed the bulk of live performances well into 2022. Musicians relied
more on direct-support sites like Patreon – bands sought investment for
specific albums via Kickstarter as early as 2010, but the pandemic necessitated
the deeper fan involvement made possible through Patreon.
When an independent regional
musician focused solely on the home market, the limits of logistical realities
helped drive a house-concert business that proved a booming new venue option
long after Covid restrictions ended. This was particularly true for summer
months stretching into the fall of 2020. Since attendees at outdoor house
concerts could practice social distancing, local heroes here in Colorado, like
Jeremy Facknitz and Edie Carey, could conduct live performances in the worst
months of lockdown. What was less successful was the attempt to preserve a
festival environment through the use of “pod clusters” of people within large
outdoor venues like sports stadiums – it was too difficult! And the minor
successes reached in the fall of 2020 made some bands too optimistic about
rebooting national tours. Several hit the road in the winter and spring of
2020-21 only to find themselves stymied by resurgent Delta and Omicron waves of
Covid.
What surprised many, though
it may have reflected the fact that bands had little else to do, was the pace
of new music in 2020-22, which kept rolling along through lockdown, inflation,
and the dissolution of supply chains. Even newcomers were given proper due
without benefit of support tours – Olivia Rodrigo, Wet Leg, The Linda Lindas,
Pom Pom Squad, Illuminati Hotties, and dozens of other groups and soloists
gained a following based solely on studio recordings. Behind all the releases
was the unspoken desire, however, that musicians and fans wanted to get back to
live music as quickly as possible. Fans
were desperate for novelty and levity, as Wet Leg’s instant hit “Chaise Longue”
proved.
What the pandemic no doubt slowed
was the rise of a truly global music business. The U.S. and EU (including the
post-Brexit UK) formed its own cloister. China trade wars during the Trump
administration, and China’s severe nationwide lockdown later in the pandemic,
prevented China from jumping onto the K-Pop and J-Pop bandwagons. (This was reinforced
by Xi’s insistence that China’s pop bands avoid Western cultural
contamination.) The wall in Asia was replicated in central Europe after Russia
invaded Ukraine in February 2022 – not just because cultural contacts between
Russia and the West fell to insignificance, but because Putin, to gain more
cultural support for the war, hewed more closely to the Russian Orthodox Church
view that Russia must go it alone in the arts, because all Western arts were
suspect and corrupt.
Musicians could scarcely
depend on a music industry that would come roaring back in all aspects, though.
Bandcamp, the former “gold standard” for online musician support, was acquired
by Epic Games in early 2022. In September 2023, Epic laid off 16 percent of the
Bandcamp staff before selling Bandcamp to Songtradr. For the time being, fans
could purchase LPs and CDs, as well as download music, through the Bandcamp
site, but no one felt too optimistic about how long this would last.
Still, this was all
trepidation about possible worries to come. As the pandemic began to lift in
the third quarter of 2022, all the fans could think about was getting back to
the arenas and clubs. And the big money to be made occasionally trickled down
to musicians, at least for the first few post-pandemic quarters.
Coming in TWO WEEKS (Nov. 15) - The Allure of Listening, Chapter 16 - Democracy, Elitism, Simlations, and Large-Language-Model A.I, in a Post-Pandemic World - We'll wrap this story up for now with a look at performing rock holograms, ChatBots who make music, and humans who compose strictly for TikTok!
There were plenty of anthems available for Black Lives Matter and Occupy, but few people heard them. And all the corporations, including music companies, who had pledged DEI strategies in 2016, dropped them all in less than a decade. 2011-2019
The explosive, yet transient, expansion of the Occupy movement in
2011-12, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the months prior to Trump’s
victory in 2016, signaled a growing realization by corporate America, including
the music industry, that it had better act “woke,” even if concern for subjects
like economic or racial justice was pretty superficial. While it took the
arrival of Trump to really spur the arch-right-wing musical outliers, the
greater noise made by right-populist musicians like Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and
Ariel Pink, had the paradoxic effect of showing that the assumptions among most
pop artists that they should provide lip service to social-justice movements had
already spread through most sectors of the music business.
The decentralist and pop-up nature of Occupy
meant that plenty of musicians showed up in various cities at spontaneous
concerts, but the plans to create benefit albums mostly were shelved, because cities cracked down on
encampments quickly, and Occupy had fizzled as a long-term movement by
mid-2012. Black Lives Matter, by contrast, experienced continued surges in
2016, 2018, and throughout the early months of the pandemic, due to specific
acts of police violence. As a result, musicians from Algiers to Deerhoof issued
music dedicated to BLM. It was easy for
musicians to pledge support for BLM, and this helped push corporations into
more enlightened DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) strategies. (The near-universal
corporate rejection of pledges for DEI and LGBTQ+ rights during the election
year of 2024, due to the mere threat of a second Trump victory, showed how
transitory and downright fake these corporate pledges had been.)
Indie was going through a
distinct “loud/soft” transition, with new acts like Florence and the Machine
and existing acts like Mogwai stressing emphatic delivery, while Decemberists,
Laura Marling, and the Civil Wars strived for understatement. And a new round
of comical chaos was in gestation through bands such as Parquet Courts, Car
Seat Headrest, and Ought, a movement that would reach fruition in the U.K., and
in stateside bands like Bodega, as the 2020s began.
Some millennials,
particularly those who had not been around for indie-rock mini-surges in the
1990s and 2000s, like to talk about the “indie boom” of the second Obama
administration, though this was dominated by more pop-friendly bands like
Foster the People, fun, Bastille, and Kings of Leon. In fact, one could argue
that sadcore women artists such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde arrived because too
much of the music scene was oppressively sparkly-happy. Rather than dismiss the
happier boom as too pop-centric, it helps to reiterate my earlier observation
that every subgenre reinvented itself every few years or so. If you were a
teenager during the 2010-16 period, the new music sounded just as legit as that
favored by indie fans in the previous two decades. As indie became more
pop-centric, it crossed over into collaborative efforts with R&B and
hip-hop worlds as well, with songwriters like Grimes and Caroline Polachek
co-writing songs with the likes of the Knowles sisters and Janelle Monae. Many
thought that indie had no center of gravity during the 2011-17 period; in
reality, the center of gravity was everywhere.
