(a talk I gave at Harvard in 2012 at a conference on Art + Rock)
“When 'art' walks through the door, it's got 15 suitcases full of very smelly washing (ideas of 'geniuses', 'creativity', 'individualism', and the rest of it)...which as far as we're concerned is the kind of crap that just clutters up your back garden, and gets in the way when you want to go out…. There is an art-based conversation that is swamping our neighbourhood, right? It's detrimental to our practice…. [It’s] high-culturally derived hogwash, and it's dragging us down… Half the groups that are around at the moment are ex-art-college groups… You are on board a sinking ship--you're one hulk of a rotting carcass, whose language...y'know... don't chuck it over us, chum, because it's redolent of all things tedious, repressive and slimy.”
- art school graduate Green Gartside, speaking to the art journal Primary Sources on the International Performing Arts, 1979
"Iggy pretty much changed my life. I saw him in 1969, when I had been fooling around a bit with electronic music, but I was still basically a visual artist.... Out walks this androgynous figure, no shirt on, muscled. He was walking out telling everybody to go fuck themselves and he had this look in his eye, and this amazing body. It kicked into “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” then “1969,” and suddenly Iggy’s flying into the audience. Then he’s back onstage and cutting himself up with drumsticks and bleeding. The bass player is humping the guitar player with his bass. The whole set lasted 20 minutes maybe. Usually at rock shows they put on some rock’n’roll between the bands’ sets, but right after the the Stooges finished, whoever was in the sound booth put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. It was perfect, because what we had just seen was great art, and the person in the booth understood that.... I realized that, as a [visual] artist, I could either carry on down this road and be dishonest, or I had to make some moves. Whatever I was doing as an artist was insignificant at this point. That’s what got me moving in the direction of the music thing more intensely—because it was a vehicle for doing something more environmental than painting."
- Alan Vega, painter / light-sculptor and member of a New York artists collective
Lester Bangs, in conversation with Jim De Rogatis, 1982
LB: "Rolling Stone's Jon Landau was saying things at the time like every Glenn Campbell album, every Jerry Vale album, every Helen Reddy album, every Ann Murray album was a distinct piece of art which should not be looked at as a piece of product.
JdR: That's definitely against your theory, right? Rock is not art.
LB: Oh, I don't know. I double back on myself so much. There's the trash aesthetic and all that. The way I've written about the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison, of course it's art.
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Rock has never quite made its mind up about "art"
Is the status of “art” something to aspire towards, to claim and to seize in defiance of those who would judge rock’n’roll as so low it's beneath consideration?
Or is "art" precisely, for those same reasons, something to recoil from -- should the onset of artiness be feared as the point at which a vital lowliness begins to fade, the confinement or castration of an energy that is properly plebeian, out in the world in a radically democratic way?
In the rock’n’roll world, art often has negative connotations – suggestive a deficit of the visceral, effete conceptualism, dry detachment -- it suggests institutionalization, politeness...
Acceptance is equated with acceptability
Art is improving, it’s associated with education - whereas rock’n’roll should be closer to truancy, delinquency, the un-edifying.
In “What A Waste”, Ian Dury lists all the socially valuable careers he could have pursued but instead he chose to be a singer in a band, the Blockheads: “what a waste what a waste... rock’n’roll don’t mind” –
Yet Ian Dury studied at the Royal Court of Art, actually taught at various art colleges...
He’s just one of numerous literally art-schooled people in rock who’ve acted out an ambivalence towards art – John Lennon, Pete Townsend are others who have done many arty, pretentious things with rock, but also have at other times argued that the art discourse contaminates rock, weakens it, makes it pompous, addles it with self-consciousness
This distrust of art can be traced far back in the history of rock – almost to the moment at which rock acquired self-consciousness and aspired to being art.
There was a point at which rock’n’roll shed the “‘n roll” - people now talked of rock –and Dury and Lennon would come to see this shift as a tragic development.
Dury was obsessed with 50s rock’n’roll, worshipped Gene Vincent, hated hippies --– Lennon was totally the long haired hippy and then he decided psychedelia had been a huge mistake – he would revert back to rock’n’roll, a stylized recreation of 50s music in its purity and innocence.
