Tomorrow Creeps in this Petty Pace

Last night I listened to the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It was one of those times when I marvelled at the freshness of a sound recording. It’s 50 years old for Chrissakes! And yet it is still astonishing. Listening to it you can find yourself declaring that this track is more sonically exciting and challenging than the majority of music made today.

            Some people find this longevity problematic. There is a belief that popular music should be constantly progressing. We should not be harking back to older records. There is something seriously wrong with pop when the sounds of the past are more innovative than the sounds of the present. This is part of Simon Reynolds’ case against the ‘retromania’ of our times.

It struck me that if people do have an issue with musical nostalgia, it is not centred upon songs. It is the steadfastness of old sound recordings that troubles them. There have always been long-lasting tunes. It doesn’t bother us that ‘Stardust’ is nearly a century old and is still being sung. If anything we enjoy the longevity of compositions such as ‘Greensleeves’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’ or ‘Scarborough Fair’. Conversely, there can be something irksome about the fact that Revolver still tops best albums lists, or that the Stone Roses’ debut album is still being praised.

            There are folk reasons for this. Songs are iterated. They are remade by the generations and they shine anew. Sound recordings, in contrast, are static. If they last, they last in their initial form. They can be remixed and they can be sampled but you cannot escape the original. They are monolithic.

            There is also an issue of auteurship. Although all music has multiple points of influence, we are used to the idea that songs are individually authored or are co-authored. The idea of the songwriting author is enshrined in copyright law. The duration of copyright in musical composition is tied to the lives of the individuals concerned. In Britain, it lasts until 70 years after the last of the co-authors to die.

            In contrast, the auteurship of sound recordings is not as well established. There is an issue of just who it should belong to: the songwriters, the musicians, the producers, the engineers? British copyright law awards it on the basis of financial risk. It goes to the party who has made the arrangements for the recording to take place. This legislation does not recognise artistry; it instead rewards record companies. Copyright is not tied to the life of an individual. It lasts for 70 years from the date that the record is issued to the public.

There is nevertheless an increasing sense that sound recordings are artworks in their own right. Some of the pangs of retromania are no more than growing pains: sound recording is becoming canonised. We have no problem with the idea that the greatest works of literature, fine art and musical composition achieve classic status. We will eventually have no problem with the idea that the greatest sound recordings are worthy of the same accord. Music retail, music broadcasting and music journalism have already moved in this direction. They kowtow to the records of the past; they appreciate their artistry; they help to establish the auteurs. Copyright law is lagging behind.

And yet there is one final twist. There is a reason why recordings such as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ are timeless: their makers had one eye on the future. Until recently the imperative in popular music was either to be forward looking or to ‘be here now’. The celebration of old records makes this harder: musicians are now saturated with and intimidated by the music of then. If any records of today are going to be canonised, it will most likely be the ones that are not overly indebted to the past masters. It is a question of balance. The greatness of sound recording should be acknowledged; the greatest sound recordings should also be transcended. 

The Sonic Reducer

As the universe expands, so do genres. They splinter and they grow. Or at least that’s one way of telling their story. Genres also reduce. The pioneers in any given field usually draw upon a variety of influences while their followers’ focus on their most stereotypical features. We can witness this in heavy metal. Black Sabbath had strong blues, folk and beat music influences, but these elements were strained out by their successors. In punk too, the second and third waves of bands were generally content to draw upon the Ramones ‘buzz-saw’ blueprint while ignoring the Ramones’ wider influences, such as girl groups at the Osmonds. Something similar is happening with EDM. Disco, electro, gospel and Krautrock each fed into the house music of the 1980s, but modern dance music seems to look no further than Faithless and Sash!  A similar reduction is present in lyric writing. The Beatles drew on the Goon Show and Lewis Carroll; the Smiths incorporated Oscar Wilde and Shelagh Delany. Their successors merely draw on Lennon and Morrissey.

            I’m not alone in feeling this way. In his recent book Electric Shock, Peter Doggett also makes complaints about heavy metal. He has bands such as Metallica in mind when stating that ‘Where old metal swaggered, new metal lumbered, lurched, ground its opponents beneath its tank tracks – remorseless, crushing, nihilistic’; adding that ‘In its refusal to employ syncopation or any other traits associated with African-American genres, it signalled its alienation from decades of popular music’.