But it was more than possible
for DEI and woke strategies to misfire; in fact, artists that had launched
earlier in the millenium were realizing that they had to pay attention to
rapidly shifting social cues with faster response times than their predecessors
ever did. The problem rarely reached the level of the type of “cancellation”
experienced by J.K. Rowling during the waning Obama years; instead, artists had
to pay attention to new feminist booms or queer political booms that drove
emerging artists like Sophie, Chappell Roan, Snail Mail, and boygenius. And if
they were slightly behind the curve, the results could be harsh. At the height
of her popularity, Katy Perry released “Firework” in 2010 to a chorus of
skeptics wondering if her feminist lyrics really rang true. By the time her
“feminist anthem” 143 was
released in 2024, the images and references seemed so cliched, the album
quickly tanked.
Despite a burst of recorded
activism by bands like L7 following the January 2017 Women’s March that
heralded Trump’s assumption of power, it should have surprised few observers
that the first two years under Trump would involve a turning inward similar to
the Reagan era. At least in the indie community, that meant the release of
exceptional but deeply personal works from artists such as Mt. Eerie, Julien
Baker, Tyler the Creator, and Circuit des Yeux. In the pop world, Top 40
artists recycled an endless series of duo collaborations among the likes of Ed
Sheeran, Quavo, Selena Gomez, Chainsmokers, Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, and many
many more, most relying on heavily hedonistic themes. The presence of newcomers
like SZA and Halsey guaranteed some salvageable elements in the forgettable pop
of the late 2010s, and 2017 displayed an occasional riff-heavy tune like
Portugal the Man’s “Feel It Still,” but the early Trump era proved as sobering
as the 1980s descent into dance hell. The sudden popularity of BTS might lead
some to conclude that K-pop provided a bright spot in a forgettable U.S. pop
realm, but to my ears, K-pop only reinforced the conclusion that the era was a
lame one.
During the Trump era, R&B
artists tended to make wiser use of pop charts than did indie or country
artists. Where the latter would continue to drop a lone single on the charts to
gauge consumers’ receptivity, Ariana Grande or Bad Bunny would release an
entire album at once in streaming media, and have ten or more singles on the
charts as a result. The physical album products in LP or CD might be delayed
for months, if released at all. The decade proved a sad one in the hip-hop
community, as the deaths in rapid succession of XXXTentacion, Mac Miller, and
Juice WRLD wiped out a generation of new talent.
The global explosion of
hip-hop and pop, primarily from people of color, reflected two important trends
as the decade was ending. Corporations had a desire to prove they were “woke”
by pushing heavily on DEI aspects of their business model, and this led to more
POC representation everywhere. But this also was an accurate reflection of
where much of the new music was being made. Traditional white-rocker music was
in a definite slump, and even the best music coming out of the indie charts
tended to be dominated by very experimental women (Julia Holter, Circuit des
Yeux, Holly Herndon, Mary Halvorsen), or Black jazz artists like Kamasi
Washington. The latter musicians dwelled completely under mass-market radar, to
be sure, but gave an indication of how even the pop underground was changing.
And when a pop talent with an experimental edge could break the mass-market
charts, as Billie Eilish did in 2019, it only reinforced the point that there
was a place for experimentalism. Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus also introduced
the world to the first mash-ups of hip-hop and country during 2019.
There were also strange
anomalies in the Top 10. Because the charts were now based on what people chose
to stream, the Christmas charts might be filled with the likes of Gene Autry,
Perry Como, and Nat King Cole, as well as holiday music of more recent vintage,
such as Mariah Carey, Wham!, and Whitney Houston. A 70-year-old version of
“Rudolph” breaking the Top 40 obviously made it difficult to assess how modern
pop was being received.
Bands reuniting in the latter
part of the decade ran the gamut from 1980s favorites like Depeche Mode, to
bands that only recently called it quits, including Panic! at the Disco and
Fall-Out Boy. As all of them went on tour, the concert scene grew more
inflationary and crowded by the year. Long before the post-Covid ticket
scandals involving Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, concert consumers had to
worry about more than the ticket resellers by 2018-19. AXS and other sellers
were playing their first games with “dynamic ticket pricing” for popular artists,
and the price of concert tickets began to regularly reach into three figures –
in fact, sub-$200 prices were considered a bargain for some artists.
Inflation also hit the LP
market in the late 2010s, long before the fire at Apollo Masters days before
the Covid lockdown created a significant lacquer shortage affecting LP prices
globally. If there was a bright spot, the mini-inflationary trends in the music
industry prior to 2020 helped prepare consumers for the supply-chain breakdowns
and concert-less months of the pandemic.
When a global shock of any
type takes place, there is a natural tendency to assume one felt precursors, but
in the case of Covid, the rumblings seemed real. My wife and I visited Los
Angeles to see our daughter at the end of the 2019 calendar year, and snagged
tickets to a New Years’ Eve Guided by Voices show at the Terragram Ballroom
promising “100 songs for 100 bucks.” The show fully lived up to its billing,
and I remember telling my wife at the conclusion that “This was the most fun
I’ll have in quite a while, since the 2020s are bound to bring us multiple
shits hitting multiple fans at once.” If only I knew.
Coming in three weeks (Nov. 1) - Chapter 15, Lockdown Goads Music to its Virtual Side. Pods and Zooms and outdoor concert masks and walled-off Walnarts, oh my! 2020-22
Streaming arrives with all the subtlety of a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet. Do independent musicians benefit, or does the infinite-playlist scroll mean a lot of vomiting? 2006-2011
The launch of iTunes in 2003-04 gave the music industry the first
monetizable download market, but downloaded files had the shortest market
dominance history in recorded music. While files still were downloaded in the
2020s, the era of market peak lasted only from 2003 to about 2008 or 2010. Opponents
of streaming figured that even those customers who were short on space for
physical objects would prefer downloaded files to streaming music, because
there was a local instantiation of the music somewhere within the client’s
control.
But it turned out very few
people cared if the piece of music was in “the cloud” or on a local disc. This
may have been misplaced trust, since eventually Apple, Amazon Web Services and
Google not only claimed to hold ultimate rights to music the consumer had
downloaded from the streaming provider, they even claimed special rights to the
consumer’s own music – if users uploaded
their own music from local storage to the cloud, the cloud owners claimed the
right to modify, control, or delete that music supposedly owned by the consumer.
