Kieran McConville
ONE love, blood, life
That article by the Cherry Bar guy is appalling. The stuff he wants played on Triple J is almost offensively bad in how out-of-date and derivative it is. No wonder it doesn't get any play; it's just guys with guitars and penile inferiority complexes who are trying to recreate their dad's vinyl collection. As soon as you mention Airbourne without being derisive, you've lost an argument.
Triple J's obviously not perfect and there's a reason why I don't exactly tune into it, but a whole lot of this debate is blown out of proportion. It's no use saying "wah wah this popular hit from the nineties wouldn't get any play now" because tastes have evolved. You could do the reverse and say "wow this popular hit from 2013 would never have got airplay in the nineties". Practically every artist actively seeking a larger audience will - consciously or not - modify their sound to some degree to appeal to people anyway. Hell, they'll be influenced by the same sounds that are shaping their audience and it'll generally be a natural evolution. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
Well yeah, tastes change, but that line of thinking can be taken too far, I mean, some artists do consciously mine older styles of genre. Sometimes it's shitty and dull and derivative, but it doesn't automatically have to be.
Otherwise everyone would have to be making hip hop or synth-heavy 'indie'.
To take an example much-bandied about these parts, I'd suggest that the National's records could have been made at any point in the last 20 or possibly even 30 years. Whether they'd be hits or not I couldn't say (they might have been massive about 1988, Springsteen massive; then again maybe not).