imomus

No, there's clearly a political dimension to Brassens that doesn't exist in Formby. Le Gorille is to the death penalty what Boris Vian's song Le Deserteur is to conscription: a gigantic "Fuck you!" to the state.

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Le Déserteur came out in 1954. It would take until Public Enemy's Black Steel before the same theme would emerge again. But, as in Brassens, I find it even more striking when such refusals are couched in gentle music. It seems to defy the whole language and spirit of violence, whereas violent repudiations of violence kind of miss the point.

From: (Anonymous)

One thing about these French protest songs from the fifties, though, is that the music is very, very trad. Musically, rock in the mid-fifties was a far more revolutionary and dynamic sound, with its mix of rhythm and blues and country, its insistence on beat, etc.

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well, public enemy's rhetoric is that of militant members of a minority fighting for their rights, its not meant as subversion, which wouldn't work at all, rap not beeing widely accepted as mainstream pop yet, but as a direct assault, whereas brassens is part of the bourgeois majority, which requires different means. another example of that would be the album "rock around the bunker" by gainsbourg, in which he, a french jew of russian ancestors, sings lyrics to straight old-school rock'n'roll tunes that take the perspective of german nazis - an ss-officer who fled to south america, or hitler complaining about eva braun always playing her favourite song "smoke gets in your eyes" - which he then covers unaltered. rock'n'roll, and now that sounds really subversive, in that context.

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Yes -- though no-one could accuse Boris Vian of being a slouch when it came to the latest, most innovative jazz sounds, that's what he was all about -- but I think it's dangerous to connect aggression with subversion. For instance, a James Bond film would have a hell of a lot of aggression-energy, not just in the plot but in the "impactful" editing. This kind of aggro-energy is typical of mass market products, and typical of rock and roll. It's not subversive in any way, though it may be "dynamic".

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and musically, brassens is nowhere near as interesting as public enemy's best tracks (or gainsbourg's). brassens is all lyrics to "standard" chanson accompaniements. whereas "it takes a nation of millions ..." or "l'homme à tête de chou" ...

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Well, the point I take from that is that rock has to be heavily decontextualized before it can become subversive. It isn't inherently so.

And, in fact, Rock Around the Bunker is the Gainsbourg album I listen to and like least. I think it's because, for me, rock can never be stripped of its basic conservatism.

For me, Gainsbourg's most subversive album is Vu de L'Exterieur, and the way it sets scatology in a gentle cradle of soft piano rock. It's a perfect balance between seduction and repulsion, and something french pop has done much better than anglo pop (see also Dutronc).

From: (Anonymous)

You're mixing up periods, though. The mid-fifties was a time when the "sanctioned" popular music of the time was not at all about aggression, it was all how-much-is-my-doggy whimsy. Now, of course, things are much more hyped up. Don't you think, say, the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray was subversive in any way at the time?

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yes, i cited "rock around the bunker" mainly for the sake of the argument, for it being a rock'n'roll record with bafflingly obnoxious lyrics. in that, i find it even more subversive than "vu de l'exterieur", because scatology is an almost acceptable topic with perverted french intellectuals, whereas a jew singing from a nazi's perspective ...
but i, too, listen much more often to "vu .." than "... bunker", and for the same reasons as yours ... (and, for a succesful mainstream pop singer, both records are quite in their own league world wide, i guess).

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geeveecatullus.livejournal.com

The album is available from emusic in Europe too (or at least in Austria, anyway)

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electricwitch.livejournal.com

You mentioned Nazis! Champagne!

From: (Anonymous)

For me, Gainsbourg's most subversive album is Vu de L'Exterieur, and the way it sets scatology in a gentle cradle of soft piano rock.

Well I wish you would do something more like this. These days, you obviously feel your sound has to be so busy - which is kind of similar to aggression in a way. You can't leave anything unadorned and unfucked up, a voice can never be a voice, a beat can never be just a beat, sounds and textures have to piled high... A song with just you accompanied by the piano would probably be the most surprising, wrongfooting thing you could do right now.

