The uncomfortable proximity of the millennium has musicians everywhere vomiting out their version of the future, most of them disposable. The ideal millennial statement would do more than just consolidate 100 years of recorded music and regurgitate it; the millennial statement would synthesize it, create something authentically new out of the familiar scraps. The familiar scraps would then become unfamiliar. In the absence of any better ideas, however, most musicians are reaching back to the past, to the ancestors of psychotropic sonic warfare.
Two years ago everyone wanted to remake the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds; now everyone wants aboard Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets. Radiohead stole the chords for "Exit Music" (from OK Computer) from that album's "Celestial Voices," Spiritualized is basically just a strung-out Floyd cover band, Beck's new album Mutations is laced with Floydian slips... you can even hear Pink Floyd floating around in the background of a Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot track.
The millennial statement must function both as alien artifact and open-ended statement suitable for casual consumption and obsessive analysis. There's a deep latent desire in this self-conscious and unshockable decade to be shocked, to lose consciousness. But for that to happen would take more than just 12 modest songs; it would take a no-limits trope-skipping journey across the modern landscape and off into space¯OK Computer. So OK Computer appeared, and everyone got excited. Since then? Nothing. Everyone grasped onto its producer, Nigel Godrich, as if he alone could bring them into the millennial pantheon, with results that have ranged from the embarrassing (R.E.M.) to the aimless and vacuous (Beck).
Millennialism is closely related to psychedelia, not just in the druggy sense but in the attempt for total experience. The music must construct a world around you, giving you space to travel about, where you no longer think any more, just feel. Total experience requires costumes, dressing up. A naked song can carry emotional weight, but can't function on the total escapist level of an album like OK Computer because it can't cause the listener to disappear, can't inspire total vacancy. More than just the song itself, it's also the electronic sounds spiraling around on the fringes, the distorted tapestry of samples which creates a counter-pull to the vacuum of the song itself. Looped atmospherics like the laugh track on "Exit Music," or the international airport ambiance of "A Reminder," provide spatial depth and flesh out the soundscape.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous," a little girl says on DJ Spooky's Riddim Warfare. Progress requires jumping into the unfamiliar, embracing the alien, stumbling headfirst into the void. When it works--and it rarely does--you are dropped straight into another world, one with no tour guide, the album cover your only brochure. It is in the charting of this new territory and the assimilation of new vocabulary that progress is made. Art mirrors culture, so it makes sense that millennial art reflects millennial anxieties. Just as the late '60s gestated in the '50s, so the late '90s are a byproduct of the '80s. The advent of the electronic device has changed everything. And so, in a somewhat soulless robotic world, the art must change to reflect that and become somewhat soulless and partly robotic.
It's this modern landscape that is being addressed when Thom Yorke sings, "There's such a chill," when Beck fake-wistfully waits until "Love will be new, never cold and vacant." It's an awareness of the growing emotional void, the galaxy of emptiness existing in plastic hearts hollowed out by the billions of fraudulent images they have been fed, so self-conscious that identity seems little more than a compilation of clichés.
Top 5 Millennial Records
1. RADIOHEAD "Airbag"/"How Am I Driving" EP
2. BECK Mutations
3. U.N.K.L.E. Psyence Fiction
4. AIR Moon Safari
5. MASSIVE ATTACK Mezzanine
