Friday Night Music

December 5, 2014 1:32 PM

Mr. Krugman’s musical reawakening came sometime in early 2011 when Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Up until that point, as is true with many baby-boomers, he believed that “the great age of modern music ended sometime in the 70s.” Arcade Fire convinced him “that the wonder goes on.” Indeed.

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman (previously) has, for the past several years, been posting very non-economist entries in his blog, under the moniker "Friday Night Music." A few selected entries (The NYT blog doesn't use tags, so there's no easy way to browse all of them):

Lucius, Monsters

First Aid Kit

Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas

Suzanne Vega

Amason

Cheryl Wheeler

Sylvan Esso

Sarah Jarosz

Beirut

Carolina Chocolate Drops

San Fermin

The Civil Wars

posted by jbickers (46 comments total)

Oh, Paul Krugman... You believe in visions and prayers, but you don't believe in what's really there.

Do you really think you're a young man on a dance floor? A young man in a young man's world?
posted by boo_radley at 1:36 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

"We play both kinds of music - indie and twee"
posted by thelonius at 1:37 PM on December 5, 2014 [30 favorites]

That's how it starts
We go back to your house
We check the Nobel
And start to figure it out
posted by gwint at 1:44 PM on December 5, 2014 [6 favorites]

I care deeply about what Paul Krugman thinks about music.

What's on Maureen O'Dowd's ipod i need to know.
posted by empath at 1:50 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

Clearly there needs to be cross-pollination between this thread and the dad-rock one.
posted by Lyme Drop at 1:52 PM on December 5, 2014

So, are we all Lucians now?
posted by chavenet at 1:57 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

OK but Cheryl Wheeler and also the Chocolate Drops are awesome for rillz.
posted by allthinky at 1:59 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wait wait wait - he's saying that economists are people?

woah woah woah there.
posted by GuyZero at 2:12 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lyme Drop: "the dad-rock one."

The Dad-Rock Life (The Thrill of the Grill)
Check the moustache
I grew it out for you
It lets me brush past
ladies in a crowded room
fucka bus pass
now I got an Audi dude
posted by boo_radley at 2:19 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Clearly there needs to be cross-pollination between this thread and the dad-rock one.

...and the current Grammy Thread
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:19 PM on December 5, 2014

I want to live in a world in which there is absolutely zero chance of my finding out what's on MoDo's iPod. (Mostly because of the possibility that there is any intersection whatsoever with what's on mine.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:20 PM on December 5, 2014

This Google Search finds many more, if not all of them.
posted by togdon at 2:29 PM on December 5, 2014

Arcade Fire is a band laser-focused to appeal to baby boomers so none of this is particularly surprising. (Most or all of the others listed are too.)
posted by naju at 2:38 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Arcade Fire is a band laser-focused to appeal to baby boomers so none of this is particularly surprising. (Most or all of the others listed are too.)

More like Gen X'ers I thought?
posted by GuyZero at 2:57 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Even my college friends, who are all about six years younger than me (so they're now in their early-to-mid 40s) seem to have mostly (with some notable exceptions) stagnated in their musical tastes; all my high school friends listen, even now, to the same awful music we listened to in the early 80s; and I basically know no one older than me (I'm 50, Krugman is 61) that even has a clue about contemporary popular music, other than what they've maybe sort of heard on the radio. That Krugman seems, to my taste, to swing heavily to the anodyne and more obvious part of the indie scene is a pretty minor criticism of his taste, all things considered. That he is even bothering to look for new music at his age is an achievement. For someone like him -- a respected academic, well-off, an economist of all things -- it's sort of amazing. I think it reveals something very positive about him.

Krugman would fit in very well on MeFi. He's a bit of a science-fiction nerd, he's culturally progressive, he's a STEM type but with a strong interest in the humanities, and so on. Given his background and his career and his social peers, he really ought to be in every sense an example of the centrist version of the Very Serious People he so often criticizes. And not just about policy, but in all his sensibilities, where, you know, his favorite band is U2 and his favorite TV shows are Modern Family and Cheers and so on. If I were to meet a random 60-year-old highly-regarded economist, I'd expect to have almost zero common points of reference with them. Or, for that matter, a random NYT columnist. That this isn't the case with Krugman continues to surprise me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:58 PM on December 5, 2014 [19 favorites]

As one of the older MeFites, I don't believe there ever stopped being good music. The problem seems to have started in the 1990s when Clear Channel got hold of FM radio and stripped down all the playlists, and then around 2005-2010 pop music started turning into an amalgamation of American Idol style ballads and eye-candy divas.

However if you go to streaming Internet radio, there's a ton of new stuff being cranked out by great artists that just is never destined to hit the Top 40 in the US. Take a look at Radio Paradise's playlist, for example... there's some good stuff in there.

