Simulacra and Simulation
Music geeks seem to be split about the trend toward finding ever more obscure parts of their favorite artists’ back catalogs showing up in commercials. The knee jerk response is almost always negative. But sometimes you’ll find them grudgingly admitting to enjoying hearing the songs more often or something. There’s also the fact that at least some of the marketing droids who are using this stuff were once record geeks themselves who went into some “creative” field and ended up as hipster-grup corporate drones.
I like a lot of the new “we sound like bands from the late 70s and 80s” music that’s come out over the last few years. It’s hard for me not to like it. These kids are way more faithful to the sound of their musical forebears than most of the people of my generation or my parents’ generation were to the music that inspired them. Liking the sound of this music is not nostalgia for me. I never quit listening to the music that inspires it. I’ve got two New Order CDs in the cd changer in my car right now. I do find these two trends coming together in a way that is personally disturbing.
I hear music in commericals sometimes that I can’t place. Usually, it’s that newer music that I just described from a band that I haven’t really bothered to listen to yet. From time to time, though, it’ll be a song that falls in a hole in my own music geekery. It’s from a b-side or import that I don’t have or maybe just an album that I listened to once when I was 14, decided was shit, and never listened to again. The slightly frightening realization I had the other day, though, was that often enough I have no clue whether what I’m hearing is genuine music from the late 70s and early to mid 80s or if it’s the new stuff. I can’t tell the real from the copy. As these younger artists start to cover the songs of the older ones or those older ones start to collaborate with the newer ones, will there even be such a thing as “real” and “copy” anymore?
