'Yet it did seem ... as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact' - Hard Times
Monday, 24 January 2011
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"]
I've been moving house/room this week so only time for a short post on the latest Toon debacle.
Underneath the shards of absurdist debris (Pardew appointed because of a gambling habit, Hughton described as "not big enough" like he's some kind of subhuman homuncule, Freddy Shepherd lecturing fans on their "duty" to stick by the team) the main upshot of the farrago is that the British football plutocracy has once again been exposed as an utterly irrationalist tendency that defies analysis.
As with the renaming of SJP (see below) there does not even seem to be any substantial motivation on the part ofAshley himself to have acted in this way. The dangers of replacing Hughton are obvious; just what on earth are the possible advantages? As with Clegg and the Lib Dems, Ashley's latest emphatically malign and unpopular decision looks like an inexplicable piece of self-immolation (though Clegg at least has the "excuses" of careerism and the possibility of a future outright defection to the Tories). I cannot think of a single rational explanation for Ashley's actions.
Has neoliberal capitalism reached a stage of development wherein the disgustingly wealthy and powerful indulge in arcane, provocative, bewildering behaviour just because they can? Does some natural human inclination toward frisson and conflict lead mandarins like Clegg and Ashley to be this visibly stupid and corrupt merely in order to provoke an outraged response? If so then by god they'll get it.
Events like those of the past two days underline the utter bankruptcy of the notion that the rulers of the country are somehow pragmatic professionals living in a "real world" untainted by adolescent idealism, committed to unavoidable "progressive" action, to soberly "getting on with the job". These people are not only gutless and soulless but totally, maniacally headless.