The curmudgeon might grumble that “the cloud is never your friend,” but few
people were listening, hence the short history of the dominance of downloads.
The arrival of ubiquitous
desktop broadband services and 4G/5G wireless services arrived at about the
same time as Spotify’s 2011 launch. Download revenue fell at a rate of 3
percent per year from then on, estimated at $1.4 billion in 2023 and $1.23
billion by 2027. By the pandemic period, downloads already counted for less
than either vinyl or CD sales. But here’s a funny thing: By 2005, vinyl LPs
were making a return, even among people who did not own a turntable, because
they were valued as objets d’art for the
music collector to keep. In the mid-2000s, many were predicting that CDs would
enjoy a similar renaissance, because lossless compression made for better audio
quality than either downloads or streaming. But the latter didn’t happen.
Indeed, by the mid-2020s, independent musicians were trying to scrape up the
money for vinyl pressings, while distributing cassettes, Bandcamp links, links
to direct file downloads, or ads for Spotify availability, because no one
seemed to want the lowly CD.
The CD’s failure to rebound
was one of the only anomalies in the 20-year period from 2005 to 2025, when
consumers were offered a potlatch of potential platforms and audio qualities to
hear their music precisely as they wanted it. It helps to remember in the years
prior to Facebook that many bands like Arctic Monkeys and Be Your Own Pet had
their careers launched by the nearly-forgotten MySpace. But of all online
environments, mobile streaming was the biggest winner. CDs were lagging so
badly by 2015, most automobile manufacturers already had removed CD players as
available options in new cars. Nevertheless, the audio industry seemed to care
more about backward compatibility than the computer industry, where varieties
of storage choices seemed to be made obsolete every few years. At the turn of
the millenium, stacks of LPs in second-hand stores seemed as useless as VHS
tapes. Twenty years later, the LPs were commanding top dollar, while VHSs (and
DVDs) were just as useless as they had been in 2000.
But did the format matter to
most consumers? It depends on the habits they brought. I was one of the
traditionalists who liked to arrange the spines of LPs and CDs alphabetically
by artist, with works from different eras arranged chronologically. I carried
that habit into folder groupings on my computer for music I had downloaded,
though I tended to keep downloading to a minimum. Many consumers of streaming
music on mobile media enjoyed the recommendations of services like Pandora, and
the clever playlists developed by Apple and Spotify. Smaller independent
artists complained that streaming was unprofitable, and this mattered to some of
their fans – though far fewer people than the artists hoped. I developed a
“guilt ratio” assessment for using streaming when it was necessary, but only as
a last resort. I was in a tiny minority who even pretended to feel guilty about
streaming.
Meanwhile, the vinyl LP was
becoming a fetish for a growing number of consumers. Before the first Record
Store Day in 2007, broad-based retail outlets like Borders, Barnes & Noble,
Target, and Urban Outfitters added LP sections, and even Walmart was not far
behind. Record Store Day, intended to support independent record stores, was
popular from its first nascent two or three years of existence, but it became
apparent almost immediately that shoppers looking for rarities, particularly
younger shoppers, had no turntables and no intention of purchasing such. The
album was seen as a collectible. RSD in its early years could provide genuine
collectibles, such as live sets and outtakes from studio recording sessions,
but by the 2020s the new lists were dominated by reissues from legacy artists.
There were many unique
aspects of the new dominance of women in the charts in mid-decade. First, pop
performers started dabbling in feminism, as evidenced by Lily Allen, Avril
Lavigne, Alanis Morisette, and particularly Pink. They not only made up for the
lackluster showings of many male artists, but women pop artists would grow
increasingly adventurous to where they almost substituted for the waning of
experimental noise as the decade ended. It wasn’t that all female pop artists
were experimental (though Beyonce’s sister Solange Knowles and newcomer sci-fi
artist Janelle Monae certainly proved that case), it was more that
experimentation in the years after 2005-6 came more and more from the pop
community than from rock, and particularly from women’s pop. Some women like
Inca Ore were direct participants in the noise genre, and 2006’s three-disc Women Take Back the Noise compilation proved that case.
It seemed almost inevitable
that the mortgage liquidity crisis of 2007 and the heavy recession that
followed would lead to a sparser music release environment in those years, and sheer
volumes of new artists indeed took a hit, but the degree of buzz created by
rising superstars like Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay made it
seem less severe than it may otherwise have been. What seemed more important
from a political perspective was the number of musicians ready to speak out
during the 2008 elections. Denver’s Flobots had set the tone with the powerful Fight With Tools album, and the reconstituted Rage Against the
Machine, as well as Ted Leo and other performers, performed benefits for
activists.
This brief flurry of activism hit its stride in the summer of 2008
at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, when Flobots, RATM, Jello
Biafra, and Wayne Kramer of MC5 took the lead in planning many demonstrations
to influence policy platforms. While the nationwide series of actions led to
some great one-off concerts, the activities were not sustained through the end
of the year, and were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the far-bigger
Occupy movement of 2011. Barack Obama’s inaugural concert had the broadest
array of pop performers to date or since, but it didn’t translate to
music-based social action, as Obama quickly found himself mired in the twin
crises of TARP and Iraq.
One victim of post-recession austerity
seemed to be experimental and improvisational music. The death in 2007 of Sun
City Girls founder Charles Gocher led to the demise of the band two years
later, and suddenly the spigots turned off for constant new releases from the
likes of Starving Weirdos, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the
Man. Certainly, the cost of physical production of CDs or LPs was a factor in
the waning of noise, but there seemed to be a global lack of energy as well.
What was unexpected was the simultaneous expansion of sound experimentation in
both pop and hip-hop fields, particularly among women artists (hip-hop had
always been in the forefront of sampling both spoken word and other musicians’
works, but now this expanded to additional musical instruments and found sounds
from nature). Notably absent in the race to get weird was mainstream rock.
There were plenty of indie rock artists that proved exceptions to the rule, but
mainstream rock acts were so late boarding the experimental sounds train, the
genre could be considered the most conservative musical style out there by the
2020s.
