The Critics' (Second and Third) Choice Award

Do the Brit Awards provide evidence of sexism in the record industry? This year they have been called out for a lack of female nominees. In particular, it has been noted that the candidates for the most prestigious award of the night, the one given out for Album of the year, are essentially a duplication of the names for the Male Solo Artist award.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and the Brit Awards has defended these shortlists, stating that the Brits are ‘a reflection of what's going on in the business. There’s been a lot of success for male acts in 2019 – and with grime and hip-hop doing very well, they are more male-dominated genres’. While this statement would appear to absolve the record industry of any responsibility for the male orientation, Taylor further excuses the Brit Awards on the grounds that there have been more female nominees and winners in previous years.

The Critic’s Choice award would appear to back up his claim. Inaugurated in 2008, its first winner was Adele. Since then, half of the winners have been female artists and each of these artists has gone on to have considerable success. This year the trophy has been renamed as the Rising Star award. It’s first winner – Celeste – is female too.

What interests me here, though, is the artists who were shortlisted for the Critic’s Choice award but didn’t win the trophy. If we look at their careers, a different picture emerges:

2008. Winner: Adele.

Runners up:

·      Duffy – had huge success with her first album Rockferry (2018) which sold over two million copies in the UK. Endlessly (2010), did not do as well. Since then there has been a hiatus in Duffy’s music career

·      Foals – have enjoyed a sustained and successful career, releasing six albums between 2008 and 2019, the last of which made it to number one in the UK

2009. Winner: Florence and the Machine

Runners up:

·      Little Boots - released three albums between 2009 and 2015, but nothing since then.

·      White Lies – have released five albums to date, with diminishing returns

2010. Winner: Ellie Goulding

Runners up:

·      Marina and the Diamonds - four moderately successful albums over the last ten years, all on Atlantic Records. The second of these, Electra Heart, topped the charts in the UK, but was the lowest selling number one album of the 21^st century

·      Delphic - an all-male alternative dance band who released albums in 2010 and 2013, the latter of which reached 77 in the UK chart. They do not appear to have released anything since 2014, albeit that one of the members is now part of a songwriting collective known as ‘The Six’, which has had some chart success

2011. Winner: Jessie J

Runners up:

·      James Blake – has released four successful and internationally acclaimed albums to date

·      The Vaccines – have released four albums and are doing OK despite some line-up changes

2012: Winner: Emile Sandé

Runners up:

·      Maverick Sabre – a male English-Irish vocalist/rapper who has released three albums: Lonely Are the Brave (2012) on Mercury records, reached number 2 in the UK; Innerstanding (2015) on Mercury, reached number 41; When I Wake Up (2019) on Famm, reached number 46

·      Michael Kiwanuka – has released three albums between 2012 and 2019 and is doing fine

2013. Winner: Tom Odell

Runners up:

·      AlunaGeorge - an electronic duo featuring a female singer and male producer, who have released two albums: Body Music (2013) on Island, reached number 11; I Remember (2016), also on Island, reached number 71

·      Laura Mvula - is brilliant, but has released only two albums: Sing to the Moon (2013) and The Dreaming Room (2016), both on RCA (Sony). She was dropped by the label in 2017

2014. Winner: Sam Smith

Runners up:

·      Ella Eyre - released one studio album Feline (2015) on Virgin EMI, which went gold. She is apparently releasing a new album on Island Records

·      Chlöe Howl – a solo album was intended for 2014 but was never released. She left her label, Sony music, and is releasing singles and EPs but with no chart success

2015. Winner: James Bay

Runners up:

·      George the Poet – a spoken word artist/poet/rapper who was signed by Island, but left the label ahead of the release of his debut album. Since this time he has concentrated on poetry instead

·      Years & Years – have released two albums. The first, from 2015, went platinum in the UK, the second, from 2018, only achieved silver, but the band still garner considerable publicity

2016. Winner: Jack Garratt

Runners up:

