The Trap Internationale

The Face is no more - again.

Which is sad.

But they've also taken down their website, leaving no trace of pieces written in its second incarnation. 

I think I only did the one - but it was one I thought was one of my best in recent years.

So here it is below: a piece about trap and its internationalization. 

They didn't use the "Trap Internationale" headline, which is understandable but I did mourn the loss of the idea of this being a pan-global counter-revolutionary movement. Irresistible to listen to even if it manifested a "principle of hopelessness" (to twist Ernst Bloch's "principle of hope"). 

This is the true musical expression of everything that Mark Fisher critiqued in Capitalist Realism (did he not in fact say something like "hip hop is the problem" - or was that just on the blog?).  

Well, Capitalist Realism does actually more or less kick off from 1996 comments of mine about the neo-Hobbesian ideology of realness and "the Real" in gangsta rap and the darker strains of jungle and drum 'n' bass (techstep etc).

"Principle of hope" is Bloch's term for a subcurrent of utopianism that informs a whole range of human expression, from literature and art to fairy tales to religion to music to...  All of them contain some sense that the world could be different, better, re-enchanted... 

Perhaps the word for trap is not counter-revolutionary but counter-utopian...  although it finds a profane utopia in the privatized dream of fame, glory,  luxury.... a  pornofantasia of excess and dominance... 

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Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music

The Face, November 18, 2019. 

“Cookin’ up dope with a Uzi.” Gangsta gritty yet cartoon-absurd, the image of stirring a crockpot of crack with the butt of a machine gun is just one of the memorable lines racing by in "Bad and Boujee", a song by the Atlanta trio Migos that reached #1 in Billboard in January 2017. The ​“boujee” celebrates a nouveau riche notion of high class: cash flashed on the most flagrant status symbol brands like Porsches and Pateks. But as Migos’s Offset gloats at the start of the song, ​“We ain’t really never had no old money/​We got a whole lotta new money though.” The video shows the group hanging at a fast food place, their girls laden with exquisite finery but dining on KFC and Pot Noodle. The track itself, produced by in-demand Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, sounds simultaneously street spartan and luxuriant. The voices – the loping, forward-tumbling flow that Migos patented – hypnotise and hook the listener. As addictive as the drugs they claim to sell, "Bad and Boujee" has now been streamed around 1.5 billion times on YouTube and Spotify.

The sound is called trap and it has dominated popular music all through the 2010s. Migos and their peers – rappers like Future, 21 Savage, Playboi Carti, 2 Chainz, and Cardi B and producers like Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, Southside, Mike WiLL Made-It – mostly come from either Atlanta or other Southern cities. But their beats and flows and production tricks have proliferated across the globe.

This decade trap has infiltrated pop music, from Katy Perry’s baleful 2013 smash "Dark Horse" to songs on Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz album (executively produced by Mike WiLL) and more recent hits by Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Trap has also inspired mutant underground and street forms, from the EDM substyle (also confusingly called trap) of slamming instrumentals like Baauer’s 2012 viral monster "Harlem Shake", to entire subcultures like drill. The latter, a morose form of trap which peaked as violent crime increased in Chicago, went on to inspire a generation of UK drillers. Mediated by the hallucinatory hellscapes of Chicago drill as pioneered by Chief Keef, the UK version is essentially a South London chapter of trap. But the productions by beatmakers like Carns Hill have a British stamp, with trace elements of jungle and UK garage in the oozy bass and looped piano grandeur (interestingly, the London sound has inspired a burgeoning Brooklyn drill scene, with UK producer 808Melo producing most the tracks by breakout rapper Pop Smoke). The gangster nihilism has a local character too, with lyric after lyric fixated on knives and stabbings. Dripping and splashing in UK drill means blood on pavements, unlike in American trap where it signifies looking incandescent with money.

Trap is a sound, a worldview, a life-stance. But before all that it was a word: the name for the place where drugs are sold. Often an abandoned house, the trap typically has a single entrance/​exit, making it a more secure fortress against attacks by rival gangs. ​“Trap”, because it’s a lure for addicts, but there’s also the submerged implication that the lifestyle of dealing is itself a trap: money simply too good to quit, despite the cumulative costs of paranoia and the subliminal spectre of early death. Trap also sounds like the right name for this sound, its clipped, staccato feel resembling the snappy quality of the genre’s sharp snare and hi-hat patterns.

The term was popularised in the 2000s by Atlanta rappers T.I., Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane – whose 2005 LP Trap House was the first of 13 albums and mixtapes by him to feature the word trap. Like those earlier Southern black sounds that took the world by storm – jazz and blues – it started as a lowdown sound with a disreputable aura: the soundtrack in strip clubs and other places where gangsters go to relax and squander their spoils.

As trap has risen to mainstream dominance, its emphasis has shifted away from ​“work hard” (the grind of drug selling and turf-protecting) to ​“play hard”. According to Alex Tumay, a recording engineer who has worked closely with Metro Boomin and the freakily inventive rapper Young Thug, and was involved with Travis Scott’s early music, this is just a different facet of trap’s obsessive authenticity: ​“The topics in trap have a lot to do with honesty. The more successful they get, the more they rap about where they are right now” – the post-gig all-night hotel party, the top-shelf liquor and drugs and women, rather than the tense monotony of drug selling.

 The sound of trap has evolved too: from the barebones bombast of the 2000s to the sinuous and slinky ooze that, in the hands of artists like Travis Scott, becomes almost a form of ambient music. The abiding cornerstone of trap is the beat. Its roots go far back, all the way to ​‘80s electro and the Roland 808 drum machine. Where New York rap followed the path of sampled and looped breakbeats, the South stuck with programmed rhythms. When the party-oriented, shake-that-ass sounds of Miami bass and New Orleans bounce fused with gangsta rap lyrics, trap was born. You recognise trap as a sound, or an influence, from the hi-hats, which run at double-time (or even faster) to the 75-beats-per-minute of the hard-hitting kick drums. There’s a coiled tension and snake-like hiss to those rapid, intricate hi-hat patterns, while rat-a-tat snares conjure a military, parade-ground feel. Today’s trap producers don’t use hardware drum machines anymore, but they create that same dead-and-dry grid-like sound within their computers. On the most fundamental level of function, the bass-boom, the ear-tickling hi-hats, and the louche swagger of the music make trap the go-to party sound of the 2010s.

 The other crucial component of trap in the 2010s is the lush weave of Auto-Tuned vocals draped over the bass-booming groove. Pitch-correction technology like Auto-Tune has blurred the border between rapping and singing. ​“A lot of people who aren’t inherently singers could explore different melodic patterns,” says Tumay, whose engineering forte is vocal processing. ​“Auto-Tune gave them the confidence to do it. The technology has given us a lot of new melodies, new cadences.” Instead of applying Auto-Tune to their vocals after the fact, MCs like Future use it in real-time; hearing their processed voices through headphones in the studio booth, they’ve learned how to push the effect to extremes. With Young Thug, Travis Scott and Migos’s Quavo, the voice becomes like an instrument, spiralling into blissful trills and moans that sound as ornamented as Arabic music and oddly religious in feeling, at odds with the profane subject matter of the songs.

 Although funny, outrageous images and contagious slang fills these songs, trap is not as oriented around narrative or sustained flights of lyricism as the more self-consciously literate forms of rap – the tradition that runs from Rakim to Kendrick Lamar. The crooning MCs of today are more about texture than text. Some old guard rappers and rap fans bemoan this as a decline from the glorious heights of yesteryear, but it’s more the case that invention and personality have moved into a different area of expression. Take the ad lib, one of the most exciting features in trap. A sort of ​“backing rap”, where a second MC repeats a keyword from each line, interjects a complementary catchphrase, or emits a sound effect or a noise suggestive of exertion or ecstasy, the ad lib has brought an almost choral quality to trap music, an interweaving of vocal parts that in the hands of a trio like Migos can be as swoon-inducing as classic doowop.

 As the selling of drugs has dipped into the background of trap, the drugginess of the sound has come to the fore: hip-hop staples like weed and codeine-laced cough syrup have been joined by prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocet. All of these drugs, and others like Molly (MDMA) are endlessly namechecked by MCs but more crucially they shape the woozy glisten of the sound, whose rippling electronic motifs often recall IDM artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. As Tumay says, it’s the birth of a new kind of psychedelia, but one that’s far bleaker than its ​‘60s predecessor: Xans and Perkys are pain-killing and anxiety-deadening drugs. Lil Uzi Vert’s emo-trap hit "XO Tour Llif3" features the plaintive couplet ​“Xanny, help the pain, yeah /​Please, Xanny, make it go away” and pivots on the catchy hook ​“all my friends are dead /​push me to the edge”. Trap is the supreme manifestation of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called ​“depressive hedonism”, that hollow feeling of numb ennui as you pour expensive liquor down your throat while sporting a mansion’s worth of jewelry on your wrist. Having a spiritual void has become the ultimate status symbol in rap.

 As if to seal trap’s displacement of rock as this era’s preeminent music of rebellion and dissolute excess, in the 2010s rappers hijacked the concept of ​“rockstar” and made it their own, and the fans moshed accordingly. Hence Post Malone’s dirge-like Rockstar, the gloriously impudent Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd and Future calling himself ​“Future Hendrix”. This decade, rap fashion has referenced rock star aesthetics, with artists ditching baggy attire for leather jackets, skinny jeans and merch which features heavy metal graphics. Trap today supplies what the Stones and Led Zep once did: a fantasy of life without constraints. And millions of fans across the world can’t get enough.

