-
[DJ Dan English and I are listening to the superlative compilation of recent Chinese alt rock, Look Directly Into the Sun: China Pop 2007]
ME: China’s gonna be the most powerful country in the world in twenty years' time y’know.
DEEJ: Really?
ME: Yep.
DEEJ: But what about America?
ME: It’ll fall behind.
DEEJ: But what about us? What are we gonna do?
ME: Who knows Dan.
DEEJ: Sweet. So … we’ll just have to rinse it til then won’t we?
ME: Or we could look for ways of adapting to the new order?
DEEJ: Nah mate.
Friday, 30 November 2007
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
THE TUNES OF OUR LIVES
-
One Thing – Amerie
Independent Woman Pt.1 (Pasadena Remix) – Destinys Child
Heard It All Before – Sunshine Anderson
AM to PM – Christina Milian
Get Ur Freak On – Missy Elliott
Can’t Nobody – Kelly Rowland
Toxic – Britney Spears
The Boy Is Mine – Brandy and Monica
Promiscuous Girl – Nelly Furtado
Crazy In Love - Beyonce
One Thing – Amerie
Independent Woman Pt.1 (Pasadena Remix) – Destinys Child
Heard It All Before – Sunshine Anderson
AM to PM – Christina Milian
Get Ur Freak On – Missy Elliott
Can’t Nobody – Kelly Rowland
Toxic – Britney Spears
The Boy Is Mine – Brandy and Monica
Promiscuous Girl – Nelly Furtado
Crazy In Love - Beyonce
Monday, 26 November 2007
YOU WERE NOT MY MOTHER MARGARET, AND I AM NOT YOUR SON
-
Having put off the inevitable for some time now, it seems the moment has come to concede defeat: the eighties are now inescapably responsible for the larger portion of the present era’s apparently limitless fondness for cultural copyism.
Perhaps the sixties held on to the title of Most Shamelessly Plagiarised Decade for far too long (what on earth happened to the seventies?) however, cultural relativism being all very well and good, it is something of an imperative that people recognise what an unusually awful period of history the years 1980-89 for the most part were.
Abandoning all forward-thinking momentum for an unabashed glorification of the sixties (idealistic, perhaps a little bit insipid, yet relatively innocuous overall) might have been unfortunate, but applying the same principle of hysterical retrogressive fetishism to a decade that attained to previously undreamt-of levels of socio-economic callousness and artistic awfulness is something that quite frankly scares the shit out of me for what it says about where we are in 2007, and more to the point, where we might be headed in the near-future.
It appears increasingly likely that David Cameron will get in next time around. If that isn’t a worrying enough thought in itself, it seems that our society is developing an ominous anticipatory passion for anything redolent of the last great Conservative era. An updated edition of The Sloane Ranger Handbook has just been published (is it just me or are girls everywhere beginning to look just a little bit sloaney?) and a new TV version of Brideshead is imminent, meanwhile the newspapers are full of reports that application numbers for private schools are soaring. Fashion is quite blatantly referencing the eighties left, right and centre, not least in what appears to be an absurd, untrammelled consumeristic decadence fuelled by the wide availability of ultra-cheap high street clothing.
Musically, the repetition of history is evident in the fact that the vast majority of British recording artists seem to be guided by an undeniably Thatcherite (and drug-fuelled) tendency towards solipsism, hedonism and greed (see The Klaxons’ suggestion that pop is an exclusively ‘escapist’ form, as well as Lily Allen’s comments on the need for working class mothers to ‘get their arses off the sofa to make some cash’, cited below) rather than political idealism or artistic vision, as was at least partially the case in days gone by. Thatcher’s dictum concerning the non-existence of society has apparently been realised to alarming effect in the British musical world. Where once it was possible to talk about musical communities and collectives founded on insurrectionary principles, it appears that the eclecticism of the nineties has merely succeeded to the kind of paralysing fragmentation, individualism and relativistic apathy that well befits an increasingly hegemonic consumerist order.
