THE FANTASTIC HOPE

OLYMPIANS 2012

2012-03-12T10:59:00.001Z

This was Blair's dream: a war hero's
welcome for himself, miles of minions
genuflecting everywhere. Drake
triumphing in the Solent summer.

Cameron is cooler. The crop fields
whisper to him as he stalks the city
framing parades, jubilees, pastoral pride --
but sport is too modern, too hopeful.

A charmed lad from Chingford smiles
a sucrose smile. Bombs ricochet in
the East End of the pea-soup planet
and the victors graze in a vaporous sky.

STRAY THOUGHTS ON THE LATE-CAPITALIST GOTHIC REVIVAL

2012-03-02T12:46:00.000Z

The pictures of the Hogwarts CGI models are interesting:

Weird that this supposed to be a conflation of Durham Cathedral and Alnwick Castle. I can see the Durham Cathedral part but mostly it's just wildly exaggerated fantasy gothic (as you might expect, I suppose).

There definitely seems to be something timely about this return to the gothic. What's worrying though is the absence of any underpinning Puginian/Ruskinian ethos.

This is culture as consumer pastoralism, a solipsistic fantasy artificially inseminated in the mechanised laboratory of late-capitalism.

LET THEM EAT CUPCAKES REDUX

2012-02-27T11:02:00.001Z

Joe Kennedy weighs in with a brilliant new critique of English terroir.

It’s now all too common to see novels, collections of poetry, and exhibitions being praised or dismissed in terms not dissimilar to those used to discuss a dining experience.

TENDER

2012-02-24T13:59:00.000Z

Feverish, I jived and heaved through the night,
Blood on the nub and raw backbone, sleek sweat
And flesh flowering, pins and needles, neat
And nipping minnows, burrowing bird flight,
Jumbled Gulliver, Lilliputian fight
On the battlefield bed and me the meat,
Boxed beneath the ocean and the sinking streets,
Head housing hives of bees, crabs, crooked light.

Lull, largo. Morning gathers in the gaps.
Calm collapsing the cushions, policing pace,
Ringing out the real, the solid-soil sounds
And soothing muffled song of tuned-down taps.
Roundel of relief, and the furrowed face
Of my dad as he wiped my brow and wounds.

KICKING THE CAN DOWN THE ROAD

2012-02-02T09:43:00.000Z

Nigh-on unbelievable garden variety conservatism in The Guardian today:

People are fatalistic. Once they get used to the initial shock and fear of hard times, it seems, they hunker down and find that life, generally, carries on tolerably well.

My guess is that life carries on tolerably better for salaried Guardian journalists than it does for the 12% unemployed in the north-east. Perhaps this sort of thing isn't so surprising, but the vast self-centredness and anti-reformism of the liberal establishment is really fucking me off right now.

Looking forward to reading Stephen Harper's book on the subject, which should thankfully be arriving any day now.

BLEAK HOUSE

2012-01-31T09:13:00.001Z

Been reading a spot of Dickens this month (along with the entire rest of the country/world) and it kinda shows stylistically in these two short posts: satire and sentiment.

By the way is anyone else irritated by the supreme lack of focus on Dickens as radical critic in all this birthday fuss? Seems symptomatic of the rather counter-revolutionary start to 2012.

AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN COLLABORATIVE RAGE

2012-01-19T12:07:00.000Z

In which Tom and Dave rail intelligently against the dystopian Saints and Scroungers.

DAFT AS A BRUSH

2012-01-16T12:54:00.001Z

I finally got round to reviewing that book about Gazza by Ian Hamilton.

While we're on the subject, here's a sonnet I wrote about the great man a while back.

WAY TO GO

2012-01-12T10:33:00.001Z

The imminent death of the guitar now being something of a meme, check out the salient (and hilarious) bit around 40secs into the 2nd part of the Pitchfork Flaming Lips docu.

THE POP BAND AS A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS

2012-01-04T10:02:00.002Z

Simon Reynolds makes an interesting point about the non-existence of a generation gap in contemporary culture.

... the only actual generational rebellion is to have zero interest in music, or minimal investment in music (opting not to see it as anything more than background enhancement to other activities, a tool for socialisation/decor for life, certainly not any kind of grand project or zone for identity formation / emancipation ...

My guess is that many young people actually learn this view of music as "decor for life" from aging, economically comfortable elder family members who have long since exchanged an "investment in music" for an investment in a 4-bedroom pile in Surrey.

In a substantially privatised culture, the ability to act independently in one's youth via a collective social apparatus is no longer possible, and the economy becomes anchored by the principle of inheritance. Hence the nu-folkers, an emphasis on tradition, record collection rock, etc. Pop music becomes a sort of bourgeois heirloom. It's not that the children of the baby boomers (and their successors) are rebelling against their parents' ethos of music-as-emancipation; rather, the view that has become institutionalised by the affluent, no-longer-radical members of this older generation is that music is just another means of capital accumulation. And it's the sons and daughters of this demographic that are breaking through to success and visibility because they're merely continuing the family business, as it were.

Hence the terrifying aptness of Mumford and Sons. (And obviously there's all the other bete-noires: FATM, Lily Allen, Laura Marling, all children of wealthy and influential parents, often counter-culture apostates. It's all in the book so sorry if I'm repeating mesel').

Depressingly (here's me thinking the faux-folkers had run out of gas) the 2012 installment arrived in yesterday's Guardian in the form of the Staveley-Taylors:

Note the first exchange in the interview: family and the home is now the starting point of musical meaning.

So what would the real modernist rebellion look like? As with a lot of these things, it's not a case of an enterprising individual somehow breaking out of this context to come up with something new: innovation will only take hold on a sizable scale when the whole culture is reorganised along fairer lines.

Also, I reckon those parents who did genuinely stick to a counter-culture philosophy and didn't sell-out are passing on a more meaningful "legacy" to their kids. It's just that these people tend not to be wealthy enough to be able to give their offspring the sort of leg-up that is necessary to make it in the music industry these days.

EZRA POUND SAID: "IT IS ONLY WHEN A SET OF IDEAS IS DYING THAT YOU GET DELIBERATE FORGERS, AND THAT MEN, ASTUTE AT SHORT RANGE, DELIBERATELY BLIND THEMSELVES FOR THE SAKE OF EMOLUMENTS AND TO HANG ON TO THEIR JOBS. SUCH A PHASE OF IDEOLOGICAL DYING WE HAVE RECENTLY LIVED THROUGH".

2011-12-19T12:49:00.001Z

2011 POP: A TOP TEN

2011-12-18T16:53:00.020Z

10. Wild Beasts - Burning

One very positive thing about 2011 was an absence of guitars right across the board. Until some profound structural upheaval changes pop music in ways we can’t now apprehend, there is nothing interesting to be done with the guitar whatsoever. We’ve gone way, way beyond that point.

Encouragingly, the pop world seems to have finally reached a broad-based consensus about this, after a dystopian phase in the mid-to-late noughties, which now, with the benefit of hindsight, seems like the final Wagnerian climacteric of a horrible dying animal.

That said, I do quite like Wild Beasts (a guitar band), partly for reasons outlined here. I spent most of this year revisiting their peerless debut album, but Smother had a handful of magic moments on it, notably this gorgeous, guitar-free microcosm, which was also a nice showcase for the peppery vocal tones of my fave Beast, bassist Tom Fleming.

***

9. Gang Gang Dance - Glass Jar

Okay okay, this is all getting a bit Pitchfork, I know. But the whole point of these things is to try to delineate the obvious/canonical, right? Better that than some narcissistic, point-scoring litany of obscurities.

Glass Jar is eleven and a half minutes of exciting, dramatic, variegated music. It’s innovative in an organic, unassuming way. There are continual surprises in the arrangement as it builds towards a rainbow-burst climax.

It’s hipster-tastic but who gives a shit? Hipsters are people too! Glass Jar is beautiful and yearning and puts you in mind of what the spirit-level mainstream of independent music might’ve sounded like if Britpop and nu-rock had never happened. I suppose, actually, that’s what I’m trying get at with all of this carping shite.

***

8. P.J. Harvey - On Battleship Hill

As Linton Kwesi Johnson once put it, “Inglan is a bitch, dere’s no escapin it”. Yet ironically, in a terrible year of revived jingoism and pernicious Tory cultural ascendancy, I was finally able to admit to myself that I am, if not English, then at least some kind of British.

Spending a bit of time in the States, the good aspects of the UK finally became blindingly apparent: The North. Football. The Beeb. Dickens. The thousands of churches. History. The Socialist heritage. Cities where the buildings are in close proximity to each other and feel like they’ve been collectively organised. The NHS. A basic atmosphere of interconnectedness. Full measure pints. Blake. Shane Meadows. Carl Neville. Activism. The Beatles. Immigrants. Accents. Moors. Stones. Mountains. The Sea.

Let England Shake seemed to fit with this personal context. But more importantly it also seemed widely resonant and of-the-moment in a way that few popular artworks manage to be. The “Englishness” trend reached an apogee this year, so it was good that one of its chief mainstream representatives was an album that used eloquent poetry and killer tunes to speak of English insurrection and unrest rather than pastoral cliché. Even Geoffrey Hill was “not entirely displeased”.

***

7. SBTRKT - Heatwave

My disappointment in the James Blake album was and is unrelenting. I know there are some astonishing sonic moments on it, but I just cannot countenance THAT FUCKING YELPY FUCKING FAUX-COLLOQUIAL EMO VOICE.

Lots of the tunes on the SBTRKT album suffer from the same blight: hackneyed melodramatic vocal lines slapped on top of otherwise superlative post-dubstep pop. Fortunately the female vocalists just about save the day (cf. Pharoahs, Wildfire).

Then there’s the scintillating (instrumental) opening track. It’s difficult to feel too sceptical about the future of British music after hearing tunes like this. The beating heart of a popular avant-garde is still there, it just needs a bit of massaging.

***

6. Rustie - Hover Traps

I’m not sure about this “maximalism”. Clearly it has some application as a way of describing a broad shift away from the minimal, but the idea that arrangements have become progressively denser because of home recording techniques doesn’t really fit with the actual texture of the music. That argument would be much better applied to, say, Animal Collective, wouldn’t it?

Take this Rustie tune. There are only about 4 or 5 main instrumental parts playing at any one time, and there’s a good deal of negative space in the rhythmic arrangement (note the remarkably funky syncopation of the hook, which relies on multiple tiny rhythmic silences for its effect).

How about this: the maximal trend, if it exists, is a question of intensity rather than density. By this I mean that an artist like Rustie is relying on “massive”, impassioned hooks, accelerated time signatures and dynamic contrasts rather than dense wall-of-sound layering. It’s not so much technologically-induced franticity as good old-fashioned Scottish Romanticism (Hegelian hugeness ... Bonkers-meets-Braveheart ...).

***

5. M83 - Midnight City

If I was being strictly faithful to the pop gods, this would be my number one. Out of all the tunes here, this is the one with the most exuberant, ecstatic, instantly graspable hook, the tune that most pleases the heart rather than the head, the tune least reducible to discursive analysis. Talk about maximal intensity!

But then, as a cultural phenomenon, M83 has become very fucking annoying hasn’t he? The voice is getting yelpier, the music cokier, the hipster fanbase more and more irksome. And the verses in Midnight City don’t really exist do they?

There’s also the fact that it became a kind of signature tune for Made in Chelsea. Have you ever seen Made in Chelsea? I saw one episode a few weeks ago and haven’t quite recovered enough yet to be able to talk about the experience intelligently. I’m serious. It was really shocking.

***

4. Nicki Minaj - Super Bass, Moment 4 Life

Geoffrey Hill on Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Dulle Griet (“Mad Meg”), in the third Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture, May 2011:

“The head is thrust forward, the toothless mouth open, and there is a mad stare in the left eye looking straight ahead at nothing.” I would be very much happier about the condition of poetry in English in the first and second decades of this century if I could look at a poem or a book of poems by one or more contemporaries and say [the above] of them …There needs to be, I would hazard, more especially at the present time, a Dulle Griet element in any work that attracts concentrated attention. And I very much regret that the role of Mad Meg seems to have devolved upon me in my thrice-yearly appearances on this platform. Among the current wave of stand-up comedians and rap musicians, there may be someone capable of taking on the role of Mad Meg …

***

3. Drake - Crew Love

Drake’s Take Care was the album of the year. Consistently listenable, frequently funny, and disarmingly sad in the best possible sense, this was a record of tragic scope and wondrous sonic variety.

James Skewered Seal Blake was apparently a major influence production-wise, but surely Burial would be a better point of comparison. Listen to the glacial melancholy of the segue from Marvin’s Room into Buried Alive (natch) for an illustration.

Crew Love seemed to irritate some people but for me it’s the keystone of the album. There’s such a fantastically uncanny disconnect between the platitudinous machismo of the lyrics and the profound bleakness of the music. Ostensibly this is a song about male solidarity, but the attempt to avow fellowship and soulfulness is everywhere undermined by the surrounding framework, so that, for example, the line “And really I think I like who I’m becoming” seems to suggest the exact opposite. Desperate pathos drips from every dark aperture of this guy’s lyrical universe:

Smoking weed under star projectors
I guess we’ll never know where Harvard gets us
But seeing my family have it all
Took the place of that desire for diplomas on the wall

Remarkable.

***

2. Destroyer - Kaputt

Okay, so this year Retromania finally exposed The Real of the twenty-first century zeitgeist (namely, that pop long ago ate itself and is now some way into the post-prandial nap, having taken a fistful of valiums before nodding off). All that was required was for someone to actually come out and say it, Khrushchev-style. Now someone has done this definitely, we can all, y’know, move on.

I had planned to write a long pretentious essay about Destroyer and the final dissipated twilight hours of pop, but after the catharsis provided by Mr Reynolds’s book, coupled with all the other encouraging political irruptions of this year, I’m actually feeling a lot more positive about things generally.

In sum, I don’t actually feel like pop music is kaputt any more. There are plenty of embryonic signs of life roundabout, and now it looks there’s a good chance we might imminently have a revived counterculture to give the whole thing some meaning again. Still: “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, all sounds like a dream to me”. Dan Bejar you are a very clever man.

***

1. Rihanna - We Found Love ft. Calvin Harris

We found our love in a hopeless place: the essence of the pop song in eight perfectly chosen words.

MORE STONE ROSES

2011-12-05T15:52:00.002Z

Look, I know the Stone Roses reunion still has embarrassing farce written all over it. But ... I'm increasingly tempted to say fuck the scepticism. And a wonderful thought dawns: what would happen if we actually started taking this seriously? Mightn't this have the potential to be part of a wider sea-change in 2012?

Surely we haven't completely lost the ability to look beyond irony and amusement and see something meaningful in a cultural event. Okay, the reunion isn't helped by the fact that it slots into the nostalgia circuit/retromania zeitgeist. But this shouldn't necessarily rule out its significance.

Try reading the following extracts from John Robb's account of last night's Brown-Squire Hillsborough benefit performance with something other than urbane cynicism:

As the band lurch from ‘Bankrobber’ to ‘Armageddon Time’ and Ian takes the vocal again that sense of camaraderie and of the real idea of ‘we’re all in it together’ extends from the stage to the audience...

The night winds on, Ian Brown is talking about the north and the power of Liverpool and Manchester being together and how the two cities can take on the world, some drunk in the bar tries to get Ian to slag off Oasis but he wont have any of it pointing out that ‘in Manchester we stick together’...

I stand there and think about punk rock and the way that it must have been there in medieval times and before and how that we are all in our own little ways just carrying the flame from one generation to the next...

There’s something quite moving and important about a big Manchester United fan like Ian Brown making this statement of solidarity with the Liverpool fans over this call for justice but then Ian knows that this is a bigger story than of rival clubs. He knows that this is a story of the contempt the authorities have for people and that the demand for justice on this tour is universal and not just about one team. Like Mick Jones- who’s a big QPR fan- this is about the bigger picture, this is about the way that people died that horrible afternoon and that way that football and rock n roll integrate in our culture and resound so strongly with us. It’s about the way that the people’s music is the perfect match for the people’s game and it’s about that ancient cry of justice that is so part and parcel of all the great rock n rolls...

I'm increasingly getting the sense that, if this sort of thing manages to rise above the likely blandishments of the media coverage, the reunion might have the potential next summer to be a vociferous radical statement with genuinely populist resonance.

Why don't we see what happens when we start believing it will be?

OXFORD LEFT REVIEW: 5

2011-12-04T02:44:00.000Z

Some thoughts on heaven as other people in the latest issue of the Oxford Left Review.