The lost or shed "n’roll" signified a teenage orientation, as lack of adult sophistication lyrically and musically,
It refers back to when rock’n’roll in the Fifties sense was at once rawer and more showbiz -- the pre-Beatles rock’n’rollers carried themselves on TV and radio in a well-behaved way, said “sir” to the hosts, whereas Lennon was ironic, informal, surly – a bohemian,
As raw and rootsy as early rock’n’roll was, it was still largely entwined in the discourse of showbiz -- as the career of Elvis shows, the rebels collapse very rapidly into middle of the road entertainment.
Your typical 50s rock’n’roller didn’t see himself as an Artist but as an Artiste. The 'e' on the end is very significant. They saw themselves as entertainers, the groups wore stage outfits. Few of them were artistically autonomous in the way the Sixties rock era artists became: mostly they didn't write their own material and their managers pushed them towards light entertainment as soon as they could, becoming an all-round entertainer.
The move to “rock” in the mid-60s is an aspiration towards thematic maturity, a conception of lyrics as being a form of poetry or literature. But it's also about being artistically independent, in control. The band as an artist that is growing, evolving, questing -- whereas entertainers basically have a shtick that they stick with. An act.
This mid-Sixties art-ification was described scornfully by The Fall’s Mark E Smith, speaking to NME in 1981: ”when the students got hold of rock’n’roll, that’s when it started going downhill”
Prior to Beatlemania, middle class youth, even those who had loved rock’n’roll as teenagers believed that rock’n’roll was a fad that had faded away. When they went up to university in the early Sixties, they were either folkies or they were into jazz – these were the mature options
But then through the Beatles and the Stones and the electric Dylan, rock’n’roll returns in new improved form: the sound as raw as ever, but the attitude and content even more appealing through its poetic and arty qualities.
From approximately 1965 onwards, largely unchallenged until 1976, there followed an unbroken period in which there was a broad consensus that rock could be and should be Art -- the long reign of progressive rock, art rock, singer-songwriter and sophisto rock – steely dan, little feat, joni Mitchell, ry cooder, randy newman – even in something as seemingly lumpen as heavy metal you had the experimentations of led zeppelin, deep purple recording with a symphony orchestra -- the interpretations of what art was ranged from jethro tull to brian eno and all points in between, but the overall consensus was that rock was art, potentially at least.
But you had a tiny sect of dissidents – musicians as high profile as Lennon and barely known as Flamin Groovies. You had heretical critics.
The first pop writer to express a profound ambivalence about pop-as-art was Nik Cohn in Awopboloopbop abopbamboom, published in 1969 – but written in 1968, placing him ahead of the pack, although there had been a handful of dissenters from the acclaim for Sgt Pepper’s.
It’s The Beatles and Dylan above all that Cohn is most suspicious of . In his book he sounds regular notes of disquiet. Dylan, he concedes “has grown pop up, he has given it brains” but he pointedly declares that “in my own life the Monotones have meant more in one line of ‘book of love’ than Dylan did in the whole of Blonde on Blonde”
Revolver was a “a big step forward in ingenuity” but a “big step back in guts” and “ because everyone copied the Beatles, ‘that’s why there’s no more good fierce rock’n’roll music no more honest trash”. The posh Sunday newspapers—“ say they're Art... but after all, what's so great about Art? What does it have on Superpop?"
Superpop is Cohn’s superlative for everything from Little Richard to Phil Spector to his personal pet artist PJ Proby. In the final short chapter of Awopbop he contrasts Superpop with rock after its shed the ‘n roll
“What I’ve written about has been the rise and Fall of Superpop, the noise machine, and the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock’n’roll music. ... Superpop? It hasn’t been much, it’s been simple always, silly and vulgar and fake, and it has been a noise, that’s all. ... Superpop, it’s been like a continuing Western, it’s had that classic simplicity, the same power to turn cliché into myth. It’s had no mind of its own. All it’s ever done has been to catch currents, moods, teen obsessions, and freeze them in images. ... made giant caricatures of lust, violence, romance and revolt... it’s finished now, the first mindless explosion, and the second stage has begun..... Pop has split itself into factions. Part of it has a mind now, makes fine music. The other part is purely industrial, a bored and boring business like any other. “
This huge gulf that’s opened up within pop is a chasm between lowbrow and highbrow. It has reproduced within a once unified Superpop, aka rock’n’roll, the very division between high and low that had once consigned all of rock’n’roll to the category of junk, trash, mindless pabulum from the culture industry. The market now, he says, is 80 percent manufactured teenpop for AM radio and 20 percent progressive music for FM rock – semipopular music, in terms of its sales.
