Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy

Much of the academic writing about Jews and popular music (of which there is nowhere near enough) places Jews as intermediaries between black and white cultures. Jewish songwriters have taken black musical forms and re-written them for white audiences (Carole King, Leiber and Stoller); Jewish producers have taken black artists and sold them to white audiences (Phil Spector, the Chess brothers); Jewish artists have repackaged black musical styles for white audiences (the Beastie Boys, Amy Winehouse). In an earlier post, I followed this line when talking about hair and popular music, claiming that the Jewfro provides a link between black and white styles. I wheeled into service a quote from Jon Stratton, who states that ‘being positioned between the ideologically driven binary of black and white, Jews have mediated between African-American culture and the hegemonic white American culture’.

            Stratton’s work is focused on post-World War II popular music and like many popular music historians he gives precedence to black musical styles. However, if we trace history back further, Jewish musicians and writers cannot be cast as go-betweens, their input is central to the popular music form.

            Michael Kantor’s film Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy redresses the balance. It begins with Eric Idle’s song ‘You Won’t Succeed on Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)’ and then provides evidence of the Jewish dominance of American musical theatre. Even Cole Porter, the one notable non-Jew amongst early Broadway writers, stated that he could only achieve success by composing ‘Jewish tunes’.

The film acknowledges the fit between black and Jewish musical forms, demonstrating an over-lapping use of minor scales. It also notes the influence of jazz on Broadway songwriters, while at the same time insisting that the Jewish influence shines through. For example, as well as examining the jazz inflections in Rhapsody in Blue, the film points out that Gershwin employed a klezmer clarinet for its famous opening. Elsewhere, there is illustration of the extent to which Broadway songwriters wove Jewish religious motifs into their tunes, most interestingly in the case of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, which uses a melody from a Jewish prayer to help explode the myths of the bible. It transpires that the Great American Songbook is also the Great Yiddish Hymnbook.

            The film has an incisive take on the themes of Broadway musicals. Some writers focused on African-Americans (Show Boat, Porgy and Bess), while others explored inter-racial subjects (South Pacific). It is suggested, however, that these musicals were really about Jews. Josh Kun states that:

One of the ways that Jewish songwriters on Broadway wrote about the experience of being Jewish is by writing about other outsiders: ‘I’m not going to tell you the story of Jews in America, but I am going to tell you the story of an African-American on a riverboat, I’m going to use somebody’s else’s story to tell you mine’. The more the Jews are not writing about Jews, I think you could argue is when they are actually writing the most about Jews.

If he’s right we should perhaps revisit Jon Stratton’s statement. In the history of American popular music the hegemonic whites are still observers, but what they are watching is Jews and African-American artists speaking amongst themselves. 

Romanticism vs. Versus

Why does the NME present a ‘godlike genius award’? Because of Romanticism, that’s why. Romanticism promoted ‘the ideal of self-expression’ and ‘the idea of genius’. It also identified ‘the hostility of modern society to talent and sensitivity’. It was anti-capitalist in nature. The last three winners of NME’s award were Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher and Dave Grohl, each of them an old man. Why? Because the Romantic ideal is dying.

            Romanticism used to serve the record industry well. During the 1960s and 1970s it helped to sell records. In America, income from record sales rose from $700m in 1963 to over $1bn in 1967. In the UK, album sales rose from 22m units in 1963 to over 80m ten years later. Many of the best selling artists were anti-corporate in nature: the Beatles (‘love is all you need’); Jimi Hendrix (‘mister businessman, you can’t dress like me’); Jefferson Airplane (‘all your private property, is target for your enemy, and your enemy is we’).

While there was a large market for commercial music, there was an even larger one for hippie ideals: a market that liked to think it was not prey to market forces. This audience felt that the major labels’ investments in military weapons, car parks, funeral parlours and brain scanners might perhaps be inimical to art. This was the era of the physical record and this audience was suspicious of its manufacture, making the connection that the standardization of the duplication process would lead to the standardization of the creative process. They thought that the major labels would want music to be neatly packaged and alike.