Social media in the Bush era,
at least as far as musicians were concerned, centered largely on MySpace,
though the rudimentary state of streaming pre-2010 made the network mostly a
vehicle for connecting fans with bands’ pictures, tour schedules, videos, and
links to purchase physical CDs or LPs. The arrival of Facebook and Twitter in
the latter part of the 2000s eventually spelled the end of MySpace, though only
due to laws of monopoly market dominance – neither Facebook nor Twitter really coalesced
into centers for musician-artist connections. But Bandcamp and SoundCloud both
were launched in 2007, and took the place of MySpace, even if both of the music
hosting sites were designed less as central hubs with a common look and feel,
and more for the musician to design and manage in a way they saw fit. Slowly
over the course of a decade, the two sites expanded technology potentials to
connect fans to unique music online, until the pandemic of the early 2020s made
the hosting of remote live concerts seem a normal extension of this trend. (Apple
expanded its iTunes and Apple Music services in similar ways, though in a manner
that always served Apple’s proprietary interests more than the community at
large.)
Some subgenres were specific
to a single online platform. Early proponents of “mumble rap,” such as Gucci
Mane, Lil’ B, and Young Thug, were so specific to the SoundCloud environment,
they became known as “SoundCloud rappers.” Obviously, with fame came a wider
spread of platform, but many musicians from a variety of genres felt it
necessary to show a little loyalty to their SoundCloud or Bandcamp roots.
The arrival of streaming services at the turn
of the decade fundamentally changed the way popularity was determined, in ways
that were both democratic and overwhelming, particularly for smaller artists.
First came the satellite radio services of Sirius and XM, which merged in 2008
to form a unified playlist-defined listener experience. Spotify was launched as
an independent streaming company, while Pandora was acquired by SiriusXM in
order to give the company a unique recommendation service using rudimentary AI
features to determine what listeners might enjoy given their past listening
preferences. The playlist compilation services of Spotify, Apple, and SiriusXM could
genuinely be touted as making the listener more sophisticated in driving future
choices, though it equally could be seen as driving listeners further into
pre-defined boxes, where they seldom would listen to something outside the box.
Hip-hop defined the million-seller
side of the decade, as Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye and Nas helped create a new
megastar category where the artists achieved the type of fame earlier seen by
Madonna and Whitney Houston. Regional hip-hop markets, particularly Atlanta
with crunk and snap, became big sellers in their own right. It is no accident
that hip-hop artists were the first to move away from all physical forms of
music – the CD already was waning when the megastars emerged in mid-decade, and
those same artists would not move to LPs until the very late 2010s. Kanye West
was the first to say “No physical products” with Life of Pablo, but Chance
the Rapper and others were right behind him.
At the end of 2010, Billboard
changed the way it compiled its Top 100 that further aided the streaming model.
Instead of record labels and A&R executives pushing singles into the
Billboard “New This Week” category, major artists such as David Cook, Taylor
Swift, David Guetta, BoB, and the cast of Glee, would
release new albums and have all the tracks from that album enter the “New This
Week” category simultaneously. In theory, this allowed the listener to choose
the best tracks to move up the charts into the Top 10. In practice, the
vote-by-streaming method tended to favor the larger artist, as a newcomer had
even less chance to break into the “New This Week” chart. It also meant that
listeners had fewer filters imposed by music elites, which proved much more of
a double-edged sword than most realized. This part of the streaming argument
seemed to preview the debate between populism and elitism that took place in
politics in the 2020s: Yes, the decision-making process of the elites had
always been unfair, but without it, consumers faced a massive repository of
streamed music that grew bigger every year. By the 2020s, everyone complained
that drinking from such a firehose was virtually impossible. The environment
for the music listener was bigger than ever, but the guides for knowing how to
listen intelligently failed to emerge, which meant that hyper-democracy often
equaled chaos.
Because the vast bulk of
listeners were casual in the ways they consumed music, the arrival of streaming
led to a rapid decline in CD sales. The LP only survived through its art-object
status. Since a USB or Bluetooth connection from a smartphone to a car was so
easy to implement, CD players within automobiles began to be phased out by
mid-decade. Since iPods had displaced Walkmans much earlier, very few portable
players required anything more than streaming (or the arcane presence of a
downloaded MP3 file). The number of consumers with audio component systems at
home dwindled to a lonely few serious music wonks. Sure, mini-systems with
powerful small Bose speakers remained popular, but they usually were used for
streaming services. A few high-end audio component specialists survived, but dealt as much in Dolby 11.2 home theater systems as they did in
audio-centric components. And as an ironic footnote for the home listener,
preamp manufacturers who promoted dual-channel analog/digital preamps,
dedicated the analog channel to a turntable, while the digital channel was for
a streaming input, because “obviously, no one listened to CDs any more.”
Coming in three weeks (October 11) - Chapter 13, The Spread of Woke Arts in Unwoke Times - Was the supposed corporate fealty to DEI just a joke in the Trump era?
Turns out the format of a musical file downloaded to a local computer was the shortest-lived format dominance in popular music history! Was that the fault of MP3? 1998-2005
Given how much the music industry later depended on lossy compression
for downloads and streaming, it is a shocking anomaly to remember how the
Recording Industry Association of America actually tried to block sales of the
first Diamond Multimedia MP3 player in 1998, which itself was just a teaser as
to how much RIAA would train the big guns on Napster two years later (Napster,
the startup who promoted “free” downloading, was formed in the summer of 1999,
before the millenium). Audio buffs sneered at the standardization of MP3,
claiming many true music fans would demand either lossless compression like
WAV, or direct dynamic compression, using pulse code modulation, in digital CDs
or analog LPs. Wired magazine
later pointed out that many millennials and Gen Z youth preferred the sound of
MP3 to lossless compression, because they had grown up with lossy compression.
The magazine called this trend “craptastic,” and pointed out that many boomers
had themselves grown up listening to the Top 40 on tinny, monaural transistor
radios (though few would say they actually preferred that sound to the high-end
stereos they would hear in their college years).
There was a significant
difference between what happened to digital recording as a result of the CD’s
introduction in the 1980s, and what happened to audio recording 15 years later
due to the ubiquity of MP3. Digital recordings with high-bit-rate sampling
could offer superior sound quality, but the turn to CDs also indirectly
encouraged sloppy studio recording and mastering, favoring a bright and tinny
sound, as we discussed in Chapter 9. Some die-hards might say that all audio
compression should be kept to a minimum, but careful lossless compression taking
place in the studio could lessen the overall dynamic range and impose a certain
amount of gain reduction (some proponents of modern classical music, and of
loud-soft progressive bands like King Crimson, would say that even reducing the
dynamic range is compromising the integrity of the artist).