Good-time party music, drugs, fashion, celebrity – this is the essence of British music, both ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ (if that increasingly meaningless distinction holds any longer) in 2007. The pre-eminent sounds of the year – New Rave and Electro – have borrowed from the electronic music of the eighties, but only in the most superficial, lazily copyistic fashion, so that the residual spirit of sixties-style radicalism and experimentation that persisted in the work of artists such as Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, New Order, Human League, and the later collectivism of the Acid House period, have been almost entirely lost in translation. Intelligent, subversive pop lyrics have been exchanged for facile iterations of the retrograde trend (see Calvin Harris) and nasty, narcissistic sneering. The year’s most representative line, both for its egomaniacal mean-spiritedness and for its frighteningly close-to-the-bone summation of the present state of things came from Bodyrox: ‘You think you’ve got it all worked out, but you don’t know nothing, nothing, nothing’.
The eighties weren’t all bad. If there exists any fantastic hope at all in the present case, it is that we might in our manic pilfering get beyond the fancy dress and recover some eighties-style anti-establishment tendencies. In addition to the shallowness of the corporate surface currently being mined, the decade was also notable for a powerful strain of opposition to conservatism – both political and musical – that was to a certain extent done away with in the nineties of New Labour and Oasis. You only have to look at Rick from The Young Ones for an example of how this kind of radicalism might descend to ridiculous levels of naivety, but perhaps a little impassioned anarchism, even of the unsophisticated sophomoric variety, would make a welcome change in the current climate? If the signs are correct, and a new era of reinvigorated Thatcherism is upon us, we are going to have to start thinking about where we might draw inspiration from in establishing a solid counter-reaction to conservatism in all its odious cultural manifestations. The oppositional fringe of the eighties, with its Red Wedge, its Factory Records, its belligerent and subversive NME, and its Rick Young Ones, might after all be a good place to begin.
Having put off the inevitable for some time now, it seems the moment has come to concede defeat: the eighties are now inescapably responsible for the larger portion of the present era’s apparently limitless fondness for cultural copyism.
Perhaps the sixties held on to the title of Most Shamelessly Plagiarised Decade for far too long (what on earth happened to the seventies?) however, cultural relativism being all very well and good, it is something of an imperative that people recognise what an unusually awful period of history the years 1980-89 for the most part were.
Abandoning all forward-thinking momentum for an unabashed glorification of the sixties (idealistic, perhaps a little bit insipid, yet relatively innocuous overall) might have been unfortunate, but applying the same principle of hysterical retrogressive fetishism to a decade that attained to previously undreamt-of levels of socio-economic callousness and artistic awfulness is something that quite frankly scares the shit out of me for what it says about where we are in 2007, and more to the point, where we might be headed in the near-future.
It appears increasingly likely that David Cameron will get in next time around. If that isn’t a worrying enough thought in itself, it seems that our society is developing an ominous anticipatory passion for anything redolent of the last great Conservative era. An updated edition of The Sloane Ranger Handbook has just been published (is it just me or are girls everywhere beginning to look just a little bit sloaney?) and a new TV version of Brideshead is imminent, meanwhile the newspapers are full of reports that application numbers for private schools are soaring. Fashion is quite blatantly referencing the eighties left, right and centre, not least in what appears to be an absurd, untrammelled consumeristic decadence fuelled by the wide availability of ultra-cheap high street clothing.
Musically, the repetition of history is evident in the fact that the vast majority of British recording artists seem to be guided by an undeniably Thatcherite (and drug-fuelled) tendency towards solipsism, hedonism and greed (see The Klaxons’ suggestion that pop is an exclusively ‘escapist’ form, as well as Lily Allen’s comments on the need for working class mothers to ‘get their arses off the sofa to make some cash’, cited below) rather than political idealism or artistic vision, as was at least partially the case in days gone by. Thatcher’s dictum concerning the non-existence of society has apparently been realised to alarming effect in the British musical world. Where once it was possible to talk about musical communities and collectives founded on insurrectionary principles, it appears that the eclecticism of the nineties has merely succeeded to the kind of paralysing fragmentation, individualism and relativistic apathy that well befits an increasingly hegemonic consumerist order.
