Levitation / Slowdive / Blur
Melody Maker, late 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Slowdive - Levitation - Blur - live, 1991
Levitation / Slowdive / Blur
Melody Maker, late 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
dreampop a/k/a shoegaze
This year, the
most happening phenomenon in British alternative rock has been a wave of hazy
neo-psychedelic guitar groups, for which the UK rock press has yet to settle on
a label. Some critics call them "shoe-gazers", because of the groups'
onstage bashfulness. Others prefer the tag "The Scene That Celebrates
Itself": groups often fraternise together at each others' shows or at London 's Syndrome club. But perhaps the most
useful term is "dream-pop", as it evokes these groups' blurry,
blissful sound and "out of this world" aura. Currently, the key
dream-pop groups (My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Lush, Chapterhouse, Ride,
Swervedriver) have US
major label records already released or in the pipeline. As yet, records by
rising bands (Pale Saints, Boo Radleys, Moose, The Catherine Wheel, The
Telescopes) are only available as British imports, but may soon be picked up by
American labels.
Like all UK pop
'movements' (e.g. 1989/90's Manchester
scene), the groups in question tend to resent being lumped together. But
sufficient similarities exist to show that dream-pop is not a media
hallucination. Dream-pop groups combine nebulous, distorted guitars with
murmured vocals mixed so low that they're sometimes completely smudged into the
wall of noise. This dazed-and-confused style was pioneered by US groups like
Husker Du and Dinosaur Jr. But compared to their American forebears, the
British groups tend to be more fragile and androgynous, their swoony harmonies
reminescent of The Byrds or Love. Other influences include the ethereal
soundscapes of the Cocteau Twins, and the fractured "avant-garage"
rock of Sonic Youth.
Lyrically, dream-pop celebrates rapturous and transcendent experiences, using drug or mystical imagery. Disorientation and loss of self are both desired and feared. Love is either presented as a purely halcyon experience, or as a "chaos of desire" (My Bloody Valentine), in which subconscious undercurrents of violence surface. Other songs deal with bewilderment, desperation, and despondency. A common theme is the desire to transcend the drab confines of everyday life, by "going nowhere fast" (Ride's "Drive Blind", Swervedriver's "Sandblasted").
This yearning for escape or oblivion relates to the groups' socio-political environment. After 12 years of Conservative government, idealism and constructive political involvement seem futile. At the same time, dropping out is an increasingly unviable option. Struggling indie bands used to live off unemployment benefit. But during the Eighties, the government waged a war of attrition against this bohemian "dole culture", harassing claimants in order to pressurise them into join government training schemes. Now Prime Minister Major's government is attempting to make squatting (another refuge for impoverished musicians) illegal. As well as deteriotating living conditions, young indie bands suffer the "twentysomething" malaise that was widely discussed in the
Having grown up in the aftermath of punk, they're making abrasive guitar rock at a time when the mainstream is dominated by baby-boomer music. Confronted by a climate of circumscribed options, both politically and in terms of youth culture, dream-pop groups retreat from public life and long-term goals in order to look for transcendence in their private lives and the here-and-now. They're dreaming their lives away.
* * * * * * * * *
It was a London-based quartet called My Bloody Valentine who pioneered the dreampop sound. My Bloody Valentine rose to prominence in 1988 with two EP's, "You Made Me Realise" and "Feed Me With Your Kiss", and the album "Isn't Anything", which featured a self-invented technique the group's leader Kevin Shields calls "glide guitar". This involves "modulating the tone directly, using a tremolo arm, rather than processing it through effects". Instead of distinct riffs, the technique produces an amorphous drone that seems to swarm out of the speakers and envelop the listener, with an effect that's at once visceral and disembodied. The normal, direct correspondence between the players' physical gestures and the sounds produced is severed, to the extent that the group seem to disappear in their own music.
