HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO
March 26 to April 1, 1997
MTV fire a string of onscreen presenters, after US ratings drop by 20 per cent. The station's facelift, which it claims will result in the screening of about 20 extra hours of videos a week, with a stronger emphasis on indie, electronica and dance artists, is also believed to have been prompted by a hugely critical music biz poll. The survey, by the Record Industry Association of America, suggests that MTV has become "surprisingly irrelevant" to consumers.
There's something a little disingenuous about opening your album with a song called "Do I Disappoint You?". This is how the fifth album by Rufus Wainwright begins: with wave after wave of opulent, complex orchestral flourishes, building and building; with a multitracked Martha Wainwright screaming "CHAOS!" and "DESTRUCTION!"; and with Wainwright himself, coy in the midst of so much melodrama. It's a theatrical set-piece pretending to be an anti-climax. It's both lovely and knowingly ridiculous. And it's also rather good.
It seems a long time ago now, when I thought post-rock was the most exciting music in the world. The thing with those early records by Tortoise and such was that they made anything seem possible. Post-rock was never going to supersede rock, but in the mid-'90s it still felt like a fantastically open-minded scene. The bands weren't hung up on the old signifiers of rock, they had this voracious appetite for so much music: jazz, electronica, Krautrock, endlessly obscure diversions from the well-beaten path. There were no apparent rules, which made it all the more disappointing that it became so formulaic so fast.
