Capturing The Zeitgeist

I think I can safely aver to not being the most musically plugged-in person there is — I have long since passed the point where your typical musical review will describe a group I've never heard of by pointing out how they're like a blend of two other musical groups I've never heard of (who, themselves, were musical descendants of … well, you get the picture). But thanks to the miracle of the intarwebs, I occasionally stumble on to something. A brief survey of a few folks I know who ARE plugged in to new music revealed that they hadn't heard of Royksopp, so I figure there's a chance you haven't either. They've actually been around a while, and released this foreshadowy video a few years ago:

It's a nice visual metaphor for our current real estate market, though I imagine that's accidental. The allusion to our forebodings of Something Even Worse tugging at the edges of our awareness is more intentional, I suspect. Karin Dreijer Andersson (the one eating the apple) provided the vocal on this track and has done some interesting work with a group called The Knife. At 6 million+ YouTube hits, some folks have clearly heard of Royksopp, so I'm guessing they have a significant European following. Two other Royksopp vids worth watching:

"Remind Me"


"Poor Leno"

Comments

[nimh]

Ah - thanks for the ego boost! :-)

What am I on about? Well, I'm also sadly long past the point you describe, not having kept up with, well, anything for at least 3-4 years now - and that coming after a previous, gradual decline of plugged-inness ll the way since my bar-working days when we had the first jungle (later called drum 'n' bass) party in town back in 1994.

BUT ... I know of Royksopp. Hell - I was listening to it endlessly back in 2002/2003. "Remind me" still makes me sad (because well, they were tough times). So now I feel a little bit better about my old-farted unplugged-inness :-D

[ballgame]

Aha! So all the kool kids HAVE been listening to Royksopp! I guess my friends aren't as cutting edge as they let on. Glad I could give you an ego boost, nimh.

So, have you heard of this band, "Radiohead"?

(kidding)

[Sir Charles]

Very atmospheric. The vocal sounded a little bjorky but not as quirky. I liked it.

It's hard to stay plugged in -- what I keep up with tends to be scarily random I think. And I don't know artists in their entirety anymore like I did when I was young and spent hours every day listening to music.

I've always been kind of a Radiohead hater -- they've just never really moved me for some reason.

[big bad wolf]

i hate to sound so old, but there are some advantages to not being plugged in and there may not be so many disadvantages to not being plugged in now as there were, oh, a really long time ago, like 75 through 87 when i listened all the time.

the main advantage of not keeping up, i think, is the ability to range widely and randomly. keeping up tends to mean keeping up with a particular type of music and with what is popular. that is often limiting, because it tends to all but require one to listen to certain things, meanwhile all sorts of fun things are going unnoticed, many of which were made long ago. it is a truism, but an important one, that most pop music isn't very good. the stuff that lasts rewards listening years on, as well as in the year of its release. it is better, i find, to catch up on a hot band of 2002, a few years late, if it meant you missed most of the dreck and instead found out about some great other stuff from years past---right now, i have finally started listening to ornette coleman's first albums and tabu ley rocuhereau.

there are, i think, two reasons why it is not so disadvantageous as it once was to not keep up. the first is the MP3 player. one can always cherrypick the hot songs and see what one thinks of them. the second is that the chances are very very high that the album won't stand up---albums are too long, they have been since the switch to cd. most great albums have had 8 to 10 songs (even a magnificient double album, such as london calling is a short double), most albums aren't great, and for the past 20 years everyone has given us 15 (or more) songs. for me, that has meant an awfully lot of albume that are 2/3 unlistenable to mediocre. in my mind (if not always in my messages), editing is an underrated good and artistic abundance an overrated one.

i don't get radiohead at all. i read interviews with them and think, what an intelligent, interesting bunch of guys, but their records touch me not at all.

[Stephen Suh]

I liked Radiohead when they were cool, man, back before they sold out to the Man.

[nimh]

I've heard of them, ballgame .. I've got this younger colleague who tells me about them .. ;)

[nimh]

Anyone who decides to cll anything "OK computer", though, hs clearly not been working on this stupid lptop, cursed be its mlfunctioning A key.