Introduction to Beijar O Céu [Kiss the Sky] anthology, published in Brazil by Loja Conrad, 2006.
by Simon Reynolds
I’m the child of a peculiar institution, a cultural space that no longer exists and that in hindsight seems highly improbable: the British music press.
I started reading the UK weekly music papers--New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror--when I was sixteen, back in 1979; that was the context in which I first encountered rock criticism and first got the idea that writing about popular music was cool, exciting, something worth dedicating one’s life to. The British press was then--late Seventies and early Eighties--at the absolute height of its power. New Musical Express, or as it’s better known, NME, sold about a quarter of a million copies every week; the other three sold another 350 thousand or so between them; the actual readership for the papers was much bigger, because every copy was on average read by three or four people. To my mind, during this period the British papers were also at the peak of their quality as critical writing (others disagree, locating the golden age earlier, in the mid-Seventies). The journalists, especially those on NME, were taking all kinds of risks, experimenting with form, and generally shooting for the stars.
A few years later, in my early twenties, I participated in what is generally considered the last “golden” phase of the Uk weekly music press, which ran from the late Eighties into the early Nineties, and was largely concentrated in Melody Maker. By this point the music papers were already deep into a long-term sales decline; different kinds of media, from glossy pop papers like Smash Hits to monthly rock magazines like Q to “style bibles” like The Face had weakened the cultural centrality of the weekly papers (nicknamed the “inkies” because they were black-and-white newsprint publications that left ink on your fingers), and there was much more coverage of pop music on TV than there’d been in the 1970s. Still, even with their prestige and authority weakened, the weekly music press continued to serve as an arena for ideas and mischief-making, they were a glorious playground for pretentious young hotheads like myself.
All through this period, from 1974 onwards, NME was the Big One, the paper whose verdict really counted, the weekly with most of the best writers. Melody Maker had once been the top paper; back the late Sixties and early Seventies it was the voice of the UK’s “progressive” underground, but it had been damaged by punk and, when I joined, it was still looking for a new identity, and trailing third in sales after Sounds and NME. However, me and some like-minded comrades were able to turn around Melody Maker’s reputation with surprising speed, stealing from NME the status it held as the thinking person’s music paper, and establishing Melody Maker as both the intellectual’s favourite and the magazine that discovered new bands first. We never managed to catch up with NME’s circulation figures, but soon overtook the other two, Sounds and Record Mirror (both of whom eventually went out of business).
The rivalry between Melody Maker and NME is a curious thing, because they were both owned by the same media conglomerate, IPC. During the golden period for the music press, IPC and EMAP (the company that owned Sounds) didn’t interfere in the daily operations of the music papers, because they sold well and, being cheap to maintain, were highly profitable. The music press had a captive market both in terms of advertisers (the record industry had hardly any other ways of reaching the record-buying and concert-going audience with their adverts for albums or tours) and in terms of readership (there were very few alternative sources of information about rock--this is an era before the internet, before widespread TV coverage of pop music, before the massive explosion of rock books and rock specialist magazines). So IPC and EMAP, not really understanding rock culture anyway, let the papers do their own thing. Why mess with a winning formula? Besides, this was an era long before market research became an integral part of the steering of magazines’ editorial direction.
Thanks to this policy of benign neglect, the UK music press evolved into a curious space of cultural autonomy divorced from the pressures of the market. In terms of their structural ownership and distribution (which was nationwide and omnipresent), the papers were corporate and mainstream; in terms of their content and attitude, the vibe that oozed from every headline and picture caption, they were underground. Indeed, many of the early 70s writers came from the Sixties underground press, hippie magazines like International Times and Oz; later, they tended to come from the punk and postpunk fanzines. As a result of all these factors--being left alone by their owners, the record industry being dependent on them for advertising and for actual editorial coverage in terms of reviews and interviews, the sheer vastness of their readership--the music papers developed a feeling of invincibility and entitlement. They felt like they could do anything they wanted, so they did. The papers became a forum for all kinds of adventurous writing--experiments with form, poetical self-indulgence, stuff that was highly political, or that drew on cutting-edge critical theory and philosophy. They would routinely run confrontational interviews with stars and hilariously abusive reviews of albums, yet the record companies would have to accept it with a forced smile, and continue paying for adverts.
In those days, because of the amount of advertising pages from the record industry, the papers had a lot of space, and so word-counts were long. Features with iconic figures like David Bowie might be so protracted and in-depth they’d be split into two parts running on successive weeks; a lead album review might be longer than a feature is today, running to a couple of thousand words. Even an ordinary down-page record review could be 1000 words long (today 150 words is considered a handsome amount, with some mags expecting reviewers to describe a record in 60 words). All this largesse gave writers space in which to speculate, write around the subject, get word-drunk or use the album review format as an excuse to write a mini-manifesto. In addition to the regular kind of things you’d expect from a music paper, there would be thinkpieces and overviews, and historical pieces rescuing certain artists from obscurity (this was a time before the explosion of retro culture, so a lot of information was impossible to find, and you certainly couldn’t go on the web). Back then, the music papers also covered a lot of stuff that wasn’t strictly music--articles on politics or wider cultural trends, pieces on film and literature (usually if they had some kind of “rock” vibe, as with certain authors--William Burrough, JG Ballard--who had some kind of affinity to music culture). But everything was filtered through the prism of music, which (as in the 1960s) was the centre of youth culture, the glue that connected everything together.
Now, not everyone who read the papers was into this kind of intensely wide-ranging and far-fetched rock writing. The majority of the readership probably bought the papers for the news pages, the gig guide, the interviews with well-known artists, the gossip column. But a substantial minority of the readership was into the ultra-serious analysis, the theoretical speculations, the febrile prose-poem paeans to favored records, and the meta-meta talk about the future of rock/the value of music/the point of criticism itself. This sort of writing could frequently be off-putting to casual readers, as it had a tendency to be over-heated and over-written, full of insider terms to the point of almost being in code, and ridiculously polarized in its opinions (artists or artifacts tended to be either GOD or utterly lamentable/pernicious/deplorable). But, if you were into this sort of rock criticism, it was a massive rush to read, almost as intoxicating as the music itself. I belonged to that core minority of music press fiends when I was a teenager, and as a writer I would go on to feed that inner hardcore, in the process helping to breed the next generation of addicts (most of whom now do their work through blogs--basically online fanzines--rather than in music papers, of which there is only one now, NME, a pale shadow of what it used to be.).
