Of
course you all see where this is going. We here at Last Plane to
Jakarta have yet to get email lambasting us for being too subtle.
The thing is, actually, that there is no genre, no type, no style,
no hue or color or effect or cadence or classification in any field
which cannot be used to make something beautiful given the right circumstances.
This includes even the types of music that we’re all pretty sure
suck outright. New country. Cha-cha. Post-Slint instrumental guitar
rock with all the cloying time-signature changes and the whispery
stalker-video-store-clerk vocals. It should not surprise anybody if
an album comes out in one of these genres that asserts itself so loudly
and so clearly as the best album of the year in any style that it
becomes easy, in the aftermath of the year-end polls, to spot the
poseurs simply by seeing who left the album in question off of their
lists. Don’t get me wrong: I hate it as much as you do when somebody
makes a great nu-metal song like Slipknot’s “Left Behind.”
The world would be much more comprehensible if whole genres could
be ignored with the comfortable arrogance of countries not “recognizing”
one another. Who, in times like ours, doesn’t wish for a more
readily comprehensible world?
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