2007
If any proof were needed that contemporary music stacks up with the best sounds from the Baby Boomer era or earlier, 2007 provided it.
"We want our film to be beautiful / Not realistic," Barnes admitted, but on this ambitous 12-minute disco-rooted anthem he managed to accomplish both.
The indie kids do love the thrift stores. In spite of this, few artists had effectively created an accurate musical representation of resale shops until the Go! Team came along. Documentary filmmaker Ian Parton did the dirty work of searching the dusty shelves and overcrowded racks for the chocest musical debris, coming away with an amalgam of jump-rope chants, show-theme brass, and educational-film soundtracks. All these components are on parade in "The Power Is On," along with the elements that crucially differentiate Parton's sample-driven party-rock from the hundreds of DJs doing similar Dumpster-diving: the sheets of Sonic Youthish noise and a lo-fi basement aesthetic that gives the song a Super-8 grain.
Selling Advertising: Indie Songs in Commercials Shockah
"New Slang," the shins (McDonalods)
"Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)," Of Montreal (Outback Steakhouse): Notoriously one of the few to agree to a lyrics change; Kevin Barnes subsequently claimed that selling out is not longer possible.
"Gravity Rides Everything," Modest Mouse (Nissan Quest)
"1 2 3 4," Feist (iPod)
Various songs from Sky Blue Sky, Wilco (Wolkswagen)
After the end of the 1990's Britpop explosion, those British rock magazines struggled to figure out where to go next: They got curious about chart pop, flirted with covering the emo and nu metal younger kids were getting into, and found themselves settling for putting American bands on their covers a lot more often.
And teenagers, like Beirut, singing in an antiquted style about the old country, can connect with other teenagers. No doubt the globalization of the music landscape, where elements from every place and time are up for grabs, has only just begun. Here's what it looked like as it was just beginning to hit its stride.
The message of "Losing My Edge" is hardly direct; it's both love letter and hate mail to The Scene, and it employs classic music-reviewer creative stunts to avoid being merely a list of complaints.