Good-time party music, drugs, fashion, celebrity – this is the essence of British music, both ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ (if that increasingly meaningless distinction holds any longer) in 2007. The pre-eminent sounds of the year – New Rave and Electro – have borrowed from the electronic music of the eighties, but only in the most superficial, lazily copyistic fashion, so that the residual spirit of sixties-style radicalism and experimentation that persisted in the work of artists such as Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, New Order, Human League, and the later collectivism of the Acid House period, have been almost entirely lost in translation. Intelligent, subversive pop lyrics have been exchanged for facile iterations of the retrograde trend (see Calvin Harris) and nasty, narcissistic sneering. The year’s most representative line, both for its egomaniacal mean-spiritedness and for its frighteningly close-to-the-bone summation of the present state of things came from Bodyrox: ‘You think you’ve got it all worked out, but you don’t know nothing, nothing, nothing’.
The eighties weren’t all bad. If there exists any fantastic hope at all in the present case, it is that we might in our manic pilfering get beyond the fancy dress and recover some eighties-style anti-establishment tendencies. In addition to the shallowness of the corporate surface currently being mined, the decade was also notable for a powerful strain of opposition to conservatism – both political and musical – that was to a certain extent done away with in the nineties of New Labour and Oasis. You only have to look at Rick from The Young Ones for an example of how this kind of radicalism might descend to ridiculous levels of naivety, but perhaps a little impassioned anarchism, even of the unsophisticated sophomoric variety, would make a welcome change in the current climate? If the signs are correct, and a new era of reinvigorated Thatcherism is upon us, we are going to have to start thinking about where we might draw inspiration from in establishing a solid counter-reaction to conservatism in all its odious cultural manifestations. The oppositional fringe of the eighties, with its Red Wedge, its Factory Records, its belligerent and subversive NME, and its Rick Young Ones, might after all be a good place to begin.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
ON THE DEMISE OF SIGNIFICANT MINORITIES
-
With the penultimate year of the decade fast approaching, we are still awaiting a band/artist capable of defining the epoch. In the musical world at large, and certainly within the UK, no-one has been able to produce a consistent and durable body of work, nor effect genuine, lasting artistic influence on any social or cultural milieu you might care to specify.
Perhaps the last band of this kind was Radiohead. Indeed, it says much about the paucity of the present era that a band formed in the early nineties should continue to occupy this increasingly isolated position at the end of 2007.
Of course, there are considerable advantages to such fragmentation, and obvious problems with a ‘top-down’ music scene organised hierarchically around a handful of Great Bands. Moreover, in the history of popular music, the genre has at all times been sustained by one-off acts of brilliance just as much as it has been by long-term artistic achievements, by small collectives and individuals as well as by big-name heavyweights.
Nevertheless, it is an alarming fact that there do not seem to be any bands that appear likely to inspire the kind of widespread, longstanding devotion to a cause that accompanied the careers of the most notable bands of the last half-century. When we look back at the first decade of the century, will there be anyone at all to point to as an instance of what was both unquestionably important to us and representative of our time? You might be able to rattle off a string of apparently suitable candidates – The Strokes, Eminem, Destinys Child; Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys in the UK – but though these figures will undoubtedly evoke the era, they will surely not occupy (even allowing for the inevitable aggrandising force of nostalgia) the same relation as did the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, The Jam, The Clash, The Smiths, Michael Jackson, The Stone Roses, or even Oasis, to their respective epochs.
