Name that Timbre

Name that Tune was a quiz that had a long life on radio and television. It first began as a show on NBC radio in America in 1952. In Britain, it was first known as Spot that Tune, which ran between 1956 and 1962 on Granada Television. It was next seen between 1976 and 1983 as ‘Name that Tune’, a segment of the Thames Television show London Night Out, hosted by Tom O’Connor. After that, it became a standalone quiz, hosted by Lionel Blair from 1983 to 1988.  It was then revived on Channel 5 for a show hosted by Jools Holland in 1997 and 1998. The most recent version was witnessed in 2007, as part of ITV’s Gameshow Marathon, helmed by Vernon Kay.

            The premise was simple. Contestants would compete to name popular tunes in as few notes as possible (‘I’ll name that tune in seven’, ‘I’ll name that tune in five’ etc.). Rather than playing a record, the tune would be played live by musicians in the broadcasting studio. If singers were featured, they would replace the words to the song with ‘la la las’. The show was dependent on a shared knowledge of popular hit songs. It would not work effectively unless the contestants’ musical expertise found an echo in that of the viewers and listeners at home. The quick familiarity of melodies could be startling.

            Melody is not our speediest musical recall, however. We’re much faster with timbre, particularly the timbre of recordings. If I switch on the radio and a record I know is playing, I can name that sound within microseconds. The same is true if I’m in a club or a bar, and the DJ has cued up a familiar record. I will know it and I can name it immediately. I’m not alone in this ability. Most of us are startlingly fast.

            One of the few times that this ability has been captured on screen is in T2: Trainspotting. Early in the movie, the main character, Renton, returns to his childhood home and puts a record on the turntable. From the label we can guess that it is Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’. He plays a tiny burst of the record before snatching it from the turntable as he is haunted by the memories it conjures.

What is brilliant about this scene is that the filmmakers have the confidence, not only that the cinemagoers will recognize ‘Lust for Life’ from this brief excerpt, but also that it will take them back to the more extended use of the same record in the original Trainspotting movie, where it soundtracks a scene in which Renton is chased through the streets of Edinburgh. (There is also a neat joke. In the first film the use of ‘Lust for Life’ is non-diegetic, meaning that Renton will not have heard it himself. Somehow, though, the record and its associations have seeped into his consciousness by the time of the second film.)

            We need more of these moments on screen. How about a very brief quiz show called Name that Timbre? And how about pitting it against Name that Tune? The timbral contestants would surely be quicker than the tuneful ones.

As well as being entertaining, this could help us think again about musical hierarchies. Melody is prioritised in the law and in value judgements generally. One of the reasons why classical music maintains its elevated status is because it is melodically and harmonically rich in comparison with much popular music. But popular music wins on timbre. What then, if it is revealed that timbre is the fastest, most resonant and deeply penetrating musical quality of all?

Pop Modernism

Pop modernism operates as a lobbying body within popular music. It is not the mainstream, but can enter the mainstream at periods of peak activity. For some, it is pop’s preferred state. It embraces the spirit of modernism outlined by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, expecting ‘cultural turmoil’ to foretell ‘social tumult’. Here, ‘music heralds’, fulfilling the purpose that Jacques Attali outlined for it:

Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.

Pop modernism first surfaced in the late 1960s, as rock music attempted to splinter from pop. Although it inherited characteristics from fine art philosophies of modernism, it rested primarily upon ‘low theory’, as Simon Frith terms it, theory that was

developed out of day-to-day practices of pop itself . . . confused, inconsistent, full of hyperbole and silence, but still theory, and theory which is compelled by necessity to draw key terms and assumptions from high theory, from the more systematic accounts of art, commerce, pleasure and class that are available.