            But the majors wanted a slice of this audience. Consequently, they turned to Romantic ideals. They promoted some of their artists as genius outsiders; rebels who were opposed to the system. Jon Stratton has argued that this ‘served to distract the consumer from the commodification which had taken place’. It also ‘allowed cultural products to be viewed as something other than simply more commodities’. Music was made to feel special and unique once again. As such, capitalists used the anti-capitalism of Romanticism to sell more products to anti-capitalist consumers than they might otherwise have bought.

            The major companies downplayed their involvement in the creation of the music. Their aim was to promote the artist star rather than the corporation. Albums replaced singles and consequently the cover sleeve (focussed on the musicians) replaced the single bag (focussed on the record label). Jon Stratton, despite exposing Romantic ideology, was blinded by this process. He constructed a flow chart in which the artist ‘creates the music’ and the record company merely ‘buys music and places it on vinyl and tape’. But weren’t record companies involved in the artistic process too? (They certainly claimed authorship of the finished recordings, as can be witnessed by their ownership of sound recording copyrights.)

            Things have changed. The download has taken over from the physical record and consequently duplication is becoming a thing of the past. Popular music might still be ‘samey’, but its standardization can no longer be linked with factory processes and procedures. In fact, some Romantic idealists argue that artists and consumers no longer need record companies at all: musicians now have the ability to transmit their recordings directly to their fans.

            This has got the music industry worried. In response, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has produced a promotional report: Investing in Music (2012). This document outlines the reasons why artists should still think of industry: without the music business they will not have the financial clout to conquer new territories; they will not have the know-how to market their music; they will not have the ability to collect the money they are owed.

Investing in Music overturns the Romantic ideal. If godlike geniuses can now go directly to the consumer (hello Radiohead), the industry wants to promote a different type of artist. These days the labels are as likely to talk about collaboration as they are about self-expression. One of these collaborators is the label itself. Going against earlier industry practice, IFPI proudly proclaims the record company to be a creative partner in the birthing of new songs. They state that ‘behind the highly visible world of artists and performers […] is a less visible industry of enormous diversity, creativity and economic value’. They also depict the industry as the match-maker between artist and artist: record labels ‘can help developing artists by opening the door for them to work with the best talent in the music business’; labels have ‘the ability to allow artists to go in with fantastic songwriters and producers’.

            These collaborations can be intimidating. New artists have always been wary of gatekeepers; the people who will permit or deny them access to success. But whereas in the days of mass reproduction it was mainly industry personnel, media institutions and retail outlets that were standing sentinel, today established artists have joined them on their watch. Andrew Nosnitsky has depicted the scene in hip-hop, where newer artists can only get a foot on the ladder by guesting on older artists’ tracks: ‘it’s become almost impossible for a middle-tier rap artist to ascend to [hip hop’s] upper tier without the explicit cosignature of existing upper-tier rap artists’. This works all the way down: middle-tier artists invite those below them to rap for eight bars on their tracks, and those on a lower tier also have someone who needs a leg-up from them. Similar scenarios are taking place beyond the world of hip-hop. Collaboration is a way that new R&B and EDM artists can first reach the charts.

            In the end, though, it is the record companies who permit these collaborations: they are the final gatekeepers of every hit that has a ‘featuring’ or ‘versus’ credit. The IFPI report hammers this point home. And so, if you have ever wondered why so many chart hits are collaborative, just think which type of artist the industry now needs.

Easy Come, Easy Go, Little High, Little Low

Is postmodernism postmodern? It has a difficult trick to pull off. According to Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, postmodernism centres on the idea that ‘the old divisions between high and low, art and popular culture, the “autonomous” and the commercial in culture, are now redundant and superseded’’. But postmodernism can surely only achieve this by bearing in mind concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘art’ and ‘popular’, the ‘autonomous’ and the ‘commercial’. It is a philosophy that is too self-conscious to achieve its own ends.