            This mention of decades should make us pause for thought. Sometimes it can feel as though bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were reaching back to ancient precursors. They had mythical figures such as Robert Johnson in their fingertips. But what is the gap between Johnson’s recordings and the first records by these bands? It is about 30 years.

The gap between new metal and old metal stretches at least as far as this. The 40^th anniversary celebrations of punk are being prepared. Alarmingly, house music is now at least 30 years old. Why does the gap between old metal and the acoustic blues seem longer than this? One answer is that it spans a greater cultural, technological and musical divide. Could it be that there was simply more going on in the 30-year period between 1936 and 1966 than there has been between 1986 and today? Another answer is that the sonic reducer has always been in place, but we’re more likely to see it in operation when we consider the successors to the music that we grew up with, than we are when we address the precursors to our first great musical loves. I have no doubt that old metal, early punk and Chicago house were each accused of simplification, reduction and betrayal in their time. The musical universe has always advanced by reduction. 

The Sound of the Overground

When an old pop lover looks at the state of pop today the reaction is often one of despair. The music isn’t doing what they want it to. There is a venerable army of protestors who say that modern music is not modern. Simon Reynolds shouts loudest amongst writers, having devoted nearly 500 pages to the subject in Retromania. But there is also Jaron Lanier, who asks: ‘Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro’. And David Stubbs, who sees music ‘debilitated by its state of thrall to its increasingly distant yet seemingly inescapable past’. Older musicians are also concerned. Tracey Thorn has claimed that ‘pop music is exhausted’. Even Noel Gallagher, who many view as the harbinger of the retro age, has moaned that there is no longer ‘anything genuinely new’ happening in music any more.

            This isn’t the only concern. Older analysts are also worried about the sound of modern music. Simon Reynolds complains about the ‘super-compressed, MP3-ready, almost pre-degraded’ tonality of pop; recordings that are ‘engineered to cut through on iPods, smartphones and computer speakers’. He is also concerned that the ‘glistening and majestic’ recordings of Aerial Pink, which are made to sound like the chart hits of 30 years ago, won’t ‘make the tiniest dent on today’s radioscape’. There is particular anguish over the state of pop singing. Mark Ellen has despaired about the ‘hollow vocal fireworks’ popularised by X Factor and its ilk. Tracey Thorn believes that this type of singing, although supposedly about self-expression, ends up being far from ‘individualistic’. She’s not alone in thinking that soul has become soulless. David Hepworth pithily describes the modern style as ‘lungs of a whale, tears of a crocodile’. Greil Marcus goes further. Beyoncé’s take on gospel, he says, is ‘a form of blasphemy.

            Pop has many musical characteristics, but most people would place vocals and timbre as being among the most important. Today’s pop has a distinct sound, one that is determined by a broadcasting ethos and a compressed musical file. There is also a particular style of singing that defines the present time. It has even brought with it new performance conventions: audiences clap in the middle of vocal acrobatics in a way they would never have done before. Modern pop might not be modernist in its intent, but it’s not overwhelmingly retro either. For the most part it is doing what pop has always done: being here now. 

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. 

Record Collecting 5: Mystery

In recent interview Jack White has stated, ‘For me, vinyl is a MacGuffin. It’s something to lure you in, and at Third Man vinyl is a MacGuffin for a mechanical, romantic relationship with music’. MacGuffin is a term that Alfred Hitchcock popularised. It is a plot device that lures you in to a story, one that gets the mystery going, but it is of no overall importance.

            It’s interesting to hear Jack White talk in this way. One of the world’s leading advocates of vinyl is suggesting that, ultimately, it’s not vinyl that matters. It’s what vinyl signifies that counts. And what is that? The idea of a ‘mechanical, romantic relationship with music’ is an odd one: the romantic and the mechanic were traditionally supposed to be at odds. But I think I know what he means. Mechanisation no longer stands for the robotic and the modern, but instead for a time when things were tangible and you could engage with them. It is traditional values that are being held up here.

In the preceding blog entries about record collecting I have been focused on the idea that vinyl is collected because of what it is not. People are operating in a dialectical manner. They are collecting vinyl because it is old, not new; because it is analogue, not digital; because it is physical, not intangible; because it is independent, not corporate.

