Baby, You're a Firework

Everyone loves fireworks. On Saturday night I went to the huge display at Alexandra Palace, an annual event that is prompted by the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ attack on British parliament, albeit that Fawkes and politics are curiously absent from the celebrations these days. There were thousands of people there. It was one of those rare occasions where you see a true cross-section of London’s population: all ages, all sexes, all sexualities, all nationalities, all races and all faiths. There’s a problem with fireworks displays, though. The first explosions are always astonishing, but how do you sustain attention over a 20-minute set? It can all start to seem a bit tedious and wasteful. At worst you feel like Aimee Mann in her song '4th of July', which commemorates America's fireworks night: ‘Today's the fourth of July / Another June has gone by / And when they light up our town I just think / What a waste of gunpowder and sky’. You know that there will be a climax at some point, but climaxing is about the only thing that fireworks know how to do.

            There is an answer to this fireworks conundrum. Why not try dancing to them? Dancing is always interesting. It can be enhanced, further still, by visual effects. The Alexandra Palace festival was sound-tracked by DJ Yoda. He was brilliant, weaving together short bursts of music from a large array of genres. He was also thoroughly modern with his faith in the past. Yoda knows the musical state of play. After 15 years of downloading services and a decade of Spotify, there is an audience that knows a huge amount of music and is open to all types. You can play anything from any era as long as it’s good and it’s right. And so we had songs drawn from the 1950s to the present day, and from styles as diverse as hip-hop, folk music, trance, post-punk, jazz-funk, soul, movie soundtracks and mainstream pop. We danced to Deodato’s version of Also Sprach Zarathustra and we danced to the Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic’. The biggest hits of the night were a remix of the Weavers’ ‘Wimoweh’ from 1952 (a song, it seems, that we have all grown up with) and a brilliant segue of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ (from 1983) into Rihanna’s 2011 hit ‘We Found Love’ (the trance clichés of this track are irresistible). Of course the whole thing ended with Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’. Except it didn’t. There was an encore sequenced to ‘Feelin’ Good’, Nina Simone’s classic from 1964. These are great times to be a DJ. And they are great times for explosive dance.  

Love of Labour

These days people hark back to the mixtapes and describe the creation of them as a labour of love. In doing so they emphasise the wrong part of this practice. There has been a large body of writing about the romantic aspects of creating these tapes; compiling them as love letters to the person you wanted to date. In my own experience romance was only a small part of mix-taping practice. Sadly, perhaps, I was more likely to make mixtapes for my mates (what does this say about my sexuality?). Most often I made them for myself (admittedly, I did have a fairly isolated upbringing).

            And I made a lot of mixtapes. In fact, just about every vinyl record I bought, as well as any pre-recorded cassettes or CDs, was reconfigured and re-contextualised as part of a tape compilation. This didn’t represent a labour of love, but rather a love of labour.

            There is a type of listening practice that is idealised above all others: dedicated, motionless listening, preferably through headphones and better still in the dark. This is the pop equivalent of the classical music concert: listening that supresses bodily activity. As with so many aspects of classical ideology this needs to be countered. Simon Frith has made a strong argument for dancing as an ideal way of listening. This is a political move. He wants to overturn the idea that rhythmically-focused black music should be reduced to ‘feeling’ while harmonically-sophisticated white music is the bastion of ‘thought’. He argues instead that ‘dance matters not just as a way of expressing music but as a way of listening to it, a way into the music in its unfolding – which is why dancing to music is both a way of losing oneself in it, physically, and a way of thinking about it, hearing it with a degree of concentration that is clearly not “brainless”’.

            In black culture there is a dynamic cluster of meanings around the word ‘work’. When you are ‘working’ you might be doing your job. The term is also applied to dancing and to dancing’s great correlate, sex. This metaphorical usage stretches from Hank Ballard’s ‘Work with Me, Annie’ through to Michael Jackson’s ‘Working Day and Night’ and beyond.

