THE YOUNG GODS, The Young Gods (Product Inc)
Melody Maker, 1987
by Simon Reynolds
One of the little myths about Pop 1987 is that "there's nothing happening, is there?" For me, 1987 has consisted of a deluge of brilliance which I've been barely able to take in, let alone digest. Outstanding releases by Butthole Surfers, Skinny Puppy, LL Cool J, Arthur Russell, Throwing Muses, Public Enemy, Happy Mondays… I'm only scratching the surface here… and sure, none of it ever hits, but I thought we'd washed those old notions of infiltrate-and-subvert out of our blood long ago.
For those who are interested in being interested, 1987 offers an improbably surfeit and diversity of options. The Young Gods are right at the front, with what looks like the most creative record released this year.
They call their music New Sonic Architecture, and it involves taking sampling beyond the dance functionalism which limits hip hop. Where most pop is linear, horizontal, The Young Gods open up space along the vertical--trapdoors open up between the beat; suddenly, the ceiling rises vertiginously; corridors branch out, down which sounds recede and loom. If this is architecture, then it's designed in the spirit of Escher--trompe l'oeil effects, nightmare perspectives, echo and shadow.
Even more disorientating is that the substances out which this architecture is constructed are unfamiliar, rendered unrecognizable and alien by the drastic sampling process. You can't play the cosy reference game because a lot of the material is stolen from classical music--strings on "Fais La Mouette" that churn nauseously like a trapped moth; on "Percussione", abrupt flares and blares of sound that come at you like an ambush.
On "Jusqu'au Bout", it sounds like an orchestra has been transformed into the sort of jackhammer powerchord riffing you'd find on the plastic punk the Pistols made after Rotten left. Indeed, it's important to make the point that a lot of the music on this record is fantastic rock music, even if made entirely on machines. "Jimmy" is furious punk, "Fais La Mouette" is a brutal stomp that reminds me of the genuine menace and savagery that lay beneath the camp surface of Glitter and The Sweet.
Franz Treichler's voice is a haemorrhage, at times a plane of abraided texture the even-ness of which surpasses even Luc Van Acker. But he can also sound sonorous, as on the beautiful, low shudder of melody on "Jusqu'au Bout". It's the voice of a singer who knows that where he wants to be is not the human at all.
There's too much being proposed and shaken up here for me to absorb in a handful of listens, so I'll just say that The Young Gods know what time it is. Their music is where Mantronix meets Diamanda Galas, Skinny Boys meets Stockhausen. Stop whinging and immerse yourself in this record.
The future starts here.
THE YOUNG GODS, Only Heaven
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
Believe it or not, kids, but there was a time when Britain was not the epicentre of the pop universe, when hipsters looked to America, New Zealand, Belgium, Canada, anywhere but Blighty. Christ, even Switzerland was more happenin' than a Little England plagued by indie voles, simply 'cos Zurich had somehow spawned untouchable Futurist power trio The Young Gods. Oh, we garlanded ye Gods with our most deliriously imagistic praise, but, oh! their self-titled debut (MM's Album of 1987) and 1989 sequel L'Eau Rouge warranted such histrionics a thousandfold. I, for one, would not retract a single spume-flecked metaphor.
If it weren't such a corny, used-up term, 'cyberpunk' would be perfect for The Young Gods, 'cos that's literally what they are: The Stooges rewired for the digital aeon, the ultimate cyborg mesh of the visceral (Franz Treichler's pagan soul, drummer Use's tribal thunder) and the machinic (metal riffs and classical fanfares vivisected and recombined via the sampler). Amazingly, shamefully, nearly a decade after Mantronix, Def Jam and acid house, the Young Gods have
yet to be dethroned as exponents non pareil of sampladelic rock. That's
not to say that no rock bands have got to grips with digital technology. But whereas post-rock units like Disco Inferno or Main use guitars in non-rockin' ways, The Young Gods do almost the opposite: sans guitars, they create the ultimate rockist sturm und drang, a pyrotechnic yet plectrum-free fantasia for fretboard-freaks.