Taking British alternative music as a specific case in point, it might be reiterated that there has not appeared in the last decade anyone capable of challenging Radiohead’s position as the most artistically important band in the country, a band whose work is simultaneously reflective of its time and able to appeal meaningfully to a substantial fanbase both within the UK and abroad.
Why is this the case? As the above list of bands makes plain, since its inception in the late seventies British independent music has suffered no shortage of hugely influential, era-defining bands. Alongside The Clash, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Radiohead, you could place The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, Joy Division/New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Happy Mondays, Blur, Pulp – the sequence stops abruptly with Radiohead. Why do we not have a similar list for the first decade of the twenty-first century?
Part of the problem lies paradoxically with the rapid growth in popularity of independent music in the UK since Britpop. Put simply, and partly as a consequence of the political climate initiated by the New Labour landslide of 1997, we have witnessed the large scale disappearance of significant minorities in our country, at exactly the same time as an insignificant majority has come to dominate our cultural and political life. In the world of alternative music, the effects of this can be felt in that we now have a series of bands who mean a little to a great number of people, and very few who mean a lot to the kind of sparsely populated small-scale communities that provide the conditions necessary for a band to evolve successfully.
Clearly, great bands do not arise out of snobbish bohemian coteries, the members of which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. However, one of the factors underlying the extraordinary fertility of British independent music throughout the eighties and nineties was its ability to achieve exactly the right balance of populism and exclusivity. Bands like The Smiths and The Stone Roses could rely on sizable and devoted communities of admirers in such a way that they were able both to sustain themselves financially and to develop artistically without the damaging effects of media scrutiny and industry hype. If The Smiths came out with ‘Hand in Glove’ today, it would go straight to number one, they would be touted by everyone from Elijah Wood to David Cameron, and Johnny Marr would soon develop a drug problem that would threaten the possibility of their second album ever seeing the light of day (I'm not trying to be facetious: this would happen. In fact, hasn't David Cameron claimed to be a Smiths fan? What is happening here!?).
The present climate is not one in which a significant minority (which in my mind is a term synonymous with the concept of a ‘great band’) is likely to flourish. Bands in the last ten years have either been too small to register or have been swallowed by an insignificant majority that seems to prevent any possibility of them attaining either real cultural influence or sustained creative development. In such a way, good bands that might in another era be capable of great things seem to peter out after an initial, wildly disproportionate deluge of interest. The Futureheads, whose fantastic first record fed into a second even more remarkable offering, only for their label to drop them because of lack of sales, represent an especially tragic instance of a pattern repeated elsewhere to differing outcomes in the narratives of Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys. All of the above have been or seem unlikely to survive for long past the frantic bursts of media attention that remove them from smaller-scale contexts in which they might be able to produce music of real worth for audiences that are worthy of the effort.
With the penultimate year of the decade fast approaching, we are still awaiting a band/artist capable of defining the epoch. In the musical world at large, and certainly within the UK, no-one has been able to produce a consistent and durable body of work, nor effect genuine, lasting artistic influence on any social or cultural milieu you might care to specify.
Perhaps the last band of this kind was Radiohead. Indeed, it says much about the paucity of the present era that a band formed in the early nineties should continue to occupy this increasingly isolated position at the end of 2007.
Of course, there are considerable advantages to such fragmentation, and obvious problems with a ‘top-down’ music scene organised hierarchically around a handful of Great Bands. Moreover, in the history of popular music, the genre has at all times been sustained by one-off acts of brilliance just as much as it has been by long-term artistic achievements, by small collectives and individuals as well as by big-name heavyweights.
Nevertheless, it is an alarming fact that there do not seem to be any bands that appear likely to inspire the kind of widespread, longstanding devotion to a cause that accompanied the careers of the most notable bands of the last half-century. When we look back at the first decade of the century, will there be anyone at all to point to as an instance of what was both unquestionably important to us and representative of our time? You might be able to rattle off a string of apparently suitable candidates – The Strokes, Eminem, Destinys Child; Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys in the UK – but though these figures will undoubtedly evoke the era, they will surely not occupy (even allowing for the inevitable aggrandising force of nostalgia) the same relation as did the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, The Jam, The Clash, The Smiths, Michael Jackson, The Stone Roses, or even Oasis, to their respective epochs.