·      Frances – a female singer/songwriter who released one album in 2018, on Capitol, which reached 43 in the UK chart. She has released nothing since 2017, but has had credits since then as a songwriter

·      Izzy Bizu – a female singer/songwriter who released an album in 2016 on Epic records, which reached number 23 in UK. Released a single in 2019 but with no chart success

2017. Winner: Rag’n’Bone Man

Runners up:

·      Anne-Marie - released a studio album in 2018, which went gold. Her singles have done well too

·      Dua Lipa – her 2018 debut album went platinum. A new album is due for release in April this year

2018. Winner: Jorja Smith

Runners up

·      Mabel – released her debut album in 2019, which went silver. Has had a decent-sized hit single with ‘Don’t Call Me Up’

·      Stefflon Don – a female rapper who has not yet released an album. She had a top ten single in 2017, but no great success with her recent releases

2019. Winner: Sam Fender
Runners up:

·      Lewis Capaldi – his debut album is a double platinum seller

·      Mahalia - released an album in 2016 that didn’t do much. Her 2019 album reached number 28 in the UK charts.

What does this tell us?

            First, that in almost all cases the winners have had greater commercial success than the runners up. The only exceptions are that last year’s winner, Sam Fender, who has been outsold by Lewis Capaldi. It is also arguable that James Blake has had a more stellar career than Jessie J. Meanwhile, Dua Lipa’s debut album sold less than the debut by Rag’n’Bone man but it looks as though she will have greater international success than him in the immediate future.

            Second, that the lack of success amongst runner’s up is alarming. Out of the twenty-four artists who were finalists but missed out on winning the Critic's Choice award only eight have had major British or international success (Foals, James Blake, Vaccines, Michael Kiwanuka, Years & Years, Anne-Marie, Dua Lipa, Lewis Capaldi). Two more acts have had moderately successful careers (White Lies, Marina and the Diamonds), while the fate of two other acts (Mabel and Mahalia) is too close to call. This leaves twelve acts who have either stopped making music, been dropped by their labels or achieved only modest returns (Duffy, Little Boots, Delphic, Maverick Sabre, AlunaGeorge, Laura Mvula, Ella Eyre, Chlöe Howl, George the Poet, Frances, Izzy Bizu, Stefflon Don). The categorization of some of these artists could be debated, but it is nevertheless the case that more of the runners up have failed than have succeeded. It could also be argued that failures always outnumber successes in the record industry, but it should be noted that here we are dealing with acts that have been prioritized by their labels. They have been signposted towards the critics. They have received considerable backing and yet this has still not paid off. The Critics’ Choice award is indicative of the fact that the chances of success have narrowed. Vast swathes of music are made available in the streaming era, but the concomitant reaction to this tyranny of choice is that the music and media industries are focussed on a mere handful of artists.

            And there is a third thing that is revealed. Prioritization is even more concentrated if you are a female artist. It is a notable achievement that nineteen of the thirty-six artists nominated for this award are female. However, it is also notable that there are only three male acts among the twelve nominees whose musical careers have ended in failure. The chances are harder if you are a woman. There is no year in which a female artist won the award and a female runner up has also achieved sustained success. It would appear that the UK music business can only wish upon one female star at a time.

Prick Up Our Ears

‘We never hear anything where no men were involved’. This is the opinion of Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes. She’s right, too. There are plenty of all-girl groups, and many of these groups have made conscious attempts to produce female and feminist music. Wholesale girl power is restricted, however. There is always a man lurking at some point in the process. By way of illustration, Grimes points out that Emily Lazar is the only female mastering engineer working today, while there are no female mixers at all. As a consequence, she feels that Art Angels, her new, self-made album, provides something novel. It is a truly female recording. Grimes says, ‘The whole record was produced, engineered, written, performed by a woman, which is pretty rare. I don’t know if I ever heard a record like that, fully, with vocals on and stuff.’

