Pitchfork 500
I find it odd that according to Google Blog Search no one has yet blogged about Pitchfork's forthcoming book on 500 of "The Greatest Songs Since Punk," titled The Pitchfork 500.
It's not coming out until November, but I stumbled upon it when searching for other stuff by Scott Plagenhoef after finishing up his 33 1/3 book on If You're Feeling Sinister. He spends most of the book placing Belle & Sebastian in context as descendents of the C86 crowd, or more precisely, Orange Juice and the Smiths (and, of course, Velvet Underground), and detailing their relationship to Britpop, the British music press, their fans, etc. Plagenhoef actually avoids describing the music on the titular album until 20 pages from the end. His main gist is that, due to the internet and MP3s, Belle and Sebastian may be the last band to find success so incrementally since even demos are instantly available to everyone worldwide on MySpace before a band even signs with a label. The death of scarcity/secrecy.
It's not coming out until November, but I stumbled upon it when searching for other stuff by Scott Plagenhoef after finishing up his 33 1/3 book on If You're Feeling Sinister. He spends most of the book placing Belle & Sebastian in context as descendents of the C86 crowd, or more precisely, Orange Juice and the Smiths (and, of course, Velvet Underground), and detailing their relationship to Britpop, the British music press, their fans, etc. Plagenhoef actually avoids describing the music on the titular album until 20 pages from the end. His main gist is that, due to the internet and MP3s, Belle and Sebastian may be the last band to find success so incrementally since even demos are instantly available to everyone worldwide on MySpace before a band even signs with a label. The death of scarcity/secrecy.
Labels: Music
Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2008
3 Comment(s):
I've thought about how it would be cool to find some metric of band popularity and make a graph that plots the trajectory of the, say, 50 most popular "indie" bands of the last 20 years. It would be cool to compare the rise (and fall) of bands in 1995 and 2007 -- as you allude to, I think it would show that the rise is much more compressed, and I also suspect the falloff in popularity is much faster, too. (Bands come up so fast now that it's easier for them to get overexposed and draw a backlash or just exhaust the appetite for their music.)
One metric for such a graph would be blog mentions over time, but that obviously rules out comparison with the earlier period. Album sales have the same problem in reverse. Maybe a hybrid measure could be constructed...
I'd suggest a formula consisting of the following:
- a sampling of year-end lists from magazines, sites, anywhere else you could find them
- a hierarchical rating based on the power/influence of the band's label
- the size of the venues a band played on tour (in a representative metro area or two)
- media mentions, although this would probably really boost the more popular bands and have no effect on those not quite big enough to get mentioned
Huh, those are all good ideas that hadn't occurred to me. Especially the year-end lists and the size of the venues the band played on tour.
The former might require some trips to the library to find pre-internet issues of music mags. I guess alternative newsweeklies would be a good source for this, because I think a lot of them do this sort of list, they represent the indie demographic, and they've been around both before and after the arrival of the internet music apparatus.
As for the size of venues played on tour, I know some obsessive fansites keep lists of all shows, setlists, etc...I doubt they're available for all bands, though. Maybe some venues keep publicly-available lists.
At some point when I have way too much free time, I will actually attempt to do this.
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