From the higher theorising of art, pop modernism has taken ideas of onward progress, originality, formal experimentation and technological fascination, a belief that you should reject ‘the current state of things in favour of the new’. It has also inherited an occasional snobbishness, a belief that progressive art should stand above ‘the realms of mass culture and everyday life’. Rock ideology, for example, included a rejection of the singles charts, as its ‘artists’ put their faith in albums instead. Speaking in 1967, Eric Clapton believed:

Singles are an anachronism. To get any good music in a space of two or three minutes requires working to a formula and that part of the pop scene really leaves me cold. I hate all that rushing around trying to get a hit.

There were technologies and institutions that helped rock artists to achieve these ends. Vinyl albums operated in a different manner to vinyl singles, both as objects and in the way that they functioned in the marketplace. Radio also helped to uphold the rock/pop split. In America the former genre was found on FM stations, while the latter remained on AM. In Britain, meanwhile, rock was the preserve of ‘specialist’ shows, broadcast in the evening hours. The two forms of music were also written about in different forms of print media, and there were different conventions when it came to playing live. It was not possible, however, for rock music to make a complete break from pop music. Unlike modernist fine art, rock music had been born within mass culture. Moreover, it was not always desirable to stay removed from the singles charts. Financially, rock artists needed to release singles in order to promote their albums. Artistically, some of them welcomed the challenge of bringing diversity to the charts. Marc Bolan declared, ‘me getting into the Top Twenty – as a musician alongside the pop stars – opens up a great thing’.

            A modernist spirit has been present in popular music at several times since the late 1960s. It has not been consistent, however. There have been particular periods when pop has become more openly questing, and there have been times in which the conditions have been ripe for this impulse to be maximised. Technology has been one driver for pop’s expansion. Synthesisers, sequencers and samplers have each helped to push the music forwards, as have new recording formats, notably the 12” single. Drugs have been another prompt. LSD and MDMA are among those to offer enhanced horizons. Pop modernism can arise when the interplay between the major labels and the independent sector is in productive tension. Separate sales charts for alternative music and dance genres have helped to foster scenes; dedicated radio support has also been essential. 

            Many of those who complain about a decline of innovation in popular music have been involved in pop’s modernist spurts. Simon Reynolds is a prime example. He has stated:

When I started taking more than a passing interest in pop, as a teenager in the post-punk seventies, I immediately ingested a strong dose of modernism: the belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future. It was there already in rock, thanks to The Beatles, psychedelia and progressive rock, but post-punk drastically amped up the belief in constant change and endless innovation. Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, this spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock.

Pop modernists such as Reynolds hark back to the vital periods of their youth; they are nostalgic, as Svetlana Boym puts it, ‘for a prenostalgic state of being’. They yearn for an era when neither they nor the music they loved were retrospective. One of the prompts for this nostalgia is that it feels as though we should be experiencing radical musical innovation: we are living through a period of major technological and infrastructural change. However, we do not appear to have many new styles of music. Contrary to Jacques Attali, it is not music itself that is heralding a new economic order; it is instead the economic organization of music that is operating in advance of other markets. 

Composure

Can songwriting set popular music free? Well, it depends upon what it is being set free from and who is calling for its liberation.

            If it is people from the outside who are making these demands, then the answer to popular music’s problems should not be found in their complaints about songwriting. As I explored in the previous entry, some ‘high’ cultural theorists are overly focused on the compositional process. They look at pop songs and see standardization everywhere. They argue that hit records create ‘response-mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society’. What these theorists tend to miss is that popular music is about more than its tunes. It doesn’t need to ape the ‘total’ compositional methods of classical music to have revolutionary potential. The best response to these theorists is not to answer their complaints about songwriting with songwriting, but to look instead at the areas in which popular music excels. It is the life force of popular music that can be radical and redemptive. It is here, in the human performance that gets captured in the grooves, that you can find the ‘magic that can set you free’. You can find anarchy and attitude, solace and soul. This is the democratic process that the best pop records enact. If the music were to prioritize composition in the way that cultural snobs demand, then popular music’s own particular magic would dissolve. In the order of things, it would forever play second fiddle to classical music, the composed form par excellence.

