Do You Remember the Days of the Old Schoolyard?

Musical taste at school is dynamic. The popularity of any band or any genre can go from being cool to being embarrassing; woe betide any student who doesn’t keep up with what is in and what is out. There are shifts in taste in each school year. There also differences in the ways that each school year uses its music. But are these differences caused by psychology, aesthetics or political economy? And do they hold true at different periods in time?

In 1972 Simon Frith surveyed a school in West Yorkshire. He found that, as pupils grew older, they moved away from the mainstream towards the underground, and away from group consensus towards greater individuality of taste. Fourth formers had ‘maximum involvement in youth groups’; fifth formers ‘emphasised beat and sound in their tastes rather than meaning’; sixth formers scorned ‘“commercial” tastes’.

In general, this remained true at my own school in the late 1970s/early 1980s. We were the punk generation. At first, there was mass consensus that all punk was a good thing. Then, in later school years, there was greater discernment: some bands were in (the Fall) other bands were out (the Boomtown Rats). There was a shift from chart punk released by major record companies (the Clash, the Stranglers), to more obscure punk released by independent labels (Discharge, Crass). By the time I left school I was ordering albums from America so that I could get hold of records that no other students owned.

Two of my nieces are currently at high school and their taste is just as nuanced and distinct. A couple of years ago they were into One Direction. They were displaying their ‘maximum involvement’ by following Britain’s biggest boy band. This year One Direction are out. My nieces are now fans of K-pop. Although their musical taste might seem far removed from the punk that dominated my school, their reasoning is not so different. My nieces are not into Psy; what they like is the more obscure K-pop. They told me they like it because it is not written about in the mainstream press. They are displaying excellent scorn for commercial taste.

And yet I’m not sure that it’s quite so easy to wrap up the tastes of school years and put them into boxes. There are factors that make these groupings unstable. One is the role of other family members. When I was at school there were fourth formers who already displayed refined taste. The common factor amongst them was that they had older brothers or sisters. These siblings gave them advanced warning of the rules of their own school years. While I’m sure this dynamic remains in place, there is now further family intrusion. The taste of parents used to be something to rebel against, but this is no longer always the case. Some ‘cooler’ parents insist on taking up the role of older siblings; they advise their children about what is and what is not to like. From what I have seen, it is as children get older that they are coming into closer alignment with their parents’ tastes. Fourth formers are still winding up their mums and dads by insisting that chart pop is amazing; but today’s sixth formers are asking their parents if they can borrow their old vinyl LPs.

Music also plays apart. There are always acts and genres that are aimed specifically at school kids, but this music varies in both quantity and quality. Some of this comes down to demographics: when there are lots school kids around the music industry aims a lot of music at them. Some of it comes down to luck. Bliss was it to be young in the late 1970s when punk held sway. This music was aimed at children, but it was also complex. It felt important at the time and still feels important today; it informed the philosophy by which I live. While I’m an arch populist and an out-and-out lover of hits, I struggle to find similar significance in One Direction.

The media infrastructure also changes from generation to generation. When I was at school the move away from the mainstream was largely a game of one-upmanship. It also wasn’t that hard to escape mass media. Although there was a greater presence of popular music on terrestrial television in those days (Top of the Pops was being broadcast to 15 million viewers each week), the music was hardly touched upon in the daily papers (it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that both the tabloids and the broadsheets gave it greater coverage). As such, it wasn’t difficult to access ‘obscure’ music (listening to John Peel’s radio show or buying Sounds would do the trick).

Things are different today. My nieces aren’t just turning away from chart pop out of a desire to refuse mainstream taste; they are also turning away from it because its depressing to be confronted with the antics of today’s pop stars in the mass media. It’s simply not safe to be a fan of Rihanna, Rita Ora, Justin Bieber or the other performers who receive media saturation. Who knows what they’ll do next? Their disrobing is embarrassing and their antics are stupid. And so instead my nieces are putting their faith in K-pop acts about whom we know nothing and who chose to say nothing in the press. Although there is wisdom in this, I’m not sure that it’s a design for life.

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?

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?