Music

"Without music, life would be a mistake" - Friedrich Nietzsche.

You’d think by now it would have ceased to surprise me, but if anything it just baffles me more these days: Why does music work? And, since I agree with Friedrich up there, why the hell does messing about with sound even matter, let alone matter so much to me? It’s as if its very presence in modern life is a constant reminder that the human world is not fundamentally based on rationality, but strange half-understood emotional impulses and ritualised behaviour. I mean it makes no sense does it? Why should the manipulation of tonal vibrations and rhythms be so powerful and beloved, to point its everywhere in society and the people who make it can be so prized and idolised?

That said, I know for many it’s really never much more than wallpaper to hum or dance to. I even struggle to explain it to people in my life, who hear me noodling around, once again, with this or that instrument or piece of machinery for no apparent end; or listen uncomprehendingly to maybe a minute from one of the dozens of hours of odd and jarringly disparate constructions I have spent so many days crafting... and say “that’s nice dear” or shrug “s’alright I 'spose”. I’ve accepted I have to say it’s a hobby, as if it simply occupies a place in my life like rollerblading or playing Pokemon Go. Of course, it is a hobby, it is, but...

I am nearly 40, long past the teenage tribalism of music-as-fashion-identity, long past any desire to get up on stage and strut my stuff, long past any dream of turning it into a career ­– all of this is virtually irrelevant now. Many of my contemporaries, even those who were seriously into their music, have to some extent left it partially behind by this stage, putting away the proverbial toys in the proverbial attic, while their listening has not gone much beyond what they loved when they were 25.

And yet, now, at the start of middle age, dicking about with noise and finding stuff to listen to is as utterly vital to me as ever, if not in resurgence. So what is this all about, if not an early midlife crisis?

Therapy

One of the reasons I value music so much now, as opposed to when I was 17, is for its therapeutic quality. That's more important now, with the stresses and strains of "adulting", than it was back then, when I was basically just dreaming of being a rock star. I seriously cannot recommend enough what a wonderful thing it is to be able to play an instrument, what a balm it is in the face of world-closing-in stress and black-fug-of-the-soul gloom.

Of course, on the one hand it is an expressive release to channel your feelings through your fingers and have it feedback into your ears – and songwriting has in the past acted as a very precise way of articulating what I was feeling and why, all wrapped up in a finely honed and quite pretty package, like spewing your thoughts out in a letter and analysing and refining them until you’re satisfied. It is satisfying and very cathartic, and you have a little proud gem of a creation to show for your troubles, to keep (and perhaps later cringe at) for all eternity.

But on another level just playing for just yourself is a kind of mindfulness, to use the parlance of our times. I love the fact that picking up an instrument and playing, for no particular end other than to enjoy it, puts you in a state of concentration that has nothing to do with work or practical worries, the pressures of the world, the current state of your bank balance or relationships, or whatever. For half an hour or so you are only concerned with producing a pleasing or interesting sound, and nothing outside of that matters. It’s the act of being-through-playing – it’s damn Zen, dammit, and I constantly forget just how much it clears my head and makes me feel better, bringing at least some degree of calm and content for a moment, along with the thankful knowledge that there is more to life than my current anxious obsessions – there is this too.

And if anyone is any doubt of how deeply playing an instrument can impact on your mental state, take a look at this shizz; or this.

For these reasons I would encourage anyone thinking of taking up an instrument to do it just for themselves – don’t worry about how good you are or how much you need to practice, just dabble in a meditative way on a regular basis and you will slowly find you can do more and more. Approach it not as work, but as exploring and playing.

Play

Without a doubt one of the central elements to my relationship with music is play – it’s not lost on me that getting a new piece of kit to play about with is about the only thing that gives me the same feeling as an adult as getting Lego when I was kid. Pieces of musical gear are big boys toys, yes, and I’m completely unrepentant about that. Again this works on lots of levels.

At the most basic there is the actual moulding and finessing of raw sound. With something like a synthesiser you can approach it in two ways – as an instrument to play, yes, but also as a straight sound-manipulation machine. I tell you, getting your hands on a proper synthesiser is like being handed a fresh piece of shiny, glittery Play Doh which you can kneed and sculpt to your heart’s content until you’ve got something ace. You can tweak away until a boring off-the-peg noise turns into something huge, or achingly atmospheric, or one type of sound completely changes into another – and then save it out and start all over again. Something similar can be said of messing about with effects pedals or recording techniques. It’s great fun, fascinating and exciting.

Then you can take up the instrument as an instrument and just noodle around in the therapeutic way described above, testing and exploring what accents, chords, rhythms and melodies you can coax from it, and when you hit on something that sounds good, keep doing it – the next thing you know you have pretty passage or wonderful riff that you can develop further... and before you know it you’re on your way to writing something. And all the time, you’re learning, practising, improving.

Finally, you can take these sounds, these passages and put them together like ingredients in a pot and see how they cook, as it were – one of the most satisfying things for me is the moment when, having roughly planned out the structure of a song and tried a few different things together, you actually record a few elements layered over each other and then play it back – and, if it works, suddenly it’s more than the sum of its parts; you’ve created something bigger and with more emotional guts and punch than the simple handful of riffs and noises you started with. It's sheer joy.

At every stage you are exploring and playing, checking what you can do and what works, learning and then doing it all again – it keeps your “inner child” alive and it’s got to be good for the plasticity of the brain.

*A note of caution with this approach, though, is that it probably explains a lot as to why I never attempted a music-related career or became seriously good at any one instrument – I may wish I could play piano properly but I was always much more interested in messing about with studio gear, doing bonkers, non-linear things with instruments and putting together songs, than I ever was with learning to read music and practising scales in any systematic way. I never wanted it to be work.

Mood

The older I get the more fascinated and awed I am with the raw stuff of music. For my money it’s the most direct and immediately affecting of the arts, but also one of the most abstract – even though I now know a lot about the tricks, techniques and building blocks of the stuff, there is still so much to learn.

It still seems like utter alchemy how the simple pairing of two or three or four notes, or the contrast of one chord changing to another, or just a tiny shift up or down the scale against a droning root note, can have such an immediate and visceral effect on the emotions. You can evoke the whole range of responses, from sadness to joy to unease to warmth to rage to surprise to surging triumphalism, by a simple shift of the fingers, by changing tensions on groups of strings or the size of resonant chambers – and the effect it has is mind boggling, sheer magic. The same can be said of the sounds themselves, different textures, timbres and resonant frequencies, along with rhythms and tempos.

Why it is so utterly effective at mood manipulation is mysterious, but certainly has something to do with innate responses – such as the (probably) in-born discomfort and alarm at discordant or sudden sounds, related to danger or the crying of an infant, say... or the soothing effect of the mother’s heart beat in the womb, maybe. Certainly the preference for sonic harmony seems to be a universal trait.

Other responses are learnt, particularly the pairing of certain instrument sounds with the time and place they were most used (note everything with a Fender Rhodes electric piano in it immediately sounds like the 1970s) or the pairing of songs with what was happening in your life at the time (an otherwise cheesy ballad can attain deeply affecting grand pathos forevermore if it was on the radio when you split up with a childhood sweetheart or lost a beloved pet, for example).

What’s more, these relatively straightforward responses can then be played with and built upon in ever more complex ways, so you can find yourself enjoying uncomfortable discord if used in the right context, to evoke pleasingly empathetic anguish, righteous anger, or anarchic spirit; or re-imagining a familiar chord progression, melody, or band sound into something new and different, while still riffing on the emotions the original version provoked.

All of this combines to mean certain genres – instrument combinations, styles of playing, song structures, production techniques and other musical tropes and ticks – can be massively evocative of whole worlds. You can be transported to a baroque-period German cathedral, or an English seaside ballroom in the 1930s, or a San Francisco jazz club in the 1950s or a sticky-floored gig in Manchester in 1979, or downtown New York at the same time, or somewhere on a Polynesian island at an indeterminate time in the past, or even THE FUTURE, but how it looked in the 1980s. The sound tells a story, and an immersive one, and that’s a large part of its appeal.

It’s got to be said there is a degree of escapism about this, as there is with a lot of art – but also, as with a lot of art, it reminds you there is so much more to the human world and human history than your own time and place and everyday obsessions. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your bureaucracy.

Metaphor

It is a wonder that music (or art in general) exists at all and continues to hold such an unquenchable fascination and central place in human society, I suppose. On the surface it would seem there is little rational about it, no obvious practical purpose. But then again, through the abstract manipulation of sound we can represent the world in metaphor and powerfully communicate things we struggle to articulate in words alone.

We like to think our actions are motivated by reason and logic but that, to me, has always seemed like a laughable pretence; no, the world and people’s activity is made up of an impenetrably complex web of innate and learnt reactions and gut drives, constantly pinging off each other and feeding back again and again until it’s hard to see what is what. The rational is but a thin veneer on the top, like glib lyrics sung over a minor masterpiece.

Music is perhaps an abstract metaphor for all of this activity, the complexity of the world in microcosm: Endlessly adaptable, infinitely complex in its history and interplay, expressing and provoking the full spectrum of mood, and modes of being. Spanning all human history and culture, it is a mirror of us – and of life itself. I’m not sure what we would be if we took it away.

