posted by fenzel on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 7:00am
I’m not going to say that Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop…
Eh, why not, I’ll say it, whether it’s really true or not – “Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop.” I sorta did anyway already. Let’s court controversy.
Observe:
But remember what evolution actually means. People often erroneously assume evolution is like progress. That is means things are getting better. Evolution doesn’t mean that at all; it isn’t normative. There is nothing inherently better about a rabbit that is white in the winter versus a rabbit that is brown in the winter.
Evolution is the product of things that survive and breed. It’s about adapting to hostile environments. Popular music faces a very hostile environment these days – sales are way down, noise is way up, and getting a single anything to last in the popular conscious for more than an afternoon is a herculean feat.
What sort of song evolves in this environment?
What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
And when it wakes up in the morning, why does it feel like P. Diddy?
Read on. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. Read read read. Tonight, I’mma fight ’till you see the sunlight!
posted by Matthew Wrather on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 12:01am
Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Jordan Stokes to overthink the decade at its close, addressing the defects of memory and nostalgia while recapping trends in music, television, and movies.
posted by fenzel on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 8:43am
With the arrival and departure of the last Weezer album, Pork and Beans, concluded without incident,
This is no longer provocative.
and, more importantly, with its world dwelling in a cultural space between irrelevance and exhaustion, I think it’s about time that we, perhaps a year or two late, declare that hipsterism is over.
And I don’t mean “so over” over, using an epistemology incapable of refuting itself. I mean over like when your mom has come over to your friend’s house and you’re six and it’s been time to go for ten minutes and she’s starting to get pissed. “It’s over, Peter, get in the car,” over.
And as with the fall of all great empires, that makes this time for armchair anthropologists to pick apart its corpse. Or, if we’re feeling less like vultures or consider trucker hats less than Imperial — make fun of its former halfhearted iconoclasm. Resistance is, after all, futile.
My take on why the reason you like your Thundercats shirt now is fundamentally different from why you liked your Thundercats shirt in 2002, plus why ‘90s techno will never die, after the jump —