Cohn: “ In ten years, they’ll probably be called by another name entirely, electric music or something, and they’ll relate to pop the way that art movies relate to Hollywood...., you’ll have pop composers writing formal works for pop choirs, pop orchestras; you’ll have pop concerts held in halls and the audience all sat in rows, no screaming or stamping but applauding politely with their hands; you’ll have sounds and visuals combined, records that are played on something like a gramophone and TV set knocked intot one, the music creating picture and patterns; you’ll have cleverness of every kind imaginable. Myself, though, I’m not interested. Not that I have anything much against masterworks in principle but I’m hooked on image, on heroics. It’s like films – the best in art movies have no doubt been the most sensitive, brilliant and meaningful works of art, and where have I been? In the back row of the Roxy, of course, gawking at Hollywood. The art movie carries the quality and Hollywood carries the myth.”
So here Cohn aligns Superpop - in his view, true pop - with blockbuster movies, pulp entertainment made by the Hollywood system.
Cohn offers here a very early form of what is now known as poptimism or popism: a belief in the de facto superiority of “good honest pop product”, a trust in the major labels, who like the Hollywood system, to keep on churning out great entertainment precisely because they only care about money. Their output is sublimely uncontaminated with artistic intent, it aims only to thrill and distract - and get your dollar.
This is one of two ways that the art-ification of rock has been resisted.
The first, the Cohn stance, is basically pro-capitalist, it folds pop and rock back into showbiz, sees records as units of commodified pleasure, the performance as a spectacle. Performers and producers alike are seen as highly skilled professionals. There is a kind of cynical-realist integrity to this factory-line production of good honest commodified entertainment. You can consume without illusions about it being meaningful or the harbinger of revolution. A sort of almost gustatory honesty in the way the consumer consumes, enjoys, and then forgets. Pop is disposable.
The other anti-art view comes from a completely different, anti-capitalist angle: it is folk-ist. Authentic music emerges from the people organically, reflects the worldview and concerns of that community. It then gets co-opted and commodified and eventually weakened. Just as bad as selling out is when it gets gentrified. "Folk" ideology here is not necessarily tied to the formal properties of traditional music, to acoustic guitars and such. Folk-ism includes urban conceptions of the folk culture: notions like the streets, the ghetto, as represented in rap or certain kinds of dance music.
Around the same time as Cohn published Awopbopalop, a different dissenting view about rock-as-art was being formulated in America, not Superpop and if anything leaning to the folk view in so far as it valued a certain primal rawness. Lester Bangs was the major prophet here although there were others such as Greg Shaw whose Who Put the Bomp magazine was one of Bangs main outlets, the other being Creem magazine.
Creem dubbed itself "America's Only Rock'n'Roll Magazine" --a jibe at Rolling Stone -- while Who Put the Bomp!'s had the slogan "rock & roll, all rock & roll, and nothing but rock & roll" .
So that’s the reinstatement of the ‘n roll right there.
This vision of a return to rock‘n roll doesn’t have Nik Cohn’s mythic Hollywood Western pulp quality but it’s very teenage. Its a stylized, idealized version of adolescence, the inarticulate brutish juvenile delinquent – and a rejection of the introspective sensitivity of singer-songwriters such as James Taylor in favor of the two-dimensional cartoon of boredom and lust and aggression offered by The Stooges.
Celebrating Iggy Pop and his band, Bangs insisted that true rock'n'roll was "essentially adolescent music… it can't grow up"; he retrospectively celebrates the sixties garage bands he once despised and says that the bands he admired then, like the Yardbirds and the Who “ got ‘good’ and arty with subtle eccentric songs and fine philosophy...” This pales next to the Stooges debut LP and Funhouse whose raw power is “supermodern, though nothing near to Art”.
"Nothing near to Art" - like "art" is cooties, something to recoil from... a contaminant, a debilitator
For heretics like Bangs and Cohn, Sgt Pepper's was the sacred cow they aimed to slaughter. But ironically Lennon at the exact same time was moving in the same direction -- distancing himself from bourgie art and reinstating the ‘n’roll.