Art Angels is a valiant enterprise. There is nevertheless still a male presence in this woman’s music. We need only follow Grimes’ logic further down the line. Most instruments have been designed and built by men, as have most professional recording studios and most software programmes. It is men, primarily, who have been responsible for the development and manufacture of recording formats.

This matters aesthetically as well as politically. Record listening is a complex process. This can be witnessed in the interviews that Justin Morey and Phillip McIntyre conducted with artists who used samples. They wanted to know what attracted them to particular recorded sounds. I have quoted some of the responses before:

“Sometimes we might sample a drum loop that’s amazing, you know it’s got a fantastic sound. For us it’s the atmosphere that it gives [to] something . . . so [we look] more for the sound and the feel that a sample would give you rather than the playing.”

“So we sort of chanced upon all this stuff that we weren’t really aware of because it wasn’t part of our generation really … We really liked the kind of woody warmth to that stuff, which was all obviously produced in lovely studios, and the sound you were getting off the vinyl . . . And hearing that in the context of the cleanliness of the analogue synths and drum machines and stuff like that, we just enjoyed that whole kind of warmth really, and just the way it added this kind of organic dirt.”

“The sonics, the groove … it is essential the sonics.”

“the circumstances that they recorded in were atmospherically different than the way modern records are recorded, and that’s part of the whole thing”

“A lot of the time, it is the sound”

When we listen to records there are many things that prick up our ears. The songwriting and musicianship are clearly important, but so is the sound of the instruments, the sound of the room, the sound of the recording format itself. There is something great about this. A record is not just made by a community of musicians; it is made by a series of communities, including the production team, the mixers, the manufacturers and the mediators. Popular music truly is popular: it is of the people. Grimes is right, however, to make us pause for thought. Sometimes it is good to narrow the focus; we need to have records that reflect particular constituencies. This remains easier for some communities than others, however. There probably are records that are male through and through, from the songwriter’s initial idea to the finalisation of the recording format. We are still waiting for a record where only women are involved.

War at 33 and a Third

There has been some major popular music news. The headline: people stop listening to new music at 33. At this age they no longer make an effort to keep up with popular music. They retreat, instead, to the music of their youth. Although the data behind this revelation is American in origin, the story has been reported globally. It has been covered everywhere from Fox News to the NME.

            It has also been subject to some criticism, mostly from older listeners who are claiming they are still hip. Among them is the Guardian’s Tim Byron, who is one of the few journalists to address the source of this news story. It’s not that hard to find: the data comes from a blogpost by Ajay Kalia, who is the ‘taste profiles product owner’ for Spotify. Kalia has analysed these taste profiles – the personal data of Spotify users – to find out which artists each user is listening to and how often they are hearing them. He has then coupled this data with each artist’s popularity ranking, as determined by the Echo Nest. At present, according to their ‘hotttnesss’ rating, Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in America. Finally, Kalia has quantified the results in a demographic manner. He has looked at each age group of Spotify users and worked out whether they are listening to popular artists or not.

            The results are perhaps to be expected. Kalia has found that young people are ‘almost exclusively streaming very popular music’; their listening experience seldom travels beyond the latest Billboard charts. In contrast, as people get older, ‘mainstream music represents a smaller and smaller proportion of their streaming’. According to Kalia, they stick with what they already know: ‘they are who they’re going to be’.

            Tim Byron has two main grounds for complaint. The first concerns the dubious methodology. He points out that ‘Kalia uses the popularity of an artist on Spotify as a proxy measure for the newness of that music’. Quite rightly, Byron argues that just because an artist has a low popularity ranking, it doesn’t follow that they have been knocking around the block for a bit. After all, isn’t this supposed to be the era of the long tail, in which new niche artists can beaver away in successful obscurity? Conversely, just because an artist has a high popularity ranking, it doesn’t mean they are new. Kalia even cites examples in his article that suggest as much. Eminem, he tells us, comes in at around number 50 in the popularity charts. This is an artist whose first album was released in 1996. Muse hover around the 250 spot. They have been with us since the late 1990s. Alan Jackson is ‘about # 500’. Jackson was born in 1958.