            And yet, there’s always been more to it than this. There has been a fascination with analogue records that is in excess of that for other formats. What’s more, this fascination was in place before some its rival formats existed. People didn’t need the CD to feel that the analogue was special (although the CD certainly helped). They didn’t need retromania, nostalgia, the desire for the tangible, a need for authenticity, or a search for truth to fall in love with analogue records (although these aspects have helped as well).

            Writing as early as 1934, Theordor Adorno was transfixed by a shellac record’s ‘thingness’. He was drawn towards the record’s grooves and the links that they provided ‘between music and writing’. In his 1959 novel. Absolute Beginners, Colin Maccinnes outlines his hero’s love of LP sleeves, calling them ‘the most original thing to come out in our lifetime’. Growing up in the 1960s, Stuart Maconie was fascinated by label designs:

Daft Ken Dodd bore the deep royal blue of Decca, Elvis wore the coal-black livery of pre-Seventies Orange RCA, the John Collier Theme still had its laminated sleeve featuring a giant Trilby. My favourite, though, the sight of which always quickened the pulse a little, was the very emerald green of a goalie’s jumper, the word Columbia grandly embossed in silver about the little hole.

For Roger Manning, keyboard player with Jellyfish, it was the scent of records that was intoxicating:

What really got me was the smell of the records I grew up with – maybe it was the pressing plant they used, for some reason records on the Casablanca label had a smell that blew our minds – when you smell that, it brings you right back to childhood.

Each of these writers returns us to a theme that these entries have been circling. What is it that we love most about analogue records: is it their ‘thingness’, or is it the music that they contain, or in what way is it a combination between these two elements? This dilemma is as old as sound recording itself. Writing in 1919, Rainer Maria Rilke recalled his first impressions of the phonograph:

It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented … At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

Ultimately, it’s too easy to say that people are attached to vinyl records because of what they signify or how they can be articulated. There is something inherent in vinyl records themselves. What exactly this is, though, is the biggest mystery of all. 

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. 

Whose Vinyl is it Anyway?

In Vinyl I argue that the analogue record has been articulated. It is a physical object and it is a carrier of music. Because of this dual nature, any associations with particular types of music have had to be forged. I also write about the way in which indie music sought jurisdiction over the format, in particular the 7” single. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the major labels turned to the CD and advanced that format for their own major stars, the vinyl record began to signify everything that was different. The indie labels articulated it for their own cause: it became the small-is-good format for small-is-good forms of music. This association continued. As I have written elsewhere, independent record labels were pre-eminent in the production of vinyl records in 2013.

            This year’s Record Store Day has revealed that this jurisdiction is under threat. For indie labels, the vinyl revival could have become too successful. The first Record Store Day was held in the US in 2007, when 700 independent record shops grouped together to celebrate their ‘unique culture’ and increase trade by selling records that were made exclusively for the day. The UK came on board in 2008 and Record Store Day now incorporates record shops in every continent except Antarctica. For vinyl, it is the most profitable retail day of the year.

In the UK the amount of exclusive releases has grown from around 250 in 2011 to nearly 650 this year. Record Store Day is like any other large orbiting body: its gravitational pull throws normal life out of joint. In the run up to the event, production in the few vinyl pressing plants that remain is taken up with limited edition Record Store Day products. There isn’t enough capacity to continue producing regular vinyl releases.

Some indie labels and distributors have grown suspicious of the pressing plants’ priorities. In an article in The Quietus, Phil Hebblethwaite has tabulated their woes. As early as 2011, Rob Sevier from the Numero Group was arguing that, for the record business, the logic of Record Store Day is ‘what can we shit into the form of a record and shove into the hands of the wanton masses’. This year the distributor Kudus has complained that ‘it feels like [Record Store Day] has been appropriated by major labels and larger indies to the extent that smaller labels who push vinyl sales for the other 364 days of the year are effectively penalised’. The label Modern Love has stated, ‘Fuck Record Store Day and all you self-righteous wankers who think it benefits anyone “independent”’ and ‘Fuck you to all the pressing plants out there who have made major labels their priority’.