In moving to lossy
compression like MP3, the goal was different – reduce the overall size of a
music file to make it storable on a local computer, or to optimize the
bandwidth when streaming music over the Internet. The encoder removes data
judged to be inaudible or irrelevant, and at high encoding rates like
320Kbits/sec and above, most people would not be able to tell the difference in
the source. However, lossy compression introduces noise, distortion, and loss
of detail. What is worse, each time a lossy file is sent back and forth among
music editors, the file degrades, which is why most music editors insist on
lossless files. So the CD was blamed for lower sound quality due to poor
recording decisions made in studios in the 1980s, while MP3 reduced sound
quality because quality was overtly sacrificed to improve file size. Many
compressed files of the early 2000s debuted with bright and brassy bands like
Foster the People, fun, and The Strokes, so it was often hard to tell the
difference (which is not intended as a slur on the artist).
What the arrival of MP3
delivery really underscored is that most people would prefer the convenience of
a fully digitized music library, available through cloud services, to a local physical instantiation of music in any format,
which carried environmental costs alongside the simple reality of taking up too
much space. The eventual revival of the LP, often sought out by people who did
not even own turntables, showed that many people wanted the comfort of an art
object in addition to an endless playlist. But the closing years of the 20th
century were the first time people became aware that digitization eventually
would mean the availability of the entire music resources of the Library of
Congress in an immediate form on handheld platforms. It wasn’t until the
arrival of apps like Pandora and Spotify in the 21st century that
fans realized a potential downside: if the artistic output of millions of
musicians was on tap all the time, how would music fans separate wheat from
chaff? Labels attempted to revive interest in physical formats in 2000-01
through new digital platforms like Audio DVD and Super Audio CD. In 2004-05, a
few artists like Fiona Apple, Son Volt, and Bruce Springsteen tried a “Dual
Disc” flippable CD that had audio CD on one side and DVD on the other, though
streaming would eventually make both CDs and DVDs all but obsolete. Instead, the
biggest news of 2001 was Apple’s debut of the iTunes library and the iPod
portable platform.
While the full arrival of
sampled and reassembled music would have to await the debut of better Mac
ProTools, EDM music at the turn of the millenium already was feeling the impact
of DJs who made as much or more use of laptops than turntables in their
performances. This was not the simple song-sampling of earlier hip hop and pop
tunes, or straight-out lip synching that landed Milli Vanilli in such trouble,
but the full creation of new sounds using found and repurposed sounds from
musical instruments and from the street itself. Musical purists would later
grumble that they didn’t pay good money to see two faux-musicians drag laptops
on stage, but Talking Heads founder David Byrne, in his seminal book How Music Works, said that there is no inherently greater
authenticity or legitimacy between Alan Lomax dragging tape recorders to the
Deep South to chronicle the blues masters, and newbie nerds creating music
directly from the laptop. Byrne’s view would become accepted wisdom by the
second decade of the 21st century, but not without howls of protest
from many, including the old-timey instrument community.
In the final six months of
1999, individual artists and the music industry itself felt a sense of
anticipation and palpable change awaiting the new millenium. (A stickler might
say that a new millenium begins in 2001, but medieval pundits a thousand years
ago considered the millenium to have begun in 1000, and the vast majority of
modern global citizens felt the same way about 2000.) In the latter half of
1999, David Bowie offered the first downloadable album with Hours. Stephin Merritt encapsulated Tin Pan Alley-style
pop with The Magnetic Fields’ massive three-disc 69 Love Songs. A few
years later, Richard Thompson belatedly followed up with his 1000 Years of Popular Music, ending with a Brittney Spears
cover. Even the somnambulant political activist world showed signs of life,
with the anti-globalization Battle for Seattle offering its own musical
soundtrack.
And 2000 lived up to its
billing. Many bands released defining works during the year – Radiohead’s Kid A, Modest Mouse’s The Moon &
Antarctica, Pink’s debut, New Pornographers’ Mass Romantic, Death
Cab for Cutie’s We Have the Facts, Eminem’s
Marshall Mathers LP, Elliott Smith’s Figure 8. The recording industry was at one of its highest
points in history for sheer numbers of new album releases. Yet the hint of
physical intangibility was in the air, as the recording industry launched some
of its first lawsuits against Napster. The legal actions held a sense of irony,
given that 15 years later, labels would bow to the inevitability of streaming,
which superficially seemed a lot closer to piracy than the downloadable files
targeted in the Napster cases. Metallica lost a good chunk of fans by taking a
more aggressive stance against Napster than did industry groups like RIAA.
Ironically, so many music fans with large servers had set up file-sharing
sites, which updated the shared mixtape to a shared database from which to burn
CDRs, that the actions against Napster only served to drive file-sharing
underground.
What really made the 21st-century
environment so rich was a mutual-support network of like-minded musicians who
helped make musicians’ rosters almost as vast as one would discover a decade
later in the nascent streaming world. In record stores and on web sites
worldwide, multi-band compilations were everywhere, later leading to solo recording
contracts for the better bands. The process of regeneration and rebirth was
larger than either the 1965-66 garage era, or the punk era of the late 1970s. And
this busy activity continued, even as CDs became less profitable for all
concerned. It set the stage for a streaming era where there were too many
musicians for even the most obsessed music fan to hear in one lifetime. (Again,
this was not reflected in singles charts, because indie musicians, with rare
exceptions, did not make these charts. In fact, the Top 40 underwent a major
revision in 1999 to add more hip hop and country, not only to make the charts
more inclusive, but also because there were only a handful of Everclear and
Matchbox 20 types who ever made the list, and a greater participation by hip
hop and country was needed to flesh out a very paltry radio playlist.)
It was fair to point out that
several bands launched in the 2000-01 period moved indie back into a
direct-rock sound, including The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and White Stripes.
Several such bands survive in the 2020s, though it is fair to say that this
mini-wave was the last to place guitar-centric rock in the center of indie.
After that, the genre became indie-pop by default. Later in the decade, bands
like Panic at the Disco!, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Fall Out Boy
helped drive the former niche category of emo into a pop mainstream.