There was certainly a lot of crap radio during the 1980s, but there were also a fair number of DJs who made sure some of the more obscure music saw the light of day, especially when you tuned in during the evenings and at night. That stuff would often then start going mainstream.
posted by crapmatic at 2:59 PM on December 5, 2014 [8 favorites]

> Arcade Fire is a band laser-focused to appeal to baby boomers

I'm not sure what definition of "boomers" you are using -- I certainly never saw them as laser-focused on the 50-70 crowd... I'm curious what you are seeing that makes you think that.
posted by MysticMCJ at 3:00 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

Think Bruce Springsteen worship, authenticity and capital-m Meaningfulness as high ideals, long-form concepts, "the album is everything", rockist ideals and myth-making in general... they're as much of an ambitious 70s rock-band-as-poet-savior act as you could hope for. (Not criticisms necessarily, I like them.)

Now as far as Gen X goes, don't get me wrong, there's huge Talking Heads, and a bunch of other influences. Musically there's more going on. But I can't think of another modern band that should appeal to Krugman's demographic more than this one.
posted by naju at 3:07 PM on December 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

Do you really think you're a young man on a dance floor? A young man in a young man's world?

It's fun to be this ungenerous but there's no reason to suppose he thinks he's anything but what he is: a pretty old guy discovering that if you open yourself up to it you don't have to stay stuck in the music of your 20s, and sharing that fact with his cohort readership.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:13 PM on December 5, 2014 [8 favorites]

I saw him on the Metro in DC, like a regular joe. A Chinese tourist sat next to me. I said there is a nobel prize winner on this train. He asked where and I pointed out Krugman. I left and the guy went up for a selfie, I guess.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:13 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Well, I guess that validates my disdain for the Arcade Fire, anyway.
posted by koeselitz at 3:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

One thing I've noticed in Europe is that there seems to be less age stratification in musical tastes: younger people will turn up for the concerts that pull in mostly grey heads in the US, and people seem more inclined to continue to follow new acts into their 40s and 50s. It's like they have a longer "now".
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I had never heard of Lucius until Krugman mentioned them, and they're now in pretty steady rotation on my playlist. They're about as far away from "laser-focused to appeal to baby boomers" as you can get. For Christ's sake, tUnE-yArDs was featured on "The Good Wife", and if you've listened to her stuff, you know it's pretty far from focus-grouped.

As a listener and as a musician, my take on it is that this is one of the best periods of popular music in my lifetime; granted, my lifetime only extends back to 1972. That said, I have pretty ecumenical tastes. And a shockingly large percentage of the stuff coming out now is fucking amazing.

In terms of sheer musicality, general songcraft, and "interesting to listen to"-ness, the selection is fantastic. Maybe my tastes should be considered suspect. Maybe I'm an uncritical consumer of pop. I'll just say that I'm getting more musical stimulation and having more "damn, that was REALLY GOOD" moments listening to popular music now than anytime in my life.

So I'm not surprised that Krugman is enjoying the present musical renaissance. He likes good music, and there's a ton of good music coming out. In my opinion, anyone who thinks this is some sort of low period isn't listening very hard.
posted by scrump at 3:27 PM on December 5, 2014 [8 favorites]

well, i'm 57, and i'm currently more interested in weirdness from the past because what i hear in the present just sounds like something i've heard in the past anyway, only much more stylized and precise - today's production style, where arrangements are crisp and clean and there's not any murkiness and you can hear everything, just doesn't appeal to me

i just don't hear what i want to hear so i make it myself
posted by pyramid termite at 3:28 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Ivan Fyodorovich

I basically know no one older than me (I'm 50, Krugman is 61) that even has a clue about contemporary popular music, other than what they've maybe sort of heard on the radio

As a mild counterpoint, my Dad's 72, and I've been sending him my "latest discoveries", including stuff like Metric and TV On The Radio, to his great enjoyment. He mentioned the other day that he thought Blondfire's "Where The Kids Are" sounded like Metric, which was no less startling for being something I'd thought myself.
posted by scrump at 3:34 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I want Paul Krugman to write about Taylor Swift.
posted by spitbull at 4:07 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

A photo gallery of fans at a Chicago Arcade Fire concert reveals they are mostly ... well, not teenyboppers. I count one obvious Boomer, but they're mostly Gen-X, with a smattering of Millennials. In one of the first notable coverage they got, the crowd was described as "uniformly young". On the other hand, they had almost immediate endorsement by Boomer-ish musical eminences such as Byrne, Bowie, and Lauper, but that would suggest more a timelessness or agelessness to their appeal, which I do not think was coincidental to the rise of a sort of internet-spurred ability for people to explore the music they liked irrespective of what might be popular at the time, i.e. the phenomenon where someone discovers their kids are into early new wave.
posted by dhartung at 4:08 PM on December 5, 2014

Didn't mean to offend or anything with my baby boomer comment. Just, these are exactly the tastes I would expect for someone his age encountering contemporary music. Would love to read Krugman's take on Oneohtrix Point Never or Run the Jewels but I doubt that's happening anytime soon.
posted by naju at 4:20 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

"For Christ's sake, tUnE-yArDs was featured on 'The Good Wife', and if you've listened to her stuff, you know it's pretty far from focus-grouped."

