Allmusic bio:The Black Keys is a two-man duo comprising singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney, both of whom were in their early twenties when the band’s debut, The Big Come Up, was issued in 2002. Hailing from Akron, OH, they harnessed a close-to-the-bone, raw blues-rock sound on the album, whole sole instruments were Auerbach‘s guitar, Carney‘s drums, and the occasional organ. From the start, Auerbach flaunted a fine, mature, lived-in blues voice for one so young, and the group’s material worked in funk, soul, and rock influences from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, which helped avoid undue repetition of the overdone chord progressions and stock riffs … (read more)
It’s only March 2009 but I feel it’s time to start making premature judgments on the decade in music. After the horrid 1980s and the relatively weak late-90s, this decade has rejuvenated rock and roll for a new generation. The likes of The Killers and Coldplay have topped the top-forty and a multitude of smaller bands such as the Black Keys have dominated the college radio charts. I have been unable to keep up with the surplus of bands that have made it onto the pages of NME, Q, Spin and the rest of the major music publications. However, I don’t see this decade as defining a genre or music scene of particular importance. Instead I see a decade that will be defined by its technological contributions to music.
From 1998 to 2001 it seemed like rock and roll would never come out of its tailspin. Grunge was long dead and Britpop had run its course and become a catchphrase rather than a thriving music scene. Boy and girl bands smiled at you from magazine covers with nauseating regularity. Nu-metal bands such as Limp Bizkit and Korn went platinum singing about breaking stuff and hating their parents. In this four year period I was introduced to The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the countless others who made the 1960s a time of immense musical importance. I was left wondering what happened to my own generation and why the girls were content dancing to manufactured pop and the boys head-banging to teen-angst ridden nu-metal. I love Oasis and The Verve but by 1998 they had been swept away on a cloud of cocaine induced overindulgence. Meanwhile, Robbie Williams had co-opted Britpop and grunge bands had injected their success up their arm.
Those four year of audio-induced-torture came to an end when The Strokes released their debut album, Is This It. That album made simple garage rock cool again. They sounded good and had the don’t-give-a-fuck image that had gone AWOL since the mid-90s. Is This It kick started a decade in which guitar bands would regain their prominence. Immediately following the Strokes’ debut, The White Stripes entered the mainstream with their classic White Blood Cells andThe Vines released their Beatles/Nirvana infused debut. The new decade began to look promising and that nauseating feeling subsided.
I’m still impressed by the multitude of bands emerging on a weekly basis. The vast majority of new bands become disappointing fairly quickly, but that is to be expected. The music business – particularly in Britain – has a habit of drumming up enthusiasm for the “next big thing” before realizing they aren’t the band of our dreams. Subsequently it tears them down. At least when I read music magazines I’m thinking “I want to hear that album” rather than, “why is there so much crap.” The problem is that there is no genre or music scene that will define the current decade for future generations.
The 1950s invented rock and roll and be-bop. The 1960s invented modern rock, blues rock, jazz rock, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, soul, hard-bop and free jazz. The 1970s create stadium rock, disco, funk and punk. The 1980s created the music video and many metal-related genres. The 1990s had grunge, Britpop, boy/girl bands and hip-hop. So what’s our decade’s claim to fame?
The one new style of music that could be called original is danceable rock and roll. I have yet to hear it given a proper name but what I am referring to is the current guitar bands that incorporate elements of dance and rave music. Examples would be Franz Ferdinand, The Klaxons, The Killers, Hot Hot Heat, Kasabian, and the Kaiser Chiefs. These bands wear their influences on their sleeve but have managed to create something relatively new. You can hear everything from the Bee Gees to The Jam and Joy Division up to Pearl Jam and The Stone Roses. I don’t necessarily like all these bands — I thoroughly dislike the Klaxons — but at least they are doing something slightly original.
The one element of the 2000’s that will be remembered is the utilization of the internet. Online music communities are forming without any influence from the corporate music world. That is a truly exciting occurrence in new music.
The influence of Myspace and the internet in general was on display in January 2006 when the Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not became the fasted selling debut in British history, surpassing Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. The Arctic Monkeys’ meteoric rise was attributed to fans sharing their demo tape over the internet. They were playing sold-out shows around England and kids were singing every skilfully crafted lyric before the band had released a single. This phenomenon was not possible before the advent of Myspace and file sharing. Now every person I know who owns a guitar and has some lyrics in a notebook has their own Myspace page.
The 1990s saw the initial sign of the internet’s potential to redefine music marketing. However, it took a new generation of artists and fans who have never known life without the internet to fully grasp its potential for new music. I don’t want to get into a defense of file sharing – it’s a topic large enough for its own article and Lars Ulrich might have me assassinated – but I will say it is the greatest innovation to ever happen to young bands. I have bought albums and attended shows because I was able to download the band’s songs first. File sharing hasn’t been a hundred percent positive innovation for some; it certainly has its cons for larger bands. The point remains that Napster and others turned the music business on its head. It may be another decade before the long-term repercussions of rampant downloading becomes apparent.
I’m interested to know what Gigdoggy readers believe will be the bands/scenes/innovations that will dominate the collective memory of the current decade. There have certainly been some great bands. I love new music and that is something I couldn’t say eight years ago. But do any of these bands constitute a new era in music?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no. The one thing has made this decade exceedingly important in the grand scope of music history is the utilization of the internet. It has nothing to do with the songs but it is one hell of an important innovation.
