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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 10:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 10:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 10:20 am (UTC)By the way, this is the 'wrongist' record I've ever heard: Microstoria from the mid 90's.
When I heard it I was totally startled - it sounded so alien but at the same time incredibly listenable. A year later I created a self-generating piece of musical software, for free distribution on the net, that followed some of the aesthetic qualities of the Microstoria recording - a sort of homage. The user could play around with the paramenters. Maybe that was half way to setting up a little academy to teach people how to make Microstoria music?
We're all trying to make wrong into right here - as well as right into wrong. Nothing can stop that impulse.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 10:25 am (UTC)Same difference
Date: 2009-02-09 12:02 pm (UTC)"Honour the error as a hidden intention."
Date: 2009-02-09 12:20 pm (UTC)Do you think certain Brian Eno sounds filtered through U2 and culminating in Coldplay seem to emotionally frame the last decade?
I dont know if its really Eno's fault. I read he just goes in and tweaks their minds a little by suggesting different strategies but that glacial sparkle rush everywhere is not what I imagined the future being as I gurgled along with On Land.
To be fair he always asserted that he admired the sonics of soul and r&b.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 12:40 pm (UTC)I always ask my friend who only listens to classical music if the popular music I listen to is any good.
There was something interesting in a documentary called The Jackanory Story. When discussing whether Jackanory (or something similar) could return to children's television, an exec questioned the climate of the fast shifting graphic, full on pace of current children's programming and asked why could slow paced, single talking head storytelling not work? Who says so? It was like retro necro punk ideology!
Much to my shame, I only endured Jackanory until Scooby Doo came on.
Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 01:40 pm (UTC)Someone mentioned Brian Eno's "On Land" yesterday--for a long while, I thought that would be the sound of the future--murky, subterranean, nebulous (shame about U2). Instead, pop music (as in truly popular music) got cleaner, brighter, crisper.
Back in the Eighties Ralph Records of San Francisco made a whole aesthetic out of wrong: The Residents, Snakefinger, Renaldo and the Loaf... each release sounding "wronger" than the last, at least for a while.
One "group" the Joemus release reminds me of is early Flying Lizards--for one glorious moment they made sounding broken sound transcendent.
Re: Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 01:44 pm (UTC)Re: Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 01:55 pm (UTC)I fell in love with this Flying Lizards video pretty deeply a few months ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 02:27 pm (UTC)This is "Chromium Bitch" by Gary Wilson (1977).
I don't think anything needs saving. Music isn't mortal. It doesn't die.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 02:38 pm (UTC)Dishonor Thy Intention as a Hidden Error
Date: 2009-02-09 03:04 pm (UTC)Re: Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 03:06 pm (UTC)Re: Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 03:21 pm (UTC)As for the comment just above--the video is from their "Top Ten" lp, which was sort-of not-really their last album; "Money" was from their first and superior album--which still sounds innovative after all these years. And, Momus, remember, it has Brecht/Weill's "Mandalay Song"!
Finally, I've bitten into that carrot I've been dangling on the stick before me--Momus's 1979 demos--and I can attest it has that early Eno/Flying Lizards sound all wrapped up. My second "fantastic!" of the day. When will we have the secret childhood tapes?
Suicide - Ghost Rider
Date: 2009-02-09 04:41 pm (UTC)Lovely music, but then, this raises that terrible question of (whisper it) authenticity. And once you are drawn in to the authenticity of the inauthentic, you may as well stop talking (adn start making music? I have a friend who thinks that advertising butter is the most authentically punk thing John Lydon ever did.
Matt
dekersaint.co.uk
myspace.com/dogtanion
Braless
Date: 2009-02-09 05:31 pm (UTC)(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 05:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 06:13 pm (UTC)Re: Wrongrong
Date: 2009-02-09 06:16 pm (UTC)Re: Braless
Date: 2009-02-09 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 06:30 pm (UTC)