Paul is dead

[imomus]

In the 1960s there were The Beatles and The Stones, rival bands led by Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. And in 2005 there are still The Beatles and The Stones, or rather, there are record releases by Mick Jagger's band and by Paul McCartney in the form of A Bigger Bang, the new Stones album, and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the new Paul McCartney solo album. Both are being hailed as "returns to form", but I think they're something else altogether. I think they're the work of impostors.

David Bowie also popped up this week, performing with The Arcade Fire at Fashion Rocks. He did "Five Years" and "Life On Mars", as well as some Arcade Fire songs. Although it was heartwarming and exciting to see him (Bowie's been rather quiet since his operation), the performance was oddly dis-spiriting. Here was a man trying to look and sound like the Platonic idea of David Bowie, having obviously studied the vocal and visual mannerisms of David Bowie as he appears in the popular imagination. You couldn't help thinking "It's not a bad impersonation — he got the hair just right. But the real David Bowie would always be a couple of steps ahead, trying to look and sound like someone else. This man is trying to look and sound like David Bowie, so he's obviously a fake".

The same so-authentic-it-must-be-fake thing is going on with the Paul McCartney album. Produced by Nigel Godrich, that master of faked retro authenticity, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard" makes you think "God, this guy used to be in, be, The Beatles, and this could almost be a new Beatles record, and yet The Beatles is like another era, the Cretaceous not the Holocene. Isn't it impressive that life is so long, and that artists can just keep going on and on, like the Queen?" At the same time, there's some suspicion that this might be a much-parodied artist parodying himself better than his parodists ever could (because of course he has the exact same voice as Paul McCartney of The Beatles, and doesn't sound much older than he did on "Let It Be"). Mightn't acclaim for the album be coming from that conservative instinct of the public to hear a familiar artist making a familiar sound, the same instinct that made everyone applaud Bowie's reunion with Tony Visconti, and their "late period parody" style using old tricks you recognise from old albums?

So here are the plonking piano style of the typical Beatles ballad, the lush vocal harmonies of the "Abbey Road" period, those richly sentimental George Martin string arrangements you remember from Eleanor Rigby... Everything, really, except the experimentalism of late Beatles. And you have to ask yourself whether it's self-parody, or just... well, just self, that thing that just doesn't go away as long as you live. That agglomeration of habits and tricks and reflexes and shortcuts, ambushed by the occasional self-challenge and the inevitable challenges of the ageing process. (Why challenge myself, the artist muses, when Mother Nature is making such a good job of it?)

I know how easy it is to do this; I've done it myself. I thought of my 1997 album "Ping Pong" as a "return to core Momus values", guided by the fact that some younger artists in London at the time seemed to be influenced by my work. I tried to hear my own work through their ears, hear what they were specifically attracted to, and focus on making more work in that vein. Instead of trying to become someone else, expand, I tried to become myself, or rather, my earlier self, as curated by these young whippersnappers (people like Anthony of Jack, Dickon of Orlando). The result was a sort of self-parody, in the form of songs like "My Pervert Doppelganger". But of course the old work contained this divergent movement, this desire to be a new person, and the new work contains a convergent movement, the desire to be who you "are", so the attempt to recapture the spirit of the past always fails.

To put it another way: there's a time when a rock star like Mick Jagger has an ever-changing hairstyle, and each time we see him it's new; long as a woman's, fringed, tousled, primped, and so on. But then at a certain point we notice that he's just trying to look as much as possible like the image in the popular mind of "Mick Jagger", and that his hair looks like "Mick Jagger hair", as if that hairstyle has been fixed for all eternity as the Platonic idea of Mick Jagger hair, and Mick himself is now just another guy trying to look like Mick Jagger.

If you wonder where the 1960s experimentalism of The Beatles and The Stones went, and regret that the conservatism of the public tends to mean that their wilder, more divergent moments never make it to the Platonic ideal of who they're considered to be, never seem to get into the fur ewig version, that marble bust which the original artists and their imitators alike model themselves upon, I have good news for you. There's an online museum of the avant garde which contains, amongst other treasures, wild experiments by members of The Beatles and The Stones. It's Ubu.com and it's back after a summer-long period of refurbishment. Here you'll find the real Mick Jagger rather than the Jagger impersonator on the new Stones album; a Mick Jagger who proves his authenticity by doing the last thing we'd think of as "Jaggeresque": playing a solo monophonic Moog composition for Kenneth Anger's 1969 film "Invocation of My Demon Brother". And here too is that part of the spirit of The Beatles which, although it doesn't make it onto McCartney solo albums, authenticates by its startling unrecognisability the Beatles identity: John and Yoko's 1971 film "Erection". It looks and sounds nothing like "The Beatles", so there's a good chance it's a work by one of them, containing the missing, maverick spirit of the group. The dead Beatle is obviously the living one, and the living one dead.

