APOPALYPSE NOW - the state and stasis of pop
GQ Style spring/summer 2008
by Simon Reynolds
Come Christmas time, music magazines and newspaper critics traditionally survey the trends and events that shook the pop world during the previous 12 months. Late last year, as the time approached for the annual reckoning, I found myself wondering: what on earth are they going to come up with for 2007? I mean, did anything actually happen? Hmmm, well there was Radiohead’s gambit of selling their latest album direct to the fans via honour-based pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth download. But that was a breakthrough in music distribution, not a dive into brave new worlds of sound (indeed In Rainbows’s Radiohead-by-numbers could hardly have been more same-old-same-old, more déjà entendu). What else? There was Britney’s meltdown, a convulsion in celebreality that far eclipsed the schizo-jagged avant-pop of her Blackout, a relative flop sales-wise. But when it comes to big shifts and new directions… 2007’s pop cupboard was bare.
Indeed, looking back on the whole decade so far, the
Noughties has had a ‘fallow years’, holding-pattern feel. Writer and musician Momus, an acerbic
culture-watcher, recently declared that pop was one of several things he
regarded as essentially ‘over’ (others included television, the telephone and
democracy). Me and Momus are roughly the same age (forties), and everyone knows
that as you get older, it’s harder to perceive newness in music. Partly it’s
because the more knowledge you acquire, the more you can see how everything is
precedented. And partly there’s an element of projecting your own decrepitude
onto the culture at large.
Pundits have been casting around with palpable
desperation for explanations, with some pointing to the lack of mutual exchange
between black and white music, and others pointing to a congealing of class
divisions that’s caused music to speak only to its own narrow social niche and
accordingly lack adventure or disruption. Both these diagnoses have the ring of
partial truth, but there’s something else going on; something that’s
unaccountable and even slightly mystical, in the sense that it feels
apocalyptic. Except that it’s the whimper-not-a-bang version of the end of
history, a relapse into lameness and inertia. One manifestation of the
slowing-down sensation that Finney observed is the way that 2007 didn’t feel that different from 2006, or even
2003. Whereas in the surge-phases of pop history, the differences between years
– between 1967 and 1968, or 1978 and 1979 – felt huge.
How would one go about measuring the rate of
innovation? This is culture we’re dealing with, not science; the slippery, soft
data of perceptions. One method might be look at genre formation – the arrival
of new sounds, scenes, subcultures, of the sort that are generally accepted as
a New Thing even by people who dislike the music. The Sixties gave us the beat
group explosion (white R&B Brits such as The Beatles, Stones, Kinks), along
with folk rock, psychedelia, soul, ska. Arguably even more fertile, the
Seventies spawned glam, prog, metal, funk, punk, roots reggae and dub, disco
and more. The Eighties maintained the pace with the arrival of rap, synthpop,
goth, house music, indie, dancehall. The Nineties saw rave culture and its
spiralling profusion of subgenres jostling for supremacy with grunge, while hip
hop’s continued full-tilt evolution led to the nu-R&B of Timbaland and all
who followed (including the UK’s 2-step garage explosion). Across these first
four decades of pop, added bustle came from the endless revivalisms that found
new life in styles that had been prematurely abandoned as pop hurtled
relentlessly forward into the future. Some of these seemingly backward-looking
movements – 2 Tone, for instance – became significant and ‘current’ in ways
that transcended retro-pastiche.
So how does this decade measure up? What genres
emerged that can be construed as genuinely new? Even the most generous
assessment of Noughties pop must surely conclude that the majority have either
been minor developments within established genres (eg emo, a melodic and
melodramatic form of punk) or they’ve been archive-raiding recombinant forms
(electroclash, freak-folk, neo-postpunk, and last year’s nu-rave debacle).
Grime and dubstep are exciting sounds but they are contained explosions within
a longstanding and settled post-rave tradition centred on London’s pirate radio scene. The
longer-established genres, meanwhile, seem to have hit a synchronised rut: rock
continues to graverob its own maggoty past, hip hop is stuck on an audio-video
treadmill of gangsta bling and scanty-clad booty, and electronic dance putters
through micro-trends that on close inspection turn out to be mere recyclings of
Nineties ideas.
So has everybody really
run out of ideas, simultaneously? And if so, why? It could be that we are
witnessing the music-cultural equivalent of an ecological crisis, the finite
resources of pop’s possibility as an arena having been mined to exhaustion.
(Finite, perhaps, until some new technology of extraction – sonic or
pharmacological – is invented.) Another possibility is that music has simply
been eclipsed by other forms of entertainment (game culture, for instance) and
no longer attracts the brightest minds. I’m not 100 per cent convinced: the
innately musical will always feel the pull of that particular art form. Then
again, pop has always been a hybrid form as much to do with lyrics, persona and
visuals as with sound alone; it is often pushed forward by conceptualist
non-musicians. If pop’s preeminence in the culture is slipping, a vicious circle
will set in of declining prestige followed by a decreased intake of lively
minds, on and on in ever-depleting cycles.
There’s another question to ask, though. Why does it
matter so much that pop music be in constant motion? There does seem to be a special
pressure, a historical burden, on pop that doesn’t apply to other art forms.
Experimental fiction, for instance, is a tiny ghetto within quality literature;
editors, critics and readers don’t anxiously wait for the next James Joyce or
Alain Robbe-Grillet, they’re looking for individual voices that bring something
relatively fresh to the novel, while by and large adhering to the traditional
values of narrative and naturalism, deftly drawn characters and dialogue.