            Returning to the subject of mixtapes, I want to raise a less titillating equation between working and absorbing yourself in sound. Another great way of listening to music is to turn it into a job. For me, the making of mixtapes wasn’t romantic; it was an industrial process. In my own vainglorious way I was imagining myself as a producer or engineer. I was selecting, sequencing and editing. Like dancing, this changed listening from a passive process into an active one. It was also a way of getting closer to the music. I have written before about the reciprocal relationship between recording personnel and the public: producers mix recordings with an imagined ‘ear’ of the public; one of the ways that the public listens to music is by imagining the scenario in the recording studio. There are all sorts of ways of miming along to the records we play and there various locations that we can picture ourselves in – the air guitar and the live concert are not the only games in town. In fact, one of the best ways of locating ourselves in recorded sound is to configure ourselves as engineers. And this, as much as courtship, is where the mixtape came in handy.  

Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah?

Recently I heard a radio show about Sgt. Pepper. The weak excuse to rake over old ground about this record was that it was the 48th anniversary of the photo session for its sleeve. That said, hearing some of the hyperbole that surrounds the LP did make me wonder how much of it is true.

            First up was the tale about Sgt. Pepper’s public debut. The story goes that the Beatles took an acetate copy of the album to Mama Cass Elliot’s flat, just off the Kings Road in Chelsea. They played it at full volume at six in the morning with the windows wide open. According to the Beatles’ press agent, Derek Taylor, there wasn’t a single complaint. What happened instead was that local residents opened their windows because they wanted to listen to the music.

            Really? There is no music that appeals to everyone, particularly when it has the convulsive shock of the new. It’s less likely still that music will be welcomed at six in the morning. It’s also the case that different elements of music travel at different rates. What most of the neighbourhood would have heard was the low throb of the rhythm section. Was the whole of 1960's Chelsea into drum and bass?

            This idea that everyone liked Sgt. Pepper is perpetuated elsewhere. The radio documentary recalled Kenneth Tynan’s review of the album for The Times, in which he described its release as ‘a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation’. It also quoted Langdon Winner, looking back on the album a year after it was issued. He believed that:

The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. In every city in Europe and America the radio stations played, “What would you think if I sang out of tune . . . Woke up got out of bed . . . looked much older, and the bag across her shoulder . . . in the sky with diamonds, Lucy in the . . .” and everyone listened. At the time I happened to be driving across the country on Interstate 80. In every city where I stopped for gas or food – Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend – the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.

Once again we are provided with the idea that there was unity in appreciation of this album (and once more the people caught up in its public broadcast were somehow hearing pure melodies rather than distant bass thuds).

            Maybe the truth of these statements doesn’t really matter. What’s interesting is that people were moved to say them in the first place: there must have been something about the release of this record that felt like a new community was being forged.

            Could such a thing happen today? The nearest that popular music has come to a unifying force in recent times is ‘Gangnam Style’, or maybe ‘Harlem Shake’. Nobody would write about these songs in such an overblown way.

            This is perhaps to do them a disservice. It could be said that these songs are, in fact, more global than Sgt. Pepper has ever been. They have united people of the west and east. That they’re not taken seriously is perhaps a mark of our times. One of the reasons why the Beatles elicited such highfaluting commentary was because there were divides: between the young and old, between the old and new, between the high and low arts. Cultural critics were keen to validate the Beatles and in the process could get carried away. These divides have broken down in recent years. We’ve all gone pop!

Another reason why ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘Harlem Shake’ aren’t taken as seriously is because they are dance songs. Dancing to music is nevertheless just as important as thinking about it. It’s also, in truth, a greater force for change. Although Beatlemania is often seen as the real beginning of the sixties, it should not be forgotten that ‘The Twist’ had already done much to break down social barriers. Dancing can be dangerously cohesive. The Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver once described the Twist as ‘a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia’. Adding that it ‘succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books’. The power of dance had been seen earlier with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, and would be seen again with disco and rave.

As so often, George Clinton helps us make sense of these things. He foresaw ‘One Nation Under a Groove’. Unity is best achieved through getting on the good foot, not by stroking our chins. Say what you like about Sgt. Pepper – and I’m sure that people will go on saying what they like about it - but it’s not great for dancing to.