Taking British alternative music as a specific case in point, it might be reiterated that there has not appeared in the last decade anyone capable of challenging Radiohead’s position as the most artistically important band in the country, a band whose work is simultaneously reflective of its time and able to appeal meaningfully to a substantial fanbase both within the UK and abroad.
Why is this the case? As the above list of bands makes plain, since its inception in the late seventies British independent music has suffered no shortage of hugely influential, era-defining bands. Alongside The Clash, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Radiohead, you could place The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, Joy Division/New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Happy Mondays, Blur, Pulp – the sequence stops abruptly with Radiohead. Why do we not have a similar list for the first decade of the twenty-first century?
Part of the problem lies paradoxically with the rapid growth in popularity of independent music in the UK since Britpop. Put simply, and partly as a consequence of the political climate initiated by the New Labour landslide of 1997, we have witnessed the large scale disappearance of significant minorities in our country, at exactly the same time as an insignificant majority has come to dominate our cultural and political life. In the world of alternative music, the effects of this can be felt in that we now have a series of bands who mean a little to a great number of people, and very few who mean a lot to the kind of sparsely populated small-scale communities that provide the conditions necessary for a band to evolve successfully.
Clearly, great bands do not arise out of snobbish bohemian coteries, the members of which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. However, one of the factors underlying the extraordinary fertility of British independent music throughout the eighties and nineties was its ability to achieve exactly the right balance of populism and exclusivity. Bands like The Smiths and The Stone Roses could rely on sizable and devoted communities of admirers in such a way that they were able both to sustain themselves financially and to develop artistically without the damaging effects of media scrutiny and industry hype. If The Smiths came out with ‘Hand in Glove’ today, it would go straight to number one, they would be touted by everyone from Elijah Wood to David Cameron, and Johnny Marr would soon develop a drug problem that would threaten the possibility of their second album ever seeing the light of day (I'm not trying to be facetious: this would happen. In fact, hasn't David Cameron claimed to be a Smiths fan? What is happening here!?).
The present climate is not one in which a significant minority (which in my mind is a term synonymous with the concept of a ‘great band’) is likely to flourish. Bands in the last ten years have either been too small to register or have been swallowed by an insignificant majority that seems to prevent any possibility of them attaining either real cultural influence or sustained creative development. In such a way, good bands that might in another era be capable of great things seem to peter out after an initial, wildly disproportionate deluge of interest. The Futureheads, whose fantastic first record fed into a second even more remarkable offering, only for their label to drop them because of lack of sales, represent an especially tragic instance of a pattern repeated elsewhere to differing outcomes in the narratives of Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys. All of the above have been or seem unlikely to survive for long past the frantic bursts of media attention that remove them from smaller-scale contexts in which they might be able to produce music of real worth for audiences that are worthy of the effort.
Monday, 29 October 2007
BASIL KNEW WHAT HE WAS ABOUT, FO' SHO' ...
-
Only men rejected by men can keep
either truth or beauty in view.
The moment advantage has a
part in his studies or his craft,
his work perishes.
- Basil Bunting
Only men rejected by men can keep
either truth or beauty in view.
The moment advantage has a
part in his studies or his craft,
his work perishes.
- Basil Bunting
Thursday, 25 October 2007
COMMUNICATION FROM BOBO #2
-
About Me:
IM MENTAL ME LIKE, na only joking im just proper mint, just ded, ded humble and that
About Me:
IM MENTAL ME LIKE, na only joking im just proper mint, just ded, ded humble and that
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
AS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF ON ULYSSES ('THE BOOK OF A SELF-TAUGHT WORKING MAN') I DON'T THINK FORGIVENESS IS POSSIBLE IN THIS INSTANCE
-
I know many people have already pointed out the outrageousness of Ms Lily Allen's recent comments as regards class, but I shall rehearse them one more time for good measure.