Some of the pieces in this collection come from my years, roughly 1986 to 1994, at the fevered heart of the UK music press--an example is the Morrissey interview, which was split across two successive weeks in Melody Maker. Others, clearer and calmer in tone, were written for more mainstream magazines, either during that time or after, when I’d settled in New York and was freelancing for a much wider range of magazines with different expectations in terms of lucidity and how much the writer should explain things to a layperson. There are also a series of selections from The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll, a book co-written with my wife Joy Press, and in America published on an academic press. This stuff showcases my more theory-driven side, although the taste for French post-structuralist thought and feminist psychoanalysis was actually something I originally acquired not through a stint in academia but through reading NME, where writers like Ian Penman, Barney Hoskyns and Paul Morley would bolster their rhetoric with quotations from Barthes, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Nietzche, etc.
Apart from the sheer excitement of the writing in NME back then, what hooked me into thinking of rock criticism as my vocation in life was--if I’m honest--the messianic and megalomaniac tone of the writers (Morley and Hoskyns being prime examples and the two biggest formative influences on what I do). I think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous quotation, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Well, these critics carried themselves as though they were laying down the law for the rock world, they had the prose swagger of guys who thought they alone had the vision and they alone had the balls to perceive and dictate the righteous path for music to follow. They acted as if they had a lot of power, and they actually appeared to have it too, in the sense of influencing bands, by creating a climate of sensibility in which certain ideas/values/attitudes/sounds became “sexy”. That was something that appealed to me, someone who loved music but had no musical ability as such--the impact these writers had showed me that a rock critic could actually make a contribution to the scene. Perhaps the greatest example of rock writer as prophet is someone I didn’t read until much latter, after I was fully formed: Lester Bangs, who basically changed the course of rock history, by formulating the aesthetic and ethos of punk rock years before punk actually came into being. The writers I grabbed onto as a teenage NME reader were the British equivalents of Bangs in the sense that they were partisan, they championed certain sounds and promoted certain ideas of what music should be and where it should go. You can get this syndrome in other forms of criticism--Clement Greenberg with abstract expressionism in painting, Pauline Kael in film writing--but nothing like to the same extent as in rock writing.
The fact that fiery young egos could thrive in this media environment owes a lot to the structural nature of the UK music press at that time: the fact that they were weekly papers with a lot of space to fill each week encouraged a rapid turnover of trends and discoveries of new bands, and the competition between the four weeklies for readers made that turnover even more frantic. The result was a hothouse atmosphere of trend-spotting and scene building, hype and premature exaltations. But there were also real ideological schisms and aesthetic disputes at this time. The papers would be identified with particular sounds (postpunk in the case of NME, Oi! punk and metal with Sounds) or even particular philosophies of music. In my era, there was rivalry between Melody Maker (or rather a faction within MM) and NME (or rather a particular bunch of writers who dominated that paper). Me and my crew were hailing the return of rock, inspired by largely American indie bands like Husker Du, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr and a few UK equivalents like My Bloody Valentine. Loop and Spacemen 3; the faction on NME were soul boys who believed that rock was dead, passé, an embarrassment, and that only black music was valid. So there was a war of words across the great gulf between NME and Melody Maker (in physical terms the divide consisted of a single floor in IPC’s gigantic King’s Reach Tower in South London!). My piece on rap, Sick or Sweet, is connected to that argument, in so far as it claims that hip hop has more in common attitude-wise with punk and sonically with the underground noise rock of the late 80s, than it does with soul. As well as verbal warfare between different music papers, there were also rivalries internal to each paper: the NME soul boys were attempting to crush the indie-rock fans on that paper who liked groups such as the Jesus and Mary Chain and Wedding Present, while on Melody Maker my “return of rock” gang squabbled with another group of writers who had a more pop sensiblity. Today, all these disagreements and diatribes seem amusing to me, but at the time they were intensely serious; it really felt like something was at stake.
From the early Nineties onwards, I started to grow away from the UK music press, geographically (I’d moved to America) and professionally (writing for lots of different kinds of magazines) but also emotionally (I’d begun to grow up). Over the years, some of that adolescent urgency and argumentativeness has gone, replaced by more measured and sober critique (I’ve also developed some actual journalistic skills--one of the odd things about the UK music papers was that they let people write features who had no training in reporting whatsoever!). But, deep in my heart of hearts, I still think rock writing should be how it was when I was a youth. It ought to be zealous, ardent, ridiculously polarized in its judgements; it must risk absurdity by taking things too seriously; it should be drunk with its own power (for how else can it hope to intoxicate the reader?). When I am reading a piece of rock writing today, no matter how admirably written or insightful or wise it is, there remains a part of me, disappointed, that is still looking for the sensations I got as a teenage reader--blood boiling with excitement, body trembling with a sense of the article’s momentousness. Oh, the writing itself doesn’t necessarily have to be wild and raving, to froth at the mouth like a rabid dog; it can be precise, controlled, severe even. But its effect should be like Truth punching you in the mouth. It should shake with the vibration that Nietzche (who wrote the first masterpiece of rock criticism, The Birth of Tragedy a century before rock even existed) called “the world-will”. What Iggy Pop called “raw power”.
Friday, March 7, 2008
THE NATURAL LAWS OF MUSIC: Kodwo Eshun and Simon Reynolds in dialogue
Frieze, May 1999
Simon Reynolds: The best-known British music critics are still the writers from the late-70s NME - people like Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons and Paul Morley - whose writing was to a large extent about their own highly opinionated personalities. Many of them are now columnists in the broadsheets. Looking back at their early writing, it was almost inevitable that these mouthy gits who grew up on Never Mind The Bollocks were going to become the Auberon Waugh, Peregrine Worsthorne or Germaine Greer of their generation. I think it’s significant that the leading edge of music writing since that era has been far less about writers as characters. Someone recently described me as a ‘cultural scientist’, which amused me at the time but is actually closest to what I’m trying to do. You’ve suggested the idea of a ‘concept engineer’, and that seems to be part of the same aspiration to be more rigorous. It’s more as if our generation can get off on our objective fascination with things rather than our subjective personalities. Burchill liked to lay down the law, while I’d say we’re almost trying to find the equivalent of natural laws within music.
