My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

Between this good piece from yesterday and the Jeff Tweedy interview from today, I’d say Steven Hyden has the much-debated ‘death of the monoculture’ on his mind. 

I like this exchange with Tweedy, particularly Tweedy’s ambivalence about a monoculture being a valuable facet of society in the first place:

AVC: One thing that often comes up when people talk about the ’90s is this idea of a “monoculture”—that there were certain bands that, because of the way the media was set up, became cultural touchstones, like Nirvana, Michael Jackson, or The Beatles. There’s a sense that that can’t happen today. Do you think we’ve lost the capacity to have that kind of band? 

JT: I could see that argument; that doesn’t just apply to music. It seems like we have very fractured perceptions of reality. People shop for their own realities to reinforce the way they feel already, politically or—I don’t know. I guess there is a sense that you can kind of use the way the media works now to just build your own little universe. [Laughs.] Monoculture? That doesn’t sound very appealing to me, though. I don’t really feel like that was appealing to me even then.

Semi-related: does anyone else find it odd how little the AV Club comes up in discussions of music and music writing on Tumblr?  Maybe it’s simply that they affirm some deep-seated, possibly regionally-related rockist tendencies I have, but I’m quite fond of the writing there.