Pleasurable Guilt?

Sometimes writing should be withheld. In 2002, Gary Mulholland produced one of the finest list books about popular music, The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco. As well as covering many fantastic records, the entries are shot through with insights. They also glow with a righteous passion about the injustices of race, class, gender and snobbery. This book was followed in 2006 by The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco. It is a far inferior work. Aside from the fact that albums are frequently incoherent and therefore hard to sum up, Mulholland’s pronouncements have a tendency to jar.

            The worst instance comes with his analysis of Misty in Roots' Live at the Counter Eurovision 79. Despite including the album in his book, he describes it as ‘kinda silly’ and ‘pretty camp’. This stopped me in my tracks when I first read it. Had I been listening to a different record? Was I wrong to take this album’s earnest pronouncements on race and class seriously, when really I should have taken them with a pinch of salt? Mulholland thinks so. For him this record was aimed at a ‘white middle-class audience’ who sought ‘damning judgements upon their entire existence’. These judgements include the famous spoken word introduction to this album, which states that:

When we trod this land, we walk for one reason. The reason is to try to help another man think for himself. The music of our hearts is roots music: music which recalls history, because without the knowledge of your history, you cannot determine your destiny; the music about the present, because if you are not conscious about the present, you're like a cabbage in this society; music which tells about the future and the judgement which is to come.

The Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who was responsible for introducing this record to many people, was so taken with these words that they were included in the order of service at his funeral. Mulholland argues that, while they are supposed to sound ‘simultaneously spiritual, authoritative and stoned’, the speaker ‘just sounds gay’. He is similarly snide about ‘How Long Jah’, the track on the album that says most about racism. It is introduced with a cry of ‘how long must we feel the pain?’. For Mulholland this complaint sounds like a ‘granny with a backache’.

            This writing represents a hollow game of one-upmanship. Mulholland wishes to come across as being more insightful than other listeners while also attempting to best them in terms of liberal credentials. He wants to say that, not only is racism wrong, but it is perpetuated by the fact that white listeners take roots reggae so seriously. For Mulholland, a greater move towards equality would be for white people to take the piss out of these musicians in the same way they take the piss out of everyone else. This involves calling someone ‘gay’. Aside from this peculiar attitude, what I find most unforgiveable about this writing is that it did affect my listening and presumably the listening of other readers as well. I questioned whether in listening to this album I was just indulging in some form of pleasurable guilt.

            The music speaks more loudly, though. Misty in Roots certainly condemned whiteness - ‘Satan said I’m free, but I’m not free’ – and by extension could be said to be admonishing their white audience. This wasn’t a game of assuaging guilt, however. The group always preached togetherness. They were a fulcrum of the Rock Against Racism movement. They pointedly named their record label, ‘People Unite’, and launched the career of the white punk band, the Ruts. ‘How Long Jah’ asks how long must we feel the pain. It couches the problem in monetary terms: we are ‘economical slaves’ who cannot escape ‘money the controller’. Live at the Counter Eurovision is not preaching at a white audience, it is instead enfolding this audience in shared injustices and is suggesting ways to move forwards as one.

            And it definitely is not camp. In fact, what is most astonishing about Misty in Roots is that they sought unity and spoke of shared experience despite being the victims of institutionalized racism. In the same month that the album was recorded, Britain's far right party, the National Front, had planned to hold an election meeting in Southall, the multi-cultural district from which Misty in Roots hailed. The group helped to organize the anti-fascist response. In the resulting ‘Southall riots’ the teacher Blair Peach was killed by the police. The police’s Special Patrol Group also beat Misty in Roots’ manager Clarence Baker into a coma. He was then charged with assault despite the fact he was unarmed. Tragically, ‘How Long Jah?’ was not only speaking the truth at the time it was released, but it remains true today. Another generation has been born in slavery. Black lives matter.

Compose Yourself

It’s now ten years since Ray Charles died. To mark this occasion Robert Elms asked listeners to his BBC London radio programme to request and talk about their favourite Ray Charles songs. I relished this half an hour of music. The first song chosen was ‘What’d I Say’, which is a good a piece of dance music as has ever been recorded. The second was ‘Georgia on My Mind’, which as a ballad is equally as good. In fact, when he’s at his peak, it’s hard to think of anyone who can equal Ray Charles.

            Charles was probably the first popular musician to be labelled a genius. He was also the one to whom the term was most consistently applied (check out those late 1950s/early 1960s LP titles). But where did his genius lie? To paraphrase Bob Dylan, whatever it was that Charles did, it wasn’t in the songwriting.

            Charles did write ‘What’d I Say’, but for all its innovative brilliance, the track remains bedded in the traditional 12-bar blues form. He didn’t write ‘Georgia on My Mind’, or ‘Mess Around’, or ‘Drown in My Own Tears’, or ‘Let the Good Times Roll’, or ‘Hit the Road Jack’, or ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’. Some songs for which he did gain a writing credit, such as ‘I Got a Woman’, are really old songs reworked.

            But what reworking! It’s in his skills as an arranger that Ray Charles’s genius lies: his bringing together of different musical traditions and his ability to get a band to explore their twists and turns. It’s also in his interpretative abilities as a singer: the timbre, timing and nuances of his voice. It’s also in his abilities as a keyboard player; the way that he gets a band to swing together; the interaction that he has with his backing singers, the Raelettes.

            Digital technology has encroached upon the areas in which Ray Charles excelled. The majority of today’s pop musicians arrange blocks of information on computer screens, rather than arrange charts for performing musicians. Sequencing and quantizing have taken the place of the ability to interact with a band (or to interact ‘live’ with a backing track, for that matter). The precision of autotune has replaced the grain of the voice. Artists gain their reputations for their production techniques, rather than for their musicianship skills. Moreover, when these artists play live, they remain subject to computerization. Even when their performances are not digitally controlled, they have to play with the rhythmic precision of a sequencer, or sing with the range and accuracy of an electronic device. The writing and the recording of their songs dictates this.

            I don’t want to argue that these technical innovations are bad or that great music is no longer produced. I would also like to underline the fact that the techniques that Ray Charles employed were also the results of technology; as with today’s hits, his recordings were shaped by the latest developments in instrument design, studio equipment, and microphone techniques.

What I would suggest, however, is that digital audio workstations put more pressure on artists to make a mark with their songwriting. Older records are as likely to make their presence felt through ‘feel’ as they are through their chord changes or harmonic twists. Today’s music is more rigid and compressed. New artists aren’t musicians foremost; their main occupation is as composers and editors.

            What are the effects of this? In the first instance, I would argue that it shifts the conception of popular music ‘genius’ so that it is now more in line with other art forms. It is the act of writing that is valued, rather than the life that is captured the tracks (I will explore the pros and cons of this in a later blog entry). Secondly, I would argue that it is now harder to create great pop music. Being a writer is not easy. Being Ray Charles wasn’t easy either, but in the past there were many brilliant records that didn’t have great writing, great musicianship or great arranging. They just had a great something. In his book This is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco, Gary Mulholland outlines his ‘own personal Theory One of pop’. This is that ‘Everybody has one good single in them’. It’s my personal theory that it was the quirky magic of analogue recording that made this the case. A great digital audio workstation composition cannot be stumbled across in the same way. And so, for all the supposed democracy and opened access of computer-based music making, it actually makes pop music more elite.