"there are immaturities, but there are immensities"- from Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake
A proposal by me and Paul Oldfield, to write something - a contribution to a volume of essays? a thinkpiece in Melody Maker or somewhere else? an actual book? - I really can't remember, which is slightly terrifying - on the music of the Sixties.
This would have been penned in the late Eighties, when the absence of serious study of psychedelia-as-music was actually a genuine deficit. (Not sure if this is the case nowadays - given books like Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours - although I sense that in academia, psychedelia is not taken seriously in itself, apart from being the soundtrack to the era of counterculture).
Although written up by me, a lot of the ideas here are from Paul, who was at this time finding strange echoes of this era (or his vision of this era) in contemporary groups as diverse as Das Damen and Apple Mosaic.
Some of what is proposed in this, er, proposal ended up being dealt with in part two of The Sex Revolts, which looks at psychedelia, cosmic rock, and ambient through the lens of gender.
The music of the psychedelic era has not
been given much
serious
consideration. At best it is denigrated as
apolitical, at
worst as regressive, solipsistic, nonsensical.
Traditional rock
criticism, whether social realist or
humanist lit-crit
in orientation, privileges authenticity,
commitment,
relevance.Hardly surprising, then, that
it can
find little
"worthwhile" or "valid" in psychedelia: a music
that's neither
overtly confrontational nor contestatory, and
that doesn't seem
to make a clearcut contribution to the
social struggles
of its time.
Our reappraisal of psychedelia will start
from the
premise that
what's valuable about psychedelia is precisely
its
"nonsense". We will focus on the very opacity,
indeterminacy,
and chaotic contradictions that prove such
intractable
material for a rock criticism whose preferred
mode of operation
is elucidation and validation.
Our contention is that what happens in the
psychedelia
of the mid to
late Sixties is a deconstruction of the
subject, of
gender; a collapse of identity and a crisis of
signification,
that is the source of both bliss and terror.
As such it
prefigures the schizophrenic tendencies of post-
modernism as
extensively documented this decade.
Through a survey of the imagery of the
counter culture,
in its various
stages, and in its various forms (lyrics,
record sleeves,
gestures in performance, critical language),
we hope to
uncover the utopian aspirations and impossible
desires encoded
therein.At the same time we will attend
to
what lay behind
trends and innovations in vocal style,
production,
arrangements, new instruments, inputs and
influences etc.
What were the the impulses behind the
obsessions with
with
Mediaevalism, pastoralism, Edwardian and Victorian
full Q/A transcript of the interview with Anindya "Bat" Bhattacharyya for Socialist Worker
BAT: Okay - just to start with (and on a somewhat tangential note), later this month is the 20th anniversary of the release of God Save The Queen... which of course I'm sure was ever so exciting at time, but has perhaps more curiously since been mythologised as a high point of Rebel Pop - getting to number one but being banned (GSTQ is an Unofficial Number One, which is surely like being a Square Circle), a singular fusion of revolutionary cultural energy, taking on the establishment (in all senses), and representing a movement of sorts "on the ground". What's your take on its significance Then and its significance Now (perhaps as an "event" that is always harked back to but can by definition never be repeated)?
SIMON REYNOLDS: It’s hard for me to think objectively about the Sex Pistols music because it meant so much to me at the time--or rather slightly after the time, I got into it in 1978, but it was really my entry in the whole world of rock and taking music seriously. And the music still to me has this incredible power. I know there are younger people who are like, “it’s just trad guitar rock!”. And the line that the Pistols music is fairly staidly produced hard rock is something I took in Rip It Up and Start Again because that was a common stance in postpunk bands and also it's kinda my rhetorical set-up. But what a fantastic sound the Pistols had, and within its context, quite original. Beyond that, there’s a virulence to songs like “Anarchy in the UK” and “Bodies” that still scalds me. How did they reach that place? Rotten is a monster on those songs, yet in reality he is not a violent person, quite the opposite--he shrinks from physical conflict.
“God Save the Queen” is great but it’s not my favourite Sex Pistols tune, there is something almost too perfectly anthemic about it. The lyrics are fantastic, though--“god save your mad parade”, “flowers in the dustbin,” “there’s no future in England’s dreaming”.