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Oh, I disagree. I wrote about this in The Electroacoustics of Humanism (http://imomus.com/thought201201.html). I think that just because something sounds warm and friendly, it doesn't mean it sounds conservative, and just because something sounds dense and dynamic, it doesn't mean it sounds liberating. There is a revolution of friendliness, and an electroacoustics of humanism.

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i don't achieve all of my goals, but some i indeed do. open that bottle, now!

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hey, i love plenty of "warm" or "friendly" music (terms i have to put in quote marks, because i find them problematic when used to describe music), eliane radigue, caetano veloso, to name just two favourites. i wasn't critizising brassens for sounding "warm" or "friendly". gainsbourg mostly does, too. but brassens does conservatively so, to me, in his musical forms. and in a way that suggests to me that the sonic portion of his chansons, and their arrangement wasn't his main concern. i think they tend to be rather means for him to transport his words than artistic statements in their own right.

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the reason i find these terms problematic is, because a lot of what's going on in the music of public enemy (or, well ... slayer) doesn't sound "cold" or "unfriendly" to me. that may be the paradoxical reaction of a music addict's ear ...

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What distinguishes Sister Ray is a certain amount of disinhibition and formal chaos (audible structural dissolution). Now, how "subversive" you find those qualities depends on how you feel about anarchism and libertarianism. Personally, I'm not too impressed. The authorities pay much more attention to organised dissent, and they're quite right to.

From: (Anonymous)

They haven't since the poll tax riots, though. They don't pay attention to anything that doesn't impinge financially these days, and certainly not to opinion or the arts. (I didn't sense a reversal of that when New Labour came to power, and I was right. Barack Obama used the tyranny of positive thinking, a patronising little blindfold, so I reserve judgement).

From: (Anonymous)

The authorities pay much more attention to organised dissent, and they're quite right to.

In which case, you're simply giving the authorities the power to frame the debate.

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cap-scaleman.livejournal.com

But you sang about a monkey, not a gorilla.

From: (Anonymous)

But there's no political dimension to a white boy (Elvis) imitating a gay negro, wearing eye liner and singing black music?

From: (Anonymous)

The most unexpected thing for Momus to do would be to release a yatch rock album like Christopher Cross, but we all know that as an artist he is simply not adventurous enough for that. He still considers sacred the old modernism and avant garde.

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Sure, but it's "political" the way Britain's colonies in Africa were political -- basically smash-and-grab appropriation. It's hardly subversion, is it?

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...or a band of gay negroes in loud suits and eyeliner (http://www.50srealmcafe.kokoom.com/weblog/LittleRichard6_WEB.jpg) playing backwater juke joints all throughout the 1950's-era American South?

From: (Anonymous)

An absurd analogy.

You don't think a poor uneducated white guy singing black music in the still segregated south was subversive? Why, then, did it provoke such a reaction among the authorities? Surely such cultural miscegenation was the epitome of subversion given the circumstances, far more so than Brassen's bien pensant ditty about a gorilla. (And let's not forget that the black music he was "appropriating" was itself a product of cultural miscegenation.)

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A gorilla's penis (http://www.penissizedebate.com/page11_gorilla-chimpanzee.htm) is only an inch or so long when erect, so it poses no greater threat than a suppository.

But what a suppository!

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I've been to one of the old cinderblock watering holes outside Tunica, Mississippi that Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis played back in the 50's. And I can tell you, those guys were taking their lives in their own hands.

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BIEN PENSANT!

The animal fucks the judge up the arse! Tell me an Elvis Prissy song that even acknowledges that posteriors exist, let alone that proponents of capital punishment have them and deserve gorilla penises shoved up them?

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troytheking.livejournal.com

The new album was the last 2 days handy picked by eMusic editors to be one of the 10 albums featured in "what's new" section. Considering the weekly 5000 new albums over there - this ain't trivial at all to be.