Three months of jazz

So, as 2016 gets under way, 2015 will go down for me as the year when the penny finally dropped with JAZZ. “Oh great,” I can hear all my friends and acquaintances think, “that’s just what everyone wanted to happen – now he can be boring and pretentious about something else entirely.” More than one of them told me they thought I was into jazz already because I was “that type” - which I decided I would take as a compliment while knowing full well it really wasn’t. So lap it up y’all – here I go.

Jazz does have a reputation, to the outsider, of being boring and difficult, of “all sounding the same” and being either pipe-and-slippers music for old men or chin-strokey hipster music for slightly younger old men. Which perhaps I am now, so perhaps it's apt. But I can put a date on my jazz Damascus moment: September 26, 2015, when on a perverse whim in a record shop (yes, I still do that) I purchased some Thelonious Monk albums in a ludicrously cheap boxed set and found on playing - almost to my surprise - I think I actually really like this. And I didn’t stop playing Monk (whose middle name was “Sphere”, I found out to my utter glee) for a solid month. From there Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Eric goddamn Dolphy, who for my money had to be the coolest cat alive before his teeth-grindingly avoidable death at 36 (younger than me now).

So What?

Now, I do pride myself on having eclectic taste but like everyone who says “oh, I like all kinds of music” I don’t really mean it – I have my preferred comfort zone of artists and styles I return to again and again, from which I occasionally take excursions as a kind of musical tourist; and I’m clearly rooted in rock and pop, particularly of the “alternative” sort, from about 1967 to 2007, just the same as many people of my age. I’ve had a couple of token jazz records in my collection for over a decade – y’know, the usual, Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um, a bit of Louis Armstrong – but they make their way out for a spin maybe once a year at best, when I fancy something a bit different, never quite gripping me enough to want to delve further.

"So what?" you may ask. It is not my intention to wax on about how "grrrrreat" jazz is, I know it’s not for everyone – what I want to convey is the joy, revelation and even relief of discovering and entering a whole new world at the advanced age of 38 that I previously only had a very sketchy and caricatured idea of.

You see Jazz is not just one thing as it seems from the outside, and it occurs to me that the same applies to whole areas of human endeavour that we compartmentalise as “a thing” without really knowing much in depth about the stuff that makes it up. For example, “rock music” or “modern art” or, going further, science, philosophy or – little bit of politics here, Mr Donald Trump – Islam. Again and again you hear people dismissing things under umbrella labels, having only come into contact with a couple of tiny iceberg tips of these things, assuming it’s all like that and they know all about it.

I Didn't Know About You

In jazz there is a wide spectrum of different sub-cultures and schools, historical developments and traditions, worldviews and attitudes contained under its umbrella that run the glut of human temperament and experience; from low brow to high brow, joyous to melancholy, warm to scary, jump-up to soothing, basic to complex, raw to polished, crowd-pleasing to virtually unlistenable.

The freaked out, hypnotic, spiritual "free" jazz Trane was doing in his final days has very little to do with 1920s swing or Dixieland, any more than industrial math-core metal has to do with Buddy Holly, though in both cases there is clearly a shared DNA. On the other hand much of the more challenging arty jazz of 1960s clearly shares a spirit with searching, experimental, iconoclastic music everywhere, from Stockhausen to Aphex Twin to Captain Beefheart - which is a spirit most big band swing, which is essentially popular dance music, is completely devoid of. My point is that within the box of “jazz” some trends are utterly in opposition to each other and some very little to do with each other - and the same can be said of rock music, philosophy and, Mr Donald Trump, Islam.

My Favourite Things

What is interesting about exploring a new (to me) world like this is it puts your tastes in a new light – I haven't just abandoned my previous taste in music and got a new one; rather, without even consciously intending to, I find myself looking for the same kinds of things I value in rock music.

It’s no mistake it was Monk that finally held my attention. A lot of the beginner’s recommendations (I'm ashamed to say even Kind of Blue) sounded a little too much like what I expected to hear, perhaps, so didn't capture my imagination. But I’ve always liked music that’s a little offbeat, surprises me and has a sense of humour - and Monk has that in spades.

I found myself astonished at his piano style, which seems to have come from outer space, as if his weird runs and chords are raising their eyebrows at the rest of the quartet - why did he play like that? How? He was a consummate eccentric and original, seeming to delight in the surprising note or strange clonk at the odd time, while remaining swinging, fun and accessible - perfect.

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

On the other hand some things just don't survive the translation from rock to jazz or back again – in rock and pop there’s always been the whole simplicity and rawness thing as a mark of vitality and authenticity – virtuosity in rock happens, but has never been cool, really, whereas in jazz it’s practically essential. Meanwhile, while jazz clearly has its own silly fashions and image trappings - I was astonished to see the camera pan onto the audience at a Mingus concert in 1964 to reveal six or seven young men dotted about wearing "tea" shades indoors, at night - but even so, jazz has simply nowhere near the all-too-often style-is-as-important-as-substance nature of rock and pop. But that’s refreshing, as you find yourself able to jettison so much of the cultural baggage in the migration - there is a real freedom to entering such a new world as an outsider: You can shrug off the tired old conventions you are used to, but don't have to take on the native snobberies and etiquette of the new world if you don't want to.

To go broader on that point, delving into jazz that was largely being made in the 50s and 60s offers just a tiny bit of mental relief from the zeitgeist of millennial Britain (which much as I appreciate, can get maddeningly samey and stifling on occasion, it's got to be said) – the decades-old transatlantic jazz world is a recognisable one, but there is still a difference in how things are valued and interpreted, the importance not quite placed on the same things in the same way. It puts your own time and culture, and its ephemeral nature, in perspective - as any sustained brush with history does, of course.

A Love Supreme

Finally, I’ve found the mother of new, rich seams in my ongoing mining of all things music. When I discover a new old band or artist I tend to hoover up their back catalogue in a matter of months before I get restless and go looking for something new. This will keep me going for years. It's not just the music, it's everything that surrounds it - there are whole new terms providing me with endless amusement (“Third Stream”, ffs; “New Thing”, ffs). I've even found myself getting interested in the instruments in a way I haven't before - the family of the saxophone and how each member works; the existence of pocket trumpets and bass clarinets which, while not a shock, have simply never been on my radar before...

You think you know the world - but when you delve into that labelled box you thought you had pegged, with no need to know any more about, it's contents prove so rich and diverse you find yourself overwhelmed – and realise just how little you know and how limited your worldview is. Neither box nor world will ever look the same again, and that's a pleasant surprise and an optimism-fuelling lesson.

What if everything is like that? I'm pretty sure everything is like that.

The strange case of Kanye West

He took one of the biggest entourages the festival has ever seen with him to Glastonbury – and then performed virtually alone for almost two hours.

Apart from the sheer irony of that fact, Mr West’s Glastonbury performance was the man’s whole thing right there in microcosm – the sheer ego of insisting on holding a headlining slot at one of the world’s most high profile festivals on his own on an empty stage; the grand statement in artistic minimalism that only partially worked; the disjointed flow of someone insisting on doing their own thing without any concessions to the audience; the fact that he looked rather lonely and painfully like he was trying to prove something amid the grand scale of the set up... and yet - whether wholly successful or not, he undoubtedly did end up having done something really quite unique and distinctive in the history of Pyramid Stage bill-toppers.

Not Fiddy Pence

I admit that I am utterly fascinated with Kanye – equal parts appalled at the oh-so-LA materialism, arrogance and excess, amused by his repeated foot-in-mouth buffoonery and absurd pomposity but, in spite of all that, still grudgingly impressed and intrigued with his originality, balls and, let's face it, strangeness. Whilst his mass populist appeal may belie the fact, it's pretty clear by now that the guy is pretty weird.

Say what you will about Kanye, he does have an artistic vision – I suspect a lot of those who signed the 100,000-odd petition against him headlining Glasto saw him as no more than an arrogant rapper – you know, one of those hiphop types who steal other people’s records and talk over the top about cars and shooting people, whilst being frightfully disrespectful about women and overly impressed with flashy jewellery. Not like a nice "real" band who diligently learnt to play instruments quite well n that.

But oh, though. While there is plenty of hiphop trope-ery in his music (The late Lou Reed was spot on describing some of the more offensive lyrics on his Yeesus album as “it might be (funny) to a 14-year-old — but it has nothing to do with me”) Kanye is so not your typical “Fiddy Pence” hiphop cliché. The man reads up on minimalist architecture and wants to design high fashion in Paris for crying out loud. Pretty much right from the outset he distinguished himself as a bit odd and high-minded in hiphop circles, to the extent his middle-class producer ass really wasn’t taken that seriously as a rapper at first – nowhere near “street” or gansta enough. Until he started selling records. And yes, the Glastonbury debacle, whatever you made of it, pretty much showed that – whether you rated it or not, he’s going off somewhere on his own these days.

