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Noughties so far: The soundtrack
By Alexis Pedtridis
The biggest influence on rock and pop music in the noughties has been the 90s. It was Britpop's desire for mass appeal that firmly introduced consensus culture to rock: the notion that it should not even nominally be the expression of authority-baiting, parent-scaring counterculture, but light entertainment that excludes no one, something the whole family can enjoy. So it has continued. The predominant sound of the decade so far has been what you might call consensus rock: the epic stadium balladry of Coldplay and their ilk.
You could argue that the fact that its designed for packed stadiums to bellow along to en masse suggests a desire for communion and togetherness in the post-9/11 world, but what it really tells you about the decade is that it has been filled with artists whose desire to be universally adored precluded doing anything particularly daring.
Fear of scaring off potential customers has largely proscribed politics in pop (if you're looking for a reflection of the weird combination of apathy and dissatisfaction that seems to define the noughties' electorate you'll find it on Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, an album filled with distrust of the government and dread for the planet's future, but on which the overriding message appears to be not "storm the barricades" but "tsk, typical"). Musical innovation has been left to predominantly black genres, be they R&B in the US or the multifarious offshoots of garage here, as well as the more forward-thinking pop producers - it's one of the weirdest quirks of noughties music that manufactured pop artists such as Britney Spears or Girls Aloud have ended up making more sonically interesting records than their more earnest rock counterparts. So its capacity for wry, sharp lyrical observation has been the most interesting thing about rock music in recent years, whether it takes the form of the dextrous vignettes painted by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys or the Libertines' depictions of life in impoverished east London bohemia. Occasionally, the words collided with trail-blazing music to startling effect, as in the case of the Streets' idiosyncratic take on hip-hop and lad culture or Dizzee Rascal's astonishing Boy In Da Corner, the latter the most eloquent musical depiction of the sink estate teenager's aimless, disenfranchised rage.
But someone in 10 or 20 years' time looking to find the music that's most evocative of the noughties should remember that the most dependable Proustian rush is never provided by the best or most successful rock and pop music of any era. In a decade or two, the songs that will remind you the most sharply of this decade will be the ones that you'd forgotten had ever existed. The record that transports you back most efficiently to a Saturday-night town centre in the age of asbos and binge-drinking won't be Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict a Riot or the Arctic Monkeys' A View From the Afternoon, but something such as Bodyrockers' I Like the Way You Move, a novelty dance hit, that in its thick-necked, knuckle-dragging, open-gobbed stupidity inadvertently makes you think of men in Ben Sherman shirts stamping on each others' necks outside a nightclub.
Italics mine. |
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