After 1992's TV Sky, the Gods' first tentative, toned-down
bid for crossover (Treichler abandoned his mother tongue French for fluent American),
Only Heaven is at once a return to form and a concerted lunge for the mainstream's jugular (in the US, the band's finally plighted its troth
to major label Interscope). Three years on, the Gods could have gone in at least three directions--thrash-metal, industrial (shudder!) or techno. The latter would probably have been the most fertile (given the aesthetic affinities between the Gods' streamlined furore and Beltram tracks like "Energy Flash" and "Mentasm", or indeed the last Prodigy LP), but the only gesture Treichler & Co have made in techno's direction is an increased quotient of ambience: middle-eights like reeling and whirling firmaments, tactile texture-swirls, etc. Generally, they continue to plough their own lonely furrow, keeping both thrash's feckless palsy and
industrial's blethering bombast at arm's length, while simultaneously shunning
the dancefloor (moshing and the dubiously upraised fist are still the only appropriate physical responses to the Gods).
That said, "Speed Of Night", the album's highpoint, does sound like Motorhead remixed by Richie 'Plastikman' Hawtin; sheer kinesthetic thrills, as
electrifying as mainlining a cocktail of adrenalin, steroids and crystal meth. Another triumph is the 17 minute song-cycle "Moon Revolutions", which comprises
the speed-blur and mercurial vapour-trails of "the eagle song" (featuring a solo that could be from Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold"), the ambient hinterland
of "the dreamscape" (a sort of cyberdelic take on the mid-section of Zep's "Whole Lotta Love", spun from reprocessed feedback), and the tribal tempest of "the arrow song".
Only Heaven is not all full-throttle kineticism; "Donnez les Esprits"
and "The Dreamhouse' both stalk and glower at an ominous, predatory mid-tempo,
and proceedings close with a ballad, "Child In The Tree", Franz's lush croon framed by what sounds like real acoustic strumming (Treichler was conservatory-trained
in classical guitar). But mostly Only Heaven is about speed, ascension,
exultation, "Kissing the Sun", crashing the Pearly Gates. So c'mon, feel the rush.
THE YOUNG GODS, Only Heaven
Spin, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
Sampler-wielding cyber-Stooges, The Young Gods have been the world's first 21st Century rock band for nearly a decade now. But being ahead of your time can be lonesome, since you have to wait for everybody else to catch up. Despite cult status in Europe and especially England (where they've influenced everyone from art-metal units like Godflesh to post-rockers like Disco Inferno), this Swiss power trio has made few inroads into American alt-rock consciousness. Mike Patton of Faith No More wore the Gods' spiral T-shirt in so many photo-shoots he became a walking billboard; agit-pop guerrillas Cop Shoot Cop copped a few of their sampler-rock licks. But that's about it. All this may be about to change, though. At last, the Young Gods have hitched up with a US major (Interscope, home of Cop Shoot Cop). And Only Heaven is at once a return to late '80s form and perhaps their most accessible album to date. Either way, it's a distinct improvement on their first, tentative attempt to parler fluent American, 1992's TV Sky.
Despite slight affinities with thrash (velocity, density, hygiene), despite the mistaken pigeonholing of the band as 'industrial', the Young Gods are really just about the closest thing to a 'pure rock' band you can get in the age of market fragmentation. 'Pure', in so far as they transcend genre and instead home/hone in on the primal matrix of rock'n'roll energies that connect the Stooges, Sex Pistols, Radio Birdman, Birthday Party, Killing Joke and Metallica. And 'pure' in terms of their methodology, whereby they literally distil rock's essence. Using the sampler to vivisect punk and metal songs for paroxysmic riffs, climactic powerchords, feedback detonations etc, the Gods recombine and resequence them into a monstrous uber-rock. As with Futurist art, rock's bloody physicality is sublimated into an elemental passion-play of abstract dynamic forces.
So "Speed Of Night" is Motorhead cleansed of greaser grit and biker stink, a silvered machine hurtling into a radiant nowhere, while "Kissing The Sun" is a Hendrix-meets-Icarus hymn to ascension and dazzlement. The extended highpoint of "Only Heaven" is "Moon Revolutions", a 17 minute triptych that runs from the after-image-trailing rush of "the eagle song" through "the dreamscape"'s vaporous canyon of ambience to the neo-pagan thunder of "the arrow song".
