Now here’s an interesting decade-in-review list. The Village Voice has compiled a list of New Genre Hype in the 2000’s, and rightfully so as one-hit-wonders and genre fads no longer define entire decades or entire years. We now live in an age of hyper-turnover, where the Internet’s constant stream of information makes it almost impossible for any act to hold a major chunk of attention for very long. You can’t predict the “next big thing” anymore, there’s no time for it.
The Voice’s Christopher Weingarten declares a band’s official life span as nine months from MySpace inception:
Faster than you can tweet “Serena Maneesh,” entire genres of music are “discovered” by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can’t possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with.
Now while I’d personally agree with that estimate, it should be noted that the number isn’t backed by any study. Also, Weingarten apparently thinks hipster metal died in 2007:
What It Was: Dave Grohl’s unexceptional Probot vanity project brought attention to avant-metal label Southern Lord, making it cool for the ironic-ringer-T-shirt set to share warm PeeBeRs with the denim-jacket-back-patch set. Soon, bands like the Sword, Priestess, and Saviours brought all the energy and aggression of metal without zitty geekazoid tropes like “chops.”
Creative Peak: Mastodon, Leviathan [2004]
Typically Effusive Praise at the Time: “If Sunn 0))) is the ZZ Top of experimental metal, with matching beards and Gibson Les Paul guitars, Boris might be the Kraftwerk, or the Ramones, or even the Jimi Hendrix Experience, depending on the album.” —The New York Times Magazine, 2006
What Happened?: For most people, standing through two hours of Sunn O)))’s fog machine and drone turned out to be “not really my thing.” Indie rockers started their own terrible metal bands (David Pajo’s Dead Child, Rob Crow’s Goblin Cock), and the burnouts nerds laughed at in high school resumed shaking their heads at us all.
I completely disagree on that point: hipster trend-ascribing site Pitchfork still hands high marks (and by the way, was giving 9.1’s out to ISIS and the like way before Probot) to acts from the Hydra Head/Southern Lord/Tee Pee camps, and last year’s Scion Rock Fest was a wildly successive, sold-out mecca for that scene.
What do you think? Is hipster metal really dead? Did metal see any “next big thing” in the 2000’s that actually managed to stick around (metalcore?)? Will anything define metal for all of the 2010s?
