Apropos of nothing

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. 

The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! 

Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly I was an early adopter.

Now one of the things that always mystified me back then was this idea that taking pop seriously was some sort of radically new gesture, a daring step forward into Enlightenment, leaving behind the Bad Old Days when Rockism had our minds in chains.

It always felt like a myth, this idea that before the pro-pop insurgency of the 2000s, music journalists universally treated pop with disdain; that there was never any enthusiasm or respect for artists operating in the commercial mainstream, no serious discussion of chartpop. 

I don't think this was even true in America, where generalism had long been a fairly established mode. But I know for sure that in the U.K. it was an utterly commonplace occurrence. For certain writers, it was a shtick, a specialist territory they set themselves up in. For others, it would be part of having a well-rounded approach to being both a fan/consumer and a commentator/thinker. 

So let's take a little journey into the Not-So-Dark Ages before poptimism came along to sort everything out. 

In the Nineties, on the UK music press, you often had people writing excited pieces about R&B, or all that Eurobeat pop-dance (Snap, etc). Sometimes, admittedly, with a contrarian, look-at-me aspect, to them. But the reason that that was irritating, from my point of view, was because there was absolutely nothing audaciously against-the-grain about taking a pro-pop position - either with specific instances of pop or the entire field. That  move was already well established, had an extensive history...



In the Eighties, New Pop emerged right at the start of the decade. There were two ideas here: that 

A/ it was cool and valid to "go pop" (the move made by ABC, Scritti Politti, New Order, Style Council, et al), and that

 B/ pop already contained great stuff  (all the glorious disco-funk of the era, for starters, but also things like Dollar, the mascot group for New Pop ideologues, the Annie/Robyn of their day ... You would even get writers sticking up for Bucks Fizz). 

New Pop thinking was virtually hegemonic on the rock press for some years, although it's true that the readership was not as taken with it as the writers. It's worth recalling that the term  "rockism" itself was coined in 1980, by Pete Wylie of Wah!, as a sort of auto-critique from within postpunk rock culture. It was propagated energetically by Paul Morley and others, and rapidly became the mindset of perhaps a score or more critics working on the rock weeklies and the new style magazines (where anti-rockism became dogma).  (I won't bring Smash Hits into the discussion - its only innovation was that arch, taking-nothing-too-seriously mode). 

NME's Richard Cook with a rave review for ABBA's best-of (1982)

But in the second half of the Eighties, even when there was a backlash within the rock weeklies and the post-postpunk scene against pop gloss -  a return to indie / underground values, to harder-darker and more abrasive music - the pro-pop move remained a stock critical maneuver. I remember colleagues speaking up for Aha, or Curiosity Killed the Cat, or Mel & Kim...  Pet Shop Boys were widely lauded... Everyone liked Janet Jackson...   I'm sure I made that move a few times myself. 

As for black music, it was very much on the inkie weeklies menu  - hip hop, funk, reggae, a bit of R&B, some jazz... African music in quite a big way. Even Sounds covered reggae regularly and surprisingly thoroughly, given its image as an Oi! / heavy metal paper..

In the Seventies - the period that you'd probably imagine to be the absolute darkest age of rockism - the UK music press was actually catholic and remarkably comprehensive in its coverage. The weeklies conceived of themselves as music newspapers (Melody Maker, in the early 70s, was based in Fleet Street) with an interest (in both senses of the word) in reporting and analysing everything. It was their job. So Melody Maker - according to received wisdom the "progressive paper" - would routinely cover things like Osmondmania, David Cassidy, the Jackson Five, Isaac Hayes, early disco, etc, with depth, intelligence, and respect - alongside all the things you'd expect (Hatfield and the North, Steeleye Span,  Nucleus). One week, there'd be a centre spread on Stockhausen or Sun Ra; the next a 4000 word investigation into the top producers of teenybop, or a report on the new boom for fan clubs. 

Oh look, this has just popped up at Rock's Back Pages - the late Colin Irwin, who did the folk column in Melody Maker, does a report on the funk scene at clubs like Lacy Lady and with deejays like Chris Hill (RIP). This is in 1976, three or four full years before Danny Baker would make much rhetorical hay at NME out of how the true working class Britfunk scene isn't A Certain Ratio / Gang of Four but the jazz-funk scene with its All-Dayers and Weekenders as hosted by Hill and other jocks. 

