THE OPPOSITE OF FOLK

An extract from the book is up on the Zero Blog.

When I wrote all that stuff about Mumford and Sons over two sodding years ago now, I honestly thought nu-folk was already on the way out.

It wasn't.

CULTURE INDUSTRY 2012, BUMPER SUPER EXTRA

A friend asked me what I thought about the Mercury Prize …

I dunno, what more is there to say? I suppose I thought there had been another turn of the screw this year in terms of the hype, and concurrently, the irrelevance of the whole thing. The two seem to be related. The more hysterical and insular the mediascape gets, the less people care. As with the Booker Prize, The Guardian worked itself into a frenzy with ridiculous “hustings” comment pieces, profiles on the nominees, etc, all of which would have been unimaginable in, say, the late nineties. But like contemporary politics, the music industry is now at such far remove from anything like a communitarian base that even this level of coverage/noise will almost certainly have no lasting impact on Alt-J or any of the other artists.

It was interesting that Alexis Petridis said something similar in a Guardian piece/sales summary, but in a way that illustrated just how grounded in PR commentary coverage of music has become (the fact that it’s now possible to use the word “coverage” in earnest seems to be symptomatic of the shifts I’m talking about). Bands/artists wither into the void if they don’t develop "momentum", if they don’t get enough promo, if they don’t break through to “sustainable territory”. Of course these have been stock aspects of the music industry since time immemorial. But instead of abating – as one might think it would in these days of Occupy and ongoing burgeoning crisis – the capitalisation of art is deepening in ever more subtle and profound ways. The alternative has still not manifested itself. There still isn’t really anything to discuss other than career trajectories, no vocabulary outside of promospeak.

Nick Grimshaw: on balance, a lobotomised fuck.

Another instance is the recent switch between Chris Moyles and Nick "Friend to the Stars" Grimshaw on the Radio 1 breakfast show. Far be it from me to make a martyr of Moyles, who was clearly a grade-A fucking neo-Savilite working-class-Tory shit-sack. But at least there was a streak of bathos and scepticism in his presenting act. His replacement, by contrast, seems to be the result of a music industry conspiracy to get the most bland, capitalistic Yes-man imaginable installed in a position of public power and centrality. Grimshaw sounds and acts precisely like a PR man. This is probably at least in part because he used to be a PR man. Moyles was a clownish light entertainer, but Grimshaw speaks with the vague authority of Someone Who Knows About Serious Music, and plays whatever hype-bands need “coverage” in any given week. (There are manifest similarities here with the Mercury Prize, which was founded by the industry as a way of giving album sales a boost in the late-summer/early-autumn downturn.)

These might seem like minor developments, but cumulatively they have a big effect.

Of course it's a familiar story: “how the counterculture was superseded by hipster culture”. Hipster culture takes the remains of the left, the remains of the counterculture, voids it of subversion and makes it saleable. The centre ground comes to be dominated by superficially “innovative” art that is conservative or at best ideologically insensate, and one is continually forced to remind oneself that “indie” is the exact antithesis of what it once was. I repeat that I’m not saying anything very ingenious here, but I am surprised at the sheer formidable extenuation of these Adornian movements, and at the continuing lack of resistance.

In this bravura piece over at the Oxonian Review, Joe Kennedy says something very similar about modern British poetry, with much more pith and articulacy than I’ve mustered here.

And here, as a special appendix, is said friend’s soundbite summaries of the Mercury nominees, which are all pretty much spot on I think:

Sam Lee: "admirable ... a good kind of scholar"

Django Django: "don't like ... and the wanky clothes don't endear"

Richard Hawley: "sounds like fucking Kasabian to me"

Alt-J: "nicepresentableposhboys in interview ... ultimately sign-of-the-times wankers I think"

Field Music: "should have won ... they manage to be in good traditions but surprising and new at the same time"

Lianne le ...: "fairly boring"

Michael K: "can't believe this is on here ... pure pastiche surely?"

