1. Predicting Trends: The 2k10’s are the New 90’s

    The stranglehold on the corpse of the 50’s is finally over (the 80’s invoked the 50’s). With the turning of a new decade comes a new trendy aesthetic in indie music. The Aughts (2000-2009) were more or less a post-ironic throwback to the eighties with Internet-era sensibilities. There was a mass of indie bands that wanted to take the synthesizer sounds of New Wave bands and craft a new indie sound unlike that heard before.  What inevitably happened was a mass of indiscernible, ubiquitous pop music, just like with the eighties, except worsened by the over-saturating effects of Internet circulation.  In other words, there was simply too much shit and it all tried to sound like Animal Collective or MGMT.
    Looking back on this past decade, I’m fucking glad it’s over.  I could tell by 2008 when a new band sounded “2000’s as fuck” and they always had obnoxiously Photoshopped cover art littered with gaudy DayGlo colors.  Surely, there was good music being put out during the Aughts, but I’m really just talking about trendy Pitchfork-style “popular” indie.  As we reach the end of the first/second year of this new decade (it depends on how you look at it), we can only look forward the rest of the decade.
    The transition between adjacent decades’ distinct musical styles always takes a couple of years, unless a landmark album comes out early on (like Nevermind) and speeds up this process.  No one can predict when such revolutionary albums come out, but I can definitely sense artists trying to break away from the innocuous synthesizer hooks and annoying guitar riffs that pockmarked the face of the Aughts.  What I have gleaned from these early efforts is that the 2k10’s are going to adopt many of the characteristics of the 90’s and refine them.  The music of the 90’s was a backlash against the 80’s legacy of new wave and pop music, opting for 70’s hard rock guitars and production.  The 70’s were almost total shit, and there was a definite amount of shit in the 90’s as well.  But there was also a lot of influential and amazing music that could have only come out during that time period, distinctly 90’s music.  It is the qualities of these artists—artists such as Guided by Voices, Pavement, Slint, and Cap’n Jazz—that will be taken up and transmuted by this decade.  The 90’s were fucking awesome, but they were also scruffy, scruffy in a way that was complementary to the neon pastel sheen of the 80’s.  The 2k10’s will subsume the aesthetic style of the 90’s, refine it, and become the new 90’s.

    Reasons Why The 2k10’s Will Become the New 90’s:
    1. All the 90’s kids are growing up now and the ones who enter the indie sphere will bring those 90’s childhood experiences into it, because our culture has a creepy fixation on the purity and innocence of childhood, and people try to capture that sentimentality.
    2. 20th/25th anniversary editions of seminal 90’s albums will be released this decade, garnering new interest in 90’s music.
    3. This decade’s early releases indicate a shift away from the use of synthesizers in favor of more clean or warm sounding guitars.
    4. Miley Cyrus has taken to wearing t-shirts cut Flashdance-style of Kurt Cobain’s face and performing covers of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in concert, much to the obvious chagrin of Kurt Cobain’s corpse, which is not rolling over in its grave so much as it constantly rotating, like a 7-Eleven hot dog.  It probably looks more like a cheeseburger Big Bite, honestly.
    5. It’s cool to wear flannels and skinny jeans now, not that flannel ever really went out of style.  This is already an improvement over the baggy fat-people clothing of the 90’s.
    6. No one cares about Animal Collective or Panda Bear anymore.
    7. Roomrunner out of Baltimore is apparently bringing grunge back in a big way.  I haven’t heard it yet, but maybe it’s good, unlike 99% of grunge music. (Yeah, I went there, bitch.)
    8. You remember all that trashy dance and electronic music from the 90’s?  Yeah, we already have our new version.  It’s called dubstep.  Once Skrillex does a remix of Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday,” we’ve come full circle.

    -David H

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