In the famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon equates Fifties rock’n’roll with reality, a raw truth that cut through both socialized pretence and artistic pretension. He asserts that nothing since has been better than simple 50s rock’n’roll and further, that the best Beatles stuff was in that vein: it was the music they made before they ever entered the recording studio – their live performances in Hamburg,
Lennon: "The best stuff is primitive and has no bullshit… It's not perverted or thought about."
What followed seemed to echo Hamlet’s mother exasperated suggestion to the verbose Polonius - “more matter, with less art”. So, the primal venting of the Plastic Ono band album, then a different form of plain speech, Some Time In New York City, lyrically blunt lyrics addressing sexism, racism, injustice, Northern Ireland, over gutbucket rock with no frills. Lennon here makes a folk ist argument for rock as the people’s music,anticipating the sloganeering side of punk that included Tom Robinson Band or CRASS.
Of course while he was going back to art-less rock’n’roll Lennon was up to all kind of arty shenanigans with Yoko both on record and in the public eye. And these hopelessly unresolved feelings about whether rock could or should be art anticipated a kind of vital identity crisis at the heart of punk – a movement containing a high proportion of art school people, manifesting artiness everywhere from the clothes to the graphic art of flyers and record covers to– yet often prone to anti-art and anti-intellectual rhetoric.
Malcolm McLaren is a good case study – a product of the British art school system, attending three different colleges during the 1960s, he talked retrospectively of punk and the Pistols as a gigantic art piece bearing his signature.
“Rather than just while away my time painting, I decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay,” he declared, airily.
Epating the bourgeoisie via the mass media was good art.
Yet when Johnny Rotten formed Public Image Ltd, its overt experimentalism was for McLaren a relapse into bad-art: 1970s-style progressive post-psychedelic music, which he loathed. Like Lennon and Ian Dury, he adored 50s rock’n’roll, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Postpunk was music for students.
Of PiL’s Metal Box, McLaren sneered “He's asking you to take a course in music before you understand it.”
Rock and roll, he said was "only a bloody Mickey Mouse medium really.” that was what was good about – its larger than life cartoon quality. An echo of Cohn’s Superpop vision.
McLaren would argue with increasing vehemence in years to come that Rotten had always been a closet hippy, an aesthete, and that the true Pistol was Steve Jones, working class, a petty criminal who stole the band’s gear by breaking into the backstage area of a Bowie concert –wonderfully symbolizing the McLaren idea of punk as the working class’s revenge against art rock
And also Sid Vicious, who had the ability to lose himself in a cartoon persona, become this mythic scale anti-hero,
Lydon himself was totally conflicted on the subject of art. In a 1978 interview he spat: “I hate art. I can’t stand it”. This despite having studied a course in art at a Further Education college. In the Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, Steve Jones described Lydon as “an intellectual" but he often mocked those who "intellectualized" things ( like Greil Marcus with his analysis of punk in Lipstick Traces). Lydon dismissed Situationism as "mind games for the muddled classes", a jibe not just at Marcus but at McLaren, fingered as the arty poseur trying to intrude fancy French theories into visceral rock’n’roll, and perhaps Pistols designer Jamie Reid, another art school product who probably professed to hate art.
The confusion comes I think from Lydon’s social background – working class, but encouraged by his mother to read from an early age, he was widely read, enjoyed taking exams, at the Further College Education college enjoyed talking to the teachers in the pub about Shakespeare. But at the same time a great wariness about becoming bourgeois, an exaggerated loyalty to one’s roots.
A similar kind of ambivalence is detectable in The Fall’s Mark E. Smith - both Smith and Lydon came from this abiding stratum in British society, this liminal zone where upper working class bleeds into lower middle class, a precarious zone but the source of so much of the exciting energy in British pop culture, the social bedrock of mod, glam, punk
So Smith, like Lydon is a supersharp autodidact, a bookworm , who never went to university. He left school to get a low level white collar clerical job as a clerk. Throughout the Fall’s career there’s on the one hand a self-taught artiness (Smiths’ lyrical influences include Wyndham Lewis, the band would collaborate with the avant-garde ballet dancer Michael Clark) and on the other perpetual sneering at their art school peers in postpunk, at music paper critics who over-intellectualise the band.
Early on The Fall actually had a song “Hey Student’ jeering at all the undergraduates in Manchester -- as well as typical working class contempt for freeloading students with generous grants it was a music taste based enmity. I read before the quote about “when the students got hold of rock’n’roll, that’s when it started going downhill” . Smith then pointed particularly towards the Soft Machine and their Canterbury scene cohorts. These were mainstays of the early Seventies college gig circuit; Canterbury itself is the British city with the densest number of colleges in the country.