[Since we are making him a regular contributor from now on, this is probably Mike Raine's last guest post. Here he asks a simple question about past musical culture and ties the answer to our 'generation X' heritage'. Great read. Everyone has an opinion on this so lets hear it.]
To be read while listening to Bob Dylan’s‘The Times They Are A Changin’
followed by Graham Nash’s Chicago
Where has the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll gone? This is something I often asked myself in high school as I started discovering the brilliance of Bob Dylan, CSNY, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and countless other classic artists whose music contained a message and a political consciousness.
As I began to expand my musical interest, I realized that music was never going to be the center of a youth movement in the same manner it was in the 1960s. There are simply too many genres for kids today to choose from. Revolution was drowned out by a thousand different messages bombarding youth. It was easy to have a unifying message forty years ago. You essentially had three genres dominating the music world: rock and roll, folk, and blues. And they all had related messages of peace, love, and tolerance.
Personally, I blame disco. The coke-fuelled overindulgence of the disco scene was about selfishness, not brotherhood. Its music was mindless escapism. But this was only the beginning. From this point on, music became more diverse, lacking a focused message. There is a musical genre for every feeling you may have. Feeling angry? Listen to punk, heavy mental or gangster rap. Feel like partying? Listen to disco, pop, dance, hip hop, funk, or electronic. Feel like protesting? Listen to umm…… I’m not so sure anymore.
Yes, a few bands out there who get political on occasion. Think of Bruce Springsteen, REM, Bright Eyes, and most obviously, Rage Against the Machine. There are others, of course. But the point is that rock and roll is no longer a unifying force that politically conscious teens and twenty-somethings can rally behind.
What about U2, you ask. Clearly, U2 is an incredibly popular band – possibly the most popular band – but Bono has climbed so high on his pedestal you have to squint to see him. You have to give him credit for achieving more in the name of progressive politics and human rights than any of his predecessors in the music world. Still, most youth have hard time identifying with him because the level of esteem he now carries.
We are missing a new, young band or artist who professes a desire to make the world better and who can connect with young listeners on a large scale. And even if we were to find a new Dylan, would he or she have real impact? I am not too confident. As great and inspiring as Dylan was, he was a product of the times and came out at possibly the most opportune moment in music history for an artist of his style and message. In the early and mid 1960s while Dylan was earning the moniker “voice of a generation”, there was an incredibly unpopular war waging in Vietnam. A generation was coming of age that had never dealt with the consequences of all-out war the way their parents did. Television sets glowed in every living room with the realities of war, poverty, and racial segregation.
Possibly most importantly, the target generation in America was subject to military draft. Nostalgia can be a funny thing. It makes people gloss over the facts of earlier times. I am continuously amazed at the lack of importance given to the military draft and the role it played in instigating the youth movement of the sixties. It does not take much to forget that all the protests, sit-ins, die-ins, etc. that appear so altruistic when seen as brief black-and-white news clips actually had a very self-interested motivation behind them. There is something about the real possibility of dying pointlessly in a foreign land that motivates young people to take to the streets. Had there not been a draft that threatened to send an entire generation of young Americans off to their deaths, I am willing to bet that the 1960s would not be the blueprint for political consciousness it has become.
Over the span of years that mark the current war in Iraq, there are have been protests against the war, yet no one claims that the anti-war movement is currently as strong as it was in 1968. Sit in on any university political science class as they discuss the war and the public’s reaction to it and you will hear countless students lamenting the lack of action taken by their peers. Surprisingly, few of these passionate and frustrated students will provide a more thorough explanation as why this is the case other than to say that “young people just don’t care anymore”.
I think young people DO care about ending the war; they just don’t care as much. Students today would like to see the war end but they have people to see and Facebook pages to update and in when it come down to it, they are not the ones going to war. When seen in this light, it is easy to understand why anti-war protests don’t draw the numbers they did in the 1960s. This brings me back to the original point, the music.
The political music of the 1960s did not create a climate ripe for protests, the protests created a climate ripe for political music. Songwriters often write about what they see, and in the 1960s they were seeing upheaval and political activism. Dylan did not write The Times they Are A-Changin’ and wake up the next day to find that indeed something was a-changin’. He wrote the song because he saw and sensed that things were changing. Youth didn’t take to the street of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention because Graham Nash wrote the song Chicago. Nash wrote the song because the kids were in the streets.
So what does the lack of politically conscious music mean for today’s music lovers? It is a symptom of our times? Properly read, the symptom tells us we aren’t likely to be sent to war anytime soon and in the meantime, we have a lot of options in what we listen to.
So maybe the lack of political songs is a good thing. After all, if tomorrow I turn on the radio to hear Avril Lavigne singing “tin soldiers and Harper coming…”, I may start forwarding my mail to Khandahar. Well, I would do that as soon as I stop laughing at the thought of Avril Lavigne getting political.
Where has the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll gone? This is something I often asked myself in high school as I started discovering the brilliance of Bob Dylan, CSNY, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and countless other classic artists whose music contained a message and a political consciousness.