Great stuff from the other contributors, especially Cailean Gallagher's piece on Scottish independence.

LIKE ONE PERSON

2011-11-14T09:33:00.001Z

The division will not be over whether or not they are seen ... but over how they are seen; as the gilded-cage justifiers of petty-minded conservatism and fear, or as the developers (even if not the actual originators) of all that is open and challenging and outward-looking in mass culture, as the voice of the working class speaking out against elite abuses of power and in favour of the global unity of the proletariat. Let us hope that the passing of time eventually allows the latter view of the Beatles to decisively win. If the former view wins, Cameron and Welch and Adkins and the BRIT School will also have won, and we will all be infinitely poorer for it. If the latter view wins, grime and dubstep and the unacknowledged, still unkillable radical lineage in British society will also have won, if only by proxy, and we will all be - in all the senses that matter - immeasurably richer.

Robin Carmody offers a nicely Ruskinian summary of the Beatles.

While we're on the subject, that Scorcese George Harrison documentary is very watchable isn't it? Although it does lack the narrative richness - and, I'm afraid to say, the good tunes - of No Direction Home. The thing that strikes me about The Beatles increasingly is their historically unique embodiment of solidarity and team spirit. In the docu Eric Clapton says something like: "they were like one person"; it does seem that a large amount of The Beatles' elan and brilliance inhered in the communication of this quality of unity and anti-egotism to the world at a moment when egalitarianism was briefly prevailing, doesn't it?

I know it's a truism of "Fab crit" to say this, but all the best Beatles moments came when they helped each other out, when they managed to transcend their egos by way of the group. A good example of this from the Scorcese documentary is the performance of "If I Needed Someone". It's a pretty mediocre song, but when John and Paul come in with the harmonies the second time around it suddenly lifts into the magic place:

The Beatles presented a very basic foregrounding of co-operation and friendship, so basic in fact that it was probably destined to be travestied in the ensuing years, to the point that it now seems like a sort of lobotomised, Friends-style message of slumber-party chumminess. It takes an effort of imagination to recover the profound, radical singularity of The Beatles' ethos of fellowship, anti-individualism, and love.

RICKY'S FETISH

2011-11-13T12:21:00.006Z

Just read Stewart Lee's splendidly baroque piece about Ricky Gervais's almost unbelievable new venture.

One of the more encouraging developments of the past year or so has been a gradually dawning, what-were-we-thinking realisation that noughties Brit comedy was an utterly morally bankrupt final travesty of the notion of "alternative comedy". If anyone still doubted that Little Britain was a sinisterly bigoted attack on the weak, after Come Fly With Me this view was no longer tenable. Similarly, the bizarre disability sadism of this "Derek Noakes" thing will probably make people look much less fondly on The Office and its oh-so-ironic wheelchair/midget/sexism gags.

The Gervais project that really riled me though, the point at which the whole edifice came tumbling down and I began to feel profoundly guilty for ever finding The Office funny, was this:

It's quite a short step from this squinting, buffoonish northerner to Down Syndrome sufferer Derek Noakes isn't it? Sometimes I think I get carried away with the north-south divide thing, but when I look at stuff like this, all doubts vanish. Comedy is supposed to dismantle hierarchy and suggest alternative worlds by targeting and undermining power. So what on earth is going on when supposedly alternative - but actually extremely wealthy and influential - comics choose the working class north as a primary target of satire? Oh yeah, what is required of satirists in an age of spiralling inequality, unimaginable elitism and barbarous wars is a lampooning of ethnic minorities, the disabled, and minimum wage workers in depressed former manufacturing towns. What kind of insane bourgeois fetish is this? And what does this cultural stuff say about the distribution of power in the UK more generally?

***

Even 15 years ago Gervais's shtick would never have flown. For all its flaws, something like The Fast Show is a record of the notably less mean-spirited, more establishment-ridiculing, stereotype-inverting culture of pre-noughties alt-comedy:

NOT ACCEPTABLE

2011-11-11T09:58:00.012Z

Was Thatcherism very marginally more compassionate than Blairism-Cameronism? Just saying like.

I was getting a bit worried for a while back there. It would be just like NUF-fucking-C to go and start playing really well, right when I've got this book coming out that uses them as a pop cultural paradigm for the failure of neoliberalism and why big-business is recklessly hell-bent on self-destruction.

Thankfully, Ashley has come through again.

Take away the profound underlying seriousness of the whole thing, and it's a sort of folk-opera isn't it? I wonder if we'll look back on these episodes after the revolution with misty-eyed fondness (eg. "Do you remember that Mike Ashley?" "Ah yes, he was a complete fucking prick wasn't he?" "True, but he knew how to make PR decisions that looked like bizarre situationist pranks intended to gradually radicalise the populace, didn't he?" "Yes indeed, a worthy adversary and a born entertainer! A shame, in a way, that he was decapitated and hung by his own entrails from the Sports Direct sign on the Gallowgate End during the 2018 rising." "A shame indeed Comrade Keegan, a shame indeed. Those were the days").

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

2011-11-09T16:22:00.016Z

Extract from a letter Basil Bunting wrote to Ezra Pound, February 1931:

ENGLAND. If Wales and the North don’t rise this autumn, there’s little hope of anything but extinction. The new program of the T.U.C. should be drawn up quite simply, thus:

1. Hang Rothschild and a select retinue of “merchant bankers”.

2. Confine Rothermere in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum with public warning to Beaverbrook and the Berries.

3. Warn Australia Canada S Africa that if they dont both pay up their proportionate share of the cost of the fleet and loosen up a bit on the immigration restrictions, they will be put up for public auction to any buyer who cares to undertake the job of reconquering them, such as Germany or the U.S.A.

4. No import dues, and a bloody big supertax.

5. Abolish the game laws.

6. Abolish the Home Office.

7. Confiscate the church lands and royalties. After that elect a new house of Commons and omit to summon any of the hereditary peers to parliament.

NEW FORMS

2011-11-07T00:01:00.001Z

Interesting avant-garde response to recent events from an American poet.

MACHINE DREAM

2011-11-06T08:57:00.003Z

Guardian article, on the let-them-eat-cupcakes zeitgeist.

Weirdly, pretty much simultaneously with my piece there was another comment feature based on a discussion about the death of the protest song between Billy Bragg and this lad:

Couldn't really have hoped for better empirical illustration of my argument.

Some great morsels from (Bedales alumnus and former Holby City star) Flynn:

It's confusing to know where to put your energies now. I don't have a Twitter account, because I want to ... put my creative energy into writing songs.

My direction, what I'm drawn to, is overcoming cynicism, but in a more abstract form.

... there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself.

Where people come from has no relevance.

TORIES AT PMQS: THEIR FACES ARE ALWAYS JUST A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT AREN'T THEY?

2011-10-31T00:01:00.002Z

Note the lingering trace of compassion in Clegg's physiognomy here. He might be a mega-wanker, but he'll never be a Tory.

LATE NIGHT EPIPHANY ON WHY "THE STONE ROSES" IS ACTUALLY A REMARKABLY FITTING APPELATION FOR NORTHERN MANHOOD

2011-10-30T00:01:00.001+01:00

mountain outside; flower within

TURNING TIDES IN THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

2011-10-28T00:01:00.004+01:00

Football might only be a game, but it's still unquestionably the most symbolically important expression of a collective identity we have.

So this seems like a pretty hopeful symbolic development to me.

And there's some pretty moving symbolism in this, too:

MORE ON THAT HERMIONE HOBY THING

2011-10-27T15:44:00.014+01:00

So the gist of the call was: her boyfriend’s mother was upset by my page, and her dad “risked his life fighting against apartheid in South Africa”. My grandfathers both risked their lives fighting for the Axis, so I guess she has that one up over me.

There's something desperately, hilariously 2010s about this ongoing sub-saga. Blogging, nepotism, Twitter, recorded phone conversations, Lady Gaga, a privileged liberal elite trying to cover it's back with vague gestures at radical credentials, the shocking unacknowledged centrality and importance of private education: this is the spirit of the age laid bare innit?

I don't know this guy from Adam but I'd like to heartily thank him for the description, a "Robin Carmody-style chinstroker". Given that I do actually spend much of my time pondering over bullshit and wishing I was a bit more like Robin Carmody, this is a remarkably fitting epithet for me, one that fills me with pride and makes me think I must be doing at least something right. Cheers for that.

RECOVERING THE STONE ROSES

2011-10-26T16:07:00.010+01:00

Following the below post and comments on the Stone Roses reunion, I've been thinking a lot about why they were so important. I think at heart it's because they were perhaps the ultimate synthetic band: everything they did seemed to join together apparent antitheses (harsh/soft, simplicity/sophistication, individual expressivity/collectivism, guitar music/electronica, and so on). This is why their message remains so radical. They were truly revolutionary because they didn't conform to any of the stereotypes about Britishness. They were neither middle-class art-school wankers in the manner of Blur nor working-class boors in the manner of Oasis; but then nor were they geeky, proletarian "mis-shapes" in the manner of Pulp (cf. Mr Hatherley's latest). In fact they represented the British Establishment's deepest fear: the organised aggregate and sublimation of these disparate elements, an emboldened team of earthy, arty, funny, political, vociferous, populist, intellectual, macho, sensitive lads.

If this sounds gendered, well, I think gender and sex were integral to the opposition-dismantling tendency. To take just one example, check out the lyrics to "Going Down", an insanely gorgeous B-side from 1989:

Dawn sings in the garden
Phone sings in the hall
This boy's dead from two day's life
Resurrected by the call
Penny here we've got to come
So come on round to me
There's so much penny lying here
To touch, taste and tease
Ring a ding ding ding I'm going down
I'm coming round

Penny's place her crummy room
Dansette crackles to Jimi's tune
I don't care I taste Ambre Solaire
Her neck her thighs her lips her hair
Ring a ding ding ding I'm going down
I'm coming round

I'd better come clean and say that I think this is one of the very best lyrics in the history of popular music, no question. But value judgments aside, it's clear that the charm of this comes from its incredibly gentle, disarming brand of machismo. This is the anti-Inbetweeners, if you like: a cheeky, even "laddish" exploration of adolescent sex that is nevertheless utterly respectful, refined, and humane, redolent of some of the finest passages from the prelapsarian sections of Paradise Lost.

I suppose a certain kind of feminist might object to this sort of thing, but frankly I think this would be a huge shame. This is a woman-worshipping song in the sweetest, most generous, most self-abnegating sense, a song about heavenly intimacy that builds up to a description of a "69" juxtaposed with an allusion to Jackson Pollock's Number 5. There's a unique and divine bathos at work here, a magical evocation of that state of mind - not necessarily sexual - when everything blurs and the high becomes low and two people become one and suddenly everything under the sun seems possible. In short, this is the visceral, sensual experience of equality, the bedrock of everything the Stone Roses ever did.

Not many bands are like that.

KNIGHT PHILS THE SCREEN

2011-10-23T11:12:00.000+01:00

The estimable Phil Knight now has his very own, very good blog.

Though it's not something I'm overly familiar with, I've been enjoying his recent occult-oriented posts (see here). By way of a tribute, here's a fantastic picture of early-twentieth century occultist composer/songwriter Peter Warlock (a/k/a Philip Heseltine, a/k/a Brian Sewell's dad), who I've been doing a spot of research on recently:

Primarily I just wanted to share what is without a doubt one of the best photographic portraits I've ever seen. Look at that infernally involuted mouth!

I don't really know much of Warlock's oeuvre, other than the carol service staple Bethlehem Down, which is brilliant I think, largely because of the melisma on the word "down" that seems to pre-empt the sixties, Tomorrow Never Knows, eastern mysticism-meeting-folk revival, that sort of thing:

It's very pop-song-esque isn't it? There's a palpable verse-chorus-hook format, and a Beatles-esque formula of basic, folk/primitive melody being subtly tweaked or warped with unexpected chords to haunting effect. Reading up on Warlock it seems that his approach to music writing was actually quite similar to the later pop tunesmiths: he was self-taught, intent on being a songwriter as opposed to a composer (in the way that many late-romantic English writers were at the time of Vaughan Williams, Gurney, Grainger et al), and a "vertical" rather than a "horizontal" writer according to the account that I read (ie. he was interested in chords, in seeing where rich chordal blocks would take the melody, which recalls Ian MacDonald's view that Lennon and McCartney spontaneously rejected traditional harmony when they lighted on an exploratory, "moving chord shapes around the fretboard" methodology.)

Anyway, well done Phil, and big up the occult.

THE MAGIC OF TEAMS

2011-10-18T20:45:00.003+01:00

I think this will be an unmitigated disaster. But I'm moved to the marrow of my bones, nevertheless.

What does it feel like to support the newspaper that supported Adolf Hitler? That supports the banker cabalists that are ruining the world?

FROM A TIME WHEN FOLK MUSIC WAS MORE REMINISCENT OF MARXIST PHILOSOPHY THAN CHIPPING NORTON SET CABARET

2011-10-17T13:50:00.000+01:00

Just heard Nic Jones's eponymous debut album for the first time this weekend. Particularly struck by the early nineteenth century Bonaparte ballad "Napoleon's Lamentation":

Attend, you sons of high renown
To these few lines which I pen down:
I was born to wear a stately crown
And to rule a wealthy nation.
I am the man that beat Beaulieu,
And Wurmser's hill did then subdue;
That great Archduke I overthrew,
On every plain my men were slain.
Grand travesty, did I obtain
And I got capitulation.

Well, we chased them on the Egyptian shore
Where the Algerians lay all in their gore.
The rights of France for to restore
That had long been confiscated.
We pursued them all through mud and mire
Till in despair my men retired,
And Moscow Town was set on fire.
My men were lost through sleet and frost;
I ne'er before received such a blast
Since the hour I was created.

Well, in Leipzig Town my soldiers fled,
Mount Mark was strewn with the Russian dead.
We marched them forth, in inveterate streams
For to stop a bold invasion.
So it's fare you well, my royal spouse,
And offspring great to my adore,
And may you reinstate that throne
That's torn away this very day.
These kings of me have made a prey
And they've caused my lamentation.

Eat that Zizek.

Also, "We marched them forth, in inveterate streams" is crazy good isn't it? The whole thing is like Sympathy for the Devil crossed with Yeats's Easter 1916; an ideal mixture of hubris and pathos.

TURN, TURN, TURN

2011-10-15T09:20:00.000+01:00

Great post by Wayne over at the nineties blog on the turn-of-the-millenium, Armand Van Helden, and, err, the Glencoe Massacre. Top stuff.

TALK ABOUT BIZARRE JUXTAPOSITIONS ...

2011-10-05T14:38:00.000+01:00

The unofficial Newcastle United website NUFC.com is running a competition to publicise the re-release of Gazza Agonistes by Ian Hamilton (first published 1993) in the Faber Finds series.

How is this the first I've ever heard of this book? It sounds AMAZING.

Poet friend of Robert Lowell marries Milton and Gazza, the north-east and the nineties, cultural commentary and Jimmy Five Bellies: what's not to like?

THANKS

2011-10-04T14:39:00.003+01:00

to Carl, for summing up Folk Opposition better than I ever could.

BOOK

2011-10-03T03:37:00.011+01:00

Friends,

I have a book coming out later this month. Called Folk Opposition, it's a sort of extended rant/jeremiad/screed, at the end of which I try to gesture at some broad ideas for a revival of grassroots collectivism in the UK.

There's probably something in the book for everyone to disagree with, that being the nature of this kind of thing. At bottom, though, I tried to write something informed by an ideal of commonality, unity, and hope, because, frankly -- and I don't care if this sounds corny or trite -- these sentiments are what I felt was in most need of championing at this particular moment in time; I hope this shines through whatever flaws and contentions you have with the subject matter or means of expression.

The book was written about a year ago now. Although most of it remains fairly topical (and props to Zero for bringing publication forward to ensure this), there are a couple of minor addenda. Firstly, the riots in London this summer represent one of the most notable examples of "folk opposition" in years; obviously, not being able to tackle them is a great regret (although, on the other hand, having been out of the country at the time, I'm not sure I would've felt competent to do this anyway). Secondly, Tom Pickard, who very generously read the manuscript, pointed out that he was unsure that the term "beat poet" was an accurate description of himself. This was a failure of eloquence on my part, for which the explanation that the book was written extremely quickly is hardly an excuse. I know full well that Tom's poetry fits much better into a British Black Mountain/post-Objectivist lineage, as well as connecting back to an older northern tradition of balladry (something I probably should have made more of, given my thesis). In fact, I would urge everyone to come to their own conclusions about Tom's nonpareil poetry by reading it for themselves, and thereby bypassing any maladroit summaries I might be able to offer.