            On top of that, it is a philosophy that begins with the ‘high’ looking down on the ‘low’, and with the art world choosing to incorporate the commercial. It is also one that regards popular music as being one of the forms grazing somewhere near the bottom.

            Popular music has nevertheless been used as evidence that there is a postmodern condition. In the 1970s and 1980s theorists witnessed the music’s growing eclecticism and its rampant inter-textuality. It was mixing things up just as postmodernism should.

            Those theorists got carried away. As Andrew Goodwin has pointed out, many of the popular music artists who mixed high and low were aiming upwards, rather than trying to make cultural divisions redundant. Here he cites both the prog rock acts of the early 1970s and the post-punk artists who succeeded them, arguing that they ‘marked themselves out from the field of “pop” in rejection of the structural form of the pop song, their use of complex, dissonant forms of tonality, and in the absence of lyrical themes centred on romance, escape or “the street”’.  He points out that many of these acts were either unpopular or held the rest of popular music in contempt. Thus their outlook could more rightly be viewed as being modernist, rather than its post.

            Goodwin was writing in 1988. In 2013 there is another factor to consider. Although there continues to be much distinction within popular music, the music is now more regularly viewed as being of cultural worth: it is endorsed by ‘higher’ authorities (much to its discredit, some would say). This can be witnessed in the fact that politicians are compelled to have a knowledge of the latest pop music trends (Gordon Brown on the Arctic Monkeys; Tom Watson on Drenge). It was also in evidence at the London Olympics. The opening and closing ceremonies paid homage to British popular music, while saving their moments of pastiche for longer-established artistic forms. In addition, there has been a coming together of the popular and the classical: pop has learnt from classical music’s funding models; classical has borrowed from pop’s marketing techniques. More broadly, there is evidence of pop sitting comfortably at the cultural table. In 2009 The Times obituary of J.G. Ballard contextualised the author by means of his influence on Joy Division and Radiohead; in 1989 Kate Bush was denied permission to use text from James Joyce’s Ulysses in ‘The Sensual World’, in 2011 permission was granted; Lady Gaga’s wrist tattoo is a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, and she is now working with the artists Marina Abramovic, Robert Wilson and Jeff Koons.

            All of this barely makes an eyelid flutter, let alone a butterfly flap its wings. Many divisions have been superseded. But does this mean we’re all postmodern now or that postmodernism is passé?

In Modernism I Trusted

One of the most shameful records that I own is ‘Fuck a Mod’ by the Exploited. ‘Kick him in the head/Beat him in the balls/Jump up on his head/How much fun it is to fuck a mod until he’s dead’. That’s how it goes, sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’.

            Why bring this up? Well, mostly to grab attention about pop modernism. That’s modernism as in the high art theory: the belief that art should progress; that it should experiment with form; that new technologies should be embraced. As such, the mod revival that the Exploited are singing about is about as far from modernism as it’s possible to be. What pop modernists have in common with mod revivalists, though, is a sense that they are being fucked over.

            At least that’s what Simon Reynolds thinks. The real reason for his pessimism in Retromania is that he feels pop’s modernist spirit has died. How can this be? There are those who argue that there’s no such thing as modernism in popular music. In the first instance, the term modernism should be applied to a period of artistic endeavour that took place prior to the second world war; popular music, in contrast, didn’t really get going until the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the mid-1950s. Secondly, modernism is elitist in nature, it shunned the opinions of the general public; popular music, in contrast, is popular.

            And yet I think Simon Reynolds is right. A modernist tendency has been at large within popular music. The Beatles have much to answer for here. Despite their overwhelming popularity, the second half of their career was essentially modernist in nature: they turned their backs on the public, choosing studio work over live performance; they were pioneers of new technology; they explored the parameters of the pop form. Those who lived through the punk era, which was as much about ‘no past’ as it was about ‘no future’, or the house music movement, which provided the ultimate example of stretching pop’s form to match its function, will also have been touched by the modernist spirit.

