PopMatters Top Electronic 2009 and the (lack of) Shape of Things to Come

Curated by Yours truly, with contributions by David Abravanel, Mike Newmark, Alan Ranta, and Dominic Umile

Read the list and extended intro recapping the year in electronic by yours truly here.



A lot of things I found out about while researching that introduction would likely have made my final list and perhaps altered its trajectory slightly (after compulssively weighing my finger upon the repeat with Mordant Music's latest, it'd likely be my new #1- and definitely made my list for Pazz and Jop- which I'll be voting in this year), but I feel it's a really strong showing.

If all that name-dropping that this windbag dished out in that opener wasn't enough for you, Philip Sherburne does me one better here (though he definitely uses some names that were known in the 90s).

Lots of year-ending and decade-ending lists popping up, and no I can't resist peaking either, but no need to post all of them here. My own personal list will probably pop-up at some point after you're sick to death of seeing them. My decade list keeps changing. There's a strong urge not to over/re-emphasize the familiar canon and given others a fair shake (part of the reason Fact's list was so admirable), but then there are also albums just too hard to ignore. As of this moment though, I'm leaning towards giving a bit more gravity to those who presented with the shock of new, as it seemed extra difficult to do in this decade, with barely any reinforcement from emerging trends and movements(the fault of music journalists, to be sure, who rarely stopped long enough to find connections).

Simon Reynolds's recent Guardian post on the fragmentation of opinion on the latter half of the decade seems to disregard two essential turns that may have caused the split in consensus as the decade drew to a close; the collapse of publishing industry and the collapse of the music industry. Both were at a downhill slope beforehand, but their near-demise completely relinquished their authority in fans who were turning to all the inexpensive or free ways to receive music and opinion, finding them equivalent or even superior means of consuming new ideas and tunes.

There were positives in this divergence. As Simon points out and my 2009 retrospective paragraph for PopMatters accents, there is a ton of great music out there, overwhelming amounts in fact. The death of the monoculture is by no means worthy of plaintive eulogy by any self-respecting nutritionist of the ear. Yet, the monoculture still kinda lives on, doesn't it? Each new U2 or horrifically-designed Springsteen album absorbing far more thought time then they deserve (the new issue of Rolling Stone even suggest that many of these fogies may have puttered out their best work...ever(!) in the past decade. Can any one but Rolling Stone fathom a world where that might be true?).

Elsewhere, a lot of what rises to the top of these lists you'll soon be sick of is what Simon has elsewhere called "pernicious adequacy" (in reference to Sonic Youth, perhaps one of the more soporifically adequate bands around, the slight tweaks of their established formula inspiring a chorus of niggling chatter that's usually more interesting than the album in question). Thus, the long tail of music's current reach has inspired a mainstream in the naughties that seems to be content to remain at the end of music's history, to accept its narratives and just do as well as it can within it. The remaining mainstream has seen the savages tearing down the walls and locked itself into a gated community, hoping that maybe the fans of this decentralized vanguard will tire of the snark and the solipsism, stop posturing and accept something "authentic", ie- deliriously okay (not MOR-mind you, a differentiation worth exploring, but not here). I mean once Prurient and Villalobos can be dismissed in the same breath as "hipster bullshit", where else can you go? This decade literally saw periods where white noise, barely pulsatile house, and drone metal were cool bandwagons to hop on for a while. After that kind of austerity, you kinda have to collapse back to the middle a little bit.

There's the potential to rip it all up and start over again, as music has lost many of its previous restraints with music as a sound product pretty much a non-issue for much of the listening audience. But the comforting temptation to accept adequacy and careerism in the face of an uncertain future has never been greater either.