The myth of the song seems to be the truth about it, actually--it was one of the last times, possibly THE last time, that a song could send shockwaves through an entire society. The force of that gesture, at a time when rock’s sense of its own political power was ailing in the mid-Seventies lull, dramatically reinflated rock culture’s belief in itself. It was an injection of energy and conviction that took almost a decade to dissipate, and even after that you still had figures like, say, Manic Street Preachers who took their bearings from that. Or even the way that Public Enemy was embraced by a lot of British people (and white Americans) as the black punk, the nearest equivalent to Pistols in terms of convulsing the culture.
Especially in those five to ten years after its release, the degree of impact that “God Saves the Queen” had became the benchmark by which everything that followed was measured. You were either aspiring to that or somehow failing that. Things like Frankie Goes To Hollywood were an attempt to create an Event on that scale and with that degree of controversy and polarization. And all the seriousness of postpunk, the moral urgency of the debates about what path to follow, how best to apply our good intentions, it really comes from that moment. It’s almost a burden: how do we live up to this? And ultimately it became an unhelpful thing, because as you say, it’s unrepeatable, it’s a waste of energy. During my early years at Melody Maker, something me and David Stubbs used to write about was the urgent need to un-punk UK music culture, get rid of the albatross. It was partly a musical initiative, shedding the lingering prog-phobia and embrace more expansive sonics. But it was also about abandoning the idea of music as shock and threat, all those ideas of subversion and bastardized Situationism that were still hanging around like stale air in the late Eighties.
following on from that... I was wondering how you saw the relationship between Bring The Noise and Rip It Up - in terms of the (perhaps arbitrary) periodisation that the two books cover. What (in general terms, obviously) was the relationship between the 1986-present period that BTN covers and the more obviously glorious years of punk & postpunk covered in RIU?
Well one of the things I hope that BtN shows is that in the post-1986 period a hell of a lot of interesting stuff happened. The late Eighties and really the whole of the Nineties, I always felt like there was at any given point a bunch of new directions being pursued, I never felt short of stuff worth championing or simply talking about. And that should come across I hope, even though the book doesn’t have that much on my main passion of the Nineties, rave culture and electronic music (on the grounds that it’s thoroughly covered in Energy Flash, I wanted to avoid overlap).
But to the nub of your question, it is an arbitrary break to a certain degree. I made the break in Rip It Up and Start Again at 1984-85 partly because I had to end the book somewhere. But also because at the time it did feel like the ideas and energies of postpunk/new pop had run their course. Really, what happened around then was that postpunk turned into indie-rock: the defining groups of the time, Jesus and Mary Chain and The Smiths and REM, were sonically largely based around the Sixties and they were drawing almost entirely on white rock sources, whereas postpunk and new pop had always been about engaging with contemporary black music. So indie-rock consolidated itself circa 1983-5 as a retro-leaning culture and something that had this impotent and exiled relationship to mainstream pop, which was dominated by black musical values of soulfulness and danceability. Obviously there are no such things as clean breaks, and many bands carried on with postpunk and New Pop ideas. Cabaret Voltaire and Mark Stewart carried on making music based in postpunk ideas, and there was the whole industrial genre. And you can see Madonna and Pet Shop Boys as “late period New Pop” in a way: modern dance + literate lyrics + glam-style games with image. But in terms of what had hitherto been the vanguard of white bohemian rock, the vast majority of new bands emerging were rejecting synths, drum machines and modern music technology for the trad line-up of guitars and increasingly they were looking to the archives for inspiration, and more than that, the exclusively white areas of the archives--psychedelia, folk, country.
The other thing that happens in 1986 that seemed like a break is that hip hop really takes off. Obviously rap had existed for a while, there were some big hit records, including some songs like “The Message” that showed it could be more than just party music. There was the whole electro boom, and bubbling as an underground force on both sides of the Atlantic there’s breakdancing and graffiti and the whole subcultural aspect of hip hop. But rap--and I distinctly remember this from the time--still had something of an aspect of a fad as far as most people were concerned. Then suddenly in 1986 it resurges. It’s the Def Jam crew--LL Cool J, Run DMC, Beastie Boys--who really make it a mainstream phenomenon. But lots of other figures also come forward around this time and get a lot of attention: Mantronix, Schooly D, Eric B & Rakim, Salt N Pepa, Marley Marl. The music was also evolving from its early days as first a band-based, live musician sound and then a drum machine based sound to being an artform defined by sampling and looped breakbeats. So 1986, that’s really when I think it becomes clear that this rap thing is going to stay and is actually going to be the most sonically crucial sound of the Eighties.
So the two main subjects of Bring the Noise--indie-rock and hip hop--really achieve definition and momentum in 1985/1986, which just so happened to be when I started out being a professional music writer. Convenient, eh?