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 "Pull Up" is a trap tune that came out in 2018, a few years after Bad and Boujee. But it was made half the way across the globe from Atlanta by the Slovakian rapper Samey, with guest MCs Ego and Yzomandias (from the neighbouring Czech Republic). Released on the leading Central European trap label Fck Them, "Pull Up" has the trap sound down: it bounces irresistibly, and Samey’s chorus hook is a potent earworm. But where American trap videos feature sleek sci-fi cars, flowing champagne, and scantily clad girls at poolside parties, Samey’s video can’t quite match its aspirations. They’ve got hold of a car with the requisite suicide doors, but the backdrop is a grey Bratislava cityscape of flatblocks and road beneath a freeway flyover. Despite gold teeth and chains and lots of ink, the crew’s clothes don’t reach Migos levels of futuristic flash.

 “Yzo is the original /​Yzo is not a remake” asserts the bouncing Czech MC Yzomandias. That is neither completely true nor completely false: the inspiration is overwhelming American and specifically Atlantan, from the flows to the slang (references to ​“guap” or money). Academics have an ugly word, ​“glocal,” to describe this syndrome: globalised entertainment formats colliding with native cultures. Yet simply through the translation process, the cadences of the Slovakian and Czech languages, and the rappers’ reserves of verve, it comes out different. Despite clear intent to emulate and a ravenous desire to pull it off, "Pull Up" is not quite the real thing – and all the better for it.

 A few years ago, I went on a trip that passed through several different European nations, during which I met up with a series of old friends. The conversation invariably turned to our kids and what they were into musically. The answer, no matter the country, was always ​“trap!” And it was during these conversations that I learned that every single territory had its own local version.

 In France, PNL are huge stars with their mournfully sonorous fusion of trap and variété. Reggaeton-trap fusions pervade Latin America. You can hear trap coming out of cars or bazaars from Morocco to the Indian subcontinent. But nowhere is trap stronger than in Central Europe. Poland’s SB MAFFIJA label scored 137 million streams during the first six months of 2019 while the rapper Taco Hemingway partnered with pop singer Dawid Podsiadlo to fill the country’s sixty-thousand-capacity National Stadium. Trap squads like MO฿฿YN and MCs like Szpaku Szpaku and Kaz Balagne bypass the radio and TV to reach hordes of fans direct through YouTube and Instagram.

 In the Czech Republic, the leading label /​trap collective is Milion+. According to music critic Miloš Hroch, their sound is ​“transnational in its nature and core, with no trace of the local in their music videos, just the language of luxury brands and antidepressant pills”. Hroch points to the rural outfit Opak Dissu as an example of Czech rap that is rooted in lived realities rather than ​“straight outta Atlanta” fantasy. Opak’s ASAP Jarda once told Hroch that he believes ​“copying America here is bizarre. Half of Czech rappers live at their mom’s place and the second half is at the University. For me traplife is about going to the factory everyday and my roots in the village. We rob that [Atlanta] sound but we fill it with our stories.”

 There’s also the Roma rapper Dollar Prync, whose lyrics deal with small-time crime – robbery, street scuffles between gangs – and life as a member of a minority treated with prejudice and discrimination. His song Okamura Skap disses the xenophobic Czech politician Tomio Okamura: ​“Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese are sharpening their knives on you – Okamura, die”, he spits, denouncing the stereotypes peddled by far-right politicians that immigrants are parasites sucking up social benefits. ​“Meanwhile you motherfuckers are fucking millions into your own pockets.”

 In Italy, the outfit Dark Polo Gang became the vortex of a debate among rap fans and critics. Decried as a mindless decline from rap’s glory days by some, they are celebrated ironically by others as simulation-trap given unexpected substance thanks to genuinely impressive beats by producer Sick Luke. Dark Polo Gang’s videos for hits like "Cono Gelato" hover in a zone somewhere between mimicry and parody: a miasma of gold grills, SUVs, and hand guns stuck down the elasticated waist of swimming trunks.

 Damir Ivic, a historian of Italian rap, says that his country’s first wave of homegrown hip-hop rap in the ​‘90s, known as the ​“Posse movement”, had a more quirky native character. ​“It was quite different from the rest of Europe, encapsulating reggae, ska, and patchanka – for a few years we felt like there was a cohesive alternative scene.” But he argues that the new breed of trap-inspired rappers like Dark Polo Gang, Sfera Ebbasta, and Young Signorino has ​“nearly zero Italian flavour” and consists of ​“tattooed youngsters moaning about success and/​or drugs and/​or being wasted” just like their emo-tinged, fashion conscious counterparts in Sweden like Yung Lean. As in some other countries, Italian trap has triggered mainstream media concern, especially following the death of six kids at a Sfera Ebbasta concert. Pickpockets used ammonia or other caustic sprays to create panic and make it easier to rob people. An emergency exit collapsed in the stampede. ​“Suddenly a connection between such a tragic accident and the ​‘evil-ish’ soul of trap music has been made,” observes Ivic wryly.

Euro-Trap also gets criticised by fans of conscious hip-hop who bemoan its apolitical hedonism, its sexism and materialism. A raw, non-ideological anti-authority stance can be found here and there: Austria’s Yung Hurn’s "Fick Die Polizei", which needs no translation, comes with a video woven out of hand-held footage of rioting anarchists, burning police cars, and tear gas. But Hurn has also put out more standard trap-themed tunes like "Ferrari", "Stoli", the salacious "Ponny" and "Skrt Skrt", the latter titled after Migos’s famous ​“tires skidding” ad lib.

 “We are speaking the language of today’s youth,” said Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton-trap artist who featured in Cardi B’s huge hit "I Like It". A genre born in black America embraced by young people across the world and a sound that indicates a rebellious attitude, trap has indeed become a kind of pop Esperanto. Esperanto translates as ​“one who hopes” – the language was invented in the hopes of fostering universal brotherhood.

Yet trap, beneath its brash self-confidence, is based on a disillusionment in which hope for collective advancement is not a form of audacity but delusion. Trap sees life as feral – something captured in "Bad and Boujee" when Offset describes his gang as ​“savage, ruthless”. In this war of all against all, you’re either a victor or a victim – and the social odds are stacked against you becoming one of the winning few rather than the ​“losing” many. As visions of life go, it’s bleak and it’s depoliticising. The fact that it resonates so strongly all across the world – particularly in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, those that have adjusted most harshly to American-style free market economics – is revealing.

 If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it’s because it captured the pathologies of our era – the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism – and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It’s fitting that the decade’s dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.

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That's the piece as originally run on the Face website. But there was a different harsher ending originally:

 As Lil Uzi Vert, guesting on “Bad and Boujee”, put it: “You know we winnin' / Yeah, we is not losin’”.  It’s a grim, depoliticizing worldview, and by glamorizing it, trap is helping to make the rest of the world steadily more like America. 

At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”

Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination.  Rae Sremmurd may rap about being  “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” 

The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.”  In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. 

Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso. 

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Around this time, I did three other pieces that summed up the 2010s - one on streaming, another on 'conceptronica', and a third on ambient and New Age. The latter had a paragraph in it about trap that got cut out and adds to the analysis here:

 Beyond the boom in blissed-out soundscapes, the 2010s has seen a sort of ambient-izing of other genres - including some that would seem to be politically and philosophically about as distant from New Age values as imaginable, such as trap and its variants such as UK drill. Lyrically, it’s toxic masculinity a-go-go: the same old shit of egomania, misogyny,  commodity-fetishism, and violence. Yet the music has an ambient quality, draping glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass, with wistful melody-riffs looping endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio. 

You could call it Ambien music, after the sedative-hypnotic prescription drug, given the way that the trap MCs incessantly reference pain-killing, anxiety-deadening drugs like Percoset and Xanax. Although ostensibly taken as illegal highs, you have to wonder why this genre is so thoroughly steeped in affects like numbness and indifference, why its MCs seem so glazed and oddly passive.  Auto-Tune etherializes rappers like Quavo from Migos, Rich the Kid, Playboi Carti (with his famous “baby” voice) and Young Thug to the point where they sometimes seem barely-there:  angelic boy-men whose ego-boundaries are melting in the drug haze.  The generic nature of the beats and the restricted range of timbres… the relative indistinguishability of MCs, which is further exacerbated by Auto-Tune… the repetitious themes and tropes and vocal tricks…  these are not bugs but features. Trap is designed for immersive and inattentive listening, purpose-built to slip back into being background music, a soundtrack to driving or chilling. It achieves its effect  through accumulative homogeneity. 

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On a different post about trap, the commenter Luke had some interesting thoughts about mumble rap and a new male subjectivity in hip hop:

Regarding the dichotomy between 'conscious' hip hop and mumble rap, it is a necessary distinction, but I like to think of mumble rap as 'unconscious' hip hop not because it is anti-woke or anti-progressive, but in the psychoanalytic sense. If conscious hip hop is superego music, and the majority of other hip hop ego music, mumble rap is id music. From all the non-verbal sounds, the adlibs, the mumbling and so on, to those problematic lyrics which often come across as more the product of free association than conscious boasting.

To which, I replied: 

I like the idea about it being 'unconscious' rap, stream of unconsciousness, letting fantasy and the id come out to play.  The ecstastic blurry moans and gurgles and the tourettic ad libs, they seem to release psycholibidinal energy in spurts and spasms, it's very much some Kristeva semiotic material being let loose, strings and blobs of jouissance....  the babyvoice Playboi Carti just makes the regressive tendency manifest

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Even more thoughts on trap here  and here 

Take Care

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the End of Time

2019

History Always Favours The Winners

(part of Resident Advisor's 2000-2025 Best Albums) 

Memories are ghosts inside your mind; samples are ghosts extracted from records and trapped in forever loops. Starting from these premises, The Caretaker takes snippets of maudlin balladry from pre-World War II crooners like Al Bowlly and subjects them to escalating levels of erosion, simulating the stages of dementia. These nostalgic wisps of decaying music gradually disintegrate until all that's left is a howling dust bowl where there once was a self. Conceptually immaculate, consummately executed and emotionally devastating, Everywhere at the End of Time is the ultimate work of hauntological electronic sound art. 