Of course, the terror attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, were bound to play a sobering influence on the millenium
party, but the effect was milder and shorter-lived than the major cultural
shifts of Reagan years. In the month of October following the attacks, major
benefit concerts were held in New York, Washington, Atlanta and Dallas, and
virtually no protests were made against the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan,
as it was perceived at the time as justifiable payback. Lee Greenwood hit the
charts with “God Bless the USA” in October, as did Whitney Houston with her
rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
What was more disturbing was
the music industry’s willingness to move to self-censorship: Clear Channel
Communications sent out a list of songs “too sensitive” to play, The Strokes
removed the song “NYC Cops” from the U.S. version of their debut album, Jimmy
Eat World changed the name of its latest album from Bleed American to an
eponymous title, and Reprise Records made its odd decision to drop the release
of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to make it sound as
though the refusal to release the album had something to do with 9/11 (the fact
that the album was released by an affiliated label, Nonesuch, made the whole
event seem like a misfire).In any
event, the effects were transient, as bands were back to their usual antics in
2002, and by 2003, anger at the invasion of Iraq was felt on both the streets
and in the music industry.
The 2003 preventive invasion
of Iraq sparked transient opposition of a different sort. The invasion on false
pretense had much less justification than U.S. involvement in Korea, Vietnam,
Central America, or even Afghanistan a mere two years earlier. As a result,
protests against the March 2003 invasion were massive and global – and had next
to no effect. Because there was no draft and no long-term commitment of large
numbers of U.S. troops (many advisors stayed for decades after the fact, but
the Iraqi government collapsed within weeks), the protests were not sustained
to any significant degree. And musicians’ interests were just as superficial as
the public’s.
Thurston Moore of Sonic
Youth, in his new role as curator of many musical projects, set up
protest-records.com as a repository for four hours’ worth of protest songs from
dozens of bands (the site was still active 20 years later). Instead of selling
CDs to make money, the site allowed users to download the songs for free, only
asking for donations to antiwar groups. There also were decent political works
from Dan Bern and from moveon.org. In live performances, both Dixie Chicks and
Pearl Jam made significant statements against the Bush administration in the
weeks following the invasion. Given their audience, it was no surprise Dixie
Chicks faced scorn and complaint from the country crowd. As for Pearl Jam, Eddie
Vedder was taken by surprise by the negative reaction from many fans to his
antiwar stance. The latter rise of artists like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock
displayed an ugly truth about the 21st century – the music fan
community could not be assumed to hold a progressive stance on many issues.
Given how many artists asked Republican candidates not to use their music in
later years, it was a safe assumption that many (though not all) musicians came
from a progressive background, but often, their audiences were far more redneck
than they were. The more generic form of disaster aid relief benefit concert
remained strong, however, as events were held in 2005 for victims of the Boxing
Day tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Top 40 charts were by then
given over to a clear majority of hip hop tunes, broken only by country artists
like Gretchen Wilson or Big and Rich. The few indie-style rock bands that were
exceptions, such as Hoobastank, Train, or Creed, tended to have presence solely
within Top 40, and not much existence outside mass-audience charts. Billboard moved
slowly to adding a dedicated “Adult Alternative” chart (it was first published
in print in 1996, but not tracked online until 2008). However, such charts
began fragmenting almost immediately – New Music Express and Album of the Year were excoriated by many for hewing too close
to a mainstream line, while the annual list for the Pitchfork music
site was derided as too hipster. In short, there was a lot of fragmentation in
popular music in mid-decade, even within indie-rock domains.
Nevertheless, a few
“signifier” albums broke through the noise in mid-decade, such as Ben Gibbard’s
double hit of Transatlanticism by Death
Cab for Cutie and Give Up from his
side project, The Postal Service. These albums meant so much to millennials
that when Gibbard toured the two bands on the 20th anniversary of
the dual albums in 2023, concerts sold out everywhere. The irony from many
anniversary re-hashings is that, even as millennials chided boomers for the
multiple reunion concerts of bands like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, the bands
of the 1990s and 2000s were selling packaged nostalgia in similar formats by
the late 2010s and the 2020s. In fact, there was almost a standard algorithm
one could use for a reunion, tied to 15th or 20th anniversaries
of a significant album release, or a band’s formation. Oasis, for example,
waited until the 15th anniversary of the band’s breakup to launch
its own reunion.
A significant number of music
consumers responded to the mainstream tedium by diving ever deeply underground,
and a few clever outsider bands responded with a cavalcade of releases. Bands
such as Starving Weirdos, Charalambides, Sun City Girls, Vibracathedral
Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man released dozens of improvisational
albums on any format imaginable. Not only were very few of these destined to be
streamed at future dates, but the handmade cassettes, CDs, and lathe-cut LPs
were valued as limited-edition pieces of art.
One mid-decade milestone
appeared to be well outside the realms of recorded original music, though it
was an indicator of future media platforms for music development. The first
release of Guitar Hero in the summer of 2005 was one of several rhythm-based
video games allowing users to emulate musical instruments and vie for prowess.
Initially, the games shipped with licensed playlists of songs familiar to many.
Over time, however, gaming platforms became a vehicle for introducing new
songs, as relevant as films or TV shows. Gaming avatars were cited as an
influence when Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, created the virtual
cartoon-character band Gorillaz in 2002. Eventually, online multiplayer
environments hosted live events, with rapper Travis Scott being an innovator
for the Twitch network. The evolution would take more than a decade, but gaming
became part of the music user platform in 2005. In the next 20 years,
surreality and virtual environments would seep into popular music with as much
inevitability as streaming.
Coming in three weeks (Sept. 20) - "The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13 - Platforms Define Experiences" - (2006-2012) - As the streaming Godzilla denudes the landscape, the people shout, "To infinity and beyond!"
The 1990s were so, so much more than grunge and the Pacific Northwest. But even among direct indie participants, very few understood the ramifications. 1990-98
Kurt Cobain’s unfortunate decision to take his own life in mid-decade
immediately propelled Nirvana into the role of defining band for the 1990s indie
era. And for many casual music fans not paying strict attention, indie was
treated as a synonym for grunge and the Pacific Northwest. That is a profound
misreading of the 1990s. The real revolution of the decade came in the
development of independent distribution, independent labels, and yes, a new and
large generation of independent artists fed by what is often called the “boomer
echo” or “baby boom 2.0.” And among those artists, it was tough to find a
unifying musical theme. Indie was about a state of mind centered on displacing
the major labels.