When you say "The myth of the song seems to be the truth about it, actually--it was one of the last times, possibly THE last time, that a song could send shockwaves through an entire society." ---this leads on to what strikes me as a common theme running through both Bring The Noise and Rip It Up - you have a "manifesto" so to speak - music should ideally be (a) politically radical (b) musically avant-garde (c) have mass popular appeal. Now I agree - but the curious thing is we only ever seem to get TWO of the three at the same time - eg Stereolab is (a) & (b) but not (c), The Clash are (a) & (c) but not (b), gangsta hiphop is (b) & (c) but certainly not (a)... I picked up a sense in your book of an always unrequited and thwarted search for a "holy grail" that would combine these three... to what extent do you think this is the case? and could you care to speculate on why you don't seem to get all three together - is it a structural impossibility?
I guess you are right, that would be ultimate ideal, but it’s one that’s virtually non-existent in the history of music! There would be Public Enemy, a group that was sonically radical, politically provocative, and really popular, but who else has there been? So in practice I will settle for just a/ or b/ or c/ on their own. And even sometimes none of those things. I honestly don’t have a programme or agenda when I listen to things, it’s not like I’m measuring if they come up to scratch. It’s more that stuff will excite me and then I try to work out why, and how those reasons relate to the larger field of music and music’s history, and to what’s going on in the culture. Inevitably you notice patterns in your taste, and recurrent syndromes in the way music achieves impact, what works and what doesn’t. But it’s a constantly revised outlook rather than a worked-out manifesto. Really, it’s much more like a messy set of biases and preoccupations. And in a lot of ways what I’m always looking for is something I can’t account for or slot into my systems, something that gives me new thoughts or challenges my existing theories.
I’ve never quite worked out where I stand on the vexed question of politics and pop. Instances of politicized pop that actually work as pop--as good music and as something that’s popular, in the pop charts--seem quite rare. In a certain harsh light, Rip It Up and Start Again could be seen as the story of a bunch of different bands who tried to make politics and pop work together but failed. From Gang of Four to Scritti, it’s a litany of failure! But the failure doesn’t matter to me, it’s more that they tried; the ideas and the idealism they had served a purpose in the sense of creating a kind of cultural quickening. You had these lively minds grappling with this stuff and it was a mind-rush to follow their trajectory. The argumentativeness of postpunk culture and the striving of these groups was what inspired me--that and the amazing music.
I suppose I would make a distinction between politicized music and political music. And there’s a sense in which all music is political, there’s stuff going on in it by which you can tell the times; pop music that is conservative in its values or escapist is just as much a political statement as overtly radical music. It’s a force for anti-change! And the most interesting stuff of all is the stuff full of contradictions, stuff that leaves you conflicted. Which is why hip hop is endlessly fascinating to think about politically, for what it tells you about society and culture. It’s just that what you find there may be quite depressing, or confusing. It might not necessarily lead you to positive, uplifting conclusions.
Picking up on your point "The other thing that happens in 1986 that seemed like a break is that hip hop really takes off... that's really when I think it becomes clear that this rap thing is going to stay and is actually going to be the most sonically crucial sound of the Eighties" -- now you were working as a journalist on the "inkie" rock press at this time - what was your impression of how the rock industry reacted to this? I remember being a teenager at the time, there was a de facto "alliance" on the ground between indie kids and those into hiphop (which later morphed into rave culture) - yet the reaction of the industry was more ambivalent. I remember horrendous rows over Public Enemy, plus you spilling the beans about the racism in the music press (black star on cover = less sales). This kinda suggests that the black v white musical division is "imposed from above", while on the ground you get all sorts of cross fertilisations in both directions.
Hip hop was really hot in 1986-87, and it made for good copy--people like Schoolly D and Public Enemy--so, as I recall, it was enthusiastically embraced by the UK music press. In a sense, rap at that point was quite rockist, it was bad-boys with big egos, it was rebellious and then there was PE’s radical chic, so it was all an easy fit with the rock press. At NME there was a split between the indie rock fans who were into the C86 shambling bands and things like the Go Betweens, and the soul boy who wanted to push R&B and hip hop. It was a war between factions. But I think it was more that the aggression came from the soul boys, they had an agenda where they wanted NME to drop its indie guitar band coverage. They wanted to be more like The Face. At Melody Maker, we were scrambling to make the paper as exciting as possible and get to the new music first, cos we were underdogs trying to beat the NME. So at MM, rap was embraced on an equal level with the new guitar noiseniks like Sonic Youth. We had Run DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy on the cover before the NME did, big features on Schoolly D, Salt N Pepa, Eric B and Rakim, everyone that counted at that point. And as for the record industry--well, these rappers were mostly on major labels, right?
