At the beginning of last month, an excellent collection of widespread music entitled Now That’s What I Name Music! There was a second, somewhere in the middle of the Nineties, when folks thought new know-how was reworking music, totally and completely. The whole idea of style, they said, was finished, shattered to pieces by samplers and the intelligent postmodern collage artists who used them. Of course, that they had absolutely no idea what was coming. It wasn’t boundary-crossing musicians who would wind up blowing pop to bits. It was the web and the MP3 and, ultimately, the streaming-audio platform — these had been the developments that might, just a few years later, explode everything into infinite constellations of code and sound, with peculiar and vertiginous results.

The primary one was a shock hit, after ‘Shoye’ his debut single did not catch enough hearth. The second was a rip-off of ‘Woju’, … Read More