Kodwo Eshun: Yes. The exorbitant subjectivity that those writers all had, which paid dividends in Ian Penman, is of very little use now. Music changed so drastically that it was more pressing to analyse the widening gap between how music sounded and the terms we used to understand it. When I started writing in 1992, most dance writing was still at the level of ‘kicking’ and ‘banging’. There was a fiercely-held anti-intellectual drive that made writing about dance music more of a challenge. Because a lot of the people who make the music are working class, aren’t college-educated and aren’t especially articulate, there is a sense of a post-literate culture: people who think electronically, digitally, sonically. Of course, it’s difficult to write sonically and this difficulty is raised to an impossibility and then that impossibility is elevated into a principle. You get people writing things like ‘the music speaks for itself’ as if it’s the most admirable thing you could say - but it’s just a cop-out. There’s an idea that the writer’s aim is to empathise, to intuit, on the side of the producer against the world. It’s got a lot to do with economic status: you exchange the low economic value of music journalism for being close to the DJ, being inside a scene. That’s the deal you strike when you want to be a writer and that’s why so much of it still veers between sycophancy and cynicism.
For me, it seems far more urgent to understand what computerisation is doing to rhythm than to understand that a particular musician was a bad boy who grew up in care and had a really hard time. 99% of writing is still socio-historical and my attempt to totally destroy that is probably doomed to failure, but it’s an experiment to show that it’s viable, using the particular example of black electronic dance music, machine music, computer music. My key point is that you don’t have to begin with the social. When it comes to dance music, it seems crucial to understand the weight of a sound - why does a break press on your arms, why does it seem to scuttle, or why do people describe electronic music as cold, why does it feels like your temperature has dropped? These questions are completely unexplored.
SR: Focusing entirely on the materiality of the music creates a more intense effect. In Energy Flash (1998) I have moments when I try to plug into the drug sensorium, but I am also interested in the socio-historical reasons why a whole culture has grown up based around delirium. My first book, Blissed Out (1990), was very much anti-historical, purely about the apocalyptic now, but I’m beginning to examine the way the urge to escape history occurs within history. I keep oscillating between the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun and wanting to write about total novelty. In some senses Jungle was completely novel, totally unthinkable - it also seemed placeless. Yet in another sense it was totally local - hardcore Jungle and Speed Garage both celebrate themselves as ‘a London thing’. I’m still very attached to the idea of using the social-historical approach.
KE: In More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) I replaced sociology with what I called the electronics of everyday life, a kind of everyday cybernetics - the idea that your most intimate relation is with your record player as much as with your computer or your phone. For instance, if you focus right down and you slow your rate of attention then you hear a lot more; you lose the wider perspective but you gain a more attentive hearing. I do it with tracks which everybody thinks they know really well, tracks that have been around for nearly 20 years like ‘Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’.
SR: Talking about the social leads us to the question of differences between British and American criticism. I have a bit of a bug-bear about American rock criticism. Although the quality of it is probably a lot better than the writing that comes out of England, most of it is still very much bound up with reading music: biographical revelations or the resonance of an individual’s life. It is very much about lyrics, I think, and in some ways that’s the legacy of Greil Marcus - he still towers over American rock literature. Marcus’ last book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997) is very much bound up with issues of responsibility and the burdens of history. And I know two American rock critics, for example, who were totally uninterested in Tricky until they realised there was stuff going on in the lyrics. I couldn’t understand how anyone could not be blown away instantly by the sonics, by the sheer sensual pleasure of Maxinquaye. A common US rock critic attitude to dance music is ‘but where’s the ideology? It’s just ear candy’. In other words, it just gives you an empty sugar rush, it’s non-nutritional, sonic junk food.
KE: Not organic.
SR: There is a kind of residual puritanism in American rock writing. They rarely write about just the pleasure of things, the juicy succulence of sound.
KE: Yes, it’s only very recently that American writing paid any attention whatsoever to the sonic design, the production, the rhythm arrangements, the tonal density of hip hop, for example.
For years people even ignored the rhyming skills and the cadences and wrote purely about the signifying and the lyrics.
Not only that: the ethics, the values, the allegiance to keeping it real, to who’s down, who’s a real player, who’s living largest - an entire set of avoidances of the sonic texture, up until Company Flow when it became unavoidable. Even with Company Flow you still got writers talking solely about the fact that they’re proudly independent, until everybody found out that their label Rawkus was somehow bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch. But the idea that this is more interesting than Company Flow’s arhythmic structure is really stupid.
SR: A lot of American critics like Dave Marsh feel that music must be responsible to a certain class struggle. Marsh is the hagiographer of Springsteen and he also published Rock and Roll Confidential, an irregular magazine full of pungent attacks on the record industry, with a lot of anti-capitalist, sociologically informed writing. He’s very anti-English music - he hated all the synth pop bands and called them the new pop tarts.
KE: That’s right, it breaks the law of labour: you just extend one weedy finger, touch the button and out comes a sound, the sequencer plays for you, you don’t have to do anything, how terrible! The decadence of machines!
SR: I think this goes back to Greil Marcus too; the strong current of patriotism that often becomes a kind of Anglophobia. After the Sex Pistols and Gang of Four, English music is perceived as an effete, style-over-substance wasteland. Marcus brings up America all the time, it’s almost like he sees himself as the last true American patriot. I think REM were apotheosised as representations of some kind of lost Americanness - in the middle of the 80s there was suddenly a group that rather vaguely and abstractly talked about a new frontier.
KE: You can see it again in the way American critics over-valued Public Enemy - they thought Public Enemy was the Hip Hop equivalent of the Dead Kennedys. They loved the noisiness and insurgency because this could relate them to Punk. At the same time, techno was more austere, more glacial and totally tonal; it offered none of these consolations. As a result it’s totally off the map. At the beginning of the decade, Nelson George wrote ‘A Post-Soul Chronicle of Black Popular Culture’ in which Techno doesn’t appear. He’s utterly deaf to it - all of them were until a couple of years ago. It’s an historical situation that still amazes me.
I have to say, though, that Greg Tate has been a very big influence on me because of the way he brought science fiction and electronic music together. He made links through the encyclopaedic references of Parliament’s ‘Mothership Connection’ cycle to Samuel Delaney to Ralph Ellison, so suddenly he’d connected science fiction and concept albums, and crammed in a massive amount of information in a really encrypted way. That made for a real break with rock writing.