– Simon Reynolds

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time

Everywhere, an empty bliss

Baron Mordant

Mark of the Mould

The Wire, June 2019

by Simon Reynolds

It’s twenty years now since the first stirrings of what came to be called hauntology: Boards of Canada’s Music Has A Right to Children, Position Normal’s Stop Your Nonsense, early releases by Mount Vernon Arts Lab and Broadcast… and The Caretaker’s Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom. After eleven releases under that name, James Kirby is retiring his best-known alias. And with another leading figure in the genre-not-genre - Baron Mordant, a/k/a Ian Hicks, the man behind Mordant Music the group and the label - also calling time on his public self, it’s tempting to see these career-closing releases as tombstones for the sound-sensibility. Is this the moment to give up the ghosts? Or will hauntology enjoy some kind of after-afterlife?

In hindsight, “memoradelia” – an alternative name proposed by Patrick McNally – might have been a better way to go, avoiding the Derridean cargo carried by the term hauntology. Decay, the attrition of aging, memory’s uncanny persistence and terrifying frailty are at the maggoty core of Mark of the Mould and Everywhere at the end of time.  A memory is a kind of ghost,  sharing its queasy quality of ontological instability: a present absence, neither here nor there, now nor then.  One psychoanalytical explanation – or explaining away – of  the ghost (at least ghosts familiar to us, ghosts we recognize) is that they are symptoms of incomplete mourning:  memories we’re unable to let go.

Continuing the exploration of memory disorders in Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia  and other earlier Caretaker releases, Everywhere at the end of time – a gargantuan project launched in 2016 and now closing with its the sixth installment, plus the free side-album Everywhere, an empty bliss - is Kirby’s attempt to mirror in sound the stages of Alzheimer’s. Identity, memory and a sense of temporality are interdependent. As the first two props of the self crumble, perception of time also erodes away. What ensues is – as far as we can tell - - a prolapse of consciousness, an undignified slide into a hellish limbo of non-time. That threshold is reached on the latest batch of Everywhere: where earlier tracks lasted three or four minutes each, the new pieces dilate monstrously, ranging from 21 to 23 minutes. Listening to these entropic epics models the ego-death of advanced senility: it’s virtually impossible not to drift off into inattentive vacancy.

The first Caretaker record took its concept (and artist name) from the ballroom scene in The Shining: Jack Nicholson’s writer turned hotel caretaker turned revenant psychopath hallucinating the sound of the 1930s light-jazz ballads that the Overlook’s guests had decades earlier slow-danced to (specifically the songs of Al Bowlly, a British entertainer popular between the wars but now almost completely forgotten).  Listening to the drawn-out death rattles of these final Caretaker pieces, you might think of another iconic Kubrick scene: the uncomprehending horror of  HAL the rogue computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey,  as his brain is dismantled bit by bit, the blanks in his consciousness getting bigger until all that is left is the steadily decelerating ditty “A Bicycle  Made for Two”.

The Caretaker could have renamed himself The Caregiver, for on this project he resembles a sonic nurse in a hospice for the terminally ill. Kirby is a custodian in another sense. For over two decades, he’s collected thousands of dirt-cheap shellac 78 rpm discs of Bowlly-type music, from which he’s lovingly sampled, looped, and filtered to create these tracks. The result is an alchemized archive of popular song:  music whose original “people” are either dead or on the downward slope. For to be capable of remembering this music as a real-time, living culture, you’d have to be in your nineties now.  What Kirby presents here could be heard as the faint, faded memory-fragments of once-beloved tunes as they waver on in atrophying minds.

It’s a style of music that, as Kirby has noted, always already ached with nostalgia, oozing a woozy maudlin warmth as comforting as a mug of Ovaltine. His treatments layer an extra sepia-tint patina of Pathé pathos. Suffused with a kindly “golden hour” glow, the earlier instalments of the project loop sonorous horns, harp twinkles and piano ripples into cul de sacs of consciousness: the melodic equivalent of those mental glitches that Americans call “senior moments”  (a self-deprecating, uneasily humorous term that shows you are still in command because you are able to identify them as aberrations). Now and then, there’s a resemblance to the Gas albums, but replacing Alpine grandeur with fireside intimacy. The titles are heartbreaking (“I Still Feel As Though I Am Me”) and often describe the music more effectively than the reviewer ever could (“Long term dusk glimpses,” Internal unravel”).

Across Everywhere’s nearly seven hours duration, everything seems to wilt and yellow as the album progresses, or rather, regresses. Sound starts to reach our ears as though through a swaddling ball of fluff that’s wrapped itself around the needle. Where before the rhythm of the pieces was a gently bobbing sway like the rise and fall of a merry-go-round horse, now it’s an agonizingly protracted pestle-and-mortar grind, slowly pulverizing thought into sparkly dust. By the end – the 20-minute long pieces - there’s no discernible motion, just a sandstorm standstill, eternity-as-abyss.

The Caretaker faces decay and death with serenely fatalistic acceptance, aestheticizing the inevitable extinction of personality. On Mark of the Mould Baron Mordant’s subject is middle age and the response is different: he’s not going down without a fight. There’s a feeling of writhing struggle to this album, a man at war with the spores he’s inhaled. Comprising fifteen tracks plus the bonus inclusion of their instrumental versions, Mould is the grand bouffe finale to a career, Hicks sicking up a feast of all his favorite riddim tics and danktronica textures. 

Much of Mould resembles the vastly more compelling music that dubstep could have been. True, few things could be more boring in 2019 than manifesting a dub influence, but Mordant’s idea of it descends more from Cabaret Voltaire than Lee Perry: it’s a dead-aired, dessicated, deep-underground-silo version of dub, built around cold delays rather than misty-mystic reverb. Imagine Shackleton unshackled. Call it Middle-Aged Echo. Other portions of Mould supply a banging ‘n’ clanking update of early Nineties techno - “(It’s A) MariMba (You Knob)” could be a great lost track from the sessions for DHS’s “House of God” – that exploits the capacity for detail and dimension afforded by current software.

Elsewhere Mould overlaps with eMMplekz, Hicks’s glorious collaboration with Ekoplekz’s Nick Edwards, except that in this case the Baron is handling not just the verbals and lyrics but the backing tracks too. Being a genius word-wrangler means that the Baron is better equipped to describe what he’s doing than me. Trying to tag his unique delivery and idiom - a Tourettic monologue riddled with floridly fetid imagery and gruesomely tortured puns - I toyed with formulations like “mental effluent,” only to be outmatched by a passing reference to “spoken turd” on one track here.  Likewise, hoping to pin down the particular tone of sour derision in Hicks voice,  I realized eventually that le mot juste was in fact “mordant”.

Peter Cook, or certain characters that the comedian played, could be a reference point for the vocal tone – gruffly classless, indeterminately Southern English, withering, withered, the sardonic sneer undercut by its own impotence – but doesn’t capture the uniquely macabre brand of Anglo-surreal humour on offer. That voice and the encrypted private slanguage are maintained not just on record, but in press communiques, email correspondence and interviews, making you wonder if Hicks uses it in everyday life too, when shopping or making up bedtime stories for his kids.

As for what Hicks rants about, one ripe terrain is the sort of modern-day U.K. ugliness that inspires online forums like Shit London and Boring Dystopia. A Robert Macfarlane of built-up Britain, Hicks is an accomplished “visual noticer” with a keen eye for the unsightly and characterless.  But he’s equally observant when it comes to the unreal life of the Internet – the not-so-great indoors - especially the fatuities of today’s music scene. Many lines here read like snippets from blog reviews or Boomkat blurbs. “The Internet Did It” points the finger obliquely at, well, all of us, probably: the crime is left undefined but could refer to the economic nonviability of the leftfield musician’s life in the age of streaming, or to a creeping paralysis and hemorrhaging of meaning and momentum. Choice phrases fly by almost too fast to register: some near-abstract (“lichen 2-step”, “are you being serf?”, “Disneyhole”) and others nearly too on-the-nose as parody or invective (“make an avant sound-design tune that drops into a chamber of grimy vox”, “listen to these cunts waffle on about branding themselves”).

But – and here’s where midlife-crisis comes in – much of the time the target of the tongue lashing is Hicks himself.  “Anything With a Pulse” self-berates with cries of “you’re nothing nearly / there’s just nothing coming through” that suggest a battle with creative block, and it’s followed by “Somebody Wake Up Hicks”  whose title makes it clear that the “you” in the previous song was really “me”. Defying his own sense of abject futility - “there’s thousands of LPs out there like this” goes one line –this album froths over with a last-stand surge and splurge of creativity. And, a vague affinity with Sleaford Mods aside, there’s really nothing else out there in modern music that resembles the Baron’s particular blend of sound and spiel.

Themes of deterioration, self-doubt, and declining powers pervade, even as the sounds and beats rattle and ping ferociously. “Blong” features a child-voice jeering “Dad is a dick”.  “Insane Note” has a line about being “persona non grata” and a grim, sinking-feeling chant “you know that / I know that,” while its title could be read as one step further along from the “sick note” that gets you off school or work. “Percussive SuMMer” is a piss-stream of consciousness spraying into a latrine of sound: the lyric reads like a real-time vignette of Hicks musing to himself in a local tavern, supping a pint, roaming through random memories and rejoicing that a deferred jury summons will allow him a few days to make some tunes.  “KFC’s Toilets” might be an answer record to Burial’s “In McDonalds.” The little kid’s voice – presumably Hicks Jnr - reappears on “Aldi Bin Bag” chanting something indecipherable (“Arseland, oh yeah”?).

All the verbal bile and brackish sound roil towards a clammy climax on “Only For Fun Game,” the penultimate track. Framed with voice-shivers that lurch upwards in pitch, it’s a lament for a life wasted onscreen. “There’s a day out there I really should get to,” goes the chorus. “A life under sky that’s vented and Lenten….  These are the days you can’t get back/ the melted clocks on Dali’s back.” After a flurry of lyric-shards ranging from abstract to uproarious -  “turned on by budget sportwear”, “senile stepovers”, “reduce the risk of a fall while bathing,” “no notifications are good notifications,” “everyone’s over-compensating for a Tavares deficiency” – Hicks signs off with “this is a gentle piss-take”. It’s the last decipherable utterance on the album – the closing track “Back in the US(S)B” fades out with mumbled vocal sounds – and perhaps the last words of a career.