Jessie W: "zzzzzz"

Plan B: "I know nothing about rap ... but oddly I liked this more than most of the stuff here"

Jazz Trio: "err, they're a jazz trio"

Maccabees: "U2 pompous Bono vocals, stadium rock pretensions ... is this unfair?"

THE POLITICAL DIMENSION OF SENTIMENTALITY

Great post by Peter Fanning over at the NUST blog, which summarises a whole lot of straightforward righteousness. No matter how many times I read that Bobby Robson quotation, it never seems hackneyed. It's the political dimension of sentimentality, innit, like I was saying about that Del Amitri tune earlier this year.

Speaking of which, I finally finished reading Ruskin's Praeterita the other day, which has an interesting section towards the end about Carlyle and Scottish art:

... the whole tone of Scottish temper, ballad poetry, and music, which no other school has ever been able to imitate, has arisen out of the sad associations which, one by one, have gathered round every loveliest scene in the border land. Nor is there anything among other beautiful nations to approach the dignity of a true Scotswoman's face, in the tried perfectness of her old age.

Okay, so maybe this is sentimental, gloopy Victorianism, especially the last sentence. But it nails Del Amitri!

By the way, I wouldn't recommend Praeterita. Lots of picturesque descriptions of the Alps and absolutely no proto-socialism. Having said that, in my edition there was a pretty good preface by Kenneth Clark, which I read at the end (so's not to spoil the story, y'kna); Clark points out that Praeterita was essentially a work of consolation written in the wake of Ruskin's political disappointments. The pathos of this went a long way to redeeming the book's escapism. But still, I would go for the critical, political stuff instead, if you're that way inclined.

THE DAY I MET MY HERO

 

I get off the Overground at South Hampstead and it immediately starts pissing it down. I’m slightly late so I think about running, but I’ve got three layers on – a lot for an unreconstructed Northumbrian – and I don’t want to be sweaty and florid for the big man.

            Predictably, when I get to Abbey Road, I’m the first one there. Catriona the Warner PR lass meets me after a short while in the reception. She’s clearly a bit music-biz, a bit ersatz, but frankly, because of her base of friendliness and the fact that she’s not a 40+ man, she will seem more and more like a paragon of human decency as the next hour unfolds. The next person I’m introduced to, I’m never quite sure who he is. He could be the head of Warner, he could be the producer of the album, he could be the studio owner or Johnny’s manager. It doesn’t matter much. Because he looks and is dressed very similarly to Bill Nighy (Bill Nighy in, well, anything), I’m going to call him Bill, which is almost unquestionably not his name. Bill is in his forties, is wearing an expensive black suit with a black shirt underneath, and has one of those Stones-y haircuts which make me thank Sir Mick of Jagger I don’t live in Manchester any more.

            We head up to a small room on the second floor. When I daydream of Abbey Road, I think of the stock stuff: the Summer of Love, visions of the Beatles bursting into immaculate 3-part harmonies at the pinnacle of the twentieth century, Ringo eating a Chinese takeaway in the corner, that sort of thing. This room, however, looks like a basement in a sixth-form college in Stoke [no offence, Ms. Weston]. It must be less than 15 feet wide and 7 or 8 feet deep. There appears to be some sort of Blur box-set on a shelf on one side of the room (like, ew), and on the other is one of those tacky posterboard things, you know, the ones you buy from the pound shop that usually have a fuzzy picture of Al Pacino in Scarface on the front. This one has a picture of The Smiths on it, along with the words “The Smiths” in comic sans. (Only joking about the comic sans, but you get the idea.)

            I ask Bill if I can record the interview, like The Quietus has asked me to.

            “Oh no. This isn’t an interview you know”.

            “Ah. What is it then?”

            “It’s just a chance to listen to some tracks from Johnny’s new album and hang out with him!” Catriona says, with bubbles.

            “Ah. No problem”. Follows an awkward pause.

            “Sit anywhere you like,” Bill says finally. “The other journalists should be here soon, and Johnny’s just having a spot of lunch.” Which other journalists? I think to myself. What is this?

            I decide to sit in the chair in the corner.