Responding to what are in my view entirely justified recent attacks on her mockney accent in the masterly musical satire that is 'LDN Is A Victim' (see article below), Allen states:
'So what if we're middle class? Just 'cos your mum was too lazy to get her fat ass up off the sofa and make some cash. I shouldn't be able to make tunes, yeah?'
.....
JESUS
FUCKING
CHRIST
.....
Sometimes a person will make a comment so spectacularly reprehensible on every conceivable level, that you begin to wonder whether anything they ever say or do can make amends.
I know many people have already pointed out the outrageousness of Ms Lily Allen's recent comments as regards class, but I shall rehearse them one more time for good measure.
Responding to what are in my view entirely justified recent attacks on her mockney accent in the masterly musical satire that is 'LDN Is A Victim' (see article below), Allen states:
'So what if we're middle class? Just 'cos your mum was too lazy to get her fat ass up off the sofa and make some cash. I shouldn't be able to make tunes, yeah?'
.....
JESUS
FUCKING
CHRIST
.....
Sometimes a person will make a comment so spectacularly reprehensible on every conceivable level, that you begin to wonder whether anything they ever say or do can make amends.
Friday, 5 October 2007
ON ACCENTS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY POPULAR MUSIC
-
The present increasingly desperate attempts by the commercial musical mainstream to adopt caricatured Indie! posturings having resulted in a vogue for an exaggerated, bogus colloquialism as regards the pronunciation of lyrics, now might be an appropriate juncture to reflect on the issue of accents in popular music.
The leaders of the current school of corporate-independent music – Lily Allen, The Kooks, Kate Nash - united in their predilection for placing an inordinate emphasis on ostentatiously enunciated regional accents in their work, might in self-defence point to a long tradition in popular music of adopting an alien vocal pronunciation in the name of good art. For all that the Beatles initiated a short-lived trend for their native Liverpudlian accent in mid-sixties pop, the larger portion of their vocals are consciously Americanised, if somewhat idiosyncratically and often erroneously (a comic case in point occurring in their cover of ‘’Til There Was You’, with Macca inserting a rhotic ‘r’ sound into the word saw: ‘but I never sore them singing’). Other of the notable British bands of the period – The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, even quintessentially ‘English’ bands such as The Kinks - shared this tendency adopt American or ‘mid-Atlantic’ pronunciation. With punk arrived half-notions of authenticity giving rise to an aggrandisement of the demotic, but did the cockneyfied vocals of Joe Strummer really accord with his middle-class background (this is not to mention the Geordie Sting’s hideous cod-Jamaican travesties in the ensuing era)?
Good popular musicians, like all good artists, understand that creativity involves all manner of role-playing, mask-wearing, and experimentation with a multitude of disparate identities just as much as it demands fidelity to one’s origins (cf. Shakespeare’s ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ (Hamlet, 1.3.78), alongside the countervailing, and perhaps more representative, view of Jacques in As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage … and one man in his time plays many parts’ (2.7.139-142)). Any creative process is fundamentally one of transformation through affectation, of development through the exploration and adoption of foreign modes. Conversely, clinging dogmatically to fixed, naively naturalistic notions of selfhood can get you into all kinds of trouble, not the least of which might be a tendency to produce boring, conservative art that endlessly repeats the same calcified puritanical half-truths, founded on the spurious notion that a straightforward artistic representation of truth is at all possible (cf. The Twang, Kasabian, latter-day Oasis &c).
