Thank you for the fantastic essay. I thought to speak up for the Panda Bear list; if it was ignored, perhaps it has more to do with those very same elitist attitudes in the avant garde/experimental circles towards an indie/electronic artist. I would also not close the door of history on the impact that such a list could generate over a longer period of time, as new fans discover in it new horizons of sound and unexplored connections
Thanks for reading and for your comment. I don't mean to disparage Panda Bears' list, but I guess my feeling is 1) it's not very interesting, visually, and 2) it's not very surprising by 2007. The Post-Genre, Post-Internet cornucopia flattening of discovery. It's also not noisy, like Zappa or NWW or the Beatles, noisy in the sense of seeming beyond our ability to process. The sheer number of artists on the NWW list seems to make it beyond cataloguing and knowing and mastering. Of course the networked historiography of the p2p era proved that not to be the case. So this relatively short safe list of the early 2000s just doesn't strike me as particularly interesting, and I think that says more about the times than the list itself.
Thank you for the fantastic essay. I thought to speak up for the Panda Bear list; if it was ignored, perhaps it has more to do with those very same elitist attitudes in the avant garde/experimental circles towards an indie/electronic artist. I would also not close the door of history on the impact that such a list could generate over a longer period of time, as new fans discover in it new horizons of sound and unexplored connections
Thanks for reading and for your comment. I don't mean to disparage Panda Bears' list, but I guess my feeling is 1) it's not very interesting, visually, and 2) it's not very surprising by 2007. The Post-Genre, Post-Internet cornucopia flattening of discovery. It's also not noisy, like Zappa or NWW or the Beatles, noisy in the sense of seeming beyond our ability to process. The sheer number of artists on the NWW list seems to make it beyond cataloguing and knowing and mastering. Of course the networked historiography of the p2p era proved that not to be the case. So this relatively short safe list of the early 2000s just doesn't strike me as particularly interesting, and I think that says more about the times than the list itself.