            Reynolds goes further. He argues that, out of all art forms, ‘pop music could be said to have held out against the onset of postmodernism the longest’. As evidence he cites ‘vanguards like hip hop and rave’ and ‘isolated modernist hero figures within rock or pop itself’. I think there’s something in this too. Postmodernism’s lack of affect hasn’t sat well with pop’s libidinous drive. Conversely, the music’s canonisation is distinctly modernist in tone. Think of those ‘best albums of all time’ lists: Sgt. Pepper; Dark Side of the Moon; Innervisions; Computer World.

            For me, Reynolds is on less sure ground when identifying the modernist audience. He claims that ‘chavs are Britain’s last bastion of futurist taste’, largely on the grounds that Britain's white underclass has a preference for black music, including ‘R&B and lumpen post-techno styles like donk’. I’d be reluctant to say that anyone from any class or ethnic background has a monopoly on forward-looking taste. What I would suggest, though, is that it is more likely to be those from middle-class and/or art-educated backgrounds who would filter that taste through a belief in modernism. This would include critics such as Simon Reynolds and, if I’m honest, myself. You would be able to see this in our taste for black musicians (James Brown rather than Bobby Bland; Stevie Wonder rather than Al Green; Public Enemy rather than 2Pac; Missy Elliot rather than Beyonce), as well as for middle-class artists influenced by black pioneers (Pink Floyd’s cosmic take on the blues; Radiohead’s dystopian jazz; James Blake’s austere dubstep).

            There is a reason why this matters: pop modernism has wielded power. It is has been an agenda-setting taste, not just in constructing popular music’s canons, but also in encouraging certain types of artists to be signed and promoted by the media. It can be witnessed in the demand that new artists be innovative and original, and maybe even difficult. There are residual bastions of modernism amongst journalists, documentary commissioners and prize-giving panelists (hence James Blake was a shoo-in to win this year’s Mercury Music Prize). Their viewpoint is being overtaken, however, and as a consequence we have Reynolds’ worried fretting. Many new acts favour the past over the future, or rather than searching for ‘newness’ they are focused on ‘nowness’ (see my previous post). Should we mourn modernism’s passing; or should we kick it in the head, beat it in the balls and jump up on its head?

Retromania, Newness and Nowness

Retromania is easy to spot. Simon Reynolds coined the term to lambast the current state of popular music. He claims that ‘Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once’.

            Evidence is all around us. The NME is now promoting the ‘1990s Renaissance’, while this year’s biggest two hits have gone beyond retro and into the world of homage: Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ wears its debt to Chic in the most obvious manner, while Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ is caught up in a copyright infringement case with Marvin Gaye’s estate. One recent example that stood out to me came in the review of the latest Arctic Monkeys album AM in Q magazine. They praised Alex Turner for ‘citing relatively modern influences: Dr Dre and the processed “ex-girlfriend” R&B of Aaliyah’.

            Relatively modern? Aaliyah died in 2001 and Dr Dre blueprinted his production techniques with The Chronic, an album that was released in 1992. If sounds made 20 years ago are still considered up-to-date, this is as damning for R&B as it is for indie music. And there is evidence that the rate of progress is slowing down. The 20-year time period from 1953-1973 encompassed a whole cycle of popular music, from the rock ‘n’ roll of Sun Records to the post-modernism of Roxy Music. The period from 1973-1993 saw another turn of the wheel, encompassing punk, post-punk, hip-hop, synth-pop, house music, drum and bass, et al. The period from 1993-2013 has encompassed, well, what exactly?

            There’s certainly been much talk of newness. As a consequence, innovation and originality should also be easy to spot. Unfortunately, ‘new’ has become one of the most loosely and overused words in popular music. The term is most problematic when used to justify programming policies or the supposed altruism of the music industry. BBC Radio 1 uses the banner ‘in new music we trust’, and I’ve heard its DJs state that they are fans of ‘new music’, as though this were a genre. Meanwhile, record companies have used the fact that they are investing money in ‘new’ music as a means of justifying punitive recording contracts and (in a previous life) the high cost of CDs.