As ever, singer/bandleader Franz Treichler's delivery is tres Jim Morrison,
and his lyrics a reeling mind's eye panorama of Nietzchean imagery: glacial altitudes, rarified remoteness, vast solitudes, inclement realms where
only the gigantic of spirit roam. If Nietzche's 1872 opus The Birth Of Tragedy was, as some claim, the first rock critical text, then Only Heaven is Friedrich's theory fleshed, or flashed, out. "Count the stars... that's what/we are/fighting for": the Young God are militant mystics, hungry to be consumed in the blaze of glory. The Gods' penchant for grandeur may still prove too much for Sebadoh-fans to stomach, but anyone who digs Led Zep IV, Electric Ladyland or Ritual de Lo Habitual, should get ready to swoon.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
IGGY POP, The Hummingbird, Birmingham
Melody Maker, winter 1988
By Simon Reynolds
I bring a whole lotta baggage to my first live Iggy. This month I've found myself listening to the first Stooges album more than any contemporary record. I don't go along with the idea that musics are all inevitably outmoded by technical or critical advances: there are some statements, charged with the aura of a moment, that transcend the limits imposed by their era. So at the close of 1988, it doesn't feel strange to be razed still by Asheton's wah wah flames, or recognize an eternal eloquence in Iggy's dumb poetry. "She wants somethin'/But I'm/Not right/Nooooo/And it's always this way". But even more than anthems of disaffection like "Not Right" and "Real Cool Time", it's the morose mire of "Ann" that drags me under again and again, "Ann" with its vision of love as narcosis, love as capitulation: "You took my arm/And you broke my will… I floated in your swimming pools/I felt so weak/I felt so blue."
So my head is spinning in a confusion of anticipation and resignation as I prepare to set eyes on one of the six or seven people I've really worshipped in my life. "Now I'm ready to close my eyes/Now I'm ready to close my mind." But can Iggy do it for me, lay me low, finish me off? Not really. Where the Iggy of '69 can still incapacitate and galvanise me like almost no one else, 88's Iggy is sabotaged by his own influence. It's the Iggy-without-whom factor. On the one hand, rock has caught up with him, did so a long time back in fact, and the dullards have banalised a lot of what The Stooges proposed, turning the the "world's forgotten boy/seeking only to destroy" posture into an orthodoxy: a certain American idea of "punk", whether exemplified by Pussy Galore or Guns N'Roses. On the other hand, more extreme aspects of The Stooges have been raised several powers by Loop, World Domination Enterprises, Sonic Youth, Young Gods even.
Iggy can't be blamed for wanting to capitalize on all this stature and indebtedness. I just wish the legend was better served than by this revue.
His band are stonyfaced artisans, either clichés (a baldie in shades on rhythm guitar, a lead guitarist in a big black hat) or nonentities. All they're capable of is a precision-chiselled mayhem. It's reliably raucous, but never heavy. A "good time", which is to say, not that greaet. Not as undignified as I'd feared, but far from the sensual inferno I'd half-hoped for.
"1969" gets typical treatment: the original's ominous sense of the USA as one giant powderkeg is lost in the revved-up proficiency. "TV Eye" is similarly too uptempo, slammed out rather than strung-out, and the original's sublime climax--where the riff suddenly congeals and Iggy subsides into strangled moans and electrifying sucking sounds--is left out altogether. "High On You" is prefaced by a speech disowning his drug-taking past: the song's aerobic intensity showcases the new Iggy, who's into being alert, who can't afford to get wasted, burn up or pass out. Iggy the survivor, who leaves the stage in one piece, ready to fight another day. Fair enough, but because of this, the music can't be allowed to brood or malinger, let alone self-destruct, but is all at the same relentless go-for-it, hell-for-leather pace.