My Bloody Valentine developed this sound further on 1990's "Glider" EP. On the track "Soon," ghostly guitar harmonics and backing vocals hovered over a churning funk groove influenced by rap and acid house. ""The weird sampling on hip hop records was what encouraged us to attempt to create eerie effects on the guitar in the first place," says Mr Shields. "Soon" won the admiration of Brian Eno, who described it as "the vaguest music ever to have been a hit". Appropriately, their next EP "Tremolo" ventured even closer to Mr Eno's ambient music. On the blissfully disorientating "To Here Knows When", My Bloody Valentine sampled their own guitar feedback and played it on a keyboard. "Soon" and "To Here Knows When" both appear on the group's new album "Loveless" (Sire 26759-2), an ear-baffling tour de force of symphonic chaos that wholly justifies Mr Shields contention that "the electric guitar still contains an unexplored universe of noises."
Of the groups that emerged in My Bloody Valentines' wake, Slowdive are probably the most distinctive. Unfortunately, their debut album "Just For A Day" set for US release next January on SBK Records, doesn't display that originality as effectively as the British import-only EPs that precede it. Slowdive's sound is more serene than MBV. Relying heavily on effects pedals, the group unfurl billowing wafts of gauzy sound, amongst which nestle the pallid, demure vocals of Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell. Songs like "Shine", "Catch The Breeze" and "Morningrise" have an idyllic, pastoral air, doubtless inspired by the Oxfordshire countryside around the group's hometown. "Just For A Day" is suffused with an elegaic, sepia-tinted melancholy. Lyrically, there's a yearning for lost innocence. On their first EP, "Avalyn" turned Avalon (the Edenic "isle of apples" of Arthurian legend) into a girl's name. Mr Halstead confirms that many of the songs are about "evoking certain poignant moments that you hark back to nostalgically".
Slowdive belong to a new generation of British groups too young to remember punk rock. Mr Halstead talks of being more influenced by Pink Floyd than The Sex Pistols. Slowdive's formative pop experiences involve post-punk groups like The Cure and Siouxsie and The Banshees, whose arty approach was closer to Seventies progressive groups than punk's angry minimalism. Mr Halstead says Slowdive avoid social comment, hoping rather "to create something big and beautiful and sort of timeless." This art for art's sake approach has led some to dismiss Slowdive and other dreampopsters as apolitical, middle class aesthetes.
Two other groups, Ride and Chapterhouse, offer a neat-and-tidy, classical structured version of the My Bloody Valentine sound. Chapterhouse's "Whirlpool" (RCA/Dedicated 3006-2-R13) blended clinically layered guitars, fey vocals and groove-oriented rhythms, to become a
At the opposite end of the spectrum lies Swervedriver, the most Americanophile and least androgynous of the dreampop groups. Rooted in the "raw power" of
The problem for
the first wave of dreampop groups is that as their style has become
increasingly identifiable and marketable, they're having to compete with an
onrush of opportunistic imitators. Pioneers like My Bloody Valentine are
obliged to reinvent themselves again and again, in order to preserve their
uniqueness. It's the oldest story in rock'n'roll.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Scritti Politti
The journey of Scritti Politti is one of pop's strangest stories.
You don't need to know the back story to enjoy Scritti Politti music, its surface seductions are more than sufficient. But these drastically different--seemingly opposed--phases reflect back on each other revealingly. The mainstreamed Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85 makes you hear the latent poppiness trapped inside the "anguished racket" (Green's words) of those early EPs.
Equally, DIY-era songs like "Bibbly-O-Tek" provide the secret key to the later Scritti: they explain the melodic eerieness that persisted in hit singles like "Absolute" and point to a continuity of lyrical preoccupations: the struggle between utopian hope and paralyzing uncertainty, and Green's inexhaustible fascination with the slippery duplicity of language. “The weakest link in every chain/I always want to find it/The strongest words in each belief/To find out what’s behind it”, he crooned on “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”, the sublime 1981 pop-reggae tune that announced Scritti's new pop direction.
Talking about that single on the eve of its release and seeking to deflect any arguments from the diehard DIY crew that Scritti had gone "soft" in their embrace of pop's attractiveness and accessibility, Green suggested that there might be "a dirt, a criminality if you like, in sweetness itself". Early Scritti was shaped by a young intellectual's suspicion of pop's beauty as "false" and facile, and by a young Communist's disdain for pop as product. But at the cusp of the Seventies into the Eighties, Green decided, or realized, that beauty was never simple and that nothing could be stranger--or stronger-- than the purest of pop. Far from being trapped and travestied by its commodity form, pop music still somehow managed to speak of values and energies beyond capitalism.
