Metric - Fantasies
Over at Rolling Stone, the singer of Metric talks about how one of their songs almost ended up just like a «shudder» Shania Twain song. In the video, they entertainingly demonstrate exactly what they mean.
But how far from Shania Twain is this music, really? The thing that characterizes Twain’s music is its second order genesis - that is, she is strongly aware not of the core reality of the music, but of the cultural environment which the music creates and inhabits. Essentially, she creates it ironically.
My impression is that Metric’s creative process is also rather secondly ordered. Their cultural awareness itself demonstrates something like a lack of integrity. The danger in sounding like Shania is associating yourself with her and her audience, and Metric’s fans, I would guess, largely view that association with contempt. Such ill-considered contempt for other groups is generally accompanied by a blindness to the content of one’s own perceptions. People rather base their opinions on the social effects of holding them. In that sense, both the creation and the reception of Metric’s music seem very likely to be second order phenomena.
I know some Shania Twain fans, and I can say that they have no self-awareness whatsoever about their enjoyment of the music.
7 months ago
