sufi

lala
Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>

Tue, Jan 28, 7:09 PM (8 days ago)

to mute-social
Now available for direct ordering and/or free download…

Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965-1975
John Roberts

Challenges the conventional narratives about English popular music and
the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s

The passion, intensity and complexity of the popular music produced in
England between 1965-75 is the work of an extraordinary generation of
working class and lower middle class men and women (in alliance with a
handful of middle-class men and women) who saw in the new music the
remaking of something bigger than themselves, or more precisely,
something bigger than themselves that they could guide and shape and
call their own. In this the ‘use-values’ of popular music underwent an
unprecedented expansion and diversity during this period. Red Days
presents how music and action, music and discourse, experienced a
profound re-functioning as definitions of the popular unmoored
themselves from the condescending judgements of post-1950s high culture
and the sentiment of the old popular culture and the musicologically
conformist rock ‘n’ roll seeking to displace it. The remaking of the
popular between 1965-1975, accordingly, is more than a revision of
popular taste, it is, rather, the demolition of old cultural allegiances
and habits, as forces inside and outside of music shattered the
assumption of popular music as the home for passive adolescent
identifications.


Bio: John Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of
Wolverhampton. He is the author of a number of books, including, The
Necessity of Errors (2010), Photography and Its Violations (2014),
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015), Thoughts on an Index Not
Freely Given (2016) and The Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism,
Capitalism and Disenlightenment (2018)

PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=981

Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions now for
the special price of £10.

Release to the book trade June 2020

Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing
from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of
everyday life.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
i noticed that john roberts book a while ago and made a mental note to get it - how weird they are just giving it away as a free download, five months before the official publication.
 

sufi

lala
Well I never, who knew that the only decent pf track was actually by Peckham concept artist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Latham_(artist)

Like Latham, members of the rock band, Pink Floyd attended Regent Street Polytechnic. In 2016 Pink Floyd released their collection of rare and unreleased recorded early material in the box set The Early Years 1965–1972. On the second CD of the collection is an extended instrumental improvisation, similar to that of the middle section of their performances of "Interstellar Overdrive", which was produced by Latham. The piece is split across nine tracks on the CD.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
i wrote to third the other week something like “they discovered drugs in the 60's and thought that the beatles and Syd Barret were psychedelic rather than just silly and whimsical..”

the notion that sgt pepper and Arnold lane are psychedelic is such a hard concept for me to grasp.

i don’t want this to be a shit on that music thread, it’d be fruitful to unpick how the psychedelia transmits- and doesn’t- to different listeners.

i’m not talking about a love supreme or pharaoh sanders (and of course ‘tomorrow never knows’ is a very much ahead of its time). i mean the doors, pink floyd, greatful dead, sgt pepper, et al. how are they psychedelic?

dadrock? more like grandad rock!

an old thread i understand... given this a long hard look in the mirror.

i think we need to break it down:

1) to agree on on aspects of sound that are "psychedelic"

lets put this into categories:

a) repetitive drumming

b) reverb and other physically impossible sound spaces

to back (b) up i would refer to this quote i keep handy
“Some of the music involved loudspeakers. Hearing what some of these composers were doing was life-changing — Karlheinz Stockhausen had a four-channel electronic piece involving [pre-recorded] boys’ voices. The spatial aspects caught my attention: that one could create, with loudspeakers, the illusion of a space that was not the real space in which we were listening.” John Chowning inventor of FM hearing Stockhausen in Paris at Le Domaine Musicale
c) invisible instrumentation - by which we refer to sounds which are present and then which become invisible - this is really the apogee of psychedelic music

d) the least important from a sonic point-of-view but (ask any poet - valid) surreal lyrical content (using shorthand here)

2) to understand the background - the immediate context against which sergeant peppers and arnold layne would be have been heard

i'm not using it as the crux of my argument - we'll come to that - but when these records came out against the background of what was on the radio - no question something like "tomorrow never knows" or "interstellar overdrive" (ok sleight of hand here but bear with me) would have sounded psychedelic according to the aforementioned criteria



arguably - subjectively - they still do.

3) to acknowledge that these psychedelic tropes are now completely standard

of course these techniques are now standard. they inform all pop music. many musics have sought to intensify the effects in the intervening 50 years. so why then would people continue to fetishise the old music? perfectly reasonable question.

4) to reflect on the role of "bhakti", or devotion in the consumption of music

it's not an easy to thing to accept for any music fan - because it undercuts the sacred relationship they have with their music - but the intense worship and fetishization of certain sounds - that loving "turning over and over again" of the value and significance of certain music creates a devotional intensity that is the fundamental quality of what the hindus call "bhakti yoga" - the spiritual high you get out of worship.

i wouldn't go as far as saying that there is no inherent quality in certain musics (we have after all defined what would qualify as psychedelic music) but it is always going to be a case of "pick your poison". the grandad rock era has the indisputable advantage of having been lovingly worried over for decades - it has accrued a spiritual weight from the process of cultural fetishization - to the extent that both paul mccartney, and (when he was alive) syd barrett were/are saints.

and in the beatles favour i would argue that they skillfully or otherwise pushed all the right buttons - cleared the right channels for this kind of adoration.

5) to conclude that this devotional consumption of music is part and parcel of its psychedelic effect

it's something that seems quite uncontroversial to me. that's the role of the good music journalist obviously - as high priest in the cult of intensification. in the promulgation of certain kinds of devotion.
 
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luka

Well-known member
This stuff was way before your time Matthew your a spring chicken. Did it register as psychedelic immediately and intuitively or did you have to manuevere yourself into position?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
This stuff was way before your time Matthew your a spring chicken. Did it register as psychedelic immediately and intuitively or did you have to manuevere yourself into position?
it's a learned response im sure. an acquired language. if you played any music to an infant they wouldn't "get" it.

but that's not to say that some "languages" (ie musics) are not better-constucted or more capable of the articulation of concepts than other.
 
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