After a long period of endless album teasers and slow-burn promotional campaigns, the element of surprise has come back to big-tent music in 2013—David Bowie announced an album he’d been working on in secret for two years, My Bloody Valentine released the 21-years-in-the-making followup to Loveless, and Justin Timberlake returned to pop.
If America had its own Marianne, she would be a lot like megaselling Taylor Swift. She becomes literally wide-eyed when someone pays her a compliment; her family owned a Shetland pony; she wrote her first hit single in math class. But is that quality becoming a liability four albums in?
I, who so often eschewed the phone, am now glad to lean into those long, meandering conversations that it can inspire, those sorts of chats that would not be punctuated by bathroom breaks or impromptu meetings with managers and where a lip-twisting grin and hastily typed “lol” wouldn’t suffice as an expression of amusement.
Thirty years ago, the dawning of a new decade lent a very distinct excitement—a hope, even a demand—for art that could mark and affirm the validity of the New. This yearning is necessarily twinned with vocal repudiation of the Old, and repeated itself at the end of the 1980s. Had Kurt Cobain survived, I expect the same process would have felled Nirvana at the turn of this century. Here, and truly in every measurable aspect, My Bloody Valentine has cheated fate.
