Where virtue goes awarded
Dec. 7th, 2004 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusCongratulations to Jeremy Deller for winning the British art world's most prestigious prize, the Turner, last night. It's a sign of the times that an art world figure like Deller seems much closer to life, art -- and even what I think is important about music -- than anyone winning music awards in Britain in 2004.
UK rock and pop awards in 2004 showed pop music, and specifically rock, to be in a terminally mannerist and museumlike place; dead, irrelevant, tongue-in-cheek, out of touch with contemporary events, as conservative and hung up on the past as opera or classical music at their most decadent, smug, pastichey and tribute-ridden. Awards like the Brits and the NME Carling this year went to sadly Spinal Tappish bands like The Darkness, The Libertines and Kings of Leon, whose moronic-ironic pomo neo-primal rockism seemed to narrow the world down to retro-reverence and in-joke tribute-nudges to rock's heyday, the 1970s (did I mention that satanist-turned-celebrity dad Ozzy Osbourne won the NME's 'Godlike genius award'?).
This year's Turner prize not only shows an artist better in touch with social realities than any of the awarded music artists -- Deller's most famous video is his 2001 reconstruction of the 1984 miner's strike, 'The Battle of Orgreave' -- but also better in touch with music itself: his most famous 'painting', shown above, is 'The History of the World' (1997), a blackboard diagram of the links between brass bands and early 90s rave culture. (Deller later expanded the work by recording colliery brass bands playing the greatest hits of acid house.) 'The History of the World' may contain an art world retro-70s allusion -- a nudge-nudge heads up to one of the art world's own 'godlike geniuses' of the 1970s, Josef Beuys, one of whose arcane (yet highly political) lectures I attended in 1981. Beuys' blackboard that day linked the imprisoned Scottish hunger-striker Jimmy Boyle with the striking workers at British Aerospace's Coventry workshops.
Deller's ludic and ludicrous genre fusions parallel my own. But I also like his interest in society and history, his objectivity. I think the recognition in an art world award ceremony of these concerns shows that, while the rock world is currently as detached and anti-social as a junky, the art world is in rude health. 'The Battle of Orgreave' is a video folk history the same way a track like 'Cockle Pickers' on my forthcoming 'Otto Spooky' album is an electronic folk recitative. They both tell true stories; my song recounts the death of a Chinese cockling crew earlier this year at Morecambe Bay in northern England.
On winning his third or fourth award at the 2004 Brit Awards ceremony, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness declared 'We should thank our collective parents for bestowing on us the gift of rock'. Jeremy Deller, in his Turner interview, preferred to quote Lenin: 'One of my favourite quotes is by Lenin: "Everything is connected to everything else." I'm more into the social relationships, rather than the political... My work is quite slight, but in a good way.' Can we imagine an award-winning musician saying anything that humble, or being that interested in life? (I'll actually make an exception for Bono, whose insane messianism at least leads him to make useful declarations like his recent pledge to devote the rest of his life to fighting poverty, or his use of an appearance at an Apple Expo in LA to declare cars and roads 'ugly' and hope they disappear one day.)
Here's the lyric to the NME's single of the year, 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' by The Libertines. I quote it very much in the spirit of 'nothing much to see here, folks, move along please':
Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
Don’t look back into the sun
Now you know that your time has come
And they said it would never come for you oh oh oh
Oh my friend you haven’t changed
You're looking rough and living strange
And I know you got a taste for it too oh oh oh
And they'll never forgive you but they wont let you go
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no
Don't look back into the sun
You got your past, but you're on the run
And all the lies you said, huh did you say?
But when they played that song at the Death Disco
It started fast but it ends so slow
And all the time it just reminded me of you
And they'll never forgive you but they won't let you go (LET ME GO!)
