"I also think that in the era of a rapidly proliferating spectrum of musical options, the culture of music listening for a lot of people feeds directly into that most primal of capitalist desires: for the combination of incessant newness and minor difference. Which is why a lot of online savvy younger music geeks nowadays (I’m speculating, based on anecdotal research thus far) have less 'fave bands' and more 'rad playlists.' If the logic holds, then, it means that fans are more and more wanting a frequent turnover of artists who sound alike."
Please read Matthew and Eric’s combined treatise on why Spoon is underappreciated, and the paradox of being a consistently excellent indie-rock band in the current attention-addled musical moment.
I don’t really like Spoon all that much, but this is all very true. I spent a good chunk of this morning assembling my “favorite songs of the year” list and going through lists of the year’s best albums to jog my memory, and I was amazed at how many people I really loved over the years—from the eighties (Crowded House), the nineties (Juliana Hatfield, Robyn Hitchcock, Tindersticks), and today (like 800 bands) put out albums that I hadn’t even heard of. And I’m a pretty enthusiastic casual listener. But how the hell many articles did I read about, I don’t know, Crystal Antlers or Salem? A lot. Or, okay, not really that many, but enough that I got tired of both of reading about them before I ever heard them.
It’s also frustrating that certain artists—ahem—go from almost-universal adoration to almost-universal scorn when they make an album that a small number of people don’t understand after approximately 45 seconds of listening. No one will ever treat MIA like a serious worth-blogging-about artist again, at least not like a real fan, but three months from now we’ll all be reading rapturous praise for some band of freshmen at Oberlin that haven’t even actually started playing together yet.
(Source: The A.V. Club)