Iggy-as-spectacle is great. As a star, he cuts a more peculiar figure than ever, a beanpole halfpint with not an inch to pinch on his twitching and flailing body. But, while he acts and looks like the 16 year old brat, he also seems conscious of now having an avuncular/forefather role, making invocatory gestures to the audience, desperate to involve and incite. He knows that "kids" are still caged by the same impasses, still bored out of their skulls. But he's torn between advocating getting smart (he taps the side of his head) and proposing a willful regression into infantilism and idiocy (he picks his nose, sniffs his cock, sucks his thumb and sticks his microscopic arse at the audience). And how can rock'n'roll grow old?
"I wish I could reach out and fuck you all." Iggy Pop doesn't get quite that far (beyond being a show). The encores, "1970", "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "Gotta Right", get closest, the music finally getting ragged and approaching flashover, and like everyone else I have no choice but to raise adoring arms. Best of all, though, is when the music's over but Iggy keeps writhing on, with the spastic grace that says "I'm an idiot, so love me". He's still trying to leap out of his skin, still wants to be out of this world and have unimaginably total congress with it, penetrate to the core. You could do a lot worse than pay a respectful visit to Iggy Pop's sweating, strutting archive of himself.
THE STOOGES, The Stooges and Funhouse
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
Funhouse is, no contest, the greatest rock'n'roll album of all time. And its prequel, The Stooges, is the tremor before the full quake.
From the 1969 debut, "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" are the justly famous anthems, but if anything "Real Cool Time" and "Not Right" are even more incendiary. Ron Asheton's wah-wah tongues-of-flame, Dave Alexander's sidling stealth-bass, Scott Asheton's seething drums, all conjure up an organic, monstrous, marauding prescence. The Stooges never break loose, thrash or flail--what so many idiots today confuse with intensity--but instead hold all their deadly energy in reserve, brood and simmer.
The Stooges is awesome, but even the best songs sound like sketches for 1970's Funhouse, when the band break loose from John Cale's slightly dessicated production and rock out. Right from the start, with "Down On The Streets", it's also clear that the band have learned how to play, and leapt from the stilted Troggs-like stomp of "No Fun" to a punk-funk jive'n'roll so supple, serpentile and swinging you just gotta dance. Funhouse is proto-punk and proto-metal, but it's also, in some weird unanalysable way, jazz, even when Steve McKay isn't blowing freeform sax.
"Loose" raises penetration to a sort of existensial principle. Iggy boasts "I stuck it deep inside/cuz I'm loose"; he's unleashed, a smart bomb gone truant. "TV Eye" kickstarts with possibly the most apocalyptic riff ever, then descends to another plane of prime-evil, the song uncoiling like a cobra as Iggy lets rip a cyclone-sucking snarl and gutteral, winded gasps. Side One mirrors the male sexual dynamic (arousal, penetration, climax), with "Dirt" as post-coital aftermath: a marrow-chilling dirge-beat over which Asheton downpours silvered chords as harrowing and cleansing as "Gimme Shelter". Iggy's a glowing ember of his former inferno, belch-crooning Sinatra-style his philosophy of education-through-abjection: "I've been
dirt, but I don't care, cos I'm learning".
The songs on Funhouse aren't fast, but they sound full-tilt, all out, like a body trying to surge through a viscous, resistant medium. Which is exactly what Iggy is: Everykid struggling to cut loose from his suffocating enviroment, and, like Marlon Brando's biker in The Wild One, "just go". It doesn't matter where. In The Stooges, a certain kind of male energy finds its ultimate form of expression. Long before he started using military imagery on Raw Power, Iggy Pop was all about ballistics--about ignition, blast off and explosive impact. Iggy was on the warrior male trip, with all its attendant dangers of lapsing from Romanticism into fascism. The stance is midway between Nietzche and Beavis & Butthead: 'I'm bored/let's burn', teen deliquency conflagrating
into a war against the world, combat rock without enemies or objectives. Iggy wanted to become pure intransitive speed, go out in a blaze of abstract glory, burn alive. And sometimes burn-out, as in the downered-out entropy of "We Will Fall" (with its mantra-chants and raga drones, like ten seconds from the Doors' "The End"
looped for eternity), or the lagoon of lassitude that's "Ann" (where Iggy's drowning in his lover's eyes).