Green became convinced that the commercial overground was where the action was, rather than the margins. But Scritti's movement towards the center wasn't really about subverting pop, on the lines of the fifth column, or militant entryists infiltrating mainstream political parties. Nor was it the "sugared pill" strategy of New Wave artists (like Paul Weller with The Style Council) who attempted to smuggle Messages and Protest into the charts via upful dance pop. Green didn't want to bring something from outside into pop; he wanted to get inside pop, learn its magic tricks, and exacerbate the turbulence and excess at play in even the mildest, outwardly innocuous pop tunes. For if you really listened to what was being proposed in a typical love song, you'd find delirium and delusion, addiction and idolatry.
Green reached his revelation through listening to contemporary black pop like Michael Jackson's Off The Wall and lover's rock (a silky, supersweet UK homegrown style of reggae making the charts with hits like Janet Kay's "Silly Games"). He'd also discovered Sixties and Seventies soul like Aretha Franklin and Stax, and rediscovered stuff he'd grown up with, like the Beatles and T. Rex. All these influences swirled inside Songs To Remember, the 1982 album that followed "The 'Sweetest Girl'" . Songs displayed an impressive mastery of the rhythmic idioms of funk, soul and reggae, while its production was deluxe compared to the DIY-era Scritsongs. But with lyrics referencing Wittgenstein or deconstruction (the deliciously jaunty country-tinged bop of "Jacques Derrida"), this wasn't the complete transition to pop just yet. Scritti were still not quite ready for Smash Hits.
So Green retooled Scritti again, hooking up with American synth whizzkid David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. He absorbed the Funk osmotically, through deep immersion in hip hop and the postdisco productions of Leon Sylvers, The System, and others. This new Scritti was all about the interface between syncopation and technology, about exploiting the unprecedented rhythmic intricacy and precision made possible by drum machines, sequencers and samplers. Paralleling Scritti’s mutation into sleek, streamlined machine-pop, Green devised a style of lyric writing that could pass for common-or-garden love songs. Embracing what he called "the generic empty parlance of pop"--the babble of "baby" and "girl" and "heaven"--he reveled in the sweet nothingness of the lover's discourse while cunningly working in extra fissures and voids.
Green also developed a voice to match the hall-of-mirrors dazzle of his new sound-and-vision: a falsetto that soared and swooned somewhere between man and woman, soul and machine. On Cupid & Psyche 85 Green almost sounds like he's been AutoTuned, fifteen years before the pitch-perfecting device hit the market.
The five singles from Cupid--"Wood Beez", "Absolute", inexplicable non-hit "Hypnotize", UK smash "The Word Girl", and US smash "Perfect Way"--stand as Scritti's peak, the completion of a most unlikely narrative arc. What followed in the years to come was fitful but always intriguing. Provision suffered from Green's realisation that having penetrated the pop mainstream, he didn't really enjoy being there, but still produced gems like "Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry for Loverboy)" and "Boom! There She Was" (featuring, respectively, cameos from Miles Davis and Zapp's Roger Troutman) . After a few years recuperation, Green recharged by plugging back into the Jamaican source that had nourished so much of his best and most successful songs, from "Skank Bloc Bologna" to "The Word Girl". In 1991 he reached the Top 20 with a delicious concoction of Scritti sweetness and ragga saltiness, when he persuaded dancehall king Shabba Ranks to guest on a cover of The Beatles's "She's A Woman".
A long silence ensued, lasting almost the rest of the 90s, largely filled with skateboarding and pub-going. At decade's end, Anomie & Bonhomie consummated Green's nigh-on 20 years love affair with hip hop: the album juxtaposed guest flows from American underground rappers with Green's renewed passion for guitar playing. Songs like "Brushed With Oil, Dusted with Powder" also marked a tentative shift towards a more personal style of lyric-writing that would blossom with the oblique confessionals of White Bread Black Beer, 2006's Green's glorious 2006 comeback, and a solo album in all but name. Unlike the final tracks on this compilation--"Day Late & A Dollar Short" and "A Place We Both Belong", which come from 2007 sessions with David Gamson and make you crave a full-blown reunion of the Cupid dream-team.
