I think it's how they feel like what marketers think The Kids™ are into rather than actual authentic bands, so that naturally leads actual kids to get annoyed at their omnipresence in the media.
(I'll add that I actually like some Coldplay songs, so I'm not trying to be a snob here.)
Okay so I'm at a loss for trying to remember this musician I really liked about a year ago. He was a modernist I'm pretty sure (thinking avant-garde or expressionism), or post-modern, and did some weird vocal singing that vaguely reminds me of scat music. It also sounded awful, but intentionally. Might've been a pioneering dude too?
Maybe it was Minton and I'm not recalling faces accurately, I'll keep digging into his stuff in case it's a fluke in my memory. I feel like the stuff I heard came out in the 20s-40s, though take that as you will, naturally.
I would say that treating the sort of rock music that was popular on college radio as a single genre or movement is a pretty reductive, silly attitude to begin with, quite at odds with what a lot of these groups stood for in the first place. There were, of course, movements and styles that were associated with "college rock"—the Paisley Underground, American New Wave, the Beat Happening school of "indie," whatever that post-REM jangly-guitar-pop thing was—but the whole thesis is presumptuous and kind of... basic.
Also: REM, The Smiths and Hüsker Dü were heavily influenced by the kind of sounds coming out of punk (or post-punk, as we know it now) that the author treats as somehow alienating and excessively abrasive; and Talking Heads' pop U-turn was them returning to a tighter four-person band setup after the creative overload of recording and touring something so lavish as Remain In Light nearly broke up the band entirely.
OK, correction: He does address these things, but the approach is still pretentious. It would be cute if it were a middle-school paper, like the one I wrote on the evolution of punk (don't ask), but it's smarmy and basic and Simon Reynolds did it so, so, so much better.
You know, as unfortunate as the mass buyout of independent non-commercial radio was, it was as much a consequence of Reagan's deregulation of the airwaves as this bullshit about an ostensible NPR affiliate monopoly. And for god's sake, there are still independent college and local stations out there with strong followings and distribution on the FM.
Also, yes, the strain of '60s revivalist indie rock, the shambling bands and their ilk, they were definitely responses to the aggression of punk rock. But treating their expression of the personal as political and their affected meekness as somehow bourgeois or conservative is a ridiculous misreading of intent and a misunderstanding of history. Even if you think The Soup Dragons and The Rain Parade were bogus, their roots are in some real radical territory: The Raincoats, Subway Sect, Half-Japanese, Spherical Objects, The Slits, The Mekons for fuck's sake. The gleefully inept, the wilfully tweedy and wimpy, the radically un-macho.
God, Svenonius. You lived through this. You should know better. Or rather, you lived through the tail end of it, and it shows. You sound like the lamest punk-ass punk I have ever seen or heard.
The article already falls apart right at the very beginning, with his questioning of why there's no "college rock revival groups".
Even a decade ago, Interpol could already basically be considered one (even if they often got lumped in with the fellows trying to bring back 1960s garage rock). There's never really been a coherent wave of them, but there's been revivalists pocketed all over, Cloud Nothings being the most obvious example.
They really have no idea whatsoever of what modern music actually sounds like.
by the seventies it had become codified, established, and even conservative; particularly since its courtship of the country music audience with its “Southern rock” gambit (which begat Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, America, Molly Hatchet, Crazy Horse, et al)
... but Crazy Horse paired up with Neil Young, who tends to get seen as one of the godfathers of punk.
Lumping in Crazy Horse with what punk was trying to eliminate is just going against the historical record here.
This is pretty much my weakest area, unarguably, and even I could see the patronizing, never mind the over-generalizing (which I'd not expect from anyone writing so much as a high school paper), and the painfully myopic "why is no one doing [thing]!?" nonsense. I stopped reading early on.
A college rock variant was therefore necessary for casual middle-class rock fans, left cold by heavy metal, punk rock, Southern rock, and the breezy West Coast sound of Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac, and the Eagles.
Started back in '83 Started seeing things a differently And hardcore wasn't doin' it for me no more Started smoking pot Thought things sounded better slow Much slower, heavier Black magic melody to sink this poseur's soul
Not whatever the hell this guy's trying to make up.
Comments
Mumford and Sons, as i've said before, are not folk, are not connected to the folk scene, and did not belong on folk radio
i wouldn't expect anyone who didn't listen to folk to care about that, though
idk where the association with 'white power' comes from, i haven't seen any reason to think that
and they don't get played on folk radio anymore, either, so i have no problem with them
this album is everything i wanted Holly Herndon's Platform to be
Even a decade ago, Interpol could already basically be considered one (even if they often got lumped in with the fellows trying to bring back 1960s garage rock). There's never really been a coherent wave of them, but there's been revivalists pocketed all over, Cloud Nothings being the most obvious example.
They really have no idea whatsoever of what modern music actually sounds like.
I was trying to go off what gets generalized as "college rock", which is what this person seems to be trying to talk about.
Lumping in Crazy Horse with what punk was trying to eliminate is just going against the historical record here.