Some independent labels are now boycotting Record Store Day. They feel that its original impetus is getting lost. For them, the sale of vinyl was supposed to serve independent record labels, which were supposed to release independent music, which was supposed to be sold in independent record shops. Despite the common cause of independence, the links between these parties can come loose. One potential source of tension is that independent record labels and independent record stores can have different reasons for advocating vinyl. While the labels' embrace of the vinyl record arose in opposition to the major record companies' advocacy of the CD, the independent record stores' current promotion of vinyl stems from their reaction to the MP3. This produces a different outlook. Record Store Day is focused wholly on limited edition records; what distinguishes vinyl from downloads and streams is that access to music can be restricted. And so, what if the Record Store Day releases are being bought and not heard? This doesn't do much to further the cause of indie music. Moreover, vinyl has no natural allegiance to indie ideals. If anything the format represents the opposite of DIY. It is the one form of sound carrier that is exclusively professional: there is no easy way in which you can make your own vinyl records at home. It is also the format that lends itself best to production gimmicks – coloured records, picture discs, shaped records, limited runs, and so on. It’s a great way of packaging shit for the wanton masses.

A lot has changed since the 1990s. CD sales have declined, while vinyl sales have risen (although it should not be forgotten that the former still vastly outperforms the latter). And where the CD used to be priced more expensively than vinyl, the two formats have traded places. Consequently, the majors have returned to vinyl. They have thought again about all those old gimmicks and realised that they are a great means of promoting their artists and of making money.

They clearly have the means to do this (reclaiming the pressing plants is a neat capitalist ploy), but why should independent record store shoppers buy the major label's vinyl releases? Here, it is once again worth thinking about vinyl and its articulations. There have long been problems regarding what it is that distinguishes ‘indie’ music: is it a generic type or is it the means of production? The problem for indie could be that vinyl has been articulating the music, rather than the other way round. If the major record companies choose to reacquaint themselves with indie's beloved analogue format, how easy is it to tell the difference between their releases and those of the indie labels? 

This is the point that is raised in a Record Store Day thought piece written by John Harris. He describes the event as being a ‘benefit for a struggling musical genre’; one that, like vinyl records themselves, is an object for nostalgia. This genre is massive, however. It is guitar-driven rock music, predominantly made by young white men and predominantly bought by older white men. Harris conflates the output of independent labels and major labels, as well of separate rock genres, such as psychedlia, punk and indie. More cruelly still, he sees little distinction between the new records and re-releases that are issued on Record Store Day. If the old records are retrospective, then so are the newer guitar-led groups. In this scenario, indie is no more than the genre that used to have jurisdiction over vinyl. It is now lost amongst the general drone of guitars that have taken hold of the format. In supporting all of these rock records, independent record stores might do well out of Record Store Day, but independent record labels' are losing one of their distinguishing features. 

In Harris's scenario, vinyl is at least still being associated with a particular strand of music. Elsewhere, there is evidence that the format has taken on a life of its own. Spencer Hickman, the organizer of the UK event, shares some of the concerns of independent record labels and distributors. He also raises some new ones. Not only is Record Store Day failing to support independent record labels, but the vinyl releases are failing to support independent record stores. He has stated, ‘this year feels like the first time it’s been entirely driven by capitalism. It now feels like it’s not celebrating the culture of the record store and why they’re so good; it’s about the releases’. In this vision it is as though the records have taken over the shops and are disrupting their normal practice. It’s not Hickman’s fault that the stores aren’t full of appropriate music, just look at what the vinyl has done?

This year’s Record Store Day included releases from One Direction and Herbert von Karajan, so any argument that it could be associated with a single genre – even one as broad as rock music – is moot. The question that then presents itself is whether the day could be associated with any music at all.  Perhaps the biggest fear for anyone with a longstanding interest in vinyl is that the format has slipped from being one that was the leading sound carrier in a golden age of popular music, to one that was fetishised because it was the leading sound carrier in a golden age of popular music, to one that is fetishised because it is old. Were the patrons of Record Store Day there because they like music, or were they instead celebrating the collection of outdated objects? Was their ‘culture of the record store’ just one of nostalgia for the days when people used to go to shops? In her excellent book Clampdown Rhian E Jones has added her voice to those who are worried about the retromania of our times. She states that ‘popular culture seems currently consumed by pastiche, recycling, solipsistic navel-gazing and pantomimes of authenticity, preoccupied with kitsch fripperies and politically disengaged, with previous traditions of protest and consciousness weakened, compromised, commodified, confused or forgotten’. One of her most dreaded objects is the cup cake. If any vinyl lovers are worried that their format is being constructed as a similar ‘kitsch frippery’ then they had better start articulating and they had better start agitating. 