On “MeMbrane” from 2016’s “criminally overlooked” (a Mordant Music joke, that, but true) eMMplekz album Rook to TN34, Hicks described himself as “mildly embittered since the turn of the century”, a reference to the very earliest Mordant emissions.  Two decades on, hauntology remains a surprisingly bustling field, with records, books, events, conferences, still occurring regularly. Only last month, there was the unexpected appearance of a BBC Ideas Film titled ‘What Is Hauntology? Why Is It All AroundUs?’.  But as a “news item”, it felt tardy not topical. For there is a definite sense of this region having  being mapped out long ago, the footpaths worn bare by visitors.  

Elsewhere on Rook to TN34, Hicks crooned mordantly: “Well, I should be moving on / Singing the same old song.”  Perhaps it is time to open the windows and clear away the soupy staleness with a ventilating blast of otherness and newness.  A gust of youthful energy to chase away the ghosts for good.

JAMES KIRBY: V/VM AND  THE CARETAKER.

"It's very Northern British, very working class," says James Kirby, about the sample-based music he made in Stockport during the late Nineties using the name V/Vm. "A lot of the material on those albums reminds me of being at a horrific family 40th birthday party where all of a sudden fights erupt because somebody owes somebody else cash or looked at their girlfriend in the wrong way.  V/Vm is heard through drunken lager ears for sure."

The arc of Kirby's sampladelic career stretches from Plunderphonics/KLF-style vandalizing of mainstream pop through to some of the most consummate hauntological music made this side of Ghost Box.  Early V/Vm releases like AuralOffalWaffle and The V/Vm Christmas Pudding seemed driven by a weird ecological recycling impulse, creating "new" music by digitally mutilating the records that nobody wanted anymore: chart-busting but now unsellable crap by middle of the road entertainers like Russ Abbott and Shakin' Stevens.  Like John Oswald, Kirby focused on single artists and single tracks, rather than sampling and combining bits and bobs from all over. Technology had advanced by the late Nineties to the point where using some cracked software, he could feed whole tracks into the machine and subject the song/performer to cruel and unusual punishment.  Indeed Kirby uses the term "butchering" : "It was all an experiment, to hack up what was considered the offal, the forgotten embarrassing output of the music industry."

But there was already a proto-hauntological aspect to V/Vm, later to flower with his alter-ego The Caretaker. Kirby was tomb-raiding pop's cemetery, defiling the corpses. He was  "bringing dead pieces of audio back to life " as zombies condemned to some twilight zone version of the cabaret circuit, where they sang their greatest (s)hit night after night with clumps of pop-flesh falling off their bodies.  Another pre-echo of Ghost Box, et al was V/Vm's focus on strictly British sources:  the kind of massive-in-the-UK novelty singles and M.O.R. that never crossed over to America or Europe. Our unique national crud: the British equivalent to schlager, Germany's light entertainment and variety show fare. 

Eventually Kirby wearied of spattering the post-rave electronic scene with V/Vm matter and shifted in a more atmospheric, pensive direction. The Caretaker's  Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom (1999) drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which Jack Nicholson plays a hotel caretaker who succumbs to the supernatural malaise hanging over the place and ultimately reenacts the murders committed by an earlier caretaker, who went insane and butchered his family.  Specifically, it was the "ballroom scenes which play out in Jack's head" that inspired the album and track titles like "Thronged With Ghosts". "He is having some kind of emotional breakdown and  walks into the empty ballroom and then, right there in his own mind, the empty ballroom is full again and music is playing. "  The project's main musical source was as British as V/Vm's raw material but from a couple of generations earlier: pre-World War Two British popular song and specifically the "tragic figure" of Al Bowlly. "He was the golden voice of his generation but he was killed by a parachute mine outside his London home. Bowlly always sang as if haunted, his voice is otherworldly.  It's very strange music from this time between the two World Wars: optimistic but also very much about loss and longing, ghosts and torment.  It seems haunted by the spirits of those who went to the trenches and never returned."

The "haunted ballroom" trilogy peaked with A Stairway to the Stars, which included the resonantly titled song "We Cannot Escape The Past".  Kirby then shifted his focus to memory itself, and specifically memory disorders. Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia was about the absolute horror of escaping the past altogether. Disorienting in its scale and abstraction, this six-CD work was an attempt to imagine what it would be like to suffer from a rare form of amnesia in which sufferers are incapable of forming short-term memories and exist in a depersonalized void.  Deleted scenes/forgotten dreams and Persistent Repetition of Phrases explored similar zones of queasy amorphousness. 

Collective memory was the subject of the Death of Rave project, inspired by Kirby's participation in the Manchester club scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties. "The energy in clubs at this time was amazing. Nobody knew what to expect next." But by the middle of the 2000s, Kirby felt that when he visited dance clubs "the energy and adventure seemed completely lost. I just wanted to reflect that. I took old rave tracks and stripped them down, removing all their life."  Spectral echoes of familiar rush-inducing riffs and anthemic refrains intermittently flicker through the dense smog of sound, but "the beat and drive have gone." Recalling the surge years of rave between 1988-1996, Kirby says "Everyone thought everything was possible on those long nights. The world was ours.  Now I think this generation is very disillusioned. They saw a glimpse of light on the dancefloors but that light has gone out and the future seems grim and predictable."

Kirby's most recent work is the first music he's released under his own name, James Leyland Kirby. Sadly, The Future Is Not What It Was is a three-CD opus mingling his signature style of gaseous decayed sounds with Harold Budd/Erik Satie style piano (the first time that his own physical self, as a player of an instrument rather than a programmer, has been present in his music). "Maybe it was a year 2000 thing," Kirby mused in one interview. "2000 was always the future for us. We expected something significant from that year. When it came it was just the same as it ever was except we had no 2000 to look forward to anymore.  It could be a psychological post-millenial hangover for us all which will take some time to pass for this generation."

Robert Wyatt

 A tribute to Robert Wyatt, written and recorded for remote participation in a 2025 birthday celebration for the Great Man, organized by Sukhdev Sandhu at NYU

Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock was ruined when the students took it over”.

Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to rock  

Let’s start with Canterbury, in the south of England – where Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced by them also hailed from, resulting in what was known as the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly abstruse and often both at the same time

With its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK. Think of all the academia-related jobs and ancillary work that institutions like that support (book shops, theatres, cafes, etc) and how that changes the make-up and vibe of a place.

Now in talking of the middle class contribution to rock, I’m not really talking about bank managers or entrepreneurs, but a particular kind of non-business oriented bourgeoisie - the professions, public servants, non profits. People like Robert Wyatt's tolerant, encouraging mother, Honor Wyatt, a journalist and radio presenter - a free thinker sort- who made her home an open house for Wyatt and his friends. Later on, when she moved to South London, her small house was home to the entire Soft Machine and their girlfriends. “I don’t how we all fitted in there,” Wyatt told me. “But we did and we made our racket and my mum was fine about it.”

What’s  striking about Soft Machine and the other Canterbury groups like Caravan and Hatfield and the North is their relationship to American black music. Unlike other British groups of the Sixties such as the Stones or Yardbirds, they’re not trying to swagger like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Although Soft Machine  were obsessed with jazz, they don’t attempt to be supercool like  Miles Davis. 

Almost alone in the British sixties scene, they don’t even sing in a fake American accent 

Wyatt was one of the very first British singers of the rock era to sound English. 

The other main ones are Kevin Ayers, also in Soft Machine, and Syd Barrett, from Pink Floyd, the band that Soft Machine played alongside at psychedelic clubs like UFO, and a band also spawned from  another genteel university town, Cambridge. 

Wyatt has described his style as “it sounded like me talking, only with notes.”

So one thing I find endearing about the Canterbury groups is that they not pretending to be anything other than what they are:  nice middle-class South of England boys, educated and well-brought-up.  They fit a new archetype of masculinity that I call  "soft male" – this is the first generation of British boys to be molded by permissive child-rearing practices (picking up the baby when it's crying rather letting the infant cry out). The first generation to grow up without the stiff upper lip implanted at birth – nor did they experience being toughened up by national service in the Army, that ended around 1961.

Their backgrounds might be genteel but they themselves tend to sound socially indeterminate  - a syndrome I call middleclasslessness – if you listen to Robert Wyatt speak, it’s mumbly and slightly faltering, softened by self-deprecation.  In other words, it’s evacuated of the confidence and entitlement that rings out clearly in the voices of the truly posh.  

This late Sixties, early Seventies breed of English musician are not without faults, a self-indulgence, a reluctance to grow up – there might be the odd bit of sexism in the mix. 

But these young men are finding ways to play the music they love (jazz, rhythm and blues, rock) but also be themselves. Hence the urge to complicate things with time signatures shifts and distorted textures ... but also the puerile humor, the Anglo-surrealist whimsy, elements that parallel the Goons and Monty Python.  An odd combo of sophistication and regression.

Take a song by Hatfield and the North in which Robert Wyatt does guest vocals. It’s called "Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo and The Wee Wees)". You hear the singing and you think, ah there’s Wyatt – but actually it’s Hatfield's Richard Sinclair singing, but he sounds like a dead ringer for Robert – I call it Wyatt-ese, and it is the natural singing and speaking tone of  many of these groups. A bit further into "Big Jobs" Wyatt does appear - but doing a little bit of guest scat. No pun intended. He’s scat singing, sublimely. 