I've tried to thank everyone I know in the Acknowledgements. If you're not there it's probably because I didn't know you well enough earlier this year. Probably the major people to have been omitted in this way are the people I've come into contact with this year through writing for the "decade blogs": Wayne Kasper, Phil Knight, Agata Pyzik, and others, many of whom I know only by their first name or avatar: William, Greyhoos, Zone Styx, Oliver et al. I don't actually know any of you personally but I'd just like to say that my life has been made immeasurably better by being a part of a discussion community with you. Thanks for being so clever and sympathetic and just fucking there.

Anyway, if you'd like to buy the book you can do so here.

Cheers, Al.

P.S. Here is a short photo essay to, err, whet your appetites ...

REASON TO BE MODERATELY HOPEFUL ABOUT THE FUTURE OF MUSIC #265

2011-09-30T16:47:00.004+01:00

Field Music are a very special band. I forgot about them for a while, and didn't really give 2010's Measure much attention for some reason, but when I finally got around to listening to it properly yesterday I remembered just how precious and unique they are: a truly artful proposition in the pseud-filled landscape of contemporary Brit art-rock.

They're quite prolific (perhaps overly so), so I would recommend some selective playlisting. The first four tunes on Measure are a good place to start:

[A rather endearing un-self-conscious anti-fashion stance is one of the hallmarks of the band. For this alone, they deserve a great deal of credit, as it's probably cost them dearly in terms of sales and acclaim in a fashion-oriented market. On the other hand, their anti-visual aesthetic has also arguably been the making of them -- a way of outlasting the "post-punk revival" scene they were originally lumped in with. Meanwhile, their more hyped, more Topman-friendly pals The Futureheads have not been nearly so lucky.]

[Great magic moment around 1:45 into the above.]

Field Music are the closest thing we've got to a US band like Dirty Projectors. It strikes me that this sort of wayward pop from the fringes of academia is one of the most worthwhile ways in which rock//indie/guitar music/white pop/whatever might evolve. You keep your head down, keep away from London, deal with the industry but keep it at arm's length, maintain a meaningful relationship with your city and its local scene, carry on making low budget videos, etc., and you just might make things work in the long-term.

No version on youtube unfortunately of my all-time favourite FM tune, "Alternating Current", so this other tune from Write Your Own History (a fantastic collection of early b-sides) will have to do:

I also love the motif of brothers. When pop gets the Partnership right (Beatles, Smiths, Oasis) it can lend a powerful anti-individualist emphasis to the music. That said, one of things most worth tracking down is 2008's The Week That Was album, the side project of elder brother Peter Brewis. Again, the best stuff on this isn't on youtube so this (still pretty excellent) single will have to suffice:

David Brewis's School of Language record was release around the same time. Though not as focused as TW2, it still had some belting stuff on it:

Anyway, don't say I didn't warn you.

ANOTHER GOOD POST

2011-09-24T00:01:00.001+01:00

... over at Eyes on Ashley on the gradual transformation of the Newcastle skyline into a giant billboard.

TWO POEMS, TWO POLES

2011-09-23T18:21:00.000+01:00

The Gym On Top Of The World

From here we see the great gamut of human life;
Wolf men and flower-wrights,
Coffee kids and purple hearts.
The cypress tree tilting in the doorway at lapse of day.

Legging away on this up and down thing,
I see maps stretch to the horizon,
Yellow records of everything our fathers felt,
Barques blown mad on the crust of the ocean.

Stars twitter. Night-swallows gleam.
I come back to the start on rubber tracks.
Now and then the iron clasps lift, we gasp
At undercurrents in the pockmarked air.

Cities are all I ever hoped for.
In the past I would dream of this platform,
As the soldier dreams of a notional child.
My feet flail around on golden instruments.

But even the ancient tapestries faltered at this stage.
Here on this summit I see the sun strive,
The ground snaps to the thud of blistered feet;
The ocean whispers something about not trying so hard.

Steam percolates. Precision beats out the pace.
Sweat gathers in pools and we revel in weariness.
Ogres climb up the walls and beat at the door.
Friends of God, please will you help us?

So now you can see why I brought you here.
Fog is obscuring the Grecian columns in the distance.
Saxophones riff lazily, and wine soaks the cypress.
Let’s agree. We can do infinitely better than this.

***

The Exile of Delia Derbyshire

Twelve miles south of the border
In a farmhouse empty of sound,
I ply my ambient trade,
Cutting tape, carving the wind.

In the sixties at flower-filled parties,
Those echoing scales in the air;
In the sixties at flower-filled parties,
In my Quant gown and my bobbed hair.

Now I drink glasses of bitter
In Cumbrian workingmen’s bars:
Playing darts, fading into the margins,
Flutter of wind in my ears.

A SPARK

2011-09-16T13:23:00.005+01:00

A wonderful thing happens in this first post on new NUFC blog Eyes on Ashley:

Without sufficient proof of his company’s employment record and a PhD in international law there is unfortunately nothing we can do. The degree of the crimes are substantially different and we are in no way comparing the lack of signings with child labour. The problem is that it is the same man who oversaw both organisations and did so with complete self-interest and without a degree of care for the people affected.

When an otherwise ordinary, apolitical demographic links popular culture to an international pattern of exploitation, we should be incredibly hopeful.

In a significant sense, all we're allowed now is pop culture. Our conscious collective existence is limited largely to football, pop music, TV talent shows, high street chain-store scrimmages. As such it seems inevitable that the first glimmer of an organised oppositional response to neoliberalism in the UK will occur on these sites, when even the bread and circuses are popularly deemed to be thoroughly disease-ridden.

It will happen, you know.

WHERE WATERFALLS AROUND IT LEAP FOREVER

2011-09-14T16:42:00.014+01:00

This is us.

Might, failure, oblivion.

The last days of Rome, Michelangelo's Medici tomb, Cage's silence.

Consumer immersion and its dying fall.

Vertigo maw. A pummeling in the stomach. Cliché of Absence.

The guts of an Aztec pyramid. Our Crystal Palace.

Sleekness of Speer. The New Corporate Gothic Minimalism of the public sphere:

Names carved in fire.

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

In the gift shop afterward, you twig that soon, when the gold streams run out, the meres will be drained, the jets switched off

This is us. Eulogising transience.

The slightest monument in history.

POPULAR MODERNISM

2011-09-13T11:54:00.000+01:00

The artwork Richard Hamilton designed from the University of Newcastle art department in 1964-5 for two editions of Basil Bunting's poetry. Bunting was in his mid-sixties, and The Spoils was, astonishingly, the first book of his to be published in the UK.

Well done Richard Hamilton for your part, and godspeed. How many modernist artists are struggling in the desert right now without the help of people like you?

WAVE COMP: TWO

2011-09-10T14:58:00.010+01:00

The second issue of Wave Composition is out and it's predictably crammed with essential reading.

Especially worthy of attention is Ed Sugden's Tree of Life review, which mounts a fervently savvy defence of this divisive film (Ed: "undoubtedly the most important cinematic work of the early century"). I defy anyone to grumble about Malick's "intellectualism" after reading this piece.

Also indispensable is the interview with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman. Particularly trenchant on latter-day publishing contexts:

One of the problematic aspects of that type of interpretation ... is that Kathy [Acker] and Burroughs—and you can go back to Kerouac—all engage literature as being one with trade publishing. And that trade publishing represents access to a mass audience. Whereas historically the poem—and Pound’s almost the exception here, compared to the people who are not as famous as Pound, starting with William Carlos Williams—operate in very different economies through small presses and self-publishing. It’s not an accident that Whitman was a self-publisher, and Gertrude Stein was a self-publisher, and that George Oppen set up a press, and all of those people were doing those kind of things because they were working on a different kind of scale, getting the work out to the right people. The numbers of the right people being very different in that approach than in the approach of the novel. One of the problems with the novel is that it never was free of publishing as a phenomenon. As a result, always subject to the laws of the marketplace in its worst terms. Kathy was one of the bravest artists imaginable in terms of casting and recasting her work and asking the most basic questions about what is the nature of fiction, what is the fictive, what is its relationship to the body and the person and the self. And yet, at the same time the economy of what she was then doing was using it to reach almost a rock ‘n’ roll audience through large publishers that left her on the one hand able to eke out a living from her writing, and at the same time left her so vulnerable that when she came down with cancer she didn’t have health insurance, which is what killed her, the American medical system.

EVERYMAN OF NEWTON AYCLIFFE

2011-09-09T01:05:00.004+01:00

Really cracking first post from Dave Lichfield at his new Work Trials blog.

I've been a keen follower of Dave's alternately tragic/ mundane/ heroic/ inspiring Everyman facebook status updates recently, and the expansion into blog format is a very welcome development, especially at a time when everyone seems to be migrating the other way.

Time drones on in the flattest fashion possible with barely anything to punctuate the sickly whirr of its moronic acceleration into an abyssal state of shit-all. The fear of missing out on key life events (jobs, driving lessons, girlfriends, holidays, engagements, iPads, festivals, mortgages, promotions, pension plans, marriages, ankle-biter spawning, B&Q on Sunday, being able to pay for your own funeral). The feeling that life is something that goes on elsewhere. The feeling of estrangement. The feeling you deserve it all. Being away from your family, and you can't afford to move back, because you can't get a job. The whole days, weeks and months procrastinating in front of a screen, watching snapshots of other people's lives. No idea if things will ever improve or just continue to insult you on an ever-increasing basis.

This'll be one of the most worthwhile things you read all day, I promise.

FLAUBERT IS MINT, ISN'T HE?

2011-09-05T02:06:00.000+01:00

"Earth, mingled with stones, fell onto the coffin; and the world would never mention him again".

- Sentimental Education

OXFORD ZERO LECTURE SERIES, 2011-12

2011-09-03T16:27:00.001+01:00

A lecture series will take place next academic year at Oxford showcasing forthcoming or recently published Zero texts. The first session is on October 18th, 2011. Chris Bateman is speaking.

Blog here.

Spread the word.

And if you're travelling from elsewhere, lemme know and you can kip on my floor.

NE PASSAGE: VOL 2

2011-08-19T19:58:00.001+01:00

Sorry this slipped me mind ...

The 2nd issue of North-East Passage is avaliable (once again, for absolutely NOWT) via the magisterial Tom Astley. Just send your postal address to thenortheastpassage@hotmail.co.uk, and the man himself will send you a copy.

The issue is called "Photographs" and features essays, short stories, and err photographs. I've got a couple of pretty decent poems in there too.

THE TWO BEST RESPONSES TO THE RIOTS ...

2011-08-18T23:09:00.003+01:00

... I've read are Owen's CiF piece on the unbelievable plans to evict rioters' families (the brilliant first two paragraphs say it all), and Wayne's extended, coruscating post of yesterday: "Say Hi To The Bad Guy".

I realise in saying this I'm sorta replicating one of Wayne's major gripes (namely, the intra-congratulatory nature of the left-blogosphere), but fuck it. Passages like the following cut right to the bone:

After all, a mental disorder we all share is chronic narcissism. It's the ideological oxygen component of the neoliberal air we breathe (however toxic that air has become). Particularly when we are presented with a flattering youthful mirror image. The voices of protestors last year were given the respect and space (a key word here) rarely accorded to the (supposedly) less educated rioters of last week. Was it due to the recent uprising being unlikely to share your language? Even if it did: Could it be the niggling possibility that rioters were saying something you were reluctant to hear? It's funny how I rarely heard the word "solidarity" this time round; being quietly brushed aside for the time being.

...

Also apparent in much Left commentary was adherence to party lines, ongoing hobby-horses, career interests, interpersonal loyalties, or if discussed in more mainstream media channels: mandatory lip-service to condemning "violence". The last was pretty much across the board if discussed in newspapers or on British TV.

I couldn't really agree more with this, though I feel a desperate need to append this question to Wayne's lacerating negative critique: just what is to be done about this? How can we re-suture the two halves of the country separated by Wayne's "huge dividing line"?

For myself I feel the pressure of a daily struggle not to get sucked into the world of a "volatile housing/education market and a monotonous, but no less rabid, media". Even with blogging (or perhaps especially blogging) we run the risk of inhaling big gulps of the chronic narcissism with every sentence. Just how the fuck do you escape from this trap? How can the left-intelligentsia cross over into meaningful, truly grassroots territory? Where's the fantastic hope in all of this? What can we do?

FOOTY SEASON SPECIAL

2011-08-04T18:31:00.002+01:00

Piece by me in the Guardian on football supporters' trusts (squeezing a huge issue into a tight space I'm afraid, but hopefully the main point comes across).

Having my photo published alongside KK's is one of the very proudest moments of my life.

Here's another classic image of the great man:

AN ASIDE ON A LESSER NEWS STORY OF THE MOMENT

2011-07-25T20:53:00.002+01:00

Of course all the usual disclaimers apply (they're bland but they need to be stated): any death is an unspeakable tragedy; this must be a living nightmare for her family; it's shocking that this could happen to someone so young. For myself it feels like this is the first person of my generation to die in an end-of-the-line kind of way; other people of exactly my age have died in accidents, but this was more than an accident, the endpoint of her "natural" trajectory, an accelerated aging process, a wasting away, and as such not really different in essence from the one we're all going to have to face eventually. This was the first "mature death" of a contemporary I've experienced, and it's very sad.

Outside of this human context though, this is another one of those "how did this madness ever take hold?" moments to set beside the reaction to the Murdoch defrocking. Amid all the ill-judged appraisals from online hacks desperately scratching around for something positive to say about the actual music, there's a sense of collective embarrassment that we ever allowed what was essentially a pop-cabaret one-hit-wonder to become an international superstar and sometime figurehead for an entire culture.

Amy Winehouse released one good single in 2006, a song whose extreme formal conservatism was redeemed by a campy yet catchy and ingenious lyrical conceit. This is, quite literally, all she ever did of any worth, as far as I can make out.

The rest of what happened was essentially a meta-narrative that perfectly encapsulates the cultural nadir that was the mid-to-late noughties: consumer hedonism, etiolated post-feminism, unapologetic retrophilia of a scarcely believable magnitude, celebrity culture, an alternately tragic/fairytale myth of individualism, vast shallowness on an epic scale. It's some source of comfort to me that these things don't seem quite as hegemonic now as they did back then. Wait a minute, did someone say "Adele"?

ENDGAME FOR A COUNTER CULTURE, FINAL FRAGMENT

2011-07-20T15:55:00.054+01:00

Trees die and the dream remains

“… and then the tears brast out of his eyen …”, Malory, La Morte D’Arthur, Book XX.

“Amazing. Amazing. Really great stuff lads. But I’m not sure I quite understand the verse”.

The rehearsal is going terribly. The new tune we’re working on – our prospective next single – started life as a brilliant computer demo, but it’s now been reworked and mangled beyond all recognition, cramped with far too many indulgent ideas. Warring factions in the band tugged the tune in conflicting directions before we’d even got a performable version up and running (Me: “It sounds like a Michael Jackson pastiche for an American Apparel marketing campaign”; bassist Geoffrey: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”). After several tinnitus-inducing days of practice, we manage to jam something moderately fluid and cohesive into shape. But now the major label A&R who’s funding the single and the producer who's lined up to oversee the sessions have arrived to tell us what they think.

“Don’t get me wrong. I think I know what you mean in the verse. I’m just not sure other people will”, says Producer.

“What do you mean you don’t know what we mean? And which other people anyway?”

“Look,” pipes up our Manager, also in attendance. “We want something that’s going to create a real impact. The Zane Lowe people said the last single was ‘too frenetic’. They didn’t get it. So right now we really need something big-sounding. Something punchy. The chorus in this tune is fucking great, the best thing you’ve ever done. But perhaps the verse is a bit high-pitched and … wayward, if that’s the word?”

It’s supposed to be wayward, I think to myself. That’s where we come from: beside the way.

“Hmm,” says A&R guy, who is very young and frankly a bit slow and dim-witted. Someone told us that in the industry he’s known as Quietly Confident Joe, but to be honest, I think the industry has mistaken naivety and cluelessness for quiet confidence in this case. “It is a bit wayward,” says Joe, dimly. “The chorus is great, but can you rewrite the verse?”

Lead-singer Danny looks crestfallen. For all that I think he’s brought this on himself by tirelessly chasing after the music biz seal of approval from day one, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s being pulled so many different ways, with the result that there’s increasingly very little of him left. Because the whole venture has always been predicated on getting signed and pleasing the industry Big Other, he’s steadily lost his means of self-identification, and at the same time, most of his self-esteem.