However when Smith realized that most of the Falls fans were students he changed “Hey Student” to “Hey Racist” to fit the Rock Against Racism issues of the time. It was never recorded at the time of writing, but much later, for 1994’s Middle Class Revolt, “Hey Student” was resurrected: the old lyrics sneering at the students’s “long hair” were updated with references to Pearl Jam. (It's hardly the only example of studentphobia in rock).
What concerns Smith here is the eternal reopening of a social divide within rock – something that first rock’n’roll and then early-to-mid Sixties British beat music and mod, and then again punk had managed to bridge.
When this social divide opens up again it is invariably accompanied with the return of art discourse -- a classic instance is the split in mod between psychedelic artiness and the skinheads, who loved Jamaican ska, Northern Soul.
Psychedelia and progressive rock, then postpunk, and then in the 80s and 90s indie and alternative rock and shoegaze: this is the eternal breaking off a semi-popular, bourgeois form of rock. Exactly the same split that bothered Nik Cohn, although less in these social-political terms and more because the music he loved became enfeebled
As early as 1978, Mark E. Smith bemoaned an emerging chasm in the New Wave between arty intellectual bands (like Magazine) and “your headbanger bands for ordinary people.” A few years later, he argued that heavy metal was a healthier subculture than post-punk: metal kids didn’t spend all their time thinking about music. Attempting a kind of one-band reunification of the split halves of rock, Smiths’ vision for The Fall was a primitivist-modernism: they started drawing on rockabilly influences, talked of themselves as “a very retrogressive band in a lot of ways”, anything to short circuit there being enfolded in the progressive discourse of postpunk. "The band was attracting a lot of elitists, a lot of Eno-orientated crapheads”, Smith complained in one interview. Then there is the lyric that says "the experimental is now conventional".
Smith, like Lydon, was working class and, unlike Lydon, hadn’t dabbled in further education at all. But so powerful was the punk mythos of a reuniting of the classes through a stylized, dialectical reversion to rock’n’roll, that it had a powerful and enduring influence even on people who passed through the university system. Such as Greil Marcus, who wrote a whole essay called Against Art, launching off from a sneering stage comment by Penelope Houston of San Francisco punk band The Avengers after they’ve come on following the avant-garde percussion performer Zev has finished – " what do you call that anyway? I guess it was Aaaart"
Yet Houston was the daughter of an artist, she was studying at the San Francisco art institute. Marcus himself trained to be a professor and is no stranger to museums and exhibitions and symposiums. Nonetheless in “Against Art” Marcus talks approvingly about “the instinctive distrust of art by pop music “ which is rooted in “the perception that very little art has actually added anything to pop music”. The only exception he can think of is Andy Warhol’s Double and Triple Elvises
A similar idea is expressed by Bill Drummond, active in the postpunk era as a musician, record label runner, and manager– a former art school student himself,. In 1971 his mind was blown by a Warhol exhibition – but then he changed his mind and the last essay he wrote at art college before dropping out was ‘Why Andy Warhol is shite and the Beatles are fab’. If you got a single by the Beatles, your single was as good as anybody else’s. ‘Nobody’s copy is more original than your copy’. But Warhol was only painting the pictures of the Coca Cola bottles, whereas the Beatles are being the Coca Cola bottles. “
Warhol in the end was just the same as any artist, making singular artworks that then became collectable and valuable in the art market – pop music was radically democratic, mass production art. Warhol celebrated that –he once said “the idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is”—but cannily bottled it in a form that could play in high art and high society terms. In a sense Warhol made America play in European terms.
This antipathy to Art endured for Drummond - his late 80s/early 90s outfit The KLF had a run of huge chart success with various pranksterish and absurdist singles – then in the 1992 they quit and then mutated into the K Foundation, one of whose initiatives was to stage a parody of the Turner Prize for Art in Britain. In 1993 they presented a shortlist for their award for the worst piece of art, the shortlist being identical for the Turner’s shortlist for best work of art – and when Rachel Whiteread won her 20 thousand prize, the K Foundation gave her 40 thousand, drawn from the royalties of hits like “Justified and Ancient”
The KLF’s big Nineties hits were in a style they called “stadium house”, inspired by Drummond’s encounter with rave culture, in the UK was a youthquake on a par with punk or indeed early rock’n’roll. When I interviewed him in 1991 he talked of it in terms of a mass quasi-religious experience. But it was mass in another sense: for a moment there between 1988 and 1992, a music that united youth across class lines.
