GAH! WIND BACK WEDNESDAY SAYS, YOU AGAIN 2010? WHAT NOW?
- Bernard Zuel
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
This year’s favourites list is being polished – like a trophy, not like a turd, you nasty-minded few! – with a list of good things and accompanying playlists to be shared with you, as they say in the good book, momentarily.
As we wait, Wind Back Wednesday does what it was set up to do and goes back in time to see what mattered, what was muttered, and maybe who was munted (or should have been, if only to survive) in days of yore. Maybe even your days.
Why? To make sense? Hmm, not sure that’s possible. To make clear? Hmm, hindsight is a marvellous thing, true, but predictions are flaky business. To make you quiver with remembered passions or horrors you thought you had put aside? Hmm, maybe so, yes.
The year of return is 2010, a time when … well, you’ll see.
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TO LOOK UPON this year is to know the truth of the deeply moving, prophetic and, dare we say it, poetic, words of Roger Taylor from Queen: all we hear is radio gaga, radio googoo.
Ah yes, Lady Gaga of the eternal questions: is she a woman; is she a man; is she really wearing that? She toured Australia this year, leaving behind gobsmacked fans, horrified parents and highly emotional entertainment writers who got in a year or two’s worth of gossip, outrage and photos at the front of the book in just a couple of weeks. Score!
And if people weren't talking about Gaga they were comparing others to her. Was Rihanna Gaga-light? Did Katy Perry offer the mildly titillating Clayton's Gaga? Could you be a fan of both the Lady and the preternaturally poised and scarily slick Taylor Swift? Why wasn’t Liz Hurley texting Gaga instead of Goolies, aka Shane Warne?
Maybe the antidote to the gush over Gaga was the return of Leonard Cohen, who stayed fully dressed, save for the doffing of his hat occasionally, but caused critical and public swooning amid the sold out shows at giant concrete boxes which somehow were turned into intimate soirées by his charm and warmth. His songs weren’t bad either. He could have a career ahead of him this 76-year-old.
That's of course if the officially designated Biggest Ego In Pop, Kanye West, wishes to allow some lesser deities to share his space. For every one of us knows we are fortunate to be allowed to live in Kanye's world. And what a world it is, with designer gear and high-end friends, inner angst and outer bluster, killer pop songs and some of the savviest production around. Naysayers had to bite tongues as Kanye’s fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, justified the hyperbole. Don’t you hate that when it happens?
The antithesis of the ego-who-walks are two Australians who in their own way marked 2010 indelibly. First up is main Drones bloke Gareth Liddiard whose solo album, Strange Tourist, had compelling music but featured some of the best prose writing of the year in any literary form: brutal, vivid and pungently Australian. Fellow Melburnian, Dan Sultan, became ever more ubiquitous through the year, his second album, Get Out While You Can, only part of the reason why he was talked about and photographed as his charisma, voice and cross-generational sex appeal moved from potential to reality.
As a sign that some things can't seem to move beyond potential, 2010 was another year where no one could figure out how to make serious money from music online. Streaming services, online retailers, artist websites, media links, 360 degree record company contracts and everything else which could put a .com to their name still couldn't make up for the millions of dollars no longer there from CD purchases.
People are still buying music, just not as much, or as often, or for as much as they used to pay.
Mind you, if you're paying up to $500 to sit close to the Eagles (instead of considerably less to see one of the gigs of the year when Grizzly Bear played at the Sydney Festival) you may not have that much sense or money to spare.
Which is a shame as on the evidence so far you should be putting some cash aside for albums by Megan Washington and Janelle Monae (two of the pop albums of the year in I Believe You Liar and The ArchAndroid) or concerts in coming weeks from The National (whose album, High Violet, made adulthood dangerous and appealing) and Mountain Man (whose album, Made The Harbor, made the 19th century a whole lot closer).
Or just give in and prepare for the coming of The Beiber. Or as his fans say … goo goo, ga ga.
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