the end of pop music as a cohesive, linear event

paotsaqΒ 20th March 2024 at 7:19pm

The physical object of music is tending to be obsolete β€” the vinyl and cassette revival is arguably but a niche movement of fetishism β€” and Morley brings attention to the dissolution of past, present and future. Of course, there were libraries, even phonoteques: but there's a recurrent point of a glut.

The initial energy that made pop music happen so instantly and persuasively – the charts, the sleeves, the photography, the record labels, the two-sided vinyl album and single, the way that one thing developed into the next thing, mostly leaving the last thing behind, other than something to fold back into the new thing, but in a new form – has become defunct. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just what has happened after all that movement, now that there is such a glut, of all the music happening now, and all the music that ever happened, all of it available to pluck out of the air, as the world becomes one big mobile playground, combined with one big ideological battleground.