Over the years, Green has talked eloquently about the wrecking power of dance grooves, about how the softest music can be the most shattering. There are very few people out there who can come up with a concept like "the micropolitical effect of the goosebump" and also deliver such shivers and tingles through music. Looking back over the arc of Scritti's trajectory to date, the thought occurs that it's perfectly conceivable that the brilliant music and the brilliant ideas about music don't have any connection with each other: that the theory and the practice, the glossy music and the gloss Green puts on it all, actually come from different parts of his being altogether.
Green, naturally, and annoyingly, had that insight himself already. A long while ago, actually; in 1991, talking to Melody Maker, he argued that music has very little "to do with what the rational sensible side of you ever does. It's a lot to do with the unconscious, and the unconscious is an unruly fucking crowd.... It's always a magical thing, finding chords and tunes and the rest of it.... The theory just bumbles along after the unanswerable subconscious." Amen.
(sleevenotes for the Absolute compilation, 2011)
Bonus beats:
A friend of mine once asked me to "explain" Scritti - what exactly they were trying to do; why they mattered (to me, and generally); what governed and propelled the journey they went on, that strange leaping evolution... It's partly covered by the above, but some things are also clarified in a more chatty way in the "explanation" I offerred:
1979: Scritti's
scrawny, fractured sound and commitment to demystifying the means of musical
production have made them leaders of postpunk's do-it-yourself movement. Holed
up in a squalid squat in North London, the shadowy collective--drummer Tom
Morley, bassist Nial Jinks, singer/guitarist Green Gartside-- issue sporadic
communiqués to the wider world: sessions for John Peel's radio show, EPs
wrapped in grubby photocopied sleeves, and occasional appearances in the music
papers, where the theory-dense spiel of ideologue-in-chief Green is alternately
baffling and enthralling.
1983: Scritti have morphed into a pop group and romped their
way into the UK hit parade with the state-of-art electro-funk of "Wood
Beez" . Two years later, they complete the crossover triumph with "Perfect
Way", which reaches #11 in the Billboard singles chart. A band that took its name from a tome by the
Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and penned songs with titles like
"Hegemony" has penetrated the money-pumping heart of Pop Mammon.
You don't need to know the back story to enjoy Scritti Politti music, its surface seductions are more than sufficient. But these drastically different--seemingly opposed--phases reflect back on each other revealingly. The mainstreamed Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85 makes you hear the latent poppiness trapped inside the "anguished racket" (Green's words) of those early EPs.
Equally, DIY-era songs like "Bibbly-O-Tek" provide the secret key to the later Scritti: they explain the melodic eerieness that persisted in hit singles like "Absolute" and point to a continuity of lyrical preoccupations: the struggle between utopian hope and paralyzing uncertainty, and Green's inexhaustible fascination with the slippery duplicity of language. “The weakest link in every chain/I always want to find it/The strongest words in each belief/To find out what’s behind it”, he crooned on “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”, the sublime 1981 pop-reggae tune that announced Scritti's new pop direction.
Talking about that single on the eve of its release and seeking to deflect any arguments from the diehard DIY crew that Scritti had gone "soft" in their embrace of pop's attractiveness and accessibility, Green suggested that there might be "a dirt, a criminality if you like, in sweetness itself". Early Scritti was shaped by a young intellectual's suspicion of pop's beauty as "false" and facile, and by a young Communist's disdain for pop as product. But at the cusp of the Seventies into the Eighties, Green decided, or realized, that beauty was never simple and that nothing could be stranger--or stronger-- than the purest of pop. Far from being trapped and travestied by its commodity form, pop music still somehow managed to speak of values and energies beyond capitalism.
Green became convinced that the commercial overground was where the action was, rather than the margins. But Scritti's movement towards the center wasn't really about subverting pop, on the lines of the fifth column, or militant entryists infiltrating mainstream political parties. Nor was it the "sugared pill" strategy of New Wave artists (like Paul Weller with The Style Council) who attempted to smuggle Messages and Protest into the charts via upful dance pop. Green didn't want to bring something from outside into pop; he wanted to get inside pop, learn its magic tricks, and exacerbate the turbulence and excess at play in even the mildest, outwardly innocuous pop tunes. For if you really listened to what was being proposed in a typical love song, you'd find delirium and delusion, addiction and idolatry.