“You can rewrite the verse, can’t you Danny?”

“Yeah okay. I’ll see what I can do over the next couple of days.”

***

In the summer that follows everything accelerates to the point that some sort of implosion becomes inevitable. The Zane Lowe people belatedly “get it”, and Zane himself begins to ladle on us the sort of manic, superbowl-announcer hype that is his stock in trade. From this point on a major deal is basically a formality. Even in a period of downturn for the industry, if you’re a half-interesting British band and you have a manager with a track record and the backing of the nation’s foremost radio DJ, sooner or later one of the big guns is going to have a punt. And when this happens, because A&Rs are precisely as lazy and sheep-like as the schoolbooks say, it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for the bids to come in. Once someone gets it – it seems – so does everybody else, with miraculous simultaneity.

So, as Manager keeps reminding us, after breaking through to radio and MTV2 territory, we hold all the cards. All we have to do is play the game wisely, put our feet right through festival season and we’ll have finally made it to “base camp” (OED: Base Camp, colloq. mus. ind. b/s, the record deal; the light at the end of the tunnel; a pot of gold used to lure gullible young musicians; the point at which all artistic and ethical compromises made in the run up to being signed magically vanish and a band is allowed to do what it wants with impunity).

But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this is not a game I have any interest in playing. For a long time I tried to justify being a part of what was obviously a thoroughly moribund indie scene by regarding it all as a sort of heroic challenge. We could, I thought, with a minimum of effort, be the most daring, articulate, politically engaged, vociferous band of the last 20 years, and upend the whole rotten musical landscape at the same time as we won people’s hearts with subversion, modernistic flair and dizzyingly eclectic pop skills. This might sound like blind idealism, but my theory was that not only would this have been the right thing to do, it would also have been successful. People are crying out for something radical and uncompromising. All we had to do, I thought, was have the courage to resist certain temptations, resist going down the obvious mainstream paths, try to create a way of existing outside a doomed music industry that seemed like it was in its death throes. We could have been the first band of a brave new epoch instead of the last one of an era of gentrified Glastonburys and wearisome corporate awards ceremonies, a band that survived in the long-term on the margins instead of in the short-term at the centre of an ephemeral middle-class leisure industry. But over time I’ve realised that no one else really feels this way. To put it baldly: Danny, the lead singer, in the grand tradition of lead singers across the ages, sees the band as his big chance to put his ego into the stratosphere; Geoffrey, the bassist, wants to be an indie pop star; and Jimmy, the drummer, just wants a steady, respectable job.

Faced with this disconnect with the other band members, for a while I took refuge in a sort of romantic formalism. I posted an article on our myspace blog called “Why We Write Pop Songs”, in which I tried to pretend that the music was all that mattered, man, and that the outside world couldn’t harm us so long as we focused on the magic of sound alone:

When you strip away from pop music all the politics, the celebrity, the money, and the hyperbole, you are left with a series of magical moments of pure form, moments that ultimately resist analysis, and that have the potential to completely transform your life and make you feel like the world has been created all over again when you hear them.

…

Pop music is not about fashion, or commercial compromise, the egotism of individuals or the surface world of urbane media types – it is about trying to salvage tiny transcendent spaces of beauty and meaning in a world that tries with all its might to impose upon us the fallacy that life is just so much shallow, meaningless, pleasure-seeking selfishness. We write pop songs because we think that creating those life-transforming musical moments when the sun appears to shine in the bedroom is one of the most hopeful, radical things a human being can do.

For all the truth in this, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut out the peripheral stuff: the money and the hyperbole, the cultural context, the “surface world of urbane media types”. Of course I went into the whole adventure knowing that compromises along the way were inevitable, that not everyone is as left-wing or idealistic as I am, that being professional and pragmatic has its own kind of nobility, that funny little plans never work quite right. I knew the music scene in the UK was in the middle of some sort of epochal nadir and that we would face an uphill struggle trying to do something worthwhile. I knew alternative music wasn’t quite what it was when we first came to know it as teenagers, when there was still something faintly meaningful in the notion of a counter culture, when John Peel was still alive, and hip-hop and dance music thrived in underground national networks, and the NME was still worth reading in parts.

I knew things had become pretty bad. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer extremity of the situation. Gradually a vast, tragic realisation has dawned, and it has hit me like a death. Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to see that the remains of the counter culture – “indie music” in this case – now stand in complete antithesis to any original counter-cultural ethos. Not only that, but the simulacrum that now passes for alternative music is actually obviating the possibility of any new aberrant or oppositional culture developing. In short, being in a guitar band in the early-twenty-first century, I am not just a hamstrung, compromised part of the solution: I'm an integral part of the problem. I can see the way things are going. We’re becoming just another mildly prog-ish guitar band sustained by media hype and PR bullshit, the kind of Serious Artistic Proposition that gratifies the music industy’s vanity and enables it to pretend that something new is happening, while the really new development, the real democratic upsurge, is left to fall by the wayside. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted.

And yet even having finally reached this conclusion, despite all this I think I could still carry on battling if it was part of a team that at least vaguely agreed in the necessity of some sort of fight. I’ve known Danny and Jimmy since we were kids in the same remote part of Northumberland. We’ve shaped each other’s lives: shared musical tastes, first-time drugs experiences, got beaten up at school because of having long hair. My parents died when I was in my early twenties, and Danny and Jimmy were at both funerals. Surely that’s got to count for something? Surely some kind of family-feeling, some unshakeable spirit of fellowship can be the common purpose that binds us together, even if we have slightly different views about some things? Wouldn’t a sense of shared history and separateness be enough to see us through?

It would’ve been enough for me, but in the end the forces of self-interest and the machinations of capitalist realism manage to take even this away from us. Toward the end of the summer, we’re playing one of my tunes in rehearsal when drummer Jimmy, who rarely offers his opinion on anything, says that he doesn’t think it’s worth bothering with the tune.

“It’s not that I don’t think it’s good. It’s great. I just don’t think it fits into the set.”

“What ‘set’?" I say. "We decide the set. And anyway, our gigs are absurdly eclectic as it is. What the hell is all this for if we’re not able to do what we like?”

“We can’t really do what we like though, can we?” chips in bassist Geoffrey. “We should be doing whatever is expected of us.”

“Are you joking? What the fuck? What who expects of us?”

“I just don’t think we can take any risks with the set bearing in mind that we’re not signed yet”, says Jimmy, and I can feel tears welling in my eyes. People talk about negative solidarity, but this is something else: outside of people dying, the worst single moment of my life. How has our whole identity, our grounding in friendship, our shared past come to count for so little against impressing some imaginary industry figure? How has one of my best friends, someone from the same part of the country, the same school, the same lonely fucking village as me, come to put short-term professional gain before loyalty and a basic belief in ourselves as a unit? How have they managed this?

***

We always should have been a Newcastle band, so it’s appropriate that it should all end there. The morning after a surprisingly good gig at the Ouseburn, with lots of our friends from the north-east in attendance, the three of us – Danny, Jimmy, me – are sitting in the Centurion Bar at Newcastle Central Station. Geoffrey isn’t here because I didn’t invite him. He was from a different world, never really a part of the band I started and named with my best friends in the worst period of my life.

It's the first day of September. The three of us are sitting sipping on cokes underneath the vaulted Victorian ceiling, a grand multi-coloured mosaic that reflects in winks and glimmers the rays of late-morning light coming in from the vast open station.

“So why did you invite us here Al?”

I start to read out loud from a single piece of A4 paper. I didn’t think I could do this without some kind of script, idiot that I am. I’d like to leave the band, and I’d like you to respect this as my absolute and final decision …

When I’m finished reading there’s really not much more to say. Jimmy pats me on the leg and says something feeble that makes me think how perfunctory and business-like he’s become about everything over the last few months. Danny isn’t saying anything. I need to catch my train back down to Oxford and my girlfriend, so I say my final goodbyes and head out to the platform.

Before I’ve gotten too far Danny comes running after me. He’s weeping and he buries his head in my shoulder.

“I’m so sorry Al”.

“It’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about”.

“I love you”.

“I love you too”.

I shouldn’t have been so forgiving. Actually, there's a world of things for him to be sorry about. But then it’s probably right that, as the whole thing concludes in any meaningful sense, there should be one last, inviolate statement of loyalty, something of the original dream to hang on to in the months and years to come.

Endgame fragment 1.
Endgame fragment 2.

SHOUTING FROM THE HIP

2011-07-18T16:11:00.001+01:00

As an addendum of sorts to the above post and comments, here's the first NME I ever bought (actually my dad bought it for me - he was a reader back in the '60s/'70s, which I guess is a revealing context in itself):

Telling eh? This is from summer 1996 and you can see that there's an epochal tug of war going on here: "Noel on the new Oasis album" and "Lager! Lager! Lager!" vs. Public Enemy, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Radiohead, the actual leftfield music of Underworld etc (though what Simply Red is doing there is anyone's guess).

The contrast with the 2009 cover speaks for itself, but around that time I actually counted the number of words and it was literally half the amount of a mid-nineties edition.

Have finally got around to reading Owen's Pulp book and he highlights another interesting stage in this narrative:

... in the early 2000s, the NME made a swerve into coverage of electronic music, R&B and hip-hop, but covers for Aphex Twin, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Destiny's Child and Missy Elliott did not go down well with readers; as is well known, the NME's circulation has always plummeted when a black artist is on the cover.

Wayne, I can remember we were talking about this "turn-of-the-century moment" a while back weren't we? I really need to get back to writing for the decade blogs innit so maybe this would be a good place to start ...

THE NEWCASTLE UNITED SUPPORTERS TRUST

2011-07-17T16:47:00.000+01:00

has a new blog.

All ye supporters of fan ownership (which should be everyone) should check it out.

2011-07-11T22:21:00.015+01:00

I’m sitting in Bryant Park, which is both the best and the worst of New York. And what do I, a young man, think of the world today? Light sits in pearls on the trees and the green has grown lushly since the spring when I was last here, and there is a fountain and I decide that everything is well or adequate, as in I don’t feel that I am inadequate, and I think that really loving the world is so rare isn’t it, so many reasons not to, but I do now, I know it in a warm rush. English office girls eat yoghurt and falafel salad out of tupperware boxes because America and England are the same place now really. “It's great this heat you feel like you’ve had a much harder workout.” And what sort of caste are they, is it Ancient Rome or yes more like nineteenth century Britain like Henry James or an Impressionist painting full of ladies in white and beautiful shapes elegant long legs so much power and control. That’s what I’ve thought about this year, about power and how simple it is really, you grow up and you learn to hate power and if you’re good you learn how to say this in the right way. It’s like Basil said to Tom: “do not let it embitter you”. But these girls, oh calls for sympathy from on high, they are okay really and one is going home to see her boyfriend, “3 out of 5 days with his family”, and I know that can be tough. What do they do every day? I suppose if they’re happy I should be too because if there’s one thing I do it’s try hard even if not in that sort of way. And really I don’t know how all of this America can carry on it feels ready to burst and you look in people’s eyes and it’s like they know it, everyone knows they’ve gone way beyond and gotten way more than they ever should or else it’s one of those broken faces so sad, if it takes my whole life I want to see fire back in those faces, I know it will happen one day. On that note all these buildings look ready to topple, they’re sort of proud but self-mocking, they know they’re temporary not like a cathedral or Le Corbusier's UN building which I love and which sits apart in gleaming turquoise majesty on the edge of Manhattan now the scaffolding has come down, and this has taught me about the European side to my soul which was one reason for coming out here in the first place, this sense of contrast. So lucky to be able to come here, but it’s such a weird one isn’t it, I’m outside the normal run of career etc this is something I’ve tried to do in a productive way, and I'm here with my girlfriend who is a scientist doing worthwhile research with state funding I think, though I suppose I am guilty regardless. Guilt is good it makes you try to be kind, if everyone was a little guiltier we wouldn’t be in such a mess. But then I’m eating a falafel and salad in pitta for lunch and I worry that feeling happier puts you back into a cycle of condoning all the pernicious stuff, like when you say fuck it and buy an expensive shirt and feel really good about it, it has a magic which is the glisten of power ultimately, to come back to that point, you accept the force of this power and it lifts you momentarily into the clouds. This is at the route of it all isn’t it, this religious joy in things and money and self and like DFW says this is one very good reason for actual religion, and I don’t know where I’m at on that count. I went to a Catholic church a few weeks ago and loved the singing and the fact that it was in Latin but then the sermon was boring and of course there’s the question of authority, which I’m not opposed to per se, but this was the wrong kind of authority, like in the film of The Da Vinci Code which I checked out because Zizek liked it and agreed with him that it was good, though maybe this was down to feebleness of mind just accepting his judgement. No, I’m not like that. It is the Sacred Feminine principle I think however, because I found myself saying the Hail Mary one night before I went to sleep and it felt right somehow, the feeling of God as a mother, which is how I felt about the Duomo in Florence because medieval cathedrals and maybe all cathedrals for that matter are supposed to be Mary the mother, and I felt this very powerfully, that it, the Duomo, was looking after me somehow in that very specific time of need. So I think religion has to come back into the equation in some form or we’re all buggered, I don’t understand the atheists they’re like adolescents who haven’t gone beyond the buzz of taking the piss out of holy cows or their teachers or whatever. Lots of people use “paternalism” like it’s assumed everyone knows it’s a dirty word, but to me because I don’t have any parents any more it speaks of nurturing and warmth, so I think paternalism is part of it too though of course not in a conservative or fascistic way. The family could be a model for a better society instead of an alternative to it, which both I suppose a certain kind of Communist and Margaret Thatcher would agree on, but I think it would be the wrong kind of Communism or Socialism that ignored this. And oh God it does feel like all the madness of that women might finally be departing after thirty years, like the death of the White Witch in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, because if there’s one thing this Murdoch scandal shows it’s that things do change and Empires crumble and it's like I’ve always thought, except for in my darkest moments, that you have to at least hope things can change for the better to even really be a proper person. And as I somehow sit in this beautiful park in New York this in the end is what I think about the world as a young man, that all those terrible powerful people might just if we can believe it fall into the dust, that we might finally be able to say their names out loud and absorb justice and the possibility of change into our bloodstream, even if fucking utopia or call it what you will can of course never quite arrive, and then we can pass this blood on to our children who aren’t even born yet, and we can survive for longer and in greater numbers, and dream richer, more hope-skeined dreams.

"THE YEAR OF THE INDIE"

2011-07-04T10:10:00.003+01:00

After the Miliband Loop, here's some more scarcely believable media surrealism.

The "Association of Independent Music" announces a "new" alternative awards ceremony: the AIM Independents Day.

The event, held in Soho, central London, will include awards ranging from international achievement of the year to best difficult second album and the Golden Welly for the best independent festival.

This is not a leg-pull, I assure you ...

With Adele, on independent label XL dominating the charts and airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic, dance label Ministry of Sound having a run of success with singles such as Example's Changed The Way You Kiss, which beat Coldplay to No 1 last month, and Arctic Monkeys' fourth album, Suck It And See, on Domino making it to No 1, champions of the sector are heralding 2011 as "the year of the indie".

All hail the return of counter-cultural subversion!

"Independent music-makers have been overshadowed in the last 10 years by the relentless X-Factor phenomenon and vast marketing campaigns," said Wenham ["CEO" of the events]. "The independent sector, by contrast, has never regulated its genres and creates a real mix driven solely by a passion for music."

Other awards categories include:

Independent entrepreneur of the year
For someone approaching the market in a smart and forward-thinking way

Innovative marketing campaign of the year
Recognising the year's best independent marketing campaign

Independent breakthrough of the year
For the artist who created serious waves in 2011

Indie champion award
For an individual who demonstrates unwavering support for the independent community and voted for by Aim members

Lest you think that the Guardian article announcing this is just another puff piece written by a lobotomised hack in thrall to music industry PR, bear in mind that there is actually some real news here:

Ben Watt, founder of small dance label Buzzin' Fly and half of Everything but the Girl, said the release of Tracey Thorn's latest album, Love and Its Opposite, on the label's sister imprint Strange Feeling, was a textbook example of what could now be achieved by an indie in the new world. "Tracey reached her fans easily and directly with cheap nimble marketing that maximised social networking, and we made decent money for her and for the label," he said.

Yes, that's front page Guardian website news, disinterested reportage of a worthwhile cultural initiative that puts the focus back on "passion" and away from "sales". This is a really new, really comment-worthy development.

