I was browsing in Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free yesterday (a primarily indie-rock store in downtown Berlin) and they had the top albums of the year lists from Mojo and NME posted on the wall. Number One according to Mojo, NME, and the two staff members' lists posted on the wall is Elephant by the White Stripes.

Am I missing something? When did the White Stripes become the best and/or most important band in the world? Sure, my tastes haven't been in sync with the NME since the fall of Britpop, but this years' list had me growling like an old curmudgeon, "rrrgghh, this rock and roll garbage, in my day we listened to real music, not this shouty crap". It's one thing to be out of sync, and quite another thing to hold very little respect for the NME's list in part because I don't like most of the stuff on it. The NME Xmas issue has been a holiday highlight for me for a decade, but this year, after seeing the list and the featured contents on their web site, I doubt I'll bother with it this year.

Jon Spencer must be hanging himself -- he released "Orange" a decade too early. I never heard "Plastic Fang", but it must have been really atrocious to have been panned and shunted aside so quickly in the Strokes & Stripes world which we live in, particularly after the large promotional push behind it.

This most recent breed of rock bands has been pushed down our collective musical throats. They've been championed far out of proportion with their bottom line. Enough time has passed for these bands to take their mantle at the forefront of music. But it hasn't happened. The White Stripes are not the Next Big Thing. They are barely even a big thing.

It should be obvious that the biggest trend in music is rap/R&B/urban/etc. It is the dominating style in pop music today, by far. Not only that, the quality is through the roof, as good or better than pop music has been at any time during the rock era. Nobody hyped the urban music takeover, because discussions of the Next Big Thing in music is limited only to the Next Big Rock Thing, because most music criticism is still rock based and the people who write about it are rock-centric to the point that rock is the Music That Truly Matters and everything else doesn't.

The White Stripes struggle to sell a million albums but textbooks of ink are spilled on them. In the meantime, the Neptunes and Timbaland productions dominate the pop charts. Like the Beatles and Motown before them (to name but two examples), they have styles that are indisputably groundbreaking because their music has raised the bar for anyone who plans on writing and producting a hit. Do they get their credit as hitmakers and pop music success stories? Absolutely. Do they get credit for making important, vital, relevant music? Almost never. Does Motown? Of course. Do the Beatles? Ha, what a stupid question.

In 1998, I wrote (in a notebook which preceed the construction of this web site) that a rather large amount of time had passed since the most recent Next Big Thing (grunge, or Britpop if you consider the UK). As a result, writers were subconsciously (or consciously, in some cases) desperate to find the next megatrend and gain lifetime bragging rights for being the first to hype it. They were so desperate that they resorted to hyping anything, such as swing. Like swing had a chance in hell. Or, in the case of electronica, they lumped a whole load of unrelated musics under one buzzword-friendly umbrella and expected it to shift product just based on the holy word alone, giving no thought to marketing strategy or intentions of the artists. Furthermore, I now believe (in 2003) that there will never be another Next Big Thing, no single style such as grunge or soft rock or synth pop that will take over the charts and the papers, no matter what the hype or the critical acclaim. It will never happen again. Let me repeat that. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Never. Again.

Why? Because people's tastes are too diverse. The pop charts mesh dance, rock, and rap without a second thought; music is proliferating at a rate far faster than before, and the internet has made everything readily readible and downloadable, so broadening one's horizons has never been easier. So, a fine website like Pitchfork can ruin a perfectly good year in review by saying that nothing summed up 2003 like the Rapture did. In ten years, people won't remember 2003 as the year of dancepunk any more than we remember 1994 as the year of the New Wave of New Wave (exactly: nobody does remember NWONW, that's the point). They will, however, remember it as the year the Rapture released a pretty decent debut album. Just like I'll remember 2003 as the year I got bigtime into Tindersticks again, and the year of one totally amazing MUTEK festival, and the year I bought the classic MBV albums on vinyl. I won't remember it in terms of some grandiose summary statement, i.e. the year that 90's angst and post-yuppie consumerism gave way to 00's global anti-war 9/11 backlash and public services over fiscal responsibility. Because such loftly summation statements are no longer relevant.

Thus, discussion of the NBT invariably leads down a dumbass path. The electronica hype is a great example of this, because to the average Joe all this music came out of nowhere, the industry didn't know how to sell it and most writers didn't know how to write about it. The only thing everyone could agree on was how to hype it, but of course without the proper context the whole thing came off as looking stupid. I recall a Depeche Mode interview circa "Ultra" (sorry, can't remember what publication), smack in the middle of the electronica uber-hype, and the interviewer asked Dave Gahan if the electronica buzz indicated that it was finally cool to like DM. Gahan lucidly and bluntly blew off the question, merely noting that DM's two biggest albums came at the height of grunge. That just about sums up the magic of early 90's DM.

Behind every electronica story was the endless repartees of "can this stuff sell?", invariably asked by people who had no clue how to sell it. How come nobody brought up the fact that nearly ten years previous, Depeche Mode had sold out the FUCKING ROSE BOWL for the finale of their "101" tour. Yes, I'd say that the music can sell, then. Before "alternative" became "mainstream", Nine Inch Nails had sold two million records and Jane's Addiction had sold out arenas throughout the summer for the inaugural Lollapalooza. In both cases, minimal radio play and MTV hype were involved. Magazines and TV weren't screaming at people about how cool these bands were. That fall, Lollapalooza lucked out when they signed up Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a then-unknown Pearl Jam to play the festival the following summer, only to have all these bands break out simultaneously into the bigtime. Lollapalooza 1992 could have been the almighty grunge celebration extravaganza, but in fact, nobody remembers it for those three bands, they remember it for Ministry blowing everybody off the stage each night. Ministry, the band that had sold out 2000-3000 capacity venues at every stop on their previous national tour, unbenownst to nearly everybody who discovered "alternative" when Nirvana dethroned Michael Jackson.

The point of all these ramblings is that acts can frequently become a Very Very Big Thing without necessarily being hyped as the Next Big Thing. And just as such successes often defy hype and tidy labels, a year of music doesn't deserve to be summarized in one sentence as "The Year of ____". And there's my Year in Review.