Now that it is long gone past (and dead) - what album? momu? moi?

Can tell you there are some TROY albums at sight on the site as well...

voila!

TROY

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count-vronsky.livejournal.com

Wasn't Jailhouse Rock a paean to the joys of prison sex?

sample lyrics:

"Spider murphy played the tenor saxophone,
Little joe was blowin on the slide trombone."

"Number forty-seven said to number three:
Youre the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,"

"The sad sack was a sittin on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin all alone.
The warden said, hey, buddy, dont you be no square.
If you cant find a partner use a wooden chair."

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I think it's undeniably true that rock music has become part of the establishment culture - I believe, and I suspect Momus also does, that the biggest problem Britain has at the moment is its desperate thrusting after someone else's declining empire, just as the biggest problem it had in 1956 was its desperate thrusting after its own empire (which by that time was effectively dead), and in that context rock today is the equivalent of, say, the light classical music of Eric Coates or Ronald Binge then, the sound of desperate late-imperial aspirations.

I think you can acknowledge that while recognising that, at the beginning, rock was quite the opposite of what it is now. What it has become now is in fact a grotesque distortion of what it originally was. It has become accepted into the Daily Mail view of Britain, and its American equivalent, but I don't see how it can be redeemed at this late stage. But I can still understand why so many British people liked it and didn't like Brassens circa Suez, even though I regret many of the aftereffects (and specifically the key strategic role of rock in Blair's mind when he spoke of "reordering the world".

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slight correction - meant to say:

"(rock) has become so accepted into the Daily Mail view of Britain, and the equivalent American view of the US, that I don't see how it can be redeemed at this late stage."

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eclectiktronik.livejournal.com

love the intro: 'This song is called the gorilla, and it is offensive" !

and let's not forget the Brassens song 'P...de toi' (sort of roughly translates as 'you fucker') which in my humble opinion is one of the best song titles ever. Especially considering the era.

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jermynsavile.livejournal.com

Sad to say there was a time when you could sing this song on British TV.

And Jake Thackray was more beautiful in his prime than Elvis was in his.

Rock's "rebellion" has always been far more about sex than anything else. And capitalism, if you'll excuse the pun, doesn't really give a toss about sex, it's just something else to market. Musically, rock isn't any more or less radical than any other genre.

And as for the period that supposedly contained its finest and most radical flowering, well, there are different takes (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article4909710.ece) on that too.

From: (Anonymous)

The problems with "being rebellious is so acceptable it's more rebellious to not be rebellious" are numerous.

1. At a high level, "ignore what people think and do what you want even if they call you crazy" hasn't lost local potency. Nowadays the battle in the West is with "seen it all before" rather than moral prudery. This pushes people into obscure corners. Most of which have too many paradoxes (good for art, bad for energetic change).
2. A laissez-faire "find your own space and make mistakes" attitude is still needed in many places around the world. Some societies are virtually open prisons. Not sitting there like an unchallenging row of cabbages is still a useful thing to suggest.
3. It's based on a retrograde debate. No-one in the West takes drugs to change society, some take them for anti-social pleasure. Rock too, a neutral thing. Punk got tired explaining that revolution was machinic - but that was the reason to do it, not the reason to stop.
4. It all goes through one's personal filter. Only certain people notice, say, swear words in songs. I have a friend who cries "Punk used the f-word years ago! It's not fresh, big or clever. Or challenging. In fact, it's fucking boring." Meanwhile I didn't even notice it.

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kineticfactory.livejournal.com

Well, Joemus has a Cliff Richard cover (of one of his early teenage-love ballads).

I could imagine Momus doing a yacht-rock album to turn the dialectic of conservatism and subversion on its head, much as Folktronic did for the authenticity of folk music.

