RSSDecade in Review : Deep
Frank McGahon's selections from the last 10 years.
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It's a tricky business, looking back and summing up the character of a decade. There are two principal problems. Firstly, cultural changes rarely track the exact turning of the decade.
Even though we have a clear picture of what ‘the 70s’ and ‘the 80s’ were like and associate them with particular musical genres, you could argue that the 80s didn't get going until 1981 and in many ways, the true musical and cultural watershed that brought that decade as we now know it to a close was 1988 and not 1990.
Conversely, one of the musical genres most associated with the 80s was the New Romantic movement - yet this style had run its course by 1980 with its mainstream assimilation by David Bowie and his ‘Scary Monsters’ album.
The next problem is when you are so close to something that has just passed, it's often difficult to see the join. There's a natural progression in music - it's often only by looking back that you can draw a line between what belongs in that decade and this. In this regard, it wasn't until the mid-00s that I began to think of 1990s music as something different in character to that which we were all playing in this decade.
That said, I'm going to make a stab at sampling the music that describe the decade for me. I call it a ‘sampling’ rather than a selection as it’s would be nigh-on impossible to pick out the definitive tracks and there would undoubtedly be many egregious omissions. There are a number of obvious, well-known tunes along with a few more obscure ones that were maybe overlooked for whatever reason. So, for the moment, here we go…
Next: Frank's top five albums, singles and more...
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FrankMcG @ 4 Dec 2009 9:23Cheers Magoo!
I'd be surprised if the Gotan Project tracks don't sound familiar to you - they get used a lot on tv...
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Frank , very good article, I enjoyed reading it, agree with what you say too re record label shut down, but I have found a gem - The Gotan Project ‘La Revancha Del Tango’ [Ya Basta] - will have to investigate further, nice.