Where virtue goes awarded

Congratulations to Jeremy Deller for winning the British art world's most prestigious prize, the Turner, last night. It's a sign of the times that an art world figure like Deller seems much closer to life, art -- and even what I think is important about music -- than anyone winning music awards in Britain in 2004.



UK rock and pop awards in 2004 showed pop music, and specifically rock, to be in a terminally mannerist and museumlike place; dead, irrelevant, tongue-in-cheek, out of touch with contemporary events, as conservative and hung up on the past as opera or classical music at their most decadent, smug, pastichey and tribute-ridden. Awards like the Brits and the NME Carling this year went to sadly Spinal Tappish bands like The Darkness, The Libertines and Kings of Leon, whose moronic-ironic pomo neo-primal rockism seemed to narrow the world down to retro-reverence and in-joke tribute-nudges to rock's heyday, the 1970s (did I mention that satanist-turned-celebrity dad Ozzy Osbourne won the NME's 'Godlike genius award'?).

This year's Turner prize not only shows an artist better in touch with social realities than any of the awarded music artists -- Deller's most famous video is his 2001 reconstruction of the 1984 miner's strike, 'The Battle of Orgreave' -- but also better in touch with music itself: his most famous 'painting', shown above, is 'The History of the World' (1997), a blackboard diagram of the links between brass bands and early 90s rave culture. (Deller later expanded the work by recording colliery brass bands playing the greatest hits of acid house.) 'The History of the World' may contain an art world retro-70s allusion -- a nudge-nudge heads up to one of the art world's own 'godlike geniuses' of the 1970s, Josef Beuys, one of whose arcane (yet highly political) lectures I attended in 1981. Beuys' blackboard that day linked the imprisoned Scottish hunger-striker Jimmy Boyle with the striking workers at British Aerospace's Coventry workshops.



Deller's ludic and ludicrous genre fusions parallel my own. But I also like his interest in society and history, his objectivity. I think the recognition in an art world award ceremony of these concerns shows that, while the rock world is currently as detached and anti-social as a junky, the art world is in rude health. 'The Battle of Orgreave' is a video folk history the same way a track like 'Cockle Pickers' on my forthcoming 'Otto Spooky' album is an electronic folk recitative. They both tell true stories; my song recounts the death of a Chinese cockling crew earlier this year at Morecambe Bay in northern England.

On winning his third or fourth award at the 2004 Brit Awards ceremony, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness declared 'We should thank our collective parents for bestowing on us the gift of rock'. Jeremy Deller, in his Turner interview, preferred to quote Lenin: 'One of my favourite quotes is by Lenin: "Everything is connected to everything else." I'm more into the social relationships, rather than the political... My work is quite slight, but in a good way.' Can we imagine an award-winning musician saying anything that humble, or being that interested in life? (I'll actually make an exception for Bono, whose insane messianism at least leads him to make useful declarations like his recent pledge to devote the rest of his life to fighting poverty, or his use of an appearance at an Apple Expo in LA to declare cars and roads 'ugly' and hope they disappear one day.)



Here's the lyric to the NME's single of the year, 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' by The Libertines. I quote it very much in the spirit of 'nothing much to see here, folks, move along please':

Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!

Don’t look back into the sun
Now you know that your time has come
And they said it would never come for you oh oh oh

Oh my friend you haven’t changed
You're looking rough and living strange
And I know you got a taste for it too oh oh oh

And they'll never forgive you but they wont let you go
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no

Don't look back into the sun
You got your past, but you're on the run
And all the lies you said, huh did you say?

But when they played that song at the Death Disco
It started fast but it ends so slow
And all the time it just reminded me of you

And they'll never forgive you but they won't let you go (LET ME GO!)
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no

Dig through layer on layer of lazy, half-digested, half-understood references (Oasis' 'Don't Look Back in Anger', Bob Dylan's 'don't look back', David Bowie's 'Look Back in Anger', the play of the same name by John Osborne, 'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden... who knows, and who really cares?) and you might find the core of this half-assed song -- the vague and veiled heroin reference in 'taste for it' and 'never let you go'. Just like some tedious old junky (or, even worse, an 'air junky' just going through the motions in ironic-moronic-reverent mode), rock music prefers to stay in its bedroom listening to old records than go out and join the dots of all the interesting, funny, trivial or important stuff going on in the world.

Next year Jeremy Deller will collaborate on a touring show of British folk art, 'a vernacular parade of spray-painted cars, flower arrangements, gurning competitions, crop circles and images of mad sporting activities - an exhibition by people who don't normally get exhibited, curated by an artist who believes there may be nothing more important.' Human-scaled, humane, humble, collectivist... it's the kind of interesting scheme you could imagine an award-winning visual artist or folk singer cooking up, but never, these days, an award-winning rock singer.