Look back in opus numbers

[imomus]

Don't Look Back, an event organized by All Tomorrow's Parties, is "the season that invites artists to perform seminal records live in their entirety". Coming up later this year they've got House of Love performing their first Creation album and Sonic Youth performing Daydream Nation.

But why's it called "Don't Look Back"? Surely "Do Look Back" would sum up better what this kind of event is all about? Where did this idea begin? And how would I feel if someone invited me to perform, say, "Circus Maximus" or "Ping Pong" in a penguin suit at the Royal Festival Hall?

I feel pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. It clearly represents a museumification -- if not a mummification -- of pop music, a shift to the kind of classical music mindset where performers are reduced to interpreters of a canon, doing a "repertory" of set, venerated masterpieces. Bob Dylan performs his Opus 6! (Implication: when he's dead and gone, someone else will perform it with the same reverence. Or possibly more.) It's part of the Mojo-retro-necro shift I've noticed happening to this once-vital art form, and to that extent I deplore it.

I think you can see the process taking shape in the 1990s, when Philip Glass made (rather bad) symphonic versions of Bowie and Eno's albums Low (recorded fresh and spontaneous in 1976, made into a bad symphony in 1992) and "Heroes" (recorded fresh and spontaneous in 1977, made into a bad symphony in 1996). Bowie performed the Low album in its entirety when he came to Berlin in 2003.

It isn't just the kind of person who reads Mojo and wants rock music to be "classic" who wants this kind of event to happen, though. Fine art, when it turns its attention to popular music, is currently very interested in the idea of "faithful" reconstructions. Take my friends Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. By day they actually work in the music industry. By night they're artists, and you're likely to find them staging a reconstruction of the Ziggy farewell concert at the Hammersmith Odeon, or a live re-enactment of The Cramps' seminal 1978 performance at Napa Mental Institute.

Note that word "seminal", which crops up both in the BBC's plug for Forsyth and Pollard and the blurb for Don't Look Back. "Seminal" is a nasty word, a word that suggests that artists shoot their load and can then only do a sort of "repetition-gurning" thing whereby they mime the resulting orgasm for coins for the rest of their lives. "Seminal" annoys me the same way "iconic" annoys me. "Iconic" is the favourite word of the appalling Kirsty Wark on the dreadful Newsnight Review, the BBC's dismal arts review programme. "Iconic" basically means "something famous, something you'll have heard of even if you aren't much into art and culture". It plugs right into repetition culture, celebrity culture, Top 10 lists, soundbites.

So when artists are invited to perform (for coins) their "seminal" and "iconic" albums, they're basically being told to knuckle under and accept that they probably only made one statement loud enough to reach the back of the hall -- or even to fill the hall -- one statement the people who don't particularly care about art might care to hear. Of course, some artists do only make one important statement, one good album, or have one hit song that touches sublimity and gets inside everybody and makes the Classic Radio playlists. It's a dismal thing, that, almost a curse. I'd much rather have, you know, The Fall. Or me. Productivity, process, pluralism, those are the things. In fact, given that Eno believes so much in process and texture, I'd imagine he must have been appalled, secretly, by Philip Glass's vulgar treatment of Low and "Heroes". He's probably too diplomatic to say it, though. And I genuinely believe Bowie was delighted by the whole thing.

Then again, there are some things to be said for the pop opus trend. First of all, it reminds musicians that they aren't just satisfying themselves when they make music. A finished record becomes the property of the public who embraces it. And some records are embraced much more widely and forcefully than others. Why not allow the public to time travel by revisiting a record they particularly liked, a record that became a part of their lives? It could be a powerful communal experience.

Secondly, if this does represent a museumification of pop music, is that necessarily a bad thing? Sure, vitality is great ("energy is eternal delight", says Blake's hellish proverb). But a certain kind of calm, dead quality can be lovely too. I've waxed lyrical about embalming fluid often enough in these pages, in essays like Classicism and Atrocity and Museums are better than clubs. Who needs raw spontaneous animal vitality when deadness and classicism can be so marble-lovely?