Your mere mention of tUnE-yArDs put "Gangsta" solidly into my head. Of course, then I immediately played it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:09 PM on December 5, 2014

Even my college friends, who are all about six years younger than me (so they're now in their early-to-mid 40s) seem to have mostly (with some notable exceptions) stagnated in their musical tastes;

Thing is, by the time you are 40, you've got a good 20-30 years of music you grew up with. So the time you have to discover new music while maintaining what you had with the old stuff diminishes. Eventually, you get to know all the music you really need - or more importantly, have the time for - and so the newer stuff becomes less and less relevant.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 5:16 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

As an aside, I've found the best possible way for me to keep current with What The Kids Are Listening To is to find the college stations. A good 20-30% of my listening at present is either Sirus XMU or the local university radio.
posted by scrump at 5:21 PM on December 5, 2014

Krugman loves Computer Jesus Refrigerator.
posted by ergomatic at 6:21 PM on December 5, 2014

Naju, you didn't offend at all - I was honestly curious. You framed it in a way I hadn't considered, and one that makes perfect sense. Thanks for answering- now I realize that 70s rock influenced me indirectly in ways I hadn't considered. Which is funny since I always considered the 70s my least favorite decade for music.
posted by MysticMCJ at 6:29 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

to keep current with What The Kids Are Listening To is to find the college stations

The college stations near me are playing lots and lots of really old blues, r&b and country stuff, along with weird chem-trail conspiracy stuff. Are kids listening to that now?
posted by DarkForest at 6:43 PM on December 5, 2014

Oneohtrix Point Never

Sounds like the tunes played behind stand-alone arcade games, which is, I suppose, understandable.
posted by telstar at 7:33 PM on December 5, 2014

I've found the best possible way for me to keep current with What The Kids Are Listening To is to have a kid.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 8:21 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Me too, which is why I know a lot about One Direction, Owl City, and Katy Perry now. Match that, Paul Krugman!
posted by escabeche at 8:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I like Ariana Grande so much I want to order an Ariana Venti </alaska>
posted by en forme de poire at 9:25 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I like Arcade Fire (except for that recent foray into cocaine disco - that was horrible) but I don't see the laser focus on boomers. Other than the occasional Springsteen graces, most of their sound is set on Gen X.

I'm a boomer (just turned 57) and for me, the hunt for new music had never ended. Some of my friends have given up. They just listen to whatever's on the constipated classic rock stations and almost never buy new music. But I know many who have not given up. Me, I almost gave up in the mid-90s when grunge died and all that manufactured dance pop (Britney, Backstreet, etc.) took over. But the Internet opened up at the same time, exposing me even more to the underground. I found a couple sites dedicated to prog rock and found out there were a ton of new bands practicing that dark art. At the same time, I could pick up the public radio stations that were exploring alt/indie. A couple years ago a record store clerk had a freakout when I bought Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest on vinyl. He couldn't comprehend anyone over 25 listening to that. I worked with a few twenty-somethings in the 00s, they'd give me Decemberists and I'd give them the Kinks. It all worked out. And finally, I got to the point where I finally "got" jazz and achieved somewhat of an appreciation of classical.

So I would say I listen to an even wider variety of music than I ever did back in my prime. My tastes are still pretty rockist. I prefer artists that write and perform their own material. Beats and drum machines leave me cold - it's like George Clinton said of disco "it's like making love with just one stroke". It's way too easy for me to spot the influences in "new" bands and that spoils some of the fun. I prefer music with an edge so I'm afraid that you'll never catch me listening to anything in whatever passes for the top 40 these days. I've got a good public radio station that gives me an incredible variety of music, the web does the rest. I've been getting more and more instrumental in my tastes because it's great to work to. So I'm playing a lot of stuff like Djam Karet or some of those stoner bands like Earthless that just work up monstrous grinding twenty minute grooves.