At a certain point, the idea of the vanguard seems to
have lodged itself in rock culture, persisting there long after other art forms
had pensioned it off or problematised it. Modernism – the belief that art has
some kind of inherent evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through
genius artists and masterpieces that are ‘monuments to the future’ – filtered
into rock in large part thanks to the sheer number of art-school alumni who
formed bands. Perhaps, above all, it’s
the Beatles (whose ranks included art-school kid John Lennon) who are to blame.
Their astonishing run of creative growth – that four-year sprint from Rubber
Soul to the White Album – set the bar impossibly high for everybody who came
after, although musicians from Talking Heads to Radiohead did their damnedest
to match it.
Beyond just pop music, it’s the Sixties as an entire
epoch that contributes to the current sense of stasis. On every front of
culture – architecture, fashion, art, movies, sexuality, et al – that decade
was the era of the neophiliac. That’s conservative critic Christopher Booker’s
term for the Sixties mania for all things innovative and tradition-violating.
It is because the Sixties moved so fast that we judge today’s sluggishness and
nostalgia so harshly. Yet in a hideous irony, the 1960s are also the major
generative force behind retro culture. Through its hold on our imagination, its
charisma as a period, the decade that
constituted arguably the greatest eruption of new-ness in the entire 20th
century has turned into its opposite. Neophilia becomes necrophilia.
It’s as if we can’t get past this past. Hence the
endless Beatles/Stones/Dylan covers on magazines such as Mojo and Uncut, the
interminable repackaging of babyboomer music, the steady stream of biopics and
rock documentaries. Hence also the young bands picking at the already-ravaged
carcass of that era. You can’t blame them, in a way. Rock at that time had a
quality of happening-for-the-first-time freshness; it also felt like a force
for change. When young musicians today, like the bearded troubadours and
minstrel maidens of freak-folk – Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Animal
Collective – hark back to the Incredible String Band and Jefferson Airplane,
there is a poignancy to the impulse – a yearning to restore to music the importance
and power it seemingly enjoyed in that belle époque.
Perhaps, though, it’s high time to lay the Sixties to
rest, along with all its over-investments in music’s power and excessive
expectations for pop to be a non-stop rollercoaster of change. Our belief in
progress in general has been shaken badly recently – by the resurgence of
faith-based fundamentalisms, by global warming, by reports that social and
racial divisions are deteriorating rather than improving. If everything else
feels like it’s gone into reverse, how could poor old pop be immune?
Perhaps that’s why a different notion of music is
taking hold: not as the endlessly recharged shock of the new, but as a force
for continuity, a foundation of stability in a precarious world. From dubstep
to the new folk, a lot of today’s most rewarding music is based around the
durability of tradition and the strength of folk memory. Iconoclasm and
innovation have been supplanted by veneration and renovation – the role of the
artist is to make small but significant tweaks to long-established forms.
Interestingly, both ideas of the role of art were active in the Sixties.
Simultaneous with the impulse to voyage into the cosmic beyond and to
experiment with technology (amplification, the recording studio, effects),
ideas also circulated of going back (to childhood, or to simpler, rural ways of
life – ‘getting your head together in the country’), and a reverent
investigation of traditional forms of American and British music was undertaken
by everyone from Dylan to Fairport Convention.
As a diehard futurist who grew up during a period of
full-tilt innovation (postpunk) while also feeling an intense attraction to the
1960s, I’d find it a real struggle to jettison my belief in change as pop’s
core imperative. The future-rush of hearing music that seems to come out of
nowhere is addictive. To give it up would not just be difficult, it would feel
like a capitulation – learning to settle for less. But maybe we were all
hoodwinked by a historical aberration, a freak period of cultural tumult that
was really a side-effect of the economic boom and technological surge of the
post-war period. Rather than viewing history in terms of striding boldly into
the future, perhaps it’s more realistic to see it as something that moves forward
in stumbling fashion, with meandering digressions, pauses, and retracings of
footsteps. Certainly, there is little in current music that could sustain the
faith in pop as a vanguard. Today there is no cutting edge, just music: lots of
music, too much maybe, some of which feels like a vigorous if slight twist on
the familiar (Arctic Monkeys, say), and a far smaller ‘some’ that glitters like
the proverbial new thing under the sun.
Yet there’s a further scenario that is worth
considering, in which innovation is not so much over and done with as a ball
that’s out of our court. Perhaps it is only the West (in pop terms, the
Anglo-American pop/rock tradition) that is fatigued. Perhaps the Next Big Thing
will come, finally, from Asia or the Southern
Hemisphere. After all, China and India are set to be the economic/demographic
powerhouses of this century, and paradoxically these most ancient cultures feel
‘younger’ than ours at the moment. Ironically, that’s because, in a sense,
they’re still in the mid-20th century: the era of rampant industrialisation, of
hubris-laden state initiatives like massive dam projects (China is even
embarking on its own space missions, with other Asian countries soon to
follow).
It’s more than likely that the over-driven economic
metabolisms of these mega nations, in tandem with the social rifts and tensions
caused by uneven distribution of wealth and uncontrolled rates of change, will
generate all manner of interesting cultural and sub-cultural phenomena. Perhaps
it’s simply time for the West to… rest. For a bit.
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