First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who helped run/staff ACF and ACF Detox in Chattanooga this weekend. Both tournaments were very well-run and a lot of fun. I just have a couple of little random thoughts about music in trash (small 't-r-a-s-h') tournaments. I've shared these with a couple of people, but I thought I'd throw them out and see if anyone else agrees with me. Why is it that it's OK to ask questions about the *career* of a band like, for instance, Kajagoogoo who is, as an *artist*, inconsequential to the flow and development of whatever time they were living in, but somehow it's not OK to ask about a band who, say, sells 200,000 or 400,000 copies of every album, gets lots of critical acclaim and mention in music publications, and has a really devoted fanbase (just to throw out three, Underworld, Modest Mouse, and Saint Etienne, none of which I have ever heard mentioned in a pop culture tournament). Dexys Midnight Runners probably *averaged*, over the course of their career, about that many sales per album in America, yet for whatever reason they're considered more germane to trash. I don't get it. Who actually owns a Kajagoogoo album, or a Los Del Rio album, or albums from any of a number of artists who put out one song that made it onto the radio? Yeah, maybe that one song isn't obscure, but the artist sure is. And the kicker is, it almost seems like questions about one-hit artists exist at the expense of artists who came from the same era and movement and had prolonged success with several singles and albums. Just looking at New Wave, you hear questions about Soft Cell and Timbuk3 but not the Cars, who were clearly the more important and more successful band by any measure. Why? Music in trashy tournaments is almost threatening to develop into a canon as immutable as the ACF or NAQT canons, which, while ironic, is pretty depressing. Classic rock is fine; one-hit wonders from the 1980's; classic country music is OK; modern country music, only the very biggest sellers; same with rap, although with rap you rarely hear certain subgenres represented whatsoever. "Alternative" music is OK as long as it's *extremely* popular -- think Blink-182 or Eve 6. As far as current pop music, representation is overwhelmingly to artists who have just put out a debut album or a debut single, are foreign, or were represented on a successful soundtrack to a movie and haven't really been heard from since. Blues, other than B.B. King, isn't "allowed"; nor is folk, nor is alt-country, nor is chamber pop (with the exception of Belle and Sebastian), nor world music that isn't from a band that's had a big hit. And forget about college radio, except for artists who have hit it big, like R.E.M. or Beck. Trip-hop and other forms of electronic music are marginally acceptable; dance music, with the exception of anything that might end up on "Jock Jams". What music fan this canon represents I'm not sure. I just wonder *why* what's excluded is. Anyway, if you got to the end of this little rant, congratulations. I'm just a little frustrated as a so-called "rabid" music fan that I somehow manage to get more movies and TV questions at trash tournaments than music, even though I see *maybe* three movies a year in the theatres, rent movies *very* occasionally, and can count the number of TV shows I watch in a week on my fingers.
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