Comments

[martymartini.livejournal.com]

What about Ringo?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Another thought on this. Popular music artists are "products" in a commercial market. The best thing to be, if you're a product, is something "new, exciting different" or an old, well-established, familiar, recognisable, reassuring brand. Now, while Coca Cola may be able to keep the exact same formula (actually that's a bad example, Coke used to contain cocaine, just like David Bowie did!), a human being, being human, tends to change and age. Therefore, as a living "brand", he will resemble less and less the original formula, and will have to work harder and harder faking what once came naturally (botox, wigs, and so on). He will thus come to resemble his impersonators.

[neil-scott.livejournal.com]

This doesn't just apply to old rockers, I think lots of people have a mental image of when they were most vital and try to recreate it. Trouble is, people can't help but change (literally as cells die and the scenery changes). Perhaps the only people who can pull it off are those like Dylan who believe that a ghost dictates to them their material.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the giveaway here is the presence of Nigel Godrich as the producer on the McCartney album. Godrich came to fame making a younger generation of artists sound like the older generation. Now he's working with the older generation to make them sound like they were when they were younger. What the younger artists and the older ones share, and what brings them to Godrich, is the feeling that authenticity is in the past.

[(Anonymous)]

Very, very interesting questioning! how does one actually deal with his own image after this has crystallised in one or many forms? when did you actually begin to "recognize" your own so that you could play with it? do you think jagger and mccartney are actually conscious of what people are expecting from them, image-wise THEN musically-wise? and how to decide if someone is repeating him/herself artistically consciously or because composition is all about "tics"? we could ask bjork, aphex twin or hosono haruomi the same question. when are they pastiching themselves? when are they playing with people's expectations? what is artistic freedom after one, two or three decades or mediatic exposition?
anyway

cool topic

(odot)

[mo-no-chrome.livejournal.com]

Surely the Platonic ideal must also be complicated by the audience. There's the public's Platonic Bowie (Ziggy Stardust, imho) and that of the critics (the Berlin trilogy).

But does this mean that the 'real' work must be that which is panned by both groups (for example, Bowie's amazing and truly original concept album 1.Outside)? And, taking that idea to its extreme, if you're a true fan, do you purposefully like the worst work in order to prove it?

[scottbateman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the new Stones album makes me sad--Keith plays great, Charley plays great, Mick plays some mean harmonica and sings well, but there are pretty much no interesting musical ideas on the entire album; they played it way too safe.

Still, "Rough Justice" is a nifty single.

[(Anonymous)]

Might this not be part of a more general issue of inflexibility in how we present ourselves and are perceived socially? I'm no rock star, but even so, will my public ever let me get out of my early 21st century decadent period? Will I want them to let me? When I'm dancing at a party in 2045, whether I'm dancing the same way, or a different better way, I'm ready for the fact that I'll still probably be dancing like someone's dad, with my whole personal history fixedly retro, and a parody of itself. A bunch of old photos and clippings my kids look through.

Ubu.com

[(Anonymous)]

Ironically, a jaunt through Ubu.com seems to be a jaunt through the past in the search of authenticity as well. I'm sure I'll eventually listen to what you've pointed out; can't help feeling that every moment spent poring through the obscurities of the past is not a moment spent seeing Momus or others perform in a forest, or merely going to see the forest itself, which is constantly adapting, and constantly NOW. (I suppose it's a platonic image of a forest as well, if one doesn't spend much time looking.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's definitely something in that. I recently ranked my favourite Bowie albums, putting his Deram compilation "Images" at number one. If "searching" and "trying to be someone else" are the essence of Bowie's work, there's more of that going on in this material than anywhere else. And even if "Ziggy" and the Berlin trilogy also contain "divergence", their canonisation tends to erase the very identity crises that made them so interesting when they first came out.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there's an inevitability that we all become riffs on our perceived public image, and people genuinely in the public domain even more so. People like Bowie and Jagger have this huge amount of baggage, and there's no way of ignoring it. If they ignore it, the story then becomes "he's ignoring his past and trying to do something different! How pathetic/great, etc". In other words, the focus remains on the baggage and how the artist is dealing with it. It's inevitable, but it's not necessarily bad. (You seem to have a rather Romantic notion of "experimentalism", Momus) Some people just keep refining who they are, rather than becoming someone new (another Romantic/Modernist dream?) We can all spot a Picasso painting, with its particular style and thematic obsessions. This doesn't mean that what he was doing in 1907 is necessarily better than what he was doing in 1947.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

"I like the early stuff."

