then what?

Post Modernism in fool effeckt, me thinks. PM gives me a headache.

PMT?

8 inches of snow in georgia = ethan starts a'thinkin.

it's an interesting question, but probably phrased a little too convolutedly to answer easily. you seem to be saying that the beatles weren't inherently adolescent, which i don't necessarily agree with. ditto for the velvets, television, beach boys, doo-wop, funk blah blah blah. if anything the problem with the beatles is that they were inherently adolescent whereas they were presented (either at the time or in retrospect) as Something To Treat With Veneration. whereas kraftwerk or black sabbath were all schtick up front but incredibly serious about their respective music. bands who take their cues from the beatles, stones, b. wilson, etc. tend to = tedious bores, just for that reason. whereas most of the acts who took their cues from sabbath or kraftwerk or disco (which - and let's not be coy - amount to more than 2/3 of modern pop) = more "fun." (obv. this theory, like all theories, is not airtight.)

sure anything can fall into that "left behind" category. the synth pop you seem so enamored of lately ruled the world until what? 84, 85? who knew it would take almost 20 years to have a revival. disco of course is the king of the "left behinds" who ended up having the last and longest laugh.

Types of music seem to fade after purism grabs them by the neck. The early 90's fetish of underground hip hop could get left behind becase the scene generally excommunicates other aesthetic blueprints. Pop and top 40 hip hop will never pastiche Def Jux because it'd feel regressive; commercial hip hop is already further down the lineage (or at least leaves the early 90s alone). The 'underground' that is being picked up by the mainstream would have to come from highly deviant genres that sound completely new and different (rave-synths or jungle drum programming in pop. MJ Cole remixing Mariah Carey).

A new timbaland-copyist indie would be battling purism and breaking the mold they're rooted in. You could argue that Tigerbeat6 is doing this by scoffing at the IDM massive with overt timbaland/bling influences.

Thought: perhaps indie's relationship with the pop world (and long-presumed status as "angulariser" of the the pop world) is being weakened/distorted/overtaken by the new pop regime in which the "pop" genres have their own autonomous "underground" sectors. Thinking of bling hip hop & 2-step in particular (doesn't apply really for R&B or teen-pop) where you'd be hardpressed to say that the genre was unambiguously pop or underground because the gap between what is being played in the clubs and what is getting onto the charts can be so large (in the reverse sense, indie/alternative/whatever scenes have had trouble defining themselves on the basis of brief flashpoints of massive popularity earlier on). The underground sector acts like the creative engine, constantly throwing up ideas which, if they have enough popular appeal, drift into the charts; the underground is also in dialogue with the charts, and is prone to changing its own sound based on what has happened in the charts (eg. 2-step goes dark/dancehall/MC-based possibly as a reaction to the overly-sunny R&B style that was dominating the charts). The interconnectedness of these pop-underground aspects makes meta-commentary much faster (like intranet vs internet) and thus outside commentators are left out of the loop - to continue the 2-step example, Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car" was nice, but seemed awfully tardy as a commentary on a style which had almost entirely moved on from the state the track attempted to parody.

The "indie" genres, thus denied this sort of role (perhaps because their original performance of this role was historically located and not a permanent grant) are therefore perhaps forced to wait their turn if they want in on certain sounds, not only until the pop moment has passed, but until the entire scene within which that pop moment was formulated has migrated elsewhere or vanished. But this still leaves them a lot of options (it surprises me, for example, that it was bling-hop that cottoned on to hip-house before anyone else, right in the midst of the Timbaland era, as I can't think of a better or cleverer reaction to/ against Timbaland than hip-house).

I think a bit of Jess' anti-Beatle bias is shining through; saying the Fab Four have any less of the schtick / pretense that the Sabbath or the Kraftwerk is surely just the work of those rockist historian goblins. The "Beatles are SERIOUS" groundwork has been laid for nigh on, what 20+ years? The same sort of theorizing is currently / has recently been applied to folks like Kraftwerk & the Sabbath (& other bands of this ilk) - as soon as a group passes from "fad" to reference point, their critical stature is re-evaluated.

Oh - and if I have Ethan's reference points right (indie = White Stripes, Strokes, ya?), then they're just visiting the same hot spots that many a group before them recommended.

And, as far as Ethan's final question - "is modern pop as such too inherently adolescent to ever have nostalgia appeal thirty years later in the degree that the beatles did?" - I wouldn't say modern pop is too adolescent as much as too CALCULATED. Of course, most pop is calculated, created to put the smack-dab on its intended demographic, but never has such calculated maneuvering been so blatantly obvious. But, then, listening to some stereotyped indie- pop might make one reconsider whether "modern pop" (in the form of Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, NKOTB) hasn't been appropriated by the underground.

I'd take this from a different angle - there are two types of underground music. There's the avant garde which is serious beardy college types making overtly intellectual music that tries very hard to be different a la Rephlex, Sonic Youth, John Zorn et al, and doesn't really come from much of a pop sensibility at all.

And then there's enthusiast music which underground hip hop and indie in the way Ethan was talking about fall under. This stuff tends to be made by people who got really into a particular style when they were young and then began making it when they got older and trying to bring some of that vibe back with their new tunes. Thus Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy et al were young when disco first started, stayed true to that style despite its unpopularity then when they reached their peak of influence ten years later they reintroduced the music they'd loved as house. Similarly all underground rappers are keen to announce the fact that they used to make pause button mixes of the Cold Crush when they were preschoolers or whatever.

So the tunes that get picked up on and recycled by enthusiasts tend to be the tips of underground icebergs (at least they do in the two examples above). So you'd suspect that 90s 2-step and jungle, for example, might be more prone to plundering than Timbaland who is essentially a pop artist rather than a scenester. But fuck it, if you're going to recycle anything from the last ten years it might as well be Tim...

Then What? Then we all start sounding like jazzmen from the 1920s. We haven't ripped off King Oliver in decades.