Both NME and Melody Maker reported on Northern Soul - Sounds I'm almost certain did too. "If it moves, cover it".

MM's Richard Williams wrote circa 1976 one of the most perceptive pieces about dub reggae and its revolutionary implications. 

There were also individual writers who -  as the Richard Williams Melody Maker rave review of Gary Glitter below shows -   would sometimes put forth the against-the-grain arguments so familiar to us from the poptimistic kerfuffle of the 2000s.  

The NME was just as expansive: even during the sombre height of postpunk, they'd run cover stories on Michael Jackson and Giorgio Moroder, big features on Earth Wind and Fire and Chic...  as mentioned Danny Baker's enthused reports on the UK's burgeoning jazz-funk scene... passionate and informed coverage of reggae from roots 'n' dub to lover's rock ...  an appreciation of Abba... 

I'm not so familiar with the US rock press of the 1970s but I have seen a fair few issues of Creem, and in there you will find writers making arguments celebrating, say, The Sweet, in terms of pure pop excitement, brilliantly effective if  manufactured thrills, etc.  

In the Sixties... well, rock criticism is nascent and unformed at that point, so I'm not sure there's a rock/pop divide clearly marked such that people could dramatise themselves around it. People tended to use 'rock' and 'pop' interchangeably.  

Still, there is an argument  for seeing Nik Cohn as the Original Poptimist, albeit a gloomy one in so far as he thinks Pop's energy flash and pulp heroics have been stifled by the pompous self-seriousness of Rock. 

It is notable that the first two major youth-music books by British writers both use the word "pop" in their titles: Cohn's Pop From the Beginning, and George Melly's Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts. Also worth noting, as regards differences between the UK and the USA: Cohn's book was retitled for the American market as Rock From the Beginning. 

Perhaps the battle the poptimists keep on fighting is a America-specific problem that regenerates itself perennially;  whereas the battle never needed to be fought in the U.K. in so far as pop has historically not - most of the time -  been a dirty word, a synonym for phony and fabricated - at least for most sensible people. 

So, essentially, the pro-pop approach - in both its attention-seeking mode and conscientious fair-minded generalist mode - has a history going back over fifty years, at least - possibly longer.  

It's easy to see why the notion of a Dark Ages would be appealing, should you fancy seeing yourself - or  being seen - as a light-bringer, someone on the side of Right: boldly rectifying longstanding injustices, and breaking new intellectual ground in the process too ...  

But this narrative is, to a startling degree, a myth. 

Williams making the "don't knock the greasy kids's stuff" move - and even in '72, far from the first to do it.

the trash aesthete move - Glitter can't be denied "except by impossible snobs who lack any real feeling for rubbish"

"he does it to those kids in just the way they want it done" is unfortunate language, with hindsight... 

Prototype Thoughts on Melody Maker (late 60s / early 70s incarnation) as the Original Poptimist Paper (or at least, the Original Generalist Paper). The key general point is this, which possibly explains the rise of poptimism at the start of the 2000s as a response to a narrowing of focus in the UK music press (coupled also with the rise of a Pitchfork in its then indie-ist form): 

... By the mid-90s, music magazine publishing had fragmented so much that this kind of catholic comprehensiveness was no longer tenable. When the music weeklies didn't have hardly any rivals, they could cover rock but also its adjacent genres - soul, dance, etc. But as time went by they got less and less benefit from these attempts at being comprehensive. Their core readership wasn't interested, or was actively turned off; meanwhile, the genre-ist fans gravitated towards the the genre-ist magazines.

....It's considered righteous for people to criticise NME.... or the early, pre-reformed Pitchfork for their failures to cover certain genres, or when they did cover them, lambast them for doing it in a tokenistic way, or for imposing their own rockist biases. Failing to "understand them on their own terms".... 

But you never got hordes of rocktimists railing against The Source or Vibe for their failure to cover Queens of the Stone Age or Arcade Fire, did you?    Nobody ever expected Smash Hits to take on Terrorizer or The Wire type music. No one thinks less of Mixmag and DJ for their lack of "engagement" with indie.  Did Blues and Soul ever put MBV on its front cover, like MM put Bobby Brown on its?...  