SR: The relationship to drugs, especially with rave music, is very problematic for many American rock critics and that goes all the way back to 1968 and the moment when a lot of very important rock bands backed away from psychedelia: Dylan and the Band returned to Americana and Roots Music, the Stones became very bluesy after their disastrous psychedelic follies, and the Beatles got raw-sounding again. That was a pivotal moment, and if you look at Stranded (1979), Greil Marcus’ collection of essays by writers on their favourite Desert Island Discs, at the end is a list of what Marcus thinks are the best 150 or so records from rock history. Psychedelia is written out of it almost entirely. It’s the same in Joe Carducci’s book Rock and the Pop Narcotic (1996) - he thinks the raw heat and pulsing energy of rock was tampered with because psychedelia made it too studio oriented. So the whole idea of psychedelic or drug-related music, whether it’s Dub Reggae, modern neo-psychedelic Rock or Techno is problematic because it’s all to do with illegibility.
KE: I’d say the writers associated with Spex magazine in Cologne are much closer to the writing you find in British magazines like the Wire than to anything coming out of the States.
SR: Definitely. Just through talking to Diedrich Diederichsen and younger writers in his tradition, you can see that they’re operating at a very high level of discourse. It also suggests that there might be other good stuff going on in other European countries.
KE: David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound (1995) had a huge influence. I’d say it was one of the key books of the 90s for European writers because his project of tracing the tendencies of ambient from Debussy to Aphex Twin has really allowed Europeans back in, in a way that Americans would never have done.
SR: In Europe in general, because the lyrics are often indecipherable or incomprehensible to them, the whole rock apparatus - the importance of lyrics and persona identification - is not so pronounced. People identify with the emotional mood or the grain of a singer’s voice, or the abstract feeling that you get from a track, which leaves them more open to write about the texture of the music.
KE: Absolutely. There’s a really impressive magazine, Nomad’s Land, that’s published in France, and I was really influenced by the people who produce the Dutch magazine, Mediamatic. But the rate of translation in the other direction is disgustingly slow. As soon as you travel and start to make contact with people in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and Holland, you get a sense that everything being produced in the UK is moving out there, but it’s excessively one way and very few European books make it over here. I’ve been more influenced by European techno-theorists than European music writers.
SR: Is that where your non-linear approach to writing comes from?
KE: I’d say my writing is omni-directional rather than non-linear. It follows several paths at once. What disappears is something that most academics still have, which is a kind of post-Modern ennui - this sense that we’ve been born too late and that all we can do is cite and quote in this classic post-Modern way. Instead I have this sense that everything’s still to be done. Sometimes I get re-enchanted with nature - with the sense that nature is pulsing with microprocessors at every level of reality, that everything is potentially digitisable and that writing’s job is to trace that path. Digitisation doesn’t stop at machines - it carries on through your head, through your fingers, through the phone when you talk to somebody, and the idea is to follow the tendencies, follow this path and see where it goes…
SR: I really like the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s idea of ‘theory-fiction’ that’s somewhere between the rigour of academic writing and the prose-poem qualities of cyber-punk writing. But there seems to be a sort of polemic within that CCRU stuff against the idea of metaphor, whereas to me it’s still within the domain of figurative language. The Romantic poets took inspiration from the latest scientific discoveries, and sometimes I wonder - can you describe music with scientific accuracy? Isn’t this writing actually a kind of late-90s poetry?
KE: No, no, not at all. I hate it when people describe what I’m doing as poetry, that’s the worst thing. It’s not science, it’s cybernetics and it’s not cybernetics in the sense inherited from Norbert Wiener, it’s cybernetics in the Deleuze and Guattari sense. There’s a section in Mille Plateaux (1980), so I’m just going to read it. ‘There is no biosphere or noosphere but everywhere the same mechanosphere. Cultural or technical phenomena provide a fertile soil, a good soup for the development of insects, bacteria, germs or even particles. If we consider the plane of consistency, we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it. A semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction and an electron crashes into a language. A black hole captures the genetic message, a crystallisation produces passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter, there is no ‘like’ here, we are not saying ‘like’ an electron, ‘like’ an interaction. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor. All that consists is real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, it’s just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialised, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible, a silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude or distances, it knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.’
SR: A lot of scientists would have problems with that.
KE: Of course they would, but it’s not science… it’s science escaped from the laboratory…
SR: You don’t think that passage is rhetoric? I mean, I might come up with a description of a music track as an engine, but how can we possibly say that that’s an scientific description of what the music is? Someone else could come up with a totally different one, that’s equally valid.
KE: Well, I hope they do. It’s not so much about accuracy as functioning - it’s that the description works, and allows a connection to be made to other things. I think links can now be made between fields that previously were quite rigidly separated - by value, for instance. None of us are interested in the old Dylan versus Keats argument, that’s totally dropped out of the window. The Deleuze and Guattari approach leads you away from all those value judgements, and that’s what’s great about it. TV and radio journalists always end up asking me what’s good and what’s bad, and that’s just not the point - the point is how music functions and what it’s doing. If you went back to ideas of value we’d all get blocked and stultified - we’d be inventing canons that legitimise this approach over that approach - really boring things like that.
SR: Alright, for example, let’s take the stuff the CCRU’s allies,
O[rphan] D[rift>] have written on Techno. It’s often brilliant, but I can’t take it in any other way than beautifully drug-addled prose poetry. Their descriptions of the way certain sounds dismember you and tear your body perceptions apart, like being fucked by the music or having your limbs wrenched out, make for incredibly grisly sensual writing, but to me it’s in the same counter-canon as Lautreamont and Rimbaud and Bataille… it’s not as if we’re measuring the bass frequencies with a sonograph or whatever apparatus real scientists use. There’s a certain sense in which using scientific language at this point seems much more sexy and exciting and productive as a way of thinking about music - it doesn’t seem tired, and it opens up new ways of feeling - but I still think someone could come up with a totally different frame of reference and have an equally valid way of responding to it and enjoying the music.