I could unfurl the rollcall of the illustrious indebted--the Pistols,
Birthday Party, Radio Birdman, Black Flag, Young Gods, Loop/Spacemen 3,
even Nirvana--but The Stooges don't merit your respect as a monument in our collective heritage, they warrant full immersion. This is a NOW thing--it's 1969/1970 and Iggy & co are liver than you or I'll ever be.
Melody Maker, winter 1988
By Simon Reynolds
I bring a whole lotta baggage to my first live Iggy. This month I've found myself listening to the first Stooges album more than any contemporary record. I don't go along with the idea that musics are all inevitably outmoded by technical or critical advances: there are some statements, charged with the aura of a moment, that transcend the limits imposed by their era. So at the close of 1988, it doesn't feel strange to be razed still by Asheton's wah wah flames, or recognize an eternal eloquence in Iggy's dumb poetry. "She wants somethin'/But I'm/Not right/Nooooo/And it's always this way". But even more than anthems of disaffection like "Not Right" and "Real Cool Time", it's the morose mire of "Ann" that drags me under again and again, "Ann" with its vision of love as narcosis, love as capitulation: "You took my arm/And you broke my will… I floated in your swimming pools/I felt so weak/I felt so blue."
So my head is spinning in a confusion of anticipation and resignation as I prepare to set eyes on one of the six or seven people I've really worshipped in my life. "Now I'm ready to close my eyes/Now I'm ready to close my mind." But can Iggy do it for me, lay me low, finish me off? Not really. Where the Iggy of '69 can still incapacitate and galvanise me like almost no one else, 88's Iggy is sabotaged by his own influence. It's the Iggy-without-whom factor. On the one hand, rock has caught up with him, did so a long time back in fact, and the dullards have banalised a lot of what The Stooges proposed, turning the the "world's forgotten boy/seeking only to destroy" posture into an orthodoxy: a certain American idea of "punk", whether exemplified by Pussy Galore or Guns N'Roses. On the other hand, more extreme aspects of The Stooges have been raised several powers by Loop, World Domination Enterprises, Sonic Youth, Young Gods even.
Iggy can't be blamed for wanting to capitalize on all this stature and indebtedness. I just wish the legend was better served than by this revue.
His band are stonyfaced artisans, either clichés (a baldie in shades on rhythm guitar, a lead guitarist in a big black hat) or nonentities. All they're capable of is a precision-chiselled mayhem. It's reliably raucous, but never heavy. A "good time", which is to say, not that greaet. Not as undignified as I'd feared, but far from the sensual inferno I'd half-hoped for.
"1969" gets typical treatment: the original's ominous sense of the USA as one giant powderkeg is lost in the revved-up proficiency. "TV Eye" is similarly too uptempo, slammed out rather than strung-out, and the original's sublime climax--where the riff suddenly congeals and Iggy subsides into strangled moans and electrifying sucking sounds--is left out altogether. "High On You" is prefaced by a speech disowning his drug-taking past: the song's aerobic intensity showcases the new Iggy, who's into being alert, who can't afford to get wasted, burn up or pass out. Iggy the survivor, who leaves the stage in one piece, ready to fight another day. Fair enough, but because of this, the music can't be allowed to brood or malinger, let alone self-destruct, but is all at the same relentless go-for-it, hell-for-leather pace.
Iggy-as-spectacle is great. As a star, he cuts a more peculiar figure than ever, a beanpole halfpint with not an inch to pinch on his twitching and flailing body. But, while he acts and looks like the 16 year old brat, he also seems conscious of now having an avuncular/forefather role, making invocatory gestures to the audience, desperate to involve and incite. He knows that "kids" are still caged by the same impasses, still bored out of their skulls. But he's torn between advocating getting smart (he taps the side of his head) and proposing a willful regression into infantilism and idiocy (he picks his nose, sniffs his cock, sucks his thumb and sticks his microscopic arse at the audience). And how can rock'n'roll grow old?