The Eve of the War (1913, 1963, 201?)

2014 is an unusual new year. It is dominated not by looking forwards but by looking back. Our retrospective culture is relishing its biggest opportunity yet. 2014 marks the first year of the centenary anniversaries of the First World War: we are set to have four years of analysis, mourning, re-enactments, school trips and political positioning. In Britain, the Tory education secretary Michal Gove has been quick off the mark, saying that it is time to overturn left-wing criticisms of the War. He accuses leftist historians and artists of misinterpreting it as ‘a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite’. Gove wants us to instead praise ‘patriotic leaders’ who were fighting a ‘just war’. He has also claimed that ‘the past has never had a better future’.

            I hope that amongst all the retrospection, re-evaluation and squabbling, there is time to look at the eve of the war. What is often most interesting about great conflicts is the world that they leave behind. Britain didn’t just lose a generation of men in the First World War, it said goodbye to a whole way of life. Some of the best art about war has depicted societies that are on the verge of eclipse: Cabaret, Oh! What a Lovely War, An Inspector Calls, even the first series of Downton Abbey.

            2014 is the anniversary of another cataclysmic event. It marks 50 years since the first British pop invasion of America. On 1 February 1964, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by the Beatles reached number one in the Billboard Hot 100. On 9 February, the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, attracting an estimated 73 million viewers. Although by no means as tragic as the First World War, Beatlemania wrought havoc upon a previous way of being. In his appropriately titled book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elijah Ward outlines the effects of the group’s success. They ‘transformed teenage dance music into a mature art form’; they recast black music ‘as the roots of rock’n’roll rather than as part of its evolving present’; they promoted the recording studio at the expense of live music; they introduced the idea of the self-contained group; they introduced the idea that artists should write their own songs.

            I’m sure that this year will see commemorative analyses of the British invasion. As with the First World War, however, I hope some attention is paid to the world that existed before this cataclysm. I love the pre-Beatles musical era: rock ‘n’ roll, the Brill Building, American Bandstand, Alan Freed. If we look closely at it, though, something curious materializes. The modern pop landscape looks a lot like the world the Beatles were supposed to have destroyed. We have manufactured teen idols and girl groups. Black music of all kinds is dominant. Hit songs are just as likely to be written by teams of songwriters as they are by the recording artists. Cover versions are rife. Live music is apparently generating more money than recordings. Dance crazes are breaking out all over again - last new year I was dancing Gangnam Style, this new year I was doing the Twist.

            And maybe the state of pop music should make us think again about the eve of the First World War. The British Prime Minister at the time was Herbert Asquith. Like the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, he was educated at an independent school and Oxford University. The early Edwardian era in Britain was the last period without the semblance of a welfare state (the Liberal government introduced pensions in 1908, National Insurance in 1911, and Health Insurance in 1911). The future has never had a more appropriate past. 

The Media was our Helper and our Lover

The New Statesman has kindly re-posted my blog entry on ‘Retromania, Newness and Nowness’, giving it the new title ‘Pop has Substituted “Newness” for Innovation’. Published on this wider forum it has provoked some unrest. The criticisms of my work can be grouped into three mains areas. First, I’m told that if I want to find innovative music I’m looking in the wrong place. Second, it is pointed out to me that Retromania is not a new phenomenon. Third, I’m informed that as a Lecturer in Popular Music I have no right to be talking about popular music. I’ll deal with the second two complaints in later blog entries, but here I’ll address the search for innovative music.

            My first response is that I never claimed to be looking for it myself. The article is instead about the proud boasts of major record labels and radio broadcasters that they are uncovering ‘new’ music. As such it is focused on these institutions as well as on the media companies who underpin their operations, hence the use of quotes from Q and the NME. My claim is that each of these players concentrates on the music of now, rather than on the music of the future; as such the article it is much against Simon Reynolds’ idea that retromania is all pervasive as it is against record companies’ and radio broadcasters’ claims to originality. The title that the New Statesman has given to the piece doesn’t help to make this clear, but I must admit that I’m also guilty of confusing the issue: my suggestion that that the last 20 years has seen a dearth of innovative music could be seen as provocative and distracting.