KE: Yes, that’s very much the point; somebody should say ‘well this is all wrong because...’, that would be really wild. One of the things I wanted to do in my book was find what Erik Davis calls the ‘electromagnetic imaginary’ - it’s the idea that music is an energy source. You’ve written about this as well, and you can see it most clearly in Jungle tracks and Miles Davis - that listening to the music is like getting into the Jefferson Airplane or getting onto the Grand Funk Railroad or taking an expressway to your skull or listening to Air and going on a safari to the moon. In the late 90s, we’re all plugging into an electromagnetic way of thinking; we’re more into electronic thought processes and digital thinking and that’s where I want to get. It’s what I call ‘concepttechnics’, the kind of conceptual thinking about music, the idea that there’s a turntable in the head, that there’s a synthesiser in the head, that there’s a sample in the head, that our way of thinking is a sampladelic thought process. This feels exciting to me, and this is the kind of science I’m doing - it’s not a question of not scientific laws, but definitely transonic processes. What do you think?
SR: It strikes me that what you’re talking about can also be applied to earlier periods of music. I always loved The Stooges, for instance, and their songs are all about energy pulses - Raw Power. You can see it running through the history of rock - Garage Punk was about these kids who were really hyped up on illegal stimulants like amphetamine and LSD, which actually increased the rate of electricity flow in the brain and the nervous system. And they were hyped up on new technology - the wah-wah and the fuzz-tone pedal were the sampler and synthesiser of their day - that guitar sound seems gritty and organic and ‘authentic’ now, but at the time they were intensely technological, artificial processes. Like Techno, Garage Punk was all about electricity. I’m trying to develop a way of looking at music past and present that’s not about identifying with the emotion or the protagonist of the song, it’s about intensifying with the energy.
KE: Yes, that effortless momentum - the music pulls you forward, as if you’re attached by a big string. Greil Marcus described the intro to ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ as making you feel like you’re on Jupiter, like you’re crushed by the gravity, by the weight of the sound. It’s the one time I’ve read Marcus really thinking about the effect of sound, and it was very smart.
SR: He once wrote that music doesn’t change the world, but it can change the way you walk through it. He meant your cultural perceptions and your sense of possibilities -like the Sex Pistols gave people a glimpse of a whole different way of living their lives - but in a quite literal sense that he didn’t mean, music really does change the way your body moves.
KE: The gait, the kinaesthetic - absolutely.
Frieze, May 1999
Simon Reynolds: The best-known British music critics are still the writers from the late-70s NME - people like Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons and Paul Morley - whose writing was to a large extent about their own highly opinionated personalities. Many of them are now columnists in the broadsheets. Looking back at their early writing, it was almost inevitable that these mouthy gits who grew up on Never Mind The Bollocks were going to become the Auberon Waugh, Peregrine Worsthorne or Germaine Greer of their generation. I think it’s significant that the leading edge of music writing since that era has been far less about writers as characters. Someone recently described me as a ‘cultural scientist’, which amused me at the time but is actually closest to what I’m trying to do. You’ve suggested the idea of a ‘concept engineer’, and that seems to be part of the same aspiration to be more rigorous. It’s more as if our generation can get off on our objective fascination with things rather than our subjective personalities. Burchill liked to lay down the law, while I’d say we’re almost trying to find the equivalent of natural laws within music.
Kodwo Eshun: Yes. The exorbitant subjectivity that those writers all had, which paid dividends in Ian Penman, is of very little use now. Music changed so drastically that it was more pressing to analyse the widening gap between how music sounded and the terms we used to understand it. When I started writing in 1992, most dance writing was still at the level of ‘kicking’ and ‘banging’. There was a fiercely-held anti-intellectual drive that made writing about dance music more of a challenge. Because a lot of the people who make the music are working class, aren’t college-educated and aren’t especially articulate, there is a sense of a post-literate culture: people who think electronically, digitally, sonically. Of course, it’s difficult to write sonically and this difficulty is raised to an impossibility and then that impossibility is elevated into a principle. You get people writing things like ‘the music speaks for itself’ as if it’s the most admirable thing you could say - but it’s just a cop-out. There’s an idea that the writer’s aim is to empathise, to intuit, on the side of the producer against the world. It’s got a lot to do with economic status: you exchange the low economic value of music journalism for being close to the DJ, being inside a scene. That’s the deal you strike when you want to be a writer and that’s why so much of it still veers between sycophancy and cynicism.
For me, it seems far more urgent to understand what computerisation is doing to rhythm than to understand that a particular musician was a bad boy who grew up in care and had a really hard time. 99% of writing is still socio-historical and my attempt to totally destroy that is probably doomed to failure, but it’s an experiment to show that it’s viable, using the particular example of black electronic dance music, machine music, computer music. My key point is that you don’t have to begin with the social. When it comes to dance music, it seems crucial to understand the weight of a sound - why does a break press on your arms, why does it seem to scuttle, or why do people describe electronic music as cold, why does it feels like your temperature has dropped? These questions are completely unexplored.
SR: Focusing entirely on the materiality of the music creates a more intense effect. In Energy Flash (1998) I have moments when I try to plug into the drug sensorium, but I am also interested in the socio-historical reasons why a whole culture has grown up based around delirium. My first book, Blissed Out (1990), was very much anti-historical, purely about the apocalyptic now, but I’m beginning to examine the way the urge to escape history occurs within history. I keep oscillating between the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun and wanting to write about total novelty. In some senses Jungle was completely novel, totally unthinkable - it also seemed placeless. Yet in another sense it was totally local - hardcore Jungle and Speed Garage both celebrate themselves as ‘a London thing’. I’m still very attached to the idea of using the social-historical approach.
KE: In More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) I replaced sociology with what I called the electronics of everyday life, a kind of everyday cybernetics - the idea that your most intimate relation is with your record player as much as with your computer or your phone. For instance, if you focus right down and you slow your rate of attention then you hear a lot more; you lose the wider perspective but you gain a more attentive hearing. I do it with tracks which everybody thinks they know really well, tracks that have been around for nearly 20 years like ‘Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’.
SR: Talking about the social leads us to the question of differences between British and American criticism. I have a bit of a bug-bear about American rock criticism. Although the quality of it is probably a lot better than the writing that comes out of England, most of it is still very much bound up with reading music: biographical revelations or the resonance of an individual’s life. It is very much about lyrics, I think, and in some ways that’s the legacy of Greil Marcus - he still towers over American rock literature. Marcus’ last book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997) is very much bound up with issues of responsibility and the burdens of history. And I know two American rock critics, for example, who were totally uninterested in Tricky until they realised there was stuff going on in the lyrics. I couldn’t understand how anyone could not be blown away instantly by the sonics, by the sheer sensual pleasure of Maxinquaye. A common US rock critic attitude to dance music is ‘but where’s the ideology? It’s just ear candy’. In other words, it just gives you an empty sugar rush, it’s non-nutritional, sonic junk food.