In terms of grass roots stuff, perhaps you hung out with more progressive types, cos I recall that indie-fans in those days were very sniffy about dance music and chart pop, and rap was kinda lumped in with that to an extent. An example is this group the Age of Chance, a noisy shambling guitar band who made a career out of being the indie group who embraced rap and pop. They did a cover of Prince’s “Kiss” and this was a big gesture, they were rejecting indie crypto-racist Luddite parochialism! Today no one would blink an eyelash but in 1986 it was considered a big deal that an indie band would do this. That said, I think rap cos of its rebellious credentials had more credence in the indie world, so you got things like World Domination Entreprises, who had this strong reggae dub input anyway, doing a cover of LL’s “Radio”, and even horrible grebo bands like Gaye Bikers on Acid dabbled with rap. The Def Jam rap-meets-rock sound was a gateway for a lot of people into hip hop.
I don’t honestly think indie people are racist--in a live review of the Smiths playing a Rock Against Racism benefit in late 86 that I nearly put in Bring the Noise, I noted that indie fans were probably more likely to be anti-racist in their political beliefs that your average R&B loving prole--it’s more that they had and often still have a limited idea of what ‘proper’ music is. And a lot of black music was seen as machine-music or not having much lyrical content or for having straight aspirations. But white soul was disliked for those reasons just as much.
You’re right though about the fact that market research showed that music press readers tend to not to buy issues with black faces on the cover. Whenever Melody Maker would put people like Public Enemy or Cameo or Bobby Brown on the cover, it wouldn’t be a great selling issue.
Related to this is perhaps one of the more startling theses you put forward in BTN - that there is a peculiar elective affinity between working class street culture (coded black) and middle class art culture (coded white). You see this very starkly in grime, which has a street following and an arthouse following but *nothing* else! Now it struck me that this thesis of an affinity is only peculiar if you assume a "sociological" understanding of class (and therefore a bourgeois-ideological one), one that categorises people according to their habits - while a more rigorous Marxist definition of class - one based on relationship to the means of production and strictly indifferent to questions of "culture" leads to a very different picture - and one which could be seen as class solidarity cutting across cultural differences...
You’ll have to guide me through this one: what is the affinity in terms of their relationship to the means of production between music bloggers (tending I’d say to be products of higher education, probably working in the media or some kind of language-based profession like education) and grime youth (less likely I’d assume to have gone into higher education or be destined for careers in the professions)? Cos I’d have thought it was actually an example of how culture--a taste for edgy, futuristic sounds--cuts across class; how music is one of the places we go to transcend our class identity. Or maybe it’s a coincidence, two different groups who are invested in the idea of being a vanguard but who derive different sorts of cultural capital from it. Or maybe the same kind of cultural capital, but it’s applied in totally different contexts.
It’s a one-way romance/alliance, though. I do wonder if the grime kids are even aware of all the bloggoid discourse around their music or what it would mean to them if they were.
Okay, I didn't make myself particularly clear there. What I'm getting at is that the "class identity" that's getting "transcended" or "cut across" here is "class" in the ***sociological*** sense, "cultural class" if you will, and not class in the strict politico-economic sense, ie the Marxist sense of the term. If you think of class as a relationship to the means of production then much of our "common sense" about class turns out to be mystified... For instance, teachers and university lecturers are part of the working class these days, while say the "market trader" characters you see on EastEnders are in fact middle class (petit-bourgeois to be precise). Now I'd argue that the only definition of class that makes sense *politically* is the Marxist definition, which by definition draws together a vast number of people across the world that have little or nothing in common culturally speaking (an Argenitinian factory worker, an Indian agricultural worker, a Norwegian engineer...) - so the very notion of "class identity" is nonsense, class politics is not an identity politics, it is not based on "who you are" but "what you do", it is in a sense a universal solvent of identity, an anti-identity. So from this point of view, the "taste for edgy, futuristic sounds" is certainly cutting across (ideological) cultural divisions - but is it really cutting across class ones? Or could it not (and I know this sounds barmy) be seen as the "class for itself" in emergence, a coming together of different skills and techniques from across the (by now huge, global and connected) working class?
