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December 01, 2009

David Stubbs: The Big Thing in Pop is Lost... Long Live the Teeming Abundance of the Little Things...

The Quietus | Read Full Story >

The Quietus:

What happened to pop? What’s become of it? Its story in the 2000s was, on the one hand, the story of its tedious ubiquity, but also, in another sense, its disappearance. In the 1980s, Paul Morley was an arch-theorist of a meta-notion of Pop. He expressed it baitingly and facetiously (annoying heavy metal fans by talking about “hard” groups like Depeche Mode or declaring Tight Fit to be superior to Led Zeppelin 3), but also with a riotous eloquence in the case of ABC, bestowing upon them a magnificent surplus of significance which for many became a dimension of the music itself, not just a critique of it.

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De-souled, de-rocked, de-popped, the “mainstream” is arid and bereft, all life ossified, dried out by overweening corporate intervention. Already giant record companies have merged into conglomerates like Universal. People point to this bare ocean bed and say that there is “nothing happening”. However, that emptiness is a bit like the place where the Red Sea has parted – for to either side, marginalised and kept from the centre by invisible forcefields, is a teeming, tsunami-high, oceanic abundance of activity in every genre, every permutation, every possibility of cross-fertilisation.



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