Tom Waits vs. David Bowie

[thirdform]

It's like Robyn. You critically look at her songs and they are nothing but cliches of the last 30 years plopped one top of another. But this is why Green Gartside managed to fool people. He has such an atrocious voice his infatuation with Derrida could work. Because it was such bad, really awful, out of tune pop music there was no way of suspending disbelief. So that worked for him, on rockist grounds.

 

[sus]

Suspending reason

 

[thirdform]

There is an inevitable bourgeois (status quo) compliance to pop music, on a musicological level. Adorno was right about this. He's interesting on this ground. What makes a good popular composition. Where he goes wrong is to impute a meaning to the composers works which is not there. I.E: Schoenberg was nothing but an elitist and the bourgeois artist avant-la-lettre, the obsession with absolute serial originality and non-repetition for every composition. Which is precisely why he hated Teddy. It's a useful sociology experiment but ultimately becomes irritating in the real world. No music as extant in a non-revolutionary time can be revolutionary, it can only point the imagination to revolution. So yes, Adorno is wrong, but what he's getting at is interesting, what logistics and skills must be deployed to appeal to the widest possible audience across the classes?

 

[thirdform]

i dunno, i reckon @thirdform could get behind this. the great volksmusik being a push on behalf the proletariat

It's not necessarily what or what I don't get behind, it's just evidently the case. Pop music is closer to a pack of kitkats from Tesco than it is a home made liver kebab which you only have once every two years when you go to see your aunt Fatima or whatever.

It's... actually a development that quoting @blissblogger again, he was really dismayed with in the early 00s. But it's always been this way.

The remorseless, ruthless, invincible precision with which this vidpop is
programmed, edited, choreographed, groomed... definitely verges on the
militaristic. And the "artists" involved, whether it's Aguilera or Aaliyah or
whoever, are like figments spun into existence by squadrons of technicians--make
up artists, hair stylists, lighting crews, postproduction special effects,
recording engineers who tint and pitchshift the vocals, chop up the best takes
down to single words and re-stitch them together... The amount of energy and
effort and money and micro-management that goes into one 2 second shot in a
video, or one bar of the record, it's staggering... These stars are cartoons,
robots, ciphers, logos, branding devices.... and while I suppose there's a sort
of Baudrillardian hyper-real/posthuman/simulation-pop buzz to it... I dunno, is
it backward of me to prefer the early Eighties New Pop era? Where there was a
striving for glamour yet at the same time the charm of all-too-evident flaws and
fallibility and untampered, untreated fleshly reality-- I'm thinking of Altered
Images or Human League... or going back further, Marc Bolan (who, with just a
mane of corkscrew curls and some glitter on his cheekbones, was more
otherworldly and alien than any of today's digitally enhanced popstars). This
faux-animation element to modern vidpop, the way that the choreography and film
techniques are designed to make humans move in ways that resemble the characters
in videogames, is why you've got this spate of pop groups taking the next
logical step and hiding themselves behind cartoons: Gorillaz, Daft Punk's
anime-style promos and robot shtick. William Gibson's Idoru--the purely
computer-generated star-as-figment--is just around the corner.

I'm also, gotta admit, starting to feel a certain intellectual exhaustion with
the whole rhythm-as--the-star, rhythm-as-melody approach. When everything else
about a record sucks--the song, the star, the cultural ramifications--maybe a
"dope beat" alone ain't sufficient. Rhythm, melody, lyrics, compelling
persona.... It's not entirely unprecedented to have the whole package: Sly
Stone, Prince, P-Funk... there's even a few white examples I can't be bothered
to list.

Perhaps what I'm imagining in the back of my brain is some kind of eventual
revolt against the utter victory of "black" musical values
(rhythm-and-production as more important than song/lyrics; nouveau
riche/aspirational, licking-the-arse-of-the-status-quo lyrics/attitudes) and the
return with a vengeance of rock pretentiousness/bohemianism. Simon Biddell has
been banging on about "vision" as a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the
critical lexicon---the idea of being transported, by music as well as by lyrics
and charisma, into an individual's very particular view of the world---and
citing the likes of Beefheart, Mark E. Smith, Sly Stone, Peter Hammill as
exemplars. And in a lot of ways I kind of concur, if only out of boredom, desire
for an all-change: a massive movement of sonically over-reaching and lyrically
over-ripe art rock would be just the ticket right now. (Some would say that's
what the best of modern hip hop is anyway--today's art rock--and maybe they're
right--which reminds me, you gotta hear the Cannibal Ox album). Of course, as
Biddell concedes, the idea of "vision" leads back down the perilous path towards
auteur theory, the expressionist fallacy, and so forth... But maybe it doesn't
have to be so backward: Radiohead, for instance, have shown that you can have
the vision thing and the riddim thing at the same time. PiL, Roxy Music, Can,
Joy Division---all utterly bang-up to date rhythm-and-production wise, all
utterly vision-ary. And there was this great moment in the late Seventies/early
Eighties, when people tried to fuse punk and disco, "white" and "black" in
really suggestive ways. How did we ever learn to settle for less, adapt to the
split consciousness of liking parts of things but not the whole?

Sadly I always found radiohead just too self-absorbed, too happy to dwell in their asinine Oxford melancholy, no joy, not even dread like the best horrorcore or techstep (the anticipation of psychosis and psychotic states.) But then again I didn't go to Oxford or hang out with radical feminists in my late teens, so, you know, I've always been of the persuasion of make the best out of a bad situation, even if that ends up with the sheer moronic (as @luka calls it) thud-thud thud thud of gabber, or robo-bumming, there is something not celebratory there but something that is unwilling to succumb to ennui. Boredom is counter-revolutionary, which is why k-punk was so wrong about Dido, the exaltation and veneration of the common man can only come from an condescending, middle class position, a position which is socialised in people like me and us as a habitual mechanism of guilt, which I always have to dispense with. That is the real siding with the proletariat, not the maoist nonsense of listen to the masses then go back to the party hq at all times.

FAVES / UNFAVES

FAVES AND UNFAVES OF 2000 (originally on Blissout website) Simon Reynolds's FAVES OF 2000 Greetings! Delayed because of vario...

simonreynoldsfavesunfaves.blogspot.com

 

[thirdform]

Here I distinguish the zen of techno, gamelan, Reich etc from Ennui. Zen shortcircuits the boredom paradigm by momentarily banishing it. Ennui amplifies it to seismic proportions.

 

[maxi]

minus one point for bowie this is his new album cover

 

[woops]

minus one point for bowie this is his new album cover

wow this is actually true

 

[Leo]

Minus 100 points. Might as well be Pinhead Bowie.