            The difficulty with all of this, as Simon Reynolds is well aware, is that just because an artist is newly signed or newly promoted on the radio, it doesn’t mean that their music is reaching beyond formulas that are already in place. In fact, it is the backward-looking nature of so many newly signed acts that makes retromania seem such a virulent strain. Although it wouldn’t necessarily win them any listeners, a more admirable slogan for Radio 1 would be ‘in modernism we trust’. Record companies, too, would be more likely to win sympathy if they were to apply modernist criteria: to search for artists who push boundaries, who play with form, who might even dare to be unpopular.

            Instead, what radio and record labels are excelling at is nowness. Like any dominant ideology this can be hard to detect when you are living in its midst. And yet every pop era has it – a way of producing records, a way of singing songs, a lyrical focus, an adoption of technology – that is absolutely its own. Although I agree with Simon Reynolds' thesis that this is an era in which retro abounds, I don’t agree with him when he says that ‘the pop present [has become] ever more crowded out by the past’. 2013 might not be bursting with radical innovation, but it certainly has a prevailing aesthetic.

Or, rather, it has a number of prevailing aesthetics. It also has something that helps us to spot these different types of nowness: market segmentation. This is an era in which different tastes are identified and catered for. In an earlier post I mentioned the changing demographics of popular music consumption: in the UK in 1976 over 75% of all records were bought by 12-20 year olds; this can be contrasted with last year when 13-19 year olds accounted for just 13.8% of the music purchased on the internet. In 2012 the largest market share belonged to 35-44 year olds, but each age bracket between 13 and 64 was fairly similar, ranging between 11% and 20% of the market. One effect of this is that to have a truly big hit you have to appeal to each of these age groups, hence the success of an album such Adele’s 21 or the pan-generational dancing that ‘Gangnam Style’ occasioned. The reverse is that each age group is segmented, targeted and marketed.

            This can be witnessed most clearly at the BBC. Back in the 1970s, when record buying was dominated by the tastes of teenagers, radio followed suit. Simon Frith has written of the oddity that, although the majority of Radio 1’s daytime listeners were older people, tuning in in 'factories and shops, on building sites and motorways', what they were listening to was chart music centred on teenage consumption. The compromise reached by the BBC was that, although their playlist was based on the charts, they would ‘select from within each genre the easiest-to-listen-to sounds: […] easy listening punk, easy listening disco, easy listening rock’.

            Things are different now. Radio 1 has a brief to alienate older listeners. In the words of the station’s music policy director, Nigel Harding, they do this by analysing ‘the age of the artist’s primary audience. We always try our best to select tracks that are truly relevant to our core demographic of 15-29 year-olds’.

            They are successful at it too. I am now safely outside Radio 1’s demographic and I find most of its broadcasting unlistenable. It’s not that I don’t like the songs; it’s the overall sound of the station that is ill-matched with my taste. To tune is to receive the shock of the now.

Thicke as Copyright Thieves

Copyright is racist. It’s an emotive argument, but one that has been employed frequently by music academics. The thinking goes something like this: music copyright has it roots in print culture and thus favours elements that can be captured in notation, such as melody and harmony. These musical characteristics are at the forefront of the western art music tradition. In contrast, musical qualities that are central to black music, such as rhythm, ‘feel’ and record production, are poorly protected by copyright. Consequently, white musicians, including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Marty McFly, have felt free to borrow from black music and to profit from what they have taken. Simon Frith, for example, has stated that:

Copyright law defines music in terms of nineteenth-century Western conventions and is not well suited to the protection of Afro-American musicians’ improvisation art or rhythmic skills.