So there is nothing wrong with attempting to expand artistic horizons by adopting an exotic persona. The deployment of an unusual vocal inflection might even allow you to realize otherwise unattainable creative goals. Would the Rolling Stones or Radiohead ever have been taken seriously if Mick Jagger and Thom Yorke hadn’t replaced their monotonic Home Counties accents with more sonorous and malleable American modes of speech? Isn’t this all Allen, Nash, Luke Kooks et al are doing by appropriating, respectively, ‘New London’ and Scouse accents?
Well, yes and no. On the one hand, as has been suggested, it is perfectly acceptable to try out new roles if the aim is to enhance your range of creative possibilities. However, a far less generous response might be expected if your aim in adopting a regional accent is not in fact artistic but motivated by a desire to co-opt the anti-authoritarian brio of the cultural margins in order to align yourself with a commercial trend for ‘edgy’ music that also evokes the ghost of alternative music of the past without retaining any of its original political or aesthetic impetus. For alternative music to retread shaky notions of authenticity is one thing, but what happens when the mainstream begins to disguise its naked corporate avarice by attempting to borrow an authenticity that was never quite authentic in the first place, capitalizing on the misconceptions of an aging demographic who, mindful of an adolescence spent listening to Old Indie, still naively equate external trimmings such as a distinctive regional accent with precarious if well-meaning concepts of ‘realness’?
The defense for the Kooks and co. is negated by the fact that they make a virtue (and presumably lots of money) out of borrowing the last scattered remains of the counter-culture’s rhetoric of legitimacy, cloaking their upper-middle class accents (which would give the game away as regards their Thatcherite, money/fame-oriented intentions) by posing as marginal figures in defiance of a mainstream they secretly epitomize.
The present increasingly desperate attempts by the commercial musical mainstream to adopt caricatured Indie! posturings having resulted in a vogue for an exaggerated, bogus colloquialism as regards the pronunciation of lyrics, now might be an appropriate juncture to reflect on the issue of accents in popular music.
The leaders of the current school of corporate-independent music – Lily Allen, The Kooks, Kate Nash - united in their predilection for placing an inordinate emphasis on ostentatiously enunciated regional accents in their work, might in self-defence point to a long tradition in popular music of adopting an alien vocal pronunciation in the name of good art. For all that the Beatles initiated a short-lived trend for their native Liverpudlian accent in mid-sixties pop, the larger portion of their vocals are consciously Americanised, if somewhat idiosyncratically and often erroneously (a comic case in point occurring in their cover of ‘’Til There Was You’, with Macca inserting a rhotic ‘r’ sound into the word saw: ‘but I never sore them singing’). Other of the notable British bands of the period – The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, even quintessentially ‘English’ bands such as The Kinks - shared this tendency adopt American or ‘mid-Atlantic’ pronunciation. With punk arrived half-notions of authenticity giving rise to an aggrandisement of the demotic, but did the cockneyfied vocals of Joe Strummer really accord with his middle-class background (this is not to mention the Geordie Sting’s hideous cod-Jamaican travesties in the ensuing era)?
Good popular musicians, like all good artists, understand that creativity involves all manner of role-playing, mask-wearing, and experimentation with a multitude of disparate identities just as much as it demands fidelity to one’s origins (cf. Shakespeare’s ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ (Hamlet, 1.3.78), alongside the countervailing, and perhaps more representative, view of Jacques in As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage … and one man in his time plays many parts’ (2.7.139-142)). Any creative process is fundamentally one of transformation through affectation, of development through the exploration and adoption of foreign modes. Conversely, clinging dogmatically to fixed, naively naturalistic notions of selfhood can get you into all kinds of trouble, not the least of which might be a tendency to produce boring, conservative art that endlessly repeats the same calcified puritanical half-truths, founded on the spurious notion that a straightforward artistic representation of truth is at all possible (cf. The Twang, Kasabian, latter-day Oasis &c).
