Best of the year: Daniel Trabun advises pop album
2015 IS FITTING THE END. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the seventh issue, journalist and media activist Daniel Trabun explains why the new Grimes album is the main pop album of 2015.
Daniel Trabun
journalist and media activist
Musical album today is not enough to be a good soundtrack. Swedish audiomasons record perfect music, so if you listen to Justin Bieber’s latest CD, you will most likely enjoy it - it's incredibly modern and perfectly produced. An album, like any work of art, must carry ideology and experience. Especially today, when ideologies are privatized by politics, you expect a similar force in art, and not elite, but mass, to work for everyone, pull the strings better than talented SMM players and other technologists (or their hands, why not).
At the end of October 1997, audio tapes and CDs of the new album by the pop princess and icons of Australian reality television Kylie Minogue appeared on the shelves of music shops in the world. The album was called "The Impossible Princess" and was a complex synthesis of understandable pop music and Kylie's emotional experiences from the break in relations with the label and the subsequent journey through Asia. The album about transformation was accepted poorly by both critics and listeners.
At the beginning of November 2015, Claire Boucher's new album "Art Angels" appeared on iTunes. Like "Impossible Princess", "Art Angels" fixed the moment of transformation: on the one hand, this is a pop record that the skeptic will comment on with the words "she (that is, Claire Bush) went on about the mainstream," on the other hand, this is uncomfortable pop plate, glitch version of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. The album Grimes is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic, ironic and infantile, prudently commercial and completely non-universal. This is the difference between 1997 and 2015.
Returning to ideology, as I said, this is important to me. The Grimes album is the manifesto of metamodernism (here it is explained in Russian what it is) in each song title, video, musical reference and, of course, the cover. A swinging pendulum - from a dress with a crinoline to a molly at a party. That is why "Art Angels" is the main world audio recording of 2015, the rest simply tell stories or practice technique.