Building Me a Fence

Popular music has been suffering from some growing pains. Where artists once cast themselves as being against big business and the man, they now have to present themselves as budding entrepreneurs. Take Jack Garratt, for example. Q magazine has described him as being ‘part of a new breed of pop star, led by Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, who as well as making music see themselves as CEOs, team leaders, motivational speakers and HR departments of their own brand’. This is quite a change. When I was younger, bands would pose as rebellious outsiders. Stiff Little Fingers, for example, announced themselves by saying ‘we’re going to blow up in their face’. Here, in contrast, is how Garratt talks about his career: ‘it’s been a very natural and organic growth from being an unsigned, undeveloped artist then development through my management and then upstreaming onto a record label’.

Garratt’s language is hugely unappealing. And yet it could be argued that he is taking a stronger stand against the industry than punk bands ever did. He is building is own career and he is in control. The problem, as ever, is that such talk flies in the face of popular music’s romantic ideology. Romanticism, as Jon Stratton argued back in 1983, ‘expresses itself as contrary to all that capitalism stands for’. Artists aren’t supposed to be interested in business; they are supposed to recoil in horror from business.

The irony, as Stratton has pointed out, is that romanticism supports the capitalist practices of the record industry. This is because the individualism of the romantic artist ‘operates to counteract the “distancing” associated with the music’s commodification and substitute for it an essential unity between artist and consumer which elides the function – and existence – of the record companies and thus of the capitalist process which has called the music into being’. In other words, record companies differentiate their products by promoting the genius, sensitivity and anti-capitalist nature of their artists. This is how they turn rebellion into money.

Conversely, it is capitalism that supports, or even creates, romanticism. As art is commodified, it is ‘distanced, alienated, from the artist’. On the one hand, this enables creators to blame the cultural industries for the commercialisation of their art. On the other hand, it is this commodification that enables artists to present themselves as visionary outsiders. Stratton argues that ‘the creator/producer is only able to exist as an “artist” because of the ideological elaboration of the capitalist order, and because of the cash nexus which separates him/her from the consumers’. Ultimately, Stratton believes that the whole economic structure of the record industry is dependent on ‘the apparent conflict between art and capitalism’. Without art, capitalism would not prosper; and without capitalism, art would have nothing to fight against. They need each other to present themselves as special.

Jack Garratt, with his talk of upstreaming and branding, comes from a different place. And yet, despite the fact that we live in an utterly commercial age, and despite the fact that the cash nexus can now exist directly between artist and consumer, and despite the fact that the conflict between art and commerce was only ever ‘apparent’, his talk still feels uncomfortable. We are not ready to let go of romanticism just yet. 

Prince

And so, after saying goodbye to the greatest male artist of the 1970s on January 10, we now say goodbye to the greatest male artist of the 1980s on April 21. It goes without saying that Prince was the most fantastic live performer I ever witnessed. 2016 (What the Fuck is Going On?)

Vinyl in the Digital Age

My review of Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward is available in the May 2016 edition of Popular Music. It is easy to see why I was asked to review it: it has a similar title to my own book and it covers a similar theme. There are nevertheless few genuine crossovers between the two works. We have the vinyl record as our object of study, but we take it in different directions. And this is a good thing. One odd factor of the Bartmanski and Woodward book that I don't mention in my review is its lack of consistency about what their analogue record is called. Sometimes they talk about 'vinyl', at other times it is 'the vinyl'. They do, however avoid 'vinyls', which is common in some countries and among some age groups. Maybe an international standard should be set?

Collecting the Charts

For pop fans of a certain age, contemporary Britain is a strange place to reside. There are many who, like me, find it difficult to know what the latest number one record is, let alone songs further down the charts. Meanwhile, they are living a parallel existence, where they are caught up in the Top 40 singles of the early 1980s. BBC4 has now reached 1981 with its re-runs of Top of the Pops. These programmes are met with fervent anticipation. Bob Stanley, for example, could not wait for this particular year’s repeats.

Two things, in particular, stand out about these re-runs. One is how memorable the singles are. I regularly know all of the records from a given week’s Top 40 in the 1980s and can recall most of the Top of the Pops performances. The other thing is the quality of the music. The last episode that I watched was from 4 June 1981 (sadly, BBC4 have moved away from synchronising the week of original broadcast with the week of the year in which in which that episode is being repeated). It opened with Siouxsie and the Banshees' brilliant ‘Spellbound’, went on to feature the Jam’s ‘Funeral Pyre’, Odyssey’s ‘Going Back to My Roots’, and Imagination’s astonishing performance of ‘Body Talk’; Adam and the Ants’ ‘Stand and Deliver’ was number one.

I know that I am on dangerous ground here – old people need to be wary about claiming that the past is better than the present – but I do have a defence. One of the reasons why the 1981 charts were superior to today's is because people were buying physical records rather than purchasing downloads or accessing digital streams. And one of the consequences of having analogue formats is that people collected them. The Jam had huge hits in this era because they had an avid fanbase who would buy every release no matter what its quality and pretty much in disregard of whether they had heard the song or not. This was also an era in which bands with less mainstream appeal (Siouxsie and the Banshees, for example) would still have sufficient followers who were dedicated enough and consumerist enough to get their records into the lower regions of the Top 40.

