AG Cook’s oddball imprint founded in 2013 has had a seismic impact on the charts. Now, after ten years, it can wind down in victory
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There are woefully few grand narratives in pop music these days. Over the past 20 years, there’s been nothing even remotely similar to the thrilling scenes that defined late 20th-century Britain: punk, rave, goth, two-tone, Madchester, New Romantic, garage – genres that send hearts hurtling back to a certain time and place. Even grime – whose mid-2010s popularity explosion re-energised British music, fashion and politics – was essentially a reprise of the sound that blazed a trail through 2002. In fact, when surveying the pop landscape today, it seems the closest thing we have to an overarching ‘moment’ is still The New Boring, a term coined by writer Peter Robinson in 2011 to describe the beige, ballad-heavy wave of tediously inoffensive music – your Ed Sheerans, Adeles, Coldplays – that was smothering the zeitgeist at the time. By many metrics, it still is.
If this sorry state of affairs has you primed to grieve the end of pop culture, fear not – because it’s only half the story. A genuinely novel musical subculture actually has been unfurling over the past decade: it may not have revolutionised British nightlife, but it has steadily worked to reinvent pop music in its own image.
Continue reading...by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian
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