It was totally fine for all those magazines to base their coverage on calculations about what their market was, what their readership was interested in.  Yet the accusation of incomplete catholicity always get leveled at the rock magazines. The onus is on rock criticism. 

Head Over Heels about "shitpost-modernism"

Gutted about what's happened to Pitchfork.

Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run. 

One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".

One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.

In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon.  And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.

On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarily anguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points: 

"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects.... What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen.....  I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight....  In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"

Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.

RIP Cass Davies

...  of Furious Pig, of course!

From the C81 cassette compilation - must have listened to this dozens of times in my life.

Not listened to their one actual release, this EP on Rough Trade, quite as often, I confess

Another version of "Bare Pork" that has the bit on them from the booklet the NME did as a spread inside the paper,  for you to pull-out and fold-up to go with the compilation (except that when folded up, it was just a little too thick to fit comfortably in the cassette shell) 

There's actually a live document, which  - unless I'm misunderstanding the label - looks like it came out on the Japanese postpunk label Vanity. 

Remembering Furious Pig during the writing of Rip It Up was one of the things that led me to the still ongoing and endless interest in Mouth Music and Extremism of the Human Voice. Viz, this post from 2003: 

"Talking of voices, how come there isn't a compilation or even a box-set (and maybe there is and I just don't know about it) of free vocal music, extremists of the human voice? Ideally vocal performances unaccompanied by music, or at least not mediated by technology and studio techniques (you could have a whole other compilation of that stuff: "Starsailor"). You could have one disc for the avant-classical lineage: the Dadaists and bruitism, Ligeti's choral stuff (as per 2001: A Space Odyssey), Cathy Berberian singing Berio, Stockhausen's Stimmung, Meredith Monk. Another disc for out-jazz: Patty Waters, there must be shitloads of other freeform vocalese types I don't know about. (Question: why does most free jazz leave me cold when it's instruments but is totally enthralling when it's the larynx?). A third disc for edge-of-rock: Diamanda Galas, Yoko Ono, live tapes of Buckley disastrously touring the Starsailor material, Furious Pig (this great Rough Trade vocals-only outfit, did one EP for the label, had a track on C81--sounded a bit like the Pop Group as barbershop quartet, grunts and howls and infra-human mewlings, they were inspired by pygmy music), Arto Lindsay's Christmas Rose Choir. And disc four would be like world music: Inuit plainsong (there was a disappointing CD of this stuff out on Sub Rosa I think it was a few years ago, but I remember an Eskimo field-recording LP a friend had in the early Eighties, amazing breath-pulse duets that sounded like DAF or something, then they'd burst out giggling after two minutes), Tuvan throat-singing, Pygmy monkey-chant.... This is all just scratching the surface I'm sure, suggestions welcome."

So who were Furious Pig, then? 

In the words of member Stephen Kent:

"Furious Pig was a group that emerged out of the High School experiences of a group of friends and relations in Totnes, a little town in South Devon, England. Influenced by listening to an eclectic mix of early Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Beatles, Ethiopian Polyphonic chants, The Doors, Stravinsky and Edgar Varese, among other things, we moved to London in 1979 a year after reaching the final of the National 'Melody Maker' Rock/Folk Contest - an event at which the judges included Bob Geldof, Justin Hayward [of the Moody Blues] and Ray Coleman [editor of Melody Maker]. Needless to say Furious Pig didn't win with their stirring renditions of 'I'm Going Round the Bend' and the jarring 'In Order of Height' but Bob Geldof said we'd 'Gotta Lotta Bottle'[Nerve] playing what we played. Squatting in houses around North London we developed a form of intense acapella vocal chanting, highly orchestrated with choreographed passages. It became a cult sensation on the London and N.European club scene. We toured on the bill with bands like This Heat, The Raincoats, Pere Ubu, The Slits, The Fall, The TV Personalities. We played on the streets, in clubs, pubs, schools. At the Comic Strip in Soho we were a regular music act - playing alongside all the comedians who became 'The Young Ones' and 'Absolutely Fabulous' on TV. We scored a live soundtrack to a William Burroughs book, 'The Wild Boys'. Our session on Radio 1 DJ John Peels show so divided the listenership between those who loved and those who loathed our music that it was repeated in record time. We'd spend 8 hours a day for months working on extending our vocal ranges, often in grotesque and hilarious ways - we had fun! Rough Trade Records got us into the studio and we recorded a vocal set including versions of 'I Don't Like Your Face', 'Jonny So Long' and the 'Kingmother'. I always regretted not recording 'Frozen Tarzan' with its alternating Shouting Through Cardboard Tubes and simply Shouting choreography and its Rolling On The Floor section. However, tapes do exist......

