The proposition of Simon Reynolds’ 2010 book Retromania is quite simple: if you were to show a person from 1985 a track from 1995 (say, show a Detroit techno fan a ghettotech or drum ‘n’ bass track), they would react like the gates of heaven had just been opened. But, show that same person from 1995 a track from 2005 (show a Three 6 Mafia fan a Jeezy cut) and they would be able to make heads and tails of it immediately.
It’s certainly a generalization of a nuanced text, but Retromania largely views the 21st century as a period of cultural stagnation upon the backdrop of rapid technological development. Such goes the argument of those harking towards the good old days: new technologies are stuck making old sounds and old technologies have reached the end of their use.
But those who stand by the idea of a stagnant century, even those who argue in the best faith possible with total awareness of the modern landscape, stand to miss several key factors when toying with the idea of innovation. For one, the past isn’t such a bad thing. Forgetting, after all, is how humanity stands to walk into the same mistakes. Innovation also exists outside the realm of straightforward technological progress. Innovation is seen every day in the poetic, collaborative, or even entrepreneurial aspects of music. Most importantly, as Liam Inscoe-Jones argues in his new book, there is absolutely innovation occurring in music today; people just have to hear it to believe it.
Songs in the Key of MP3 was written as a response to Retromania, but it goes much further than a straightforward defense of the 1’s and 0’s that have defined the digital age of music making. Spanning ten years from 2013 onwards, Liam Inscoe-Jones’ book Songs in the Key of MP3 covers five key artists: Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange, Earl Sweatshirt, FKA twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, and SOPHIE. Through these five artists he covers trends, movements, and sounds in argument for the 2010’s as, simultaneously, a breeding ground for both innovation and remembering. The book is a celebration of lineage, history, and artistry that surveys, not only the imagined futures that the artists built, but also the undiscovered pasts that they have come to celebrate.
Graphic by Shannon McMahon
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I’m really intrigued by how this book came to be. What point in the book’s process did you come to these five artists? Did you go into the book with the artists in mind?
The book was quite unusually conceived more by the publisher than me. The book’s being published by White Rabbit books, who some people may or may not know. They’re a massive music publisher in the UK. We have a legendary figure from the music space called Lee Brackstone. He’s the editor who oversees it all. They started with some memoirs by Richard Russell, who was the head of XL Records. Over time, they’ve had some great names. They recently published Questlove’s latest book and people like Carl Cox, legends like that. They already had this reputation, but I think, and I hope Lee wouldn’t mind me saying this, but they were quite heavily swayed towards the end of the 20th century. Great artists like Primal Scream and The Cure. I built a little bit of a relationship with the publisher through publishing short stories, actually, I’m a fiction writer as well. During the pandemic I published a short story about a social media content moderator [called You Have Been Notified], which I’m turning into a novel at the moment, which is also why everything’s been so busy.
Because of that he knew me as a writer, and I think he was excited by the idea of having someone, who he knew could tell a decent story, put together the type of music book that they publish, but for a younger audience dealing with more contemporary musicians.
Word got out that he was interested in doing that with me, and I wrote a proposal which was, essentially in retrospect, more like an encyclopedia of music over the last 10 years. I’m pretty omnivorous with my music taste, I like a bit of everything, so I tried to squeeze everything into this book in a way that was interesting to me, but potentially me alone. I went for a meeting with him in Soho, and he suggested, to get some structure, putting together 5 artists. Obviously from the start, there’s so many approaches, and the style of the book is shaped by the type of musicians you choose. There’s obviously a version of this book which is about Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar; the biggest musicians of the Era. Then there’s a version of the book where you’re talking about people more obscure than the people I’m talking about.
I think these artists specifically are interesting because they sit at an intersection between outsider, experimental, or at least niche music, and also having work that appears in very mainstream, commercial music as well. That’s why they were chosen, and they were chosen completely for that reason at the outset. I have to be honest, I had so many doubts about the book across the process, as is just the way with books. But the one thing I never had any doubts with was the five I chose, and they always ended up sending me down such interesting rabbit holes which could reconfirm that they were the right people to choose. It’s quite a long answer to quite a simple question. But there we are.