Although quite a bit younger than Drummond, my thinking is similarly shaped by punk, and my own baptismal immersion in rave culture, in 91 and 92, had a similar social-utopian dimension – the transcendence of class and race divisions in a new music that echoed the impact of rock’n’roll, mod, punk.... And the way it played out in terms of my subsequent critical writing on post-rave electronic dance music involved this same old strange dance around the idea of art.
Even as I joined the party, rave was starting to fragment, the split between headbanger beats for the proles and fancy music with arty aspirations that Mark E Smith complained about in the late 70s, that was reconstituting itself – despite my class and education, just through circumstances as a late arrival I found myself on the right side of the tracks, which is to say the wrong side of the tracks – captivated by the most lumpen, druggily hedonistic forms of rave – hardcore as it was known then
Discerning folk deemed it a debased mutant of true techno -- but I, semi-consciously following in the footsteps of Cohn and Bangs, celebrated hardcore with a mixture of defiance and doubt in my own taste. “Trash but I luvvit” is the phrase I used in the first substantial piece on ardkore I wrote, in The Wire, late 1992.
The idea was familiar: this impure, sub-music could access barbarian powers that surpassed the more accomplished forms of techno then emerging . But because of my knowledge of critical history I was totally aware that this was a Lester Bangs move – in some other writings I would invoke garage punk as an example of a once despised music that was subsequently vindicated as more prophetic of music’s future.
Nonetheless it was hard, so hard, to resist reaching for the Art word, for there was a deranged twisted complexity to the breakbeat editing and sinister atmospheres emerging in the music as it developed, It demanded recognition as an avant-garde.
The way around this fix for me was to imagine it as a street vanguard, ignorant of its own status as an avant-garde and all the better for that, more potent.
So I used the word avant-lumpen. For a while I used the term “artcore”, punning on hardcore.
Bbut then within a year, as the outside world partly thanks to this kind of rhetoric by me and a few others, accepted and indeed hailed the music – now known as jungle or drum’n’bass -- a self-conscious deepness and musicality began to change the music. I reversed on that move and looked again for the most lumpen, dancefloor functional, druggy sectors of the music -- soon I was using the word “art techno” as a mildly disdainful word for a kind of album oriented home listening designed electronic music that drew on some of the hardcore/jungle innovations but presented them in palatable or annoyingly quirky form.
In Energy Flash I have a chapter on that zone, called Fuck Dance Let’s Art, a reversal of the customary expression, about my ambivalent feelings about art techno, what would later be called Intelligent Dance Music.
I was hopelessly trying to arrest the development of the music, which to me felt like a weakening, vital rudeness turned to devitalized politeness – vibrant tastelessness reduced to inspid tastefulness. I was equally trying to shore up or recover a lost moment of unity that cut across class lines, also in the UK very much crossing racial divisions too.
I had found myself almost by accident inside a moment that was like punk, like the Beatles-Stones-Who moment, like rock’n’roll. “Art” was at once the accolade this music deserved, even the most trashy and ephemeral forms of it ( like chaotic pirate radio transmissions I taped and which I described in my rave history Energy Flash as among my absolute most precious and venerated cultural artifacts of the 20th Century) and yet art was also the downfall, the betrayal, a terrible branding burden.
"Art" then as we’ve seen has this peculiar reversible status.
It seems to fit the profile of what Frank Kogan calls Superwords
Kogan I should say is a classic example of the critic whose worldview is shaped by punk and is unable to resolve his feelings about art, on the one hand railing against what he calls the PBS-ification of rock, a creeping gentility, which led him to celebrate all kinds of teenpop and most recently the ultraplastic pop of South Korea. On the other hand he has compared the lyrics of Ashlee Simpson to the poetry of Dylan and Patti Smith.
The ‘superword’, explains Kogan is "a word that causes controversies, that gets fought over, that sometimes runs on ahead of its embodiments; a word that seems to jettison adherents"
Punk is a good example, a prize everyone is seeking to claim and define as they see it.