This is one of Wyatt’s great inventions – an instrumentalization of the voice. In Matching Mole, the group he formed after his acrimonious expulsion from Soft Machine, he does this the songs “Instant Kitty” and “Instant Pussy” – the titles are whimsical, perhaps even lewd, but the  abstract vocalese is astonishing, comparable to things that singers like Tim Buckley was doing on Starsailor. Wyatt told me that he was inspired by Roland Kirk’s playing. 

On his solo tune “Muddy Mouse (c)/Muddy Mouth” Wyatt vocally mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect. 

On the later song “Born Again Cretin” – a hilarious satire of right-wing thinking – the main Wyatt vocal is backed by a sort of bullfrog barbershop quartet of multi-tracked Wyatts wordlessly wheezing and gasping in rhythmic accompaniment.  Like so much Wyatt music, it is simultaneously whimsically absurd yet utterly ecstatic.

For his regular singing, when he had a lyric, the model was Dionne Warwick – a very un-rock’n’roll model to have. He has said that he generally found women singers inspiring, they are who wanted to emulate. 

Both modes are heard on what might be his great single work, “Sea Song”, the opening track of his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom – which starts as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then spirals off into mystical flights of wordless falsetto

Rock Bottom came out after the break-up of Matching Mole.  Wyatt had started to form a new group involving Francis Monkman of Curved Air and various Canterbury-aligned musicians, and Virgin Record wanted to sign the group.  But then, during a party at the mansion-block flat of socialite and Virgin recording artist Lady June, Wyatt tumbled out of the window of the bathroom. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist, unable to play drums again or participate in a touring rock band. So instead of signing the planned Canterbury supergroup, Virgin released a solo album by Wyatt: Rock Bottom, a heartbreakingly poignant allegory of Wyatt’s emotional regression and gradual self-rebuilding during his recovery from the accident, couched in a blurry oceanic sound that recalls Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way and Jimi Hendrix’s “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).”

Rock Bottom is dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff but it still has the trademark Wyatt whimsy. 

Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick". 

On the follow up to Rock Bottom, titled Ruth is Stranger Than Richard, 'Soup Song'  is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon. 

Another Canterbury Scene hallmark that Wyatt probably invented is the meta-song, a song that addresses its own circumstances of recording or composition, or talks about the lifestyle of the musician. 

In a version of Soft Machine’s 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a radio session for the BBC's Top Gear show.

The opening line of the first verse of Matching Mole’s “Signed Curtain”  is

 

“This is the first verse”

And in fact it’s also the second, third, fourth and fifth line of that first verse. 

 

The next line? 

 

“This is the chorus / Or perhaps it’s a bridge”

 

It closes with the lines “It only means that I lost faith in this song / 'Cause it won't help me reach you”

 

“O Caroline” similarly starts not with the lover but with the action in the studio – David on piano, Robert on the drums, “we try to make the music /We'll try to have some fun”. Then it gets romantic :“But I just can't help thinking that if you were / Here with me /I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play /More excitingly”

 

 There is the story of how Robert Wyatt had a small pop hit with a cover of “I’m A Believer” by the Monkees and appeared on Top of the Pops. Apparently the idea originated with Richard Branson and it became an obsession – Branson would ask other groups, later on, to cover Monkees songs.

But after that there was a lull, Wyatt stopped making music for several years. And a strange thing happened – his earlier music had been resolutely apolitical but strangely he did become a believer – a born again Communist, a dedicated reader of the Morning Star newspaper. And when he was coaxed back into the studio to record a series of singles for the label Rough Trade, many of them expressed his newly hardline beliefs and commitment. 

He did the song “Trade Union” with Dishari Shilpee Gosth - a Bangladeshi band of musicians from the East End of London; he covered the World War 2 pro-Soviet song “Stalin Wasn’t Stalling”; he brought out a political subtext to the Chic ballad “At Last I Am Free”. 

He sang “Strange Fruit” and “Guantanamera” and Violeta Parra’s “Arauco”. 

Best of all though was his version of the black humorously anti-authoritarian ditty by his friend Ivor Cutler, “Grass”, plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like “while we talk I'll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me / I have something important to say."

Around this time he also recorded a moody instrumental soundtrack to The Animals Film, a documentary about human exploitation and cruelty towards animals, with narration by his friend Julie Christie.

Not long after the Rough Trade singles series ended, Clive Langer and Elvis Costello wrote the song “Shipbuilding”, an oblique protest against the Falkland War, and invited Wyatt to record it.  That gave him his second hit single.

Wyatt has said that his attraction to Communism was its internationalism  - which is why he found the imperialist nostalgia of Thatcher’s escapade in the South Atlantic deplorable.

He describes himself as a xenophile – someone who resists the British suspicion of Johnny Foreigner. 

I’m sure he was aghast at Brexit and is horrified about the nativism and authoritarian nationalism resurgent all across the globe. 

He’s the kind of singer that people in the UK call a national treasure – but he’d probably hate that partly because he’d rather be an international treasure, but mainly because he is self-effacing and genuinely humble.  

Me and the Great Man (and Alfie) at the Hay Festival 2007, where I did an onstage interview with.

What a lovely man. 

Fuck Art, Let's Dance / Fuck Dance, Let's Art

 (a talk I gave at Harvard in 2012 at a conference on Art + Rock) 

“When 'art' walks through the door, it's got 15 suitcases full of very smelly washing (ideas of 'geniuses', 'creativity', 'individualism', and the rest of it)...which as far as we're concerned is the kind of crap that just clutters up your back garden, and gets in the way when you want to go out…. There is an art-based conversation that is swamping our neighbourhood, right? It's detrimental to our practice…. [It’s] high-culturally derived hogwash, and it's dragging us down… Half the groups that are around at the moment are ex-art-college groups… You are on board a sinking ship--you're one hulk of a rotting carcass, whose language...y'know... don't chuck it over us, chum, because it's redolent of all things tedious, repressive and slimy.”

- art school graduate Green Gartside, speaking to the art journal Primary Sources on the International Performing Arts, 1979

"Iggy pretty much changed my life. I saw him in 1969, when I had been fooling around a bit with electronic music, but I was still basically a visual artist....  Out walks this androgynous figure, no shirt on, muscled. He was walking out telling everybody to go fuck themselves and he had this look in his eye, and this amazing body. It kicked into “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” then “1969,” and suddenly Iggy’s flying into the audience. Then he’s back onstage and cutting himself up with drumsticks and bleeding. The bass player is humping the guitar player with his bass. The whole set lasted 20 minutes maybe. Usually at rock shows they put on some rock’n’roll between the bands’ sets, but right after the the Stooges finished, whoever was in the sound booth put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. It was perfect, because what we had just seen was great art, and the person in the booth understood that.... I realized that, as a [visual] artist, I could either carry on down this road and be dishonest, or I had to make some moves. Whatever I was doing as an artist was insignificant at this point. That’s what got me moving in the direction of the music thing more intensely—because it was a vehicle for doing something more environmental than painting."

- Alan Vega, painter / light-sculptor and member of a New York artists collective

Lester Bangs, in conversation with Jim De Rogatis, 1982

LB: "Rolling Stone's Jon Landau was saying things at the time like every Glenn Campbell album, every Jerry Vale album, every Helen Reddy album, every Ann Murray album was a distinct piece of art which should not be looked at as a piece of product.

JdR: That's definitely against your theory, right? Rock is not art.

LB: Oh, I don't know. I double back on myself so much. There's the trash aesthetic and all that. The way I've written about the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison, of course it's art.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Rock has never quite made its mind up about "art"

Is the status of “art” something to aspire towards, to claim and to seize in defiance of those who would judge rock’n’roll as so low it's beneath consideration?

Or is "art" precisely, for those same reasons, something to recoil from --  should the onset of artiness be feared as the point at which a vital lowliness begins to fade,  the confinement or castration of an energy that is properly plebeian, out in the world in a radically democratic way?

In the rock’n’roll world, art often has negative connotations –  suggestive a deficit of the visceral, effete conceptualism, dry detachment --   it suggests institutionalization, politeness...

Acceptance is equated with acceptability

Art is improving, it’s associated with education - whereas rock’n’roll should be closer to truancy, delinquency, the un-edifying.

In “What A Waste”, Ian Dury lists all the socially valuable careers he could have pursued but instead he chose to be a singer in a band, the Blockheads: “what a waste what a waste... rock’n’roll don’t mind” – 

Yet Ian Dury studied at the Royal Court of Art, actually taught at various art colleges...

He’s just one of numerous  literally art-schooled people in rock who’ve acted out an ambivalence towards art – John Lennon, Pete Townsend are others who have done many arty, pretentious things with rock, but also have at other times argued that the art discourse contaminates rock, weakens it, makes it pompous, addles it with self-consciousness

This distrust of art can be traced far back in the history of rock – almost to the moment  at which rock acquired self-consciousness and aspired to being art.

There was a point at which rock’n’roll shed the “‘n roll” -  people now talked of rock –and Dury and Lennon would come to see this shift as a tragic development.

Dury was obsessed with 50s rock’n’roll, worshipped Gene Vincent, hated hippies --– Lennon was totally the long haired hippy and then he decided psychedelia had been a huge mistake – he would  revert back to rock’n’roll, a stylized recreation of 50s music in its purity and innocence.

The lost or shed "n’roll" signified a teenage orientation, as lack of adult sophistication lyrically and musically,

It refers back to when rock’n’roll in the Fifties sense was at once rawer and more showbiz --  the pre-Beatles rock’n’rollers carried themselves on TV and radio in a well-behaved way, said “sir” to the hosts, whereas Lennon was ironic, informal, surly – a bohemian, 

As raw and rootsy as early rock’n’roll was, it was still largely entwined in the discourse of showbiz -- as the career of Elvis shows, the rebels collapse very rapidly into middle of the road entertainment.

Your typical 50s rock’n’roller didn’t see himself as an Artist but as an Artiste. The 'e' on the end is very significant. They saw themselves as entertainers, the groups wore stage outfits. Few of them were artistically autonomous in the way the Sixties rock era artists became: mostly they didn't write their own material and their managers pushed them towards light entertainment as soon as they could, becoming an all-round entertainer. 