Even though the severely self-interested, money-oriented AIM Independents Day has been taking place since 2009.

DEAD ED

2011-07-01T15:03:00.004+01:00

The most depressing thing about this is that it was so unnecessary. He could easily have come out cautiously in favour of the strike, and suffered only mild flak from the right-wing press. He could have prepared the ground for a gradual reconstruction of pragmatic Labour populism. Not only would this have been the right thing to do, it would also have been successful.

Sometime soon, somebody will have the guts to do this. But, in a quick flash of cowardice and sheer mundane stupidity, Ed is finished.

I say this with absolutely no relish, though with some hope that his successor will learn from the monumental lack of character, principle, and imagination displayed here.

MORE VOCAB

2011-06-26T11:26:00.001+01:00

As a follow-up to the post on the obsolescence of "yuppy" (and as christening of sorts for the reinstated comments feature here) can anyone think of any more tellingly dated words or phrases?

Wayne glances at agnostic in an excellent recent post.

I've got an even more basic, banal one: vain.

Nobody is "vain" anymore because everybody is.

POP UTOPIA #2742

2011-06-25T09:54:00.002+01:00

POP DYSTOPIA #338

2011-06-24T09:59:00.001+01:00

VOCAB THOUGHT

2011-06-13T13:21:00.001+01:00

When was the last time you heard the word "yuppy"? Ages ago, wasn't it?

It seems that everyone is now a yuppy, and the concept has been normalised. Hence there is no need for the word itself.

Am I a yuppy? I regret to say that I am, more or less, not by dint of choice, but because it's very difficult on a practical level to go through life avoiding yuppy cultural touchstones.

If you want to make phone calls you pretty much have to have an egregiously shiny new mobile phone.

If you want to get a cheap lunch/coffee/tea on the go, you pretty much have to go to Starbucks/Caffe Nero/Subway/pretentious sandwich outlet.

If you want to buy cheap, comfortable clothes you pretty much have to get them from Topshop/Gap/H&M.

If you want to get pissed, you pretty much have to go to a pub/bar/cocktail "lounge" that looks like a brothel done up by the Changing Rooms team in the mid-nineties.

If you want to have a cheap holiday you're looking at a "cultural" weekend away in a European capital.

If you want to read a classic novel you have to put up with cover art that looks like a soiled copy of Cosmopolitan from circa 1989.

If you want to make friends you join a gym, a dating agency, exercise class, or make do with work networks.

If you want to see live music you have to do it at a venue whose raison d'être is its sponsorship by a major lager manufacturer, or at a festival where people drink Pimms and Cava and wear fashionable high street clothing.

If you want to keep tabs on culture and in contact with all the people you care about, you have to spend inordinate amounts of time on your own, with a laptop, indulging in adrenalinized, rhizomatic activity that is the final apotheosis of yuppy work culture.

TENNYSON'S FANTASTIC HOPE

2011-06-07T00:01:00.004+01:00

I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to the mid-late Victorian period: Ruskin, Dickens, Tennyson, Morris. Perhaps this is because, in so many ways, this is the culture we're being returned to, one of unchecked, unopposed liberal materialism, one in which reform will have to start from the bottom-up, with a blind, "sentimental" leap of hope.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
      Will be the final goal of ill,
      To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
      That not one life shall be destroy'd,
      Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
      That not a moth with vain desire
      Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
      I can but trust that good shall fall
      At last - far off - at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream, but what am I?
      An infant crying in the night:
      An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

(In Memoriam, LIV)

NEW WAVE

2011-06-06T09:33:00.001+01:00

The first issue of a new experimental webjournal run by a couple of pals of mine is out. Called Wave Composition, it features a pretty remarkable array of stuff - poetry, essays, interviews, translations - all undergirded by a commitment to reviving some sort of basic avant-garde tradition in Anglo-(Franco?)-American letters. Especially intriguing is the Christian Bök interview, with its discussion of his crrrrazzy Xenotext project, and China Mieville's remarks about forging a "counter-tradition".

Creative contributions are welcome so get in touch with the editors via the email address on the site.

My own contribution to the first issue was a soi-disant "Retroactive Manifesto for Pop". It's a pretty experimental piece of writing in itself so tread carefully. But hopefully the main point comes across: pop music was/is part of something much bigger and more important than is often acknowledged, something in dire need of structural, collective renewal.

Btw, I know I said I wasn't going to mention this again, but it was entirely written prior to reading Simon's book. The "retroactive" tag (and the layout and tone more generally) is a blatant steal from Rem Koolhaas's book about New York architecture.

J-LO AND NON-DRUMS

2011-06-03T16:32:00.001+01:00

The new J-Lo single is a classic example of a burgeoning trend: the use of non-drums in pop.

Just listen to those ultra-processed, etiolated snares. What is their function? They don't facilitate dancing. They're not really anchoring down a groove or demarcating a rhythmic structure. They're too high-pitched and insubstantial for that.

They sound like that noise you make when you put your tongue on the roof of your mouth and make a "clicking" sound by blowing through your front teeth, a sort of "bubbling" effect (though the actual sound is not as poetic as this description would suggest).

I suspect it has something to do with contemporary listening habits. Do snares of this pitch-shifted frequency sound better on mobile-phones/laptops, that is, devices without much low-end?

This isn't a rant. I'm genuinely bemused/fascinated. Answers on a postcard to the email address on the right. If you can be bothered.

"I AM A FIERCE ADVOCATE OF FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM, AND YET ..."

2011-06-02T00:01:00.003+01:00

Check out this intriguing neocon companion piece to the Retromania debate (last time I mention this, I promise). Thanks to Steve Ross for the link.

WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS

2011-06-01T00:01:00.016+01:00

Feeling a wave of poptimism at the moment (probably as a reaction to the Retromania kerfuffle - see below). Getting a bit obsessed with Nicki Minaj, for instance.

Also reading some philosophy of music stuff, and having ambivalent thoughts about it.

Take Peter Kivy's Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Words and Music (2009). This is a book that deploys an infuriatingly fustian prose-style, a classic case of the analytic philosophy text that tries to be chatty and everyday and to avoid theoretical "pretention", "imprecision", and "verbosity", but ends up being utterly pretentious, imprecise, and verbose with its fussy bourgeois patois and interminable Ivy League circumlocutions. (Is it Marcuse who talks about the fact that analytic philosophers often "define their terms" in an arcane public school dialect that is anything but "pragmatic" and "neutral"?)

The content of Anithetical Arts is also DEAD annoying. “I am an inveterate, entirely unrepentant believer in the good old romantic concept of genius, and in the doctrine of progress that it supports", says Kivy, not very winningly. The entire book is a defence of the old notion of "absolute music" - an extreme formalist position which holds that, effectively, context is irrelevant; works should be denuded of their social-historical dimensions and studied as pure artifice (and even then, so the argument goes, music is such an abstruse phenomenon that it's probably ultimately un-analysable).

Of course this is classic Romantic-conservative crap, which moreover begs the obvious question: how have you managed to become a distinguished and (probably) wealthy professor of philosophy of music if you don't think it's possible to analyse music?

So that was that. But then I heard this again:

And I was reminded of this:

“… absolute music does have the effect that it does, of character-uplifting, consciousness-expanding … and to that extent, it can, as well, be described as morally uplifting. There is no evidence that this ecstatic, character-uplifting experience has any lasting effect at all on moral behavior or moral character in the long haul. Nor is it some mysterious, Orphic or Pythagorean quality that music alone possesses. (It is not the harmony of the spheres.) But never mind all of that. Music does possess it. And while you are experiencing its effect, you are the better for it, and so is the world. So we should forget about what absolute music can’t be and cannot do, and thank God, or evolution for what it can.” (Antithetical Arts, p. 232)

And I found myself agreeing with Kivy.

Momentarily.

OPENINGS

2011-05-31T10:33:00.008+01:00

The latest edition of The Oxonian Review is a minor coup for the left-blogosphere, with reviews of 3 Zero books (one by Laurie Penny of Penny Red, one by Ivor Southwood of Screened Out, and one by Evan Calder Williams of Socialism and/or Barbarism), a review of Simon's Retromania by Adam Harper of Rouge's Foam, and a longish interview with Simon by me. Phew, talk about pulling people together towards a hub. That is some crazy linkage! Have I missed anything out? Oh, the Southwood review is by the splendid Tom May of Where Shingle Meets Raincoat and A Window on the World fame (his piece perhaps the most interesting of the lot).

Anyway, please check out some or all of the above if you can.

Obviously this is a review publication, so while I would have liked everyone to be wildly enthusiastic in the service of a good cause, the requirements of critical objectivity (combined, perhaps, with the sort of ego-value in criticising other people that Simon talks about in the interview) meant that some of the reviewers came down quite heavily on their subjects.

I thought Adam's critique of Retromania was half-fair. There is definitely an air of nostalgia and world-weariness about the whole thing, and Simon's commodity fetishism is sometimes difficult to explain away (I had to do a double-take when he said "I'm not a dissatisfied consumer" in the interview).

However, I'm not sure the accusation about "reactionary overreaction" quite sticks. The argument that goes something like "older people will inevitably be more pessimistic about things, and therefore their views should be discredited" can easily be turned on its head to discredit the optimism of younger people on similar grounds. Sure, there's a vague feeling of fogeyism about Simon's fear of technologically-induced "franticity", but his critique also comes with a wisdom and a wide-angle perspective that gives it perspicuity.

Moreover, I'm only 27 and I pretty much agree with the diagnosis of Retromania. It goes without saying that bemoaning the way things are isn't necessarily reactionary. In fact, of course, negative thinking is an essential constituent part of any radical political programme. Conversely, the default assumption that "progress is always taking place somewhere" is one of the defining tenets of market liberalism, the "whiggish view of history", if you like. Optimism is all very well, but isn't it the case that, without substantive political and economic reform, an increasingly atomised society will continue to prevent people from making any genuine collective steps forward, while the culture industry continues to repackage the fragments of a just-obsolescent past as the "latest thing", thus depriving people of a wider historical sense and a shared identity?

I guess I'm just saying, very simply, that these things are structural and political, and trying to posit some heroic micro instance of continuing innovation is beside the point. The point Retromania makes quite powerfully, I think, is that our ability to evolve collectively through an avant-garde music culture is severely hampered right now. Simon's book isn't a conservative jeremiad; it's a call to arms.

WILD BEASTS, BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE, AND ALL THAT DREAMING

2011-05-30T10:34:00.001+01:00

I've been listening to a lot of Wild Beasts lately. Partly this is because they have a new album out. But also it's a result of reading Carl's post about them a couple of months ago, which compelled me to download the first album (which is clearly better than the second as Carl points out, and probably also the third, though Lion's Share and Albatross are both true belters I think).

The whole thing underlined to me the importance of having a good taste arbiter, someone whose opinion you broadly trust, someone you will listen to and take seriously when they offer a passionate defence of an artist, tune, album, book, or whatever. This isn't a subjective impulse, I don't think, though it might seem so because it appears to rule out the possibility of an "objective standard" for aesthetic appreciation. Rather, when the objective standard is regulated by the market (via organs like NME, Zane Lowe, the Mercury Prize judges, even Pitchfork) you begin to lose faith in it, and finding alternative ways of measuring value becomes vitally imperative. You have to find something else to invest belief in. Even if you should always bring reserves of critical judgment along with you, you have to make this initial leap of faith, finding a person - or, even better, a group - to give a kind of spiritual grounding to the formulation of opinion.

There's a line from a John Donne poem that I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with:

Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right;
By these we reach divinity.

I think this is what we're all looking for when we respond to a work of art - this combination of reasoning (which confirms our sense of self) and faith in someone else's ulterior perspective (which allows us to be transformed into something bigger and better than we were previously).

When I listen to Wild Beasts, I appreciate it because it's the kind of music I like (melodic but aberrantly so, hinterland surrealism with an experimental edge and some fiendishly clever lyrics). But then I first heard Wild Beasts three or four years ago, and was relatively non-plussed; they seemed nothing more than an above-average guitar band. I required something else to elevate a basic rational response (a sense that this band ticks my personal taste boxes) into a full-on appreciation, which ultimately has to incorporate an element of passion and belief, and which I found in Carl's impassioned (yet reasonable and carefully articulated) endorsement of the band. I used to experience this sort of transformative process fairly regularly, through the music press and John Peel, and I can't tell you how much it devastated me when these resources were removed from view in the last decade. So I suppose what I'm saying, in sum, is that it feels good to find something to believe in again. Sometimes I think the return of this very modest form of empowerment - this simple reinstatement of belief in other people - is what will save us all.

...

Does anyone else have any endorsements like Carl's of Wild Beasts?

One I'd like to offer is of a short-lived band from 2007-8 called British Expeditionary Force. This was a kind of collaborative side-project consisting of Justin Lockey (from Your Code Name Is: Milo) and Aid Burrows (from My Architects), two relatively small-scale indie outfits, both now defunct.

BEF only released one rather short album as far as I know, and having lost my CD copy, I can't find it on any torrent sites. There aren't any videos online to speak of, but thankfully the album is on Spotify, so I'd recommend going there if you're interested, or even (sharp intake of breath), actually buying the thing if you have a spare penny or two. There may be some stuff on the myspace page.

Anyway, the two tunes I feel really passionate about are Back of Your Hand and All Those Demons. As with Carl on Wild Beasts, I think partly I'm getting off on the North Country vibe: Burrows is from Warrington and Lockey from Doncaster/Newcastle, and it shows. Lockey's soundscapes are clearly indebted to Scandinavian post-rock (Mum and, especially, Efterklang), which I think is quite a Northern thing - looking across the North Sea and Atlantic instead of southwards to London. If the post-rock aspect sounds a tad dated at this particular moment in time, I think this is partly something that will remedied with a few more years of distance, and something that an intelligent man or woman will be able to "listen around".

So Lockey's production is unmistakably Northern, and so too are Burrows's vocal lines, which recall Ian Brown at his warm, nuanced best. Both All Those Demons and Back of Your Hand are sublime vocal performances. All Those Demons is a song of profound melancholy and resignation:

It's better the devil you know than all those demons
It's the devil who told you
It's better the life you know than all that dreaming
For one that you don't

While Back of Your Hand is more straightforwardly elegiac:

Someone new knows the fields I knew like the back of their hand.
Someone new knows the fields I knew like the back of their hand.
Seen through what was my window to the tarmac carpark below
On the sign was wrote out: no children allowed ...

Stuff like this moves me in a way that is beyond my powers of description to express. Listening to BEF, all the sadness and regret of my youth goes streaming through my head. I think of the deserted Pennines, and people struggling to get by and to be listened to. I think of failed dreams and people I no longer know, people that have died, musicians who should have been given the chance to flourish but instead came to abandon "all that dreaming". I think of an old, Northern kind of warmth that is the only variety of "Englishness" that I have any time for whatsoever.

Sorry, but I can't really say much more than that. You'll just have to believe me innit! Listen to British Expeditionary Force, and see if you can be transformed just a little bit.

POP UTOPIA #948

2011-05-29T10:43:00.012+01:00

This shit is pretty old I know, but the de-fanged version (sans Biggie lyrics - called "Symphonies") is currently audible on a noxious advert for a multinational that I won't dignify with a mention, and this reminded me that I had some stuff to say about it.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much attention it got at the time (2008-9?), but it is a truly inspirational piece of music, and here's why ...

Firstly, let's get the negatives out of the way. Dan Black looks like a total cock: an American Apparel model with an unfortunate fetish for those RIDICULOUS scarves that blighted the West in the mid-to-late noughties, and which now, thankfully, seem to have passed into obsolescence. Symphonies itself - his rewrite after Biggie's estate denied him permission to use the lyrics from Hypnotize - is an utterly risible tune, a purgation of everything great in Hypntz, and an obvious stab at "breaking" Black as a mainstream popstar. Every other tune I can find on the net by Black is diabolical. Just looking at his lightly-ironic-hipsterly-contorted face makes me want to vomit.

But, in Hypntz, he (or whoever produced it) stumbled on something extraordinary.

The accidental is integral to the pop art form as a whole. The pop song is the ultimate artistic expression of democracy and (true) populism because it is always at its best an affirmation of arbitrariness. It offers a suggestion that, potentially, anyone can attain to power. This is why the best pop songs - She Loves You, Wuthering Heights, Teenage Kicks, Express Yourself, Don't You Want Me - have a palpable feeling of heroic accident, of a beleaguered person or people somehow lighting on a magic formula.

