where the music went

Lately I've been watching Fuse a lot. The campus TV station broadcasts it whenever they don't have original content to show, which is most of the time, especially in the summer. It's kind of blowing my mind.

I think of myself as knowledgeable about music, to the point of dorkiness. At least certain specific kinds. But I'm so out of touch with this stuff. I assume that it's all very popular, probably with people who are younger than me. But there are all these band names I've never heard before. I can't even think of them right now, they're so totally unfamiliar. Well, there are some I'd heard the names of before, like My Chemical Romance and 30 Seconds to Mars (though I had no idea Jared Leto was in that band til I saw him in a video and thought I was going nuts). There are some more high-profile pop artists on there, like Avril Lavigne. And they have videos by bands like Bright Eyes that cross over from indie music to some extent, and older videos by bands like Green Day. Well, actually, Green Day almost exclusively. I'm really struck by how often I put the TV on Fuse and see a video from Dookie, after all these years, when there's very little else from that period. I think that's some kind of clue about something.

But for the most part, there are all these bands that are totally new to me. What's even weirder, I can't seem to place them at all in terms of genre. I know that if I was more familiar with this thing that is now known as "emo" (which stylistically has nothing to do with, say, Rites of Spring, and little to do with, say, Sunny Day Real Estate) that might help me place some of it. At one point they even had the authors of Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture on one of the shows being interviewed. I might have to read some books on the subject, whether I read that one or not. This whole Fuse obsession is making me feel a need to understand this stuff better. Though I'm not going to undertake any sort of Carl Wilson-style project to actually listen to a bunch of this stuff and try to find an appreciation for it. Well, never say never, I guess--I don't want to jinx myself. But I certainly don't plan on it. Still, it's this whole giant cultural thing. I feel obliged to try to understand it, at least in some kind of cursory way. But I don't even know how much of the stuff I'm seeing on Fuse is actually supposed to be emo. Seems like a lot of it is, but I'm not sure.

Mostly it's just weird running across this whole other world of popular culture that I know almost nothing about, where all my usual reference points don't make any sense. It brings up some interesting points. On the one hand, the kind of music that makes up most of Fuse's programming, whether it's strictly emo or not, definitely positions itself as...well, for lack of a better word, "alternative." The network positions itself the same way, I think. (For example, they have a show called "Tattoo Stories" that sandwiches videos between vignettes where people show their tattoos and explain the meaning behind them. Tattooing, like this emo stuff, has become pretty widely accepted while retaining an air of deviancy and transgression, which Fuse clearly wants to capitalize on.) Yet obviously these bands sell a lot of records and this TV network, while it has a sort of low-rent feel to it, is still a TV network. I don't doubt that these artists could be expressing authentic feelings of disaffection and that their audiences, however large they might be, could be primarily comprised of people who feel marginalized, different, etc. But the popularity of this stuff is at odds with both the image these bands are marketing and the self-images of anybody who somehow sees listening to them as an expression of their alienation.

I'm really interested in this disparity and whether it might relate to the fact that I've never heard of this music. Most of my information about music comes from sources that are either unapologetically oriented towards the obscure or that incorporate some degree of a poptimist aesthetic, which embraces some very overtly mainstream music but never seems to cover this music that's in denial about its mainstream-ness (though I haven't exactly done a thorough survey of poptimist criticism at this point to back up my impression). Getting into the nature of poptimism isn't something I should probably tackle in this blog post. But there have been arguments made that poptimism is more populist than other schools of music criticism, at least by some. And I wonder, if there's a lack of attention to certain veins of mainstream music by poptimists, if that suggests that the populism argument is something tacked on after the fact and poptimism is really more about an appreciation of certain aesthetics...well, regardless of what it is about, maybe it really isn't about populism at all on a basic level. Though the promulgation of the populism argument could result in pressure to live up to it, causing it to become more true in the process.

There are lots of other questions I could get into that have been raised in the course of my recent Fuse obsession, but I'll leave them for another time...