            But what about the point that has been made: that I would find original music if I would only look in the right places. I’m sure there is some innovative music out there, but my own lazy belief is that we shouldn’t have to look too hard for it. It is the duty of radical music to enter the public consciousness. In my earlier piece I made the mistake of concentrating solely on aesthetics, however I would argue that any truly innovative work should be provoking change at a social level, as well as musically. I would go further and say that the two factors cannot be divorced: if a work is not prompting social change it cannot be regarded as aesthetically new. With formulations such as this it is always tempting to reverse the wording, thus adding that if music does not have a radical aesthetic it will not be effective at prompting social change. It is the case, however, that a song can be aesthetically conservative and yet still be the cause of social transformations. This can be because of factors in the music (lyrics inspire action, realism invokes idealism) and because of factors beyond the music (songs have radical videos, records can be attached to causes, artists make political statements in interviews). Nevertheless, it can be argued that popular music’s greatest moments of rupture, such as rock ‘n’ roll, psychedelia, punk, hip-hop and rave, have each promoted both aesthetic and social change. Conversely, a common criticism levelled at artists such as Madonna and Lady Gaga is that their art is not equal to their desire to provoke. The objective correlative does not add up.

            In order to enter the public consciousness a new musical movement has to move beyond its own confines. It has to draw both converts and enemies, and it can only do this by encountering media organisations: it has to move beyond what Sarah Thornton has termed ‘micro media’, and deal with ‘niche’ and ‘mass’ media as well. Niche media would include music journalism and specialist radio programmes. Mass media is aimed at the general public, and would include TV programmes and the daily papers. Some of popular music’s greatest moments of frisson have occurred when artists have moved from the micro to the mass: the Sex Pistols with Bill Grundy; the Sun promoting and then denigrating acid house; Nirvana on Top of the Pops. These are the occasions when parents find out what there kids have been up to.

But this is to write of the world that I grew up in. It is also to write about a peculiarly British situation. The UK has for decades had a niche music press, but this press used to have a mass national readership: in the 1970s both the NME and Melody Maker achieved weekly sales of 300,000 copies, figures similar to the daily circulation of Britain’s broadsheets today. In this era the predominant specialist radio programmes (notably John Peel’s show) were also being broadcast nationally to large audiences: the BBC was retaining its hegemony. This set-up provided the means by which musical movements could be transmitted across regions even before they were picked up by mass media. It could also be argued that the mass media reached a wider audience than it does today. In the 1970s Top of the Pops could attract up to 15 million viewers (over 25% of the population). Once a song reached this programme it was truly a part of daily life.

The internet is different. Musicians can now, in theory, communicate directly with their fans – they should no longer need traditional forms of media. Alternatively, it is argued that the internet is a medium that has the potential to be more massive than anything we’ve seen before. Nevertheless, the dormancy of the majority of the long tail would indicate that links between the internet, niche media and mass media are needed, but they are not working properly for all. It is mostly songs backed by effective promotional campaigns that have received attention across the board. Consequently, the musical world is being skewed towards the major labels and their priority signings. It is not the long tail that should be the focus of studies, but instead the short head.

The most popular legal platform for music is YouTube, whose slogan ‘broadcast yourself’ proclaims it to be a mass media forum. But YouTube operates in both a narrowcast and broadcast manner: viewings for its videos can range from none to nearly two billion. It is a medium that has the ability to transmit videos to both niche and mainstream audiences, but only certain types of music are reaching a wider circle of people. What is more, they are only doing so after they have been reported on in other media outlets. At the moment these are primarily novelty songs (‘Gangnam Style’, ‘What Does the Fox Say?’) and sexuality-exploitative songs (‘Blurred Lines’, ‘Wrecking Ball’). On their own, massive viewing figures are no guarantee that a song has moved beyond its confines. YouTube is also watched individually or with peers, rather than with the family, thus I would argue that even a song such as Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ (which is the second most popular video on YouTube, with nearly one billion views) has not entered the general public consciousness. It has drawn neither converts nor enemies; it is for Beliebers only.

If this is the case for the most popular of songs, what does it mean for the radical new music that I’m told is hiding away in the corners of the internet? How will it provoke the social change that for me marks the triumph of aesthetic innovation? My main hope is that I am out of date. I hope there is a mass underground movement that I don’t know about yet because I don’t understand new technology. And then I want Top of the Pops to come back again so I can watch as this music goes overground and sit there tut-tutting at my kids.