Hypntz achieves its magic formula in a manner that is both arbitrary and obvious, which is a part of its brilliance. The Umbrella break + Starman soundtrack + a beautiful melodic rendering of a gangsta rap staple: we know exactly what has been done here, and this is why it sounds so good. It makes us think that we should be doing this too, that we should be participating, creating new syntheses with the aid of technology and the internet, appropriating anything to hand as we look for a new praxis.

Along with this radical democratic aspect, the hopeful quality of Hypntz comes from the fact that it demonstrates how a number of awful cliched elements (schmaltzy Hollywood soundtrack, gangsta misogyny, Shoreditch hipster archness) can be set off against each other to produce a transcendent negative version of the way things are. "Biggie, Biggie can't you see?": is it just me or is this line loaded with pathos because it seems to be saying: "Biggie, what if your verbal and rhythmic genius had been used to aggrandize something more than the thug aesthetic?" The lyrical peak of the track comes around 2:05:

At last, someone rapping 'bout guns and broads
Tits and bras, menage a trois, sex, and expensive cars ...

Isn't this such a clinical and extreme reduction of neolib culture that it almost buries it? Consumerism is emphatically linked to violence and misogyny, so nakedly and absolutely that we are compelled to try to think beyond it (see Destinys Child's Independet Woman Pt.1 for another instance of this sort of blatant exposure of radical individualism). The ugliest of of ugly sentiments is disarmed by humour and formal flair, and somehow comes to sound like an emancipatory exclamation (At last ...)

Dan Black's tune - probably unwittingly - brings this utopian potential out. Through its bizarre juxtapositions it tempers hubris with melancholy, and exchanges dystopian cynicism for romantic idealism. It has a sense of imploration about it, a sense of straining for something above and beyond existing materials. It is, like all the best pop tunes, the result of an idiot in the gutter juggling with rubbish and somehow managing to point the way to the stars.

MY LASS

2011-05-21T00:01:00.005+01:00

Birds giggle you
and fluttering chatter of
your feathers ruffles
muscles and ghosts my
heart up through the
shivering cup of the sky.

SORRY TO SOUND LIKE DERRI-FUCKING-DA, BUT ...

2011-05-20T09:14:00.007+01:00

With the Retromania bomb about to drop, Simon Reynolds gestures at Borges as a prophet of "excess all areas" culture.

My own high-cultural penny'orth, however, is Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

Famously, this is sorta bullshit. Try to parse these lines, and you quickly lose any thread of meaning you might think you pick up on. But that phrase: If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable - that resonates doesn't it?

Moving quickly into the realms of massive theologico-cultural conjecture, the whole retromanic thing seems to me to have something to with the occlusion of death in a modern technocratic society. Death has replaced sex as the great taboo. We just don't know what to do with death - the one thing a culture of pluralism and excess cannot find a space for: the absoluteness of an ending. Hence, things that are obsolete become weirdly fetishized. The sobering fact that the past is absolutely no more is replaced with a sort of adolescent inability to let go of childhood toys and move on.

I think if there's meaning in Eliot's Burnt Norton it's this - this basic religious sense that we only properly exist when we let go of the past and treat the extraordinary, tragic reality of dying as a means of defining what life is. That is what he means by "redemption".

I think.

GRANT'S LAST TAPE

2011-05-14T10:02:00.001+01:00

Grant Edgeworth promises to put late-nineties tape culture through the tumble-dryer over at a tremendous new blog with a splendid name:

King Sonic Low Noise

LEAVING THE MOON

2011-05-10T00:01:00.008+01:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://theterrestrials.bandcamp.com/track/leaving-the-moon"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Leaving the Moon by The Terrestrials&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
A sort of poem-tune by me. I do love Bandcamp. It beats me why the record industry still wields such monolithic power when resources like this exist.

ROYAL WEDDING IN NEWCASTLE

2011-05-09T00:01:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Paul McGuire for this.

THE DON

2011-05-08T15:26:00.000+01:00

"Already in the 1930s, the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how - at the very moment when global market relations began to exert their full domination, making the individual producer's success or failure dependent on market cycles totally beyond his control - the notion of a charismatic 'business genius' reasserted itself ... attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi he possessed. And does not the same hold true even more so today, as the abstraction of the market relations that govern our lives is pushed to an extreme point? The bookshops are overflowing with psychological manuals advising us on how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor - in short, treating success as being dependent on a proper 'attitude'".

THE LATEST REVIEW EVER

2011-05-07T23:03:00.001+01:00

Of Carl's White Diaspora, which I can't recommend highly enough. And it's free innit, so no excuses. I would urge people to print it out however - reading upside down pages on a laptop just doesn't work (although it is briefly hilarious to try).

KRAFTWERK AND THE INSTITUTION

2011-05-02T14:08:00.003+01:00

A somewhat fustian review of mine in this week's Oxonian Review about a new book of essays on Kraftwerk.

What I didn't say in the review is that I'm in two minds about this sort of thing: on the one hand it's good to have a pop subject treated with this level of seriousness, but on the other there's the risk of calcification and institutionalization, of a kind of academic branding that is not so dissimilar to the fashionista-commodification I talk about in the review (and I realise that I'm totally complicit in this by throwing my own hat into the ring, although of course I didn't get paid for writing the piece, which as far as I'm concerned makes it just a slightly less self-indulgent, more detached form of blogging praxis).

Anyway, I hope it comes through that I tried to focus on what was meaningful in the message, man.

And actually part of the message is that the institution (the right sort) can be a redemptive force, right?

Title: "Exactly the sort of casual co-option of someone else's aesthetic I abhor" (or, I'm a twat).

NERINA PALLOT THINKS ...

2011-04-29T09:20:00.007+01:00

Couple of issues raised by this very thinly disguised "thought piece".

Firstly, it seems the Guardian is more gone in the tooth than I thought.* How did this piece come to be written? Is it a puff piece for an MOR recording artist or for a major record label or for the record industry itself? Whichever is true, the whole thing raises profound questions about the national media's publishing processes and its complicity with corporate PR.

Secondly, isn't this a sort of nightmare vision of how music production might pan out? There are so many reprehensible - even sinister - sentences in the piece ("when promotion time arrived again, I had acquired a few more credit cards", "I got the shot in the marketing arm that only a major label can bring"), but what I find most disturbing is the description of the "Mom and Pop label". I'm not familiar with the phrase, but it conjures images of wealthy upper-middle-class suburbanites making the incredibly bland music they've always wanted to using their privately hoarded cash, while they mix in circles where you just happen to one day get a call from the head of Universal "asking" you to record an album "for the company".

Lastly, I actually quite liked Nerina Pallot's "Everybody's Gone To War" in a perverse kind of way back in '05. It sounded like one of those nasal US country-pop hits I find somehow irresistible (see also Shania Twain's "I'm Gonna Getcha Good", Avril Lavigne's "Complicated"). However, wiki research reveals she's not in fact an alt-country singer from North America but a privately-educated lass from Jersey (channel island), which makes things a whole lot less endearing, and more weirdly prescient.

*And by the way, the fawning, lifestyle-ish coverage of the royal wedding has been truly embarrassing.

MOVEMENT IN THE FAR CORNER

2011-04-26T15:28:00.002+01:00

Wonderful new Toon-based music fanzine The North East Passage (co-edited by Mr Tom Astley) is out now, a welcome HYPERBOREAN BLAST FROM THE MARGINS in this week of ODIOUS CENTRIFUGAL BOMBAST.

Copies (print only) of the first edition - entitled "Maps" - can be got TURTALLY FREE by emailing one's postal address to:

thenortheastpassage@hotmail.co.uk

A CUT OUT AND PASTE DESCRIPTION OF ALMOST ALL POP MUSIC IN 2011

2011-04-25T15:50:00.001+01:00

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YOU'VE GOT NOTHING TO SAY! YOU'RE A BUNCH OF BORED, SPOILED KIDS ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON GOING THROUGH THE DRESSING UP BOX! YOUR LACK OF ANY KIND OF POLITICAL SENSIBILITY OR PROJECT VITIATES YOUR ART UTTERLY! WHERE IS YOUR SYMPATHY OR SOLIDARITY, WHERE IS THE INTERST IN ANYTHING OUTSIDE YOUR OWN NARROW NETWORK OF SCENESTERS?
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[The inimitable Carl Neville précises the Not Not Fun debate]

A STRAY THOUGHT ON THAT REBECCA BLACK TUNE

2011-04-20T21:06:00.013+01:00

Isn't this massive oscillating pro-/anti- Rebecca Black hysteria nowt more than a classic case of Freud's "narcissism of small difference"?

The conditions of music production are now thoroughly auto-erotic. Increasingly, rich kids make tunes for their own plutocratic class. The culture industry is riven with nepotism and glutted with narcissistic vanity projects. Internet technology allows us all to make the art we want, but only a tiny minority of us has the societal, promotional resources necessary to break into viral, bankable territory.

With this in mind, why is it not okay for Black to be gifted a recording session by her parents, which she then uses to record a self-regarding song celebrating her Hannah Montana lifestyle, but it's fine and dandy for Florence and the Machine to make a living (enabled by a private education and media contacts) out of a corresponding little-girl-lost, consumer fantasy aesthetic? (See also Little Boots, Lily Allen, the Mumford + friends network, etc.)

So maybe this is the nerve being trodden on. It's not that "Friday" is an anomalous "worst record ever". There's no anomaly here. This is the buried reality suddenly becoming garishly visible.

AND THEREFORE MUST HIS CHOICE BE CIRCUMSCRIB'D: THE WISDOM OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

2011-04-16T15:03:00.010+01:00

NB: this is a cross-posting from the '90s-present blog Up Close and Personal. For those of you that haven't done so already, check it oot!

David Foster Wallace is fast approaching the status of a "sage writer" (albeit a tragically posthumous one). As everyone knows, Wallace was the Guy Who Moved Things On From Postmodernism, so in a way it makes sense that he should be treated as a sort of modern-day Ruskin, a doler-out of soundbite ethical wisdom in an age trying to recapture sincerity and cohesiveness after the pomo-relativist flood. Middling rockist indie bands are wont to quote the bit in 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" where Wallace talks about the likelihood of the next generation of radicals being a "weird bunch of anti-rebels ... who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles". Zadie Smith and Foals are notable celebrity admirers. Meanwhile, Guardian hacks post links on their vanity websites* to Wallace's now very widely quoted 2005 Kenyon commencement speech, a dazzling 20 minute morality lesson (now better known in its transcribed form as "This is Water"), which has become a sort of "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" for the 2010s. Fuck's sake, when I was scratching around for something pithy to say as a goodbye bow to my middling indie band a couple of years ago (long story), I posted the whole of the Kenyon speech to our Myspace blog. It wasn't really all that relevant to that particular moment of personal crisis, I now realise, but hell, it was the most sagacious thing I was reading at the time, and it seemed to fit in some vague way with the bloody-minded, stand-taking gesture I was making.

Right now, as Wallace's final work - the unfinished novel The Pale King - is about to be published, the Saint DFW tendency is reaching a spectacular climax, accompanied by the sort of inordinate PR hysteria we're all familiar with. The media idolatry is unfortunate, but then again, it's bound to be short-lived. More importantly, you get the impression that, when the culture and publishing industries have moved onto their next five-minute hero/victim, Wallace's voice and legacy will still be just about audible underneath the debris of post-mortem exploitation and expropriation (or that's the hope, anyway).

So what is the legacy? If Wallace was - and still has the potential to be - a modern sage, then what kind of wisdom did he impart? Taking the Kenyon speech/"This is Water"** as a sort of condensed moral manifesto (and despite Wallace's protestations that he shouldn't be regarded as a didactic "wise old fish", he clearly was just this - a willingness to be so was perhaps his greatest contribution to contemporary letters), the most striking thing for me is how damnably conflicted his argument is. The rhetoric, for once, is lucid, cogent, and pomo-free. But the message remains infernally difficult to hammer out. Broadly speaking, Wallace seems to be caught between a visionary perspicuity about "what is to be done" on the one hand, and a self-lacerating, high-sceptical tendency that to a large extent nullifies the affirmative potential of these astonishingly powerful insights. This is not the place to speculate about parallels between this sort of mindset and Wallace's tragic biography. What is certain, though, is that this expression of the struggle between hope and fear, unselfishness and self-directed masochism, positive utterance and negative qualification of it, is the key testament of one of the most harrowingly representative figures of our times. Wallace's struggle was, and remains, an epochal one.

I'm with Wallace on about 90% of the statements he makes. "In the day to day trenches of adult life, there's no such thing as atheism": so simple, so dead on the mark. "And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self": again, it would be churlish to try to gloss eloquence of this calibre. The speech concludes with the following brilliant penultimate paragraph, which seems to hit so many nails on the head it's not even funny:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces [of self/money/appearance/intellect worship] in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

We're all used to the neoliberal malaise being explained in all kinds of complex theoretical ways, but where else will you find such an economical, profound, even mystical (in the best sense) critique of the radical selfishness and spiritual paucity of neoliberal culture?

Yet extraordinarily (and this is evident even in the above passage), the whole weight of Wallace's argument is ultimately predicated on a pronounced self-centredness that ends up merely replaying the victory of a worldview which imprisons us in "our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms". We do not have to look hard for the culprit, the snag that means Wallace cannot finally rise above the atomism that is his ostensible target. Where are we to look to try to get back in touch with real freedom? Ourselves. What is the only virtue, the antidote to self-worship, the "capital-T Truth" that remains after a "whole lot of rhetorical bullshit" has been "pared away", the secret to "making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head"? Choice, the word that is littered throughout the Kenyon speech like some blindingly obvious traumatic crux.

In the day to day trenches of adult life, Wallace argues, one must become a sort of heroic superman, dedicated to caring for others, but only achieving this civic awareness through preternatural self-discipline and the continual invocation of one's formidable moral-intellectual might. By simply straining hard enough, we will be able to transcend reality and inoculate pain:

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

No amount of undeniably beautiful phraseology can cover over the fact that Wallace's solution to surmounting a consumer-hell-type situation (and tellingly, he sets his parable in a supermarket) is a bizarre restatement of the terms of the market place: "you have other options", "you get to decide", "most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line". Isn't this sort of alchemical make-nice strategy exactly what the advertising executive is trying to promulgate on a daily basis? Contra Wallace, might not there be some value in acknowledging the awfulness of a consumer-hell-type situation for what it really is? Wouldn't this be the really true exercise of civic-minded consciousness: recognising that the solution does not lie with one's individual powers of imagination alone, that there might be a more social, less heroically isolated way of responding to the causes of depression and misery? Wallace appears to briefly identify the root cause of such suffering in "the world of men and money and power", but the focus of his solution is not on this matrix. It is turned bravely but violently back on a quite different target; that is, himself.

Crucially, in the actual Kenyon speech (as opposed to the transcribed version), Wallace is speaking to a class of graduating students, and the emphasis is on the value of a liberal arts education as a means of fostering the sort of consciousness that makes responsible choice possible. This makes the whole premise a lot saner and less like a proclamation of radical stoical individualism, and this establishing context should probably be reinstated in future published versions of "This is Water" to make it clear that Wallace was not in fact addressing the world with a parti pris, but merely trying to say something intelligent and constructive to a group of young people for whom a light reminder of the importance of responsibility to others cannot have been such a bad thing. Nevertheless, it seems that the "moral superman" motif was one that Wallace obsessed over and grappled with in his last years. I haven't read The Pale King yet, but the reviews suggest that it does in fact essentially reiterate the argument of the Kenyon speech. As one reviewer puts it (quoting Wallace), the "crucial conceit" of the novel is "that the soul-crushing boredom of tax work can lead to transcendent bliss, 'a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive'." To me, this seems to amount to something like philosophy-as-prozac.

The side of Wallace that I love doesn't have anything to do with this inverted, masochistic narcissism. For me, Wallace's sagacity lies in his willingness to get squarely behind a moral or ethical precept and stay there, the "childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles", the fantastic hope, if you like. In the 1920s, T.S. Eliot said, "we await the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something", and by god, we're still waiting, which is just one reason why it's such a crying shame that Wallace had to go and top himself. Perhaps even more than this though, the message that I think should be his legacy is his revival of a particular kind of novelistic tradition, one that runs through Dickens, The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Mr Sammler's Planet, and a host of other works up to (and arguably ending with) the postmodern period, one that foregrounds as a sacred rite the utopian process of one human consciousness coming into contact and merging with another. This seems to me to be the grand underlying scheme in Wallace's masterpiece Infinite Jest (1996), nowhere so magically evident as in the scene towards the end of the novel in which Mario Incadenza poses as a homeless person, and waits for many days until somebody comes up and touches his outstretched hand. The reawakening of this basic sentimental, moral commitment to socially-minded anti-individualism was Wallace's most profound gift to the culture. It's just that, as the Kenyon speech shows, he didn't seem to be able to equate this anti-individualism with the need to take the fight out of his own head.