"Furious Pig came to an end when I left to become MD of Circus Oz in Australia. However all the other band members continued recording careers: Martin Kent aka Martin Pig with a series of singles on Rough Trade and Dominic Weeks and Cass Davies with two full length LP's on Recommended Records: Het - 'Lets Het' and another with French chanteuse Hermine."

This next chunk o' commentary seems to be from somewhere else (I've taken it from an older Hardly Baked blog entry) but who knows.... 

"This is an ensemble of male vocalists from England who created their own eccentric concept of experimental music using only voices, even though there was a fair amount of existing work in this vein, mostly in the academic world (e.g. Joan LaBarbara), but also stuff like Linda Sharrock and Jeanne Lee.  This has a grass roots punk/cabaret/comedy aspect and offers both fun and musical substance. They clearly worked out a lot of creative, rehearsed parts for these maniacal songs, so it's not just some guys acting goofy.... "I Don't Like Your Face" has a large section based on Balinese kecak, which is always a good thing!  There are connections between this project and other important early 80s creative music from England like Het and Hermine Demoriane. They played on bills with This Heat, etc.  It's a fabulous slice of underground music history.

""A friend said upon hearing them for the first time: '...it’s like The Manhattan Transfer went insane and recorded music in the plough of the sicker Fugs, dis-harmonizing cries and yelps in a studio with windows left open toward the farmyard.'"

Quoth Stephen, "Tapes do exist" - someone should release them!

As Kent mentioned, after Furious Pig, Cass Davies and Dominic Weeks formed Het and in 1984 released the album Let's Het, through Woof Records (formed by ex-Henry Cow man Tim Hodgkinson + his partner in The Work, Bill Gilonis)

Here's the whole album, it's rather good - slightly closer to "palatable"

Stephen Kent, meanwhile, would form Lights in a Fat City, which I actually reviewed live at the ICA, unaware of any connection to Furious Pig. 

 

April 8, 1989, Melody Maker

Seem to remember the album didn't quite capture the live experience. 

And then it seems - and it makes sense - that Lights in A Fat City found their way into that whole Club Dog zone 

The missing link between 23 Skidoo and Loop Guru.

I had great fun chatting with the Rock's Backpages crew - Barney Hoskyns, Mark Pringle, Jasper Murison-Bowie - for this week's RBP Podcast.  We talked about the UK music press and my time on Melody Maker, about Bob Stanley and Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha, about Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement and a whole bunch of other things including the late Lee Perry and the late Charlie Watts.  

This week at Rock's Backpages, there's also a spotlight on some of my archival pieces, including a review of the 1987 Monsters of Rock Castle Donington festival, an appreciation of Joy Division based around the film Control, and "Worth Their Wait", a tribute to the print music press of yesteryear,  There's also a 1991 piece of mine on Saint Etienne as part of their St Et spotlight, linked to their new album I've Been Trying To Tell You. 

They also have a piece on mine of roots and dub reggae as part of their Lee Perry tribute. 

painted into a corner

Recently I read Janet Malcolm's famous New Yorker piece "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" - after her death, someone had tweeted a scan of the first two pages, which misled me into thinking it was a profile of the art critic Rosalind Krauss (a figure who radiates intellectual glamour - albeit not quite enough to get me to read the two books I've bought of hers, as of yet). 

Of course it's not about Krauss, it's a profile of Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy and a trek through the microworld of artists, curators, dealers and critics in 1980s New York.  It's incredibly sharply observed and acerbic stuff. 

One thing that struck me is how that whole milieu with its factions, feuds, spats and schisms resembled another microworld - you guessed it, music criticism. Not in the details or the ideological stakes, and certainly not in the status and money involved, but there seemed to be correspondences in terms of the rhetorical intensities, the investments, the stances struck, the personality types, the bitchiness.

I was particularly taken by a section where Malcolm talks with Carter Ratcliff, who wrote for Artforum and Art in America, and the conversation turns to the flamboyant critic Rene Ricard, whose approach was so different from Ratcliff's cool, dispassionate, historically well-informed way of going about things. (The reference to deAk is to another Artforum critic, Edit deAk, renowned for her fractured and elliptical style).