Imma mention "Imma let you finish"

I suppose one of the things that keeps me interested in Kanye, despite having written him off as “just a knob” countless times, is the tantalizing explanation for how a man can be so utterly, complacently, self-deludedly certain of his own unique greatness, way beyond even the massive egos of his contemporaries – and the answer is of course, that he clearly isn’t. I have never known anyone so desperate for the affirmation and approval of others, an unquenchable hunger that speaks of a deep, deep insecurity – that if the arbiters of art aren’t saying he’s THE BEST, it can never be true. Other artists rise above, and pooh-pooh the validity of, mere popularity, titles and awards - but it really, urgently matters to Kanye.

The key to understanding his attitude goes way back. He mentions in interviews his eighth grade basketball coach who, without explanation, didn’t put him on the team, making him realize if he doesn’t fight for recognition himself, he will not get it. And no matter how successful he is that seems to remain. Today this extends those he sees as "his people" as well – he has apparently offered to stage “Imma let you finish”-style protests on behalf of others aside from Beyonce (his mentor Jay-Z’s wife) whom he keeps white-knighting for at awards ceremonies.

He also keeps claiming those who don’t immediately bow down to his greatness and let him do whatever he wants must be prejudiced against him. While I’m sure he has a point that there are still race issues in the upper echelons of showbiz, and there is a sneeriness at a rock star trying to do fashion and so on, there is something a bit rich about one of the most rewarded and privileged men in music claiming he’s hard done by – when his success has opened up so many more opportunities than the vast majority of anyone could ever dream of - and to add to that, he happily tramples over and dismisses the efforts of others (Ms Swift, Beck?). He has a persecution complex on a par with a UKIP MP, which he doesn’t seem to realize is only made worse, not better, by his constant fronting.

Whatever, Kanye is an angry, troubled man, and it’s right there in the music. His confidence is hollow and vulnerable, which is never clearer than, say, in the contrast of the messiah-complex lyrics to “I am a God” with the panic-attack screaming and panting that inexplicably accompanies it. Again, in the words of Lou – who, by the way, was actually a fan – Kanye’s last album was full of “I’m great, I’m terrible, I’m great, I’m terrible - that’s all over this record”.

Neither Finn nor Freddie

And it was right there in the Glastonbury set too. The first and last parts were a greatest hits package that at least proved that Kanye is a bit like Crowded House (probably the first and last time he will be compared to the lovely, low-key, down-to-earth Finn brothers) – you know more than you think. There is quite a variety of sound and style there for those who will listen - but overall it was a glimpse into quite a cold, steely, serious world of one man’s angry head-space.

When I tuned into Glasto on the dear old BBC my initial reaction was “OMG, this is a bit of a mess”. Never mind Lee Nelson’s stage invasion (Jarvis Cocker would be proud), there were bits where the momentum just completely dropped: Partly as he insisted on an extended auto-tune ballad section in the middle that just made it plain he couldn’t sing; partly as there were drops and disjoins as it seemed he'd only decided on the set list in the dressing room 10 minutes before going on; and partly due to technical errors (he abandoned "I Can’t Hold My Liquor" after barking out a couple of lines and letting the guitar bit run). It simply wasn’t as slick as you might have expected, given that f***ing entourage.

And, as social media lampooned, it really didn't demonstrate that he was “the greatest living rock star on the planet” as he claimed – he just doesn't quite have the effortless showmanship of say, a Mick Jagger or James Brown or – yes – Freddie Mercury. In fairness, I don’t really think his intention was to sing a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody at all, he was just joining in karaoke-style as he span a bit of the record in the middle of his gig - ‘cos, why the hell not. But never mind his singing, his stage presence wasn't quite Freddie either, though there was something hypnotic about seeing what he would do next - earlier he had abruptly left the audience hanging, stage in darkness, for minutes before reappearing on top of a f***ing cherry picker. This was not Kiss – no pyrotechnics, no costume change, no zip wire. Just Kanye up a crane. But it was when I noticed he had left the stage lit but completely empty during this for two or three songs, that the contrary pervert in me giggled with glee at the audacity – while it might not have been “history in the making” as he meant it, I think he may have been right, in a way - that had probably (certainly) never happened before in a headlining Glastonbury slot.

Where was "Mike"?

More than a week on and the more I think about it, the more I think the whole thing might have been brilliant. People are still talking about it. The image of him in his bleached double-denim under those ludicrous banks of lights is burned on all our mental retinas. It was utterly simple, yet utterly unique. When Jay Z did Glasto, he turned up with a full band, turned on the charm and opened with a deliberately shambolic few verses of Wonderwall in a cheeky nod to his critics which won everyone round. Not Kanye. No, the massive ego took to the stage, barely acknowledging the audience, with only those huge f***-off whirring modern-art-installation lights, an Akai MPC sampler which he used for about three seconds, a fleeting side-stage visit from a man from Bon Iver, and the shady, hidden-away (imaginary?) “Mike” for company. It was bonkers, really, and it split Twitter in two like samurai sword.

He will never endear himself to people who like their rock stars nice and pleasant and down to earth, and I am sure he is quite a horrible human being to do any kind of business with. No, he can’t really sing, he can’t really play and he can’t really dance. He is a deluded cock.

But there is something of the classic, larger-than-life, maverick rock oddball about him - the combination of ego and art, the clash of the crass and the highbrow, striving to reach beyond the confines of his genre with one foot (or two) planted in a fantasy world of his own making, in the vein of a Prince, Bowie, Gaga, Bush or, um, Trent D'Arby. And while the music might not be to everyone’s tastes, I’d go as far as to say I think he is the real deal as an artist – he is genuinely a bit strange, driven to change, full of fire and a-buzz with unusual ideas and creativity - and he has the balls and passion to do his thing, whatever anyone else thinks.

I’m never sure if I’m laughing with him or at him, but I’m quite glad he exists – in world of increasingly styled, tried-and-tested, as-expected, by-the-numbers acts, he’s at least reliably different and interesting. All day, n****.

Rock is the new jazz ~or~ on the now-perceptible retreat and fossilisation of guitar music

Given its status nowadays as a decidedly niche musical preference (albeit with a large, passionate and dedicated following), it’s worth remembering that for decades it was the unrivalled popular music of choice. At the heart of western culture, it was the soundtrack to everything from dance floors to household chores, Sunday drives to happening dives, concert hall gigs to student digs, newsreel footage to dinner parties. No, that last one didn’t rhyme.

But as the century wore on, previously fringe and underground musical styles began to change and coalesce into something new, something burgeoning and breaking through, that all the kids were listening to... and one day it was just obvious: The tried and tested old stuff just wasn't the mainstream any more.

But enough about the decline of rock music.

Ha, ha, ha! Yes reader, and ha. You can see what I’ve done there, I’ve pretended I might be talking about jazz, but actually – imagine this! – I was talking about guitar rock! See?

Ok, everyone saw that coming (or were probably just confused) but my point stands – I actually, genuinely, think guitar rock is finally over as THE mainstream form of popular music. What slowly happened to jazz when rock came along - well, now it’s happening to rock.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

I’m aware it’s an old eye-roller of a joke – people have been saying this kind of thing ever since that bloke from Decca Records didn’t sign the Beatles because “guitar groups are on the way out”. The end-is-nigh for guitar music has been announced fairly regularly throughout my entire life – notably with the breakthrough of synth-heavy music in the early 80s, and then Acid House in the early 90s. But in the past couple of years, the “death of guitars” call is less the combative, iconoclastic battle cry of those who want to wash away the old, and more the sad, keening air of those who have begun to notice the lack of it and miss it. Which I think means it might actually be happening.

I stopped having my finger on the pulse somewhere around the early 2000s when the height of exclusive hip-dom was still the glitchy IDM (intelligent dance music) of WARP records, and whatever the hell Radiohead were doing post-Ok Computer. But though my interest in modern guitar bands may have waned, I was dimly aware there were various children ten years younger than myself with wild hair, yelping into microphones, banging on drums and – yes – hammering the guitar strings. Good for them, the wanky little urchins, I’d think.

Their disappearance has been so slow it has been almost imperceptible. I assumed the reason I nowadays only ever heard Cowell-or-Brit-stage-school-style pop produce, or banging beats, or in-tha-club hip hop, or electro r'n'b, or twee hipster folk, or faux-50s dinner-party crooning, was that I simply don’t look around any more; so of course I only ever come into contact with the most mainstream of mainstream. Which is almost certainly true – but, importantly, guitar rock used to be part of that. Now I’m not sure it is - unless it's 40 years old, in which case it's ever more everywhere, as Black Sabbath plays in your local tea room and The Sex Pistols in your supermarket.

Teenage Kicks

I recently happened to take a look at the schedules of a popular generic young persons’ radio station and it was a bit like taking the car in for a service assuming nothing much was up - and finding all kinds of shocking developments under the bonnet. The range of music played was as expected, but the focus wildly changed. All the little genre-specific dance, hip hop and urban shows, those wannabe-cool nods to credibility these stations like to throw in - once lodged in late night slots on a Thursday or summat – they now make up the bulk of the schedule. Meanwhile general guitar-based pop and rock music (and not just the niche stuff) – well that’s now lodged in late night slots on a Thursday or summat.

