Coming in from the coasts

You know the old truism about how trends start on the east coast, or in Europe, and have to "make it" in to the Midwest or other more culturally remote regions? Well, the Dirty Projectors have made it to new music-land. I thought I was hip because I heard of them through word-of-mouth all the way back in April (always the most approved-of way to find out about something new), but now even Newmusicbox has reviewed Bitte Orca, and the band has become the most recent pop-world entity that composers like to trot out their appreciation of without really incorporating as an influence. This practice goes back into the '90s as well: the previous batch included Radiohead and Bjork, favorite groups of many composers who liked to claim they "didn't only listen to contemporary concert music" although what they wrote sounded exactly, and only, like other contemporary concert music. I'd imagine that even back in the '80s, composers whose music was still infatuated with inaudible pseudo-modernistic pitch structures would trumpet their love of the Talking Heads to try and seem more with-it. To be fair, I've spent most of my short composing career trying to make my pop influences matter in my non-pop creations, and pretty much haven't been able to. A friend recently told me that any sort of "crossover" is twice as hard to pull off, and I think he's right.

So anyway, now that everyone else is talking about Bitte Orca (and, according to a friend who works with musicians in Brooklyn, the city of New York is now tired of the band), I won't talk about it anymore, except to say that I'm envious of the young musicians who'll get to hear this at age 15. I'll bet they get the same feeling I did at the same age when I first heard The Soft Bulletin or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This is a special intersection in music, one where whimsical experimentalism meets pop accessibility. It's a rich corner that has led to some beautiful results with replay value. To the youngsters who are inspired by this stuff, I say this: watch out with music school. They aren't going to understand your relationship to this music. So keep a hand in recorded music, because those people will.

Also: I've plugged them once, I'll plug them again, but another group/project that fits into this realm would be The Oracle Hysterical.