Blog rock lacks a political edge ("raging against the machine is out" - DUH, Obama is president now)

Guardian UK ^ | Tuesday 9 February 2010 10.20 GMT | Ben Beaumont-Thomas

[a fool in paradise]

The US music blogosphere seems to have been turfed of late. The general terrain has returned to nature: gone are the tacky, post-Justice mirrored surfaces of two years ago and in their place are lo-fidelity hillocks and dream-pop pastures.

Just take a look at the names of the buzzy bands of the past few months: from the mountains (Mountain Man, Mount McKinley, Speck Mountain), through to the woods (Tall Firs, Woods), and then down to the sea (Beach House, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Best Coast, Beach Fossils, Coasting). There's a Rainbow Bridge to a Summer Camp, and Silk Flowers and Blue Roses in High Places. And all of it set utterly outside the city, outside work, outside the America of healthcare debates and ongoing wars.

Their fascination with the pastoral and apolitical is augmented by the other major strain in the US underground: nostalgia. With their intoxicatingly naive, redolent and melancholic music, the likes of Ducktails, Julian Lynch and James Ferraro retreat from the realities of modern life to the rose-tinted and half-remembered plains of their childhood, scattered with the imagery of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Global Hypercolour T-shirts, and red Lamborghinis.

So why is this happening? Kevin Drew of Canadian band Broken Social Scene articulated the current difficulty in songwriting in a recent interview with Pitchfork, saying that post-Bush, "now we're in the 'yes, we might be able to' world". There's no machine to rage against any more, no one to be calculatedly hedonistic about.

Of course, you could argue that the lo-fi hipster slackers would never have raged anyway. And it's easy to fire accusations of privilege as these (overwhelmingly white) musicians who comfort to look outside their immediate surroundings at an America of topographical majesty...

[a fool in paradise]

Dweeb Rock PING

[Snickering Hound]