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Indeed. Thackray was wonderful. And/but he was the antithesis of rock culture in every possible way, right down to pretending that he came from rural Yorkshire when in fact he came from Leeds (which, by rock culture's norms, is almost as frowned upon as pretending you were privately educated if you weren't).

I would agree with a large part of the essence, if not all the details, of Dr Fowler's theory. I think he might be judging 60s rock culture slightly too much from the perspective of its influence on the radical-reactionary mix of Thatcherism (which could not have been foreseen when it began, in the days of Macmillan grouse-shooting on the moors, etc.) but I think he is brave, and correct, to attempt to rehabilitate Rolf Gardiner - or, at least, to not judge him as irredeemable without even studying his actual ideas (see also, here, what Henry Williamson's youngest son got up to).

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Some good points (although the last bit of your first point does bring on shudder-inducing memories of NME 1987, Paolo Hewitt et al: "energetic change" is a *very* Red Wedge / Style Council phrase, and I think the result of the '87 election still has a residual effect to discredit such rhetoric).

But I think you're exaggerating what people like me (and to a greater and, I think, sometimes overt extent, Momus) say about rock culture. We're not (well, I'm not) advocating a return to Reithianism, or to the immensely class-stratified norms of pre-rock Britain (we may sometimes say that rock was counter-revolutionary to the extent that it conned people into believing that class divisions had narrowed much more than they actually had, but that doesn't mean we support what there was before it - Momus certainly seems to hate that old Britain). We're merely saying that the *mainstream* of rock has become part of the orthodoxy (Coldplay/Cameron). There are still movements within rock that aren't fooled by the new elite (i.e. Cameron) and indeed despise them, and I respect them even if the music isn't to my own personal taste.

Swear words in songs only irritate me if the singer/band *thinks* they're anti-establishment because they've used them. If they seem to consider themselves part of the New Norms, without any pretensions to be anything else, I'm completely un-arsed as well. So the latterday Rotten/Lydon is a far greater irritant to me than any unapologetic stadium rock band.

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You know what's even more subversive than a gorilla?

A TURBOGORILLA!

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jermynsavile.livejournal.com

I am slightly biased against Rolf Gardiner owing to have, last week, been unable to get into a favourite restaurant due to its being co-opted by the local branch of the Soil Association. I hold him (in)directly responsible.

I agree with you about rock hardly being able to predict the reactionary narcissism of Thatcher, but think that rock's state of perpetual adolescence and self-indulgence was always likely to turn sour. But good points all and I'm not far from your thoughts on the matter.

Incidentally, is your comment missing a link at "here"?

From: (Anonymous)

Hmm, but it's almost too coincidental for me that the same things that leftist commentators like Momus condemn for being not-as-radical-as-we-need (noise/swagger/swearing/drugs) are the same things conservative critics used to condemn as too radical. No-one says "Oh he's wearing flip flops. I keep telling him, they're not going to change the world. But he doesn't listen." Revolution is more than power's homoerotic dream of blue collar rough trade.

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We could call this the "radicalism treadmill" or something. Since radicalism is reactive, it necessarily becomes reactionary. Since it's revolutionary, it becomes circular.

I should add here, for the record, that this is an old theme of mine. I proposed three articles to the NME in 1986 about elderly male singers "more thrilling and dangerous than a thousand Jesus and Mary Chains": Jacques Brel, Jake Thackray and Serge Gainsbourg. The Brel and Gainsbourg ones got written, and I phoned Thackray to set up an interview. He suggested Fuller's Tap, which was a pub in a brewery somewhere off the M4. Since I didn't have a car, it took me hours to find the place, and by the time I did, he was gone.

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Indeed, but what is and isn't radical changes from era to era. Specifically, what was radical in a Britain whose single biggest problem was its lusting after its own dying empire (and resenting the influence of a certain foreign power) can easily cease to be so when one of the biggest problems (if not the biggest) is lusting after the influence of that very foreign power and seeing Britain as an honorary extention of it.

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