So there is nothing wrong with attempting to expand artistic horizons by adopting an exotic persona. The deployment of an unusual vocal inflection might even allow you to realize otherwise unattainable creative goals. Would the Rolling Stones or Radiohead ever have been taken seriously if Mick Jagger and Thom Yorke hadn’t replaced their monotonic Home Counties accents with more sonorous and malleable American modes of speech? Isn’t this all Allen, Nash, Luke Kooks et al are doing by appropriating, respectively, ‘New London’ and Scouse accents?
Well, yes and no. On the one hand, as has been suggested, it is perfectly acceptable to try out new roles if the aim is to enhance your range of creative possibilities. However, a far less generous response might be expected if your aim in adopting a regional accent is not in fact artistic but motivated by a desire to co-opt the anti-authoritarian brio of the cultural margins in order to align yourself with a commercial trend for ‘edgy’ music that also evokes the ghost of alternative music of the past without retaining any of its original political or aesthetic impetus. For alternative music to retread shaky notions of authenticity is one thing, but what happens when the mainstream begins to disguise its naked corporate avarice by attempting to borrow an authenticity that was never quite authentic in the first place, capitalizing on the misconceptions of an aging demographic who, mindful of an adolescence spent listening to Old Indie, still naively equate external trimmings such as a distinctive regional accent with precarious if well-meaning concepts of ‘realness’?
The defense for the Kooks and co. is negated by the fact that they make a virtue (and presumably lots of money) out of borrowing the last scattered remains of the counter-culture’s rhetoric of legitimacy, cloaking their upper-middle class accents (which would give the game away as regards their Thatcherite, money/fame-oriented intentions) by posing as marginal figures in defiance of a mainstream they secretly epitomize.
Monday, 1 October 2007
A NEW ONE FOR THE O.E.D
-
whileyfication /wīl-if-i-kā’-shun/ n a deteriorative process of gradual dilution occurring over a period of time; an excessive, indiscriminate, uncritical enthusiasm, esp when referring to music
festivals; an ability to identify aesthetic or other value in the music of David Gray; a slow travestying of British alternative music through the incremental hybridisation of that genre’s artistic and ethical principles with those of MOR market-driven rock, the conservative singer-songwriter sub-genre, celebrity culture, fashion, consumerism, and other manifestations of post-Thatcherite culture (cf. William Burroughs on the American Dream: 'to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through').
whileyfication /wīl-if-i-kā’-shun/ n a deteriorative process of gradual dilution occurring over a period of time; an excessive, indiscriminate, uncritical enthusiasm, esp when referring to music
festivals; an ability to identify aesthetic or other value in the music of David Gray; a slow travestying of British alternative music through the incremental hybridisation of that genre’s artistic and ethical principles with those of MOR market-driven rock, the conservative singer-songwriter sub-genre, celebrity culture, fashion, consumerism, and other manifestations of post-Thatcherite culture (cf. William Burroughs on the American Dream: 'to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through').
Friday, 7 September 2007
THANK FUCK FOR OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH
'What about that thing we were going to do?'
Higgs and I having just finished our marathon viewing of the Our Friends in the North DVD (all 10hrs 23mins of it), I would just like to say how fucking glad I am this wonderful social-realist document exists.
Our Friends in the North is an epic in the true sense of the word, in that it records and reflects back the recent history of an entire society. How rare is it today to come across a narrative that attempts to embody the story of a tribe in all its panoramic scope? OFITN parallels Middlemarch in so many respects, and it deserves to occupy a place on every British DVD rack in the same way that you might once have expected to find Middlemarch on every bookshelf in the country.
My personal favourite moment is when the southern policeman up north for the miners’ strike adopts a faux Geordie accent to piss off Anthony. What comes out is pretty poor, but not detectably different from any of the supposedly authentic ‘Geordies’ – Eccleston, Craig et al – heard in previous scenes, and a noticeable improvement on Nicky’s mother, who seems to have arrived in Newcastle via the Indian sub-continent (as well as somewhere Hebridean? Or perhaps Galway? There’s a definite Gaelic lilt there).
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