KE: Not organic.
SR: There is a kind of residual puritanism in American rock writing. They rarely write about just the pleasure of things, the juicy succulence of sound.
KE: Yes, it’s only very recently that American writing paid any attention whatsoever to the sonic design, the production, the rhythm arrangements, the tonal density of hip hop, for example.
For years people even ignored the rhyming skills and the cadences and wrote purely about the signifying and the lyrics.
Not only that: the ethics, the values, the allegiance to keeping it real, to who’s down, who’s a real player, who’s living largest - an entire set of avoidances of the sonic texture, up until Company Flow when it became unavoidable. Even with Company Flow you still got writers talking solely about the fact that they’re proudly independent, until everybody found out that their label Rawkus was somehow bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch. But the idea that this is more interesting than Company Flow’s arhythmic structure is really stupid.
SR: A lot of American critics like Dave Marsh feel that music must be responsible to a certain class struggle. Marsh is the hagiographer of Springsteen and he also published Rock and Roll Confidential, an irregular magazine full of pungent attacks on the record industry, with a lot of anti-capitalist, sociologically informed writing. He’s very anti-English music - he hated all the synth pop bands and called them the new pop tarts.
KE: That’s right, it breaks the law of labour: you just extend one weedy finger, touch the button and out comes a sound, the sequencer plays for you, you don’t have to do anything, how terrible! The decadence of machines!
SR: I think this goes back to Greil Marcus too; the strong current of patriotism that often becomes a kind of Anglophobia. After the Sex Pistols and Gang of Four, English music is perceived as an effete, style-over-substance wasteland. Marcus brings up America all the time, it’s almost like he sees himself as the last true American patriot. I think REM were apotheosised as representations of some kind of lost Americanness - in the middle of the 80s there was suddenly a group that rather vaguely and abstractly talked about a new frontier.
KE: You can see it again in the way American critics over-valued Public Enemy - they thought Public Enemy was the Hip Hop equivalent of the Dead Kennedys. They loved the noisiness and insurgency because this could relate them to Punk. At the same time, techno was more austere, more glacial and totally tonal; it offered none of these consolations. As a result it’s totally off the map. At the beginning of the decade, Nelson George wrote ‘A Post-Soul Chronicle of Black Popular Culture’ in which Techno doesn’t appear. He’s utterly deaf to it - all of them were until a couple of years ago. It’s an historical situation that still amazes me.
I have to say, though, that Greg Tate has been a very big influence on me because of the way he brought science fiction and electronic music together. He made links through the encyclopaedic references of Parliament’s ‘Mothership Connection’ cycle to Samuel Delaney to Ralph Ellison, so suddenly he’d connected science fiction and concept albums, and crammed in a massive amount of information in a really encrypted way. That made for a real break with rock writing.
SR: The relationship to drugs, especially with rave music, is very problematic for many American rock critics and that goes all the way back to 1968 and the moment when a lot of very important rock bands backed away from psychedelia: Dylan and the Band returned to Americana and Roots Music, the Stones became very bluesy after their disastrous psychedelic follies, and the Beatles got raw-sounding again. That was a pivotal moment, and if you look at Stranded (1979), Greil Marcus’ collection of essays by writers on their favourite Desert Island Discs, at the end is a list of what Marcus thinks are the best 150 or so records from rock history. Psychedelia is written out of it almost entirely. It’s the same in Joe Carducci’s book Rock and the Pop Narcotic (1996) - he thinks the raw heat and pulsing energy of rock was tampered with because psychedelia made it too studio oriented. So the whole idea of psychedelic or drug-related music, whether it’s Dub Reggae, modern neo-psychedelic Rock or Techno is problematic because it’s all to do with illegibility.
KE: I’d say the writers associated with Spex magazine in Cologne are much closer to the writing you find in British magazines like the Wire than to anything coming out of the States.
SR: Definitely. Just through talking to Diedrich Diederichsen and younger writers in his tradition, you can see that they’re operating at a very high level of discourse. It also suggests that there might be other good stuff going on in other European countries.
KE: David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound (1995) had a huge influence. I’d say it was one of the key books of the 90s for European writers because his project of tracing the tendencies of ambient from Debussy to Aphex Twin has really allowed Europeans back in, in a way that Americans would never have done.
SR: In Europe in general, because the lyrics are often indecipherable or incomprehensible to them, the whole rock apparatus - the importance of lyrics and persona identification - is not so pronounced. People identify with the emotional mood or the grain of a singer’s voice, or the abstract feeling that you get from a track, which leaves them more open to write about the texture of the music.
KE: Absolutely. There’s a really impressive magazine, Nomad’s Land, that’s published in France, and I was really influenced by the people who produce the Dutch magazine, Mediamatic. But the rate of translation in the other direction is disgustingly slow. As soon as you travel and start to make contact with people in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and Holland, you get a sense that everything being produced in the UK is moving out there, but it’s excessively one way and very few European books make it over here. I’ve been more influenced by European techno-theorists than European music writers.
SR: Is that where your non-linear approach to writing comes from?
KE: I’d say my writing is omni-directional rather than non-linear. It follows several paths at once. What disappears is something that most academics still have, which is a kind of post-Modern ennui - this sense that we’ve been born too late and that all we can do is cite and quote in this classic post-Modern way. Instead I have this sense that everything’s still to be done. Sometimes I get re-enchanted with nature - with the sense that nature is pulsing with microprocessors at every level of reality, that everything is potentially digitisable and that writing’s job is to trace that path. Digitisation doesn’t stop at machines - it carries on through your head, through your fingers, through the phone when you talk to somebody, and the idea is to follow the tendencies, follow this path and see where it goes…
SR: I really like the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s idea of ‘theory-fiction’ that’s somewhere between the rigour of academic writing and the prose-poem qualities of cyber-punk writing. But there seems to be a sort of polemic within that CCRU stuff against the idea of metaphor, whereas to me it’s still within the domain of figurative language. The Romantic poets took inspiration from the latest scientific discoveries, and sometimes I wonder - can you describe music with scientific accuracy? Isn’t this writing actually a kind of late-90s poetry?
