What Happened to the Scene?

Our shrinking attention spans, and music’s flawed imitation of fashion’s trends model, have combined to rob our generation of a scene that could define our era

Though previous decades are defined by the cultural movements that set them apart from their predecessors (Motown, Grunge, Britpop, Hair Rock, take your pick), it’s much harder to pin down for recent times. Despite a monumental recession and a change of government, no significant cultural movement has taken shape.

Instead, there is something uniquely cross-bred about culture, and music in particular, today. The Queen of Now, Lady Gaga, sums it up: “The mark of a great song is how many genres it can embody”. Substitute the word “great” for the words “likely to sell”, and she might well have defined the nature of the modern mainstream music industry. In fact a Lady Gaga album is so disparate as to leave little of consistency to engage with bar her superbrand personality – which suits her bank balance just fine. The Gaga model is widely imitated, to varying degrees of success – turn on the radio and hear songs leap from dubstep basslines to soaring trance keyboard to europop vocals, before a rapper collaborator is drafted in to deliver a middle eight.

This is echoed in fashion – vintage clothing has gone mainstream, skinny jeans are worn by emo kids and fashionistas alike, and everyone’s look seems to borrow at least a little bit from everyone else’s.

Though cross-genre influence is nothing new in music - the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have existed without Keith and Mick skimming off the best of American blues, and Keith’s later fascination with country - in chart music today, this borrowing isn’t an homage or a celebration of a different genre, it’s a calculated rip off to lend credibility to a hollow commercial enterprise, defined entirely by the “personality” of the artist, not the music itself.

And it seems clear that one thing this has robbed us of - we of the noughties and beyond - is a real sense of a defining “scene” for our times.

Is It Us?

Well, partly - we just don’t seem to have the attention span to sustain a cultural movement in that way any more. When the Arctic Monkeys’ first album stormed to what seemed like an era-defining position in the early 2006 with the album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, it was a debut unlike any before it. Dragged to the big time by fans, not by promoters, these guys looked like likely candidates to define their era.

But they haven’t. As soon as the novelty wore off, we were looking for the next one – and though no-one quite came close (and my God there were dozens), people were less interested when the cheeky Sheffield lads returned. Their subsequent work was good, but it hardly seemed to matter. Their new album, Suck It And See, can win all the awards it likes (and it’s already doing its bit for the trophy cabinet), it’s not enough.

This lack of attention span isn’t all bad, however. Indeed there’s a strong argument for the lack of a dominant movement being a good thing.  Arguably the cultural cross-pollenation we see now makes people’s personal musical horizons much more broad. Though a lot of this is down to ease of access due to the internet, people have never been so interested in so many things at once – where in our parents’ day a person’s record collection (a few shockers aside) would stay close to one genre, or at least tell a linear story of that person’s taste from one genre to another as they grow older, now a person’s iPod will have hundreds of different types of music, waiting to be deployed for any occasion. A teenage girl (or a middle aged suburban man, for that matter) might have everything from saccharine hairbrush pop to electro and drum and bass on their iPod, and there would be nothing unusual in that. There’s far less identification to one single type of music, certainly, but that means there’s far less resistance to dabbling in different types of music. It might be shallow interest, but it’s there, and it’s to the enormous credit of tireless new music champions like the Tiggerishly enthusiastic Zane Lowe that this is growing.

This shows a lesser emotional attachment to music - maybe a damaging effect of the disposable nature of chart music, and possibly of the click-now, think-later download era – but in some ways at least, broader experience is better. It at least shows a measure of curiosity, and a level of curiosity based on the music itself, rather than personality or promotion. The kaleidoscope of genres even the most average iPod houses should offer some crumbs of comfort to acts slaving away on the periphery. This shallow support, hidden on iPods in bedrooms everywhere, needs to be linked together somehow to gain momentum, which is where some acts – Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, et al - have successfully used (the seemingly now-irrelevant) MySpace for in the past.

The Shape Of An Industry

That lack of attention span plays right into the hands of the much-maligned but terrifyingly successful Cowells of this world. Much of the music in the charts seems designed to just intrigue for long enough to induce the all-important 99p iTunes click. So rather than a genre of music seizing the moment, and the minds of that day’s youth, to storm to popularity in the way the Beatles or Nirvana did, chart music today channels the spirit of a scene without ever having to represent it - deliberately transient, seemingly not meant to last any longer than the duration of its radio play.

 This brings a nondescript track, and possibly its celebrity vehicle, some temporary credibility, but prevents the underground scene it is borrowing from to break through in a meaningful way. Radio tracks are given just enough of a dancey edge to be suitable in clubs, and people dance the night away without ever engaging properly with the scene they’re enjoying the bastardised nuances of.

 Music, then, is following fashion – where trends are set at the extremes, and are then watered down and re-purposed to sell in volume in the mainstream centre.  This works beneficially for fashion, because at the extremes are the pinnacle – the couture houses, the international designers, whose work costs the most.

In music, there is no such high-returns equivalent. You write a song, record it, and it’s available for 99p on iTunes. You can’t charge more for it because it’s avant-garde and trendsetting, unlike the catwalk shows of New York, Paris, London and Milan. More to the point, there’s no free download of high-fashion clothing, so prices don’t have to be so low as to deter the free downloaders.

So nowadays, rather than a meritocratic ladder, the music industry is more of a circular fortress – the money is in the centre, but it’s increasingly hard to get there without a hell of a lot of corporate support or an all-too-rare populist tidal wave such as the Arctic Monkeys once enjoyed.  And, to stretch a metaphor a bit too far, those guarding that fortress catch whatever you throw at them – the hallmarks of your scene, the characteristics of your craft, and use them as ammunition against you. There are talented acts who achieve chart success of course – look at Adele for the most recent and heartening example – but she’s not a trailblazer representing a generation. Nor has there been one, arguably, since Britpop.

Acts now need to take the fight elsewhere, to capitalize on the curiosity of the masses, rather than wait for the anointing hand of the charts. But they also need to play to the short – and shortening – attention spans of even the most interested audience. The increasingly clichéd role of “curator”, where an artist reaches outside their role of musician and tries to own a bigger collection of cultural artifacts, may be the answer – though this rather plays into the hands of the “superbrand” personalities- Gaga, Kanye West, et al – rather than those slaving away for recognition at the periphery. Or, it may be that multi-channel experiences like Bjork has just released – rather than albums – are the answer, although the amount of artists besides Bjork who could successfully carry a musical vision through other media as well might be few (without resorting to collaborators or recording company minions to add all the non-musical channels).

For those acts that can make the most out of shallower support, perhaps all hope is not lost. However it seems that the age of the era-defining “scene”, and a place in cultural history is dead.