“This version of love I can dwell on in the musing”
Something In The Room She Moves
DOMINO
POP music used to be the preserve of the autodidacts, the highschool dropouts who taught themselves a few chords on the guitar and worked things out instinctively. The odd classically trained figure would sometimes crop up here and there – a Mick Ronson scribbling string arrangements on the back of a cigarette packet, a Donald Fagen writing out complex extended chords for his session musicians to improvise over, a Sean Moore from the Manic Street Preachers playing the occasional trumpet flourish over a punk track – but, by and large, pop and rock musicians would eschew formal learning and play by ear.
But something odd seemed to happen around the millennium, when an entire sub-genre of classically trained art-rock figures started to emerge across theDeerhoof, Battles, Midlake and many more. Where the art school had been the breeding ground for so much British rock music of the 20th century, the 21st saw the music conservatoire producing a peculiar brand of North American pop oddballs.