In Modernism I Trusted

One of the most shameful records that I own is ‘Fuck a Mod’ by the Exploited. ‘Kick him in the head/Beat him in the balls/Jump up on his head/How much fun it is to fuck a mod until he’s dead’. That’s how it goes, sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’.

            Why bring this up? Well, mostly to grab attention about pop modernism. That’s modernism as in the high art theory: the belief that art should progress; that it should experiment with form; that new technologies should be embraced. As such, the mod revival that the Exploited are singing about is about as far from modernism as it’s possible to be. What pop modernists have in common with mod revivalists, though, is a sense that they are being fucked over.

            At least that’s what Simon Reynolds thinks. The real reason for his pessimism in Retromania is that he feels pop’s modernist spirit has died. How can this be? There are those who argue that there’s no such thing as modernism in popular music. In the first instance, the term modernism should be applied to a period of artistic endeavour that took place prior to the second world war; popular music, in contrast, didn’t really get going until the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the mid-1950s. Secondly, modernism is elitist in nature, it shunned the opinions of the general public; popular music, in contrast, is popular.

            And yet I think Simon Reynolds is right. A modernist tendency has been at large within popular music. The Beatles have much to answer for here. Despite their overwhelming popularity, the second half of their career was essentially modernist in nature: they turned their backs on the public, choosing studio work over live performance; they were pioneers of new technology; they explored the parameters of the pop form. Those who lived through the punk era, which was as much about ‘no past’ as it was about ‘no future’, or the house music movement, which provided the ultimate example of stretching pop’s form to match its function, will also have been touched by the modernist spirit.

            Reynolds goes further. He argues that, out of all art forms, ‘pop music could be said to have held out against the onset of postmodernism the longest’. As evidence he cites ‘vanguards like hip hop and rave’ and ‘isolated modernist hero figures within rock or pop itself’. I think there’s something in this too. Postmodernism’s lack of affect hasn’t sat well with pop’s libidinous drive. Conversely, the music’s canonisation is distinctly modernist in tone. Think of those ‘best albums of all time’ lists: Sgt. Pepper; Dark Side of the Moon; Innervisions; Computer World.

            For me, Reynolds is on less sure ground when identifying the modernist audience. He claims that ‘chavs are Britain’s last bastion of futurist taste’, largely on the grounds that Britain's white underclass has a preference for black music, including ‘R&B and lumpen post-techno styles like donk’. I’d be reluctant to say that anyone from any class or ethnic background has a monopoly on forward-looking taste. What I would suggest, though, is that it is more likely to be those from middle-class and/or art-educated backgrounds who would filter that taste through a belief in modernism. This would include critics such as Simon Reynolds and, if I’m honest, myself. You would be able to see this in our taste for black musicians (James Brown rather than Bobby Bland; Stevie Wonder rather than Al Green; Public Enemy rather than 2Pac; Missy Elliot rather than Beyonce), as well as for middle-class artists influenced by black pioneers (Pink Floyd’s cosmic take on the blues; Radiohead’s dystopian jazz; James Blake’s austere dubstep).

            There is a reason why this matters: pop modernism has wielded power. It is has been an agenda-setting taste, not just in constructing popular music’s canons, but also in encouraging certain types of artists to be signed and promoted by the media. It can be witnessed in the demand that new artists be innovative and original, and maybe even difficult. There are residual bastions of modernism amongst journalists, documentary commissioners and prize-giving panelists (hence James Blake was a shoo-in to win this year’s Mercury Music Prize). Their viewpoint is being overtaken, however, and as a consequence we have Reynolds’ worried fretting. Many new acts favour the past over the future, or rather than searching for ‘newness’ they are focused on ‘nowness’ (see my previous post). Should we mourn modernism’s passing; or should we kick it in the head, beat it in the balls and jump up on its head?

Retromania, Newness and Nowness

Retromania is easy to spot. Simon Reynolds coined the term to lambast the current state of popular music. He claims that ‘Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once’.

            Evidence is all around us. The NME is now promoting the ‘1990s Renaissance’, while this year’s biggest two hits have gone beyond retro and into the world of homage: Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ wears its debt to Chic in the most obvious manner, while Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ is caught up in a copyright infringement case with Marvin Gaye’s estate. One recent example that stood out to me came in the review of the latest Arctic Monkeys album AM in Q magazine. They praised Alex Turner for ‘citing relatively modern influences: Dr Dre and the processed “ex-girlfriend” R&B of Aaliyah’.