            “Don't sit in that chair! That’s my chair. Sit anywhere, except there.” I literally laugh at Bill when he says this, but he doesn’t laugh back.

The other music journalists arrive about twenty minutes late, conspicuously dry after their taxi journeys from central London. Roger Fluellen Johnson from The Observer is in his forties, is wearing a trendy suit, and has one of those Stones-y haircuts too. Mike Thompson from Mojo is in his forties, is wearing an expensive suit, and has one of those Stones-y … you get the picture. Johnny arrives and he looks exactly like all the other guys, I’m afraid to say. Is this the man who wrote “Please Please Please (Let Me Get What I Want)”? I find it difficult to countenance the idea.

            Over the next half hour we are treated to seven songs played at ear-splitting volume from the forthcoming album, which nobody outside the room has heard before. Apparently the record company people were blown away when they first heard these works-in-progress, and thought: we really have to play these to other people. It seem that that’s where the idea for this “thing” came from (no-one else seems to know what it is either) – we just really wanted to share these songs. I find it interesting that the “other people” they want to share the tracks with just so happen to be representatives of the major music press publications (plus, inexplicably, me), but I keep my mouth shut.

            The seven songs are, without exception, unutterably lifeless, detumescent dad rock. The third one is, I suppose, not that bad. It could almost be by Wild Nothing or Real Estate (ie. bands who sound a bit like The Smiths in a decorative, 2012-hipster sort of way). But the rest is unequivocally awful, like Oasis but much, much worse, replete with lyrics like “I wanna leave town” and “lookin’ through my eyes now” and “wakin’ up in the sun now” (it’s always a bad sign when lyricists put “now” at the end of a line just to fill out the scansion).

            At the end of the seventh song, Bill leans over to the mixing desk, and theatrically turns the volume knob right down, to signal the end of the performance. We clap enthusiastically (even me - hell, what can a brother do?). Follows a long discourse from Johnny and the record company people about where the record “came from”, which is so heartbreakingly boring I won’t recount it.

            The assembled journos each take turns to say very bland, positive stuff about the songs. At one point Mike Thompson from Mojo pipes up, “It’s almost Smithsy, in parts.” The faces of the record company people fall flat. This is not the right thing to say, it seems.

            Bill interjects: “Hmm, yeah, we thought that at first. But then we thought, actually, it’s not so much Smithsy as … Johnny. It’s actually just Johnny.” Everyone murmurs eager assent, and the conversation is wrapped up. We get our coats and pile out of Abbey Road.

            “Goodbye Alex. Take care now”, says Johnny, as I head down the steps and out onto the waterlogged street.

THIS IS FOR MY TRAPPED IN THE '90S ***GAZ

Just how did this happen? The last thing anyone predicted was that 2012 would be dominated neither by an expansion of Occupy nor a resurgence of right-wing populism. Instead we have a government that is doing exactly the same thing British governments have done for the last 30 years, ie. moderately strengthening and deepening neoliberal expansion. I don't care if Labour get in next time around, they show absolutely no sign that they'd do anything other than very cautiously modify the right-of-centre agenda; I mean, I seriously doubt whether wondercunts like Balls and the MilliPods would even have the fucking guts to roll back Osborne's latest attempt to play Battleships with the human rights of the populace with this "shares for rights" fucking travesty. What a fucking fucking bunch of fucking cunts.

But seeing as this is The Fantastic Hope an all (although in this instance The Barely Excusable Escapism is far more accurate) ...

I was saved from a total nervous collapse yesterday by getting properly acquainted with the new Nas album, moments of which are so astonishingly accomplished and vital, it literally made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.

Sum highlights:

Music is good. Even if life isn't.

CHARLOTTE WITHERS

We might have
fallen quite
melodiously
in love.

Her father
the widowed
Mr. Withers
was in town
visiting his
umquwhile
clientage
on carboniferous
business.

While
he wandered
on the coal wharves
we disputed
the relative merits
of painting
and music.

I wrote an essay
nine foolscap
pages long
dedicated to the
total overthrow
and discomfiture
of her opinions
and the establishment
of mine.