But “art” , in the rock context, is even more fraught than a superword
There is an attraction-repulsion syndrome that surrounds the term, in the rock discourse. Art is a birthright that you’ve been cheated of and that you chase, right up until the point it is acquired, when it is immediately renounced, it becomes toxic, repugnant.
Another way of looking at the role the word art plays in rock discourse is supplied by Donald Kuspit’s book The Dialectic of Decadence
According to Kuspit, “in modernity, every novel art is at first taken to be non-art, but once it is finally accepted as art – which it would not have been had it not been novel and uncanny enough to seem like non-art – it is understood to have failed or fallen short of Art as such, and is dismissed into art history” -
Decadence is a state of debility, the depletion of instinctual energy, and its replacement by irony, detachment, an over-developed sense of history. Hence the never-ending need for an influx of barbarian energy from "outside"
Art looks to non-art for renewal – as Warhol did with the images and trademarks of mass production and commerce.
In the beginning, all of rock’n’roll was on the right, which is to say, wrong side of the boundary – the non-art side -- trash, noise, jungle music, all rhythm– at once savage and industrial, raw like folk and manufactured like showbiz.
Then, in a triumph that is simultaneously a defeat, artistic value was conferred on it -- and so the ever-recurring need is to get beyond that pale again. Which is also to rejoin the real world, to get out there, away from the white walled rooms, and to merge with and transform everyday life – become plebeian.
Rock and pop still seem to figure as a repository of raw power in at least one place: the imagination of a number of contemporary artists, where it serves as the non-art reservoir that revitalizes their practice and staves off decadence.
For Retromania I interviewed the British reenactment duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
Their work includes restagings of rock gigs like the final Ziggy Stardust concerts, a Cramps gig at a mental asylum in California – Forsyth and Pollard were at pains to convey that they didn’t get inspiration from art but from music – they got into reenactments simply because they wanted to create an art work that had the visceral excitement of indie rock gigs – for them the rock gig is something like the situation as it figures in Situationist theory: not a passive spectacle but participatory, an event. To amp that up they were drawn to reenact the most event-like events, such as Bowie’s final concerts as Ziggy Stardust.
So why not form their own band, if rock has the power that art doesn’t? Well interestingly they said that they felt the art world had less strictures than the music industry, which is where they earn their living, working for a record label.
Another British artist expressing similar feelings is Elizabeth Price -- unlike Forsyth and Pollard she’s a former musician, but now she’s artist whose video installations borrow from advertising and pop sources like the Shangri Las, an influence on her own band Talulah Gosh. This recent video work was a reaction against boredom with her own work in installation and sculpture – she told The Wire magazine, “I was interested in doing something that had a less academic and polite address” . Most modern art is “cool, measured, it’s outside of things... it has no relation with the actual social lives we exist in” whereas a rock gig is “loud, it’s hot, you can smell other people’s bodies, you feel the bass in an embodied way... exactly the things that had been evacuated from art”
Price, Pollard, Forsyth, are all old enough to have come up through indie rock when it was still shaped by punk’s recent memory and its inherited value system – their idea of rock’s social power comes from a similar place to Frank Kogan’s or Greil Marcus’s or Bill Drummond’s.
But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk and of the mid-Sixties and rock’n’roll, has faded, so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...
Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable – the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of “fine music”, which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art.
One index of this shift has been the rise in the last decade of the term “curator” within left-field rock, I write about this in Retromania, how activities like selecting a compilation, or booking a festival, are now described as curation – in the underground you also have what I’ve called the ETSY-ification of rock, a micro-culture of limited edition releases with handcrafted packages, elitist both by necessity and by choice -- music that lies somewhere between art and the artisanal.
And then less obscurantist but still very much aimed at a discerning minority there has been the rise of NPR rock.
Kogan complained about the PBS-ification of rock, but NPR has become a huge force in alternative music, they are actually a driver of sales, they have preview streams of major Pitchfork-type albums on their website.
One of the NPR stations in LA, KCRW invented a programming template they called Morning Becomes Eclectic that has been super influential – the mix is alternative music, but not the noisy types --nearly always well produced, tasteful, and yes eclectic, made by new breed of band who draw on a whole wide world of influences and also all across music history – so they are both cosmopolitan and they have a rich sense of the music as heritage -- -- the presenters of the shows speak with calm, almost hushed tones, like the news program hosts on other NPR sentences.