Hmmm, interesting. I like the idea. I think Fredric Jameson imagined
something like this happening in that fat book Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late capitalism, new forms of panglobal solidarity
Actually in my blog I did a thing ages ago that was like listing the
parallels between bloggers and grime MCs. I can't remember the details but
the gist was that there were structural affinities in terms of what they
did, the narrowcast nature of the medium. It had suddenly struck me that the pirate stations weren't mass media, just cos they were on the radio dial. in practice only a small number of people tuned in, probably equivalent to the larger blogs. and people were turning themselves into legends through persona construction -- bloggers just as much as MCs -- but it was as local legends not mass cult icons (even though in blogland the locale is non-geographic, a locale of sensiblity, whereas with grime it's the radio's broadcast range). it's basically Momus's "in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people" idea
have you seen the bizarre video for Dizzee's new single Sirens - it's on its website - what on EARTH is going on in the final scenes? There's some very weird commentary on class and the sexualisation of young black male bodies going on there... which reminds me - what do you think has happened and will happen to grime? it seems to be permanently stuck in a "might break thru" mode, but never catches on a becomes the "next big thing"... any ideas why this is? and is it a good or bad thing? and to what extent does the demonising and stigmatising of grime, Channel U etc etc keep it marginalised? (see this article by David Moynihan for some background on this http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9699 )
I haven't seen the video. It's terrible, my interest in hearing the dizzee album
is really low. Being such an adherent of scenius theory, i was quite
negatively affected when i saw Dizzee on one of those grime DVDs, risky roadz i think, being interviewed a few years ago and he said something like "i'm still part of grime, still part of the scene. it's just that these days, i don't do pirates and I don't do raves" i thought, 'pirates and raves, that IS the scene, you dolt!". Bit like goldie unplugging himself from the scenius, i can't imagine his muse prospering being cut off from the grime lifeforce, as exceptional an individual as he undoubtedly is.
Still you can see why he'd want to separate himself from the scene, it's now
a millstone rather than a launchpad isn't it? it's in this dismal post-hype stage where it never broke through and happened in a mass way, yet it's not longer fresh or hip. most of the bloggerati support has moved on. the mainstream media, what are they going to say, writing it up? 'grime --it's still there!'
There was a moment there in 2005 where it really looked like it was on the
verge. and then 'Pow' was a big hit but not as big as they thought it would
be, and Lady Sovereign didn't put out her album when the moment was ripe, and the Roll Deep lp was misconceived and Kano's was too midtempo and brit-rappy.
They botched it, but then again I can criticise the cross-over bland-out/tone-down moves but there's no guarantee that pure uncut in your face grime would have prospered any better.
That reminds me - I couldn't help but smile at the vignettes in BTN where you buy some obscure record and rave about it for ages then realise to your horror that the lyrics are completely reprehensible etc... I was curious that you (a) admitted this (b) admitted that you avoided buying or listening to stuff that OTT in terms of sexism/homophobia etc... now many people in these permissive anything goes isssalllmoosicinnit times would see your stance as almost laughably old-fashioned and "PC", a throwback to a time when Politics Mattered Maaan... what would your response be? and how do you deal with the contradiction of Great Music Whose Politics Suck?
I must have in my collection so much music that has reprehensible attitudes or offensive lyrics -- especially in terms of misogyny and sexism -- so I'm not sure exactly why this one example got to me. I mentioned my misgivings in the column on Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg, but I think the main thing you're talking about is the TOK record, the dancehall one about setting the chi-chi man on fire. It was something about loving it so intensely for such a long period on this Massive B radio show in New York before finding out what 'chi chi man, we go bun dem' or whatever the chorus is, actually meant, and really being taken aback. Also the song is so exuberant and joyous that to find out how
the exuberance was targeted and what actually animated the glee and joie de
vivre in the song was horrible, as it was one of those tunes and rhythms
that really get under your skin and follow you around in your life.
But that's a pretty rare occurrence, short of outright 'hate rock'/nazi Oi!
there's not much much I would deny myself. that's if something arrived
through the mail, of course. Wen you're actually in a record store and
poised to hand over your credit card you might stop and think 'Do i really
want to line these people's pockets?'. that's how it was with TOK, i was in
the dancehall section of Virgin in New York and i thought 'naah'.
I dream and hope of a day not too far off when the "anti-PC" stance seems
laughably old-fashioned and a throwback to the days when no one cared and
nothing mattered. I thought i could see it on the horizon as far back as
1998, i remember telling a Spin colleague when I worked at the mag that the
New Earnestness was coming --but it hasn't arrived, not really, not yet.
