”In the ’00s, no indie-rock band put out material as consistently strong as Spoon. Britt Daniel steadfastly refused to write even one clunker on Spoon’s records, which were released every two or three years to an audience that was impressed, then amazed, and then slightly bored by how Spoon never made an artistic misstep. This consistency proved to be a double-edged sword. Spoon was both highly respected and yet not passionately adored. Almost everybody that followed indie rock seemed to like Spoon, but never as much as bands not necessarily expected to be brilliant. It was only when you looked back over the course of several years that you realized that, holy shit, Spoon was one of the best bands of its era.

Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? series on the Onion AV Club is one of the best things going on in music writing right now. Every bit of it is brilliant, spot-on, thoroughly wonderful. This digression about Spoon, which has little to do with its ongoing remembrance of the alt-rock 90s, is so ridiculously CORRECT CORRECT CORRECT that I had to share it here. This phenomenon is the #1 thing I am most bitter about as a music critic. I hate that the thing I most treasure as a fan of music — artists who are consistently brilliant — has this way of damning great musicians to faint praise and/or indifference. Spoon is certainly the best example in recent memory, but it happens with a lot of my favorite acts and ugh ugh ugh. Watch out, James Murphy. You’re next. (via perpetua)

Agree with the Tyner piece (really enjoy his AV Club thing too) and with Matthew’s own agreeance.  A couple more branches, perhaps, to keep this idea…branching or something (and this is characteristically off the dome and I have to type in a little tiny box, so don’t expect too much coherence beyond spelling words correctly):

1) I think that Spoon’s a total anomaly not only in the 00s, but in the history of rock.  If you agree with Tyner, Matthew, and me, Spoon’s put out, since 1998, 5 great albums, with absolutely no fat (in terms of success and the quality of the sound).  I’ve been with them since 2000, and I think that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is their best.  So they’re improving, too (IMO).  As for this year: I mean, is there a Spoonier song than “Mystery Zone” for the love of god?  Isn’t “Written in Reverse” maybe Britt’s best ever vocal?  Most bands will start declining after 3 or 4 albums, max.  Among their fin-de-siecle indie contemporaries, only the White Stripes are really with Spoon in terms of regularity, and they’ve got nothing on them in terms of innovation; the Strokes and Interpol both lamed out after 2 albums, and Spoon only seems to be refining their craft.  That to me, is like five All-Star seasons right out of the gate for an athlete.  Kanye-quality excellence.

2) Then why do we take them for granted?  Just speculating here (and again, to read along you have to pretend at least to agree with my taste re: the band [also, that I’m the keyboard player]), but I think Spoon came along right at the wrong time for consistent, long-term bands w/r/t Spoon’s kind of music.  By this, I mean that it’s easier for a band like, say, the Black Keys or (especially) the White Stripes to sustain critical/commercial success (BK will sell 400k of their new one, BTW) playing variations on blues rock than a band like Spoon, which let’s face it, can’t just force out something as effortlessly classic-seeming as “The Way We Get By” or “The Underdog”. 

2.1) I also think that in the era of a rapidly proliferating spectrum of musical options, the culture of music listening for a lot of people feeds directly into that most primal of capitalist desires: for the combination of incessant newness and minor difference. Which is why a lot of online savvy younger music geeks nowadays (I’m speculating, based on anecdotal research thus far) have less “fave bands” and more “rad playlists.”  If the logic holds, then, it means that fans are more and more wanting a frequent turnover of artists who sound alike.  (This could very well be an argument about genre formation, but I’d rather it not be.)  In this atmosphere, steady, reliable bands who deliver a “sound” that is uniquely theirs are going to get more shafted than they would in the past (think about poor fucking Ted Leo, who put out one of this year’s greatest and smartest pop-rock records, but suffers from The Spoon Syndrome).

2.2) In rap and teen pop especially, you can add “extra-musical sociological significance” to newness and slight difference (the latter reason being why Big Boi—resolutely boring in terms of drama—struggles to hit 200k).  Spoon is nothing if not steady and satisfying; they’re not dramatic, though.  They don’t offer any longer threads to grab onto.  The Elektra thing happened a looooong time ago.  Britt Daniel would have to save a baby from a fire to grab a headline.f

(via marathonpacks)