borderpolice said:
the most important word is the "like pop <B>now</B>"! Music changes, by being heard often, by being copied, by being used in new contexts. Popularity changes contexts. even "I luv you" isn't immune!
no, i think the important bit is "Wasn't, really, was it?", as dismissing the idea of it ever having been
"revelatory and revolutionary"
(and yeah true popularity changes the context, but "i luv u" -- sadly--only ever got to #29 in the UK charts so i'm not sure if it ever became pop -- more's the pity)
"Wasn't, really, was it?" is really saying: "you were fooling yourselves, chaps"
and i think that is a large part of the pop-ist impulse, it's a big "Wasn't, really, was it?" to the whole of rock history. "It was never really going to change anything, was it really?... if it had been, then things would be different, now, wouldn't they?" "So let's dispose of the whole idea of 'change', because it can only make us depressed".
Now this impulse is based in the desire to rid of the considerable burden of history, and i totally understand it (and even had something of that impulse when i was writing the Blissed Out material -- rock discourse as this massive ponderous legacy, this doctrinal baggage)... having to live up to the past.... it's both a burden and an impediment, impeding you (the argument runs, and i can see its sense) from appreciating the small significances and pleasures of the now
morley used to have this line actually at the height of new pop, going on about appreciating and looking for "the small things" and not getting hung up on the Giant Steps or Big Gestures (the search for a new Clash that had so many of his NME colleagues down in the dumps, unable to enjoy the light frothy buzz of haircut 100 and altered images. Or equally the search for the new PiL.)
upthread i mentioned, or implied, it's virtually impossible to write entirely from within the transient pop thrill which is why people keep slipping back into rockist modes; you can do it but you have to be a genius. morley is one of the few who can stay almost entirely within this dizzy thrill zone. he never falls into the sociological register, the heaviness of the Real never impinges. that's what he was like in classic New Pop 81/82 mode, you got this sense of abstract energies whizzing around but everything remained gloriously unpinned down. And
Words and Music is a whole book in that zone of giddy almost-nullity. (The key argument is that New Pop came back in late 90s with all that r&b and sugababes type stuff. Lotta problems with this argument but later for that).
Words and Music -- and it is the
Das Kapital of popism--is delicious but a bit like eating a diet that consists entirely of sugar. (Also thought the last chapter was a bit like a Mondo 2000 article from the early 90s. The poptimistic utopia of lighter-than-light, all-that's-solid-melts-into-air pure pop connectivity definitely smacks of pre-bubblecrash, pre-9/11 mindset).
i think this sugar-high way of writing about music does capture something essential about music --- its
insubstantiality, mutability, impossible-to-pin-downability, the abstractness of it at all levels. but i can't go along with its lack of a social dimension, and there is something "heavy" about music too that relates to the heaviness of real life.
and morley actually wrote somewhere that a lot of the giddy froth of his new pop writing came from a sort of running away from the Heavy and the Real represented by his father's suicide
^^^^^^^^^
re your borderpolice's complaint about the absence of close musicology, well nobody does that outside the academy, that Susan McLary approach... and even there i don't think she or robert walser or whoever successfully proves that such and such a chord/glissando/whatever has a certain effect that correlates... when you read her analysis of say a whitesnake or madonna song in terms of musical structure and infalliable emotional effects certain things have, often one's own experience of the piece of music contradicts their reading.
anyway the pop-ists don't go in for this kind of thing either!
^^^^^^^^^^
re tim's recurrent point about people legimitising their own subjective tastes with the seal of the Important
... point taken, obviously, but i should point out that there's loads of things i like and even love that don't have these X-factors i go on about, or only have the most tenuous connection with them.... i'm not sure what argument i could make that tied say Prefab Sprout to 'emancipation' but they were one of my favorite groups at a certain point. there's many more examples, quite a few current ones,
that doesn't mean that the X-factors haven't existed and aren't worth talking about and aren't worth looking for in the future