"I wish I could reach out and fuck you all." Iggy Pop doesn't get quite that far (beyond being a show). The encores, "1970", "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "Gotta Right", get closest, the music finally getting ragged and approaching flashover, and like everyone else I have no choice but to raise adoring arms. Best of all, though, is when the music's over but Iggy keeps writhing on, with the spastic grace that says "I'm an idiot, so love me". He's still trying to leap out of his skin, still wants to be out of this world and have unimaginably total congress with it, penetrate to the core. You could do a lot worse than pay a respectful visit to Iggy Pop's sweating, strutting archive of himself.
THE STOOGES, The Stooges and Funhouse
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
Funhouse is, no contest, the greatest rock'n'roll album of all time. And its prequel, The Stooges, is the tremor before the full quake.
From the 1969 debut, "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" are the justly famous anthems, but if anything "Real Cool Time" and "Not Right" are even more incendiary. Ron Asheton's wah-wah tongues-of-flame, Dave Alexander's sidling stealth-bass, Scott Asheton's seething drums, all conjure up an organic, monstrous, marauding prescence. The Stooges never break loose, thrash or flail--what so many idiots today confuse with intensity--but instead hold all their deadly energy in reserve, brood and simmer.
The Stooges is awesome, but even the best songs sound like sketches for 1970's Funhouse, when the band break loose from John Cale's slightly dessicated production and rock out. Right from the start, with "Down On The Streets", it's also clear that the band have learned how to play, and leapt from the stilted Troggs-like stomp of "No Fun" to a punk-funk jive'n'roll so supple, serpentile and swinging you just gotta dance. Funhouse is proto-punk and proto-metal, but it's also, in some weird unanalysable way, jazz, even when Steve McKay isn't blowing freeform sax.
"Loose" raises penetration to a sort of existensial principle. Iggy boasts "I stuck it deep inside/cuz I'm loose"; he's unleashed, a smart bomb gone truant. "TV Eye" kickstarts with possibly the most apocalyptic riff ever, then descends to another plane of prime-evil, the song uncoiling like a cobra as Iggy lets rip a cyclone-sucking snarl and gutteral, winded gasps. Side One mirrors the male sexual dynamic (arousal, penetration, climax), with "Dirt" as post-coital aftermath: a marrow-chilling dirge-beat over which Asheton downpours silvered chords as harrowing and cleansing as "Gimme Shelter". Iggy's a glowing ember of his former inferno, belch-crooning Sinatra-style his philosophy of education-through-abjection: "I've been
dirt, but I don't care, cos I'm learning".
The songs on Funhouse aren't fast, but they sound full-tilt, all out, like a body trying to surge through a viscous, resistant medium. Which is exactly what Iggy is: Everykid struggling to cut loose from his suffocating enviroment, and, like Marlon Brando's biker in The Wild One, "just go". It doesn't matter where. In The Stooges, a certain kind of male energy finds its ultimate form of expression. Long before he started using military imagery on Raw Power, Iggy Pop was all about ballistics--about ignition, blast off and explosive impact. Iggy was on the warrior male trip, with all its attendant dangers of lapsing from Romanticism into fascism. The stance is midway between Nietzche and Beavis & Butthead: 'I'm bored/let's burn', teen deliquency conflagrating
into a war against the world, combat rock without enemies or objectives. Iggy wanted to become pure intransitive speed, go out in a blaze of abstract glory, burn alive. And sometimes burn-out, as in the downered-out entropy of "We Will Fall" (with its mantra-chants and raga drones, like ten seconds from the Doors' "The End"
looped for eternity), or the lagoon of lassitude that's "Ann" (where Iggy's drowning in his lover's eyes).
I could unfurl the rollcall of the illustrious indebted--the Pistols,
Birthday Party, Radio Birdman, Black Flag, Young Gods, Loop/Spacemen 3,
even Nirvana--but The Stooges don't merit your respect as a monument in our collective heritage, they warrant full immersion. This is a NOW thing--it's 1969/1970 and Iggy & co are liver than you or I'll ever be.
Friday, March 7, 2008
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”.
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”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)