Annus horribilis

The first time I came across punk was on a school trip to (I think) Madame Tussaud's. At the end of the museum there was a ride that took us through the history of pop music. It must have  showed Elvis and the Beatles, but the only ones I remember were an animatronic waxwork Madonna doing ‘Like a Virgin’ and Sid Vicious doing ‘My Way’. I can’t remember the Vicious waxwork, but the video for ‘My Way’ shocked me. I didn’t know whether he really had shot audience members at the end of the song or if it was just an act. The ride moved on to the next pop milestone, but I couldn’t pay attention. I asked my Dad as he drove me home what punk was. He said it was a group of people who hated everything.

Years later I got into 90s American pop punk and delved into punk history. I read the Sniffin Glue anthology and Please Kill Me, and watched The Filth and the Fury. I remember Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming was one of the books that sat uselessly on the table in my A Level Media Studies class. Dropping out of A Levels was probably a big part of what drew me to the era and the music, but the Casualties-style reenactors you’d see at gigs served as a warning of the perils of nostalgia.

A major aspect of documentaries and histories was the Jubilee. It always had to be emphasized how different it was back then, how seriously people took the monarchy. One part of Filth and the Fury details Lydon’s attack by royalists, who knifed him in the knee with a machete. The bunting and the street parties all seemed like bizarre period details that aging punks laughed about when they reminisced and tried to emphasize that people really did feel so strongly about the Queen, as if no one today would believe them.

It’s an obvious point to make and I know lots of people are making it. But there is something wrong with the fact that 35 years after ‘God Save the Queen’, despite all the upheavals between then and now, the one thing to stay constant is the pageantry and adoration of royalty.

It’s not that I’m surprised they’re still here — nothing short of a revolution would get rid of them. No, it’s that I am staggered by the deference and fawning over these unbearable cretins. In an age where we apparently can’t afford education, healthcare or wages, what we can afford is a nuclear warhead and parties for the fucking Royal family.

I’ll leave you with the words of punk hip gunslinger and easy target Tony Parsons:

“An old punk until the day I die, I still loathe much about a system that elevates mediocre non-entities like Cameron and Clegg to the highest office. But – like the overwhelming majority of our people – I have nothing but respect, admiration and love for the Queen. She is of course more of a true punk than Johnny Rotten will ever be. Her Majesty has followed her destiny, done what she was born to do – surely the very heart of the punk ethos. [...] The Queen does not represent a life of privilege for a few pampered toffs. The Queen embodies the best of us.”

2012: annus horribilis.

Crossed Over And Crossed Out

That project - an ever evolving, uncontroversial portrait of contemporary tastes in popular music - addressed one problem surrounding music in the file-sharing era to the exclusion of all others. Faced with readers who wanted to know how to be fans in the internet age, Pitchfork’s writers became the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption. Pitchfork’s endless “Best Of” lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions of the Billboard sales charts. Over the years, these lists have (ominously) expanded, from fifty songs to 100 or 200, and in 2008 the site published a book called The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. Similarly, Pitchfork’s obsession with identifying bands’ influences seems historical, but isn’t. When a pop critic talks about influences, he’s almost never talking about the historical development of musical forms. Instead, he’s talking about his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive - he is congratulating himself, like James Murphy in “Losing My Edge,” on being a good fan. While Pitchfork may be invaluable as an archive, it is worse than useless as a forum for insight and argument.

What did we do to deserve Pitchfork? 
The answer lies in indie rock itself.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie’s successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the ’90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping - or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics -and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring,” he said to a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau.

(Click the above for the rest of the article) 

Desecration Acts, Coda

Part Three: Slouching Toward Ypsilanti

Getting the "band" together. Some twenty years after the fact. Hey, why not?

Nevermind that, back in 1974, it had largely started out as an art-school hijinx, the product of youthful boredom and malaise and surplus energy, designed to befuddle a handful of locals through an infrequent series of "guerilla" (i.e., uninvited) performances around town. Freeform guitar caterwauling, tape loops, a version of "Iron Man" performed with a rhythm section consisting of a coffee can and vacuum cleaner...that sort of thing. As one of the founders, Mike Kelley &mdash, would recall looking back over two decades:

"All of the members of Destroy All Monsters had grown up during the alternative cultural renaissance of the late sixties. We had all been raised on the psychedelic excesses of the MC5 and the Stooges, and the general feeling of that time: that every form could be combined and all excesses were possible. Now we were in the dark ages. Detroit's economy had collapsed and taken with it its radical culture. Detroit was a dead city. And Ann Arbor, once the 'drug capital of the midwest,'...and a thriving radical intellectual scene, was now slipping back into being a sleepy and conservative fraternity-row college town. All of the musicians of the previous generation were trying to adapt to the cleaner hard rock sound of the day. ...This was the milieu that birthed Destroy All Monsters. We were designed to be a 'fuck you' to the prevailing popular culture."