            But lets forget about outsiders for a minute. What does a focus on songwriting look like from within popular music? What difference can it make to people who are actually making and consuming this form? Here, there is a potential for composition to be democratizing. Conversely, there is a potential for the ‘life force’ of popular music to be tyrannical. Far from being a magic that can set you free, the prioritizing of ‘feel’, ‘soul’ and ‘attitude’ can distort our perceptions of the music. It gives kudos to musicians who have a supposed ‘authenticity’. It places a focus on the lives of the artists rather than quality of the work. It also favours men. Keeping it real or being true to the streets are by and large masculine pursuits. They should not be the standards by which all popular music is judged.

            A turn to songwriting can open things up. When someone like Noel Gallagher centres his greatness on his songwriting ability, it is invitation to be measured against Bjorn and Benny, rather than Brown and Squire. If fans are told to focus on the ‘song’, they can forget about authenticity for a while. They no longer have to suffer the ‘perfect pop’ of Big Star or Teenage Fanclub and can listen to genuinely perfect pop instead, including records that actually made the charts. Putting songwriting first helps to give female artists a greater chance. If we ignore the poets, seers and sages who have become the Romantic pin-ups of popular music’s history and instead concentrate upon composition, the gender biases of popular music and artistic genius can start to dissolve. In this order of things, Carole King has as much validity as Jim Morrison. It is no coincidence that female musicians are having increased success now that popular music has a greater focus on songwriting. After years of boys showing off about their noise, the music is regaining a sense of composure.

            This is not to say that girls can’t make a great noise too, but because the phallic grind of popular music has become encoded as male, the noise of girls has to be thought out in a different manner. In order to create the gushing thrust of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Led Zeppelin didn’t have to write much. They merely had to take Muddy Waters’ ‘You Need Love’ by way of the Small Faces ‘You Need Loving’ and play and produce the riff with a power it had not previously known. In order to create their female rock music, the Slits had to think about the semiotics of each chord and each beat.  The group’s guitarist, Viv Albertine has stated, ‘The four of us constantly questioned everything. Each note had to be as exciting as the one before it and no clichés’. With her ‘mosquito’ tone, she aimed to replace ‘the old, oppressive patriarchal way that guitars sound’. Warpaint, a contemporary female four-piece, have also expressed a determination to write in a textural rather than climactic fashion. They want to avoid the punchlines that are common in both the music and comedy of men.

            And so where does this leave us in our search for popular music and liberty? Will we find emancipation in the grain of the voice or in the structure of the music? I’m going to equivocate. The thing is, I like both Led Zeppelin and the Slits, and I have found moments of freedom in records by each of these bands. Popular music can be a standardizing and reactionary force; it can also be challenging and cathartic. And these polarized tendencies can be found in both the structure and the grain. The songwriting process can reinforce the edicts of capitalism in both its musical and economic aims; it can also force us to think twice about societal norms. The concepts of soul and groove can become clichéd and can reinforce racial stereotypes; they can also bring out untapped emotions and encourage listeners to search across cultural divides. Authenticity can be a bind and a distraction, but some role-model artists can encourage people to think twice about how they live their lives.

A record can be transformative because it does exactly what the artist intends it too. Alternatively, a record can be revolutionary because audience members reinterpret it in a radical way. That reinterpretation doesn’t have to be ironic either; it can be more earnest than the author’s original intentions. Moreover, the divide between the artistic and the re-interpreted doesn’t have to be made along rock and pop lines, with the 'untouchable' works of art falling in the former category and the reworked works of art falling in the latter. In fact, records from any genre can be used in different ways: audiences can find what they want in them – or what they hate in them – by accepting or rejecting the composers’ intentions. Ultimately, the reductive and redemptive aspects of popular music work in accordance with everything else about this popular form: we takes our choice.