Michael Quercio, guitarist
for 1980s psychedelic bands The Three O’Clock and Game Theory, said that the
rise of grunge actually limited the audience for his early 1990s band Permanent
Green Light, because flannel-powered hard rock swamped the lighter sound of
jangle-pop. This tells us two important
things: First, the subgenres of indie could often work at cross-purposes to
each other. Second, a narrowly-defined indie rock market might have been even
more niche-oriented than the OG days of punk, at least in indie’s early days. The
big news in early 1991 wasn’t necessarily Nirvana (at least at the time), but
the fact that hip hop artists like LL Cool J and Beastie Boys finally were
breaking through into mainstream charts. Metal bands also were grabbing
tailwind from the unexpected success of Metallica’s Black Album. Meanwhile,
the largely irrelevant Top 40 charts were filled with the type of crooners that
defined the 1980s, as well as intelligent songwriters who should have known
better, continuing the vapid production sound of 1980s digital synthesizers
(think Susanna Hoffs’ “My Side of the Bed”).
Still, what made the first
few months of grunge so critical in defining new artists for decades to come is
that small labels and regional artists finally found a path to breaking the
stultifying power of the big labels. Sure, within 20 or 30 years the small
artist was struggling due to low streaming profitability and the high cost of
physical media production, but these factors affected newcomers and mega-stars
alike. In the early 1990s, for the first time in a decade, pop music had
second-string and third-string artists in the dugout, and many of them were
great. And the major labels never recovered from the one-two punch of indie on
the charts, followed by an Internet culture that made it impossible for the
labels to regain the amount of control they wielded in the 1980s.
In the final months of 1990,
we moved to Colorado and had a baby girl at the same time, so there was a
natural inclination to treat the world as brand new. I had to learn to balance
my listening to “grown-up” pop with doses of Raffi and Kathy Dines, but that
only taught me to widen my musical tastes. Meanwhile, by the time my daughter
was a year old, she was attending the inaugural Lollapalooza, and let it be
known that her favorite act was The Butthole Surfers. It truly was the
beginning of a new age.
Having more innovative small
artists to choose from meant there would be a certain amount of tiresome acts
that were over-hyped. We’d all rather forget the neo-hippies Rusted Root, for
example. Lemonheads also comes to mind, though Juliana Hatfield grew up to be
quite the solo artist (more so than her bandmate Evan Dando). Others drifted in
a quasi-famous haze, like Buffalo Tom and Blind Melon. For the most part,
though, the arrival of the indie machine meant that there were many more
downright decent bands to listen to, covering the gamut from Built to Spill to
Guided by Voices.
The expansion of musical
experiments also allowed a flowering of noise in its various sub-genres. There
had been a 1980s market for Coil, Nurse with Wound, and John Zorn’s various
experiments in that decade, but new labels like Siltbreeze and Road Cone provided
enthusiastic fans (even if small in number) access to bands like Harry Pussy
and Jackie-O Motherfucker. (More melodic but equally unmarketable bands like
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Sun City Girls rode along in this wake.) The
development of a new market that could genuinely be called “the next
underground” was a boon to special record stores like Kim’s and Other Music in NYC,
Amoeba in San Francisco and L.A., The Quaker Goes Deaf in Chicago, and the
Newbury Comics multiple franchises in Boston. The people that frequented such
stores would often say that the hunt for unusual 45 rpm art objects or
strangely-packaged cassettes brought back the fun of early punk-rock days.
The rise of the smaller
boutique record stores in the early 1990s underscored the precarious state many
of the larger record or book/record chains found themselves in as the decade
progressed. Tower Records, Virgin Music, and Borders Books all experienced
hyper-growth in the 1990s after staying in relative health through the CD
conversion of the mid-1980s. To their credit, they supported the first vinyl
resurgence of the 1990s (which many latecomers forgot about, or were unaware
of, as a larger vinyl resurgence took place in the 2000s). As a result, the
stores managed to retain a certain credibility with snobbier music fans. But
Tower in particular had an expansion rate that was not sustainable as downloads
replaced CDs at decade’s end (the sight of the Tower mini-skyscraper in NYC
across the street from the small and scrappy Other Music indicated the extent
of the problem, though Tower’s 2006 demise was followed ten years later by the
end of Other Music). By the mid-2000s, only Tower Japan, where CDs never fell
out of favor, could stay alive following the global 30-year growth of the
franchise. Virgin and Borders quickly followed suit into oblivion, leaving only
Barnes & Noble left in the post-Covid 2020s to market books, CDs, and vinyl
in brick-and-mortar stores.
In the 1990s, innovation was
bubbling down to the lowest level, and the number of new bands being formed
climbed back to late 1970s levels, yet this artistic surge happened
counter-cyclically to any political or social upheavals. In fact, the “Greed is
Good” slogan characterizing the 1980s accelerated into overdrive during
Clinton’s years – U.S. hubris at “winning” the Cold War aligned with further
acceleration of the NASDAQ stock market in the early Internet era, to give rise
to a make-money culture seemingly devoid of politics. With the exception of a
group of European artists who released a protest single in response to Desert
Storm at the start of 1991, the succeeding Clinton era was defined by American
exceptionalist hubris, and entrepreneurs getting rich on high-tech. Bands
seldom had reason to be in the forefront of social commentary, though
songwriters like Elliott Smith often turned the personal into the political.
Music fans had to be
self-motivated to really appreciate the 1990s, however. Except for an odd
showing by Toad the Wet Sprocket, Radiohead or The La’s, there was little
representation of indie on the radio charts, either Top 40 or AOR (except for
college stations). Hip-hop, however, was expanding into more experimental
veins, thanks to the likes of Digable Planets and Wu-Tang Clan – and was topping the charts while doing so. (It’s
important to point out that, while the death of Tupac Shakur spurred more
outsider hip hop, labels were simultaneously pushing “safe” R&B of the
Whitney Houston/Toni Braxton variety.)
