Mainstream, the new Avant Garde? The "best of" lists have thrown up a few intresting confessions. Anyone else prepared to come clean with a "guilty pleasures" best of?
The use of the term "guilty pleasures" in conjunction with the appearance of mainstream albums on various top 10 lists is exactly what I don't like about many avant-garde listeners' attitudes to music. They feel that their taste in music is so elevated that you can only justify listening to non-avant-garde music by wrapping it in a package of postmodern irony. This approach does nothing but continue the age-old supposed dichotomy between high art and low art, a canyon still wide open. As for myself, I didn't put the Kylie Minogue album in my top 10 as a "guilty pleasure". Sure, I take much pleasure in listening to it, but I don't feel guilty about it, and I certainly don't feel I need to justify my appreciation of the album by resorting to irony or anything of the sort - to me, it's a just a very good pop album, with some killer tunes. I also do not need to find any hidden references to avant-culture in it that "the general public probably don't get" to justify why I think it is a good album (even though the opening track and first single "Slow" could certainly be accused of being influenced by minimal electronics, for instance). To me, it is simply a good album, one that I have played a lot since I bought it. As Zorn has said it himself, the avant-garde has become a genre all unto itself. In much so-called experimental music, there isn't much experiment going on, because most of what is being played or produced has been done many times already. The only thing that makes it being tagged experimental is that 99.5% of the audience haven't heard any of the other 50,000 albums out there that use extended techniques, noise, scraping sounds, non-linear structures, and electronics in combination with acoustic instruments, to name but a few elements from the dictionary of the "weird". Quality is a rare thing, both in pop music and in experimental music (I'd like to think of Stanley Zappa's rants in Bananafish here...). To me, it no longer matters whether an album is from the pop or the avant world for me to appreciate it. As long as I feel excited about it, and have the urge to put it in my CD player, I reckon it's a good album. That being said, anyone else on this list who is into Broadcast as much as I am (and actually thinks they are the best band around these days)? Frankco