Byron suggests that the data can be looked at another way. Rather than old people being behind the times, they are instead adept at searching out niche subgenres. In support of this idea, he points towards the Australian radio station Double J, which is aimed at older listeners and has a more diverse playlist than its sister station, Triple J, which is targeted at youngsters. And so, whereas Kalia depicts a ‘coolness spiral’ that we spin outwards on as we approach death, Byron instead posits the idea that we spin towards coolness. The elderly are experimental. I’m not sure that he’s right. Surely one of the reasons why Kalia’s data has received such widespread coverage is because he has tapped into a common understanding. As we get older, we do feel our grasp on popular music slipping away. On the other hand, Byron is correct to point out flaws in Kalia’s reading of the data. For example, Kalia’s taste profiles indicate that men stop listening to popular artists earlier than women. In Kalia’s opinion, this means they are subject to a ‘taste freeze’: they have stopped searching for new music. Surely, though, the issue at stake is the escape from mainstream music. Men are more snobbish about the charts than women are. They are consciously trying to avoid popular artists in their need to identify with the edgy and the unknown.

There have been many previous studies of demographics and taste.  Kalia’s, though, has received more attention than any of them. Why is this the case? One reason is that it puts a definite age at which our move away from the popular becomes terminal. What’s more, it is a pertinent musical number: 33 is the speed at which a vinyl LP plays. This format, lest we forget, was originally targeted at adult listeners. What is curious, however, is that at no point in his article does Kalia use the number 33. This leads us to Byron’s other problem with the research: he takes issue with the way it has been reported. The coverage of the survey has a repetitive quality. The internet is now populated with articles titled ‘People Stop Listening to New Music at 33’. A news agency somewhere has taken Kalia’s information and condensed it. They have also highlighted what they want to see.

The age of 33 in fact comes from a link in Kalia’s article. This takes us to a separate blog, in which 33-year-old Steven Hyden tells us that his peers ‘are married with kids, mortgages, and lots of other important real-life stuff that takes precedence over finding new bands to like’. Kalia’s own work features a similar age at which interest in popular music declines, but it is the less memorable and less specific demographic of the ‘average listener’ who is in their ‘mid-30s’. Byron takes issue with the fact that, whereas the original article has qualifications (notably the number of times Kalia says ‘on average’), this hedging of the data is removed in the media reports. Consequently, a less nuanced picture emerges. That said Byron is also guilty of only seeing what he wants to see. Although Kalia’s main focus is on the way that older people ‘stop keeping up with popular music’, he does suggest a separate reading of his data. He believes that some adults will deliberately search out ‘less-familiar music genres . . . from artists with a lower popularity rank’, at which point his analysis looks much like Byron’s own.

There is one final quirk in the way that the data has been reported. Byron notes that the original analysis is not specifically concerned with new vs. old music. He’s right: the term ‘new music’ doesn’t appear once in Kalia’s article. And yet it is there in the headline of every re-run of this story. The term is used in the Fox News report, it is there in the article in the NME. In fact, even Byron uses it. His piece is titled ‘I’m 33 and Still Listen to New Music’. And this is what interests me most of all: when did new music become such a cult?

I was at school in the 1970s. At this point the taste battle wasn’t between young people, who liked ‘new music’, and adults who liked the past. Youngsters were instead supposed to progress beyond juvenile pop music towards an adulthood spent listening to classical music, MOR and jazz. What’s more, most of the musical landscape was new. It was the arrival of the compact disc that started to change things. The CD vastly increased sales of back catalogue. Consequently taste could now be split between those who listened to pop music of the present and those who listened to popular music’s past.

