Playground column: Tan mal que está bien -- so wrong it's right

[imomus]

Too 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.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The trouble is it's an eternal arms race, isn't it? As soon as you've located some aspect that is "so wrong it's right", what you've actually done is located another convention - briefly new and different, but if it enjoys any success it too is destined to become so right it's wrong. Perhaps what's so right it's wrong is this particular paradigm of popular music, this eternal search for the ephemeral "new" which just has us chasing our tails. Or perhaps we're looking for the "new" in the wrong places. Personally, I'm not sure popular music can be revived as a cutting-edge medium. After all, the relevance of mediums comes and goes.

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm with you all the way with this one...although I am still trying to improve my chops through a series of bass lessons on Youtube(!)

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.

Same difference

[stormbugblog.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

The right wrong thins is quite appealing but you could argue in an Adorno way that really its nothing more than a fetishisation of nuance and detail on what remains essentially a rather narrow band of underlying musical forms. Whether its Kylie or Joy Division the range of keys, sequences, time signatures etc employed in popular music remains much the same. Therein lies the success of those like ENO who can make music seem different and exciting and new when it’s rather the same. We can and do enjoy this delight in detail but it will always leave us thirsty for more nuance and difference and therein lies the capitalist/consumer paradox. In this light John Peel was actually the most commercial DJ on Radio 1 as he kept on endlessly rediscovering the same music.

"Honour the error as a hidden intention."

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

"Certain mistakes have become clichés and orthodoxies in their own right."

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.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

Isn't it the duty of the listener/consumer to be different?
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

[(Anonymous)]

As noted elsewhere, part of the problem may have to do with the playback device; listen to a CD or mp3 file a thousand times and it will still sound the same, and digitally perfect (even cheap systems sound pretty good these days). When I was a child, the 45s I played literally hundreds of times on a toy phonograph got scratchier and more warped with each play, and all the more lovable. Pop music should be made to mutate and self-destruct like that.

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.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

This is "Chromium Bitch" by Gary Wilson (1977).


I don't think anything needs saving. Music isn't mortal. It doesn't die.

[palux-negro.livejournal.com]

I think the same with cables, I love midi and s-video cable.

Dishonor Thy Intention as a Hidden Error

[(Anonymous)]

Why do we make music? We are seeking to recreate those exciting, seductive moments that we remember from the first few songs and albums that we fell in love with, when we first came across a new mood or an attitude that was novel and thrilling. The great majority of artists make the mistake of seeking to literally recreate the texture or mood of their favorite records, when they should really just be setting out to create something interesting--using any means at hand. Brian Eno was the first--and maybe the only--in music to really comprehend this and articulate it. So he went into projects without having a mood or a texture in mind, but instead thought about processes--what's a way of working that will potentially generate interesting output? But unlike the avant garde, he was willing to use his ears to reject the results if they weren't sonically interesting.

Suicide - Ghost Rider

[(Anonymous)]

My favourite bit of this video is the one person that applauds them at the end.

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

[boof-boy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the introduction to No Bra. Finding music that doesn't sound like something I've heard before has become a real quest for me, and this is the first thing I've heard for a while (from the UK anyway) that sounds reasonably new. The last was Oorutaichi (sp?) which you also introduced me to. Keep 'em coming.

[(Anonymous)]

ROCK IS NOT DEAD IT IS JUST BEING PRETENTIOUS AND GERMAN SOMEWHERE
I've even made about a quasi-Japanese word to explain it. Granted I don't speak Japanese and am distrustful of those who do.
Also,

[tranceperentsky.livejournal.com]

I saw No Bra last year in Paris.
It was a great live, very special but extremely great.

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

ok, question. my favorite currently recording pop artist is patrick wolf. thoughts? certainly, he's a fan of production (to the point where he's selling his record through bandshares to fund a major label style production rather than compromising in his eyes.)

http://thequietus.com/articles/01059-patrick-wolf-on-leaving-universal-to-follow-the-righteous-path-alone

then again he had to get out of his major label contract to be able to produce his music unmolested. i guess the distinction is between what you're doing artistically and how you're accomplishing it technically? they're inextricably intertwined in pop music since so much of the sound comes out of the studio.

also, blur's modern life is rubbish came out in 1991, and while it's not as lauded as loveless, it's a conventional pop/rock record and i think it's generally held up well and has a positive critical reception still as far as i'm aware. no clue your opinion on blur, but it seems a bit of a counterpoint to the "only MBV's experimentalism is remembered" argument.

on a quick look, AMG has loveless at 5 stars and MLIR at 4.5. presumably those are not contemporaneous reviews. on the other hand, pitchfork (lol) doesn't have MLIR on their 90s top 100 at all; loveless is #2 (behind your favorites, radiohead! with OK computer.)

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Hey momus, this has reminded me, do you have any copies of your interview (http://imomus.com/dailyphoto040802.html) with McLaren you could post? I've always wanted to read it.

An interview with Harmony Korine I read last year got me going on the Sun City Girls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J-5P-Mz_8&feature=related) for a while, but I think I like No Bra better.

Not right.

[(Anonymous)]

The Fall have been doing the "Not right" thing for ages. Leaving the guide track playing when the song's finished; Smith carrying on singing when everyone else has stopped; Smith singing the verse too late and carrying on with it when the group go into the chorus (and vice versa), glitches in the recording; cutting to cassette recordings of Smith singing along in a hotel room (a mistake, but edited into the finished song) - lots of stuff like that. It is one of the things that mmakes me love them.

My brother doesn't like your stuff (this to Momus) because he can hear the architecture - IE, it sounds like a bloke and a sequencer - which is why I do like it (I'll win him round yet).

The Kingsmen's version of Louie Louie is made by the mistakes, isn't it?

I'm going to think about that idea of music changing a lot - more than in the last 50 years - during Haydn's time. I think it's a good idea, though.

Stephen Parkin

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

For the reasons implicit in this entry I love The Shaggs:


....they were described by Zappa back in the late 60s as 'better than the Beatles' , precisely because they embodied a sort of naíve adventurous spirit , people walking on unfamiliar terrain and free of all 'cosmetization' in the form of musical perfection, industrial norms and other hateful production practises...can you imagine George Martin trying to do anything with this lot, LOL!

That said I also like Steely Dan, perhaps their binary opposite....ein Mensch in seinem Widerspruch.

Rongwrong

[(Anonymous)]

And yet, how exactly do we define "wrong" in modern popular music? To Western ears, we might say that "wrong" usually means:
a) too dissonant, too discordant, too distorted
b) off-beat (literally), off-pitch, poorly played or sung
c) too disturbing, too assaultive, too idiosyncratic
Toss and serve...

When "wrong" becomes acceptable, it is usually because it is:
a) humorous
b) spooky or weird
c) aggressive, but in an athletic or danceably energetic way
d) we just get used to it

But what of other Music Genome "moods"? How often do we hear, and how difficult is it to produce, music that is "wrong" but also (for instance) joyful, elegaic, sexy, or contemplative?

Perhaps what Ralph Records missed the most, but David Cunningham "got" was the sex...

PS So glad The Shaggs received a shout-out--my favorite group of all time, no kidding, no irony intended. The WigginsnSiisters created their own language, their own discourse, their own fashion statement, their own world; they remain my litmus test as to which of my friends' taste in music I can actually trust. But Lord Whimsy, please tell us more if your dare! I've even gone so far as the Fremont Town Hall to lay my laurels.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

"German" minimalism is really the freshest thing out there now, in my humble opinion.