I made a list of tracks I liked this year, and it was a bit more than 50 so I thought I’d winnow it down to 50, and then I remembered 8tracks only allows two tracks by any one artist in a mix so I had to drop a bunch of Taylor Swift and Charli XCX tracks and then there were only 49 tracks on the list. They’re organised in an order that makes some kind of vaguely coherent mix, rather than in order of how much I like them. You can listen to the whole thing as a mix above, or the individual songs through the links below. Read more↴
Walmart as Utopia. Obviously there are lots of songs about conspicuous consumption, but most of them are about a fantasy level of consumption which is unattainable (probably, for the artist; certainly, for most of their audience). I think Jay-Z has actually produced the Adornian nec plus ultra of this genre with “Picasso Baby.” How do you top a song that says, “I’m so rich I can buy art, the value of which is defined precisely by its purported exclusion from the sphere of exchange-value”? But what I’m thinking of for this theme are those songs where the utopianism of consumption is placed somewhere rather more everyday: Diamond’s “Living in the Mall” is probably my favourite example, though Shampoo’s “Take a Break” kind of works too. Read more↴
I don’t know if it’s just that, as I write this, an excellent article on the influence of internet market pressures on music writing, and so on music, is blowing up my Tumblr, but it does feel like music in the last year has been structured by the internet in a qualitatively new way. The internet has been the way I (and I’m sure many people) have primarily found out about new music for years now, but it seems like the specific differences of the internet both accelerated and went mainstream this year. 2012 opened, more or less, with Lana Del Rey on Saturday Night Live and with her the mass-media arrival of FULL TROLLGAZE. I’m still not sure I get the economics of trollgaze. I mean, we don’t literally live in an attention economy, and at some point you have to monetize this attention; I see how Buzzfeed can monetize Lana Del Rey’s controversy, but how does LDR make money by trolling people? But, then, I’m not sure her project is entirely about trollgaze; her music is actually quite good, particularly her more recent EP, which is more self-conscious in its deployment of the oddness of her voice and the creepiness of her lyrical choices, culminating with her summing up the sticky-sweet erotics of nostalgic Americana on “Cola.” The other side of the Buzzfeedification of music is the meme-ification of the one-hit wonder; a foreign-language song becoming a novelty hit on the basis of a dance video isn’t exactly new, but the way “Gangnam Style” became popular through YouTubed reinterpretations is kind of new (what effect will this have on the form of future one-hit wonders?). Read more↴
In a piece written in 1990, Judith Butler writes of defensive feminist responses to postmodernism, in which postmodernism is the sign of “an impending nihilism” with “dangerous consequences” because politics, and particularly feminist politics, “requires a subject, needs from the start to presume its subject, the referentiality of language, the institutional descriptions it provides” (Feminist Contentions, 36). According to the view Butler is criticizing here, feminist politics needs to be defended from postmodern theory because postmodernism undermines “the referentiality of language,” that is, the idea that the meaning of language is fixed and under our control, or that language is a medium through which we can express our intentions. Two developments of the past few years make me think it is worth re-opening this discussion of the relationship between feminist politics and the referentiality of language: the feminist blogosphere and the lyrics of Taylor Swift. Read more↴
I don’t know if it’s just that, as I write this, 