Yesterday, Carlos and I made the stupid, but necessary decision to finish Christmas shopping, which resulted in spending somewhere around five hours in my car heading up and down freeways and side streets between the Valley, the Westside and the South Bay (for those not from LA, that's the route to LAX, avoid it at all costs during the holidays). When the radio rotation of KXLU, KROQ, Indie, Jack KDAY on my presets proved no longer interesting, we popped in one of those Radio Soulwax bootleg cds that I spent too much money on at Amoeba a few years back.
"Uh-oh, I think I hear some 'Sunglasses at Night,'" Carlos remarked.
"Yeah, when was the last time you heard this at a club?"
A few years ago, I was playing between three and five nights a week and, outside of the all 1980s club, Tiga and Zyntherius' cover of "Sunglasses at Night" was a staple, just like "Emerge" (Fischerspooner), "Silver Screen, Shower Scene" (Felix da Housecat), "Fuck the Pain Away" (Peaches) and "Frank Sinatra" (Miss Kittin and the Hacker). For songs that were such major hits at the clubs, it seems odd that all have completely disappeared from the city decks. The lifespan of a hit song has certainly decreased.
While there are plenty of older songs that have never left my crate ("Blue Monday" is the obvious example, others include "Connection" from Elastica, "Personal Jesus" and "This is Radio Clash"), post-2000 numbers never seem to last more than a few months (exception can be made for certain songs that never cleared a dancefloor but never became major dance hits, as these songs can last for a few years). This seems to be a sign that perhaps the hype machine is moving a bit too quickly, that the buzz wears and the hit hangover begins before the artist can really resonate with an audience. Case in point: LCD Soundsystem. A band that is as good as this one live and whose singles, such as "Losing My Edge," packed dancefloors, should have crossed over with the release of its major label debut. It didn't.
Thinking back to my formative club years, I can recall tunes that lasted throughout the better part of the 1990s. I can also remember one particular track, "Silence" by Delerium featuring Sarah McLachlan, that was a club staple for a few years before it became a radio hit. However, before the dawn of the millennium, high speed internet connections and file sharing, it was damn hard to find a song. First, we would have to figure out what the song was, which meant either stalking the DJ booth or going to Vinyl Fetish when we knew one of the DJs was there to ask questions like: "What's that song with the sample from Carmina Burana?" (Answer: Apotheosis "Oh Fortuna") or "There's this song where a girl is singing 'Did I dream/You dreamed about me?' and then a guy shouts 'Who loves you and who do you love?' Um, what is it?" (Answer: Messiah "Temple of Dreams). After someone told us what the song was, we had to find it and that was no easy task even if we did go to specialty outlets. However, when one of us actually did manage to acquire one of the hits, that cd or record or cassette copy was handled like a Faberge egg.
This is the downfall of the democratization of music. When the majority of the crowd at the club knows what is cool before it makes it's first appearance over the soundsystem and when anyone with an Ipod can DJ, it lessens the impact of a song and even the club experience as a whole. The gut reaction to scream "I have to find this song" becomes an apathetic remark of "Yeah, I've had this MP3 for months. Whatever." The fact that one no longer has to trek across the city to find this song makes it automatically more likely to become disposable ("Eh, I'm sick of it. Delete."). It is, indeed, a sad age for music.