Although there is a basic truth to this theory, it is not without is own problems. It reinforces stereotypes: black musicians are depicted as being rhythmic rather than literary; black music as the product of the community rather than artistic genius. It also ignores the fact that much black music is supremely melodic and harmonic. In addition, it should be noted that some black musicians have a nuanced understanding of copyright law and have used it strategically. Herbie Hancock shrugged off accusations that the version of ‘Watermelon Man’ on Headhunters is heavily indebted to a recording from the Central African Republic, by invoking the racist nature of copyright:

we’re the people who’ve lost the most, who’ve had the most stolen from us. We know what it means to come up with, you know, a sound or a tune, then to have it copped and turned into a big hit or something like that. We’ve been through all of that. But this isn’t like that. This is a different thing, you see, brothers, we’re all making African music, that’s what I’m talking about.

Employing a different tactic, we now have Pharrell Williams, who has shown that ‘Blurred Lines’ owes nothing to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ by employing the biases of musical notation:

If you read music, all you have to do is read the sheet music. It's completely different. Anybody that plays music and reads music, just simply go to the piano and play the two. One's minor and one's major. And not even in the same key.

Hmm. YouTube views of ‘Blurred Lines’ are currently hovering around the 225 million mark and the recording has been number one in 14 different countries. How many people are consuming this song via its printed score?

I Ain't No Square with My Corkscrew Hair (and Moustache)

Students taking my Popular Music degree have included me in a team for Movember, all of us growing moustaches in aid of testicular cancer research (to donate click here). Inevitably this has made me think about the use of the moustache in popular music. There are clearly different tendencies: the beatnik moustache (Acker Bilk, Frank Zappa); the gay biker look (Freddie Mercury, Paul Rutherford, Glenn Hughes of the Village People); the metal moustache (Tony Iommi, Lemmy, Derek Smalls), the eccentric’s moustache (Ron Mael, Nick Cave), the European moustache (Gorgio Moroder) and the moustache to signal a burgeoning seriousness (the Beatles). However, I’m struggling to draw any historical conclusions.

            In contrast, men’s hairstyles have been an indicator of crossover in popular music. This goes back at least as far as Elvis Presley, who used Royal Crown Pomade hair grease in order to slick back his hair. This was a popular product among black Americans, who used it in order to style their hair into white styles. Nelson George has remarked that ‘in a typical pop music example of cross-cultural collision, there was Elvis adapting black styles from blacks adapting white looks’.

            In contrast, the Beatles mop-top look was not so easy for black fans and artists to adopt. Ben E. King has held this hairstyle responsible for terminating the racially mixed musical culture of the early 1960s:

But when they came along – because you know black people can’t grow their hair long and straight, now forget that – so they came along with long, straight hair, and that changed the whole attitude of the music in a racial way.

By the mid-1960s, however, white artists were adopting black hairstyles: witness the afro grown by Eric Clapton and the similar cut that helped Noel Redding to pass his audition for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. This period of miscegenation was short-lived. White hippies went in one direction, growing their hair very long and loose, a style that was even harder for black people to adopt than the Beatles’ cut. Conversely, as the black power movement grew more militant, its afros grew bigger and more magnificent, laying down a gauntlet that few outside the black community could take up.

            Few, but not all. There is another ethnic element to consider: Jews. Jon Stratton has written that ‘being positioned between the ideologically driven binary of black and white, Jews have mediated between African-American culture and the hegemonic white American culture’. This is as true of Jewish hair as it is of Jewish songwriting. Although some people have remarked on the similarities between the Beatles’ mop tops and the pudding-basin cut modeled by the Jewish comedian Ish Kabibble, more commonly Jewish hair has signalled an affinity with black culture. Witness the fantastic afro-growing ability of Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, Marc Bolan, Mick Farren, Charles Shaar Murray and Geoff Travis. Apparently there's even a word for what's going on here: the Jewfro.

Somali Spears

Another story from the Metro. On Monday they reported that Britney Spears recordings are being used as a weapon to scare off Somali pirates. Merchant navy officer Rachel Owens, who works on supertankers operating off the east coast of Africa, is reported as saying, ‘these guys can’t stand Western culture or music . . . as soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can’.