Mentioning this to a teacher friend of mine, he confirmed that da teenage kidz he teaches have slowly stopped dreaming of buying guitars and forming bands as the years have gone by. In his current year only one child does this, but rather than being seen as a too-cool-for-school rebel, he is seen as a bit odd and geeky for it. The rest, if musically inclined, would much rather get mixing software for their tablets or a synth plug-in that can make those sick WOB-WOB-WOB sounds.

This is really what clinched it in my head. I remember being that age, when there were various options for what genres of music to get into to assert your individuality – and then there would be that kid who was into jazz. Now, jazz would be so far off the teenage cool map that it didn’t even register. It wasn’t even something your classmates would have much of an opinion on – it wasn’t trendy, counter-trendy, hip or sad; it was just odd and unknown. Jazz was the kind of thing your mate’s more cultured dad, with his expensive hi-fi system and massive record collection, would sit with a glass of port and listen to. You knew it was once hellish cool, but a world away from the current teenage experience, in another time and place. Ok, so maybe we’re not there yet, but give it 20 years, maybe 25 – and that’s exactly what guitar rock will be.

It’s All Over Now

I'm NOT saying there won't always be people making guitar music and a wide audience for it - after all jazz is still alive and well - just that it is steadily losing its undisputed place at the centre of pop culture in more sustained way than we have previously seen.

No, guitar music is clearly not dead, not by a long shot – but what is happening is it is becoming ever more niche, and ever more like museum-piece music. It is fossilising. As with jazz, which underwent massive changes from the traditional swing of the inter-war years through hard-edged bebop and high-art free jazz to the funky Latin and fusion stuff of the 1970s, at some point hence the whole scene has just begun to shrink and retreat from the public imagination – and in the process has crystalised into primarily historical music.

As with jazz, rock no longer sounds NOW. It is past-times music, to be emulated as best as possible, y'know, like back in the days of the greats whose like we will never see again. Today it virtually always sounds like it’s heavily referencing something from at least 25 years ago – which means its glory days have very clearly long gone.

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

This backwards referencing has been gaining ground for some time. Sure, every generation has its novelty throwbacks, but beyond that the rock music journalist’s default for cool has been stuck on post-punk English mod and/or New York rocker style since about 1979. Oh how they adored it when Blur started wearing tufty haircuts and parkas like they might be from Quadraphenia or summat. And oh, how they jazzed their pants over the "subway tan" of NY punk revivalists The Strokes. In the UK, Britpop was a new high for nostalgia in rock music – everyone at that time was constantly banging on about The Faces, The Kinks, The Who, and... um... Paul Weller (including Paul Weller), while others were posturing around in glittery brown and orange 70s attire and yelping like glam-period Bowie.

Ever since such retro-fetishism has become the norm, but it wasn't always thus - directly before that was the massive break-through in alternative rock music where all manner of previously undergrounds forms – thick sludgy grunge, psychedelic noise rock, wistful indie jangle, industrial synth goth, livid rap-metal hybridisation, strum and bass et al – began to get serious air play, and suddenly anything seemed possible and acceptable. Of course I’m biased because this happened to coincide with my teenage years, but that now seems like the last golden age of guitar rock. Genres still seemed to be rapidly developing, with fresh ideas, on a mass scale; as opposed nowadays, where you seem to get to the odd isolated individual experimenter beavering away somewhere while everyone else does genre-precise recreations or light-entertainment-showbiz takes on classic rock.

Ashes To Ashes

Why guitar rock appears to have finally fossilised is not just about age, but also about technology. One element is how cheaply, easily and authentically one can emulate the sounds of the past now – as digital modelling technology has made this accessible to all, so all have made retro-sounding records. Also, with all music, from the dawn of recording onwards, streamable and downloadable along with everything ever written about every artist, the whole history of guitar rock is now at everyone’s fingertips – and a crushing, paralysing history it is for anyone with pretensions of doing anything remotely original in the field, or trying not to be too influenced by the sheer weight of it.

Rock has gone through repeated phases of establishing a tradition, then modernising and breaking away from that, only to return later in a post-modern fashion. In fact the whole of the 2000s was pretty much one long post-modern period for guitar music as it regurgitated its own history in multifarious forms. But, as with all post-modernism, where do you go from there?

Thanks to communications today, everything is at once so interlinked that it threatens to become homogenous and so fragmented that it threatens to become too dispersed (which sounds like a contradiction, but really isn’t) and music is no different – I suspect the days are simply gone when unique, self-contained “scenes” could spring up in a city in isolation before breaking through into the wider world 18 months later. A muso kid in Seattle is as likely to be trading beats with someone in Paris as hanging out down their local live music bar.

But all the same, as a music fan and consumer it’s a massively exciting time to be alive – because you can get your hands on an artist’s entire career output in one swoop, and delve into any strand of musical history you like. It’s immersive. Which ironically explains why I’m not that bothered there’s not much in the way of new, vibrant, interesting guitar music coming through – as there is still plenty of old golden age stuff to discover which is still new to me - but then I’ll soon be of the expensive-hi-fi-massive-record-collection-and-glass-of-port-dad age, so I suppose that’s only right.

Taste Bigotry

This was supposed to be about the polarisation of people’s aesthetic tastes – with graphs like the one on the left. That graph’s axes are not exhaustive by a long shot – there could also be simple vs complex (NOT the same as visceral vs cerebral), playful vs sombre and so on. I may yet sling up such graphs, filled out with examples, but I’m sure you get the gist. For now this: What turned into a damn essay on taste bigotry, and the tension between the trads and the moderns...
   

Iconoclasts

Earlier this year I had one of those phases where I developed a sudden interest in something and, as is my wont, immersed myself in it for a few months: Modernist architecture.

Leafing through beginners guides to all the various movements, manifestos and Stijls, I noticed, unsurprisingly, that there were an awful lot of “shoulds” and “musts” about the way forward for slinging together some rooms n that.

I got it – the new, young, passionate architects were tired of the same old shit, and keen to lay out their vision, embrace technology, fresh thinking, the new demands of modern living – to make their mark and change the world, which they largely did, hence all the books about them.

But I couldn’t help a wry smile at all the “musts” and “shoulds”, the new rules that must be adhered to – because I kept thinking “Why?”

Technology must not be hidden away, but proudly on display said the futurists; architecture should make use of strong vertical and horizontal lines, all black and white and primary colours, said De Stijl enthusiasts; decoration must be binned in favour of simple, functional forms said the minimalists.

Radical, exciting and seminal ideas for sure, and they have been validated by continued use – but why the “MUST”? Why so imperative? Because that’s the way it’s so often stated – as if EVERYTHING DONE BY EVERYBODY FROM NOW ON MUST BE THIS WAY or dismissed as creaky old bollocks.

Fair enough, it’s only the more extreme exponents who talk like this, and it is the passion talking, and passion is a good thing – but it made me smile because it was all so familiar from looking back through the history of spheres I was more familiar with – in particular “popular” music. The beatniks, the hippies, the punks, synth pioneers, trailblazers of various dance and electronica genres... they all had their share of prophets insisting the old ways were crap and wrong and dead and things SHOULD be done differently now, and here are the new rules.

Basically, the same very-human responses can be found in any sphere that has developed and progressed – everything has its fashions, its iconoclasts and trend-setters, from visual art to literature to philosophy to... fashion itself.

So much for iconoclasts. While I admire their fire, I’m often a little cool on their single-mindedness and short memory. Seems a bit... well... closed, and the emphasis on erasing history a bit... well... Stalin. And it’s got to be said, the attitude that things MUST be this way (while defending a new idea) smells rather reminiscent of the similarly intolerant and diversity-dismissing attitude of the trad crowd (defending old ideas).

Trads

Classic ideas. Time-honoured ideas. Back to basics ideas. Authentic ideas. None of this new-fangled, faddy nonsense. On the one hand the trads can be a bit fuddy-duddy, like your mate’s dad who is baffled by anything outside his own cultural reference points – where all modern art is dismissed as “not real art, can’t even paint a proper picture”, all modern buildings are “bloody eye-sores” and all modern music is “not real music, it’s just talking/shouting/noise, can’t even sing/play, sounds like a drum kit falling down the stairs,” etc etc.

That kind of thinking is easy to take the piss out of and dismiss as ignorant philistinism – but often overlooked is the equally entrenched ideology of the young trads, rediscovering and re-asserting the “real” and “authentic” from yesteryear - from the current antidote-to-throwaway-culture passion for cosy, traditional skills, crafts and way of doing things (baking, knitting, iron-mongery, Polaroid photography, collecting vinyl records) to the perennial muso’s insistence that recording on analogue equipment is just better, that one must use “real” instruments recorded live and no gimmicky effects, that there is a soul in the simplicity of folk or delta blues or 60s jingle-jangle that is impossible to attain by any other method.

