The art of pop
Jul. 26th, 2006 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
I'm busy in the staff room today, so I'd like to leave you in the hands of a relief teacher. Class, this is Mr Cocker. Anything funny about that name, Louise? No? Thank you. Now, Mr Cocker has a very interesting presentation for you today. He's made a report on his tape-recorder about the effect of British art schools on British pop music. Let's just thread the spools, then you can listen to it. Mr Cocker went to Central Saint Martins, admittedly quite a while after he started his pop group Pulp. He was a bit ambivalent about the value of an art school education at the time: his thesis was all about how students would be much better off if all the art schools were closed down for five years. Which didn't go down terribly well with the tutors, obviously. But now he feels that what's valuable about these largely 19th century institutions is the eccentricity they foster. You'll hear, for instance, one tutor reminisce fondly about the year the staff of the sculpture department wore brown paper bags over their heads. No, Raymond, you may not put a bag over your head. We're not at art school yet.All right, settle down, settle down now everybody and listen to Mr Cocker's report. I shall be back presently to ask you questions.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 08:08 am (UTC)Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 08:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 08:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 08:59 am (UTC)Either way, British pop life wouldn't have existed in any way, shape or form without dole money, art college grants and the social and economic reform window that Attlee hustled in after WWII.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 09:01 am (UTC)But of course we mustn't forget that government is "not dissimilar to the mafia in its manipulation of trading rights and extortion of its citizens", as we learned yesterday.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 09:37 am (UTC)But the fruits, both artistic and financial, speak for themselves: John Lennon, Pete Townsend, Malcolm MacLaren, The Kinks, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno - etc etc etc virtually the whole backbone of British pop.
I'll never forget the week that Tony Blair's New Labour got into number 10, and the first thing he did was to abolish college grants.
Amongst the hurrahs, nobody even blinked.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 09:53 am (UTC)The radical nature of British education from 60s onwards is something we should celebrate instead of all that BritArt / British Rock acts and Union Jack waving. Give me Summerhill (A.S Niel + Ivor Cutler) or even the dissenters academy in Hoxton (1669) any day!!!
[Hoxton] "was one of the birth-places of the illegal Non- Conformist sects, who met behind locked doors and constructed secret escape passages. The Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, barred these religious Dissenters from schoolteaching and excluded them from the universities. So they started to establish their own colleges, or Academies... One of the earliest Academies was opened - in 1669 - in Hoxton Square... The first Academy in Hoxton Square was followed by two others, both equally successful. The last survived till 1830, when it moved to Highbury. But the name of Hoxton Academy was kept alive in its Chapel and Sunday School. The Chapel, opened in Hoxton Street in 1796" Coombs, T. 1975 p.39)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 10:12 am (UTC)The first time I heard of St. Martins was, like a lot of others, in Common People. I had a great three years there too despite almost constant complaining at the time. Jarvis is so good at this kind of thing, you wonder why he doesn't make more films (anyone remember his series on outsider art?).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 10:22 am (UTC)But far from being rich, she comes from a family of communist intellectuals chased out of Greece by the fascist regime of Papadopoulis. Maybe that Euro-communist heritage is why she wanted to live like common people... Or maybe she just wanted to hang with Jarvis because he was hot.
what can a poor boy do...
Date: 2006-07-26 11:13 am (UTC)i dont think i will ever be at "art college" in the sense discussed here..
i just hang with people from there...osmosis..oddly enough i was a fringe hanger on of the student union scene at Aberdeen University in 1984
i used to think the digital inclusion IT community projects I assisted with at the turn of the century were the new cultural salons of bottom up eccentricity but it has gone all business..bums on seats..outputs..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 11:55 am (UTC)here's the horrors' video for sheena is a parasite (http://www.stashmedia.tv/feed/sheena.mov), directed by chris cunningham and starring samantha morton!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 12:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 01:56 pm (UTC)Perhaps it was 'cause they liked Jarvis and got him and the record muddled up.
If so, I know what they mean.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 02:11 pm (UTC)- Urban Ospreys
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:05 pm (UTC)I've taught design classes and lectured at art schools, although I never went to one myself. This (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzxnVukR7kQ&search=soul%20train) was my art curriculum when I was young--much to be drawn from it. I should teach a course on it sometime.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:34 pm (UTC)A old-school dance line formed at a wedding recently, and it was amazing how people who usually don't think of themselves as particularly creative started to employ their reserves of wit, improvisation and showmanship, and how each participant got immediate feedback from the other participants/spectators. First we had a young buck doing flips, then a middle-aged portly fellow came in and cooled things down and smartened things up by strutting down the walk, producing a comb and fixing his hair. I then came in, produced my moustache brush, gave a few strokes, then ended with my usual pimp float outro. Great fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 03:58 pm (UTC)Let's take it on the floor...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 05:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 05:18 pm (UTC)"My Pink Half of the Drainpipe." Oh, man. OHHHH man!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 07:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-26 11:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 04:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 04:24 am (UTC)My grandmother, who hailed from northern KY, where much of these bands were from, was in a jug band. She didn't go to art school, either--but she knew her way around spoons, a washboard and thimbles. Filthy limericks, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 04:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 06:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 04:04 pm (UTC)I'd imagine that we wouldn't have the rich treasury of music we now do if everyone who had intelligence and talent rushed right to the endgame, like today. In part, I think that's why the eighties didn't become the sixties--they burned through their ideas too quickly. An argument could be made that that's the downside to art school's influence.
Art schools can work wonders, but I doubt a culture can stay robust and healthy if all its offspring have the same DNA.