            I’m intrigued by these tales of musical counter-terrorism: elsewhere it has been reported that Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ has been used as a form of torture in Gauntanamo Bay, while Transport for London regularly uses classical music to ward of loitering kids at its more ‘urban’ underground stations. Whose taste is really being exposed here: the terrorists or those who are trying to combat them? Owens appears to be as anti-Britney as she is anti-Somali pirate, and elsewhere in the Metro article Steven Jones of the Security Association for the Maritime Industry is quoted as saying ‘I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention’. Surely it is the relentlessness and loudness of the musical exposure, as much as it is the artist in question, that is the cause of annoyance to the victim. And so are the DJs of these tracks just having some harmless fun, or are we witnessing the terror of cultural capital in action?

Lou Reed's Death Song

On the day before Lou Reed died I had been talking with a friend about how mainstream the Velvet Underground have become. This was occasioned by the fact that the band was the subject of questions on two TV quizzes in the previous week. On Pointless contestants were asked to estimate how many members of the general public would know what is depicted on the cover of the group’s first LP (the result was surprisingly high). On Only Connect the contestants quickly identified the names of band members in a cryptic grid, finding this one of the easiest answers.

            On the day of Lou Reed’s death he made the headlines of BBC news and was placed on the front page of most British newspaper websites. On the day after, he made the front page of the Metro. I read this free newspaper on the way to the British Library, where I was researching the music of 1978-1980 by looking at old copies of Melody Maker, Sounds and NME. The coverage of Reed’s death provided a contrast with the rock deaths of this era. Keith Moon, Bon Scott and John Bonham all passed with barely a mention; Ian Curtis’s death did make the front page of the NME but was not given the blanket coverage that would be expected of this indie icon; it was only John Lennon’s death for which all the front pages were held, but even this event only caused a short pause in the music papers’ quest for newness.

            And so we really do live in different times. Popular music is now firmly part of the establishment and the passing of its grand masters is time for national reflection. The media is now more obsessed with the music’s past than it is with its present. We also appear to be more ghoulish: is the 21^st century witnessing a return to Victorian levels of death obsession? It’s certainly not hard to imagine Velvet Underground fans wearing black. 

Song to the Siren: Pop Culture & the Warning Klaxon

A great article by Robert Barry has appeared in The Quietus, titled ‘Song to the Siren: Pop Culture & the Warning Klaxon’. It concerns the use of alarms in popular and classical music, a subject that I’ve long been interested in, hence Barry references my essay ‘Alarms on Record’, which appeared in the journal Static back in 2007.

            Barry’s article is at its most interesting when contemplating the appropriation and re-appropriation of police alarms. Did ravers co-opt and disarm this sonic symbol of oppression by turning it into a joyous rush in their tracks? Or is it the case that ‘our physiologies never habituate. No matter how thoroughly our conscious minds might know that a loud siren is rushing by is not coming for us, our blood pressure still spikes, our pupils still dilate, and our hair sells still flatten and twist’, particularly as the alarms of authority are getting louder and more pin-pointed.

            I once played a whole set of records with alarms in, DJing at the Tate Gallery in London of all places, and the effect of these sirens was certainly one of increasing menace. At the start of the evening people were barely noticing the fact that there were alarms in each track, but by the end there was the ‘creeping ambiance of low-level panic’ that Barry describes. It was ‘Dominator’ by Human Resource that proved to be the turning point. Security moved in and told me that the pictures were being damaged by its maddening clangour.

The Great Hip Hop Hoax

I have just watched the fascinating documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax, which concerns two rappers from Dundee, who found that they couldn’t get signed when A&R people heard their Scottish accents, and so they pretended to be American instead. This ruse worked. Posing as Silbil and Brains, skateboarding rappers from Huntington Beach, California, the duo were quickly signed to Sony Records and appeared to be poised for stardom. Throughout their incubation period they maintained their conceit, fooling everyone around them.