To say nothing of the "shits and giggles" component. At any rate, within a couple of years, two of the main instigators -- Kelley and guitarist Jim Shaw — departed to the west coast to enter grad school, leaving the other two members of Destroy All Monsters to carry on with the enterprise however they saw fit. What soon followed for the outfit is history, or at least a footnote in the annals of the Midwest's contributions to the American "proto-punk" canon. With the Stooges' Ron Asheton and the MC5's Michael Davis in the lineup, it became — according to member Cary Loren — a period of "formalism" mixed with "out-of-control energies and egos." By the 1980s, the group had ceased to be, while Kelley and Shaw were off embarking on what would become highly successful art careers.

Come 1994, the members of DAM found reason to look back to DAM's beginnings as they assembled a collection of the group's early, unreleased recordings. After some discussion, they decided — why the hell not give it another go? The timing was a little ironic, seeing how the early '90s already an orgy of "reunion" tours by acts from the 1960s and '70s getting back together for the sake reliving a few glory days of yore. From the Swingin' Medallions to Three Dog Night, eventually followed by — not too many years later – the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. In doing so, the idea was effectively reset all the gauges to zero — using their original 1974 "art-noise" intentions as their starting point. Sporadic performances, tours and CDs would result in the years that followed. Of these, the album Swamp Gas — recorded in the final years of the decade/century and seeing release in 2001 – perhaps best embodies DAM's initial intent.




As far as historical revisionism is concerned, Swamp Gas retells the latter half of the "American Century" through a haze of lysergic mind-rot, "alternative"/New Age spirituality, UFO cults, "trash" culture, and conspiracy theories; all of it threaded by a free-form racket or free-form jamming, yakkety guitar, droning noise, primitive electronics, vari-speed tape collages, and the occasional cartoon sound effect. An open mystical invocation — reminiscent of bits from Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In... LP and attributed to Madame Blavatsky — tells of the "Seven Worlds of Eternity" and urges the listener to "kill all desire." The voice of Sun Ra recurrently drifts through the miasma of noise. At one point, Mike Kelley steps to the mic delivering a 17-minute long ode to the famed UFO sightings over Dexter, MI in March of 1966 as they were recorded by witnesses and law enforcement officials, invoking Sananda and Mark David Chapman and Project Blue Book, while intermittently offering interpretations of the top ten hits of the spring of '66 ("Nowhere Man," "California Dreaming," "Homeward Bound"). All of it coming wrapped in a copy of the Swamp Gas Gazette, a mock newspaper bearing extended Heaven's Gate-styled texts on UFOs and Sananda and whatnot, as well as a couple of articles purporting to reveal "The Truth" about Iron Butterfly and Question Mark & the Mysterians.

It's an extended exercise in mind-fuckery that's sometimes bewildering, and sometimes merely numbing...not unlike hearing Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground hammered out in an amphetamine blur. It is, admittedly, not an incredible album. Ultimately, it's an artifact — an effort at channeling the aesthetic spirits of a particular bygone time, resuscitating the stillborn potential of a creative em-oh and an era-specific sense of restlessness and disenchantment. Something about the cathartic noisiness of it all probably still felt somehow vital, just as necessary as the whole shits-and-giggles aspect. Which I suppose is what one could expect from a long-delayed transmission from the beginning of the Age of Diminishing Expectations.

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[   Part One   ]               [   Part Two  ]

1999-2002 (And Ensuing Spenglerian Decline)*

There's always a risk of nostalgia with these blogs, but I think for the most part everyone has done a pretty good job of avoiding it, perhaps largely because backward-looking is so obviously The Problem Right Now, and utterly devoid of all negative potential. I say this to make clear that the following post is written without any conscious nostalgic sentiment, and by a determined, fundamentalist hater of past-worship.

This disclaimer is necessary because I want to suggest that part of the reason for the moribundity of contemporary pop music is that, at some point in the early-to-mid noughties, lots of incipient, potentially great musical movements were jettisoned, thus depriving us of the modernistic alternative culture which peaked around the turn of the century and that should have carried on growing.

