2011 has been a phenomenal year for new music, even as the mainstream continued its descent into a banality from which it sometimes feels like there's no escape. How many auto-tuned cyber-Pop clones can one culture take? Only time will tell, but as the Lady GaGa / Calvin Harris centre-ground hammers home its 'Music For Bowling Alleys' project with mind-numbing precision sanity can be preserved by looking left-field into the darker reaches of the 'Digital Village'. Indeed, life on-line is so enormous now there are infinite avenues of escape (making 'end of year lists' ever harder as 2009/10/11 blur into a vague period characterised by numerous styles and sounds seemingly just hanging in the ether and connected to little else - not even packaging.). If there is a notable - and alarming - absence amongst 2011's soundtrack it's the lack of dissent registering in traditional out-lets. After all, 2011 is looking like a water-shed year in how most people perceive the world Capitalism has constructed, the Arab Spring, Occupy Movements and a historically unprecedented global recession alerting everyone - bar the 1% - that something is deeply amiss in the way society is structured. And yet, the music of 2011 would give no clue to that.
Where in 1992 (to select a random pre-history, though one that happens to exist against a backdrop of economic recession) Kurt Cobain's scream alone registered primal objection on behalf of a generation, Ice Cube's antagonism demanded surveillance by the FBI and even Ministry's music videos spliced together TV news footage that captured the failure of Reagan's 'trickle down' economics and the perversity of living in a media village, a hard cut to 2011 reveals how that type of dissent is visibly absent. And what's in its place? Capitalist-friendly 'X-Factor' Pop (hence Beyonce at Glastonbury). To site one example, Jay-Z is now as likely to be profiled by Bloomberg TV as he is The Vibe (i.e he is part of the problem, not the solution). Or, to put it another way, when did you last hear a musician scream or get angry about anything or everything?
Where in 1992 (to select a random pre-history, though one that happens to exist against a backdrop of economic recession) Kurt Cobain's scream alone registered primal objection on behalf of a generation, Ice Cube's antagonism demanded surveillance by the FBI and even Ministry's music videos spliced together TV news footage that captured the failure of Reagan's 'trickle down' economics and the perversity of living in a media village, a hard cut to 2011 reveals how that type of dissent is visibly absent. And what's in its place? Capitalist-friendly 'X-Factor' Pop (hence Beyonce at Glastonbury). To site one example, Jay-Z is now as likely to be profiled by Bloomberg TV as he is The Vibe (i.e he is part of the problem, not the solution). Or, to put it another way, when did you last hear a musician scream or get angry about anything or everything?
As such the musical highlights of 2011 tend to function as a coping strategy for the brutality of the world, more embalming fluid than fuel to rage against the social order. Nobody is contending that past-eras of pop culture that expressed political or personal discontent (from Dylan to Public Enemy) provided any constructive alternatives, but at least they conceived of there being a problem, and in turn set the imagination free and helped the individual decide what they were for and what they were against. In 2011 music culture is certainly sonically seductive, yet it increasingly feels disconnected from reality. Here are some personal favourites.
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