Meanwhile, more expansive pop
and rock had to be actively sought out. Since not everyone received a mixtape
from a secret admirer, and since platforms like Pandora and Spotify were still
a decade away, TV producers would insert songs by up-and-coming indie artists
into shows like ER and Gilmore Girls, driving a fanbase interest that would have to be
satisfied by visits to record stores. The potential for downloads still awaited
broadband connections and standard compression formats for audio files (MP3 was
approved in 1995, but not widely adopted until the end of the decade).
Because the smaller
independent labels could not demand fealty from bands (and often encouraged a
bit of label-hopping), many musicians would issue music on multiple labels at
once, particularly for vinyl-only releases. The line between official studio
and “bootleg” release was blurred considerably. Sonic Youth had a series of
official studio releases and a second set of SYR live and eclectic recordings.
Guided by Voices regularly gave the nod to approved bootleg live recordings
with exceedingly small vinyl press runs. Trumans Water may have taken the
strangest approach in late 1993 with a series of “plausibly deniable”
recordings coming from different record labels. The band’s own label,
Homestead, released Godspeed the Punchline in early
1994 in both LP and CD formats. Simultaneously, three small labels issued LP-only
improvisational variants – Godspeed the Static, Godspeed the
Hemorrhage, and Godspeed the Vortex (the
latter augmented with an extended CD release later) – which were distributed
randomly, without catalog numbers, to record stores across the country, as well
as sold at merch tables at shows. The band got kudos and laughs from fans by
saying the Godspeed variations never existed.
The arrival of the Netscape
browser and web-based services allowed the first experiments to take place with
downloadable music. Aerosmith offered a free digital single, “Head First,” via
CompuServe in 1994, while Duran Duran could claim the first downloadable sale
of a single in 1997, “Electric Barbarella” (establishing the baseline price of
$0.99 for the single). But since most of
the world was still on dial-up modems, and audio compression still was not
standardized, the efforts were unwieldy novelties. Music lovers were most
likely to use the web first to check for physical product availability via a
record store web site or artist’s label site. Since secure financial
transactions were not yet available, these usually involved checking inventory
and placing the order via phone or mail. But it was a start.
Driven at least in part by
Internet self-selection, the type of pop music bifurcation that drove a wedge
between Top 40 and AOR in the 1970s created segmentation even within indie rock
sectors by mid-decade in the 1990s. There was a cluster of radio-friendly
artists who churned out regular hits, including Gin Blossoms, Blues Traveler, Folk
Implosion (though the related band Sebadoh never charted), Bush, Lisa Loeb, Live,
Soul Asylum, Sheryl Crow, Rusted Root, Blessid Union of Souls, and Matthew
Sweet. Then there was the cluster of more esoteric bands that grew out of small
labels and seemed destined to not hit chart status regardless of attempts to
polish their sounds. This involved a far larger roster of artists, including
P.J. Harvey, Cat Power, (smog)/Bill Callahan, Guided by Voices, 3 Mile Pilot,
Trumans Water, and dozens of others. Many did not try for deliberately weird
sounds (though some did), but seemed confined in advance to an underground
realm – though once in a while a specific album might pop above the noise. But
just as the big-seller pop audience could get lost in its own ignorance of the
wider world, fans of the broader underground often displayed indie snobbery,
sometimes unwillingly. I remained ignorant of many of the more popular bands
because I simply never bothered to check out pop radio.
It also helps to remind
ourselves of the dozens of subcurrents vying for attention outside hip hop and
indie rock. Deadheads got a new lease on jam life with the arrival of many
bands of the Phish and Widespread Panic Ilk. Spaceage bachelor pad life got its
second instantiation after the 1950s through the revival of bossa nova culture.
EDM not only hit its 1990s drum-and-bass stride, but gave new life to the
emerging shoegaze world of Stereolab, Tortoise, and Flying Saucer Attack. Young
women experimenting with nonbinary culture could gain experience with feminism
or gay/bisexual sexuality on the rocker side via Riot Grrl bands like Bikini
Kill and Team Dresch, or on the folk/funk side through Ani DiFranco and her
Righteous Babe label-mates. (It bears mentioning that a new generation of
lesbian artists would show up every 15 years or so, and the late-teen/early-20s
fans rarely had the slightest notion that previous generations of artists
existed.) On the plus side, everyone got something to listen to, but the
obvious downside was that popular music was too fragmented to provide anything
like a unifying cultural statement. But in the midst of the Clinton era, that
did not seem too important.
Some media outlets like Spin declared in retrospect that the second half of the
decade was when the indie rock bubble started to deflate. I observed something
different taking place, a trend that benefited the music listener. The periods
of renewal and reinvention that once took place every seven to ten years were
compressed to ones every two to three years. Some bands managed to last through
multiple such periods (GbV, for example, held on through reorganizations to
celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2023). Artists that were
experiencing a slight sophomore slump in 1996, such as Sheryl Crow, continued
to reach later heights in the new millenium.
And here’s what the critics
missed: It made little sense to talk of a punk revival, an indie revival, a
nu-metal revival, a hip hop revival, when every genre was getting rebooted and
refreshed every two to three years, from the late 1990s through the 2020s. Did
the music industry have its down moments due to the advent of streaming, the
2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic? No doubt. But one could choose any
year as representative of a “new punk revival,” and that might be true for
certain regions and certain subgenres. Contrary to what Spin and others might say, the unit numbers of CD sales, LP sales, concert
tickets might go up and down, but serious creative slumps did not exist in the
30 years following the birth of grunge.
In fact, the occasional
surprise epic still could emerge from the mainstream, as witnessed in 1998 by
Madonna’s turn to a more EDM-friendly dance style when she partnered with
William Orbit for her groundbreaking album Ray of Light; by the
overnight success of punky flyboys The Offspring; by Cher’s unexpected
breakthrough return to the top with the album and single Believe; and by Lauryn Hill breaking records for her first
solo work separate from Fugees, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (the
absence of a follow-up was a major industry story in and of itself). My own
tastes in the late 1990s, as a father of an elementary student, varied between
mega-acts at Red Rocks or small gigs with the likes of Pavement and Elephant 6
artists, in addition to taking my daughter to a date on the global Spice Girls
tour.
Coming in three weeks (Aug. 30) - Chapter 12, The Millenium Arrival of Craptastic Compression -
The shortest dominance of a music format was the downloadable file to store on a local
computer - but was that the fault of MP3? (well, maybe).
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