In the 1990s people started to use the term ‘new music’ strategically. BBC’s Radio One signalled its intention of aiming for a younger demographic by adopting the policy of ‘new music first’. This sponsoring of new music helped to justify the licence fee, as does the BBC’s more recent slogan, ‘in new music we trust’. The 1990s was also the era in which the record industry started to court government. There were numerous official reports, which sought ministerial backing for anything from the high price of CDs to the extension of copyright. In these reports the term ‘new music’ can regularly be found. The industry campaigned for its restrictive policies by suggesting that it took risks on untried artists and untested sounds.

More recently, people have started to use the term ‘new music’ as if it were a genre. It is used as such in the Fox News story, in which panelists are asked if they like new music? ‘I think it’s totally over-rated’ one of the representatives replies. But what is ‘new music’? If it’s simply the music that is released by newly signed artists, how can it all be bundled up together with people either claiming to be for it or against? If it is music that is supposed to be at the cutting edge, how does this square with the fact that today’s young artists are frequently described as being uninspired and retrospective? If it is music that the listener hasn’t heard before, does it matter whether this music was released last week or early in the last century? Maybe what the whole war at 33 is really all about is whether people are into new new music: are they listening to sounds that qualify as being modern when it comes to the artist’s age and their approach? If this is what is at stake, we’re going to have look somewhere other than taste profiles and hotttnesss ratings if we want to find out the true novelty of the new. 

I Like Sir Mix-A-Lot and I Cannot Lie

I’m coming towards the end of the teaching weeks of my university degree programme. Reaching this climax has made me think about the start. The term begins in October, and I try to open each academic year by looking at the main pop events of the preceding summer. In 2013 this was easy. There had been the big news stories of ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’. There was copyright and sexual exploitation to debate.

            The summer news of 2014 seemed more trivial. Big butts were on the agenda. Meghan Trainor was topping the charts in the US and the UK with ‘All About the Bass’, while Jennifer Lopez had released ‘Booty’ and Nicki Minaj had released ‘Anaconda’ (‘I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the muthafuckin’ club’). Everything about these releases seemed a bit tired, from the provocative subject matter through to the provoked response. I nevertheless found myself coming down on the side of mild liberal outrage, finding these female artists more exploited than exploiting, not least because each of the songs was primarily written by men and men were also responsible for the sexually graphic videos for the Lopez and Minaj singles.

            Looking at male composers and directors leads us directly to Sir Mix-a-Lot. Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’ samples heavily from his 1992 track ‘Baby’s Got Back’, a pioneering work in the field of big butt songs. I played the Trainor, Lopez and Minaj songs to my university students. In general, the response was negative. Most of them thought that the songs and/or videos offered negative portrayals of women. I also played the students ‘Baby’s Got Back’. Here we paused for thought. Almost all of the students loved this track. I do too. And yet its lyrics can’t be said to be any more progressive than those sung by the female artists (‘If you want to role in my Mercedes/Then turn around, stick it out’; ‘My anaconda don’t want none/Unless you’ve got buns, hon’). The song doesn’t even have the excuse of being a larger woman’s riposte to our diet-infatuated society.

            Why do we let Sir Mix-a-Lot get away with it? It’s not because we see him as some authentic pimp, providing us with a slice of ghetto life, nor is it really because he’s perpetuating the innuendo-laden tradition of black popular song. It is instead because ‘Baby’s Got Back’ is great. In contrast, the Trainor, Lopez and Minaj tracks are not. Aesthetics do matter, even when it comes to songs about backsides.

Quality doesn’t need to be maintained throughout the whole of a track either. What makes the Sir Mix-a-Lot song is its opening line. To an extent, you can forget the rest. ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie’ may not be Shakespearean, but it’s certainly arresting. More important is the way that Mix-a-Lot delivers it, pausing and rising through the first four words and skipping more frantically through the next four. Meanwhile, the bassline prowls away and the drum machine starts to clatter like crazy, cued by the crucial first mention of the word ‘butts’.  The content of this lyric is as carefully weighted as its style. ‘I like big buts’ is brazen, but ‘I cannot lie’ is confessional, leading us into one man’s story, told in the face of white society’s norms. And so, do we find ourselves liking this track against our better judgement, or is it because of it?