*Is there anything more pernicious than the aspiring journalist's personal dot.com website? Why not just get a blog? They're free, and more interesting.
** This is only an abbreviated version of the text, published in the Guardian after Wallace's death. See penultimate paragraph for a link to the full audio of the speech.

GREEN TORY PAIDEUMA

2011-04-14T19:19:00.002+01:00

Aha! No more speculations needed: the nu-folk / Green Tory / royal wedding axis becomes blindingly apparent:

Another one of those how-did-it-ever-get-this-bad moments, in a year full of them.

Something's got to give soon though, surely?

HERMIONE HOBY CONTROVERSY

2011-04-13T20:47:00.003+01:00

I've been following this brouhaha with interest (original post here).

I find it difficult not to judge some of the guy's comments misogynistic (eg. the bit about pony riding lessons) and there's a good deal of unhinged vitriol. But some of his criticisms are just so damned pithy. Puncturing the PR bubble that much arts journalism currently resides in is always a totally worthy cause. We need much more of it.

And what's even more shocking about the whole thing is the level of the counter-attack on Twitter, like as soon as you try to challenge the power structure (even with a single blogpost), down come those bricks ... Twitter does seem to have the potential to be used by the culture and media industries as a sort of nepotistic Blitzenkrieg.

The Conor McNicholas bit deserves repeating too:

Conor McNicholas … remembers exactly where he was when he first heard [The Strokes]: in his car, listening to the radio, on London’s Stroud Green Road. “‘Last Nite’ came on,” he says, “and it was one of those moments where you go: ‘Fuck. Popular culture will never be the same again.’”

Quite.

BELLOW HAD IT RIGHT, IN MANY RESPECTS

2011-04-06T15:45:00.013+01:00

“Both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were, for Sammler, utopian projects. There, in the East, the emphasis was on low-level goods, on shoes, caps, toilet-plungers, and tin basins for peasants and laborers. Here it fell upon certain privileges and joys. Here wading naked into the waters of paradise, et cetera. But always a certain despair underlining pleasure, death seated inside the health-capsule, steering it, and darkness winking at you from the golden utopian sun”.

- Mr Sammler's Planet

A WORLD ELSEWHERE

2011-04-04T15:35:00.003+01:00

Two recent pieces by me for the superb Carl Neville-engineered decade blogs. One at ... And What Will Be Left Of Them on Martin Bax and '70s milieu, and one at Up Close And Personal on the '90s and drugs.

OH AMERICA, OH IN-GER-LAND

2011-03-23T16:53:00.004Z

One of my favourite moments on Let England Shake is the hunting horn on "The Glorious Land", not just because it's a nice sonic intrusion, a neat use of sampling, a palpable "happy studio accident"; nor because it seems like a wry acknowledgment of the controversy in the late-nineties about Harvey being pro-fox hunting. No, I like it because it sounds like an American hunting horn.

It would have been so easy for Harvey the Dorsethire lass to ham up the "Englishness" side of things, to write a Laura Marling-style, Green Tory, Mercury Prize-sure thing; a paragon of pastoralism and national myth in the nu-folk mould but with added critical gravitas would have gone down a treat in the royal wedding year. Instead, there are so many facets of Let England Shake - the faintly insurrectionary title, the bleakly monochrome cover, the focus on war and crisis rather than green and pleasant lands - that puts it at a distance it from all that humbug.

Above all, of course, there's the bastard transatlantic nature of the music itself. Harvey's bedrock of blues and post-punk means she can never stray too far from healthy internationalism down the path of insularity. So there's lots of Morricone, scraps of Joanna Newsom, Bjork, Beach House maybe, and what sounds like a Bollywood sample (on a tune called, incongruously, "England"). And it's surely no coincidence that one of the best hook-moments here (What if I take my problem to the United Nations?) is a steal from a US rock'n'roll icon, Eddie Cochran.

This makes sense though doesn't it? If you're going to write an album about war and identity over the last 100 years there's obviously no point in retreating into an archaic nationalism when you the real Imperium "plowing our land with tanks and feet" is, broadly speaking, an Anglo-American one.

Some cracking lyrics too:

Goddamn' Europeans!
Take me back to beautiful England
and the grey, damp filthiness of ages, and battered books,
fog rolling down behind the mountains,
and 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.

Bits o' Blake perhaps? (Hopefully not via Richard Ashcroft). This one good too:

The land returns to how it has always been,
The scent of thyme carried on the wind.
Jagged mountains, jutting out,
Cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth.
On Battleship Hill I hear the wind say:
Cruel nature has won again.

KEN LOACH INTERVIEW

2011-03-14T12:53:00.003Z

New film Route Irish, football, and the Labour Party entangled in the latest OR.

NOUGHTIES SOLO-IDGE

2011-03-08T16:43:00.006Z

[Modernism still exists at 3:20]

[Understated melodic niftiness at 2:10]

[Err speaks for itself at 1:03]

[Television-redolent, almost-band-redeeming action at 1:29]

[Stately chicken nuggets at 1:59]

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

2011-03-07T15:28:00.002Z

Piece by me ("The Cultural Logic of Green Toryism") out in the fourth issue of the Oxford Left Review.

It was written wholly independently and prior to Robin Carmody's brilliant recent blogpost on a similar theme, which I can heartily recommend as a mostly superior parallel discussion.

Extensive typos in the otherwise brilliant OLR. Just to clarify: I don't think there was a "Manchurian archetype" in '90s Britpop. Though this is an intriguing thought.

Wankers. By consensus.

MORE TOON MYTHOS

2011-03-04T09:35:00.003Z

"And I came across Newcastle, which I'd never been to before. And as soon as I saw it, I knew that's where I wanted to shoot. It was such an incredibly visual city. It didn't look like a British city. It looked like Chicago or New York.

There were those extraordinary bridges and, of course, the other element was the huge ships, which were a kind of architecture in themselves."

- Get Carter director Mike Hodges in today's Guardian.

NEW BLOGGERY

2011-03-01T00:01:00.001Z

A piece on Waterworld and oceanic feeling over at new nineties blog Up Close and Personal.

Great stuff also being written at eighties cousin Faces on Posters/Too Many Choices.

ARMSTRONG EXPERIENCES A SHIVER OF HOPE IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

2011-02-28T16:46:00.021Z

In the heart of the country
Armstrong is ailing.

Beside the Tesco
in the marketplace

last week he lay
across a trolley's

path, screaming:
We have no betters!

Music is ours!
His allergies get

worse. He talks
in honey-nut loops.

His paranoia
makes him fear

the squirrels
in the woods.

But, just the other
day, as he was browsing

through the large print
books, he saw a

woman at the done-for
public library desk

get up on tip toes
like an agile cat;

and peering over
piles of burnished

paperwork, she took
him in her eyes

and smiled, and gently
she began to say

(with Polish words):

Loneliness
will not last.

OPEN SKIES

2011-02-08T12:12:00.005Z

"A worldwide television service, with genuinely open skies, would be an enormous gain to the peoples of the world, as short-wave radio, bypassing national controls, has already clearly been. Against the rhetoric of open skies, which in fact, given the expense and sophistication of satellite technology, would be monopolised by a few large corporations and authoritarian governments, it will sound strange to defend national autonomy. But the probable users are not internationalists, in the sense of any significant mutuality. The national or local components in their services would be matters merely of consent and publicity: tokenism. In most countries, if these systems gained control, independent productions would become very difficult or impossible. Most of the inhabitants of the 'global village' would be saying nothing, in these new terms, while a few powerful corporations and governments, and the people they could hire, would speak in ways never before known to most of the peoples of the world."

Raymond Williams, Television (1974)

NEW BLOOMSBURY, OLD TORIES

2011-02-04T10:07:00.000Z

My review with Steve Ross of Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists, and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.

ENDGAME FOR A COUNTER CULTURE, FRAGMENT 2

2011-01-29T09:38:00.020Z

Homecoming Queen

We get out of the van feeling nauseous. Two nights ago was Newcastle, yesterday Edinburgh, today Manchester, and this travelling schedule combined with too much booze and crap food has given us sore heads and sallow faces. Touring is just as awful as everyone says it is. I quite enjoyed our first one out of sheer novelty, but the second one is already turning into a mundane, exhausting experience. I was eating a Snickers bar washed down with Coke Zero for breakfast this morning as we pulled out of a Scottish service station, when the van iPod spewed up MGMT’s “Time to Pretend”. I suddenly realised why this song is such a pithy one for our rainbow-chasing generation. "I’m feeling rough I’m feeling wrong in the time of my life". Underneath the carapace of fashionable hedonism, this is the sickly reality of culture industry work life in the early twenty-first century.

Tonight we’re playing a “hometown gig” at a venue called Night and Day in Manchester. While we did play our first gig here a couple of years ago, our Manc identity is at best a half-truth. Two band members studied performing arts at uni here – lead singer Danny and bassist Geoffrey – and until recently we all lived together in a squalid terrace house, which would at least have been rock’n’roll in the clichéd, old-fashioned sense if it hadn’t been in affluent Didsbury (home of stockbrokers and aging comedy actors). But this is the sum total of our Manchester credentials. I would have been happy for us to become an adopted Manchester band, but for a long time this wasn’t on the cards. The city’s music scene has been in a bad way for some time, caught in the grip of Britpop nostalgia and Blairite shallowness, and we’ve found the local ambience difficult to fit in with. More to the point, the rest of the band seemed totally indifferent to the city, especially Geoffrey, a native of Reigate, Surrey, and a tireless advocate of re-location to London (a place “where stuff actually happens”). I’ve long since realised that we should probably have started the band in the North East where the remaining three of us grew up. As it is, we’re deracinated and rootless professionals, careerist young men living on parental handouts and inheritance money, praying that eventually the indie equivalent of Simon Cowell – whoever that is – will throw some industry dollar our way. We could be in Manchester, Shoreditch, Sydney, or Brooklyn, and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

But recently we have been told that “it is good for us to be a Manchester band”. Not being from London automatically lends us a very slight tinge of hinterland mystique. On top of this, a spate of bankable Topshop-indie acts has emerged from the city in recent times, and, perhaps most importantly of all, we've recently attracted the attention of Guy Garvey from Elbow, who won the Mercury Prize last September, and who is proving a vital name to drop in all kinds of contexts. So although three of us have recently moved to completely different parts of the country to live with girlfriends, we’ve started to emphasise the Manc connection more and more. This is part of the rationale, I think, behind tonight's show in the Northern Quarter, one of a nationwide set of gigs sponsored by a well-known American whiskey manufacturer, which sees us paired with another “local” act, the much-hyped solo singer Faerie Queen. She’s from Preston, which is part of historical Lancashire at least.

I say the tour is “sponsored” by the American whiskey brand – let’s call it Johnny Roberts – but in fact they’re pretty much owning the whole thing. The brand imagery (monochrome Americana and hackneyed rockstar shibboleths) has invaded the venue like a shrewd STI. Before we’ve even finished unloading the van, two über-fit blonde girls with orange, fake-tanned faces and dead eyes greet us with armfuls of corporate merchandise – tee shirts, posters, triple-A pass-holders, all of which bear the Johnny Roberts logo replicated many times over in prominent places.

As we begin the usual interminable wait for someone to tell us when we’re soundchecking and what the hell is going on, the dead-eyed girls thrust a couple of sleek black Johnny Roberts-customized Fender Stratocasters in front of us. We’re encouraged to autograph the guitars with silver pen, as all the other JR Tour bands have done already (they're the first prizes in a tie-in competition). As we sketch gloopy, metallic signatures on these gleaming artifacts, it occurs to me that this might be one of the strangest things I’ve ever done.

***

After several hours of unrelenting boredom we’re finally given the nod to soundcheck, which we perform in a seamless, automatic maneuver.

As stage time approaches, the smallish venue begins to fill up, and the downstairs dressing area coagulates with friends, relatives, stagehands, journalists, and a TV crew here to film the gig for a special T4 highlights show. My girlfriend arrives, and I greet her with unbridled soppiness. I can hardly believe this one-woman oasis of sanity and down-to-earth intelligence is still taking the trouble to join me at ersatz, soul-numbing media spectacles like this. Her brother and his family are coming over from Warrington to watch tonight, and she tells me they’re excited. Why this is, I can’t really fathom. Even though we’ve been playing pretty much the same set of songs for two years now, it’s only recently, after NME features and Zane Lowe radio plays that any enthusiasm for the band has started to grow among our friends and family. For a long time everyone was politely sceptical about our robotic, theatrical brand of art-pop. But after the London media “got onboard” (a favourite phrase of both Manager and Geoffrey), the scepticism was replaced overnight with dozens of “likes” on Facebook and messages of support from people we barely know. It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that people are turned on by even the merest flash of minor celebrity. Pure fame must be the most powerful intoxicant in modern Britain.

In the dressing area most of the attention is directed at Faerie Queen, who topped many of the Ones to Watch polls in January, and who has recently picked up a Best Solo Artist award at a major industry ceremony (even though she hasn’t actually released an album yet). She’s standing chatting to her NME journalist boyfriend, who wrote an especially poorly-written-yet-hyperbolic feature about our band last month. God she’s tiny, I think. What is this Faerie Queen shtick all about? She’s turned herself into a real-life pop Alice in Wonderland, without a thought for the consequences. A little girl consumer fantasy for old and young, men and women alike.

As if to underline this, my attention wanders to a conversation between Faerie Queen's manager and her dad, which is unfolding just within earshot. Dad is a huge man with a thick torso covered by an expensive-looking Aran sweater, the polar opposite of his diminutive daughter. Someone told us earlier that he’s obscenely wealthy, a casino owner or something. This seems appropriate, as there’s definitely a hint of Veruca Salt about Faerie Queen. She might be a northerner, but she’s incredibly posh. Like seemingly everyone else in the modern music industry, she went to a private school followed by a performing arts college.

Right now, I can hear her Dad speaking aggressively to a frightened-looking manager:

“You know she’s been crying lots this past week”.

“Hmm, yeah.”

“It’s all this attention she’s getting, it’s not good for her. She’s stuck doing exactly the same thing every day." Dad’s voice gets louder and louder, until he’s basically shouting. "What if it all falls through? She needs another life!”

“Of course, of course. But you see, it’ll just take time,” says her manager in a soothing undertone. “At the moment we’re very close to establishing her as a Madonna-style mainstream pop act. Once she makes it through to what we call ‘sustainable territory’, things will get much easier, I promise you”.

This innuendo-filled business-talk seems to have a mollifying effect. After all, Faerie Queen's Dad is an entrepreneurial man-of-the-world. But just to make clear he's not someone to be messed with, Dad repeats his final point with a guttural, growling emphasis:

“She needs another life. She needs another life.”

***

Onstage later, we play our honed, professional set of songs to a blandly appreciative audience. Always the same act: the same clinical riffs, the same gestures and movements, the same computerized rigidity about everything. Jimmy the drummer is an expert session musician; he’s consummately businesslike behind his wall of cymbals. Danny the lead singer gets lost in his hermetic, impenetrable music, not speaking to us except to make snappy comments now and then, not looking anyone in the eye for the duration of the performance, his redeeming sense of humour put on ice. Out of all of us, Geoffrey is by far the most comfortable performer. A onetime model and high-school actor with parents in the media, Geoffrey was born to inhabit the indie pop star stereotype. His act consists of clichéd posturing and occasional insouciant one-liners delivered to the audience (“Huh, you didn’t expect that now did you?”; “We’re the band you’ve all been hearing about”, etc). This is embarrassing, to put it mildly.

Surrounded by these examples, I really haven’t got a clue how to behave onstage. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t get over the fakeness of it. I can't get over the fact that, while pop music is supposed to be a spontaneous, subversive, anarchic form of expression, a typical gig is now an utterly rule-bound, schematized event, every bit as staid and ritualized as a ballet or a TV commercial. I’m constantly being told to “move around a bit more”, “work on your stagecraft”, “look like you’re enjoying things”. Just because the compulsion is to have fun rather than to retain composure and suppress emotion doesn’t make it any less of a compulsion. I find the whole thing oppressive and terrifying, and play my guitar like a frightened rabbit as a result.

