2009: A new face odyssey

With 2009, the rather lamely-titled noughties come to an end. There was, of course, a time, when the ninth year in a decade had a sort of mythological contemporaneous importance to both the past and the future of popular music: an importance which manifested itself in people accepting the ‘death’ or ‘rebirth’ of eras, trends and genres, while simultaneously erecting rather reductive umbrella-terms (in the vein of the ‘Swinging’ sixties, ‘New Romanticism’ et al) in an effort to make sense of rapidly evolving musical landscapes, and inextricably linking these new understandings to the passing of decades. In, above all, widespread cultural punctuating, as commentators interpreted a certain kind of event – the Rolling Stones playing Hyde Park in 1969, say, or Sid Vicious ODing in a Greenwich Village apartment ten years later – as having sufficient significance to ensure that, as far as music was concerned, nothing could ever be the same again.

But this is not that time. Because for myriad reasons that it makes very little sense to explore now (beyond pointing out that principal among them is, of course, the towering monument to both human achievement and human stupidity that is the internet), the noughties have tolerated such a smorgasbord of absurd new genres (most of them appropriately enough prefixed with the ubiquitous NU-), have heralded such an excessive number (and, indeed, variety) of artists as ‘era-defining’ (from the Strokes to the Streets, via Dizzee and the Arctic Monkeys), and have played host to so many stuttering ‘movements’ and ‘revolutions’ (the vast majority of them actually invented by the NME), that attempting to encapsulate their essence in a single word, or to locate even a couple of truly noughties-defining moments or individuals, would be like trying to catch smoke – as pointless as it is impossible. Indeed, it is appropriate that the first decade in the majority of people’s lifetimes to have a name that hasn’t ever really caught on (let’s face it, noughties does sound a bit gay, doesn’t it) has also been the most musically indefinable for half a century. And with linguistic experts already debating what on earth we’re going to call the next ten years (the teens? The naughteens?) it seems more than likely that this is a state of affairs that isn’t going to be changing anytime soon.

All of which makes talking about the significance of 2009 in terms of any sort of larger context all but impossible. It will, like the last few years, inevitably be a hyperbolically-charged, unimaginatively inconsistent, www-centric law unto itself. Certain trends from the last couple of years do undoubtedly still have legs – both the commercial and critical dominance of the theatrically hip female artiste is only going to become more intimidating, thanks to the likes of La Roux (oddpop), Little Boots (fit), Florence and the Machine (HYPE), Lady GaGa (predictable), VV Brown (retrotastic) and a new Lilly Allen record (entitled It’s Not Me It’s You – eek), and lovely gentle ghosty-folky shit (resurrected in 2008 by Fleet Foxes, Noah and the Whale and the alarmingly adored Bon Iver) will continue to thrive in the form of Slow Club, Trembling Bells, the brilliantly named Wounded Knee and, potentially, the Chaplin Sisters (who are EXCELLENT). But the standard broadsheet-backed alternative-breakthrough quota is likely to be filled by a pretty diverse cluster of bands: Empire of the Sun (hopefully), White Lies (definitely), Broken Records (probably), Little Comets (for a short time) and Mirrors (improbably). Oh, and taking on urban-crossover responsibilities for 2009 will be Chipmunk. He’s going to be everywhere.

Elsewhere, there are a couple of records to get genuinely excited about. Merriweather Post Pavilion, the seventh studio album by the wonderful Animal Collective, has got an astonishing critical momentum behind it, and promises to be a uniquely inventive joy, and new releases from the likes of Andrew Bird (January 20th), Missy Elliot (February 10th) and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (March 17th), as well as a solo debut from Dan Auerbach, the brilliantly-voiced frontman of the Black Keys, all look capable of making 2009 positively bearable. Meanwhile, high-profile new albums by Antony and the Johnsons, Bruce Springsteen, Franz Ferdinand, the Prodigy, Morrissey, No Doubt, the Beastie Boys and Cyprus Hill may well universally disappoint, but will make a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people in the process. And while we’re on the subject of money, if reunions that apparently we all never thought we’d see happen are your thing, then start getting excited about Blur. And then start getting even more excited about Morrissey and Marr.

The conclusion that one should draw from all this, is that 2009 isn’t going to be the last hurrah that hindsight tells us resounded in 69, 79, even 1989. The noughties are a decade which will be remembered not for the cultural bricolage that has confused a generation of teenagers looking for something to belong to, so much as for the new platforms that have been constructed to house that mess – myspace, youtube, the ipod, the podcast, Bluetooth, limewire, digital television and a thousand other remarkable innovations. And it’s going to take more than the passing of a decade to reverse that particular sphere of development. 2009 is going to be a year in which the genuine, passionate lover of music has to trawl through an ever-growing quantity of shite in his or her efforts to find something to cling onto, something to love. Thank Christ for a generation of geeks, then, who have given us the tools with which to do it.