It’s really interesting you say that there wasn’t any doubt in these five artists, because you cover so many other artists in the interim of the stories that it feels like a lot of them could have been in one place or another. For example, the Arca story is fascinating and brilliant, and it goes so hand in hand with the FKA twigs story. More specifically on that artist point, what came first the story or the artist? Did you decide that you wanted to tell the PC Music story and use SOPHIE, as a result of it? Or did you decide to tell the PC Music story as a result of SOPHIE?
The reason that I had a confidence in these artists is that I literally grew up in this music. I probably got into all of these artists- how old was I in 2013? I was 17. It was prime time for me. That was when things are obviously blossoming, and then you hit up uni and you’re constantly seeing music live. I saw some tentpole figures from this era, like Grimes, in quite a small club in Nottingham, in the UK. I really grew up with all of these artists. If they had a new album out, I’d check out interviews, I’d see who they were working with, and I’d check out those people. It was simultaneous in the sense that I knew the SOPHIE story enabled me to talk about PC Music from the jump, and allowed me to talk about Charli xcx and everything in that circle.
They’re all cheats in a way. Oneohtrixpointnever got me to talk about The Weeknd and some of the more obscure electronic music. One of the reasons I knew these artists I was so confident in them is that I knew they all gave me the opportunity to cheat. I knew Earl Sweatshirt, for example, had worked with Tyler, who is someone who could have been a name on the front of the book. But I knew, because Earl was there, I could talk about Tyler, I could talk about Frank Ocean, and I could talk about the people he embedded in later, like Danny Brown, MIKE, and billy woods. I think the reason I was confident is because I knew I could cheat using these artists from the start, and one of the reasons they were chosen was they were part of rich communities of music that I can then dip into.
I do think the most explicit cheat was the one you mentioned, which is the FKA twigs chapter, because I knew I wanted to talk about Nicholas Jaar and I knew I wanted to talk about Arca. Because twigs had obviously collaborated with him, in a major sense, on both her 1st 2 albums.
I knew I could do that without anyone calling bullshit on the five artists thing. I think one of the reasons I was so confident is that I knew it didn’t limit me just to them, because they all had such a rich network of collaborators.
If you had to pick a 6th artist or topic, what would you go for?
It’s such a nightmare. When I was reading over the book after I submitted it in about March of last year, believe it or not. It’s crazy how long the process takes. Pretty soon after that, Charli started teasing the brat Album. Obviously more than anyone could have anticipated, that became something that was quite popular in the super mainstream. People who are quite casual music fans are suddenly clocking into Charli properly for the first time. As I was reading the SOPHIE chapter, there were a couple of paragraphs on Charli. It seemed a bit weird because it feels like if the book was being written now, she would probably be in there as one of the five, so I guess she is the standout.
I think she’s in competition with potentially Arca. There was a magazine [Vice] who named Arca as the artist of the decade, which is obviously a bit of an obtuse choice, but I think it was actually completely valid. So much of what she did- aesthetically, stylistically, and fashion-wise- shaped the decade. I think there’s a strong argument for both Charli and Arca.
What was the process like in getting people to talk for the book? Very notably you don’t talk to any of these five artists other than Daniel Lopatin. What was the process like thinking through who you actually wanted to have a first person conversation with?
I definitely aspired to speak to everyone. The Oneohtrixpointnever chapter obviously is a long interview with Daniel Lopatin. He was the one of the five I did get to speak to at length. It’s been a learning curve, because I’m obviously not from that world. Whether I’m successful in my venture or not, the writing world is very different to the music industry. Tthat’s been part of the learning curve of trying to ingratiate with some of these artists. Honestly, everyone has very different styles and approaches to how they plan to engage with people coming from this kind of perspective. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just a journalistic venture. I view this as quite different to writing a feature piece for a blog, because it’s got a whole lineage to it, but I can imagine to them it probably wasn’t that different. It’s something that obviously didn’t end up being relevant in the book.