This is an idea some of us have touched on lightly in comments boxes, and it seems to be gaining currency elsewhere as we approach the 10-year "point of objectivity"; namely, that the period 1999-2002 was in some senses a golden age for pop, or at the very least, a sort of window of possibility that was subsequently closed and bolted shut by an unspecified combination of Bush/Blair/Iraq/9/11/nu-rock/neoliberalism-on-autopilot/Jo Whiley/Justin Lee Collins/Heat Magazine/Zane Lowe/Pete Doherty/the internet/climate change/good old fashioned cultural-economic decline.

Owen talks about this idea of an early-noughties "opening" in his Pulp book [I've already quoted this on my own blog so apologies for the repetition if you've read it there]:

... in the early 2000s, the NME made a swerve into coverage of electronic music, R&B and hip-hop, but covers for Aphex Twin, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Destiny's Child and Missy Elliott did not go down well with readers; as is well known, the NME's circulation has always plummeted when a black artist is on the cover.

And today, in Pitchfork, Tom Ewing offers similar sentiments:

The summer of 2002 was studded with so many terrific pop, rap, and R&B singles that it now feels like that time was the peak of something. And as new ways of distribution break down old musical habits, there are calls for us to revive past ways of experiencing music. It's easy to become reactionary. But the snowball excitement of a leak was something new and giddy then-- tens and hundreds of people, first friends then strangers, discovering and thrilling to a track all at once. Pop waxes and wanes, but that communal joy stays with me.

Ewing advocates a Whiggish, "poptimist" view of pop, a somewhat apolitical perspective that opposes "reaction" with the optimistic assertion that technological progress (in his case social media and internet downloading) is essentially a positive force that will create more and better musical results. Nevertheless, he seems to be suggesting something slightly different here: that the "communal joy" which initially presided over internet culture in the early part of the 2000s was something new and exciting (past tense) and that, ten years on, this "peak" seems like a time of lost opportunities since reneged upon. 

Again, nostalgia must be avoided at all costs. The period in question was hardly a modern Renaissance. The pop and r'n'b of the time was often riddled with appallingly Thatcherite lyrics (cf. esp. Destinys Child) and used to promulgate a very-un-radical culture of consumer hedonism. But how about this for a broad-brush theory of what has happened to pop culture: its increasing obeisance to technology and the shift to ultra-individual consumption has actually completely severed all connection between contemporary music and "communal" contexts, has completely obviated any way of linking pop production to a collective history. At some point in the mid noughties, pop ceased to be joined to the world in any meaningful sense.

Another reason why this seems accurate is that, in many ways, you can so easily imagine an alternate history in which this cultural impasse hadn't descended, in which r'n'b, grime, and dubstep had continued to flourish up to the point that, in 2011, with an African American president installed in Washington, and with radical oppositional feeling burgeoning in the UK, pop and politics would have coincided in the way they have done in the past, and music might have soundtracked and enabled a wider reform movement founded in positive emancipatory sentiment. Wouldn't Miss E ... So Addictive have made so much more sense if it had dropped this year? Wouldn't 2011 rather than 2003 have been a much better year for Boy in Da Corner to win the Mercury Prize?

The most salient question arising out of all of this should be: how are these moments of possibility closed down? How did the noughties come to be dominated from 2003 onward, not by the innovations of Missy Elliott, Aphex Twin, and Godspeed You Black Emperor!, but by a completely ethically and artistically bankrupt, retromanic (*nods at SR*) pop culture with absolutely no relation whatsoever to the historical moment?

Maybe the simple, obvious answer to the belated, harebrained question posed by the editor of NME this weekend ("Punk spoke up for angry kids. Why won't today's bands follow suit?") is that, when organs like the NME abandon an alternative position and start championing The Strokes, Razorlight, and Kaiser Chiefs over Dizzee Rascal, So Solid Crew, and Destinys Child, sooner or later relevant pop culture is going to dry up. If the progressive modernism of the turn of the millenium had been given continued mainstream coverage and representation, and if we hadn't all retreated into atomistic microcosms from which it's increasingly impossible to agree collectively on what new and meaningful even mean, right now the musical tendencies of 1999-2002 might be reaching near-deafening, revolutionary levels of volume.


*"The Speng" seems to have become a sort of mascot for these blogs hasn't he? Bonza.