the 90s
This isn’t a fully developed thought and just a passing idea, and I’ve since thought of like 34002402 exceptions, but after listening to “90s alternative” internet radio for the last 3 hours at work, I think I have decided that the “alternative” (i.e. major label) acts of the 90s, on a whole, were dramatically better than the “indie” (i.e. indie label, or at least those self-presented as such) artists of today. There’s a certain inherent lameness or cheakiness to the overall sound that perhaps lends itself to being thought of as “guilty pleasure” music (while indie’s overall sound tends to be more ironic in an intellectual and melancholy way, as opposed to a self-deprecating/silly/fun way), but ultimately the average 90s alt band, which is probably somewhere from “decent” to “pretty good”, and always inherently listenable, is much better than the average 00s indie band, which probably borders on embarassing in its confused counterpoint of sincerity and pretension with irony and whimsicality. Yet, it’s hard to say the 90s were actually a better musical decade, and not just because of what was going on in the pop and hip-hop sectors of music. I think the real problem is that, sometime around, I dunno, 1997?, the 90s gave up on the idea that they could ever achieve the sublime, and just completely embrased the reality of their musical existance. It’s debatable whether or not that’s, philosophically, a “good” action, but I think part of the indie artists charm is that a lot of them still think they can achieve something truly transcendent. The attempts and the sentiment are kind of lame, perhaps, and they’re often (read: usually) self-deprecating, with an air of “we’re not actually serious about this,” but at the same time, they’re deadly serious, and perhaps that’s what really what we should mean when we say “postpostmodern,” the realization that everything can be fake and self-conscious and meaningless like the 90s, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anyway. Instead of stewing in self-referential mania, producing works of art that do little but tell us that the art itself is meaningless, we proceed towards meaning knowing we’ll never actually get there, like a mathematical limit. Perhaps music is at its best a journey of lost causes.
