Tangy Bee Buzz

Music 2003: Rock is dead (once more with feeling)

I'm not sure if this is a Salon Premium article or not, so I'm going to take a chance and put a link to this story in (it's an 8-pager otherwise; an awful lot to post). [FYI, I know how to do the link the way Ryan did, but it's not working! Aaaargh. Still, you can follow the url below.]

http:////www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2004/01/02/year_in_music/print.html

The gist of the story is:

Forget those boring white boys with guitars. Thanks to Missy, OutKast and Timbaland, for the first time since the Beatles, the most vital forms of pop are found at the top of the charts.

In many ways, 2003 was a depressing year for music. The New York rock explosion of 2001, from which we'll be feeling the aftershocks for years, enshrined as the cutting edge of cool a shameless and sadly unironic parroting of the past. That ethos spread far from Brooklyn this year, and it was disheartening to see just how much acclaimed music demonstrated an enormous debt to the past, and very little to any kind of personal vision. This was a year in which it was easy to feel that there was nothing new under the sun. At least, it was easy to feel that way if you didn't listen to any hip-hop.

Full disclosure: I know very little about hip-hop and have only recently started buying the albums rather than just listening to singles on the radio. And yet, it was hip-hop that gave me hope this year, that made me feel that perhaps this really was an exciting time in music. I was not alone in that feeling. The Grammy nominees were announced last month, and they are overwhelmingly hip-hop dominated. During the week of Oct. 4, the top 10 singles on the Billboard chart were, for the first time, all by black artists. We've been told for years now that hip-hop has arrived, that it is now the dominant genre in the music business, in much the same way that every day for the last three months an article has appeared somewhere with the news that Howard Dean is on his way to becoming the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. Hopefully the Billboard stat and the Grammy nominations list will act as Al Gore's endorsement did, and put to rest some of the novelty.