The move to “rock”  in the mid-60s  is an aspiration towards thematic maturity,  a conception of lyrics as being a form of poetry or literature. But it's also about being artistically independent, in control. The  band as an artist that is growing, evolving, questing -- whereas entertainers basically have a shtick that they stick with. An act.

This mid-Sixties art-ification was described scornfully by The Fall’s Mark E Smith, speaking to NME in 1981: ”when the students got hold of rock’n’roll, that’s when it started going downhill” 

Prior to Beatlemania, middle class youth, even those who had loved rock’n’roll as teenagers believed that rock’n’roll was a fad that had faded away. When they went up to university in the early Sixties, they were either folkies or they were into jazz – these were the mature options

But then through the Beatles and the Stones and the electric Dylan, rock’n’roll returns in new improved form: the sound as raw as ever, but the attitude and content even more appealing through its poetic and arty qualities.

From approximately 1965 onwards, largely unchallenged until 1976, there followed an unbroken period in which there was a broad consensus that rock could be and should be Art -- the long reign of  progressive rock, art rock, singer-songwriter and sophisto rock – steely dan, little feat, joni Mitchell, ry cooder, randy newman  – even in something as seemingly lumpen as heavy metal you had the experimentations of led zeppelin, deep purple recording with a symphony orchestra  -- the interpretations of what art was ranged from jethro tull to brian eno and all points in between, but the overall consensus was that rock was art, potentially at least.

But you had a tiny sect of dissidents  – musicians as high profile as Lennon and barely known as Flamin Groovies. You had heretical critics.

The first pop writer to express a profound ambivalence about pop-as-art was Nik Cohn in Awopboloopbop abopbamboom,  published in 1969 – but written in 1968, placing him ahead of the pack, although there had been a handful of dissenters from the acclaim for Sgt Pepper’s.

It’s The Beatles and Dylan above all that Cohn is most suspicious of . In his book he sounds regular notes of disquiet. Dylan, he concedes “has grown pop up, he has given it brains” but he pointedly declares that “in my own life the Monotones have meant more in one line of ‘book of love’ than Dylan did in the whole of Blonde on Blonde” 

Revolver was a  “a big step forward in ingenuity” but a “big step back in guts” and “ because everyone copied the Beatles, ‘that’s why there’s no more good fierce rock’n’roll music no more honest trash”.   The posh Sunday newspapers—“ say they're  Art...  but after all, what's so great about Art? What does it have on Superpop?"

Superpop is Cohn’s superlative for everything from Little Richard to Phil Spector to  his personal pet artist PJ Proby. In the final short chapter of Awopbop he contrasts Superpop with rock after its shed the  ‘n roll

“What I’ve written about has been the rise and Fall of Superpop, the noise machine, and the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock’n’roll music. ... Superpop? It hasn’t been much, it’s been simple always, silly and vulgar and fake, and it has been a noise, that’s all. ... Superpop, it’s been like a continuing Western, it’s had that classic simplicity, the same power to turn cliché into myth. It’s had no mind of its own. All it’s ever done has been to catch currents, moods, teen obsessions, and freeze them in images. ... made giant caricatures of lust, violence, romance and revolt... it’s finished now, the first mindless explosion, and the second stage has begun..... Pop has split itself into factions. Part of it has a mind now, makes fine music. The other part is purely industrial, a bored and boring business like any other. “

This huge gulf  that’s opened up within pop is  a chasm between lowbrow and highbrow. It has reproduced within a once unified Superpop, aka rock’n’roll, the very  division between high and low that had once consigned all of rock’n’roll  to the category of junk, trash, mindless pabulum from the culture industry.  The market now, he says, is 80 percent manufactured teenpop for AM radio and 20 percent progressive music for FM rock – semipopular music, in terms of its sales.

Cohn: “ In ten years, they’ll probably be called by another name entirely, electric music or something, and they’ll relate to pop the way that art movies relate to Hollywood...., you’ll have pop composers writing formal works for pop choirs, pop orchestras; you’ll have pop concerts held in halls and the audience all sat in rows, no screaming or stamping but applauding politely with their hands; you’ll have sounds and visuals combined, records that are played on something like a gramophone and TV set knocked intot one, the music creating picture and patterns; you’ll have cleverness of every kind imaginable. Myself, though, I’m not interested. Not that I have anything much against masterworks in principle but I’m hooked on image, on heroics. It’s like films – the best in art movies have no doubt been the most sensitive, brilliant and meaningful works of art, and where have I been? In the back row of the Roxy, of course, gawking at Hollywood. The art movie carries the quality and Hollywood carries the myth.”

So here Cohn aligns Superpop -  in his view, true pop -  with blockbuster movies, pulp entertainment made by the Hollywood system.

Cohn offers here a very early form of what is now known as poptimism or popism:  a belief in the de facto  superiority of “good honest pop product”,  a trust in the major labels, who like the Hollywood system, to keep on churning out great entertainment precisely because they only care about money. Their output is  sublimely uncontaminated with artistic intent, it aims only to thrill and distract - and get your dollar.

This is one of two ways that the art-ification of rock has been resisted.

The first, the Cohn stance, is basically pro-capitalist, it folds pop and rock back into showbiz, sees records as units of commodified  pleasure, the performance as a spectacle. Performers and producers alike are seen as highly skilled professionals. There is a kind of cynical-realist integrity to this factory-line production of  good honest commodified entertainment. You can consume without illusions about it being meaningful or the harbinger of revolution. A sort of almost gustatory honesty in the way the consumer consumes, enjoys, and then forgets.  Pop is disposable. 

The other anti-art view comes from a completely different, anti-capitalist angle: it is folk-ist. Authentic music emerges from the people organically, reflects the worldview and concerns of that community. It then gets co-opted and commodified and eventually weakened.  Just as bad as selling out is when it gets gentrified. "Folk" ideology here is not necessarily tied to the formal properties of traditional music, to acoustic guitars and such. Folk-ism  includes urban conceptions of the folk culture: notions like the streets, the ghetto, as represented in rap or certain kinds of dance music.

Around the same time as Cohn published Awopbop, a  different dissenting view about rock-as-art was being formulated in America,  not Superpop and if anything leaning to the folk view in so far as it valued a certain primal rawness. Lester Bangs was the major prophet here although there were others such as Greg Shaw whose Who Put the Bomp magazine was one of Bangs main outlets, the other being Creem magazine.

Creem dubbed itself "America's Only Rock'n'Roll Magazine" --a jibe at Rolling Stone -- while Who Put the Bomp!'s had the slogan "rock & roll, all rock & roll, and nothing but rock & roll" . 

So that’s the reinstatement of the ‘n roll right there.

This vision of a return to rock‘n roll doesn’t have Nik Cohn’s mythic Hollywood Western pulp quality but it’s very teenage. Its a stylized, idealized version of adolescence, the inarticulate brutish juvenile delinquent – and a  rejection of the introspective sensitivity of singer-songwriters such as James Taylor in favor of the two-dimensional cartoon of boredom and lust and aggression offered by The Stooges.

Celebrating Iggy Pop and his band,   Bangs insisted that true rock'n'roll was "essentially adolescent music… it can't grow up";  he retrospectively celebrates the sixties garage bands he once despised and says that the bands he admired then, like the Yardbirds and the Who “ got ‘good’ and arty with subtle eccentric songs and fine philosophy...”   This pales next to  the Stooges debut LP and Funhouse  whose raw power  is “supermodern, though nothing near to Art”.

"Nothing near to Art" - like "art" is cooties, something to recoil from... a contaminant, a debilitator

For heretics like Bangs and Cohn, Sgt Pepper's was the sacred cow they aimed to slaughter. But ironically Lennon at the exact same time was moving in the same direction --  distancing himself from bourgie art and reinstating the ‘n’roll.

In the famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon equates Fifties rock’n’roll with reality, a raw truth that cut through both socialized pretence and artistic pretension.  He asserts that nothing since has been better than simple 50s rock’n’roll and further, that the best Beatles stuff was in that vein: it was the music they made before they ever entered the recording studio – their live performances in Hamburg,

Lennon: "The best stuff is primitive and has no bullshit…  It's not perverted or thought about." 

What followed seemed to echo Hamlet’s mother exasperated suggestion to the verbose  Polonius -  “more matter, with less art”. So,  the primal venting of the Plastic Ono band album, then a different form of plain speech, Some Time In New York City,  lyrically blunt lyrics addressing sexism, racism, injustice,  Northern Ireland, over gutbucket rock with no frills. Lennon here makes a folk ist argument for rock as the people’s music,anticipating the sloganeering side of punk that included Tom Robinson Band or CRASS.  

Of course while he was going back to art-less rock’n’roll Lennon was up to all kind of arty shenanigans with Yoko both on record and in the public eye.  And these hopelessly unresolved feelings about whether rock could or should be art anticipated a kind of vital identity crisis at the heart of punk – a movement containing a high proportion of art school people, manifesting artiness everywhere from the clothes to the graphic art of flyers and record covers to–  yet often prone to anti-art and anti-intellectual rhetoric.

Malcolm McLaren  is a good case study – a product of the British art school system, attending three different colleges during the 1960s, he talked retrospectively of punk and the Pistols as  a gigantic art piece bearing his signature.

 “Rather than just while away my time painting, I decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay,” he declared, airily.  

Epating the bourgeoisie via the mass media was Good Art. 

Yet when Johnny Rotten formed Public Image Ltd, its overt experimentalism was for McLaren a relapse into Bad Art:  1970s-style progressive post-psychedelic music, which he loathed. Like Lennon and Ian Dury, he adored 50s rock’n’roll,  Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Postpunk was music for students. 

Of PiL’s Metal Box, McLaren sneered “He's asking you to take a course in music before you understand it.”  