  

Reading that passage, it occurred to me that the Ricard approach - what Ratcliff elsewhere describes as a "sort of ecstatic, fanlike involvement... with one thing or another from moment to moment", and which was marginal within the world of art criticism -  occupied a much larger and more central place in  Anglosphere music writing -  and particularly in the U.K.  Such that the Ratcliff mode (deep historical knowledge, understanding of the craft side of making artworks, etc) was the more unusual occurrence, represented within British rock writing by figures like Ian MacDonald and a few others.  

"These gestures he makes in the vicinity of the new painting" seems like something that could be said of a certain breed and lineage of rock writer prone to an oracular, frothing-over mode of testifying, in which wild claims and far-fetched connections might be asserted that had little to do with the intentions or concerns of the artist. 

Another section in "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" also seemed to have a possibly discomfiting resemblance to certain phases of certain music papers. This time it's the critics Thomas McEvilly and Max Kozloff who are speaking:

Fortunately the weekly music papers - being so large and coming out so frequently and therefore having so much space to fill -  were almost forced  to be pluralist.  Unlike a monthly periodical with smaller space and a tighter coterie of writers, such as  '70s Artforum or October, the journal founded by Krauss and others who quit Artforum after an ideological rift. But also unlike a music fanzine. Of necessity, just to fill up the pages on a weekly basis, each music paper accommodated many voices. Consensus was harder to marshal except at exceptional moments of urgency in music history, like punk.  And even then, there were other kinds of music that needed to be covered - the established music scene and older bands didn't just cease to exist punctually with the arrival of punk, they kept on putting out records and touring. And there were genres completely outside the Old Wave / New Wave rock narrative. 

The closest thing to 1970s Artforum in music paper history I can think of is NME's almost-total exclusion of New Wave of British Heavy Metal and Oi! from coverage. But even then, it wasn't like the paper was 100 % post-punk. *

Also fortunately, even those music writers with I-Be-the-Prophet traits, tended to be more plural in their tastes. The  fast-moving, ever-changing nature of the music scene would usually buffet them out of their tunnel-vision fixity, forcing a rethink. Or they might simply be attracted by different scenes/sounds at the same time, requiring the suppleness to entertain different value-schemes simultaneously, oscillating between ideas from piece to piece.  

                                                      

Still, I have to say (and here's where the forbidding intellectual glamour of Krauss comes in) I can't help but admire, still, this drive to totalize the field of current art production, to create a shapely picture that shoves the irrelevant to one side and projects a forward path through the mess. 

Because nothing's lamer or less useful really than eclecticism - liking a bit of this, liking a bit of that, for quite different reasons. Someone operating as a critic from that sort of non-stance, however neat their turn of phrase or sharp their sporadic insights...  it seems like a bit of a cop out really. I mean, from what basis do you issue your opinions?  If you've not mustered the will and determination and sense of purpose to formulate a system, or even a coherent perspective, why then should I put any credence in what is really just a random succession of reactions and judgements?   

It's a career path, though, for sure.... 

Someone once quipped of me - this was at the peak of my MBV/AR Kane/first-phase post-rock belief in the becoming-abstract destiny of electric guitar music,  the figurative focus of the human voice disappearing into rippling bliss-folds, texture >text - that I was in danger of becoming the Clement Greenberg of rock crit. Now I had not heard of Greenberg, so quickly acquainted myself with the precepts -  and concluded that this was simultaneously a high compliment and a sly and savagely on-point insult. (And perhaps a sage bit of advice, a friendly warning).

Luckily, rave came along to knock me out of that particular loop and into a different orbit...  

* Belatedly recalled this comment made to me by Andy Gill, who wrote and edited for NME during the postpunk / new pop / soulboys versus indie era: "We used to have editorial meetings at NME - they were ghastly affairs, arguments about genres and which things should be covered and which things should be ignored. I would be thinking 'we should just cover all of this'. I could never understand the factionalism, and the absolutist nature of the factionalism".

But I suppose what I'm saying is, "I did  - and still do - understand the factionalism, and the absolutist nature of the factionalism. Wouldn't necessarily want to live there anymore... but I also know it gets results".