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no
Dig through layer on layer of lazy, half-digested, half-understood references (Oasis' 'Don't Look Back in Anger', Bob Dylan's 'don't look back', David Bowie's 'Look Back in Anger', the play of the same name by John Osborne, 'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden... who knows, and who really cares?) and you might find the core of this half-assed song -- the vague and veiled heroin reference in 'taste for it' and 'never let you go'. Just like some tedious old junky (or, even worse, an 'air junky' just going through the motions in ironic-moronic-reverent mode), rock music prefers to stay in its bedroom listening to old records than go out and join the dots of all the interesting, funny, trivial or important stuff going on in the world.
Next year Jeremy Deller will collaborate on a touring show of British folk art, 'a vernacular parade of spray-painted cars, flower arrangements, gurning competitions, crop circles and images of mad sporting activities - an exhibition by people who don't normally get exhibited, curated by an artist who believes there may be nothing more important.' Human-scaled, humane, humble, collectivist... it's the kind of interesting scheme you could imagine an award-winning visual artist or folk singer cooking up, but never, these days, an award-winning rock singer.
UK rock and pop awards in 2004 showed pop music, and specifically rock, to be in a terminally mannerist and museumlike place; dead, irrelevant, tongue-in-cheek, out of touch with contemporary events, as conservative and hung up on the past as opera or classical music at their most decadent, smug, pastichey and tribute-ridden. Awards like the Brits and the NME Carling this year went to sadly Spinal Tappish bands like The Darkness, The Libertines and Kings of Leon, whose moronic-ironic pomo neo-primal rockism seemed to narrow the world down to retro-reverence and in-joke tribute-nudges to rock's heyday, the 1970s (did I mention that satanist-turned-celebrity dad Ozzy Osbourne won the NME's 'Godlike genius award'?).
This year's Turner prize not only shows an artist better in touch with social realities than any of the awarded music artists -- Deller's most famous video is his 2001 reconstruction of the 1984 miner's strike, 'The Battle of Orgreave' -- but also better in touch with music itself: his most famous 'painting', shown above, is 'The History of the World' (1997), a blackboard diagram of the links between brass bands and early 90s rave culture. (Deller later expanded the work by recording colliery brass bands playing the greatest hits of acid house.) 'The History of the World' may contain an art world retro-70s allusion -- a nudge-nudge heads up to one of the art world's own 'godlike geniuses' of the 1970s, Josef Beuys, one of whose arcane (yet highly political) lectures I attended in 1981. Beuys' blackboard that day linked the imprisoned Scottish hunger-striker Jimmy Boyle with the striking workers at British Aerospace's Coventry workshops.
Deller's ludic and ludicrous genre fusions parallel my own. But I also like his interest in society and history, his objectivity. I think the recognition in an art world award ceremony of these concerns shows that, while the rock world is currently as detached and anti-social as a junky, the art world is in rude health. 'The Battle of Orgreave' is a video folk history the same way a track like 'Cockle Pickers' on my forthcoming 'Otto Spooky' album is an electronic folk recitative. They both tell true stories; my song recounts the death of a Chinese cockling crew earlier this year at Morecambe Bay in northern England.
On winning his third or fourth award at the 2004 Brit Awards ceremony, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness declared 'We should thank our collective parents for bestowing on us the gift of rock'. Jeremy Deller, in his Turner interview, preferred to quote Lenin: 'One of my favourite quotes is by Lenin: "Everything is connected to everything else." I'm more into the social relationships, rather than the political... My work is quite slight, but in a good way.' Can we imagine an award-winning musician saying anything that humble, or being that interested in life? (I'll actually make an exception for Bono, whose insane messianism at least leads him to make useful declarations like his recent pledge to devote the rest of his life to fighting poverty, or his use of an appearance at an Apple Expo in LA to declare cars and roads 'ugly' and hope they disappear one day.)
Here's the lyric to the NME's single of the year, 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' by The Libertines. I quote it very much in the spirit of 'nothing much to see here, folks, move along please':
Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
Don’t look back into the sun
Now you know that your time has come
And they said it would never come for you oh oh oh
Oh my friend you haven’t changed
You're looking rough and living strange
And I know you got a taste for it too oh oh oh
And they'll never forgive you but they wont let you go
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no
Don't look back into the sun
You got your past, but you're on the run
And all the lies you said, huh did you say?