Record Collecting 4: Space and Time

Record collecting isn’t only about scarcity and obsolescence; it’s also about space and time. Shellac and vinyl records – as both objects and music formats - have provided means for transportation. The sounds that records emit can carry listeners from their own confines to the location of the artists, whether that be the Metropolitan Opera or the Mississippi Delta. It can also bring the artists to them. The records themselves are both temporally and spatially marked. Their designs show evidence of where and when they were made; their analogue nature means that they wither in time, just as their owners do.

            Record collecting was originally focused on space but it has become more interested in time. The playing of records was once marketed as a means of geographical transplantation. In the early 1900s the advertising of companies such as Victor and the Gramophone Company was focused on the idea that, by purchasing records, you were inviting the artists who had made them into your home. It was suggested that, if you played the finest records, it was the equivalent of entertaining elite guests. Consequently, their marketing was focused on the output of operatic ‘celebrities’, such as the early recording star Enrico Caruso. These records were demarcated with special ‘Red Seal’ labels so that your more quotidian visitors could, at a glance, see the standard of musical company that you had been keeping. It has been suggested that the displaying of these records took on more importance than the playing of them. Louis Barfe has stated, ‘Later collectors noted the preponderance of mint single-sided Red Seals and were led to conclude that they were rarely if ever played’.

            Consumers weren’t necessarily encouraged to keep hold of their records, however. Prior to the First World War the attention among gramophone enthusiasts was as much on the advancement of sound recording technology as it was on the musical contents of the cylinders and discs: this was an era of upgrades. Neither producers nor purchasers believed that record collecting would be a worthwhile practice. Why hoard records if they were only going to degrade or if a new one would sound better? As late as 1923, the classical music journal Gramophone was noting that there is ‘no need to be too careful of the life of records, you can wear them out and get the latest’.

This neglect of records nevertheless helped to make them collectable. They became scarce and valuable, something to hunt down. Time was also waiting in the wings. In their search for older records, collectors were able to transport themselves (or the people who had made the original discs) temporally as well as spatially. Both factors were of importance to early jazz record collectors. Melody Maker reported in 1933:

It is apparent that quite a number of dance-music students jealously guard their collections of early ‘hot-jazz’ records as much as they do their more contemporaneous ‘New Rhythm’ styles, and, as a fellow fanatic, I can well understand their hobby … The collection of old-time records is a fascinating one; I personally get as much thrill from the capture of an original ‘Dixieland’ disc as a philatelist does from some scarce foreign stamp – and I might say that there are so many like me that the price is soaring, and even a very worn-out affair costs more than the latest Ellington. (Butterworth 1933: 183)

Many of these ‘hot jazz’ records were being re-issued, often with more accurate label information than on the first issue, but collectors still went in search of the original releases, even if scratched and worn. Stephen W. Smith commented on the practice of some of the earliest American jazz collectors: ‘There are those who will have nothing but the original label, and who will turn down a clean copy of a record in preference to one in bad condition because the latter has what is known to be an earlier label’ (1939: 289–90).

There were acoustic justifications for such behaviour: Smith argued that in the dubbing of jazz reissues the high and low frequencies of the original recordings were usually lost. There were also extramusical reasons for searching out the first issue: it could locate the purchaser there, at the point of origin. In response to the mass reproduction of records there was a desire amongst some collectors to escape the ‘commercial’ and find the ‘authentic’. The record posed the problem, but it also provided the solution. What better than if non-commercial music – rendered so by both its origins and its age – was housed on a ‘non-commercial’ disc? Forget the major-label reissue (which came out when everyone was buying this music) find the original release on the obscure label, whose original audience was the 'race' or country market (transporting you back to the record’s pre-mainstream days).

