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imomusToo many of my columns here at Playground may have seemed to give the impression that pop music is over. Today I want to talk about what can save the medium and give it a future. It's slightly paradoxical, but I believe that pop can be saved by sounding broken. Pop can be saved by sounding wrong. Too much pop sounds too right too soon. The reason it sounds right is that it reminds us of something we've heard and accepted before. And the reason pop sounds initially wrong is that it's like nothing we've ever heard before. This "shock of the wrong" is incredibly important, because it's the most immediate indicator of a search for a new grammar and a new syntax in pop music. That search must go forward if pop is to remain vital.
Music has become so right it's wrong; it must become so wrong it's right. When I say "so right it's wrong" I mean that professionalism and production technology have made it very easy to achieve a certain kind of gloss and power -- I call it "easy power". There are rock and pop colleges now where students learn the accepted and acceptable way to engineer and produce and play and sing on records. YouTube is full of musical experts teaching guitar and drum technique. These people are all so right they're wrong. Their advice must be ignored. Instead, we need to listen to people so wrong they're right.
Finding those so-wrong-they're-right people happens so rarely that it leaves pungent memories. One came when I heard Public Image Limited for the first time. The sound of the bass, the drums, the guitar, the synth, the singing -- everything was "wrong", and yet it all came together to produce a music I learned to love. PiL had a habit of locking engineers out of the studio and promoting junior tape operators like Nick Launay to work at the mixing desk. Mediocrity comes from the habits of professionals; sometimes it's better, as John Lydon did on the Flowers of Romance sessions, simply to lock the professionals out of the studio when they go for a pee.
David Cavanagh's book about Creation Records notes that when My Bloody Valentine's Glider EP came out, people in the Creation office thought the tremolo arm and feedback effects were the result of warped vinyl. Then they noticed that the sound was coming from a tape. My Bloody Valentine were so dissatisfied with the professionals at various London recording studios that they constantly changed them while recording their Loveless album, using nineteen in all. When label boss Alan McGee heard To Here Knows Where for the first time he told Kevin Shields: "There's something wrong with the tape." Shields replied: "No, that's the record."
When the artist thinks all the studios sound wrong and the record label thinks the finished record sounds wrong, you can be fairly sure that something is going right. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is now remembered as one of the era's masterpieces. The records that sounded too quickly "right" back in 1991 have mostly been forgotten. Meanwhile, 90s artists who started out interestingly wrong (Tricky comes to mind) have lost their edge this decade by embracing the "easy power" of formula. They seem to have forgotten how to make interesting mistakes. In other cases, mistakes have been neutered by repetition. Certain mistakes have become clichés and orthodoxies in their own right.
My most recent impressions of interesting wrongness have come from the Japanese artists I've called Matsuri-kei. Another revelation came when I heard a London band called No Bra. The song doherfuckher is all out of time, shoddily recorded, uses an auto-accompaniment keyboard with cheap sounds, has odd lyrics and random-sounding backing vocals. And yet all these "errors" somehow become assets; the voice has something vulnerable and intimate about it, and the failure to develop the arrangement only adds to the track's authenticity and emotional directness. Here's No Bra's She Was A Butcher -- less shockingly wrong than doherfuckher, but still startling. Check the abrupt ending, which sounds like a mistake:
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The wrongness of popular music isn't confined to unprofessional or startling sound; it also has to include the personal morals of its creators and distributors. Malcolm McLaren has spoken often of the importance of delinquency and crime in rock's history; rock was the music of gangs and hooligans, distributed by underground cabals of business criminals and mafiosi. When that history of illegitimacy gets replaced by rock colleges and meetings with prime ministers, everything is upside down.
You can hear McLaren talking about the criminal rackets behind the Juke Box networks of the 1950s in this radio documentary. But be aware that I'm encouraging you to do something "wrong" here -- to download an illegal torrent via a dubious file-sharing service. And that brings us to the criminal prosecutions by the RIAA of music fans in America who are caught file sharing. You can see these prosecutions in two ways. Either the RIAA, in their over-zealous attempts to enforce copyright and protect music industry professionals, are doing something so right it's wrong -- criminalizing the very people the music industry depends upon, its audience -- or they're doing something so wrong it's right: restoring a life-giving illegitimacy and danger to a medium which has become, in recent years, far too legitimate and far too safe for its own good.