Thirdly, I did have an idea recently, an idea for a series of art shows that would take place over the next twenty years. Each show would reproduce an album of mine. The gallery would be full of contemporaneous memorabilia, and I'd be sitting there, singing that year's songs. The idea would be to try to recapture and capitalize, in the art world, on an unfulfilled potential, an excessive, over-qualified creativity squandered in the ephemeral pop world. Turning failure into success, I would offer myself that impossibility, a second bite at the cherry.

But why save such a good idea for the art world? I'd like to announce, today, that I am prepared to accept commissions to perform selected albums from my back catalogue in their entirety in chandelier-filled concert halls. Should I receive such a commission, I shall restore the records as painstakingly as the Donald Sutherland character in "Don't Look Now" restores Venetian frescoes. I shall scour eBay for the exact electronic devices I used to record said albums, and turn thrift stores inside out to find the shabby corduroy suits and ill-advised early acid house ravewear I was sporting as I recorded them. Wigs reproducing the perm and dye jobs I let Vidal Sassoon hairdressing students crop and chop into my hair will be acquired and adapted. I shall re-read diaries to get into the exact emotional state I was in when I was "the tender pervert" and "the poison boyfriend".

The fee I will require for each reconstructed album will be one million dollars. Eternity doesn't come cheap, you know.

Comments

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

None of this recreation stuff out of you. I wanna hear more remixes and see some Curly Carl breakdance videos. Wearing your Berufskleidung of course. :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Yes, I'm still alive. You're quite right. But for a million dollars, I'd play dead, live in concert.

[(Anonymous)]

I prefer to see this more as a reaction to the fragmentation of pop over the last few years, an attempt to reintroduce coherence and focus to a BODY of work. Certain contemporary musicians have begun performing new records in their entirety too. It seems natural to me that mp3 culture will have its corollary in the return to the opus. Your positive take on this would be far more interesting than the more obvious reaction in your post. Funnily enough, me and some friends were joking yesterday that you'd be waiting by the phone once you heard about the House of Love gig!
Jason

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Paragraphs 8,9, and 10 are positive. 11 shades over into sarcasm, it's true, but I think I can see some good points in the opus system's favour. It's certainly a way to create a slightly more special evening than "Here's an artist who'll play a bunch of songs, old and new."

[thunderbox.livejournal.com]

I think the fee should should be in guineas.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

One million dollars is 473,332 guineas, give or take the odd wooden thrupenny bit.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Also, as a connoisseur of the whisker, what do you make of this fellow?



I spotted him a few days ago at the Blind Jewish Workshop Museum (http://www.blindes-vertrauen.de/) here in Berlin.

die roboter rubo

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

what do you think of terre taemlitz piano varioations of kraftwerk?

A better idea....

[kabuki2point0.livejournal.com]

A far more grotesque and therefore much greater idea than you performing an album from your back catalogue in its entirety is to give the one million dollars to Ben Elton who would be commisioned to write a Momus musical in the vein of similar things that have been done about ABBA, Rod Stewart and er, Boney M: A weak narrative acted out woodenly, peppered with Momus songs. 'Insipid (surely 'inspired'?) by the music of Momus. I can see the standing ovations now.

[(Anonymous)]

I've always thought of albums as something different from concerts, and the people I like most - The Fall, Hammill, Zappa, and even you - don't, or didn't, attempt to reproduce records on stage: they do something new. I can see the point of doing one whole LP; but I can't see any in my list doing it, and even if they did - why not just stay at home and listen to it there?

Re: die roboter rubo

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I bought her Gary Numan record at a time when I was also buying, for instance, the Senor Coconut and Balanescu Quartet Kraftwerk records. Late 90s. I'm now rather bored with that whole thing. Avant-novelty cover versions, essentially.

Don't Look Now...

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

So who, or what, will haunt you while you restore your frescoes from the past? And will you meet the same untimely end that Donald did? Don't Look Now must be one of the most truly frightening movies I've ever seen... I felt like I needed a Lysol shower afterward, or to scrape off the outer 3 or 4 layers of epidermis. I'm not sure if I should be disturbed that I almost enjoyed the steamy Sutherland-Julie Christie love scene.

