Fake it so real we are beyond fake
From a super-smart piece by Los Angeles Times' music critic (and a personal hero of mine) Ann Powers, about the state of music at the end of the decade:
The most fascinating personalities of this new era would never present themselves as unwashed or genuinely unplugged. They're show people who are able to dance, crack jokes and work all the knobs that power their multimedia extravaganzas. Eminem and Britney Spears, will.i.am and Kanye West, M.I.A. and OutKast, Rihanna and Lil Wayne: In nearly every niche, millennial artists have shown a marked preference for artifice over raw expression, costume and theatrics over plain presentation and foregrounding the tools they use to make music over pretending that it all comes "naturally." ...
Then there's Radiohead. It's impossible to find a more earnest embodiment of that central unit of authentic rock, the band, today. Yet no matter how scruffy the image of Thom Yorke and company, Radiohead's music runs on the illusions and nightmares of the post-millennial world. Using club beats and the fragmented compositional structures of contemporary classical music, Radiohead writes little operas for paranoid androids and mutant fishes in the information stream.
I like the way she constructs "artifice" here as not necessarily an antonym to sincerity, just as another way to present art. What do you think?
More artifice at the blog:
+ Imogen Heap live (and plugged in) in Seattle
+ Tilt-Shift fakes with Nick Harmer
+ Lady Gaga's little shop of horrors
-
- groups:
- Music, music blog
-
- tags:
- Music, Music Videos, Lady Gaga, Radiohead, 10 more