I got close to speaking to a bunch of these people, like Devonté Hynes. I was incredibly engaged from the start. I met him backstage at a show at the Barbican [Centre]. He couldn’t have been nicer. He was saying that he was very flattered by the idea for the book, which I just found bizarre because I was just like the book is so insignificant compared to all the cool things he’d done in his career. Just because they didn’t end up having a full interview- and that was more personal stuff for him- I did get to speak to some people who’d worked quite closely with these artists.
The big one, which I don’t know if it comes across so explicitly in the book, and it was probably the biggest honor of the process, is being able to speak to so many people who were close to SOPHIE, obviously the only one in the book who tragically, isn’t able to talk for herself. I very quickly received word from her brother and sister. I met them in London, and we had a great conversation. They made it clear that they didn’t think it was the best thing for the book for them to be directly quoted in the book, but I think, quite reasonably, they were kind of trying to suss me out and see whether I was a casual fan or someone who had something interesting to say about her work. We had an off the record conversation about her life, how she worked in her personality. You can’t get closer to someone than being their sibling. That was a great privilege and really generous of them to do that. It was really touching that they gave me their blessing in the end.
I spoke to some of her other close collaborators. The weird thing with Sophie is she had a really tight knit circle, and yet journalists have consistently missed that. People would reach out for Charli or Caroline Polachek, who I did speak to for the book. They themselves would say they worked with Sophie a couple of times, and they were part of the same circles, but they weren’t day to day close. Whereas I spoke to someone called Aaron Chan, who was the director of videos like “Faceshopping.” They were living together for periods of time. They were incredibly close. But Aaron was like “no one’s ever reached out to me before,” so I felt like
I could pat myself on the back that I reached out to some of the more appropriate people. That gave me a real insight into SOPHIE’s day to day, and and how she lived and worked in a way I hope comes across in the book. Yeah.
You touched on this a bit with SOPHIE, but sewing in the story of the artist’s personal life is always very fascinating to me. For you personally, what was the line between dipping into an artist’s personal life?
I wanted it to be completely led by the music. Even when I’m talking about details of someone’s life which aren’t particularly salacious, like: Dev Hynes wanted to be a biographer. I think that informs the way that he approached making music. The fact that he looked at this history of music looked at the way certain artists were treated versus others, and then wove that into the Blood Orange albums, and the artists he chooses to play in repertoires and stuff like that.
It was very much led by relevance. You couldn’t do SOPHIE’s story justice about talking about her transitioning. Before, there was some media discourse about whether this person should be using a female name. Obviously the reason for that became apparent. Luckily for that, like A.G. Cook told such a beautiful story about when SOPHIE revealed her gender identity to him in his tribute to her. So I just let A.G. do the talking. I never felt the need to pry on troublesome times in people’s lives. Twigs obviously had an abuse lawsuit going on. It just felt super irrelevant, and also inappropriate to harp on those details in a book about music, because it is fundamentally about the music, and secondary about the people who made it. These aren’t really biographies. They’re just aspects of biography. If it wasn’t in service to helping you have a clear understanding of the music, and where it came from, I thought it was irrelevant.
One thing I really loved about this book is that it feels like it’s in conversation to Retromania, Simon Reynolds book. I love that book, but I do like the the contrast it takes to it. Would you say you’re standing in disagreement with that book? Or are you just speaking from a different time.