She wasn’t pretty,
rather, pleasant
in a wild-flower
sort of way,
especially if her
eyes were
looking at you,
and her mind
with them.

I said
goodbye
to this fragile,
freckled, fair,
sensitive
slip of a girl
on Camberwell Green
in the Spring of ’38.

A short
while later
her father
“negotiated” her
marriage
to a Newcastle
coal merchant,
who treated her
pretty much
as one of his
coal sacks
and she died
within a year.

(Ruskin, Praeterita, pp. 207-8.)

WHAT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO CALL "ELEMENTAL RESOCIALISATION"

The Audience:

The Answer.
 

A GLOSS ON HILLSBOROUGH

As is now unambiguously clear, part of the reason both Hillsborough and the subsequent cover-up happened in the first place was a popular belief that football supporters are invariably aggressive, recalcitrant, stupid, lumpen, and dishonest. This attitude was present in the minds of the police and emergency services as the tragedy unfolded. It was present in the minds of the police hierarchy and the Tory MP Irvine Patnick as they sought to deflect blame away from themselves and onto the fans as easy targets. It was present in the minds of The Sun editors who sought to shoehorn the tragedy into a wider propaganda campaign directed at discrediting British (particularly northern) working-class people in the wake of the miners' strike and the general mood of insurrection of the Thatcher years. It was present in the minds of all the people at the time who eagerly seized on the received Sun/government version of events as confirmation of their prejudices. Over the last two decades, it has remained a popular attitude, for example, in the mind of Boris Johnson, who argued that people in Liverpool were wallowing in "victim status" in the wake of Hillsborough. It is still the popular perception in the minds of many people today.

On the right, football-bashing follows the form of the old "rugby is a thug's game played by gentleman; football is a gentleman's game played by thugs" adage. This is a pernicious and influential, if boring and predictable, class-based stereotype. On the left a more elaborate complex is evident. For all that the Blairite soft (soft) left valorised football in the nineties and noughties as an accessory of its Cool Britannia mythos, it seems that many - if not most - people on the left even now share the right-wing disdain for lumpen, thuggish football fans. In place of the usual class-based right-wing slurs - drunkenness, yobbishness, sheer common stupidity - leftist commentators attack football and football fans from leftist angles of attack: football supporters are racist, or misogynist, or passive, imbecilic consumers of a capitalist leisure industry. Marc Perelman's recent book for the left-wing London publisher Verso, Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague encapsulated this tendency.

What we might call the "empowered left" - journalists, publishers, media figures, politicians - typically adopt some variation of the above position, substituting bien pensant critique for traditional snobbery (or perhaps conflating the two). The result is an intellectual consensus across the board: football is a thug's game. The London left carries on with its bookstalls, launch parties, discussion groups, music festivals, Twitter noise, online chatter. Meanwhile, people outside of the empowered left, the people who are always somehow exiled to the outside of the circle of thought and influence, are dying, being silenced, campaigning, and just occasionally - after many years of hoping and striving - achieving victories against a rotten establishment on the ground of the culture and causes that matter to them.

Until this gulf is somehow narrowed, until the assumptions of ugliness are banished, until the negative, knee-jerk epigrams disappear that are still widespread about football, the British regions, and a mainstream oppositional culture that is not some "white working-class" throwback but a living and breathing normative radicalism in potentia, the really powerful will remain free to depict tragedies like Hillsborough however they see fit.

A WORLD ELSEWHERE

Slightly puzzling lack of comment from the left about the Hillsborough findings.

I'd like to think this isn't another instance of Badiou-reading Alfie Meadows supporters disdaining, y'know, actual working-class causes outside of London/the London commentariat. But then I can't be sure.

PS

‎70s Bowie is Opening Ceremony, 80s Bowie is Closing Ceremony. All putatively/aspirationally socialist pop ever is Opening Ceremony, all unabashedly consumerist and passive pop ever is Closing Ceremony. The distinctions have been there for decades, of course; we just haven't had such a universally-understandable distinction until now.

Robin Carmody on Facebook. Broadly true I think.