Rock and roll, he said was "only a bloody Mickey Mouse medium really.” that was what was good about – its larger than life cartoon quality.  An echo of Cohn’s Superpop vision.

McLaren would argue with increasing vehemence in years to come that Rotten had always been a closet hippy, an aesthete, and that the true Pistol was Steve Jones,  working class, a petty criminal who stole  the band’s gear by breaking into the backstage area of a Bowie concert –wonderfully symbolizing the McLaren idea of punk as the working class’s revenge against art rock 

And also Sid Vicious, who had the ability to lose himself in a cartoon persona, become this mythic scale anti-hero, 

Lydon himself was totally conflicted on the subject of art. In a 1978 interview he spat: “I hate art. I can’t stand it”.  This despite having studied a course in art at a Further Education college. In the Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, Steve Jones described Lydon as “an intellectual" but he often mocked those who "intellectualized" things ( like Greil Marcus with his analysis of punk in Lipstick Traces). Lydon dismissed Situationism as "mind games for the muddled classes", a jibe not just at Marcus but at McLaren, fingered as the arty poseur trying to intrude fancy French theories into visceral rock’n’roll, and perhaps Pistols designer Jamie Reid, another art school product who probably professed to hate art.

The confusion comes I think from Lydon’s social background – working class, but encouraged by his mother to read from an early age, he was widely read, enjoyed taking exams, at the Further College Education college enjoyed talking to the teachers in the pub about Shakespeare. But at the same time a great wariness about becoming bourgeois, an exaggerated loyalty to one’s roots. 

A similar kind of ambivalence is detectable in The Fall’s Mark E. Smith -  both Smith and Lydon came from this abiding stratum in British society, this  liminal zone where upper working class bleeds into lower middle class, a precarious zone but the source of so much of the exciting energy in British pop culture, the social bedrock of mod, glam, punk

So Smith, like Lydon is a supersharp autodidact, a bookworm , who never went to university. He left school to get a low level white collar clerical job as a clerk. Throughout the Fall’s career there’s on the one hand a self-taught artiness (Smiths’ lyrical influences include  Wyndham Lewis,  the band would collaborate with the avant-garde ballet dancer Michael Clark) and on the other  perpetual sneering at their art school peers in postpunk,  at  music paper critics who over-intellectualise the band.

Early on The Fall actually had a song “Hey Student’ jeering at all the undergraduates in Manchester -- as well as typical working class contempt for freeloading  students with generous grants  it was a music taste based enmity.  I read before the quote about “when the students got hold of rock’n’roll, that’s when it started going downhill” . Smith then pointed particularly towards the Soft Machine and their Canterbury scene cohorts. These were mainstays of the early Seventies college gig circuit; Canterbury itself is the British city with the densest number of colleges in the country. 

 However when Smith realized that most of the Falls fans were students he changed  “Hey Student” to “Hey Racist” to fit the Rock Against Racism issues of the time. It was never recorded at the time of writing, but much later, for  1994’s Middle Class Revolt, “Hey Student” was resurrected: the old lyrics sneering at the students’s “long hair” were updated with references to Pearl Jam. (It's hardly the only example of studentphobia in rock).

What concerns Smith here is the eternal reopening of a social divide within rock – something that  first rock’n’roll and then early-to-mid Sixties British beat music and mod, and then again punk had managed to bridge. 

When this social divide opens up again it is invariably accompanied with the return of art discourse --  a classic instance is the split in mod between psychedelic artiness and the skinheads, who loved Jamaican ska, Northern Soul.

Psychedelia and progressive rock, then postpunk, and then in the 80s and 90s indie and alternative rock and shoegaze: this is the eternal breaking off a semi-popular, bourgeois form of rock. Exactly the same split that bothered Nik Cohn, although less in these social-political terms and more because the music he loved became enfeebled 

 As early as 1978, Mark E. Smith bemoaned an emerging chasm in the New Wave between arty intellectual bands (like Magazine) and “your headbanger bands for ordinary people.” A few years later, he argued that heavy metal was a healthier subculture than post-punk: metal kids didn’t spend all their time thinking about music. Attempting a kind of one-band reunification of the split halves of rock, Smiths’ vision for The Fall was a primitivist-modernism: they started drawing on rockabilly influences, talked of themselves as “a very retrogressive band in a lot of ways”, anything to short circuit there being enfolded in the  progressive discourse of postpunk.  "The band was attracting a lot of elitists, a lot of Eno-orientated crapheads”, Smith complained in one interview. Then there is the lyric that says "the experimental is now conventional".

Smith, like Lydon, was working class and, unlike Lydon, hadn’t dabbled in further education at all. But so powerful was the punk mythos of a reuniting of the classes through a stylized, dialectical reversion to rock’n’roll, that it had a powerful and enduring influence even on people who passed through the university system.  Such as Greil Marcus,  who wrote a whole essay called Against Art, launching off from a sneering stage comment by Penelope Houston of San Francisco punk band The Avengers  after they’ve come on following the avant-garde percussion performer Zev has finished – " what do you call that anyway? I guess it was Aaaart" 

Yet Houston was the daughter of an artist, she was studying at the San Francisco art institute.  Marcus himself trained to be a professor and is no stranger to museums and exhibitions and symposiums.  Nonetheless in “Against Art” Marcus talks approvingly about  “the instinctive distrust of art by pop music “ which is  rooted  in “the perception that very little art has actually added anything to pop music”. The only  exception he can think of is Andy Warhol’s Double and Triple Elvises

A similar idea is expressed by Bill Drummond, active in the postpunk era as a musician, record label runner, and manager– a former art school student himself,. In 1971 his mind was blown by a Warhol exhibition   – but then he changed his mind and the last essay he wrote at art college before dropping out was ‘Why Andy Warhol is shite and the Beatles are fab’.  If you got a single by the Beatles, your single was as good as anybody else’s. ‘Nobody’s copy is more original than your copy’.  But Warhol was only painting the pictures of the Coca Cola bottles, whereas the Beatles are being the Coca Cola bottles. “  

Warhol in the end was just the same as any artist, making singular artworks that then became collectable and valuable in the art market –  pop music was radically democratic, mass production art.  Warhol celebrated that –he once said “the idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is”—but cannily bottled it in a form that could play in high art and high society terms. In a sense Warhol made America play in European terms.

This antipathy to Art endured for Drummond  - his late 80s/early 90s outfit The KLF had a run of huge chart success with various pranksterish and absurdist singles – then in the 1992 they quit and then mutated into  the K Foundation, one of whose initiatives was to stage a parody of the Turner Prize for Art in Britain. In 1993 they presented a shortlist for their award for the worst piece of art, the shortlist being identical for the Turner’s shortlist for best work of art – and when Rachel Whiteread won her 20 thousand prize, the K Foundation gave her 40 thousand,  drawn from the royalties of hits like “Justified and Ancient”

The KLF’s big Nineties hits were in a style they called “stadium house”,  inspired by Drummond’s encounter with rave culture, in the UK was a youthquake on a par with punk or indeed early rock’n’roll. When I interviewed him in 1991 he talked of it in terms of a mass quasi-religious experience.  But it was mass in another sense: for a moment there between 1988 and 1992, a music that united youth across class lines.

Although  quite a bit younger than Drummond, my thinking is similarly shaped by punk, and my own baptismal immersion in rave culture, in 91 and 92, had a similar social-utopian dimension – the transcendence of class and race divisions in a new music that echoed the impact of rock’n’roll, mod, punk....   And the way it played out in terms of my subsequent critical writing on post-rave  electronic dance music involved this same old strange dance around the idea of art.

Even as I joined the party, rave was starting to fragment, the split between headbanger beats for the proles and fancy music with arty aspirations that Mark E Smith complained about in the late 70s, that was reconstituting itself –  despite my class and education, just through circumstances as a late arrival I found myself on the right side of the tracks, which is to say the wrong side of the tracks – captivated by the most lumpen, druggily hedonistic forms of  rave – hardcore as it was known then

Discerning folk deemed it a debased mutant of true techno -- but I, semi-consciously following in the footsteps of Cohn and Bangs, celebrated hardcore with a mixture of defiance and doubt in my own taste. “Trash but I luvvit” is the phrase I used in the first substantial piece on ardkore I wrote, in The Wire, late 1992.  

The idea was familiar: this impure,  sub-music could access barbarian powers that surpassed the more accomplished forms of techno then emerging . But because of my knowledge of critical history I was totally aware that this was a Lester Bangs move –  in some other writings I would invoke garage punk as an example of a once despised music that was subsequently vindicated as more prophetic of music’s future.

Nonetheless it was hard, so hard,  to resist reaching for the Art word, for there was a deranged twisted complexity to the breakbeat editing and  sinister atmospheres emerging in the music as it developed, It demanded recognition as an avant-garde.

The way around this fix for me was to imagine it as a street vanguard, ignorant of its own status as an avant-garde and all the better for that, more potent. 

So I used the word avant-lumpen. For a while I used the term “artcore”, punning on hardcore.

Bbut then within a year, as the outside world partly thanks to this kind of rhetoric by me and a few others, accepted and indeed hailed the music – now known as jungle or drum’n’bass --  a self-conscious deepness and musicality began to change the music.   I reversed on that move and looked again for the most lumpen, dancefloor functional, druggy sectors of the music  -- soon I was using the word “art techno” as a mildly disdainful word for a kind of album oriented home listening designed electronic music that drew on some of the hardcore/jungle innovations but presented them in palatable or annoyingly quirky form.

In Energy Flash I have a chapter on that zone, called Fuck Dance Let’s Art, a reversal of the customary expression, about my ambivalent feelings about art techno, what would later be called Intelligent Dance Music.

I was hopelessly trying to arrest the development of the music, which to me felt like a weakening, vital rudeness turned to devitalized politeness –  vibrant tastelessness reduced to inspid tastefulness. I was equally trying to shore up or recover a lost moment of unity that cut across class lines, also in the UK  very much crossing racial divisions too. 