According to Smith, America’s first collectors of jazz records came from the Princeton and Yale universities. Similarly, in England, Melody Maker could point out ‘How the Varsities Pioneered Jazz’. These enthusiasts wished to travel cross-culturally in space as well as time. Smith states that:

Many of the collectors’ items were originally issued purely for Negro consumption and consequently were sold only in sections of the country which had a demand for them. Copies which found their way into private homes were usually not given the best of care since many of the Negroes, for their own reasons, did not care to change the needle frequently enough to save the record surface.

Here we witness one of the stereotypes of the record collector. The white, middle-class male who is immersing himself in music that another culture has neglected, both physically and temporally. It remains to be asked: why this class and why this gender?

From the jovial sexism of Afflatus writing in Sound Wave in the 1920s (‘has the gramophone enthusiast any room or time in his life for a wife?’) to the gloom of High Fidelity (‘men, always young men’), record collecting has consistently been portrayed as being a male activity. This has been backed by empirical research. At least 95 per cent of those who volunteered to take part in the film Vinyl, Alan Zwieg’s 2000 study of record collecting, were men. The respondents to Roy Shuker’s 2004 survey were also largely male. He discovered that both males and females viewed record collecting as being primarily a masculine hobby:

Most [64 out of 67] of my respondents, especially the males, drawing on personal observation, argued that record collecting is largely a male activity. Conversely, the majority of women collectors [7 out of 11] are conscious of being a visible minority.

And yet, when it comes to collecting in general, Frederick Baekeland has argued that ‘Girls are more likely than boys to collect at all ages’. In his study of the gendered aspects of record collecting, Will Straw indicated that ‘were one presented with statistical evidence that the typical record collector was female, one could easily invoke a set of stereotypically feminine attributes to explain why this was the case’. Straw, therefore, struggles to find an explanation for the gender bias. His own conclusion is that it reflects a masculine need to order the world: ‘the most satisfying (albeit under-theorised) explanation of the masculine collector’s urge is that it lays a template of symbolic differentiation over a potentially infinite range of object domains’. In Straw’s opinion the male collector is a ‘nerd’: his expertise fails the ideal of masculinity because it is ‘acquired through deliberate labour of a bookish or archival variety’. However, he can counter this behaviour with ‘hipness’ if his collection is cultivated with ‘the air of instinctuality’.

Straw argues that another way in which the record collector can attain hipness is through a desire to ‘refuse the mainstream’. Elsewhere Matthew Bannister argues that ‘To resist the passive consumer/fan tag, male record collectors often adopt a bohemian, anti-commercial stance, typically by “valorising the obscure” and transgressive’. This chimes with the jazz collectors, introduced by Smith above. For those middle-class enthusiasts, black American jazz was both obscure and transgressive. Smith’s text indicates that the origin of at least one strand of record collecting lies in cross-cultural immersion, in the need for an ‘other’. This helps to explain its gender bias: such immersion allows the nerd to unveil the hipster within. This is largely a male preoccupation, as Simon Frith has pointed out:

To understand why and how the worlds of jazz (and rock) are young men’s worlds, we have to understand what it means to grow up male and middle-class; to understand the urge to ‘authenticity’ we have to understand the strange fear of being ‘inauthentic’. In this world, American music – black American music – stands for a simple idea: that everything real is happening elsewhere.

I would add that, equally pertinent, is the idea that everything real has happened elsewhere. Music can provide a link to this past. The original record can go further still: it is an artefact that has been retrieved from this domain. As the cartoonist and collector Robert Crumb pointed out: ‘Somebody of that era bought it and listened to it, and that record carries that aura from whoever else had handled and appreciated that object’. It is the record label that offers proof. It is no coincidence that many American independent labels have retained strong regional associations (Sun in Memphis; Chess in Chicago; Philadelphia International – a label name that neatly combines localism and globalism – in Philadelphia). Through these labels elsewhere can enter the home.

