As the seconds tick away and 2009 slides across the globe it seems strange to think we are entering the final stretch of the 21st centuries first decade. The noughties have passed far too quickly in some respects - it does not seem so long since the optimism of the New Millenium and fear of Y2K. But equally it seems impossible to think back to a world when Vladimir Putin was a surprise choice for Yeltsin's successor, or when 9/11 was just a number. Yet I am not here to dwell on the tumultuous events of the past nine years - nope, this one is all about the music.

 

Looking at past decades it is easy to define them, at least from afar by their music: from the grunge and Britpop of the nineties to the proto-rock of the fifties. Soundtracks celebrated and regurgitated over stock footage montages in a myriad documentaries. Music forever associated with space and time. By rights I should be at the forefront of this decade's musical trends. My teenage years have coincided perfectly with this period, 24 hours after it finally expires in 365 day's time, I will turn (gulp) 20. But looking back over the past nine years, it is difficult to discern the real peaks of 21st century music.

 

That's not to say that this decade has been a tuneless time. Everyone here will of course have come to know great records and great bands in the last nine years. I certainly know that I have, indeed it is the bands of this era which have turned me into the music junkie you know today. Without Rilo Kiley, Gogol Bordello, Bright Eyes and dozens of other bands the last 9 years would have been unthinkable. But when it comes to trends my mind draws a blank. Sure The Strokes may have invented indie-rock, rap has been commercialised and fully incorporated into the mainstream, and even shock-horror, into the world of chin-stroking hipsters, we've seen 80s revivals, nu-rave and  the return of lad-rock. We even had nu-metal. The all-encompassing, era defining trend seems to be absent. Sure 2009 may perhaps yield some great new trend, something that springs to mind when the word noughties is spoken - something to cover those newscast montages that take us from dimpled chads to Sarah Palin in 45 seconds, but somehow I doubt it.

 

Ironically, it is this lack of trend that I feel defines the pattern of the 2000s. Because the revolution witnessed in these years was not in what we listened to, but in the way we listened to it. In the last ten years the internet has grown up and matured just as much as the people of my generation. In 2000 you could spend 20 minutes downloading a single song. Now you can have an album in that time. And you can even do it legally. Instead of spending hours flipping through record store racks, you can find that obscure album instantly. Mix-tapes can be made in minutes, without spending hours fiddling with a tape recorder. Thanks to portable devices, you can carry all your music with you. This of course has good and bad aspects, but then so did the invention of synths. Yet this is not what is special about the decade for me. Sure the internet has made music easier to obtain, but it has also made it easier to discover. And this is the legacy we will remember from this decade.

 

The greatest contribution the twenty-hundreds have made to popular music (at least in this writer's humble opinion) is the increased musical awareness it has gifted us. No longer do music lovers have to rely on poorly photocopied zines and radio DJs to keep up with trends. No longer is the music lover limited by geography in what they can find. For the first time it possible to be involved and informed about trends on the other side of the world, a blogger with half a brain can turn you on to music that you would never have heard before, bands can build up an international following just by bunging their tunes on the net. And this is perhaps why there are no overwhelming trends anymore. People can find whatever they want, and this leads to fantastic musical diversity. Instead of a few artists capturing the zeitgeist and obtaining megastardom, thousands can carve out their niches and reach people across the globe. The mainstream as hit a delta and panned out (to use a clumsy hydrological metaphor), and the underground is melding with it. Indeed the greatest trend of the 21st century will be one of finding the music you love, no matter how obscure and disparate.

 

But perhaps I am being too cruel on  my decade. Perhaps other people's rosy spectacles have coloured my view of the past, and in turn made me search for things in my own generation that weren't there, and were never there in the past either. Perhaps I have simply missed out, and looked down on the true trend of my generation - the cyrpto-democratic hyper-branding of music, the Idol phenomenon that takes commercialisation to an impressive extreme. All I know is, with 3288 days gone and 365 left, this dwindling decade has been one of great change fore the music industry, and one which probably has a last hurrah left in it.

 

And I wonder if they did ever manage to meet up....

• Video views (8) |
• Permalink
• | Write Comment
• | Comments (6)