(The Spanish version of this, the monthly Momus column for Madrid music site Playground, is here.)
Music has become so right it's wrong; it must become so wrong it's right. When I say "so right it's wrong" I mean that professionalism and production technology have made it very easy to achieve a certain kind of gloss and power -- I call it "easy power". There are rock and pop colleges now where students learn the accepted and acceptable way to engineer and produce and play and sing on records. YouTube is full of musical experts teaching guitar and drum technique. These people are all so right they're wrong. Their advice must be ignored. Instead, we need to listen to people so wrong they're right.
Finding those so-wrong-they're-right people happens so rarely that it leaves pungent memories. One came when I heard Public Image Limited for the first time. The sound of the bass, the drums, the guitar, the synth, the singing -- everything was "wrong", and yet it all came together to produce a music I learned to love. PiL had a habit of locking engineers out of the studio and promoting junior tape operators like Nick Launay to work at the mixing desk. Mediocrity comes from the habits of professionals; sometimes it's better, as John Lydon did on the Flowers of Romance sessions, simply to lock the professionals out of the studio when they go for a pee.
David Cavanagh's book about Creation Records notes that when My Bloody Valentine's Glider EP came out, people in the Creation office thought the tremolo arm and feedback effects were the result of warped vinyl. Then they noticed that the sound was coming from a tape. My Bloody Valentine were so dissatisfied with the professionals at various London recording studios that they constantly changed them while recording their Loveless album, using nineteen in all. When label boss Alan McGee heard To Here Knows Where for the first time he told Kevin Shields: "There's something wrong with the tape." Shields replied: "No, that's the record."
When the artist thinks all the studios sound wrong and the record label thinks the finished record sounds wrong, you can be fairly sure that something is going right. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is now remembered as one of the era's masterpieces. The records that sounded too quickly "right" back in 1991 have mostly been forgotten. Meanwhile, 90s artists who started out interestingly wrong (Tricky comes to mind) have lost their edge this decade by embracing the "easy power" of formula. They seem to have forgotten how to make interesting mistakes. In other cases, mistakes have been neutered by repetition. Certain mistakes have become clichés and orthodoxies in their own right.
My most recent impressions of interesting wrongness have come from the Japanese artists I've called Matsuri-kei. Another revelation came when I heard a London band called No Bra. The song doherfuckher is all out of time, shoddily recorded, uses an auto-accompaniment keyboard with cheap sounds, has odd lyrics and random-sounding backing vocals. And yet all these "errors" somehow become assets; the voice has something vulnerable and intimate about it, and the failure to develop the arrangement only adds to the track's authenticity and emotional directness. Here's No Bra's She Was A Butcher -- less shockingly wrong than doherfuckher, but still startling. Check the abrupt ending, which sounds like a mistake:
[Error: unknown template video]
The wrongness of popular music isn't confined to unprofessional or startling sound; it also has to include the personal morals of its creators and distributors. Malcolm McLaren has spoken often of the importance of delinquency and crime in rock's history; rock was the music of gangs and hooligans, distributed by underground cabals of business criminals and mafiosi. When that history of illegitimacy gets replaced by rock colleges and meetings with prime ministers, everything is upside down.
You can hear McLaren talking about the criminal rackets behind the Juke Box networks of the 1950s in this radio documentary. But be aware that I'm encouraging you to do something "wrong" here -- to download an illegal torrent via a dubious file-sharing service. And that brings us to the criminal prosecutions by the RIAA of music fans in America who are caught file sharing. You can see these prosecutions in two ways. Either the RIAA, in their over-zealous attempts to enforce copyright and protect music industry professionals, are doing something so right it's wrong -- criminalizing the very people the music industry depends upon, its audience -- or they're doing something so wrong it's right: restoring a life-giving illegitimacy and danger to a medium which has become, in recent years, far too legitimate and far too safe for its own good.
(The Spanish version of this, the monthly Momus column for Madrid music site Playground, is here.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 05:39 pm (UTC)But then again, the "wrongness" Momus says he's a fan of isn't all that new; Noise music, which breaks from all convention, goes all the way back to the early 20th century.
