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.

Notes on Eurovision 'Camp'

I don’t usually watch the Eurovision Song Contest, but my Greek partner’s mother is staying with us at the moment and Saturday’s show provided an irresistible opportunity for some pan-generational, pan-European viewing. It was also more interesting than expected, with Conchita Wurst’s victory providing an added political dimension, as well as moving the competition outside of its normal confines of camp. For my thoughts on her victory, please click through to the article ‘On Camp & Conchita’, which was published in the Quietus today.

From Cover to Cover

When the Beatles destroyed rock ‘n’ roll in the early 1960s, one of the main victims was the cover version. Artists who didn’t write their own material were castigated. Worse still, white artists who covered material by black artists and had better success in the charts than them, were deemed to be racial oppressors. Pat Boone is usually regarded as the main villain of the piece. Simon Frith has stated that his cover of Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ is ‘probably the nearest thing to a consensual bad record in popular music history, a track that is both exploitative and feeble’.

            But cover versions are making a comeback. As stated in my previous post, they are one of elements of the current pop world that hark back to the pre-Beatles era. Some of these new cover versions can be labelled feeble and exploitative. Talent show winners are causing outrage by recording cherished pop songs (‘Hallelujah’, ‘When We Collide’); white artists are causing upset by performing black artists’ material (Fall Out Boy’s version of ‘Beat It’); and opportunists are trying to cash in by hoping we will mistakenly download or stream their ‘tribute’ versions of hits (the multitude of cover tracks that populate iTunes and Spotify).

            Cover versions are also performing a completely different feat: they are becoming the last refuge of the pop snob. In my previous post I wrote of the way that party DJs are becoming more altruistic; they are playing the hit songs that partygoers know. Some have found a way to do this and still eat their elitist cake, however. Rather than playing the original version of the song that everyone has heard before, they opt for obscure, cultish cover versions. At one and the same time they can show off their knowledge of pop’s long tail as well as its short head.

            This is productive consumption in action. In refusing to endorse the hegemonic version of a hit song, these party DJs are indulging in guerrilla tactics. They are ‘poaching’ popular culture in a way that theorists such as John Fiske and Michel De Certeau would admire. Fiske has argued that resistance to the cultural industries is ‘characterized by the creativity of the weak in using the resources provided by a disempowering system while refusing finally to submit that power’. For him, it is not art works that constitute popular culture, but instead what the people do with them. The truly ‘popular’ cultural moments occur when the people react against the ‘forces of domination’.

            By this measure, the most radical (and camp!) act that could now be performed within the world of cover versions would be to re-appropriate Pat Boone and stand him against the cultural power bloc that has made Little Richard dominant. This isn’t happening, however. The party DJs who are playing cover versions might well be snobs, but they also believe in an aesthetics of the popular. They want to put forward the best popular culture and for them it is to be found within the works created by the cultural industries. They maintain a faith in this art that critics such as Fiske, for all his supposed populism, would deny. 

Party Streamers

One of the things that interests me most about the digital streaming of music is the way that it has affected party DJing. Two weeks ago I was at a house party in Athens throughout which the whole supply of music came from YouTube. People didn’t have to rely on their own record collections; they could draw on virtually the whole history of record music.

            And what was the result? They played hits. The same thing has happened at parties I’ve been to in the past few years in London, Berlin, Paris and Evesham. Now that obscurity is freely available to all, party DJs no longer feel the need to show off their knowledge of b-sides and bootlegs. It is instead more important to have an insight into the music that people actually want to hear. Gone are the obscure dance instrumentals of yesteryear; DJ’s are now playing sing-a-long songs.

Two further things struck me about the music that was being played. First, despite the fact that most people knew most of the songs, my guess is that very few of them would have owned these tracks if they would have had to buy them as records. The night began with classic rock ‘n’ roll tracks and ‘Let’s Twist Again’ before moving on to disco and synth-pop. We were hearing tracks that, although widely loved, would bestow little cultural capital upon any owner. They were also records of such common currency that no one would have to buy them to be able to hear them, even in the days before digital piracy and streaming. (There were some interesting national variations when it came to the hits, however; in Greece, ‘Jeopardy’ by the Sound, ‘Mr Roboto’ by Styx and ‘Electricity’ by OMD all appear to have been massive.)

            The other thing that struck me was that many of the records would have previously been termed ‘camp’. At one point, one of Athens’s many heavy rockers took over the computer, but after playing a couple of metal tracks he quickly turned to ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’, ‘YMCA’ and ‘It’s Raining Men’. Greece can be quite a macho society at times, but the playing of these songs caused outbreaks of dancing rather than cries of alarm. Even the rock tracks that he played fell into the ‘camp’ category. We heard Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ and Twisted Sister’s ‘We’re Not Going to Take It’.

            But is ‘camp’ still the appropriate word for this music? In fact, was it ever? Looking at Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’, I find little in her jottings that fit. She states that the ultimate camp statement is ‘it’s good because its awful’, but there’s very little that’s bad about any of these tracks. ‘It’s Raining Men’, in particular, is one of the most important artworks of the 1980s. It is musically and lyrically brilliant. It’s provocative and liberating. It’s video is pretty fantastic too. ‘We’re Not Going to Take It’ attempts a similar feat and almost pulls it off. For Sontag, the essential element of camp is ‘a seriousness that fails’. Each of these tracks, however, was designed to give pleasure and has succeeded in doing so in spades. Perhaps most importantly, none of us were appreciating this music ironically; we weren’t seeing ‘everything in quotation marks’ and we weren’t claiming to have a ‘good taste of bad taste’. It was a party at which people were having the good sense to have good taste in good music.

            It’s not an exaggeration to claim that digital streaming has set people free. Musical tastes are more diverse than they have ever been and are less hidebound by conventions of cool. We need to push further, however. It’s time to stop excusing the pleasures of the popular by referring to them as camp. When did anyone ever go to a disco in an ironic frame of mind?