There is a clear merit to this as there are a lot of good things that have been, or are in danger of being, lost - and this fights the good fight against the fickle and forgetful march of so-called “progress”. But there is the point at which it tips over into young fuddy-duddyism, a retro-hipster’s snobby wet dream, recoiling from anything new. It can all get so worthy and backwards-looking that it becomes stifling and restrictive – The trad crowd’s accusation that any musical artist who tries anything experimental is “pretentious” is a case in point, and massively ironic. Sure, arty/experimental types may have high-falutin’ ideas that they don’t quite reach, but they often have an imagination, sense of humour and playfulness that worthy trad types lack completely. One of the meanings of pretentious is “takes itself too seriously, thinks it’s more profound than it is” – which for my money describes the “authentic” trad crowd precisely.

Paradoxically, the lets-get-back-to-basics trads are also often iconoclasts. As much as the futurists, they also want to wipe away the status quo and set up a better, golden future, but by harking back to an imagined golden past. Rather like the Nazis did.

Gaps

One of the problems I have is the unjustified leap-of-logic gaps at play here. One is the generalisation from what you like about a specific thing to sweeping, unjustified claims about whole genres, trends and styles.

Now, everyone has tastes. Everyone finds certain themes, moods, approaches and outlooks resonate more naturally with them. If you pay attention to how what you like is put together you will find recurring elements you can pick out and pin down – but the results are sometimes not quite what you thought. It could be as simple as a preference for certain harmonies and chord changes whatever the genre, certain sounds in a certain frequency range, certain materials or colour palettes or geometric structures and shapes. It could be that for some reason some element of an artwork evokes a mood you enjoy, or dreams and aspirations you have. Or it could be something opens your eyes to new possibilities or chimes neatly with your past experience. But it’s one thing to describe these elements specifically when talking about a specific thing, and another to then say everything of a similar genre, or made by certain group, must be “authentic” and everything not, “crap”. But people do that all the time.

Another leap is the gap between “I’m fed up of this and want to do this instead” and “This must be got rid of and everyone must do this”. There is no justification for that jump – it’s a simple case of “Everyone must think what I do, or they are tw*ts”.

We tend to lump radical idealists together but, for my money, there are two clear trends – one of which I have sympathy with and one of which I’m inherently suspicious of.

On the one hand you have the open-minded, expansive attitude: those who say things don’t need to be like they are, or have been – that we can cut loose, man, from old or current thinking, strive for change, try new things and new ways of being. Some experimentation will work out and change the world, some will peter out as naive and flawed idealism, but the point is to try, to encourage innovation and variety.

On the other hand is the closed-minded and restrictive attitude: once the “new ways” have been established something else creeps in – a dismissive, cooler-than-thou sneer towards anyone who isn’t on-board as the enemy to be stamped out. And anything not associated with the “new ways” becomes untouchable, the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater. This is simple bigotry, really, at best discouraging of free-thinking and diversity, at worst downright dangerous.

Bigotry   

Because while it might not seem to matter when talking about the silly subject of art and entertainment, such closed, prejudiced thought processes are precisely the kind of thing going on in the mind of any bigot, just translated into the sphere of politics, culture and society.

The philosophers Depeche Mode (in their sweet-but-cringingly-naive industro-pop hit People Are People) said: “I can’t understand what makes a man hate another man, help me understand.” Well, Martin (Gore, who, I think you’ll find, sings that bit, not lead singer Dave Gahan), this may help. If someone is refusing to acknowledge anything good beyond the tiny cluster of things that make up their single-minded obsessions – and worse, Martin, calling for all else to be stamped out and their vision thrust on everyone – then there lie the seeds of alarming, hate-breeding intolerance, even if all they are doing is messing about with paint. Thank God they’re a penniless artist and not in government, is all I’ve got to say, Martin.

Ok, it may not matter in art and entertainment – but that kind of thinking is still a bad habit and (if I’m allowed to use a “should” of my own) I think it should be challenged when it crops up.

It may seem trifling but sweeping generalisations like “all pop music is throwaway trash”, “all guitar music is boring” or “all electronic music is soulless” are groundless prejudice – that because something has often been that way, that it must always be so. If someone manages to wrestle high emotion out of “clinical” digital software, or creates something genuinely fresh and new out of the old and traditional methods, you are probably in the presence of genius – or at least something remarkable and exciting – because someone has done something that has eluded others. But the closed minded will completely miss such possibilities.

That said, certain ways of doing things have certain features, and lend themselves better to some experiences than others. The mistake is often to judge one type of thing with the criteria of another, and miss the joy to be found by judging it on its own merits. You don’t go to abstract art to see a pretty landscape. You don’t read Kafka for the laughs. You don’t go to a Bauhaus building for cosy rustic charm. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to be enjoyed or enraptured by there.

You don’t go to genre-shattering experimental electronica for emotional, intimate lyrics, nor acoustic ballardry for cutting-edge, rule-book-trashing new sounds. There is joy in both and room in the world for all. And there is room in yourself – to explore a kaleidoscopic variety of moods, tastes, and types of thing. Tying yourself to restrictive “shoulds” and “musts” will only cut you off from whole continents of experience – of what is, what was and what might be. Cut loose, man.

Punk.

Punk. Yeah, right on, punk. Am I, in fact, the only person in the multiverse who gets just that faint, niggling hint of annoyance and suspicion every time I hear that word nowadays? Who picks up the undeniable whiff of pretentious airs and graces when that word is applied to anything outside the late ‘70s? Who boggles at the audacity of those who would casually self-apply this word to themselves and what they do?

Why? Why would I feel like that? Well I suppose it’s to do with the perceived status of the word. Punk is about the only musical genre whose credibility is simply beyond question. Words like jazz, metal, techno, hip-hop, country, rock, pop, reggae, d’n’b, “electronica”, indie, house – even funk, for funk’s sake – are perfectly capable of being sneered out as a derogatory pooh-pooh, and happily suffixed with words like “nonsense”, “rubbish” and “bollox”. But you just don’t do that to punk. Well, you can, but people will look at you like you were a) born in the 1800’s and probably listen exclusively to Yes and/or Dire Straits b) a pre-teen girl who idolises Justin Biebles or Jedwank or One True Voice or whatever fresh-faced-clean-living-non-threatening-pop-fodder is spewing out of the corporate mangle at this precise moment. Which is strange; because it’s not like punk has any more consensus on whether the music was actually good or not than in any other genre. Plenty of people don’t like punk. But nobody under 60 – nobody – questions its authenticity. Everyone knows that punk is visceral, angry and nihilistic – punk doesn’t care if you like it or not, in fact it practically wants you to hate it, which is why it’s so cool. It has none of the pomp, pantomime and geekery of metal, none of the self-satisfied corporate cock-suckery that soured hip-hop’s reputation, and seems to have somehow side-stepped the culture-based incomprehension that causes people to refuse to even try to understand, say, reggae, or most electronic dance-based music. Most genres of music are associated with types of people: Your typical fan, who is eminently open to ridicule. Think of a genre and you can always think of a particular kind of worst-case pathetic specimen who likes to listen to it, even if you know this is an unfair stereotype – the stereotype exists. Yuppies. Chavs. Hippies. Red-necks. Teeny-boppers. 18-30 clubber dregs. Jazz-pseuds. Emos and goths (ahh, bless). It’s guilt-by-association – you get enough silly or dull or pretentious or, in whatever way, reprehensible people listening to a type of music and that’s it – its credibility, in the minds of non-fans, is done for. Tainted.

So how has punk escaped this? Well, your typical punk fan is – well, a punk. And only a punk, nothing else. And punks are scary. Not that some hip-hop gangtas and muscles-n-hate metallers can’t be scary - but all punks are scary; it doesn’t matter if they’re weedy or moronic or 14 years old, because they’re all livid, unhinged, self-destructive nihilists who are as likely to nut your face, gob in your chips and knife you in the kidneys as say “Hale-and-well-met, good-fellow”. They “want to destroy passer-by”. That’s what Mr. J. Rotten said. Poor old passer-by. Except that this isn’t true, is it? It’s utter, utter, B.S. – very, very few punks were ever really, fully, 24-hours-a-day like this, by most accounts. Most of them wanted people to think they were. But, like goths, it was an affected pose, a lifestyle fashion choice, like any other pop-culture fad. Punks were just people – hyperactive, speed-fuelled, stroppy, sneery, yoof people, maybe, but still just people all the same. It wasn’t the end of civilization after all. But somehow the stereotype persists that punks really are just like that. Where other genres’ stereotypes have grown familiar and cosy or broadened to incorporate multiple kinds of everyday folks, the punk stereotype has retained its initial shock value and specificity, somehow. Why? Almost certainly because it was so short-lived. We never had time to become familiar and cosy with the punk, or with the kind of general public who listened to punk as a simple matter of personal taste. Whilst the impact of punk had massive pop-culture reverberations, pure punk was a flash in the pan – it was all over, really, by about 1980. Pure punk was non-sustainable. You can be a life-long hippy. But you can’t be a truly anti-everything anarchistic punk and still hold down a day job. Really you need to be dead by your mid-twenties, or you’re just not punk enough. If you survive, you had better be in a state approaching Shane McGowan.