But when they played that song at the Death Disco
It started fast but it ends so slow
And all the time it just reminded me of you
And they'll never forgive you but they won't let you go (LET ME GO!)
She'll never forgive you but she won't let you go, oh no
Dig through layer on layer of lazy, half-digested, half-understood references (Oasis' 'Don't Look Back in Anger', Bob Dylan's 'don't look back', David Bowie's 'Look Back in Anger', the play of the same name by John Osborne, 'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden... who knows, and who really cares?) and you might find the core of this half-assed song -- the vague and veiled heroin reference in 'taste for it' and 'never let you go'. Just like some tedious old junky (or, even worse, an 'air junky' just going through the motions in ironic-moronic-reverent mode), rock music prefers to stay in its bedroom listening to old records than go out and join the dots of all the interesting, funny, trivial or important stuff going on in the world.
Next year Jeremy Deller will collaborate on a touring show of British folk art, 'a vernacular parade of spray-painted cars, flower arrangements, gurning competitions, crop circles and images of mad sporting activities - an exhibition by people who don't normally get exhibited, curated by an artist who believes there may be nothing more important.' Human-scaled, humane, humble, collectivist... it's the kind of interesting scheme you could imagine an award-winning visual artist or folk singer cooking up, but never, these days, an award-winning rock singer.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 09:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 09:42 am (UTC)brass bands ---> music <--- acid house
Date: 2004-12-07 09:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 10:06 am (UTC)I agree with you on this current crop but can't share your views on rock in general.
I'm off to listen to AC/DC back-to-back with corkscrew king in a non-ironic way.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 10:18 am (UTC)Interesting that Beuys shows up here. About an hour ago I was listening to the 'Ja/Ne' piece.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 10:55 am (UTC)Of course, we shouldn't forget that the Turner Prize is also sponsored by a drinks company -- Gordon's gin. And that the Tate, the institution that hosts the prize, was founded by another company dealing in addictive vice -- sugar moguls Tate and Lyle. Sponsorship is not the problem.
Now if only the British government would make heroin legal, and plough the profit they make from it into the arts, and into new prizes like the Turner, then bratty bands would make less money singing about it and we could turn the proceeds to as creative a use as the Tate has turned sugar.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 11:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 02:19 pm (UTC)I mean, that's what the situation reminds me of.
This (http://my.opera.com/quentinscrisp/journal/54) is only very vaguely related (in that it's about art), but I thought it might be of interest.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 08:58 pm (UTC)The clouds and the rain
Date: 2004-12-07 10:00 pm (UTC)Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, madam: that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals. (Beaumarchais' Figaro)
Orgreave in Taipei
Date: 2004-12-07 01:25 pm (UTC)It's up at TFAM (http://www.tfam.gov.tw/english/index.asp) through the end of January, in case anyone's stopping by Taiwan.
- samantha
http://www.samanthaculp.com/newterritories
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 01:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 03:19 pm (UTC)i'm in babyshambles
Date: 2004-12-07 04:16 pm (UTC)But like the comment a little below yours, the Libertines are far from being the radio-friendly corporate rock band as the reading of any bio would tell. As much as Momus seems to despise them, there is nothing wrong with a simple, nostalgic guitar melody. The lyrics are not always winners, but they aren't trash, and some are gems.
I also the find the voices of Peter Doherty, who now fronts Babyshambles, and Carl Barat to be extremely soothing. The accents shine through and allow me to recall even more classic groups like, well, the Kinks.
Never forget Arthur.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 03:25 pm (UTC)in the words of Jagger/Richards
Date: 2004-12-07 03:59 pm (UTC)or Neil Young "hey hey, my my / rock and roll can never die / there's more to the picture, than meets the eye / hey hey, my my.."