KE: No, no, not at all. I hate it when people describe what I’m doing as poetry, that’s the worst thing. It’s not science, it’s cybernetics and it’s not cybernetics in the sense inherited from Norbert Wiener, it’s cybernetics in the Deleuze and Guattari sense. There’s a section in Mille Plateaux (1980), so I’m just going to read it. ‘There is no biosphere or noosphere but everywhere the same mechanosphere. Cultural or technical phenomena provide a fertile soil, a good soup for the development of insects, bacteria, germs or even particles. If we consider the plane of consistency, we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it. A semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction and an electron crashes into a language. A black hole captures the genetic message, a crystallisation produces passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter, there is no ‘like’ here, we are not saying ‘like’ an electron, ‘like’ an interaction. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor. All that consists is real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, it’s just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialised, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible, a silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude or distances, it knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.’
SR: A lot of scientists would have problems with that.
KE: Of course they would, but it’s not science… it’s science escaped from the laboratory…
SR: You don’t think that passage is rhetoric? I mean, I might come up with a description of a music track as an engine, but how can we possibly say that that’s an scientific description of what the music is? Someone else could come up with a totally different one, that’s equally valid.
KE: Well, I hope they do. It’s not so much about accuracy as functioning - it’s that the description works, and allows a connection to be made to other things. I think links can now be made between fields that previously were quite rigidly separated - by value, for instance. None of us are interested in the old Dylan versus Keats argument, that’s totally dropped out of the window. The Deleuze and Guattari approach leads you away from all those value judgements, and that’s what’s great about it. TV and radio journalists always end up asking me what’s good and what’s bad, and that’s just not the point - the point is how music functions and what it’s doing. If you went back to ideas of value we’d all get blocked and stultified - we’d be inventing canons that legitimise this approach over that approach - really boring things like that.
SR: Alright, for example, let’s take the stuff the CCRU’s allies,
O[rphan] D[rift>] have written on Techno. It’s often brilliant, but I can’t take it in any other way than beautifully drug-addled prose poetry. Their descriptions of the way certain sounds dismember you and tear your body perceptions apart, like being fucked by the music or having your limbs wrenched out, make for incredibly grisly sensual writing, but to me it’s in the same counter-canon as Lautreamont and Rimbaud and Bataille… it’s not as if we’re measuring the bass frequencies with a sonograph or whatever apparatus real scientists use. There’s a certain sense in which using scientific language at this point seems much more sexy and exciting and productive as a way of thinking about music - it doesn’t seem tired, and it opens up new ways of feeling - but I still think someone could come up with a totally different frame of reference and have an equally valid way of responding to it and enjoying the music.
KE: Yes, that’s very much the point; somebody should say ‘well this is all wrong because...’, that would be really wild. One of the things I wanted to do in my book was find what Erik Davis calls the ‘electromagnetic imaginary’ - it’s the idea that music is an energy source. You’ve written about this as well, and you can see it most clearly in Jungle tracks and Miles Davis - that listening to the music is like getting into the Jefferson Airplane or getting onto the Grand Funk Railroad or taking an expressway to your skull or listening to Air and going on a safari to the moon. In the late 90s, we’re all plugging into an electromagnetic way of thinking; we’re more into electronic thought processes and digital thinking and that’s where I want to get. It’s what I call ‘concepttechnics’, the kind of conceptual thinking about music, the idea that there’s a turntable in the head, that there’s a synthesiser in the head, that there’s a sample in the head, that our way of thinking is a sampladelic thought process. This feels exciting to me, and this is the kind of science I’m doing - it’s not a question of not scientific laws, but definitely transonic processes. What do you think?
SR: It strikes me that what you’re talking about can also be applied to earlier periods of music. I always loved The Stooges, for instance, and their songs are all about energy pulses - Raw Power. You can see it running through the history of rock - Garage Punk was about these kids who were really hyped up on illegal stimulants like amphetamine and LSD, which actually increased the rate of electricity flow in the brain and the nervous system. And they were hyped up on new technology - the wah-wah and the fuzz-tone pedal were the sampler and synthesiser of their day - that guitar sound seems gritty and organic and ‘authentic’ now, but at the time they were intensely technological, artificial processes. Like Techno, Garage Punk was all about electricity. I’m trying to develop a way of looking at music past and present that’s not about identifying with the emotion or the protagonist of the song, it’s about intensifying with the energy.
KE: Yes, that effortless momentum - the music pulls you forward, as if you’re attached by a big string. Greil Marcus described the intro to ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ as making you feel like you’re on Jupiter, like you’re crushed by the gravity, by the weight of the sound. It’s the one time I’ve read Marcus really thinking about the effect of sound, and it was very smart.
SR: He once wrote that music doesn’t change the world, but it can change the way you walk through it. He meant your cultural perceptions and your sense of possibilities -like the Sex Pistols gave people a glimpse of a whole different way of living their lives - but in a quite literal sense that he didn’t mean, music really does change the way your body moves.
KE: The gait, the kinaesthetic - absolutely.
THE BNF DEFICIT
from Unfaves 2001, Blissout
by Simon Reynolds
The greater part of the work being done today--musically, critically -- strikes me as gap-filling. A band like Clinic, for instance, have found this tiny strip of terrain to call their own, a thin patch of sonic possibility bordered on every side by precursors who enjoyed much more room to manoevre. Now, you might feel inclined to lend Clinic your support, praise them for doing the best they can in a tricky predicament. Or you might feel inclined to turn away with a soft sad shake of the head, wondering how people can get worked up over such miniscule increments of novelty.
It's probably a generational thing: if you came of age in an era of Giant Steps and Bold New Formulations (BNFs), the present age with its micro-genres and Next Medium-Sized Things is going to be increasingly frustrating. People born after, say, 1977, of necessity have grown up with a more detail-oriented appreciation of smaller measures of innovation and idiosyncracy. One thing's clear: whoever comes in the wake of Clinic will have an even more circumscribed space in which to operate.