Musically it was also a cul-de-sac, a dead-end. Whilst it may have been a searing blaze of fresh, raw, jettison-the-bullshit energy, what most people seem to forget is that punk was massively conservative and intolerant. It sneered and gobbed at anyone who used anything other than 3 chords on anything other than guitar, bass and drums. Anyone over 25 was too old. And god-forbid you wheel out a synthesizer. When Joy Division, always slightly apart from the pure punk crowd and more accurately described as “post-punk”, did this, Ian Curtis’s girlfriend – the one who wasn’t his wife – allegedly accused them of “sounding like Genesis” (Genesis were the prog-rock enemy to the angry punk-influenced yoof at the time). Needless to say, that’s f***ing absurd; but it amply demonstrates attitudes to variety and experimentation in those punk-drenched times. The Damned got away with early keyboard usage, but only because Captain Sensible made a point of playing three reedy notes shambolically and knocking the stand over at the end of the gig. But their second album was produced by Pink Floyd's (prog/psychedelic) Nick Mason and that was met with howls of derision and seen as a shocking faux-pas that nearly finished them off - despite the fact that any resulting changes to their sound were utterly minimal - a negligible, shoulder-shrugging smidgen more polished and melodic, which would have inevitably been the case whoever produced it. The likes of The Stranglers, despite being in the midst of the punk scene when they started out, playing all the same venues with all the same bands, and clearly sharing much in common in their sound and attitude, were never properly accepted as punk – they had a synthesizer, three of them were too old, two of them could play too well and two of them had facial hair. No chance. This despite the fact that Joe Strummer reportedly split the 101er’s (who often shared the bill with the early Stranglers) after telling Hugh Cornwell “My band is shit, Hugh – I want a band like yours!” – and next week joined The Clash. This conservativism was also a lie – many punk icons from John Lydon (née Rotten) to Rat Scabies later admitted to liking all kinds of diverse musics that they would never have publicly admitted to at the time. In fact, as it turned out, the first wave of UK punk acts did have a broader appreciation of music and more catholic influences that became clearer as they developed: The Clash's London Calling experiments; the Buzzcock's 60's bubblegum pop and repetitive, angular kraut-rock touches; the inherent psychedelia in The Damned and Siouxsie and the Banshee's later goth stylings. Rather it was the music press, the fans and the second-wave copyists who did most to petrify punk into rigid standardisation. Pure punk was such a narrow and inflexible genre that it literally had, to quote Mr. J. Rotten again, “No future” (clever that, see). Those that survived had to veer away from the narrow template. Those that didn’t, imploded. Punk’s lasting legacy was via post-punk – where punk mutated into something else and other genres were infused with some – but only some – elements of its energy, aesthetic and ethos. That stuff had legs, because it was open to endless variation and diversification. Pure Punk wasn’t – it was simply a cleansing fire, a stubble burning sweep to make way for fresh new growth.

So: Let’s return to where I started – why does use of the word “punk” when referring to things nowadays, annoy me? Well, first of all, “punk”, in the pure sense, is as time-locked as ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll – and as such any modern act that claims to be pure punk, without adding any modern spin, should reasonably expect to viewed in the same vein as Showaddywaddy – novelty retro throw-backs. It seems a bit of a conceit to claim to be full-on punk unless you were a) there in ’76-’79 or b) are accepting that you are simply describing your sound as mimicking that of original punk. But more annoying than this is the way the term seems to be bandied around willy-nilly in a way that can seemingly mean whatever you want it to. Sadly, perfectly good acts such as Mogwai, The Prodigy and Sepultura have at some point claimed that they were “punk”. Needless to say, they sound nothing like each other, and none of them would even have come within Walking Distance (that’s a Buzzcocks song. Clever, see?) of being recognized as punks back in ’77. They’d have been laughed out of Bromley. There isn’t even really any identifiable thread in common between them; because it depends which element of punk influence you are talking about: Are you referring to a certain visual style aesthetic? To a lo-fi, amateur do-it-yourself ethos (as if punk was the only genre ever to use this)? To an anti-establishment politicised outlook? To a generally rebellious, bratty, obnoxious demeanour? To an iconoclastic hatred of the “old”? To a genre-based style-template for making records? Or to a commitment to stripped down simplicity (no solos)?

Referring to such elements as “punk” is fine if it’s done knowingly and lightly, but when it’s said in utter po-faced seriousness I just want to tell the speaker to f*** off. I have no problem with a term like “punk-influenced”, but when people insist something vaguely punk-influenced IS punk... oh, right. Spare me, huh? Having pink hair does not make you a “punk” any more than having a synthesizer makes you Genesis. The media do this all the time when talking about the likes of P!nk or Avril Lavigne (who went on record to tell them to stop calling her punk because she didn’t know what that was supposed to mean – good for her!) This is chronic enough, but when people deliberately call themselves “punk”, that’s when my nose really wrinkles with disdain – because not only is it pungent bullshit, a bogus claim; it’s also a really obvious conceited grab at credibility, as if you can somehow summon all of original pure punk’s livid anarcho-political anti-establishment rage, unhinged youthful energy and unimpeachable authenticity simply because you play a cheap instrument badly or have a tongue piecing. Piss off. Punk.

Punk. - appendix 1: reservations about the mythos from someone who Wasn't There.

There are all kinds of unshakable myths surrounding punk that get trotted out again and again as canon. Having grown up with this accepted doom, it tends not to occur to one to actually analyse these myths – and it causes a surprised double-take when one does, and realises these things aren’t necessarily 100% correct. First of all, that “Music had all got pompous, stagnant, tired and boring”: Certainly, there were a fair amount of extravagant rock behemoths, snoozesome trad-rock noodlers, tired hippy hangovers and comfortable, polished MOR blandophiles who were brought down a peg or two by punk’s immediate, straight-up energy and Heath-Robinson approach. Sure, there was plenty of slick, shiny mainstream commercial pap – but then there always is. There may have not been a lot in the top ten album charts of those years immediately before punk that would appeal to da kidz on da street; but, in retrospect, the sheer volume of now-iconic names producing seminal albums full of vibrant, innovative music in the first half the ‘70s makes the charts of the last couple of decades look shamefully paltry and inconsequential. A lot of it may have quite understandably looked distant, dull and alienating to your average stroppy teen living in squalor on an inner-city council estate; but I’m (the) damned if I’m going to adopt the perspective of a stroppy teen as my considered musical-historian-style overview. And yet people do. Whoever they are. Punk’s gravitational claim on credibility is so powerful that everyone just accepts that this was, apparently, the case – and blithely write off the majority of musical output of the time without really thinking specifically about what or who it is that they’re writing off – or whether they properly agree with that. The “serious” music papers may well have been full of prog, and, ok, that’s hard for a lot of people to stomach. Not everyone’s cup of pretentious herbal tea, but it’s not quite fair, or even accurate, to call the more bonkers, out-there, experimental stuff “dull” and “stagnant”, and only the more high-profile were into expensive theatrics. Glam and art-rock was also rife, and an admitted influence on punk, particularly the likes of Bowie and early Roxy Music on the Bromley contingent. Where was this desolate dark-age of music, this terminally tedious and infuriating desert of artistic authenticity? Was 1975 really that bad? Maybe you had to be there.

One thing that is certain is that punk certainly changed the music industry – in many ways for the better, but not in all... In reality, for all the overblown corporate guff it crippled, it also killed off swathes of interesting, artistically credible acts with its conservativism – what they were doing simply went out of fashion. And make no mistake, punk was always about fashion, and image in particular – which brings us on to the next myth – “Punk was back-to-basics, no frills, unpretentious”: Back-to-basics, yes. No frills, yes. Unpretentious, y... noooooo. Punk was staggeringly self-conscious and affected, in the way that only surly teens can be. Every time I see footage from ’76-’79 there is always a slightly uncomfortable moment when all the accrued mythos falls away, just for an instant, and I simply see a gaggle of silly puffed-up spotty yooves gurning away like naggy toddlers and trying that little bit too hard to look nonchalantly wise-assed and intimidating. Grr, look how obnoxious we are. And then I remember that these are icons, worshiped by thousands, and shudder at how age has jaded me. Now that’s nihilism. But punk, as I said, was always about image. It marked a new high in style-over-substance – as long as you had the look and the attitude, the music didn’t really matter – so long as it was fast, simple and nasty. Not that punk didn’t have plenty of good tunes – but it was the image and attitude that drove it, that was the break-through, and if we’re talking about impact on the music industry, that’s one less savoury aspect of punk’s legacy – it ratcheted up the importance of look and attitude for all the po-faced cooler-than-thou underground hipsters. That’s an irony – while the prog crowd may have had a fondness for big theatrics on the stage, their personal image was not really an issue – they were, by and large, thoroughly average looking unassuming blokes with poor personal grooming. Meanwhile, the punks were, in their own way, every bit as image-obsessed as the glam crowd – but often more militant, because their image was about “authenticity”. In this respect Sid Vicious really is representative of the whole thing – only in the band because he looked good, had buckets of ‘tude, and would provide good theatrics –yes, theatrics – on stage and in interviews – never mind that he contributed nothing musically. John Lydon would eventually grow weary and stifled by his own image (and Malcolm McLaren’s insistent control of it) and form Public Image Ltd., who’s first single Public Image drips with palpable distain for the image-obsessed. Punk was eating itself – pretty much marked the beginning of the end for purist punk.