[(Anonymous)]

I think the visual art analogy is really interesting: we don't tend to think an artists late work is rubbish like we do a musician's. Maybe it's because music is more sensitive to fashion.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think this relates to my entry from a few days ago (it's really been McCartney week on Click Opera!) when I objected to "Ebony and Ivory"'s line "people are the same wherever you go". I think Paul is now saying something like "we all know that people are the same whatever age they are". And that's questionable (though obviously something is consistent in a person, whatever age they are, and in people, wherever they live). There's some Essentialism or Platonism here which is denying the way age (or culture and place) changes us, keeps us different and diverging. And the moment you propose this unchangingness as a virtue, you stop growing and stop changing. You fossilize, yet, despite the solidity, you still have a hard time resembling your bust. Perhaps Sir Paul could do with a bit more Cindy Sherman in his soul.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think visual art is a bit different because it's more protected from the market than pop music. See my comment above about the choice, for a product, between being "new and exciting" and being "familiar and established". In marketing terms, there isn't really much alternative to those extremes, and there's a lot of marketing pressure on pop acts to be one or the other, fresh or recognisable. Artists (and failed musicians like me, ha!) are somewhere in between, though, and can stay somewhere in between for a very long time. Marketing requirements and sustained artistic vitality are at odds.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Aphex Twin is weird, he's re-trenched his sound into a permanent 1997, but he's doing it under new and fake identities like Analord. Bjork sounds ever-more-inescapably Bjork even as she advances towards Inuit throat-singing and Japanese gagaku music. Even young bands like Animal Collective now sound instantly recognisable, almost self-parodic (though I haven't heard "Feels" yet). And o.lamm... well, he seems still to be in that interesting phase, slippage!

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, the marketing thing is important. Bowie once said (fairly recently) "I guess I'm the sum of what everyone thinks I am." That's inescapable, but also pretty tightly prescribed if you're a big star in the entertainment business. If you're a small fish, "what everyone thinks you are" is a far vaguer proposition.

Marketing requirements shift, though. They were probably better adapted to sustained artistic viability in the 70s than they are now. After all, Bowie managed to be artistically credible and commercially huge for an entire decade, which is probably as good as it gets.

Also commercial success can sometimes add to rather than substract from artistic vitality. In some ways, those great Bowie albums were artistically enhanced by their success. ie Ziggy Stardust was an album (partly) about a rock messiah written by a middling rock musician, who on the strength of the album became a rock messiah by playing the role of a rock messiah etc etc...

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, but it's only commercially expedient to produce a new album just like the last one if the last one was good, and the new one is rubbish. Or, I guess, if you're dealing with buyers, A&R, and media who don't know what's good or bad and have to be told by the figures.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Is the platonic ideal of Bjork that she's this weird experimentalist whose weirdness is more memorable than her songs? So much so that the weirder she gets, the more Bjork she is? And didn't she self-parody quite early in her career, with the likes of "The Modern Things", which was dangerously close to Dawn French's impersonation of her?

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

Not that it really matters, but I don't understand these comments about Nigel Godrich at all. In what sense did he come to fame making a generation of younger artists sound like the older generation?

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

Maturation can be a lonely thing. Alex Chilton refuses to "do" Alex Chilton and nobody is intersted in anything he's doing anymore.

[facehead2k.livejournal.com]

but it's that identity that drives her to never make the same record twice. Even if she tried, when you record in ten different studios with different engineers and 30 other collaborators, its going to make creating the same records more difficult.

Failure Keeps Me Fresh

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

I don't know how it is for you, Nick. But for me, when I listen again to earlier material, it's the failures that excite. It's the stuff that didn't work, didn't come off, or that nobody else loved

Re: sexual energy

[urban-ospreys.livejournal.com]

I read a biog of a gay porn star that had a line "at the age of thirty Troy did the decent thing and made the transition from being a 'hot bottom boy' to become a 'scary kinky top man." Rockers won't be adored by the lens forever, but it's rare to see them go 'kinky top man' either. Vitality-wise most seem in a half-apologetic middle ground.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_greengrass/]

What you're saying is absolutely true, and especially apparent on "Reality", but you have to compare these artists who are trying to recapture the past with the artists who are forging ahead into change- artists like Bob Dylan, who is an unrecognizable wreck in concert now and produces consistently sub-par work. Or the interview on the Daily Show with Kurt Vonnegut, in which he stated that 1)he believes in God-guided evolution, 2)he hates liberals, 3)Bush is an alright guy. I don't know how you feel about Vonnegut, but I find this personally disheartening. Maybe the art runs out with time. Maybe the old people should keep singing the old songs- they stop being artists and become creative folk musicians. They are dead, but at least they're not zombies.