I remember an old graphic design tutor of mine describing postmodernism as "the belief everything has already been done". I'm still extremely skeptical of this interpretation but I can see how someone would come to this conclusion.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 06:59 pm (UTC)"The plethora of directions that music took in the first quarter of the 20th century led to a reaction by many composers. Led by Stravinsky, these composers looked to the music of preclassical Europe for inspiration and stability. While Stravinsky's neoclassical works — such as the Double Canon for String Quartet — sound contemporary, they are modeled on Baroque and early classical forms — the canon, the fugue, and the Baroque sonata form"
Who did you think I was talking about?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 07:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 07:47 pm (UTC)more groundbreaking
Date: 2009-02-09 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 08:14 pm (UTC)he never lived in the sovied union as far as i know
(you young fellas rely way too much on half-read wikipedias and stuff)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 08:30 pm (UTC)I assumed he did because he was Russian. I don't know anything about his life. and I didn't learn about him on Wikipedia! I recently had to write an essay on tradition and dissent in music and his music featured prominently in the text book and audio CDs I was given.
They chose him as an example because his neoclassical chamber music was considered to be quite modern sounding, but in actuality this work drew upon a lot of traditional, preclassical elements. That was something that was pointed out to us -- dissent in music isn't always about methods but the social context.
A modern example of this:
Ancient tribal music...
...Gave birth to modern, fresh sounding "neo-tribal" sounds. It's not original, it's old styles within a new social context. Much like Matsuri-kei.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 08:57 pm (UTC)so picasso and stravinsky were first influenced by 'africa' first (the 'africa' that brian eno says 'there's not enough africa in computers'.)
then later by historical enlightened western logic.
1. is there really a dyonisus/apollo or own/other's binary there or are they just plain equivalents (enlightened western logic was to western people right after ww2 as far off and 'other' as africa was before )?
2. is the 'africa' of so-called matsuri-kei in 200x the same as the 'africa' of stravinsky or picasso in 190x ?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 10:07 pm (UTC)I mention this because Stravinsky's musical history is curious considering where he lived during this period.
Take for example Shostakovich who lived in Soviet Russia -- he was initially very experimental but then turned to neoclassicism and general traditionalism because of (allegedly) communist oppression. He was pressured, he was accused of "formalism" and being anti-soviet.
Stavinsky on the other hand, lived under western democracy in France and America... so why did he turn his back on experimentation? He was free to be wild and avant garde, but instead he led the way for a lot of soviet composers by being traditional.
Shostakovich's return to tradition was approved and embraced by the soviet. Stravinsky's return to tradition was perhaps in contrast to the modernism of the west. His return to tradition perhaps made him a dissident.
To answer your question -- they are plain equivalents. Culture doesnt stand on its own in isolation -- Social context defines it and gives it its life and meaning. and as society changes, so does that definition.
2)
Picasso's abstractions at times resemble the primitive abstractions we see in anciet tribal artwork but Picasso was primarily driven by western modernism. he wanted abstraction to be seen as equal, artistically, to realistic representation. He wasnt about primitive tribal art, he was about modernist abstraction.
Stravinsky in his later work turned to traditionalism, possibly to mirror the drastic political changes he saw happening in his homeland. Was he a soviet sympathiser? i dont know, I can't find anything on that. This traditionalism would have possibly been a show of dissidence in the west, but an example of conformity in the Soviet.
As for neo-tribal sounds... i think neo-tribalism is by and large presenting us with a traditional style out of its original social context with a modern twist, and therefore it's closer to the dissidence of Stravinsky's neoclassical work than of Picasso's abstractions.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 07:08 pm (UTC)Well, I believe its evident that "everything has already been done".
The tricky part is the interpretation of that phrase. Obviously it cannot mean that *literaly* everything has been done. I don't think the phrase was ever meant in that way. Yes, there are lots of genres and music conventions to be discovered etc etc.
What "everything has already been done" actually means --and in this way it's right--, is not that nothing can be practically new, but that nothing can be, say, conceptually new. I.e, that "new" as a concept is meaningless to us.
(Or, if you prefer, that nothing can be *felt* as new, anymore, besides its' non-relatedness to an older sound).
We are not shocked by any novelty anymore --and we don't treat it as something really strange. In the postmodern era of pop music we are prepared to listen to anything. A person in the '60s or '70s was not --new had a shock value and a novelty value.
Emotionally and conceptually, "new" for us is reduced to the same minimal level as listening to the *latest* record of the same band --like listening to the "White Album" after having listened to "Magical Mystery Tour".