            The film raises all sorts of questions about that classic popular music concept of ‘authenticity’, but there are many layers to it here. On the one hand, there is the fact that the British industry figures would only deem their act marketable if they were from hip hop’s homeland. On the other hand, it is made clear throughout the film that they were signed because they were genuinely good and also because they were genuinely immersed in hip hop culture. Chris Rock, from Island Records, who approached them after their first ‘American’ showcase, states:

If you meet someone who’s into hip hop you know straight away. I have a massive collection of trainers. I buy vinyl records. I listen to music all the time. I wear these crazy glasses that everyone thinks ‘my god, what are they?’ And that’s the hip hop culture. Authenticity within hip hop is pretty much that. You’ve got to live and breathe it. Silibil n’ brains were hip hop. It was hilarious. They had clever enough lyrics and flow to actually impress people like me.

The film also made me think that authenticity in hip hop culture is more complicated than first appears. While it’s perhaps the ultimate genre for wanting to keep things ‘real’, it’s also the case that hip hop artists are shape-shifters. This is most obvious when it comes to nomenclature. There are very few hip hop artists who haven’t changed their names: Tracy Marrow becomes Ice-T, Curtis Jackson becomes 50 Cent, Thebe Kgositsile becomes Earl Sweatshirt, and so on. This can be related to older black music practice – McGinley Morganfield became Muddy Waters and Chester Burnett became Howlin’ Wolf. There is even a tradition whereby artists take on more than one persona. James Brown had a roll call of titles (Mr Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One, the Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, etc.) and George Clinton has numerous alter egos (Dr Funkenstein, Star Child, Sir Nose D’VoidofFunk, etc.). This can also be witnessed in hip hop: Marshall Mathers is Eminem is Slim Shady; Robert Diggs is RZA is Prince Rakeem is Bobby Digital is the Scientist. And so why not be Scottish and Californian?

            Sadly, the public never got to experience Silibill and Brains’ duality. Their act was dropped and it appears that they failed for two main reasons. One, is that it was psychologically dangerous for them to perpetuate their lie (this process reminded me of the episode of Colditz in which Wing Commander Marsh feigned madness in order to be released, but got so deep into his act that he became insane). The second reason is that they missed their window.

            I have never seen this aspect of popular music success and failure captured so effectively before. Things move fast and there is only a buzz around an act for a certain period of time: the public cools off; record company personal move on to other projects. Crucially, Brains delayed the release of their first single. His sister is convinced that he did so because he was scared of the consequences of their cover being blown. Whatever the reason, the timing was terrible. Shortly after delaying the release, Sony merged with BMG and the person who signed them got laid off in the process. Jonathan Shalit states that ‘there’s always a moment when you’re developing creative people, if you don’t have success before that moment passes, they often don’t have success’, and their co-manager Del Conboy talks about industry practice: ‘once someone at the top has told all the foot soldiers that that band is probably on the way out the phone stops ringing, you can’t get hold of people, and I remember thinking at the time, because I’d gone through it before, "this feels like that time again". No one will really say "this isn’t working, it’s over"'. Their new A&R man was part of this process. He apparently told them, ‘we’re not going to get rid of you, but we’re not really sure about this either’, before adding the killer line, ‘I don’t think you guys are believable’.

The Kids are Untied

I’m reading Simon Frith’s The Sociology of Rock at the moment, in part as preparation for the conference that takes place in his honour at Edinburgh University in April at which I’ll be speaking.

            Some of the statistics from this 1970’s book are fascinating. For example, in the UK in 1976 more than 75% of popular music records were sold to those in the 12- to 20-year-old age bracket. Compare this to the BPI Statistical Handbook 2013, which states that last year only 13.8% of records and downloads sales last were to 13- to 19-year-olds (the largest band of purchasers were 35- to 44-year olds with 19.7%). Here you have a potential answer to all sorts of questions: why popular music is no longer so associated with youth; why our current times are so difficult to identify musically (what would a ‘teenies’ package tour sound like?); why adults are acting like kids; why there is so much retromania; why Adele is so successful.