Record companies took advantage of this collecting mentality. One method was to build up demand for a record and make sure that fans knew the release date. They would therefore go out and buy the single in bulk, giving it enough impetus to get into the charts. Another method, arriving slightly later, was to release records in multiple formats. This too played to the collector's mindset. Committed fans would buy a song several times over to ensure they had each of its versions. As well as guaranteeing a high first-week entry, this method could also prolong a song’s success. A case in point was Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who maintained ‘Two Tribes’ presence at number one by regularly releasing new 12” remixes during its chart run.

But why should this result in better music, particularly if the fans were collecting artefacts rather than songs? Here we have to address the reasons why fans become fans in the first place. They become devoted to artists because they sense a special something in them. This usually derives from the music itself (even if they end up buying every release or going to every possible performance by an artist, regardless of their quality, they will have been attracted in the first place because of a record that they found outstanding) and because of the personality of the performer (fans repeatedly invest in an artist when they feel a strong bond). And this bond persists. I love ‘Spellbound’ not just because it is a great song, but because Siouxsie was a transformative artist and she transformed me.

And what of now? We live in an era when hits really are hits. This has produced numerous great songs, but overall a sense of commitment – to artists, to performances, to the charts, to anything other than the song itself – has been lost. Streaming, in particular, has meant that the charts are based more on use value than they are on collecting appeal. One consequence of the fandom of collecting physical records was a fans’ partisan enjoyment in following those records' successes in the charts. Today, there is less need to know where a song has got to and what its position is because there is less of a bond with the record (if you have streamed it, you might not even have paid for it and yet you will have affected its position in the charts) and there is less of a bond with the artist (one consequence of buying records was that you entered into financial and commodified bonds with the performer). 

Fandom does still play a part in the Top 40, but it is now largely the preserve of teen idols, as Justin Bieber’s Yuletide domination of the charts testifies. Older music collectors, meanwhile, are buying vinyl re-issues and they are lost in the hit parades of 1981.

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. 

Europa Ending

What defines England most? For Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, the country was:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

In 1941 George Orwell initiated a more prosaic tradition. For him, England was comprised of

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs, old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings, these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

T.S. Eliot’s politics couldn’t have been more different, but his own summary of English culture, from 1948, had echoes of Orwell’s:

Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, the Cup Final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

Eliot advised that ‘The reader can make his own list’. And perhaps this is what defines England most: it is not the contents of these lists that count, but the lists themselves. The English love them. They are the verbal equivalent of standing in queues. Writing in 1980, Mark E. Smith saw through this crap. For him, Orwell’s English scene had become the ‘English Scheme’:

You got sixty hour weeks, and stone toilet back-gardens

Peter Cook’s jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups

Point their fingers at America

Down pokey quaint streets in Cambridge

Cycles our distant spastic heritage

It’s a gay read, roundhead, army career, grim head

If we was smart we’d emigrate

Although Smith has prided himself on his ‘pre-cognition’, it is immigration rather than emigration that has prompted England’s darkest fears. Xenophobia marks the nation as much as lists do. In recent times, little Englanders have seen their fortress breached. They want it to be rebuilt. And so, the years of European Union have seen the ghost of Orwell rise in the most unlikely places. Speaking in 1993, when he was Tory prime minister, John Major claimed that

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’.

Johnny Rotten has witnessed less permanence. He waxed nostalgic in 2012:

I miss the roses, those English roses, of salad and beer and summer here and many mannered ways of cotton dresses skipping across the lawn off happy faces, when football was not a yawn and clear the bomb sites, and all the days were long. November into winters here, snows would turn my page.

His revelries were shot through with the blues of an ex-pat. In 2011, P.J. Harvey evidenced a different longing for home. She wrote in character as a soldier who had been posted abroad:

Goddamn Europeans!

Take me back to beautiful England

And the grey damp filthiness of ages

And battered books

And fog rolling down behind the mountains

On the graveyards and dead sea-captains.

Let me walk through the stinking alleys

To the music of drunken beatings

Past the Thames river glistening

Like gold hastily sold

For nothing

She is as unromantic as Smith, but these lists are always slippery. It is February 2016 and voices P.J. Harvey would never have dreamed of are chorusing her ‘Goddamn!’ 

The Singer Came Last

When listening to records from the early part of the twentieth century one thing that is notable is the absence of singing. There are a lot more instrumental records, and in those records where there is singing it often does not arrive until we have gone through at least one instrumental verse and chorus.

            This can now strike us as odd, as we have got used to the fact that songs come with vocals up front. It is mediation that has been ringing the changes. Jazz was one of the first genres of music to become known through recordings. It was primarily focused on the timbre and improvisation skills of the musicians. Sound recording could capture these qualities; sheet music could not. It was also recording techniques that returned us – gradually – to singers. Electric recording arrived in the mid-1920s and for the first time singers used microphones in recording studios. New, intimate styles of singing were developed, and with them a more intense relationship developed between listeners and singers. Singers were also pushed to the forefront because of the broadcast and filming of music: these media required a different centre of attention to live performance.

            At the same time, the neglect of vocals should not strike us as odd. Anyone who has played in a band will be familiar with the fact that singers can be an afterthought. It is often musicians who form bands: a gang of mates who play guitar, bass and drums. The singer is often the last to join and they can be something of an outsider. In addition, they are not usually listened to. They will be drowned out in rehearsals and also at some live gigs. It is also the case that at smaller gigs there may be no spotlight; thus the audience’s attention is spread between various group members. It is only when bands turn their focus towards recording that things begin to change, and it is only when they are signed to a record label that the singer starts to be elevated to pole position. This can be a hard dynamic to handle for all parties concerned.