Whitesnake and frosted spike-mullets. That’s what the ’80s brought us. Not just that, I know, but those two things top my list of most severe cultural damage.
Our habit of measuring decades in terms of cultural trends (especially musical trends) seems to have aligned quite handily with the rate of change for a good few cycles. Hear a tune from the ’50s, and it’s pretty easy to tell it came from the era of car fins and atomic bras. Ditto with the pastel and psychedelia of the ’60s, not to mention the sideburns and mustard yellow muscle cars of the disco age.
Things started getting a little muddier, it seems, in the ’90s. Nirvana threatened to define a ragged-edged answer to radio-ready pop, but then Kurt Cobain departed and that void was filled with heavily compressed nuggets of distorted throwback rock, too polished to be interesting and too forgettable to tag the ’90s as the decade of much of anything in the musical department. If it hadn’t been for Radiohead, the decade might have proved a total wash in terms of musical innovation.
Now the Aughts have rushed right by. And yes, technically the decade doesn’t end until 2011, but why linger when nobody much is going to miss it anyway? Or at least, so says a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: “According to the poll, a combined 58 percent said the decade was either ‘awful’ or ‘not so good,’ 29 percent said it was fair, and just 12 percent said it was either ‘good’ or ‘great.’ …50 percent said it lost ground on peace and national security, 54 percent said it lost ground on the nation’s sense of unity, 55 percent said it lost ground in treating others with respect, 66 percent said it lost ground on moral values, and a whopping 74 percent said it lost ground on economic prosperity.”
It really was that bad. Perhaps it’s because everybody left of Glenn Beck (a category that inevitably includes most innovative artists) was too busy fending off Bush-Cheney insanity, hurricanes and recession, but the Aughts ended up with almost nothing to define the musical decade. There are always exceptions, but it’s really tough to come up with anything in the aesthetic world that says 2000-whatever. We had plenty of retreads, from Green Day’s renewed and still-dull popularity to the revival of even older bands like The Police and The Who.
What about closer to home? Music that comes to listeners more directly, as local artists invariably do, naturally has its fair share of the same old thing. On the other hand, when musicians do something new and interesting, their nearest neighbors hear it first. The Valley in particular deserves its reputation as arts incubator. So what happened in our own musical stew?
Just like the culture at large, we’ve seen returns to and continuations of the past, with the Sierra Grille hosting a Bay State Hotel revival, mostly featuring bands who played in the same room a decade or more ago. The Sighs got back together, and old favorites like Ed Vadas and the Lonesome Brothers carried on in the reliably entertaining way we’ve come to love.
But the year that is currently winding to a close went a long way toward saving our aesthetic bacon in the pure innovation department. Much more happened musically, of course, but one trend which has given up some new methods and sounds is minimalism in the instrumentation department: on a non-regional level, just witness Brian Wolff, who has coaxed a startling array of rocking sounds from, of all things, the tuba. Locally, Flava Evolution, a band begun by several members of the Leah Randazzo Group, pared down their jazz sound to just bass and three horns. That odd lineup, it turns out, really works quite well.
Perhaps the most far-reaching and prescient innovation happened nearly simultaneously last April at Amherst College, University of California at Irvine and Stanford University. In an interesting upping of the ante in Flava Evolution-style minimalism, Amherst College visiting professor Jason Robinson (saxophone) played a concert with Adnan Marquez (saxophone) and Michael Dessen (trombone). Each player performed on his own stage, hundreds or thousands of miles from the other two. A new incarnation of the Internet (called Internet2) made this nearly real-time collaboration possible, but the imperfect nature of even such high-tech methodology meant each audience heard something slightly different and imperfectly aligned.
Of course, to seekers of new sounds, that’s not necessarily bad. It’s fertile ground that points to the kind of meta-craziness that may well come to define the next decade.
As Robinson explained, “All three of us are composers in addition to performers, so one of the things that intrigues us is how to incorporate those latency times, because most listeners will notice a hiccup with an eighth of a second. One of the pieces has a section where [the other two] are playing an astinato, a repeated rhythm—a groove, essentially—and I improvise on top of it here. To the audience here it will sound like we’re playing in time, but to them [on the West Coast] it will sound like I’m a little off. It comes together in an interesting way on an artistic level. We’re trying to use this as a jumpstart to think about different ways to compose and perform.”
The Aughts may well come up with pretty much naught to define themselves artistically, but if you look closely enough, you can hear the sounds of things to come, residing in the barely explored ideas of how listeners receive sounds and just what constitutes a performance. It’s not the jet pack we were promised, but as aesthetic futures go, it sounds pretty good from here.