The likes of Malcolm McLaren always wanted punk to be about fashion, of course, and he will tell you again and again how he created UK punk by importing such fashion from the New York punk scene. Myth #3 – “UK Punk started in New York”: Now, in a certain sense I can accept this – there clearly was a big influence from the New York CBGB’s scene that filtered across to UK punk, particularly in many of the fashion touches, and McLaren provides a direct connection here. Also in the simple, stripped-down and sped-up wilful angular ugliness of the sound. But what is infuriating is that when people talk about New York punk and UK punk they seem to just take it as the same thing – and, it’s just... not. The Ramones had long hair, for crying out loud. New York punk such as Patti Smith and the New York Dolls was for arty underground bohemian hipsters, anti-establishment in a grimily subversive way that owed a debt to the likes of the Velvet Underground and The Stooges. UK punk was very much an every-man (or every-yoof) thing, a disenfranchised, working-class youth-movement of sorts – much more political, vocal and angry, from The Sex Pistol’s violent nihilism to The Clash’s outspoken left-wing causes. It’s this side of it that really took hold in the UK, and that’s the side of it that fashion hipsters like McLaren never fully intended or foresaw – and yet it’s impossible to understand UK punk without it.

I’m being over-antagonistic, maybe. There’s clearly a lot of foundation in what I’m calling “myths” here, I just have reservations that such things are often over-stated. It annoys me that you can’t question this sacred canon and expect to retain your street-cred, when in fact there is plenty there to question – the reality is never as simple and unambiguous as the mythos. Maybe you had to be there... and well, y’know, I wasn’t.

A Marxist Criticism of The Simon Cowell

What is my problem with this Simon Cowell? I want to take the opportunity to clear up a misunderstanding. A lot of people take umbrage with that guy – his persona is, after all, not meant to inspire a surge of warming fondness. “But he just speaks his mind,” people say, “he’s cruel to be kind.” “He’s harsh but fair.” “He’s brutally honest, but usually right.” Fair enough.

Although: actually, really, actually, he isn’t always right, actually, is he, really? Actually? Yes, he knows what cuts it for success in a certain cash-raking market, but in a broader sense his taste is, frankly, soul-numbingly bland and inane. I mean: Robson and Jerome, for fucks sake. As others have said before me, he couldn’t spot a Bob Dylan if it jumped up and blew a weedy harmonica in his face.

But this is not my problem with Cowell. He provides a necessary delusion-shattering service to the horrifyingly un-self-aware (though his shows have, it must be said, done massive, massive damage in encouraging such delusions of imminent discovery and stardom amongst the unwashed masses), and his pantomime villain shtick makes for entertaining telly. No, I have no real problem with that – my problem with this Cowell is that he is one of the most cynical, manipulative, exploitative, money-grabbing cocks ever to swagger into my purview, and the dubious ill-effects of his selfish activities on the all-pervasive pop-culture around me are constantly thrust in my face. That is my problem with Cowell.

That was unfairly personal – I’m sure he’s a nice guy when he’s at home with his pet dog (I am imagining a pet dog, I do not know with any certainty that there is a pet dog). Or at a barbecue with friends (perhaps the dog is there also). I would happily chew the fat, and a burger or two, with him. I expect he’s witty and diverting company, even. It’s not who he is or how he is so much as what he does that bothers me. Let me explain by invoking the restless geist of Karl Marx.

Karl “Groucho” Marx

I am by no means a Marxist by a long way: I find the goals of his Communist ideology head-shakingly naive and idealistic; I am suspicious that any such “utopianism” is, at root, simply an attempt for one person to forcibly stamp their ideals and values onto everyone else; and his treatment of everybody as an undifferentiated, faceless social mass strikes me as inhuman, and offends the nostrils of my firmly entrenched, individualistic, outsider mentality. However, I have a wistful soft-spot for Marxist criticisms of materialist, capitalist society, mainly because I live in one, and so much of what Marx highlights rings true in this respect.

For those of you unfamiliar with this, let me break it down like this:

You may think that when you apply for a job, this is what is happening: You are a free agent with time and skills to offer. Your potential employer needs a hand to get some things done, and could use your time and skills. So you rock up, and as two equal human beings you strike a deal that benefits you both – “Hey! I tell you what, if I help you out, how about you help me out? Yeah? Cool. Let’s sign a contract and we can all live happy and fulfilled as free, equal human beings.”

But – and here’s the Marxist elephant in the room – you are not actually equal at all, are you? Actually, someone is holding all the cards, and it’s not you.

This is what Marx would say is happening: Your potential employer is a bloated capitalist fat-cat who has managed to grab a whole bunch of stuff – money, property, resources – for themselves, probably through being (or their ancestors being) ruthless, cunning or even downright violent, and they are guarding that stuff like metal codpiece. You on the other hand, have nothing, neither you nor your ancestors being ruthless, cunning or downright violent enough. You rock up like a Dickensian orphan, cap in hand, and beg “Please sir, can I have some stuff (money, property, resources)? I promise I’ll do things for you. I’ll give up my time and work myself to the bone, and I won’t answer back.” And the fat-cat may deign to throw you a shiny ha’penny or two if you scratch his back and help to make him richer, or he may tell you to piss off. If you do not do this, you will starve. So much for freedom.

You are a dog, begging for scraps from the king’s table – and not Simon Cowell’s well-fed and well-loved barbecue-going dog, either. To Marx, in a capitalist society a small minority of people control all the wealth and resources. The rest of us are simply used by them as a source of labour, an energy source to exploit, a bunch of batteries to be used up in order to maintain and increase their control of the wealth and resources. 

But, you might protest, the capitalist fat-cats still have to answer to the whims and demands of what the masses want, or they won’t make any money – and here is where the clever bit comes in. No one is saying it is easy to be a capitalist fat-cat – it is a constant battle to maintain your wealth and position, certainly. But if you control the wealth and resources it is much easier to influence the masses – to ensure there is a market for your produce, and to ensure that your workers are kept sedate and unthinking; to ensure your labour force, your energy-providing batteries, are kept in their place, content to carry on working as batteries and unaware of any alternative – and even better, happy to buy the produce of your business and other businesses like yours.

You promise them, perhaps, that if they are good, hardworking, obedient, humble drones then they will be rewarded in heaven. Or if they work really hard, then maybe they can be rich fat-cats too (even though, practically, this is extremely unlikely to happen). And if they feel any dissatisfaction with their miserable, monotonous, grey, work-exhausted lives, then the answer is that they should buy this amazing, life enhancing product that the fat-cats are making, and that will make everything better.

Meanwhile, they can escape into entertainments that numb the mind and show people like them living fun, happy lives, or lives full of gossip and drama and intrigue; or show people a bit better off than them being happy, successful, attractive, cool and care-free with the comfortable living from the money they’ve earned – if you work hard, you could get that too. Clever, very clever – capitalist society is set up to keep everyone working and keep the fat-cats rich. Everything that goes on happens in order to serve the interests of those who hold the wealth and power.

Or – here’s a thing – what you could do, right, is this: create a TV show that does lots of these things at once. It acts as mind numbing entertainment to distract you from the daily grind; it encourages you to spend your hard-earned on product and phone-ins; and, yes, it also lets you dream that, if you’re just lucky enough, you too could escape the grind and be that happy, successful person living the care-free life of glamour, fame and material excess. Thank you Mr. Cowell.

Simon “Fat-cat” Cowell

Yeah. Ok, maybe that is all a bit jaded. Most people are generally a little more self-aware than that – they know their jobs are shit, they know they’re not that likely to be the next Leona Lewis, they know the X-Factor is simply entertaining brainless guff. But not everyone. And there is something in applying Marx to Cowell. This Cowell has made his money out of, essentially, exploiting people. If you are in any doubt about this, consider the following:

1) People do not just walk off the street and out in front of the celebrity judge panel you see on TV. There are far too many people for that. Everyone who gets to see Cowell and the benign music industry deities that flank him must already have gone through multiple auditions to get there. Oh, yes. That means the crazies and no-hopers too. They have been selected by someone for the judges to humiliate for your entertainment. So much for “cruel to be kind” – they’re more than happy to build you up and play about with you for a few laughs first. It’s good telly.

2) A friend of mine has a friend who did, in fact, apply for one of these shows – it may have been back when X-Factor was Pop Idol (ignoring the potential law suit lurking in that statement), I’m not sure – but the first thing she was asked was “Do you have a personal life-story we can tell?” Hers was not deemed interesting or tragic enough. Because, if you’re not an out and out jaw-dropping weirdo, and you don’t quite cut it as a carbon-copy current-mainstream-marketable-popstar clone, then you can also get on telly by telling a lovely little tear-jerking “human interest” story. That will fill up a nice five minutes, complete with some tinkling tender piano motifs from a rousing emotional “indie” ballad of the moment, before they shatter your dreams, chuck you out on the street, and everyone forgets about you again. People’s actual real personal tragedies are all good currency to squeeze a sentimental TV moment out of. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, never mind that these are real people’s actual lives being messed about with and thrown out for everyone to gawp at. 