For full transparency, Lee Brackstone, the editor I mentioned, was also Simon Reynolds’ editor, and also commissioned that book. He said to me during that conversation in Soho that he viewed my book as in conversation. He put it both ways, he said in conversation and in disagreement with that book. That’s how I continued. I’ve got it on my shelf now, and if I flip it open, I find very little to disagree with, yet in spite of that…
Firstly, there was the idea that music and culture will stagnate. I really don’t find that to be the case. There was almost a limitation to that thesis of what can be new. Newness was put in quite strict terms in relation to genre and founding new genres. There are definitely a lot of artists who make music in a fashion that would have sounded alien to people in the early 2000’s. I think that’s absolutely true. But also there’s a lot more nuance than that. I question that most in the Dev Hynes chapter. Reynolds argues for a radical forgetting and I found it ironic because obviously it’s meant the idea of that was to move beyond the neoliberal choke hold on culture. Yet that is exactly how the neoliberal tech elite talk. They talk about moving fast and breaking things. Let’s quickly move on from the past and lessons of our history, and be radical in that sense, but obviously to move on from history is a mistake and what allows and facilitates kind of fascism to continue in a political sense. I disagree with that sense of forgetting. Blood Orange shows the power of remembering, while other artists, like SOPHIE, did progress sound into a direction that no artist before her had and disproves some of the theories of that book.
A final thing on that: a lot of people who agree with that mode of thinking would be the first to say, “artist rights have been degraded and musicians don’t have the say that they should have in their careers.” Simultaneously they would also be the first to say, “they don’t make them like they used to. Björk’s one of a kind. Bowie was one of a kind. We’re never going to see that again.” I saw that a lot when David Lynch died, like that’s never going to happen again. We’re never going to have directors like that again. I see directors working in a Lynchian vein, but doing their own things with it all the time. It’s the same with musicians. I see musicians making brave new music, the kind of stuff I’ve never heard before all the time. I think it’s a contradiction to say that we need to value artists more and not let companies like Spotify degrade the ability of artists to make art, and simultaneously be saying no one’s making good music at the moment, anyway. I think that’s an inherent contradiction. I wanted to fight against that as well.
There’s this sentiment that if you were to show someone a jungle track from ‘95 to the person in ‘85, the person in ‘85 would be flabbergasted. But then you show someone something from this year to someone in ‘95, they’d be able to quickly wrap their head around it. What do you think about that?
That generation of critics grew up on rave music, which was clearly a time of very fast [innovation]. If you go on Wikipedia and you look at genres in electronic music in the 90’s, it is crazy. It’s constant genre/sub-genres iterations until something sounds so completely different to the previous wave. I think that’s all absolutely true. There’s a natural ceiling, because that was all facilitated by technological advancement by the fact that you have these drum machines and sequences and processes that could produce drum patterns at a faster pace, or a higher volume, or anything that had been available in the seventies. After a certain while there’s a cap on what new technologies can actually provide. A lot of the genres are born by those technological advancements. Beyond a certain point, there’s only a certain realm within the possible. They were very locked in and tuned into electronic music to the point where things seem to slow in the noughties. That was inevitable when something was happening that quickly. It became, “I was used to fifty new genres every year and having my mind blown every year, and now it doesn’t seem to be happening within that particular thing.”
There’s a lot of music beyond electronic music. I would put something like Some Rap Songs or something like that. I genuinely don’t think that a record like that really made sense to people when it came out. People are still making sense of it, and I really don’t think if you played it to an absolute hip-hop fan, like an absolute fan of DJ Shadow, or El-P or something in 2001. I think they would really probably hate it. I can’t imagine people five years before the album really being able to appreciate and understand what Earl and some of his collaborators are doing on that. On the flip side, it’s not even music I massively enjoy. But if you just throw on like 10 seconds of a hit song of a Future album. Even for people who are really into T.I. in 2005, it sounds bizarre. If it was 1970- and I know that’s not the game that’s being played, because that’s 50 years ago- but it would really be the most mind blowing avant-garde thing. The things that’s being done with the voice, the things that’s being done with rhythm. It would be absolutely mind blowing to people, perhaps even more. If they’re into Kraftwerk, a new future record would be more mind blowing to them than a jungle track, I’m sure. Obviously this is very popular music, like number one on the Apple Music charts. I think there’s a lot of weird stuff. People don’t appreciate it as weird stuff or denigrate it because it’s rap music or because it’s not electronic music, which for a long time people believed, and SOPHIE and her family obviously believe this, is the music of the future. There’s a lot of truth to that, but the limitations of measuring things by electronic music alone cause a lot of problems for that generation, because I think different things are happening even while they were writing those that they weren’t necessarily tuned into.