            Relatively modern? Aaliyah died in 2001 and Dr Dre blueprinted his production techniques with The Chronic, an album that was released in 1992. If sounds made 20 years ago are still considered up-to-date, this is as damning for R&B as it is for indie music. And there is evidence that the rate of progress is slowing down. The 20-year time period from 1953-1973 encompassed a whole cycle of popular music, from the rock ‘n’ roll of Sun Records to the post-modernism of Roxy Music. The period from 1973-1993 saw another turn of the wheel, encompassing punk, post-punk, hip-hop, synth-pop, house music, drum and bass, et al. The period from 1993-2013 has encompassed, well, what exactly?

            There’s certainly been much talk of newness. As a consequence, innovation and originality should also be easy to spot. Unfortunately, ‘new’ has become one of the most loosely and overused words in popular music. The term is most problematic when used to justify programming policies or the supposed altruism of the music industry. BBC Radio 1 uses the banner ‘in new music we trust’, and I’ve heard its DJs state that they are fans of ‘new music’, as though this were a genre. Meanwhile, record companies have used the fact that they are investing money in ‘new’ music as a means of justifying punitive recording contracts and (in a previous life) the high cost of CDs.

            The difficulty with all of this, as Simon Reynolds is well aware, is that just because an artist is newly signed or newly promoted on the radio, it doesn’t mean that their music is reaching beyond formulas that are already in place. In fact, it is the backward-looking nature of so many newly signed acts that makes retromania seem such a virulent strain. Although it wouldn’t necessarily win them any listeners, a more admirable slogan for Radio 1 would be ‘in modernism we trust’. Record companies, too, would be more likely to win sympathy if they were to apply modernist criteria: to search for artists who push boundaries, who play with form, who might even dare to be unpopular.

            Instead, what radio and record labels are excelling at is nowness. Like any dominant ideology this can be hard to detect when you are living in its midst. And yet every pop era has it – a way of producing records, a way of singing songs, a lyrical focus, an adoption of technology – that is absolutely its own. Although I agree with Simon Reynolds' thesis that this is an era in which retro abounds, I don’t agree with him when he says that ‘the pop present [has become] ever more crowded out by the past’. 2013 might not be bursting with radical innovation, but it certainly has a prevailing aesthetic.

Or, rather, it has a number of prevailing aesthetics. It also has something that helps us to spot these different types of nowness: market segmentation. This is an era in which different tastes are identified and catered for. In an earlier post I mentioned the changing demographics of popular music consumption: in the UK in 1976 over 75% of all records were bought by 12-20 year olds; this can be contrasted with last year when 13-19 year olds accounted for just 13.8% of the music purchased on the internet. In 2012 the largest market share belonged to 35-44 year olds, but each age bracket between 13 and 64 was fairly similar, ranging between 11% and 20% of the market. One effect of this is that to have a truly big hit you have to appeal to each of these age groups, hence the success of an album such Adele’s 21 or the pan-generational dancing that ‘Gangnam Style’ occasioned. The reverse is that each age group is segmented, targeted and marketed.

            This can be witnessed most clearly at the BBC. Back in the 1970s, when record buying was dominated by the tastes of teenagers, radio followed suit. Simon Frith has written of the oddity that, although the majority of Radio 1’s daytime listeners were older people, tuning in in 'factories and shops, on building sites and motorways', what they were listening to was chart music centred on teenage consumption. The compromise reached by the BBC was that, although their playlist was based on the charts, they would ‘select from within each genre the easiest-to-listen-to sounds: […] easy listening punk, easy listening disco, easy listening rock’.

            Things are different now. Radio 1 has a brief to alienate older listeners. In the words of the station’s music policy director, Nigel Harding, they do this by analysing ‘the age of the artist’s primary audience. We always try our best to select tracks that are truly relevant to our core demographic of 15-29 year-olds’.

            They are successful at it too. I am now safely outside Radio 1’s demographic and I find most of its broadcasting unlistenable. It’s not that I don’t like the songs; it’s the overall sound of the station that is ill-matched with my taste. To tune is to receive the shock of the now.