The same syndrome applies to ideas-about-music. When was the last BNF? By my count, nearly five years ago, with Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun. Before that you'd have to go back to the turn of the Nineties, and Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Before that, the approach and sensibility hatched by Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan in the late Eighties. Before that, the BNF's start coming too thick and fast to enumerate. This suggests that thinking-about-music parallels music-making: a sort of thermodynamic model that starts with a Big Bang and a flaming surge of creation, Giant Steps and BNF's galore. The possibilities for formal breakthroughs and striking Thought-Stances get progressively used up as time goes by, though. It's getting mighty crowded out there: more and more folk chasing smaller and smaller options. From galaxies to solar systems, from planets to space-dust.
The non-appearance of BNFs isn't due to a deficit of capability (there's more than enough brain-power out there). Is it just a lack of will-to-power and sheer determination, then? Or are people simply no longer interested in making that kind of totalizing macro-approach, find it unseemly or naff or just uncalled-for nowadays (these times of smaller shifts and evolution-not-revolution). Perhaps it's simply that there's nothing around musically/subculturally that would warrant and justify such an effort (with all its risks of making a fool of yourself).
For there's a grandiosity to the BNF; unconsciously, perhaps, the formulator is asking for the edifice to be torn down, its unsound foundations exposed. All BNF's are lopsided, and some are more wrong than right. But I can't help but admire the determination and guts that go into their construction, appreciate the starkness of intellectual contour. A prime example is More Brilliant Than The Sun, much of which I disagree with but which I can only salute as a heroic contribution to the, erm, dialectic. As with Carducci's BNF (whose premises I ultimately reject) the sheer contentiousness of More Brilliant is hugely valuable and galvanizing---responding to its challenges has sharpened up my own thinking no end.
It is disheartening that in five years since its publication, no one, to my knowledge, in the English-speaking world has mustered the resources of hubris and gall to attempt something of similar scope and ambition.
BNFs tend not be genial things, of course. There's an aggressive aspect, a tyrannical impulse (this sort of book is often praised along the lines of "it will change the way you think about XXX forever", which, if you think about it, is a rather despotic ambition: a putsch on people's minds!). The formulator usually wishes, implicitly or explicitly, to invalidate all other ways of looking at stuff. And every BNF becomes a set of blinkers, blinding its creator to new possibilities, unforeseen pleasures, unexpected shifts; the cardinal blunder of looking in the same place for your rapture/rupture. Pop music's protean on-rush will always outwit, outflank, outmode every BNF, leave this monument of thought standing there looking slightly ludicrous; stranded, no longer applicable to the new conditions.
Perhaps we are better off without BNFs, better off finding more affable, humble, non-polarising ways of looking at pop. As someone who gets off on messianic fervour, though, I can't help finding this kind of unassuming approach ultimately lacking some vital buzz-factor: it's too mild in temperament and temperature. Where's the fiyah?
from Unfaves 2001, Blissout
by Simon Reynolds
The greater part of the work being done today--musically, critically -- strikes me as gap-filling. A band like Clinic, for instance, have found this tiny strip of terrain to call their own, a thin patch of sonic possibility bordered on every side by precursors who enjoyed much more room to manoevre. Now, you might feel inclined to lend Clinic your support, praise them for doing the best they can in a tricky predicament. Or you might feel inclined to turn away with a soft sad shake of the head, wondering how people can get worked up over such miniscule increments of novelty.
It's probably a generational thing: if you came of age in an era of Giant Steps and Bold New Formulations (BNFs), the present age with its micro-genres and Next Medium-Sized Things is going to be increasingly frustrating. People born after, say, 1977, of necessity have grown up with a more detail-oriented appreciation of smaller measures of innovation and idiosyncracy. One thing's clear: whoever comes in the wake of Clinic will have an even more circumscribed space in which to operate.
The same syndrome applies to ideas-about-music. When was the last BNF? By my count, nearly five years ago, with Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun. Before that you'd have to go back to the turn of the Nineties, and Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Before that, the approach and sensibility hatched by Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan in the late Eighties. Before that, the BNF's start coming too thick and fast to enumerate. This suggests that thinking-about-music parallels music-making: a sort of thermodynamic model that starts with a Big Bang and a flaming surge of creation, Giant Steps and BNF's galore. The possibilities for formal breakthroughs and striking Thought-Stances get progressively used up as time goes by, though. It's getting mighty crowded out there: more and more folk chasing smaller and smaller options. From galaxies to solar systems, from planets to space-dust.
The non-appearance of BNFs isn't due to a deficit of capability (there's more than enough brain-power out there). Is it just a lack of will-to-power and sheer determination, then? Or are people simply no longer interested in making that kind of totalizing macro-approach, find it unseemly or naff or just uncalled-for nowadays (these times of smaller shifts and evolution-not-revolution). Perhaps it's simply that there's nothing around musically/subculturally that would warrant and justify such an effort (with all its risks of making a fool of yourself).
For there's a grandiosity to the BNF; unconsciously, perhaps, the formulator is asking for the edifice to be torn down, its unsound foundations exposed. All BNF's are lopsided, and some are more wrong than right. But I can't help but admire the determination and guts that go into their construction, appreciate the starkness of intellectual contour. A prime example is More Brilliant Than The Sun, much of which I disagree with but which I can only salute as a heroic contribution to the, erm, dialectic. As with Carducci's BNF (whose premises I ultimately reject) the sheer contentiousness of More Brilliant is hugely valuable and galvanizing---responding to its challenges has sharpened up my own thinking no end.
It is disheartening that in five years since its publication, no one, to my knowledge, in the English-speaking world has mustered the resources of hubris and gall to attempt something of similar scope and ambition.
BNFs tend not be genial things, of course. There's an aggressive aspect, a tyrannical impulse (this sort of book is often praised along the lines of "it will change the way you think about XXX forever", which, if you think about it, is a rather despotic ambition: a putsch on people's minds!). The formulator usually wishes, implicitly or explicitly, to invalidate all other ways of looking at stuff. And every BNF becomes a set of blinkers, blinding its creator to new possibilities, unforeseen pleasures, unexpected shifts; the cardinal blunder of looking in the same place for your rapture/rupture. Pop music's protean on-rush will always outwit, outflank, outmode every BNF, leave this monument of thought standing there looking slightly ludicrous; stranded, no longer applicable to the new conditions.
Perhaps we are better off without BNFs, better off finding more affable, humble, non-polarising ways of looking at pop. As someone who gets off on messianic fervour, though, I can't help finding this kind of unassuming approach ultimately lacking some vital buzz-factor: it's too mild in temperament and temperature. Where's the fiyah?
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