When I listen to it I feel vaguely catered for, precisely targeted as a demographic –– and there’s a discomfort, similar to the feeling I’d get at art-techno events in the late 90s. I missed the vibe of raves but mainly I would feel restless because the last place I want to be is where I’m surrounded by people who are just like me
I can take about 30 minutes of KCRW and then I turn to the pop stations, the banging brainless club music that rules the top 40 and then when I start getting Adorno-like feelings about that ... I turn to the classic rock stations, where you can get music that at its best seems to like fragments of a lost unity -- but only because it is old music, very old music in some cases.
But the most interesting music of today seems to totally comfortable with seeing itself as art and as minority interest – along with “curation” as a model for music-making, there has been the rise of the concept-musician – not completely analogous to the conceptual artist, but there are certainly similarities - musicians like James Ferraro, Onehotrix Point Never, John Maus, artists on the Ghost Box label, invariably there’s a spiel accompanying each new release -- framing of the project is increasingly essential -- you’ll even get a group now and then that actually has a manifesto -- Prince Rama, a female duo who have this concept “ghost modernism” and composed a text entitled The Now Age: Meditations on Sound and the Architecture of Utopia
Another figure getting a lot of attention at the moment is Julia Holter, a CalArts raduate, whose electronic pop on albums like Tragedy and Ekstasis is informed by her interest in Greek tragedy and Medieval icons. Tragedy included a song called “Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art” while on her website she used to offer something she called HANDMADE THING, a CD-R and a sculpture for 25 dollars.
Increasingly with these zones of music, where micro-genres terms float by fleetingly such as chillwave and witch house – I can’t help thinking of Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word... there’s a sense that we’re heading into a place where the music can’t actually be enjoyed or even felt without the intervention of a concept. A certain kind of music-journalist and blogger loves this kind of thing, it gives them something to riff on and riff off - read some of the blogs and webzines that specialize in this area of music, like Tiny Mix Tapes and it reads a lot like prime period October.
Sometimes I’m one of those music journalist / bloggers and other times I feel a disquiet about where all this is going....
It’s an easy thing to fall into a mutual admiration mirror image syndrome --the new breed of concept musicians think like critics, you see -- Amanda Brown, who records as LA Vampires told me, "when I make music, I'm only interested in thematics. I think, "What do I want to present? I'm trying to make a certain statement. And that takes it out of emotionality and more into a cerebral place. 'Meaningful' becomes more of an adjective than 'soulful'. " Brown actually describes herself as "not a musician" but an "audio artist".
This sensibility is all the more striking because it’s emerged out of indie rock culture, which always leaned towards a shambolic lo-fi slacker aesthetic -- towards a vague populism, or at least “beautiful loser”-ism.
But the self-image of the audio artist appeals I think for a number of reasons. Doing this kind of music is almost never a livelihood these days – even putting out a large number of limited edition releases per year doesn’t generate much revenue
But the work gets a much wider listenership and critical and blog response through its being illegally shared and downloaded. So the prestige of being taken extremely seriously and widely talked about in some way compensates for the fact that is not a means of making a living.
Certain albums, like James Ferraro’s recent album Far Side Virtuality get discussed and talked about and regarded as momentous in a way that far out-stripped the record’s actual sales. Circulating through the blogosphere, it becomes almost like a virtual exhibition – something everyone has to have heard, in the same way that Christian Marclay’s The Clock has to be seen, if just for an hour or two, so you can participate in the cultural conversation.
But Marclay, operating properly in the art world, has actually monetized his art. The concept musicians I’m talking about are a long way from being able to do that – and at the same time, these artists have largely opted out of the traditional routes for rock bands to claw their way towards financial viability, the gig circuit.
The logic that you should expand your audience, that you should move from semipopular to real popularity, was once an ethical imperative, especially in the years following punk when the consequentiality of rock was restored, the sense that it had the power to change the world
That logic of out-reach was what seemed to push Sonic Youth, against their bohemian nature and their innate artiness, towards signing with Geffen - getting themselves onto MTV and playing bigger venues and rock festivals.
The modern day equivalents to Sonic Youth – these concept musicians and audio artists --seem reconciled to the idea of semi-popularity, culthood.
All those hang-ups about art have faded away.
The 'n’roll has long gone, and the rock is evaporating pretty fast too.
