002 The Tens

So… the 2010s. What an amazingly horrible decade to live through. Not flat out terrifying like the 40s, or tumultuous and revolutionary like the 60s, or even definitively crushing for an entire social class and culture, like the 80s. No, the Tens were a more venal, dismal kind of horrible, where grievance and bad faith became a kind of totalising currency. Against a backdrop of objectively frightening developments around climate change, food and water security, drone warfare, mass surveillance and right wing extremism, so many petty, insecure people seemed to find their voice online. It was, as Barbara McClay put it, 'a decade of sore winners'. 

History will recognise this as the era when the illusory promises of liberal democracy finally started give way. A screen-based culture that began by rewarding shameless self promotion ended up delivering a new political order, and all the old fights we thought we'd won and could leave behind - anti-fascism, anti-racism, civil rights - have now to be fought all over again. It marked the end of ironic detachment as a justifiable attitude towards political and social questions. It was the time when we all picked a side again. After twenty years of neo-liberal insulation it has been a cold, cold wind.

We've all been getting older in the process, which hasn't helped. Trying to become an adult amidst this socio-cultural regression has been a complicated undertaking. Day to day decisions, like how to get to work or what type of toilet paper to buy, require an endless subliminal moral audit, weighing our abundant privileges against our equally abundant sense of inadequacy and alienation. It's no wonder that we are both more aware of and less able to deal with our own mental health Yet somehow, amidst of all of this decay, we produced one of the best 10 year stretches of pop music ever witnessed. Funny that…

I hadn't fully appreciated this state of affairs until I started pulling this playlist together in November. End of the 'teens articles were starting to pop up in my timelines, and it seemed like a good idea to take stock of the sounds that I have been enjoying over the recent and not so recent past.  I did something similar at the end of the last decade, although in quite a different state of mind. Sadly I can't find the exact list anywhere now but remember that I populated it with quite a lot of politicised, confrontational music (it definitely had We Want Your Soul and Single Ladies on it). The 00s were the time that I moved from idiot teenager, to emotionally stunted PhD student, bar tender and part time DJ. Pop music on the whole was pretty irrelevant to me. I remember it as Ibiza chillout, sexy RnB, boy and girl bands, lame indie rock and the continuing capitalist death march of hip hop. I dragged 70 of minutes of rebellion out of the era with some considerable effort. This time, I filled up a playlist of nearly 100 absolute bangers in about 2 hours. Sure there was a lot of crap to sift through - there always is with pop - I was just struck by how much great mainstream music there was that I connected with, and how stylistically coherent the it seemed when heard together. The question has to be how did pop get so good? Here's a few angles on this:

• Electronic/digital production techniques have come of age. Untethered to guitars and other analogue instruments, pop producers are now applying digital tools to create an amazingly wide range of effects, deploying heavy bass, variety of tempo and time signature, auto-tuned vocals, dark, light and a truly international range of rhythmic and melodic influences. Sample /retro culture has effectively died a death in the charts. Its place has been taken by a generation of musicians who know how to nod towards or replicate classic 20th century musical components within a framework that could only have been made in the here and now. The strange prevalence of what can only be described as a "yacht rock" sound palate underpinned by Afro/ratchet drum loops (Bouff Daddy, Blue Lights) is completely inexplicable, yet distinctive and pleasing. We have a signature sound for the first time since the mid 90s.
• The black, latino and queer origins of the electronic music are explicit in this era's pop. Opening tracks Strangers and Sorry are perfect examples. Likeable yet coolly ambivalent singers pay the dance floor its due; the satisfyingly deep drops release the endorphines, drawing deeply from classic house, disco and gay pop. It's gold… Robyn and Little Dragon were doing this years ago: I was convinced the latter should have been massive back then, so I am happy to include them here as precursors of a truly distinctive pop sound for The Tens.
• 2008 was the nadir of the modern music industry. Revenues had completely cratered under the impact of so-called "piracy" - they still haven't recovered to their 1999 levels incidentally. Spotify was essentially the saviour of the capitalist music industry, re-establishing confidence and creating new economies that lowered the profitability ceiling for everyone. In doing so they created opportunities for artists who in previous eras might have ended up pigeon-holed. The upfront subscription model has made music much more of an adventure. Streaming encourages the listener to dabble, with less pressure to own albums or invest financial and cultural capital in a small range of performers. Streaming has had negative effects on music - I will explore some of these in the future - but it's hard to deny pop as a cultural experience has improved immeasurably in the last decade. While I was absolutely determined to keep Edmund Sheeran out of this whole thing, it is clear he has been one of the emblematic artists of the decade. The chap has absorbed global influences like a kitchen sponge soaking up spilled champagne. But happily this appropriation has for once given those influential global pop sounds a boost. Here I have joints from the UK (D Double, Kano, Ghetts, Big Zeeks and others) Nigeria (Burna Boy), Colombia (J Balvin), India/Canada (Sidhu Moose) and Jamaica (DJ Vadim, via Russia). All sound sufficiently similar to sound right next to each other on algorithmic playlists (and this one!), but retain the important local and scene-based signifiers of cool and alternativity. It's been a somewhat virtuous cycle, dislodging the A&R and music journo as the principle gatekeeper of the mainstream. Spotify is, after all, the first medium in recorded music history which gives listeners pretty much exactly what they want, when they want it.
• Auto-tune isn't for everyone. It's rise - stemming largely from influential Caribbean music scenes like dancehall and reggaeton - gives colour to a vocal style which walks a line between song and rap. It sounds lazy at times. The clipped, underexplained lyrics, quantised into the track like any other synthesised component, feel distant or emotionally tranquilised. This is intentional. Cool, unapproachable style, standing apart from RnB/soul tradition, is a perfect sound for serious-faced, performative club glamour. Listen closely (try Loyalty or 47) and there is as much wit and soul in the lyrics as any other era. 
• In a decade of rising bigotry, recrimination and anger, darkness pushes in. I had to include the furious and the ominous (Exeter, Guts) the narcotised (Let U Know, Deadbeat Summer), the misogynistic and money worshiping  (N**as in Paris, For the Paper) to acknowledge the elemental pull of negativity on the modern pop aesthetic. This is still amazing music. Pop is usually at it's worst when it's pretending to be something it's not - a paragon of virtue, say, or an authentic underground sound, or a cultural feelgood service for straight white people. The appetite for this new range of styles and voices perhaps suggests we are experiencing the end of detached postmodernism as a respectable cultural stance. As it is no longer justifiable to stand apart from the fray and announce oneself unimplicated in the strife of the world, perhaps pop has drawn us in, offering us a space in which we can enjoy and acknowledge a range of identities, for better or worse, richer or poorer etc etc. It's not enough to make the world a better place, clearly, but pop has never been about that. Pop is good now, and it's because more people hear themselves and their lives in it.