Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen Malkmus

Malkmus is doing that wry musician thing: sounding almost too casual while quietly indicting the whole hype economy that decides what “matters.” His point isn’t just that trends shift; it’s that the media’s spotlight is less a mirror than a rotating stage light. Trip-hop, in his telling, isn’t crowned because it’s inherently superior or even newly urgent, but because it’s legible to a particular moment’s appetite for “electronic,” “new,” “cool.” “Flavor of the month” is the key phrase: it reduces an entire scene to a consumable taste, something sampled, posted, moved past.

The subtext is both defensive and liberating. Defensive because it preemptively shrugs off the anxious question every guitar band gets when a genre cycle turns: Are you obsolete now? Liberating because if the media’s frame is arbitrary, then the artist’s job isn’t to chase it. Malkmus positions himself outside the treadmill, implying that what’s being marketed as history is often just scheduling.

Then he slips in a gentler, more complicated idea: “It all depends on the angle.” That’s not a conspiracy claim; it’s relativism with a backstage pass. Genres don’t just rise and fall - they’re narrated into significance by who’s telling the story, which outlets are listening, and what counts as “progress” that week. Coming from an alt-rock figure who lived through the ‘90s canonization machine, it reads like a refusal to be auditioned by the trend cycle again.