So that Arcade Fire won a grammy, right? For album of the year, no less. And I suppose that’s a worthy benediction for the once-artful romance of music. I mean, what else was there to give an award to? Lady Gaga? Katy Perry? Does anybody really take this stuff seriously anymore?
Since the onslaught of emo music in the early 2000s, while I was in high school, I’ve been watching the steady devolution of pop from a rigid, monolithic structure to a screaming quorum of hedge-bets and has-beens. With rapidly decreasing traditional record sales, the transition from music as populist rejoinder to a cataclysmic divider has been thorough and remains unfinished. Perhaps, as I am afraid to believe, it will never be finished, like fashion (goddamn social network). This shattering of “music” as we know it in America has come largely thanks to the networking and layering/defining of social life, strictly upon our faith in the omniscient god-machine, life-sustainer and social differential engine.
The parallel is simple to see, but why would anybody want to see it. “Indie music” has come at a time when we are all worried about our social lives more than we’re worried about war or recession (do you remember we’re still in two wars and a recession?). The varied styles of indie music cater to those who would benefit most from their promise of distance; very different from how emo music assured that all of us have our hearts on our sleeves and we’re really all emotionally stunted and clueless, all of us together yearning to be understood. Rather terrifically, and terribly, emo music was firmly supplanted by that it is opposed to; instead of us wanting to be one and together sharing the same depression, now we all want to be islands with our own musical fortresses. I knew Eminem’s story arc before his second album came out, and I’m still surprised he hasn’t shot himself like Kobain did.