I had found myself almost by accident inside a moment that was like punk, like the Beatles-Stones-Who moment, like rock’n’roll. “Art” was at once the accolade this music deserved, even the most trashy and ephemeral forms of it  ( like chaotic pirate radio transmissions I taped and which I described in my rave history Energy Flash as among my absolute most precious and venerated cultural artifacts of the 20^th Century) and yet art was also the downfall, the betrayal, a terrible branding burden.

"Art" then as we’ve seen has this peculiar reversible status.

It seems to fit the profile of what Frank Kogan calls Superwords 

Kogan I should say is a classic example of the critic whose worldview is shaped by punk and is unable to resolve his feelings about art, on the one hand railing against what he calls the PBS-ification of rock, a creeping gentility, which led him to celebrate all kinds of teenpop and most recently the ultraplastic pop of South Korea. On the other hand he has compared the lyrics of Ashlee Simpson to  the poetry of Dylan and Patti Smith.

The  ‘superword’, explains Kogan is  "a word that causes controversies, that gets fought over, that sometimes runs on ahead of its embodiments; a word that seems to jettison adherents" 

Punk is a good example, a prize everyone is seeking to claim and define as they see it. 

But “art” , in the rock context, is even more fraught than a superword

There is an attraction-repulsion syndrome that surrounds the term, in the rock discourse. Art is a birthright that you’ve been cheated of and that you chase, right up until the point it is acquired, when it is immediately renounced, it becomes toxic, repugnant.  

Another way of  looking at the role the word art plays in rock discourse is supplied by Donald Kuspit’s book The Dialectic of Decadence 

According to Kuspit, “in modernity, every novel art is at first taken to be non-art, but once it is finally accepted as art – which it would not have been had it not been novel and uncanny enough to seem like non-art – it is understood to have failed or fallen short of Art as such, and is dismissed into art history” -

Decadence is a state of debility, the depletion of instinctual energy, and its replacement by irony, detachment,  an over-developed sense of history.  Hence the never-ending need for an influx of barbarian energy from "outside"

Art looks to non-art for renewal – as Warhol did with the images and trademarks of mass production and commerce.

In the beginning, all  of rock’n’roll was on the right, which is to say,  wrong side of the boundary – the non-art side --  trash, noise, jungle music, all rhythm– at once savage and industrial, raw like folk and manufactured like showbiz.

Then, in a triumph that is simultaneously a defeat, artistic value was conferred on it  -- and so the ever-recurring need is to get beyond that pale again. Which is also to rejoin the real world, to get out there, away from the white walled rooms, and to merge with and transform everyday life – become plebeian.

Rock and pop still seem to figure as a repository of raw power  in at least one place: the imagination of a number of  contemporary artists, where it serves as the non-art reservoir that revitalizes their practice and staves off decadence.

For Retromania I interviewed the British reenactment duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

Their work includes restagings of rock gigs like the final Ziggy Stardust concerts, a Cramps gig at a mental asylum in California – Forsyth and Pollard were at pains to convey that they didn’t get inspiration from art but from music –  they got into reenactments simply because they wanted to create an art work that had the visceral excitement of indie rock gigs – for them the rock gig is something like the situation as it figures in Situationist theory: not a passive spectacle but participatory, an event. To amp that up they were drawn to reenact the most event-like events, such as Bowie’s final concerts as Ziggy Stardust. 

So why not  form their own band, if rock has the power that art doesn’t? Well interestingly they said that they felt the art world had less strictures than the music industry, which is where they earn their living, working for a record label.

Another British artist expressing similar feelings is  Elizabeth Price -- unlike Forsyth and Pollard she’s a former musician, but now  she’s  artist whose video installations borrow from advertising and pop sources like the Shangri Las, an influence on her own band Talulah Gosh. This recent video work was a reaction against boredom with her own work in installation and sculpture – she told The Wire magazine, “I was interested in doing something that had a less academic and polite address” . Most modern art is “cool, measured, it’s outside of things... it has no relation with the actual social lives we exist in” whereas a rock gig is “loud, it’s hot, you can smell other people’s bodies,  you feel the bass in an embodied way... exactly the things that had been evacuated from art”

Price,  Pollard, Forsyth, are all old enough to have come up through indie rock when it was still shaped by punk’s recent memory and its inherited value system –  their idea of rock’s social power comes from a similar place to Frank Kogan’s or Greil Marcus’s or Bill Drummond’s. 

But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk  and of the mid-Sixties and rock’n’roll, has faded,  so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...

Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable – the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of “fine music”, which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art.

One index of this shift has been the rise in the last decade of the term “curator” within left-field rock, I write about this in Retromania, how activities like selecting a compilation, or booking a festival, are now described as curation – in the underground you also have what I’ve called the ETSY-ification of rock, a micro-culture of limited edition releases with handcrafted packages, elitist both by necessity and by choice -- music that lies somewhere between art and the artisanal.

And then less obscurantist but still very much aimed at a discerning minority there has been the rise of NPR rock.

Kogan complained about the PBS-ification of rock, but NPR has become a huge force in alternative music, they are actually a driver of sales, they have preview streams of major Pitchfork-type albums on their website.

One of the NPR stations in LA,  KCRW invented a programming template they called Morning Becomes Eclectic that has been super influential  –  the mix is alternative music, but not the noisy types --nearly always well produced, tasteful,  and yes eclectic, made by new breed of band who draw on a whole wide world of influences and also all across music history – so they are both cosmopolitan and they have a rich sense of the music as heritage -- --  the presenters of the shows speak with calm, almost hushed tones, like the news program hosts on other NPR sentences.

When I listen to it I feel vaguely catered for, precisely targeted as a demographic –– and there’s a discomfort, similar to the feeling I’d get at art-techno events in the late 90s. I missed the vibe of raves but mainly I would feel restless because the last place I want to be is where I’m surrounded by people who are just like me

I can take about 30 minutes of KCRW and then I turn to the pop stations, the banging brainless club music that rules the top 40 and then when I start getting Adorno-like feelings about that ... I turn to the classic rock stations, where you can get music that at its best seems to like fragments of a lost unity -- but only because it is old music, very old music in some cases.

But the most interesting music of today seems to totally comfortable with seeing itself as art and as minority interest – along with “curation” as a model for music-making,  there has been the rise of the concept-musician – not completely analogous to the conceptual artist, but there are certainly similarities -  musicians like James Ferraro, Onehotrix Point Never, John Maus, artists on the Ghost Box label, invariably there’s a spiel accompanying each new release -- framing of the project is increasingly essential --  you’ll even get  a group now and then  that actually has a manifesto --  Prince Rama, a female duo who have this concept “ghost modernism” and composed a text entitled The Now Age: Meditations on Sound and the Architecture of Utopia

Another figure getting a lot of attention at the moment is Julia Holter,  a CalArts raduate, whose electronic pop on albums like Tragedy and Ekstasis is informed by her interest in Greek tragedy and Medieval icons. Tragedy included a song called “Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art”  while on her website she used to offer something she called HANDMADE THING, a CD-R and a sculpture for 25 dollars.

Increasingly with these zones of music, where micro-genres terms float by fleetingly such as chillwave and witch house – I can’t help thinking of  Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word... there’s a sense that we’re heading into a place where the music can’t actually be enjoyed or even felt without the intervention of a concept.  A certain kind of music-journalist and blogger loves this kind of thing, it gives them something to riff on and riff off  - read some of the blogs and webzines that specialize in this area of music, like Tiny Mix Tapes and it reads a lot like prime period  October.

Sometimes I’m one of those music journalist / bloggers and other times I feel a disquiet about where all this is going....

It’s an easy thing to fall into a  mutual admiration mirror image syndrome --the new breed of concept musicians think like critics, you see  --  Amanda Brown, who records as LA Vampires told me, "when I make music, I'm only interested in thematics. I think, "What do I want to present? I'm trying to make a certain statement. And that takes it out of emotionality and more into a cerebral place. 'Meaningful' becomes more of an adjective than 'soulful'. "   Brown actually describes herself as "not a musician" but an "audio artist".

This sensibility is all the more striking because it’s emerged out of indie rock culture, which always leaned towards a shambolic lo-fi slacker aesthetic -- towards a vague populism, or at least “beautiful loser”-ism.  

But the self-image of the audio artist appeals I think for a number of reasons. Doing this kind of music is almost never a livelihood these days – even putting out a large number of limited edition releases per year doesn’t generate much revenue

But the work gets a much wider listenership and critical and blog response through its being illegally shared and downloaded. So the prestige of being taken extremely seriously and widely talked about in some way compensates for the fact that is not a means of making a living. 

Certain albums, like James Ferraro’s recent album Far Side Virtuality get discussed and talked about and regarded as momentous in a way that far out-stripped the record’s actual sales.  Circulating through the blogosphere, it becomes almost like a virtual exhibition – something everyone has to have heard, in the same way that Christian Marclay’s The Clock has to be seen, if just for an hour or two, so you can participate in the cultural conversation. 

But Marclay, operating properly in the art world, has actually monetized his art. The concept musicians I’m talking about are a long way from being able to do that – and at the same time, these artists have largely opted out of the traditional routes for rock bands to claw their way towards financial viability, the gig circuit.

The logic that you should expand your audience, that you should move from semipopular to real popularity, was once an ethical imperative, especially in the years following punk when the consequentiality of rock was restored, the sense that it had the power to change the world

That logic of out-reach was what seemed to push Sonic Youth,  against their bohemian nature and their innate artiness, towards signing with Geffen - getting themselves onto MTV and playing bigger venues and rock festivals.

The modern day equivalents to Sonic Youth – these concept musicians and audio artists --seem  reconciled to the idea of semi-popularity, culthood.  

All those hang-ups about art have faded away.  

The  'n’roll  has long gone, and the rock is evaporating pretty fast too.