The TV crew tonight aren’t helping. We’re playing on a tiny stage made even more cramped by Johnny Roberts banners, iron railings and camera dollies. The gig goes relatively well up until the last song. Then, as we begin the histrionic crescendo that we always finish with, I look over at the T4 director and my heart freezes over with terror. He’s looking straight at me and gesturing furiously at the floor.

“Dance!” he screams, as a camera swings towards me, so close that it nearly knocks me off my feet. “Dance! … Dance! … Dance!”

It takes me a while to realize that he’s actually saying “drums”. He’s trying to get one of the cameramen to zoom in on Jimmy’s frenetic drumming. He's looking for a spectacular money shot. He’s not looking at me at all.

[Endgame Part One here.]

2011-01-24T16:30:00.005Z

Cracking new book - Irish Studies in Britain (ed. Ellen McWilliams and Brian Griffin) - can be bought here and here. Fine essays on Yeats and Peter Warlock, Yeats and MacNeice, autobiography and the Irish short story, and one by me about Joyce and modernism's affinity for "elementary" musical forms.

KEATS, WALTER BENJAMIN, AND THE OLDNESS OF HAUNTOLOGY

2011-01-23T00:01:00.012Z

Is it facetious and/or tautological to point out that hauntology might be a good deal older than is usually intimated?

In talking about the "spectre haunting Europe" Marx and Engels were drawing on a vocabulary inherited from Romanticism (and perhaps even earlier precedents - Shakespeare and Hamlet is a connection many people have suggested). For as long as capitalism has existed, in other words, there has been a radical, reactive artistic impulse to uncover "spectres of lost futures" (to borrow the terminology of latter-day post-Derridean hauntology). I can see how this might have acquired a new colouring in the Fukuyaman era, and there's no doubt that revenants and lost worlds are especially prescient right now. I suppose I would just give this sort of thing a much wider ancestry than anti-postmodernism mainlining back to Marx.

Two examples spring to mind. The first is a famous wedge of Keats:

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

Isn't this representative Romantic valorisation of "long ago" hauntological, in that it has already a sense of the past as a redemptive force, not merely food for nostalgia? Aren't "charm'd magic casements" and "faery lands forlorn" exactly what Ariel Pink, Belbury Poly and co. are seeking out - and collaging together - to create their musical worlds?

Another slightly more modern (yet still pretty old) example is of course early-twentieth-century Dadaism/Surrealism. Walter Benjamin's summary of Breton and Nadja strikes me as being a veritable hauntological manifesto:

[Breton] can boast an extraordinary discovery. He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the "outmoded", in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism ... Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys ... on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance of the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of "atmosphere" concealed in these things to the point of explosion.

Just saying like.

ENDGAME FOR A COUNTER CULTURE, FRAGMENT 1

2011-01-22T14:59:00.014Z

The Man in the Beer Garden

The four of us are walking down a street somewhere in West London. I don’t know London too well so I don’t know which street. We’re heading for a meeting with a major record label A&R head, in a pub beer garden that will turn out to be cheery and ivy-covered – bucolic, you could say.

I decide to try to say something pithy and useful to our manager, who met us at the tube station to brief us on the way over:

“Is there anything we should know before the meeting? Any dos and don’ts?”

“Good question. That’s a very good question actually. Well, I dunno if there’s anything specific really. Oh, whatever you do, don’t say you’re the kind of band that isn’t too bothered about selling records.”

“Ha. No worries!” says bassist Geoffrey.

“You’d be surprised though,” says Manager, “how many bands do say that sort of thing”.

We share a giggle, though I think we might all be laughing for very different reasons.

Ian Maclean the A&R head actually turns out to be quite a nice guy. He’s a large, gentle man from the west coast of Scotland with a mass of floppy red hair and a mellifluous accent. Danny the lead singer and I have been best friends since childhood, and we once went on a holiday as teenagers to the small seaside village in Scotland where Ian grew up. After this bizarre coincidence emerges, the conversation gathers fluency, helped along by many pints of posh continental Weissbier, which Ian puts on a record label tab. He tells us some anecdotes about his thirty-odd years in the business. They’re packed with the usual name-dropping and aggrandized language, but for once this doesn’t bother me. He’s an infinite improvement on almost every other industry figure we’ve met up until now, unassuming and earthy. As Manager will say when Ian leaves, to more ambivalent giggles from us, “he’s too major league to be arrogant”. Bassist Geoffrey puts it more succinctly: “Ian is The Man”. This will be delivered with a mixture of sarcasm and approval.

Right now though, Ian is entertaining us with his let-me-tell-you-a-bit-about-me-and-the-company routine:

“The first gig I ever had was engineer on Kate Bush’s first album. We used to go out for a joint every morning, and I would spend the rest of the day trying to pretend I wasn’t stoned out of my box. I used to blush whenever I spoke to her, she was that good-looking. I was only nineteen”.

I like Ian, I think to myself. He’s a Celt, and as my mum would’ve pointed out, that means he is innately good by default. On top of this he seems to understand where we’re coming from. Maybe bassist Geoffrey is right, maybe the days when the record industry was full of unscrupulous money-minded bastards are long gone. Ian tells us that he got into the business in the late seventies and early eighties because he loved “leftfield guys like XTC and The Associates”. He says he wanted to do what he could to further the cause of innovative music like this. He says we remind him of exactly those sorts of bands. This is fucking sweet!

Eventually we get onto the inevitable topic of The State of the Industry, and I take this as another opportunity to say something pithy and useful. Because I’m a bit pissed by now, I decide to chance a bit of very mildly subversive rhetoric. But what comes out is more like clichéd PR-babble:

“Yeah, I mean, it’s such an interesting period. With the bottom falling out of the mainstream, there’s a lot of scope for really challenging art-rock bands to completely reorder the musical landscape. I mean, you can’t play safe any more, so why not risk doing something truly radical? It’s a great time for mavericks”.

Why am I always so inarticulate in these situations? I can’t believe how truly vapid and awful my argument sounds out loud, like something out of Peep Show. But, to perhaps everyone’s surprise, Ian seems to like it.

“Definitely. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a great time for mavericks, you’re dead right.”

General enthusiasm and relief abounds around the table, followed by a lull in the conversation. Bassist Geoffrey - who has, I realize, been unusually quiet up until now – decides to take the opportunity to speak. He leans forward, and says, apropos of nothing, in an almost theatrically hushed voice:

“But we are the kind of band that wants to sell records, you know”.

Silence. My friend Danny shuffles in his seat and shoots me a glance that I can’t quite read. He hasn’t once spoken up against this sort of crap over the last two years, and he’s hardly likely to start now. Increasingly, it’s becoming apparent that he agrees with it.

“Exactly,” says a suddenly altered Ian Maclean. “When I first heard you guys I thought to myself: these guys want to do things on their own terms, but they want to sell a lot of records while they’re doing it”.

I sip my pint and realize with cold certainty that it can only be a matter of days now before I leave this band.

TRISH KEENAN/BROADCAST

2011-01-21T15:37:00.001Z

Some thoughts.

LAMENT FOR THE TRINITY SQUARE CAR PARK, GATESHEAD

2011-01-09T19:29:00.004Z

(Apologies for the cloak n dagger. I made this tune innit.)

2011-01-08T11:10:00.002Z

Because kids, the pop dream really is like a cocaine fantasy, in many respects!

Cracking stuff.

IS JAMES BLAKE GOING TO GET FUCKED BY THE MAINSTREAM, CLASSICAL-STYLE?

2011-01-05T20:49:00.005Z

Judging by a leaked copy of his eponymous debut, it looks that way.

The preponderance of vocals shows up his LDN neo-colloquial accent. A major blunder: could almost be The Maccabees or something. But perhaps this exposé of Burial-esque dubstep as deeply upper-middle-class has been a long time coming?

It didn't bode well when JB revealed that the album was partly inspired by Laura Fucking Marling (NB, in a forthcoming Zero book I will advance the case that Marling is directly or indirectly responsible for nearly all of the most odious things in Britain today).

You can't help feeling that in another, better era, Blake would've heeded the golden principle of British electronica: stick to the beats.

It's like all those Zane Lowe Hottest Record in the World Right Nows and Brit Critics' Choice nominations have communicated a radically antithetical message: why don't you flatter your ego a little by slapping middlebrow nu-folk vocal lines on top of everything and doing Feist covers - just a little something to entice the daytime radio demographic?

A real shame.

2010 POP: A TOP TEN

2010-12-31T14:08:00.029Z

10) The Tallest Man on Earth – Burden of Tomorrow

This is utterly devoid of idiosyncrasy, originality, discord, or any of the other things that usually make pop great. Nevertheless, it’s possibly the best song in the Top 10 for sheer endorphin-inducing melodic brilliance.

The Tallest Man on Earth sounds exactly like a person who isn’t Bob Dylan doing an exquisite impression of Bob Dylan. Analysis-wise, I don’t really have anything more to add, except to say that he is brilliant regardless of this fact.

“Burden of Tomorrow” turns and twists and bends, then it leaps and soars and resounds from the top of a mountain before saying, once I held a pony by it’s a-flagging mane! Then it shimmies around and around and judders and soars again and says once I held a glacier to an a-open flame! before it ends, perfectly.

9) Sleigh Bells – Crown on the Ground

Unlike The Tallest Man on Earth, Sleigh Bells sound totally new and wonderfully discordant. They are also quite breathtakingly loud.

Their genuinely loud loudness is proof that smashing established sonic barriers to smithereens can still be a defining part of avant-garde pop practice. One of postmodernism’s most patently bogus maxims was that everything has been done before; hence we might as well recycle the past. In actual fact, there is still lots left to do, and thankfully, people like Sleigh Bells are still doing it.

They splice together beatific nineties-style girl pop with monolithic slabs of guitar and utterly disorienting Dan Deacon-esque programming. The results are startling. “Crown on the Ground” sounds like David Lynch pumped to the gills with amphetamines and happy pills (ie. very good).

8) Owen Pallett – E is for Estranged

The template here is filmic pop-minimalism of the Michael Nyman/Yann Tiersen variety. But Owen Pallett is charming and delicate enough to ensure he rises way above middlebrow Classic FM territory.

“E is for Estranged” features vamping piano chords redolent of Blur’s “Sing”, and shows that vaudeville stripped of jovial irony and put into a minor key is one of pop’s golden formulas (see also: those Smiths). If only Blur had done this more often they might have been a great band, instead of an infuriating 50/50 mixture of excellence and mockney tat.

Owen Pallett is one of the very few live performances I have enjoyed, ever. The Reichian phasing also makes more sense in the context of the loop-pedal live act. Sublime, evocative, orchestral queer-pop of the highest order.

7) Deerhunter – Helicopter

I hesitate to include this, because Deerhunter have been getting more than enough props from other sources, notably Pitchfork. This makes me suspicious. They’re not all that amazing really are they? An above-average indie band from 1993.

“Helicopter” though is the closest thing to consensual alt-rock “event tune” I can think of in 2010. I couldn’t get past the retro-fashionista surface-sheen of “Round and Round”. Likewise, These New Puritans’ Hidden was good but didn’t have a standalone outstanding track, to my ears.

Hence, this was 2010’s only answer to “My Girls”. Lovely shimmering experimental melodic Perfektpop.

6) Big Boi – Daddy Fat Sax

I’ve always preferred Big Boi to Andre 3000. He’s crunchier and less arch – a better foil for Outkast’s outré production aesthetic. Also, “Hey Ya” reminds me of some truly awful nights out during my student days. I get irritated now whenever I hear Dre’s flights of fancy.

Anyway, “Daddy Fat Sax” is one of the highlights of Big Boi’s superlative solo debut-proper Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty. It is perhaps the only tune in hip-hop history to feature an accordion (anyone know better?!). In fact, the instrumentation in this is generally awesome: vibes, synth strings, slowed-down vocals, bizarre guttural percussion noises. Orchestral-futuristic genius.

Hip-hop is going through a funny stage at the moment. It seemed to get a shot in the arm with Obama, but this was short lived. I can’t really see many better ways forward than Big Boi’s approach: getting old gracefully but weirdly, with an ever-more rarefied, cerebral sound. We are now many miles above the streets though.

5) Sufjan Stevens – Too Much

This tune begins with some gratifyingly filthy white noise, and just keeps getting better. The percussion track is jagged and disembodied, but (probably) funky enough to dance to. After nearly a minute the melody kicks in, and it’s a true belter: a three chord hook with a 7/8 time signature, one of those glitch-rhythms that sticks in your memory like an oddly-shaped bastard.

By this point the tune is in the bag, and Stevens can get away with just looping the hook for another six minutes. The arrangement gets freakier and freakier until the whole thing collapses into a techno-classical heap just before the 7-minute mark.

Super Furry Animals used to do this sort of thing pretty well, and I was mildly saddened to hear they’d split up earlier this year. I say mildly, because they hadn’t really done anything good since Rings Around the World in 2001 (and even that was patchy). Unbeatable at their peak though (see Radiator, Guerilla, the Ice Hockey Hair EP). This one is for them.

4) Rihanna – Rude Boy

“Rude Boy” is based on a chord sequence/instrumental motif that has become ubiquitous over the past year or so. It all started with Calvin Harris’s “I’m Not Alone” in 2009; since then variations on the theme have graced Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and a couple of tunes by the execrable Ke$ha. You know the one I mean. It’s a sort of minor-key pop parody of an Ibiza trance breakdown.

I don’t care what they say: formalist trends like this seem to prove the existence of such a thing as a collective unconscious in pop writing, and I look forward to spending my dotage charting all the bizarre little lineages and half-plagiarisms in pop history.

Anyway, “Rude Boy” is class. The hook is quintessential pop scatting: all about letting rhythm lead the way. The verses are about sex. The beats are crisp. There’s the added frisson of Rihanna’s relationship with real-life rude boy/lassy-basher Chris Brown. 10 out of 10.

3) Beach House – Walk in the Park

This tune rides in on a terrible, terrible programmed drum track, a perfect example of what friends of mine used to call The Devil’s Beat. But that aside, “Walk in the Park” is superb.

Teen Dream was by far my favourite album of the year. I could quite happily have put “Zebra”, “Silver Soul”, “Norway”, or “Lover of Mine” up here, but “Walk in the Park” just about shades it. This is mainly because of its beautiful, beautiful outro. I love good outros.

In 2010, pop can’t really get much better than Beach House. Affirmative, exultant music isn't really possible in the current climate of endemic fear and cynicism. Hence, the best we can hope for – for the time being – is dreamy, hermetic melancholy that seems to speak of the profound sadness of our lonely, solipsistic lives. We’re being slowly buried alive by neoliberalism; Beach House is the sound of subterranean survival, and hope.

2) Owl City – Fireflies

This would have been my number one if it wasn’t so obviously a total one off. It’s difficult to get excited on a grand scale about an MOR amalgam of Blink 182 and Bright Eyes.

But “Fireflies” is unequivocally A Great Work of Art. Like “Wuthering Heights”, “All That She Wants”, “Don’t You Want Me”, “How Soon Is Now?” and other all-time-great pop tunes, it embodies a sense of magical human encounter with technology and form. You can just hear this guy lighting on a good thing by complete accident, experiencing an epiphany in the dead of night. This is some shamanistic shizzle.

Despite widespread evidence to the contrary, you don’t need to win a TV talent show or have gone to a private school or to have studied music at uni to write a good pop song. “Fireflies” is palpably the sound of a clueless individual producing something transcendent before clichés and professionalism have had a chance to destroy him. I say again, magic.

1) Robyn – Hang With Me (both versions)

In a musical world that has been depoliticized to the point of total surface-worshiping paralysis, Robyn’s exquisite artifice is as good as it gets.

Damn it, there is an emphatic lack of context in modern pop music, which makes writing about it very difficult. Robyn doesn’t really have a context. She makes formally perfect pop music. That’s all there is to it.

Something is lacking, but we might as well enjoy deracinated formalism like this until something better turns up. I know what’s on your mind, there will be time for that too ... There will always be time for life-affirming Scandinavian Perfektpop. It’s just that I’m holding out for some of the other, more mindful, contextual stuff, too.

This though, is its own justification.

[Also good: Field Music - "Measure", Joanna Newsom - "81", Radio Dept - "Heaven's On Fire", 3OH!3 feat Katy Perry - "Starstrukk", Morning Benders - "Promises", Tony Allen - "Secret Agent", Charlotte Gainsbourg - "In The End", Delorean - "Endless Sunset", Pantha Du Prince - "Lay in a Shimmer", The-Dream - "F.I.L.A.", Tinie Tempah - "Pass Out"]