Agreed on the Darkness although their pastiche is so masterful that I can't help but admire it. A little. Their video is hilarious. This is theater for the common people, it's escapism and fun and there's a place for that in society. The world would be too boring, serious and dreary otherwise. The Libertines are a whole different thing. I haven't heard their recent stuff but saw a wonderful show by them a few years ago. Some of their lyrics on the first album are rather oblique and intriguing. But rock and roll doesn't have to have great lyrics, a good melody can make up for that.
Art and rock (especially that which falls under "rockism", an odious term - Mick and Keith would not dig it!) are apples and oranges. Art is much more cerebral while rock appeals to body AND mind. Music provokes an immediate, emotional response. Although someone told me once that he cried while viewing a color field painting. But maybe his girlfriend had just broken up with him. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 05:33 pm (UTC)ps: love that icon. it is very "bring it!"
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 04:45 pm (UTC)wild and free
Date: 2004-12-07 06:00 pm (UTC)Re: wild and free
Date: 2004-12-08 08:33 am (UTC)yes,that seems to be one of the "sounds" now..as you said really good production,grungy,with angsty lyrics but with catchy poppish hooks.i think that is just what the punk pop movement has kind of turned into..like they can't be too dark and such so they got to keep the guitar riffs catchy..but the lyrics are darker.
even worse than that is that grungy american rock sound..like nickleback,three doors down,creed..whatever.i think that totally belongs back in the mid 90's and the fact that people can even still like that.in fact,when i was in high school i noticed a lot of people still on the wave of that type of music. i saw many cd books just filled with nirvana,pearl jam,alice in chains ,soundgarden,green day,bush..it was horrid. i wondered if these people had ever moved on with music.but that genre is still here..slowly dragging on and mutating slowly.and there is still an audience for it which is just weird.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 06:19 pm (UTC)Ah, I've just googled "turner prize for music" and it turns out it's called The New Music Award. Exciting. http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/thenewmusicaward/
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 07:22 pm (UTC)wastedspent about an hour last night tracking down web pages about and mp3s of two bands, The Arcade Fire (http://www.mergerecords.com/media.php?query_band_id=98) and The Secret Machines (http://www.bandbuilder.com/secretmachinesplayer/player.php), because apparently D. Bowie is raving about them on his website. I found them both pretty derivative and uninspiring. The Arcade Fire had a David Byrne thing going on, but really, you know, a rather mediocre David Byrne thing, a lot less interesting than, say, 'Fear of Music' (1979), like the whole thing had just got diluted. Secret Machines were just melodic American alt.rock ordinaire. No fires, and no secrets, here, I'm afraid. Move along, folks, it's just rock music after the moment has passed, nothing to see...(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 08:17 pm (UTC)droit de senorita
Date: 2004-12-08 02:50 am (UTC)What JD seems to be channelling in the diagram above is an art-world Pete Frame's Rock Trees. I can deal with that; he's someone I've interviewed a lot in my job and his Bush/Texas film made me cheer. (even so, I've got worse news for Dubya - by the time office workers go back to work his moniker will be tripster slang for weed and he'll be gradually exposed as what would happen if Bart Simpson was President and Monty Burns was doing the backlines like Cheney. Fortunately for Hunter S. Thompson, he saw a world-class groupie in Bush when the idiot was half-cut and passed out cold in his bath. Oh but then he found Jebus so it's okay, right? Even my art-hata friends want to go to this because it seems at last that the world is interested in ART about politics, which Nick dissed the last time we were in the v. PC Whitechapel. Maybe you didn't know why you were complaining: I might do - it's probably because when mainstream creative intervene in politics, nobody else does anything about politics. This year, that normal belief went out the window and EVERYONE is at it, from cycle couriers to people who thought 'I have a plan' wasn't enough. I thought I was the only one planning a weird 365-day art project about the quiet Americans (the people who don't wear sequinned jumpers to potluck neighbourhood suppers because of what the neighbours might think). Hmm. But first, it's better to go East.
G'night N. Sx
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-08 10:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-09 06:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-07 08:11 pm (UTC)from brass bands to . . .
Date: 2004-12-08 08:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-30 03:50 pm (UTC)the libertines are a great band
try up the bracket. if you even know what that means