Green reached his revelation through listening to contemporary black pop like Michael Jackson's Off The Wall and lover's rock (a silky, supersweet UK homegrown style of reggae making the charts with hits like Janet Kay's "Silly Games"). He'd also discovered Sixties and Seventies soul like Aretha Franklin and Stax, and rediscovered stuff he'd grown up with, like the Beatles and T. Rex. All these influences swirled inside Songs To Remember, the 1982 album that followed "The 'Sweetest Girl'" . Songs displayed an impressive mastery of the rhythmic idioms of funk, soul and reggae, while its production was deluxe compared to the DIY-era Scritsongs. But with lyrics referencing Wittgenstein or deconstruction (the deliciously jaunty country-tinged bop of "Jacques Derrida"), this wasn't the complete transition to pop just yet. Scritti were still not quite ready for Smash Hits.
So Green retooled Scritti again, hooking up with American synth whizzkid David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. He absorbed the Funk osmotically, through deep immersion in hip hop and the postdisco productions of Leon Sylvers, The System, and others. This new Scritti was all about the interface between syncopation and technology, about exploiting the unprecedented rhythmic intricacy and precision made possible by drum machines, sequencers and samplers. Paralleling Scritti’s mutation into sleek, streamlined machine-pop, Green devised a style of lyric writing that could pass for common-or-garden love songs. Embracing what he called "the generic empty parlance of pop"--the babble of "baby" and "girl" and "heaven"--he reveled in the sweet nothingness of the lover's discourse while cunningly working in extra fissures and voids.
Green also developed a voice to match the hall-of-mirrors dazzle of his new sound-and-vision: a falsetto that soared and swooned somewhere between man and woman, soul and machine. On Cupid & Psyche 85 Green almost sounds like he's been AutoTuned, fifteen years before the pitch-perfecting device hit the market.
The five singles from Cupid--"Wood Beez", "Absolute", inexplicable non-hit "Hypnotize", UK smash "The Word Girl", and US smash "Perfect Way"--stand as Scritti's peak, the completion of a most unlikely narrative arc. What followed in the years to come was fitful but always intriguing. Provision suffered from Green's realisation that having penetrated the pop mainstream, he didn't really enjoy being there, but still produced gems like "Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry for Loverboy)" and "Boom! There She Was" (featuring, respectively, cameos from Miles Davis and Zapp's Roger Troutman) . After a few years recuperation, Green recharged by plugging back into the Jamaican source that had nourished so much of his best and most successful songs, from "Skank Bloc Bologna" to "The Word Girl". In 1991 he reached the Top 20 with a delicious concoction of Scritti sweetness and ragga saltiness, when he persuaded dancehall king Shabba Ranks to guest on a cover of The Beatles's "She's A Woman".
A long silence ensued, lasting almost the rest of the 90s, largely filled with skateboarding and pub-going. At decade's end, Anomie & Bonhomie consummated Green's nigh-on 20 years love affair with hip hop: the album juxtaposed guest flows from American underground rappers with Green's renewed passion for guitar playing. Songs like "Brushed With Oil, Dusted with Powder" also marked a tentative shift towards a more personal style of lyric-writing that would blossom with the oblique confessionals of White Bread Black Beer, 2006's Green's glorious 2006 comeback, and a solo album in all but name. Unlike the final tracks on this compilation--"Day Late & A Dollar Short" and "A Place We Both Belong", which come from 2007 sessions with David Gamson and make you crave a full-blown reunion of the Cupid dream-team.
Over the years, Green has talked eloquently about the wrecking power of dance grooves, about how the softest music can be the most shattering. There are very few people out there who can come up with a concept like "the micropolitical effect of the goosebump" and also deliver such shivers and tingles through music. Looking back over the arc of Scritti's trajectory to date, the thought occurs that it's perfectly conceivable that the brilliant music and the brilliant ideas about music don't have any connection with each other: that the theory and the practice, the glossy music and the gloss Green puts on it all, actually come from different parts of his being altogether.
