There’s an argument I could start, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to finish it. It’d be about authenticity, and the different ways in which Americans and Brits detect, weigh and value it. A disparity certainly exists, I think, but I’m not critic enough to call it forth and give it shape. So I’ll try a different tack:
Opinions on music are almost giddily subjective, no matter what Ronald Thomas Clontle thinks. Whether this frustrates or pleases is often a function of age. The older I get, I find the less I’m disturbed by the subjectivity of it all. In fact, I’m delighted by how many different “types” of listeners I have in my single cranium. It allows me to appreciate Pet Shop Boys and even Avril Lavigne, while freeing me from having to defend my fairly strong dislike of critical darlings from Captain Beefheart to the Rapture.
But (if I may swing into the plural at this point) before we realize that we contain multitudes , we’re young and cocky and certain that our tastes aren’t just good, but Correct. And when defending our tastes in America (okay, so maybe I’m not straying from my original point so much), so-called “authenticity” is our most-cited piece of Evidence of Rightness. Slippery as that is, it happens: I’ll never forget the dewey-eyed look on my friend’s face in 1986 when he regurgitated the then-currant critical conclusion that U2 had “a lot of truth in their music.” I myself spent a lot of time in high school drafting in my head a speech I would’ve gladly delivered to any jock who cared to listen, provided he’d promise not to pummel me afterward: “Twenty-Eight Reasons Why R.E.M. is Better than Lynard Skynard.”
All these years later, and not only would I listen to someone arguing the opposite–I might even agree with him by the time he was done. Clearly something has changed, and although no single song could mark the turning point, it may as well be Blur’s 1997 (Stateside) breakthrough hit, “Song 2.” Yes, this is the song that goes “woo-hoo.” Yes, this is the song that was used in movie trailers and car ads and everywhere on the radio. But confusingly enough, in execution, it was actually Blur’s attempt to strip down and emulate the kind of music that’s NOT played on the radio. When recording this album, the band name-checked American indie groups like Mission of Burma, Pavement and Sebadoh.
So what we have here is a British imitation of an amalgamation of American indie integrity that, for at least one song, went over like gangbusters commercially. So the wank-worthy question is: Does Blur being so good at it negate the bad karma of ripping off such revered acts? Or is our reverence for these acts bogus in the first place, resulting in a two-ply fakery?
Of course now I’ve spent about half my time here explaining how I’m no longer a wank, so I hereby abandon the question. All I know is that whenever we threw a party at our house in Raleigh, it was a RULE that if “Song 2″ was played (and it always was), you had to play it two times. Because it was the second song on the album. And it was almost exactly two minutes long. And it’s called “Song 2.” And that’s about all the argument you need to deem a song perfect.