Part of the argument in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000 is technological innovation. We went from the 78 RPM to the MP3. What do you think, Very specifically, the idea of the digital world unlocked for these artists, specifically musically, but beyond just…what did Logic do? What was unlocked for them when this whole digital world opened up?
It was like a sense of liberation. That often did come in the form of being genreless artists. Every one of these artists grew up with no specific genre passion. Music over time has obviously become more and more and more accessible and available. It’s digitized music in the sense that it’s a CD, it’s not quite in the form of an MP3 player, but Dev Hynes was talking about Virgin megastores, digging in, and grabbing a Phillip Glass album, then a Neil Young album, and a Puccini album, and LL Cool J and being influenced by all of them. But the immediacy of the internet lowered the stakes.
That’s what all digital technologies do. They lower the stakes of music that you’re making to the point where you can try anything, and you might end up with that experiment being on the record, or you might end up with 50 failed experiments. The stakes are so low because you haven’t hired a studio session in Electric Lady, for whatever it would be in there. You’re just making music in your bedroom. You have access to all the music that’s ever been made. You can do literally whatever you want with it, and every single one of these artists did literally whatever they want with it. They came upon a certain style and a certain idiom that they produced their music within. Meh. They didn’t even do that. They didn’t even do that like someone like Devonté Hynes was simultaneously writing operas. At the same time he was making mixtapes. It just liberated them. The stakes are lower, the cost is lower, and that’s something that’s always completely underappreciated in music writing: pragmatic cost calculations. People are trying to make a living off this music. The fact that people can make those experiments and leaps without it really costing them that much extra meant a great deal.
I’ve spoken to a lot of different music writers and critics about the changing canon, and what people are considered to be their 101. I think the most distinct example of a shifting canon is a few years ago, the definitive Pink Floyd album was Dark Side of the Moon, and now no one gives a shit about that album, and it’s all about Wish You Were Here, if people even care about Pink Floyd. But the Beatles are still 101. Everything we know about pop music and everything we know about the studio is based on this stuff that happened 60 years ago. Stuff like Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone are coming back into vogue. A lot of women and non-white artists are coming into this conversation. Joni Mitchell’s taking a spot that Neil Young maybe once had. Writing this book, what did you notice about the the canon that necessarily wasn’t present in any past writings?
I definitely have seen, even in initial research for the book, that the canon was shifting and including some quite unpredictable and niche artists. Me and my friend Rob this week were talking about Arthur Russell. If you speak to these musicians about Arthur Russell, you’d think this was someone who was like The Beatles; someone who had top selling albums right at the heart of the zeitgeist. In reality, this is someone who wasn’t appreciated, tragically as is often the case until after his death. but he had such an influence on all of these artists. Twigs talked about him. Hynes talked about him. They’re all big Arthur Russell fans. Same as Alice Coltrane, she came up quite a lot. Also a massive one just for me personally, it’s easily some of the best music I’ve ever heard. I see her being recentered over even her husband. I already noticed that there were these names who were clearly big deals for these artists who weren’t the obvious big deals for previous artists. I found it quite exciting to treat someone like Philip Glass, like he is a major influence on the center of pop culture and not just American minimalist classical music. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. But I liked playing with those things in the book. I enjoyed nothing more than when I had a sentence where I mentioned someone like LL Cool J, and then also mentioned Philip Glass, or someone more obscure than that. The musicians in the book, especially Devonté Hynes, treated them all as equals, and that’s why their music ended up sounding the way it does. They didn’t really privilege one sound over the other, and I think that will continue. I don’t really see much need for major artists of the past to be replaced. But I see other people entering the fray around them and filling in the gaps. Again, that’s something that just can’t happen if you just forget. “But we need to be making new genres. We need to be moving quantity forward.” Well, we’re going to miss a lot of great music that didn’t get its due in the day. That’s something that I hope my book would be part of by mentioning people like Julius Eastman, and continuing to raise their profile, while also suggesting some of the more contemporary musicians as part of a future canon.
