A bird don't come for free

[imomus]

The Guardian has unleashed literature professor John Sutherland on the new album from The Streets, A Grand Don't Come For Free, with interesting results. Now, I don't agree with everything Sutherland says -- for instance, he seems to see pop music's exemption from the ubiquity of narrative as a failing, whereas I'm much more ambivalent about it, and he sees pop's four minute format as an obstacle to telling a good story, whereas I see it as the perfect format for a story miniature; a pop song has the same tight, taut structure as a joke, for instance -- but I do agree with him that Mike Skinner is an important and talented writer. I don't have that much of a problem with comparisons with Pepys being drawn -- Skinner captures the feel of modern Britain as well as Pepys captured the 17th century. They both have an admirable ability to make apparently trivial details and feckless amusements emblematic of the whole tenor of life in their times. Skinner's focus on cell phones, cash machines, TV and kebab shops and betting is as exotic and alien to the average English professor as Pepys' London, so we can forgive the hype -- maybe it's gratitude. After all, Skinner is perfect grist for the academic mill; instant pop sociology. I think I draw the line at the Dostoyevsky comparison, though. I think Dostoyevsky has a cosmological frame which goes far beyond either Pepys or Mike Skinner. He's thinking bigger questions, seeing human behaviour from a wider angle. He's a theologian, not a sociologist. I can't see Mike Skinner agreeing that 'Life is in ourselves and not in the external'.

The Guardian article ends with a little list of British pop's exceptional storytellers. Now, I have to admit that I scrolled down the list half expecting to find myself in there. I wasn't, of course. But it was nice to find old mucker Lawrence getting a mention for 'Back In Denim'. Anyway, the article started me thinking about the similarities and differences between my style and Skinner's. I don't know if Skinner has heard 'The Threepenny Opera'. Certainly you could draw a good, strong line from 'Original Pirate Material' back through Brecht and Weill to their sources in John Gay and Hogarth, and then, if you wanted, to Pepys. (Skinner also does for UK garage what Weill did for ragtime pop: at once pastiches it and makes it a powerful expressive device.)



Sutherland also speculates on the personal input in Skinner's concept album 'A Grand Don't Come For Free'. He mentions Skinner's epilepsy. I guess that's where the Dostoyevsky parallel really comes in; epilepsy also links Skinner to Ian Curtis, which is an interesting connection; Curtis had the same working class background, epilepsy and girl problems as Skinner, and even looked rather like him, but tended to focus everything through the prism of literature and art, make everything more gauzy and otherworldly. And the missing link between Ian Curtis and Dostoyevsky is Iggy Pop, whose Berlin album 'The Idiot' is a great piece of stylised storytelling that borrows more than its title from Dostoyevsky.

It might be fun to contrast a Streets song with my own 'Is It Because I'm A Pirate', which I recently made available for download here in its original raw form. ('Oskar Tennis Champion' was actually going to be called 'The Pirate' at one point; I changed the title because of Skinner's 'Original Pirate Material', an album I was listening to a lot in Tokyo in 2002 while making 'Oskar'.) Now, at first glance most Skinner songs (like the rather disappointing recent single Fit But You Know It, a rather inferior version of Jilted John's 'Jilted John') seem more gritty and realist than Is It Because I'm A Pirate, with its Cantonese pantomime flourish. But underneath its exotic stylings my song reflects a rather humdrum, universal and 'street level' experience -- the reality of my life at the time I wrote it. I developed a crush on Keiko, a beautiful waitress at the Organic Cafe in Nakameguro. Nothing much happened and I poured my disappointment into a comic song. The song adds a bigger theme, though: the joke about a pirate who really has slit throats and plundered junks using the PC argument that to project these things on him just because he's a pirate would be prejudice and stereotyping. In other words, here's a stereotype who demands that people shouldn't treat him like a stereotype. Now, I can imagine Brecht pushing irony that far, but not Skinner.

So does that make Is It Because I'm A Pirate? weaker or stronger than a Streets song? It's got the classic Streets angle of a hard luck story you might tell your mate about a crush on a 'bird'. But my song also contains a whole level of satire on PC values and the self-deceptions of the male ego which Skinner would probably not venture into. Now, the question is whether that's a strength or a weakness on his part, and in his art. And the answer is, it probably depends which literature professor you ask.