the little moments
JR: It feels tacky to start our discussion of the year in pop with sales stats, but Topic A in '06 was the continuing slow-motion collapse of the record business, a process that was accelerated this year by YouTube and MySpace and online leaks and peer-to-peer mischief, and dramatized by the triumph of Disney pop. What does it mean for popular music when 7-year-olds are the most reliable record buyers?
JC: Let me get this out of the way since it's going to come up sooner or later: I find Gnarls Barkley annoying. Further exposition upon request.
CW: There's no such thing as a bad year for music. Not even a bad week. There is always some young asshole-genius somewhere wrenching newness out of the same old notes. But if forced to plot the passing year on a tentative pop-historical bell curve, I'd come out on the flip side of Jody's cautious optimism: 2006 was a half-bad year for pop music.
AP: It's endemic to the pop experience, based around the complementary pleasures of listening to "records" (or whatever we call them this epoch) and rocking out/rocking it live. As we spend more time connecting across cyberspace, what happens to our beat- and noise-craving bodies? I get a lot from the blogosphere, but for me there's still nothing like a roomful of people united in connection to sound moving through space.
-