How much of the shifting canon would you credit to the streaming age. Not necessarily even in regards to the accessibility of out of print records. Based on how flat everything is now. What do you think is the benefit of bringing up someone like Alice Coltrane or Philip Glass onto the level of John Coltrane or Pink Floyd?
It’s again a lowering of the stakes. I talked about it with music making, but it’s absolutely true ith listening. Obviously, libraries are so important and that’s a great example of like. Why, that is so important. But that’s a rare example, in the 1980’s, say, where you could have access to music for free or for very little money. It’s really conflicting, because I think it’s fantastic for culture and absolutely terrible for musicians. I don’t know what kind of person I would even be if it wasn’t as easy for me to listen to music as it has been to listen to music. I can try a new artist within 30 seconds of finishing this sentence and find out if there’s anything I think I can get from them. The flattening of everything has not been particularly beneficial for any past artists, apart from those who’ve had little to no recognition in the past, and obviously then, it’s beneficial at least for their legacies. But it’s really beneficial for the listener and it happens on multiple levels, because there’s people like Alice Coltrane where some of her stuff was completely impossible to listen to. Julius Eastman, obviously another example, and people can check them out and that’s why their stature has increased because previously unavailable work has been made available.
Somebody who really comes to mind whose music was publicly available, but was being listened to less is MF DOOM. My girlfriend’s little sister is 16 years old and she loves Ariana Grande, The 1975, and DOOM. It’s so incomprehensible. That’s probably more through critical reevaluation. Someone like him constantly, constantly coming up in conversation. People like Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, who were very popular with my generation, were talking about DOOM. In other cases, with Coltrane or other artists whose work was just buried, you physically couldn’t listen to them before, and now you physically can, and that obviously makes a natural difference.
Alongside Alice Coltrane, I’ve been really interested in seeing the reevaluation of Pharaoh Sanders, especially following that Floating Points album. Everyone’s really caught on him as one of the greats, alongside Coltrane, Hancock, and Davis.
Conversations start about that work. Who was Pharaoh Sanders and who were his contemporaries? What kind of work were they putting out? That’s how I was introduced to someone like Archie Shepp and his album, Attica Blues. I hadn’t encountered Archie Shepp. I only encountered Archie through reevaluation of that era of early seventies jazz music because of the re-evaluation of Pharaoh Sanders. I don’t know. Something like Retromania really posits that the past was eating the present, whereas I don’t experience it that way at all. Without any intellectualizing or anything, it’s just really not my experience. I really think that the present is very much alive, not solely indebted to the past, and the past feels more alive than it’s ever been. It’s bizarre, because it’s a really bad time to be a musician and a really great time to be a fan of culture and music.
In the SOPHIE chapter, there’s a sentence that really stuck out to me. You’re talking about SOPHIE in comparison to hits of the past, like “Be My Baby,” which is one of my favorite songs ever. You say that these are songs whose sincerity we never felt compelled to question at all versus, you know. Such a big conversation around PC Music was whether these people actually loved pop music. Now, we know the answer is yes. All they really loved everything about pop music and really understood it. But that’s such a great underscore of so many artists and so much music that’s happening right now, where people become skeptical of the sincerity of artistry and insistent on something like authenticity, whereas I don’t necessarily know whether there’s anything between the two. I don’t know if Prince was more authentic as Prince than he was the Symbol. What do you think it is about the 21st century, its audiences, and its artists that just pushes the skepticism of sincere artistry?