3) When the fun’s been had with them, we get down to the serious business of creating product – but don’t be fooled, even the finalists are having their lives exploited for our entertainment. Most of them we will never hear from again (except maybe in tabloids and gossip magazines, who are making their money exploiting these people’s actual lives further) but their life stories are, for the short while they hold our interest, the batteries that fuel the producer’s grip on the wealth and resources of TV land.

Which really just goes to show that these shows are really all about the show. In reality the final musical product is kind of secondary. The show itself is what makes the money, and is impeccably crafted to pull at the heart strings – from the astonishing episode that I remember watching for 15 minutes, aghast that the entire time was an endless succession of people I didn’t know having teary reunions with their friends and family (to an endless succession of rousing, anthemic “indie” ballads, ad nauseum); to the manipulated “Cinderella meets Star Wars” narrative of the whole series: The rough, untrained peasants with their “spunk” and “talent” working through emotional trials and tribulations to finally “come good” and win the approval and acceptance of the begin Gods of light entertainment (best of all, watch how even boo-hiss villain Cowell comes to mellow and bestow his sensible hard-won fatherly respect on those who he once pooh-poohed. What a satisfying conclusion to the story).

To return to Cowell – whilst he earns plenty from his signings to Sony-owned Syco Music he earns more from the combined fees paid to him for appearing on American Idol, X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. He is also co-producer on the latter two. The show is the thing: if it can successfully cross-pollinate with his music industry interests, then all the better – but if the next winner falls flat on their sincerely gormless face, then no big deal – the show justifies itself. The show is the thing.

Cowell admirably makes no bones about the fact that he is fundamentally about making money. He doesn’t even appear to be much of a music fan, certainly not a connoisseur, and as said before, his tastes are extremely conservative, bland and narrow. He is not that interested even in making “good music”, let alone “art”, he simply wants saleable product.

For this, what you need is technical perfection and polish, an attractive image, and something that is safe and familiar and apes what is currently popular. It’s showbiz. It’s light entertainment. And that this, in the minds of many, is confused with the criteria for “good music” is one more reason I have a problem with Cowell.

Not his fault, I suppose, but he perpetuates it. In fact, that may be all “good music” is to the likes of Cowell. Many have accused the X-Factor of breeding a stable of bland, homogenised clones, that are really no more than good karaoke singers, slick cruise-ship style entertainers as opposed to unique, charismatic, original, raw artists. This may be unfair to the more talented of the participants (and cruise-ship entertainers) – it may not be my cup of Earl Grey, but it’s all fine and good in its right place.

However, there is an alarming trend for everything talent-show related to take over ever larger swathes of the TV schedule and music charts. It’s symptomatic of the age – where media saturation of our lives has reached a constant roaring background noise; where the business of music, and the public’s familiarity with it, is now so old, seasoned and practised that everything fits into a recognisable market – and those markets themselves are so massively over-saturated that everything threatens to become subsumed and lost.

We do appear to be in danger of entering a kind of 1950s-style déjà-vu state where entertainment is predominantly corporate mainstream (even "niche" stuff is only really a polished mainstream take on "niche") and controlled by a few Svengali figures who care only about slickness of product and the bucks they’re making from it – and don’t even know what concepts like artistry, authenticity and originality mean, let alone care for them. If it isn’t tied into the corporate machine, forget it. You will never hear about it.

Theodor “Theodor” Adorno

So, this Simon Cowell character has been a major player in the resurgence of the talent-show format, though we cannot put all the blame on him, of course. He appeared on Pop Idol, but that was his former friend Simon Fuller’s beast. Clones such as Fame Academy were others’ attempts to cash in on the phenomenon. Now it appears every other show has a panel of judges, or at least a couple of them (the judges, of course, are as much performers as the “performers”): The absurdly named Strictly Come Dancing, traumatic business ordeals like Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice, restaurant/food snob shows – that’s you Masterchef – and the Lloyd-Webber horrors. 

There really is something maddeningly feudal-system about the whole thing – television’s obsession that anyone who’s not on it is an unwashed peasant who must beg for the approval and acceptance of some lofty self-appointed “experts” who swan about being rude and demanding and dangling the golden keys to their successful, glamorous world in front of all who prostrate themselves before them. I haven’t even mentioned Gordon “fucking sweary chef” Ramsey. 

What’s more these shows are so obviously just the same format lazily tweaked a little and repeated over and over again, that it’s barely even worth commenting on.

However, someone who did comment on just such a thing was a guy called Theodor Adorno. Adorno was a sociologist and cultural critic who was heavily influenced by Marx. In Marx’s time (the 19^th century) the media was obviously nowhere near as all-pervasive as it is today. For Marx, the “opiate of the masses” – the thing that kept the workers docile and numb by structuring their lives, promising them a delayed paradise and instilling obedient, conformist behaviour – was religion. For Adorno, it was the media.

Adorno died in 1969, but his criticism of the media has an enduring appeal. He suggested that, in a capitalist society, the media would be hijacked by the fat-cats, or those working in their interests, because the fat-cats are, of course, the ones who hold the real power and influence. Thus the media would be flooded with shows that might seem like harmless and informative entertainment on the surface, but are actually designed to instil all that Marxist “opiate of the masses” stuff: To convince people their lives are fine and good as they are, or to numb and distract them from their unsatisfactory, alienated situation, to promise them amazing rewards if they continue to be good workers and good consumers, to encourage them to go out and buy stuff. 

In fairness, this is not necessarily a conscious thing. The media reflects the basic values of its society – it could hardly be any other way. However, in order to do this, Adorno suggested there would be a few limited formats that would be churned out again and again with slight surface variations to convince people that they have more choice and variety than they actually do, and keep them bamboozled by the shiny pretty things presented within.

Now, Adorno, like Marx, seems very jaded when considering the best of TV, radio and publishing media. This view doesn’t show much of an appreciation of what media can do at its finest – this does not explain the difference between a crappy sitcom and a sublime one, it does not explain the role of satire or thought-provoking drama or properly informative documentary.

What it does explain though, uncannily well, is populist mainstream TV. Think about Adorno’s idea of a few limited formats given endless new spins and think about the TV schedules. Daytime TV. Saturday night TV. Gentle “wind down and go to bed early to be fresh for work in the morning” Sunday night TV.

Think about all the shows (from the X-Factor to The National Lottery to Big Brother to bog standard quiz shows) that promise extremely unlikely riches, fame and success for the hoi-polloi. The soaps that raise dull, work-a-day gossip to some kind of Greek tragic levels of drama. The aspirational comedies and dramas that show materially successful people being attractive and witty or strong and heroic. The voyeuristic reality shows that spew infinite inane gossip, whether about “real people” or celebrities (oh, they’re just like us! I could be a celebrity just like them, too!) The endless parade of fine dining and property-market shows, that tell you what you could and should be doing with your money, if you work hard enough to get it (watching a celebrity chef create an intricate masterpiece out of fresh locally-sourced ingredients in Indonesia, followed by a professional couple buying a second home in Spain as a fixer-upper opportunity... all whilst sitting in your rented flat eating a microwave lasagna).

And, of course, all the above-mentioned “expert judge” shows, of which the X-Factor-style talent show is only the most basic example... why not combine the format with food, or business, or both? A quick look at the schedules tells you all you need to know about the materialistic obsessions of the capitalist west – fame, food, property, money, fashion, body image, gossip. No wonder Al Qaeda hate us.

What was my point? Where did I start with this? Ah yes... my problem with the Simon Cowell man. Well, what have we found out? He is a prime purveyor of the Adorno-style numb-the-mind-and-promise-everyone-fame-and-riches “opiate”, right down to the tweaked-format spread of shows. He basically makes his massive wealth out of using up and exploiting the lives of naive, vulnerable people who are totally at his mercy, like any capitalist fat-cat.

So what, though? It’s business, and business is cruel, but that’s the free market – it’s Darwinian and dog-eat-dog, but it’s always proved to be the best way to run an economy. And fair enough. No one has to enter the X-Factor, no one will starve if they don’t. I probably wouldn’t care if all this produced something good as an end result.

But there it is, see, it doesn’t, at least not to me – it leaves a massive smear of bland, homogenised shit across the bathroom wall of popular culture, and for what? Cowell doesn’t care, he’s just making money. The cynical, soulless values that stuff promotes offends my finer sensibilities and worse, Cowell’s influence, Cowell’s world, seems to be ever encroaching on mine, inescapable. 

This is what annoys me – it leaves me feeling alienated from my own (pop) culture.

But never mind. I will not deny occasionally being diverted by Cowell’s shows, and I am probably grateful that it gives me something (essentially pretty innocuous and whiffly) to rage about. I think he is a cynical, manipulative, exploitative, swaggering alpha-male cock, but I’d still consider inviting Simon Cowell along to my barbecue. He could bring his dog. I like that dog.