Article Response: Best Year Ever / Download This 101-81

Part 3 now up.

Your claim about "all" being "dilettantes" strikes me as excessively universalizing. I think you are really describing your own life: so why not say "I am a dilettante now"?

Apart from that, what strikes me heavily is that I've never heard of a hell of a lot of what you discuss, and the stuff I've heard of I mostly haven't heard. It is remarkable to discover just how far apart our musical heads are.

I am surprised that you like this geezer Daniel Bedingfield. I don't know owt about him really, but I quite like this one song he released called 'If You're Not The One'. Do you like that?

He is also a talking head on Dave Pearce's The Dance Years on ITV1. He probably doesn't like reminding people about that, though.

Tom's point about us being "all" "dilletantes" (ie dabblers) now is interesting and ties in with his excellent point re:how 2002 has been a year of "fantastic marginalia" ie no BNFs (is that what Reynolds calls them? - see his Faves/Unfaves 2001 for pre-emptive follow-ups to Tom's thought).

The "We are all [x] now" formation is referring to the readership - if you have the capability to read Freaky Trigger (i.e. "to use the Internet") you increasingly have the capability to listen to anything you like with unprecedented ease. If you choose not to use that capability that's up to you. Like the political formations ("We are all middle-class now" - T Blair) that dilettantes sentence echoed, the idea is deliberately exclusionary and challenging to people who don't feel like, or don't want to be, the thing in question. Something might well be lost as more people become uncommitted listeners - I'd love to provoke someone (you?) into suggesting what that might be.

Search for 'Bedingfield' and it's the first hit.

the net makes it just as easy to fully isolate yrself if you so wished obviously

Possibly I should have remembered to vote for that song in the poll.

My own comment re. dilettantes is not at all an attack on dilettantes, or on you, or the music you like. It is on the excessive generalization in what you say. I might well be a dilettante myself, but that doesn't mean everyone is. If I said everyone was a Darling Buds fan just cos some people are in a position to go and buy one of their old records, the absurdity of the claim would be evident enough.

One could probably make a good case that your list shows you as very committed to one or two genres of music. I think you may indeed be sth of a dilettante, but I'm not sure that your faves list supports that view.

I agree with what Raggett says about abilities, actions, etc.

Here's tracks 40-21 - and I've got the last chunk half finished though that's taking longer cos most of the stuff that was going to go in separate mini-essays is just ending up there now. Anything to avoid formatting separate pages.

I'm not sure that I was at all clear enough on what I meant about dilettante - I didn't mean it in a genre sense, more in a sense that the boundaries between committed and uncommitted fans of something, and between critics and fans and gatekeepers and gatekept all seem to me to be eroding. That it didn't make sense anymore to say "I am the Great Critic X and I say this year was Not Very Good but Wilco and Interpol Mattered"; or to say "I am Tom Ewing and this year Rock and Indie were Bad but hip-hop and bootlegs were Good so here are the Best Tracks".

I was renouncing any critical authority I might have because there's so much happening that it seems like mentalism to suggest that anyone can 'keep on top of it' or 'filter' it with any efficiency (things that seem to me to be implied in the idea of critics rounding up a year) - hence the 'all dilettantes' thing.

Woohoo! I've found a role in life!

and you've taken massive advantage of the net to become more so.

I'm not sure if that's taking massive advantage of the net or one very small corner of same (admittedly a rich one with lots of input). I'm massively sucking down loads of mp3s without having to try all that hard and then possibly sitting on them for months at a time (potentially stretching into years!), rather than actively seeking out something and go for the instant gratification hit of whatever I might find. I only break out the iPod for trips, I go for stretches of time at work and at home playing absolutely nothing, I generally still prefer to listen to albums first and foremost. Is that me being a dilettante (good or bad or whatever) or just being cursedly lazy? ;-) Or then again:

I'm not sure that I was at all clear enough on what I meant about dilettante - I didn't mean it in a genre sense,

Ah, fret not, I didn't take it in that sense, at least! I was more considering the means by which one listens, as I was outlining above. I remember the term 'post-indie' being thrown around a bit, but sometimes I honestly feel like I'm post-music, like it's there but not necessarily the center of my heart or brain, a strange addendum one can interact with and then just as easily ignore. An odd feeling but I'm not uncomfortable with it now, or as ragingly ticked off with it as a number of posts and a few of my articles last year suggested...

And thank ya Pinefox. The Bedingfield album is most enjoyable, my review of it should be on the AMG soonish.

this one particularly is just laden with happy-bittersweet moments.

>>> it didn't make sense anymore to say [...] "I am Tom Ewing and this year Rock and Indie were Bad but hip-hop and bootlegs were Good so here are the Best Tracks".

???

Looking at this latest list, the same things strike me again:

1) I don't know the records you like: it really surprises me, how divided things have become;

2) although I don't know them, as far as I can tell they appear to be massively concentrated in one or two genres; so much indeed for 'genre dilettantisme';

3) lots of sparky *writing*, as ever; I wish it was on a subject that I didn't find so alienating, or at least alien.

If I'd posted a list of the older music I'd got into in 2002 you might be a lot happier by the way - the Beatles and Springsteen featured and there's a Springsteen piece half-written which I hope you'll enjoy.

Ronan:
Even the Neptunes etc working with Britney and Justin gave the year a kind of anything could happen feel

For this alone, you're getting a slapping when I see you next, young man. I'd give you a sense of perspective, but I'm notoriously short on it myself.

Well, I agree with that. "Music" is an immense category - almost an abstraction, really - which I would not use in this kind of context.

Bring on the Boss. Perhaps all is not lost.

The death of musical history? Fukuyama would be intrigued...

I for one don't think that 2003 was actually that much better than 2002 or 2001 for music overall, but then I've been a bit of an advocate of the "all years are good years for music" approach for years.

I started from the realisation that I had enjoyed music more in 2002 than in any year since I was about 21/22, maybe more than any year ever. That enjoyment colours my perception of the year - I don't think there is a way to objectively rate a year, to say what it "really WAS" like. All I can offer is my perspective, which was that the lack of anything 'big' to worry about made me much more open to and aware of all the great non-big things happening.

Pinefox I mean 'dilettante' as opposed to 'expert' not anything to do with what genres I am or aren't listening to. (Though my listening is much broader than the list suggests cos obviously it's not confined to 2002's tracks).

Generally speaking, my sentiments as well. Mind you, the implication Tom makes is that this particular state of mind can replicate itself for him now year after year, but in turn that means the music isn't really the point of celebration here, but the process by which it is encountered. And there's nothing wrong with celebrating a particular change in listening habits here, it just makes the list even more of a critical red herring in ways.

I wonder...what if the list wasn't numbered at all?