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.

Comments

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Ha! -- Superstar Waitress Keiko!

Book of Essays

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

Are there any plans on releasing extracts of Click Opera and your Essays in paper/book format? I recently read "Pluricide" and "Wicker meets man". Very fond of them. This may have been discussed before. My apologies.
I have added you as a friend.

[(Anonymous)]

Until I clicked on that link, I'd never heard The Streets before... But the mere fact that this professor excludes Momus makes me doubt him more than a bit. The Kinks, indeed--but where is Squeeze's "Cool for Cats" and the first Madness album? Dare we ask for "The Ultraconformist"? Why does a Cockney or "streets" accent make you "real" and gritty, whereas a posh accent and harpsichords make you "fake" and arch? Hogarth loved both the salon and the saloon.

Re: Book of Essays

[(Anonymous)]

i have also wondered about this too when reading the essays on your site, nick. i think so many of them would lend themselves to that old, but still pretty useful, book format. i would vote for these three to be included: Double Density, Cute Formalism, and Classical Composers.
-roddy

Re: Book of Essays

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I would love to publish a book of essays, but the fact is that nobody has ever approached me to do it. Two publishers have expressed interest in me doing a book, one in Britain and one in France -- oddly enough, they had very similar names, Serpente a Plumes and Serpent's Tail, no relation -- but in both cases they stressed that they wanted to commission a book rather than publish existing writings (which are already all free online anyway). But neither of them came through with an advance, so the 'commissioning' thing didn't quite seem real. A book don't come for free, guys (unless, of course, it's the Momus website)!

[ciaan]

Rather random question: I've started reading Mishima's "Spring Snow" and was wondering if the name Matsugae in "London 1888" is a reference to the family in that book. Or something. (But no spoilers- I'm only half-way through the story. ;) )

Wasn't Dostoyevsky almost executed at one point, and it was halted while he was standing in line just minutes away from the noose? (He is also referenced in "Apologies To Insect Life" by British Sea Power, whose album I am currently obsessing over, and which makes me feel very similar to the way Joy Division makes me feel - very numinous music.)

books of essays/whatever

[(Anonymous)]

nick,
if a book ever does wind up getting published one day, you MUST include japanese translations of everything, so that all of your japanese fans finally have some idea that there is more to momus than just a post-shibuya-kei thing. they really have no idea about the writer cum aesthetic muse, since the level of your english in your writings is beyond most japanese here. i'm sure they'd be pleasantly surprised...and would buy the book right up!
anyway, just a thought.
yours,
r.
p.s. thanks for the cd, nick! got it in the mail today.
p.p.s. i think just spotten miss k. the other day in nakame. small world!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Marquis Matsugae was named after the characters in Mishima's Sea of Fertility series. And yes, Dostoyevsky was subject to a fake execution. In fact, I mention that in a song called Broken To Joking (http://www.imomus.com/romlyrics.html) which has never been released except on the CD-R 'Stop This!' (and accompanying CD-ROM 'This Must Stop!'). The song goes:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, facing the blanks again
How does it feel, your execution was a fake?
If you promise to stop your treacherous pranks
Then you can sing us the song of the falling sleet...

'Song of the Falling Sleet' was the title of an early draft of 'The Courier', a song I did with my first band The Happy Family too...

Re: Book of Essays

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

It's a shame there's not yet a convenient e-book standard (or successful e-book reader, for that matter).

[(Anonymous)]

"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... etc."

You pretentious wally.

You are no doubt correct that that Mike Skinner wouldn't venture into such a tiresome "satire" on political correctness. But not the self-deceptions of the male ego? Come now, listen to his work again. It is hardly celebratory.

He is a very important artist. What is implicit in this and other entries of yours is that pains you to countenance the idea that you are not. If you linger on such thoughts I predict that you are to become rather embittered, so do try not to.
Comparing your work and his - well, it's an interesting idea. I would suggest that the fundamental similarity is that both are ripe for parody, but with yours promising to yield an infinitely more amusing pastiche.

Regards,
Ezra Popham

[ciaan]

Ah, the recycling of ideas....

[imomus.livejournal.com]

He is a very important artist.

You pretentious wally. 'Fit But You Know It' isn't fit to carry the hem of my toga. And you know it.

[(Anonymous)]

nick currie
every girl's dream
no ordinary artist

a lily
in bloom throughout centuries
throughout big cities

traditionally
he should be married
to a scotish chick

suddenly
as he developped a beer belly
he discovered japanese chicks
had real tricks

[(Anonymous)]

unintentionally scary
sometimes funny
not to say oddity

[dee-dee26m.livejournal.com]

re: the poster above who called Mr Momus a wally.

There's nothing pretentious in the blog entry to whcih you prefer. Lines can be drawn back to any cultural source that would seem to have some themic connection to (x) subject matter. That doesn't necessarily mean the speaker/writer is claiming that there is an explicitly conscious connection (i.e. that Mike Skinner set out to evoke the works of those cited) - just that it's THERE if you want to SEE it.

This is the simplest critical tool in the book, and also one of the most fun.

[cappuccino-kid.livejournal.com]

in case you missed it, the Grauniad review did (sort of) mention you last week when they wrote about Momus the God, calling him "the patron saint of satirists".

x

[(Anonymous)]

Oh no I don't! The hem of your toga! If you are implying that you are somehow high art and Skinner low, I would like to hear your reasons. Go on, giz a laugh. I'll concede that 'Fit' is a ropey song, but it's a damn sight less irritating than your turgid warblings. The facts remain that you are a pretentious wally, and your songs are asking to be parodied. Especially the lyrics. Imagine that, in view of the dire nature of the music! One more thing - are you capable of doing a different voice to "arch, ironic and sexually frustrated but if I talk about obscure Japanese things and deconstruction no-one will notice Petshop Boy"? If so, try it.

Regards,
Ezra