And how do you deal with the contradiction of Great Music Whose Politics Suck?
Well i'm not sure there is a contradiction... the most interesting music, like the greatest art, comes out of contradictions, split impulses, confusion.
Some of my favourite writers have really conservative or dodgy or just
confused politics. not just the obvious ones like Celine or Wyndham Lewis,
but people like EM Cioran who had some kind of flirtation with Romanian fascism
in his youth and remained a conservative, anti-revolutionary sort all his
life. Or Nabokov with his aristocratic nostalgia for pre-Soviet Russia, his
strange loathing for Freud.
I'm really interested in the idea that reactionary, curmudgeonly,
jaundiced-eye type writers (or artists -- Francis Bacon) have access to
certain powers artistically through their misanthropy, their sense of abjection. Often the funniest writers have a poisonous sense of self-loathing and disgust for humanity. Also these grouchy, everything's-gone-to-shit types start out as radical, clear-eyed idealists--like Kingsley Amis who was a total Moscow-line following Communist until Hungary.
Probably on a certain level most great music sucks politically - if you could somehow translate what it proposes into politics - because great music is about impossible desires.
And then there's another story to do with pop music which is that a lot of its energies are capitalistic. and by that I don't mean, "they're a product of capitalistic conditioning and if only we could end capitalism then a pure pop music would emerge". what i mean is that the energies that pulse inside pop at the deepest core level are the same as those that animate capitalism and they help to explain why capitalism exists and why it is so hard to eradicate. Because it is seductive, the idea of individualism, competition, the fantasy of being self-made, your own master -- these are fantasies that have an appeal that shouldn't be underestimated. that's why the American ideology is so popular,
cos so many think 'I'll play the game and I'll win'.
A lot of what animates pop is ego, lust for glory, the drive for dominance, prestige, wealth. There's a lot of violence in pop music, rock music. Appetite for destruction. I think a Bataillean view of pop, to do with the will to glory, expenditure-without-return, wasting of energy and resources, might be a largely correct one. I actually thought this before I even read Bataille - me and David Stubbs did a thinkpiece in 1986 on Indecency in pop - one of the ideas was that Pop was the antithesis of Green values, it was wasteful and selfish and destructive.
I think we ended with the line "pop or a better world, the choice is yours!"
ZAPP, live at the Hammersmith Odeon, London Melody Maker, July 12th 1986
by Simon Reynolds Zapp live were perhaps the most extreme spectacle I have ever
witnessed, with both band and audience abandoning inhibitions more extensively
than at any rock gig I've attended, for all rock's Dionysiac rhetoric. And yet
the SHOW! was clearly rehearsed with military precision, as it was performed
exact in every deranged detail the very next night.
What's fascinating is how this kind of excess has an everyday
currency. Soul takes straight values, traditional gender protocol, and inflates
them to epic, surreal dimensions – as in the Battle of the Sexes duet between
Shirley Murdoch and Roger Troutman tonight. The SHOW! is all monstrously
exaggerated sexuality, seriously saucy – full of ludicrous arse-shaking, mimed
cunnilingus, Roger stripping to his briefs... Roger is an incredible SHOW!person
– one minute goosestepping across the stage plucking blues guitar, the next
reappearing on top of a stack of amps, then dragging a luckeee ladeee out of
the audience for a cartoon clinch, or impersonating Presley, or venturing way
out into the crowd on a bodyguard's back while playing a harmonica. Every so
often he asks, rhetorically, "London, Englaaaand! Can I do anything I
wanna do! Can I go crazeee?"
The music's fab, a fat, freaky, juddering funkquake. Zapp's
unique ingredient is those dexterously vocoderised vocals, that extra
ultra-tremulousness that simulates a meta-ecstasy, a bliss beyond imagination,
let alone realisation. This is the dangerous utopianism of soul.
Best night out for years.
Roger Troutman of Zapp - interview
Melody Maker, May 14th 1988
by Simon Reynolds
Somewhere between George Clinton's scrambled egghead funkadelia and Prince's squirmstrutting hypersexuality, lies the funkquake nirvana that is Zapp. A family affair from Dayton, Ohio, but definitively the brainchild of chief clansman Roger Troutman, Zapp are funk turned on so deep it's turned almost inside out.