Green, naturally, and annoyingly, had that insight himself already. A long while ago, actually; in 1991, talking to Melody Maker, he argued that music has very little "to do with what the rational sensible side of you ever does. It's a lot to do with the unconscious, and the unconscious is an unruly fucking crowd.... It's always a magical thing, finding chords and tunes and the rest of it.... The theory just bumbles along after the unanswerable subconscious." Amen.
(sleevenotes for the Absolute compilation, 2011)
Bonus beats:
A friend of mine once asked me to "explain" Scritti - what exactly they were trying to do; why they mattered (to me, and generally); what governed and propelled the journey they went on, that strange leaping evolution... It's partly covered by the above, but some things are also clarified in a more chatty way in the "explanation" I offerred:
I guess ‘consciousness raising’
might be one objective, very broadly
I think they went through a sort
of evolution, or dialectic or something
Scritti started out as Clash
type band, called The Against –
Very quickly realized the
problems with such a straightforward, sloganeering approach (preaching to the
converted, inanity etc) and switched to more complex lyrics and to music
that didn’t offer the simple satisfactions of anthemic rock
So the idea of the lyrics, and
all the discourse around the band (packaging, interviews) would be to start a
process of thought – a real critical engagement – in the listener
I suppose in a lot of ways like a
DIY update of Henry Cow, with all the sternness and forbiddingness but without
the virtuosity (did you read Totally Wired, the interview with Green I did, he
goes into this in some detail, and Henry Cow was one of the HUGE bands for him,
they actually ended up friends with the band until Chris Cutler was very
dismissive of punk’s antimusicality)
But Green was also into folk
music, English traditional music, Martin Carthy etc so some idea of the
people’s music is in there as well as the incredibly dense theory. And you hear
in in some of the chord changes and guitar textures, a bit of Carthy
And they were also directly
involved in Young Communist stuff, fund raiser gigs, anti-racism benefits as so
many were then
Then I think as the French
deconstruction etc started to have an impact he felt that the debates about
Marxism he wanted to see happen would never happen within the UK communist
party (despite presence of some of the people who started that magazine Living
Marxism, that were quite open to new approaches.... Desire/style... ‘New times’ was
their slogan)
But certainly from my own point
of view the early Scritti stuff was genuinely consciousness raising - in the
sense that the text on the back of the Peel Session EP, the page from the
imaginary book Scritto’s Republic, all that stuff about language as the prison
house of consciousness, it really had a big effect on my intellectual horizons. It was a cliche at that time for bands to say "if it only makes one person think about this issue, then..." - but this is an actual example of a band having that effect on an individual. On quite a few individuals, I suspect.
Equally it's true that ‘language’ as the
problematic was something in the postpunk air then, and even from people
like Costello circa Armed Forces and Trust and Imperial bedroom, there’s a lot
of stuff about language, words degraded, the mystifications of love
But it's because of Scritti I read Gramsci
So I think in the first phase Scritti, they were trying
to promote thought and critical engagement, the idea being also the creation of
an oppositional culture outside the competitive structures of mainstream pop
etc
As for DIY, they went through a
dialectic – starting with the basic idea that it is empowering and oppositional
to make your own music (DIY meets folk/the people’s music), it releases all
kinds of voices and opinions. Also that if you have something to say you
needn’t wait until you had the skills to put it over, the urgencies of the time
(political, cultural) meant you should speak now. hence e.g. Raincoats
Then quite soon Green felt like
DIY had become a gestural thing, a sort of empty enactment of self-empowerment
– especially with the cassette tapes movement, people putting really substandard stuff
or willfully silly music
So then there's a veer back to the idea of
talent, or at least of doing a really good job, making great sounding music,
actually trying to compete within the pop mainstream
But in among all of this is
ambition – the ego of Green - at first it hides behind
the collectivism façade, it’s sort of a “we”... but at a certain point it
breaks loose and he really want to make it, be recognized as the songwriter and
mainstay of the group, and have hits and compete with his peers
Says some very bitchy things
about his contemporaries, e.g. Martin Fry
But that explains the veer away
from DIY as well – when everybody does it (even if it’s a thing you’ve seemingly
called for and helped happen by propagandizing and providing info etc), you
don’t stand out anymore. And (if you’ve got a brain and musical gift like Green) you really want to stand out.
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