This is again a conversation about the nuance around shocking music and music that would shock now when it wouldn’t 20 years ago. Maybe some of that music isn’t shocking, based on the actual sonic makeup of the music. Maybe some of it is, especially as you get into some of SOPHIE’s more industrial stuff. But it was shocking in terms of taste. It’s so easy to forget how quickly those dividing lines and tastes have fallen. The obvious example is the Taylor Swift thing with Pitchfork, and the fact that, for a long time, they literally refused to review Taylor Swift albums. But they did review Ryan Adams’ 1989 cover album. At that I was a big follower of Pitchfork and it made complete sense. I’m ashamed to say it felt like a bit of a win. I’ll be like, fuck Taylor Swift, but let’s talk about this cover album. They covered Father John Misty doing a cover of the Ryan Adams cover album or something like that, but they wouldn’t talk about Taylor Swift. Now the idea that Pitchfork wouldn’t be propping up someone like SZA, Beyonce, or Taylor is absolutely crazy. Those lines of taste have fallen more drastically than any new genres or anything have been created.
With PC Music specifically, that is the major reason. They debuted an era when Pitchfork physically refused to review a major artist like Taylor Swift. For a lot of those people it was just genuinely incomprehensible that they could sincerely be loving this quite populist music. Exactly as you say, it was sincere. I also think a lot of the great satirical works when it comes to modern pop culture came out post the era of “Be My Baby,” Phil Spector, soul music, and Motown. As much as sometimes people on Twitter come across as quite media illiterate, I think we all are quite media literate and recognize signifiers of satire and stuff like that. When someone’s not being satirical, I think they just have to work a little harder to be like, “No this is legit. This is sincere.”
I think that’s just a big part of being a musician, though there’s just so many signifiers that everyone’s very familiar with. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing, but I just think it’s quite nice when you punch through that. No, these people who I thought were being tongue in cheek, actually were being straight down the line with it.
I don’t really want to harp on the poptimism point for too long, but as someone who was in that era, do you think that was a net good? That course correction away from this is what we are covering, this is what we’re not covering.
What was more interesting is kind of what it did for music of the past, because poptimism wasn’t just about what was currently coming out. You can see now a bit of a course correction, or over-correction, where people will really evangelize a new pop record just because it’s someone who has big sales numbers. In 10 years or so. I just think some of that stuff will age quite badly. I think the main benefit of poptimism was stuff from the past that was reevaluated. In the introduction to my book, in the dedication, I reference Karen Carpenter. That’s someone who was completely dismissed because they were a woman working in pop music, and that’s just not serious music, apparently, so that was completely dismissed. As popular as Prince was or as respected as Prince was, some of his music underwent something that’s now already finished, which is a reevaluation of his work. “Actually, maybe Purple Rain was one of the best records of the 80’s,” not just one of the best pop albums with a bunch of Sonic Youth and Talking Heads above it. The best thing about poptimism was reevaluating other stuff that wasn’t the current pop records being released in the day. I guess my answer is that it has been a net positive, probably.
Not that I necessarily want to ask what it’s going to be, because who really knows, but how soon do you think the next inflection point, something that’s as shattering, technologically or musically. as a Napster, MP3, cassette tape,m or a 45. How soon do you think it is? How comfortable do you think people are in the infinite scroll in the algorithms in the standard that we’ve set now?
It’s hard not to imagine it would be some kind of reversal. I was reading about Kristin Hayter yesterday, talking about hard music. She was saying, by a point, you’ve got every possible setting cranked to 100 and you’ve got five hours of a wall of sound. You can’t get heavier than that. That’s true of where we’re at with streaming service stuff. It’s every single piece of music you can access, sometimes illegally and sometimes not, for free immediately. There is no beyond that. It’s not a sustainable economic situation. People won’t be able to create music if we continue in the way that we are. I think the next inflection point can only be some reversal. I don’t think it will be a reversal to people only listening to music by buying a CD or so a week. I don’t know what it will take, but my prediction will be more of an economic prediction, I think there will be an economic breaking point. Where people are finding that they can’t afford to see live music, musicians can’t afford to keep releasing music because people can’t afford to go to live music and that’s their only revenue source, something else is going to have to happen. I don’t know what shape that will take but I’m sure it will have as big an impact on music as all of the other inflection points have had, and it will be very interesting.