Over the last decade, Zapp and satellite projects like Roger have delivered a series of dancefloor classics like 'More Bounce To The Ounce' (funk as tantric mantra, with Roger's multi-tracked vocoderised vocal spiralling off towards the peaks of the mystic East, reminiscent of the involuted acrobatics of Tim Buckley's Starsailor, while remaining cartoon absurdist). Then there was 1986's delectable brace of 'It Doesn't Really Matter' and the impossibly luscious 'Computer Love'. And last week Zapp brought the high unreality and serious sauce of their live show to London.
Zapp's unique element is Troutman's talk-box treatment of his own voice, which (like their sound in general) is simultaneously a distillation of funk's essence and an exaggeration of its mannerisms: it conjures an ultra-tremulous meta-ecstasy. Where did he dream that up?
"I kept hearing Peter Frampton and Stevie Wonder using this talk-box, and I got intrigued. So I got one and soon saw why they weren't more popular. It's really hard to use, to manipulate it and to sing at the same time. So I spent hundreds of hours in my garage teaching myself to talk with it, like a child learning the alphabet and all the vowels. When I had that down pat, I studied real powerful black singers, so I could do anything a singer could do. When I put it on records, I had no idea it would be so hypnotic to people."
It makes you sound superhuman, extraterrestrial even.
"Fans, they want you to be BIGGER than life," he replies.
The only comparison I can think of is what Prince did with his voice on the Sign 'O' The Timesalbum. Another similarity is the way you and Prince pile it all on, saturate and overload your records with elements from all over black pop history (like funky Butthole Surfers), and from white rock history too.
"I'm a fan of all kinds of stuff. Led Zep, Hendrix, Steve Howe and Jon Anderson from Yes. And if I can present some of that in a black context it makes me seem a little koo-koo, different, y'know."
The Zapp live show exhibits the stunning span of Roger's versatility, encompassing comedy, guitar heroics, blues, George Benson-style virtuoso jazz languor, impersonations of Elvis, stunts and japes at the audience's expense. Does the idea of mixing it up stem from the days of hanging out with Clinton and Bootsy?
"Ah no, it's from the days of being a regional, nightclub band, 1965-79, having to play a lot of places to make a living. Some were all-black, some all-white, and often you'd get clubs with guys shouting, 'Rock'n'roll! Play some fuckin' rock 'n' roll'. So I had to beef up the repertoire with Top 40 rock 'n' roll tracks. Only way to keep 'em quiet, only way to succeed. Give the customer what he wants, give it to him and he'll make you rich. Look at me," he gestures at rings. "This stuff is real, y'know!"
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As Roger, he's just had his biggest hit with 'I Want To Be Your Man', Top Three in the States, Top 40 over here. If he wants, the door to white America and couples-oriented soft radio is open now. He's a workaholic though, with numerous projects on the boil at once: the fifth Zapp album, the new Shirley Murdock LP, his son Roger Jnr (age 17) who's just signed to Capitol, and the possibility of producing a couple of tracks for Joe Cocker. He's also recently helped Green on a couple of tracks for the new Scritti platter.
"I love their stuff, I liked them even before the last album. Michael Jackson told me about them, in fact. They asked me to do stuff with the talk-box and I was tickled to do it. See, a lot of groups act like I don't exist. So when Green rang up, it was a sign of acceptance, respect."
Green described you as "a man who really suffers from the funk", permanently itchin' and twitchin' with polyrhythmic ideas.
"Yeah, they noticed they just had to start off the track and I was off, I didn't even need to know what key it was, I knew it instantly, I could just dazzle around Green's vocal and spruce it up. And that's how I do my own music — I just go in the studio and record. Throw down loads of stuff, then sift through this mountain and use only a small part of it. I'm spontaneous, that's just how I am."
These days, that groove approach to funk seems in the descendant. Tracks seem assembled. What do you make of house music and the post-electro stuff?
"Ah, well — it's great. If it sells. I'm not smart enough to know what I like about anything, I just know if it sells. If 10 people like something, I wanna figure it out and use it, cos then those 10 people will like me, ha ha! Makes sense to me. If it sells, it's great. If more than 10 people like it, I like it. I have to like it. Forced to. To hell with what I like. I can deal with what I like later... after I've collected."
The chicken-in-a-basket reflexes are still deeply ingrained, but for once pandering has led to SENSUAL PANDEMONIUM rather than pallid dilution.
