We’re into November now and for music heads everywhere, especially professional ones, that means one thing: end of year lists. A tradition as illuminating as it is frustrating, the end of year list is important to online music criticism for a whole host of reasons. First and foremost it provides an easily referenced touchstone for each particular publication’s taste, allowing them in the process to form their own canons, write their own histories and cultivate their own images. This is true from tiny personal blogs to huge publishing powerhouses and the odd power of it all was well described by Mark Richardson in a piece a few years back.
For the readers, these lists throw up the opportunity to discover well-regarded records one may have missed during the year, or simply offer a reminder of something that might have slipped the mind or been lost in the flood. On a more practical, economic level, they are also comment fodder without equal, as people rush to explain how and why they know better than this relatively arbitrary list, often created by a group of people with wildly different tastes struggling towards some sort of consensus.
One problem with lists, such as they are now, is that people take them far too seriously. Readers often take them far more seriously than the writers who write them and I’ve met musicians who take them more seriously than anyone (invariably these musicians are unhappy with their placement/non-placement on a given list). As much as lists give writers a quick fire way to define their critical identity, most would seem to treat it as an impossible task that must inevitably be taken with a pinch of salt. As Pitchfork and Wire critic Marc Masters put it on Twitter recently, “More convinced every year that you can only be confident in yr year-end top 10 list if you don’t listen to much music.”
While the ever-increasing amount of music out there makes the end-of-year list’s ability to pinpoint slept-on records more valuable, it also means there’s no way that all the records one might hear and love in a year could be feasibly inserted into a list with a fixed order of merit. This way the sharing element is out front, while the personal takes a back seat.
This year, I’m posed with something of a problem when it comes to thinking about what my own lists will look like. In many ways, the most personally important record I’ve listened to in 2012 has been Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I’ve probably listened to it more than any other record this year, coming back to it again and again, in a myriad of different moods, and always finding something I can latch on to in it. I wasn’t alone either, as this past summer saw a surprising amount of new bands covering Mac songs, to varied effect.
Obviously Rumours is a classic album, and plenty has been written and said about it in the 35 years since its original release. What it has made me realise properly though is the rather false opposition that has appeared (in the media for sure, but also just in general conversation) between new and old music. There is an intense pressure at the minute to be up to date and in touch with what’s happening, always listening to the best new records, always at the coolest shows. My guess is that has probably always been there but as the sheer amount to keep in touch with becomes more imposing by the day, the feeling of missing out grows ever more acute, no matter how you attempt to navigate.
It’s somewhat ironic then that this intense concentration on “new music” – to the point where the term almost becomes a genre or recommendation in itself – has hindered the exploration and understanding of the past, which we see repeating itself with alarming regularity. The attempt to consistently find new and exciting things is hampered by not knowing enough of what has happened before to build on it. It also leads to the contemporary fascination with the machinations of some idealized music industry. In these days of musical glut, it’s often a lot easier to talk about solid, cold facts like cash flow and business structure rather than the somewhat more slippery topics of inspiration and expression or history and community, which often require moral engagement and contextual knowledge.
Critics/bloggers/curators are more guilty than anyone in this as it is specifically our role to provide that kind of lateral thought. Rather than simply recommending whatever is new and decent, we are supposedly in a position join up distant impulses and expressions, to explore the whispery sinews which hold this whole art form up. That is what this new blog will attempt to do. I hope to explore the traditions and frameworks in and around independent music, locally and internationally. We’ll also have to take a good hard look at what “independent” means here and now, when the letters DIY have begun to lose all meaning. On top of that, what do words like “success” and “ethics” mean for us? There will be more questions than answers. People, space, culture and technology are the topics at hand, ready to be opened up through new conversations that never forget about the past, especially in the process of moving forward.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUpA8R01d50?rel=0]