[vitiosuslepros.livejournal.com]

The entire idea does seem to be a gigantic waste of time, and even if the album selected is a shining example of the old, what would it sound like now?

It is sad to listen to some artists perform their older songs, songs written before their sweeping world tours that have ended with their voices sounding tired, and no longer as capable. It does not happen to everyone, but should be taken into consideration.

I just wonder how many people are going to be Looking Back In Anger?

[(Anonymous)]

The sleeve for The Ultraconformist is just atrocious.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

It is, but it's a cracking album.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

It's always the heavy guitar bands that are held up to classic status, too. I mean, early-mid Sonic Youth is great, but there's "classic" electronic-based music, too ... it just seems to be considered more ephemeral. Unless, of course, it fuses it with rock ala Stereolab (even then, they're sealed in the tomb of the 90s).

I wonder if we'll swing away from guitars again - it's getting so boring, just a few guys wanking with some WaCkY pedals.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It really is atrocious looking, yes. Mike Alway (a good designer -- he did some nice stuff for Poptones (http://www.poptones.co.uk/)) was taking the piss, trying to see just how bad a sleeve he could do.

Actually, I was trying to do something similar with the production. I tried to make it sound even cheaper than it was, (for instance, recording the sound of my tinny Technics speakers rather than taking a line out) because it was supposed to be a bootleg. I was under contract to Creation at the time, and wasn't supposed to make any new albums for anyone else. So Mike said "We'll pretend it's a live album, a bootleg." So I said "Okay, let's say it was recorded in 1910."

[sakuraamplifier.livejournal.com]

A major part of the problem with an event like Don't Look Back is that so much pop music (to use a very general term) exists on a continuum of "unpolished" (amateurish, exuberant) and "polished" (professional, calculated). So a band like Sonic Youth, who have become considerably more polished over the course of their career, performing one of their unpolished works runs the risk of coming off like an overly reverent symphonic interpretation of themselves. I can see the right artist being able to do interesting things with the concept--interesting things that aren't what you call "avant-novelty cover versions"--but interesting things would sadly end with a lot of dissatisfied museum-goers.

[(Anonymous)]

'Kurious Oranj'? Can't remember how different it was from the LP.

[heliumflash.livejournal.com]

> "Seminal" is a nasty word, a word that suggests that artists shoot their load and can then only do a sort of "repetition-gurning" thing whereby they mime the resulting orgasm for coins for the rest of their lives.

very well put. i have been thinking about the tragedy of this situation all week. it is not art, it is artifice, and exemplifies the real meaning of the word pretentious.

[(Anonymous)]

Sonic Youth is playing Daydream Nation, and that's their first super-polished album - Eric's Trip has great studio orchestration, etc., so it's not like they're trying to recapture the chaotic sounds and moods of even up to EVOL. As far as the "avant noise" stuff being reinterpreted live, it's probably the same idea behind jazz bands jamming together on songs live.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I think you're missing the appeal here--it's not that of hearing a work you're familiar with, but hearing a work you're familiar with in a new way. Most albums have very different arcs than bands ennact in their live shows, and a lot of classic albums have tracks that bands have never played live, or at least not very rarely. If you want to criticize something, criticize the fact that people are coming to see a setlist rather than a band. But bands can and do perform the albums differently than they were recorded, and the fact that there are built-in expectations allows them to play with this--see, for instance, when Jay-Z performed Reasonable Doubt in its entirety last year in New York (http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/06/jayzs_reasonabl_1.php). I think it's a concept that can be abused, but most concepts can, and by and large, this one hasn't yet. By making these "event" concerts they're granting the performers license to play around with the existing material.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

or at least not very rarely

Er, no "not" there obviously. Also, the point about the albums v. live shows is that putting rules on a performance like "you have to play this album start to finish" can force a band out of its habits and make for a new experience.

[sakuraamplifier.livejournal.com]

It was certainly more polished than anything they had done to that point, but I think it had a freshness and energy that they will have some difficulty recapturing.

[(Anonymous)]

Will you be making a Curly Carl album? Or maybe a song or two as Carl?

P.S. Love the Timelord cover.