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Troutman's very keen to present Zapp as family entertainment, with himself as positive role model — no drink, no drugs — while in his home town Dayton, he's a local hero for ploughing Zapp profits into community-enriching projects. But against the grain of this upstanding temperance, the show is ultra-raunchy, all ass wiggle, surreally suggestive grimaces and kinky undercurrents: at one point, he drops his trousers to reveal black tights...
"Yeah, but if you're gonna do a show, you gotta have something to keep the fans interested."
So do you see sex as healthy fun, whereas drink and drugs just cause damage?
"No question about it. Sure, there's AIDS, but when I say sex is healthy, I mean, if you have a special lady, you should..." A near-epileptic flurry of levitating eyebrows and corner-of-mouth twitches indicate exactly what lewd extremes one should go to with that special lady.
Another side to the positive role model aspect of Zapp is Troutman's business acumen: profits have been reinvested into making Zapp self-sufficient, with three studios of their own, a construction company, a limo hire firm and a small school, plus a community housing scheme of some 200 once-squalid houses that the Troutmans modernised and then re-let to the original tenants at low rents. The clan also look out for themselves too.
"Everyone in the group — all my brothers, Jennifer my secretary — all live in houses that I built, elaborate, beautiful houses. I wanted to do that for them. I reckon if I can provide Jennifer with a new car and a new house, then her loyalty will be 101 per cent, even more than if I gave her the money and she had to give it to someone else to get the things she needs. You see, 'He who owns the lands, owns the man'," he says, launching into a maniacal, Vincent Price laugh.
How am I going to transcribe that, I ask? "It's the laughter of the man with control," he replies.
Well, it is all a bit feudal, giving land to vassals who have to swear fealty in return. So there's this Zapp business empire?
"Maybe. There's areas where we all live. I just built and bought my son and my nephew a house. Wow, 17 and he has a new house, a big house with loads of rooms! And he brings girls over, and..." (More suggestive gurning.) "What would YOU have done if you could have had your own place aged 17. You'd kill for that. You would have had a WILD time. And they don't pay any rent, all they have to do is play music and follow me, and do what I say. How easy!"
So you're like a good king, a generous ruler.
Troutman shows the first glimmer of wary tetchiness in an otherwise consummately charming interview.
"No, I'm just Roger, y'know. I don't know what you're trying to say there. No man is an island. I can't win on my own. I don't know any other way to encourage people to follow me than giving them whatever they need. Not a king, no, no. I just wanna win. Winning's important."
I've heard you're a bit of a disciplinarian in the James Brown style when it comes to the band being tight. The show is certainly superslick, almost military.
"Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a concept to the show," he says with suspicion. "If a person understands the concept I tend to let him be, but if he doesn't understand, I'm constantly telling him to go here, go there, get with it. Entertainment is 50 per cent art, 50 per cent discipline.
"I watch TV cos it's organised, it starts and it ends and there's a climax. There's not a lot of fucking around. Musicians love to fuck around. Even when we're soundtracking, we're tight, everybody knows what they got to do and when. All other shit is bullshit, it's money shit. Musicians have their own little book of horseshit..." (he picks up my note pad) "...and somewhere right at the back..." (he rifles through) "...it says ENTERTAIN. But it should be all the way through it. Seriously, don't you think I could have done the interview in my slacks and jacket? But I made an effort, and it makes a difference."
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Troutman PUSHES himself as hard as his cohorts, and there's a muso side to him that he won't indulge too much, because it's uncommercial. It causes him some chagrin that he can't play guitar as much as he'd like.
"I'm just a fuckin' great guitar player. But how can you market that? I don't know how to do it. I play jazz stuff like George Benson, I play blues, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. I like to take songs that no guitar player could ever play and learn it note for note so I can make other guitar players' jaws drop."
During the soundcheck, he adlibbed an hysterical C&W pastiche: "ah betcha thought ah wuz a nigra".
"I've hung around with country players, broke the ice with them, so they'd teach me to play. Cos there's a real race problem between black people and country people. So I would approach country players…" (he drops into ridiculous hillbilly drawl) "...and ah talked to 'em lahk this, to make 'em feel comfortable, an' ah'd play 'em a coupla country licks, an' that would intrigue 'em, make 'em curious to show off to me, and ah'd watch, keep a tape 'corder real close, an' ah'd tape it, and then ah'd have two licks. So next time they'd be even more intrigued, and play me another lick."
Troutman may be a bit of a patriarch and a commercialist, but his obsessive desire to please as many people as possible, to have all shots covered and no market neglected has led to one of the most supersaturated, OTT sounds in funk.