My greatest gripe with music these days is that it matters so little and tastes are so divided. Music doesn't define generations any more, at least not the way it did for boomers. Sure, you youngs listen to a lot of music but you have so much else. The Golden Age of TV, streaming movies, games that give hundreds of hours of entertainment and sell as many copies as Thriller, phones smarter than the computers that ran the moon landing. See, for us boomers, TV and movies didn't cater to us (see the films discussed here) and The Graduate aside, when they did the pandering was clumsy and over-reaching. The early boomers had the lame surf movies, Elvis movies, which were about as hip as Barry Goldwater. The later boomers like me were subjected to even worse pandering. The Brady Bunch seems cute in its clueless quaintness now but when it aired it was something our parents thought we would actually like and relate to. It's that kind of shit that sold Black Sabbath albums. Music was all we had and I miss the days when it really mattered.

Thank you for staying off my lawn.
posted by Ber at 10:40 PM on December 5, 2014 [7 favorites]

Gen Xer here. There is some totally amazing music coming out right now. (E.g. New Shellac!). And I continue to discover tons of great punk/post-punk I was too young/uncultured to get back when it first came out. I feel so fortunate to be able to have the internet and live in LA and be able to go to shows here.

Krugman: I totally love him. And that he was willing to look beyond Fleetwood Mac (not that there's anything wrong with them) and start exploring contemporary indie makes me love him even more. And this is true even if he never makes it as far as Savages or Parquet Courts or whatever.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:49 AM on December 6, 2014

Thing is, by the time you are 40, you've got a good 20-30 years of music you grew up with.

Plus, you know, a job and responsibilities.
posted by spitbull at 5:20 AM on December 6, 2014

Also remember all your precious twee "indie" will be Fleetwood Mac to your kids.
posted by spitbull at 5:21 AM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Another point of reference: my dad is 62 and has recently gotten a bit more into Good Kid Maad City that I gave him sometime last year.

He called it "that weird Christian album". This is a hardcore Dylan fan that used to blast Straight Outta Compton in the 80s, and quite a bit in between. He doesn't keep up on new stuff since he's finally discovering jazz, but he can recognize what he likes.

That's also me though, and I have a real bias towards hip hop. A goth (ok, industrial) friend and I were lamenting that the arcade fire doesn't actually sound like an arcade on fire, but more like a formulaic indie band that whines a lot.

YMMV. Good for Paul.
posted by lkc at 7:43 AM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Relating music to eras by artist makes little sense artistically. I'm 57, and I keep up with "new" music in the sense of new artists. But rarely is the music "new" in that I can't relate it to something else I like from the past. I have a reasonably wide range of tastes, but my core, go-to, comfort music is in the stream of pop music starting with Brit-pop and American garage, through punk and the "Nuggets" revivals, post punk, and so on (with appropriate retro linkages to rock-a-billy and psycho-billy, blues, and other Americana). So, is the fact that I dig the Parquet Courts an indication that I'm keeping up with "new" music? I have my doubts, since I can enjoy them as being part of this larger tradition. (This is similar to pyramid termite's sentiments--who, mysteriously has the same age as me!) Really, this is how I keep up with new music. I know that I love, say Public Enemy, and so I can look for people influenced by them. (It's sort of how you do a literature review, come to think of it.)

My kids and I have a lot of fun with the whole "dad music" thing, but it's generally pretty silly, as well: at this point, it's mostly a residual cultural effect of a stale marketing trope. But let's be real: it's really pretty impossible for there to be as much of a divide between parents and their kids now (musically) as there was in the 70s: I was gettin' all "androgenous", listening to Bowie and glam rock during high school in my Ohio hick town (and reading about the Stooges and the Velvets in Cream and Rolling Stone, magazines printed on pulp paper that felt underground), while my parents were listening to Jerry Vale and Lawrence Welk. Now, my kids and I basically listen to the same sort of music (relatively speaking). The delta is just not that big.

In a weird way, this made me feel sorry for my kids. When they were younger (early teens for them, mid 40's for me), I listened to way cooler music than they did, and sort of taught them the Canon of underground rock. I remember them mocking me listening to Pavement (or the Cramps or what have you) when they were in middle school, only to realize with shock as they grew a bit older than my stuff was hip. (Well, except for Steely Dan, whom I adore, and who seem to be in the Dad Music Hall of Fame.) It got really fun when they realized I had taste, and then they developed their taste and could share in a sort of friendly competition. Now that is some fun shit, there!

Finally: Good on Krugman! The guy always struck me as a real mensch. This just reinforces that feeling.
posted by mondo dentro at 9:11 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Plenty of the 20-somethings I know think Steely Dan is really cool. But I might hang with an unusual crowd.
posted by naju at 12:29 PM on December 6, 2014

Dowd's is all ICP in preparation for her forthcoming yellow-gonzo Juggalo piece.
posted by mubba at 6:15 PM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]