I was reading Pitchfork's fifteen-year retrospective interview with Beck when "Cloudburst at Shingle Street" by 80s New Wave/synthpop artist Thomas Dolby came on at random in my iTunes. Such happenstance was appropriate, as when I first heard the vocals, I thought it was Beck.
When I realized I wasn't listening to Beck, I thought, "I could easily see Beck making music like this." Then, these Beck quotes I'd just read instantly sprang to mind:
... there's a reason the music I've made came out at the time it did. I qualify that with the fact that there were many records and musicians who were doing stuff that was really ahead of their time back then. There have been many times when I thought we stumbled upon something new, and then I'd hear something like Os Mutantes or Brigitte Fontaine and just think, "How did nobody hear this?”
His thoughts on a different matter much further back in the interview may explain his comments:
When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the 50s/60s generation was so dominant. Then, about 10 years ago, this "American Idol" thing became so dominant. I was reading something in The New York Times where they were looking at the demography of the last 60 years. It struck me that, after the 50s/60s generation, [the birthrate] was about two thirds less in the 70s, and then, in the late 80s and 90s, it goes back up. So if you're of that 70s generation, you're bookended by these two other monolithic generations-- maybe that's one of the reasons why that little time of weirdness in the late 80s into the early 90s was coming through the mainstream. The field was a little more open, in a way.
Interesting perspective. But are demographic trends enough to explain why someone like Beck, who made music similar enough to Thomas Dolby that I momentarily confused the two, could become the face of 90s alternative music while Dolby was relegated to one-hit wonder status, despite being an active musician today (you may know Dolby for his 1982 hit "She Blinded Me with Science")? And Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless, his debut album on which "Cloudburst" appeared, came out in 1982 ... Was Dolby just a bit too early and didn't fully catch the "little time of weirdness in the late 80s into the early 90s"? But he still worked throughout that period... Furthermore, I don't think Beck's demographic observation explains why bands like Animal Collective or indie in general (which is often preeetty weird, to say the least) were able to explode, if their successes were concurrent with the "American Idol" era. Regardless, the similarities I heard between Beck and "Cloudburst" in particular got me wondering how much of success really is just circumstance.
On an unrelated note (but one that still regards Thomas Dolby), "Cloudburst at Shingle Street" is another case of me paying attention to a kick-ass song in my own library essentially for the first time only because my iTunes was on shuffle or I'd typed a certain word or phrase into the search bar, and the song I’d meant to listen to finished and moved on to the next item in the list. I was on a kick of wanting to give one-hit wonders a chance a while ago, and one of those albums was The Golden Age of Wireless. I listened to the album maybe once and basically let it sit on the virtual shelf. Maybe now that I've been hooked by "Cloudburst at Shingle Street," it's time to give The Golden Age of Wireless a second spin.
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