            Vinyl continues to be one of the totems of authenticity. There are modern collectors who focus on the music of particular regions and from particular times. It is the case, however, that vinyl now more broadly now symbolizes the past. It is a relic from a time when people did things differently. The past, as everyone knows, is a foreign country. It is also one whose vast spread tends to blot out any other regional boundaries.

            This is the source of John Harris’s complaints about Record Store Day. He argues that the event is a ‘benefit for a struggling musical genre’, one that uses vinyl as its appropriate emblem. The format, in his reckoning, is a rallying point for those who wish to keep faith with outdated, guitar-driven rock music. He also suggests that:

Record Store Day may be a collective rejection of what technology has done to music, but it is not immune from its effects: indeed, in the panoply of specially reissued records that puts the Sex Pistols next to the Grateful Dead, there is a very modern sense of music being completely uprooted from its original context.

He depicts old and new record collectors and old and new vinyl records all lost in a haze of nostalgia. The contemporary record collector doesn’t care where their vinyl records have come from, what’s important is that they have come from the past. In this scenario, space is no longer the place. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in time. 

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. 

Vinyl reviewed by Carey Fleiner in Rock Music Studies

Another review of Vinyl has appeared. Writing in the journal Rock Music Studies, Carey Fleiner likes my book. She calls it ‘a fine introduction to both the history of recorded sound and the cultural impact of the physical object that is the vinyl’. She also praises it for explaining ‘clearly and in compelling arguments the dichotomy between the mass production of records and our personal relationship with them’.

            She does have her reservations, stating that that ‘Osborne’s wide-reaching scope is hampered, however, by the concise nature of the book’. In particular, she feels that my work on Eldridge Johnson, the original head of Victor Records, and on record collecting and gender could have been developed further.

            She’s right. These subjects are worthy of books of their own. And there are other topics in Vinyl that could have generated separate works, including record shops, jukeboxes and the charts. What makes the difference with her choices is that they fail to fit in with the style of the book.

            To have spent more time on Eldridge Johnson would have been to introduce a biographical element that is missing elsewhere. I am nevertheless in agreement that he is a figure who should be more widely known. Only Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner are of comparable importance in the history of the analogue disc. Amongst many other things, Johnson was responsible for the development of shellac records and the record label (in relation to both meanings of the term). He was also the first record company head to see the full potential of recorded music.

            Record collecting is a different matter. To have developed an exploration of collecting and gender would have been to draw upon skills in psychology that I do not possess. That’s not to say that I don’t have my own pet theories, and perhaps here is the place to sketch one of them out.

            A strand of thinking amongst academics is that a love of music (and of the arts more generally) is associated with qualities that society considers to be more female than male. As a consequence men have developed coping mechanisms to render their enthusiasm more masculine. One method is to fiddle with hi-fi equipment. Susan J. Douglas argues that ‘For men who loved music but were eager to avoid [effete] associations, technical tinkering was one way to resolve the contradictions’. Another is to systematize their appreciation. Will Straw argues that record collecting ‘reflects a masculine need to order the world’.

            While there’s something in this, I think there is another reason for the great male cover-up. Men can have an excessive reaction to music. The broadcaster and journalist Robert Elms has frequently argued that men are more romantic than women. It is men who are more likely to make grand gestures, whether in love or war. This can also be witnessed in the male reaction to ailments: it is men, after all, who get man flu.

            Oscar Wilde captured this aspect of maleness in ‘The Critic as Artist’. The following passage could be regarded as condescending: it looks down on a ‘commonplace’ man who should not be worthy of grand emotion. On the other hand, it could be regarded as inclusive: Wilde has keyed into the romantic longing that resides in all men. He writes that:

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who has led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

Men don’t necessarily collect records to hide their femininity, this ordering also prevents them from unleashing something terribly male. I’m not alone in needing to keep my great renunciations in check!