Author: DC
Date: October 2010
Word count: 1,155 (inc. footnotes)
I’ve just returned from 3 gloriously sunny weeks in California spent driving very slowly from San Francisco to LA in a ridiculous record-exec-pimp-wagon Mazda called “Vanilla Thunder[1]”, sampling amazing restaurants and brilliant local record stores on the way. Seriously, Californians, I’m not sure that you realise how lucky you are to still have the phenomenal collection of indie stores that you do. Every town we went to, from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz, had a fantastic record emporium staffed by fun and insanely knowledgeable folk, and that is absolutely not the case everywhere in the world. Support the local, as you won’t realise how good it is until it has gone. Anyway, not the point, which was this: while cruising in Vanilla, I got to listen to a crazy amount of chart music, simply because I forgot to take any CDs with me and as a result was at the mercy of the FM dial. While much of it wasn’t my thing (or, in the case of “DJ’s Got Us Falling In Love Again” by Usher, really wasn’t my thing but still ended up stuck in my head for three entire weeks), something really interesting struck me about some of the songs that were getting a lot of play.
Let’s take two songs as examples. Both were getting increasing amounts of airplay as our trip went on, building up to what will inevitably be radio ubiquity for both. Neither was a life-changer in and of itself – one is a very good modern rock song, and the other a very funny but quite lightweight hip-hop jam. The former being “Waiting For The End” by Linkin Park, and the latter being “Runaway” by Kanye West. However, both were fascinating in as far as they perfectly encapsulate a trend that we’re increasingly seeing in popular music.
Musical convergence is what we’ll call it. The basic thesis here is that the concept of ‘genre’ in modern music is becoming less relevant all the time as artists increasingly look beyond the confines of a single style, set of influences or “sound” to inspire them. If you will, it’s the end point of the shuffleisation of music – if your iPod plays you a smooth r ‘n b song followed by some speedmetal, a samba number, a sugarpop Katy Perry song and a South African zef-rap, why wouldn’t you begin to see commonalities between the songs, or ways in which the elements that they bring could be blended together? On the flipside, this expectation of variety is what has made FM radio stations, with their myopic focus on single micro-genres[2], feel so staid a medium.
You can see the convergence at work in these songs, without even having to listen that closely. Linkin Park, who are commonly perceived to be relatively conventional rockers, bring out a huge assortment of styles and influences on “Waiting…” The song begins with a Nine Inch Nails-style treated guitar line, is underpinned by a hip-hop beat embellished with country-sounding woodblock hits, uses a reggae cadence for some of its vocals and a traditional balladeering approach for others, has an Indian chant harmony part, and also includes some electro pulses and DJ scratching. While the resulting songs sounds big and busy, it doesn’t come off as a badly-combined Frankenstein’s monster of a track. In fact, it’s astonishing how unstrange the final product seems. We have simply gotten used to genre-blending. Sure, I could still just about describe it as a ‘modern rock’ song in my opening paragraph as there are some crunchy guitars in the mix, but to do that is to use pretty lazy journalistic shorthand to describe a song that is in fact very difficult to pigeonhole.
“Runaway”, in contrast, is in its recorded form much more minimalist, certainly when compared with the live version that Mr West has been performing lately, which layers over the core track with grating vocal drops and Bomb Squad noise effects. The song is also a degree more conventional than the Linkin Park effort – it is at least a hip-hop song underpinned by a traditionally hip-hop beat, and has a dextrous but recognisable guest verse from Pusha-T of the Clipse. But in many other ways the song is still all over the map, especially for the second single by a major-label artist: for instance, there’s little clear delineation of verse, bridge and chorus with Kanye instead repeatedly drawing on certain motifs cyclically throughout the song[3]. He also brings in an almost dubsteppish baseline, disco vocodering and a prog-rock echoing of vocals, just for fun. And again, none of this seems surprising or out of place. Convergence does that to you.
Sure, there are problems with convergence. If handled poorly, style-blending can result in songs that are just random-seeming soundclashes, with little stylistic coherence or thematic clarity. The appropriation of styles from other nations, if not done with sensitivity, can also lead to charges of cultural imperialism or ‘fakeness’, as can be seen in the criticisms of globetrotting producer Diplo for the way that he has drawn from South American and African culture. Equally, stressing how refreshing convergence can be can lead to the marginalisation of artists or bands who choose to operate within a particular niche and to perfect that particular craft, and this marginalisation can potentially be as constricting as the FM radio insistence that bands DO have a particular genre. It may explain why, for example, there is the start of a backlash against Brooklyn’s superb The National, with it alleged that they are “just indie”. Well, when you write songs that good, being “just indie” is more than enough. Given the state of radio, however, defending genre traditionalists seems to be of lesser concern than trying to encourage boundary-blurring, if only to finally put the nail in the coffin of single-genre stations. So, having spent three weeks in Vanilla Thunder with only the FM dial for company, I’d like to raise a toast, as Mr West would say – just in this case to musical innovators, rather than his “douchebags”, “scumbags” and “jerkoffs”.
[1] Because it was huge and very, very white. Seriously, thanks to car rental company that shall remain nameless for the free upgrade, but seriously… a ridiculous white hybrid the size of a killer whale?
[2] During our trip, we noted stations dedicated to “modern urban salsa”, “Hispanic hop-hop”, “contemporary Christian active metal” and “granola-inspired rural passive whale song”. Only one of those is made up. Promise.
[3] I wanted to write more about the absolutely extraordinary lyrics to this song but my editors weren’t keen on it, seeing as how my last 4,289 articles have been about rap lyrics. Let’s just say that Kanye outdoes himself, and becomes the first guy to release a song to radio with the word “douchebag” featuring prominently in the chorus.
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