spinoff

The vacuity of modern popular culture dawned on this Spinoffite this morning. There was no special reason for this damascene moment (which occurred on, of all things, Blackfriars Bridge). It dropped out of a clear blue sky, unprompted. At the centre of this problem – if indeed cultural vacuums like this can be said to have centres – is a pervading sense that everything presented as entertainment in today’s society is a debased version of something that previously had value. Sitting there on the train from Herne Hill the feeling suddenly dawned of being surrounded by a wall of 'accelerated talentlessness'. Music is a good example.

 

If we are looking for the start point of 20th century popular music, then we could do a lot worse than look to a man called WC Handy. His name is, all things considered, not all that well known, but nevertheless he is significant for being the first person to write a blues, and then publish the notes in sheet music form. So whereas previously the blues had been couched in an oral tradition, this was the first time such music had been codified, in turn allowing Handy to make money out of his song above and beyond collecting door receipts at performances. Thus, the publication in 1912 of “Memphis Blues,” can be taken as the beginning of the music industry as we know it.

 

Blues underlies all popular musical forms that have cropped up since. Blues led to r’n'b, (poor imitations of 1950s and 1960s r’n’b bands by Caribbean musicians led to a distinctly flavoured style of music named ska, which in turn gave way to rock steady, reggae and dancehall). Back in the US, r’n’b then led to rock and roll (eg.Chuck Berry), which led to rock (eg.Led Zeppelin) which then led on to punk, then new wave, metal, sports metal, thrash, hardcore and all the rest of it.

 

On the other side of the family tree, blues, combined with a healthy dose of gospel, led to soul, which led to funk, which led to disco, which gave us on the one hand hip hop and on the other house music which in turn led to techno, which led to breakbeat techno, which led to drum and bass, which led to grime. Hip hop has since been refined into rnb (that name reprised from the earlier form of music) which now stands as the most commercially viable of all the popular forms, and is currently being flogged by everyone from X Factor contestants to Snoop Dogg.

 

The origins of jazz, however, are less certain and for this reason it has been left out of the above family tree. One explanation for the birth of jazz is that the goings-on in wild west saloons saw a huge amount of shot-up pianos being sold second hand to musicians in the east looking for cheap instruments. Those pianists were forced to syncopate their playing to account of the dud notes and hence the jazz swing was born. Other people attribute the birth of jazz to pure drunkenness. There are myriad theories, all of them as dubious as these – but whatever the origin of jazz, it is certain that it shares profound links with blues and was deeply influenced by it, from the old-time Louis Armstrong days of "Basin Street Blues," right up to the sharp-suited art school chic of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” and beyond.

 

Blues has dictated the melodic, structural and tonal make up of all western popular music. The most significant of its structural gifts has been that of the minor pentatonic scale, still referred to widely as “the blues scale.” This structure is the frame around which the blues is swung, (though the major pentatonic is also used, appearing most often in country or country blues). As its name suggests the pentatonic scale it is a simple five note progression repeated continuously up the stave. In the key of A, say, the minor pentatonic is A, C, D, E, G. This note shape and the chord structures that will compliment music in this mode have formed an unconscious orthodoxy so familiar to the modern ear, that to stray from it is almost unthinkable. Even Louis Armstrong, on hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, denounced be-bop as “Chinese music,” for the liberties it took with the melodic conventions that the blues laid down.

 

As well as the structural elements of blues, stylistic elements have also survived. When we look at a contemporary band, say Franz Ferdinand, we are essentially seeing an electric blues band line-up - drums, bass, guitar and voice - that has remained unchanged since blues went electric in Chicago in the ‘40s. The vocal themes of dancing, sex, good times, drinking, hard times and the bad, dark side haven’t changed that much either. As well as lyrically and melodically, the musical structure has also remained relatively unchanged. The repeated “verse chorus verse” formula is a structure which was to a great extent cemented in place by Robert Johnson, the man who took the 12-bar approach and who performed it with such panache, such style and such heart that from that moment on any music that wasn't in a time frame with a four in it somewhere, sounded simply wrong.

 

This internal repetition is a product of the environment that nurtured the blues. Blues derives from work songs. Slave songs – music to hammer rocks to, with the repetitive rise and fall of the mallet becoming the repeated lines of song. It’s not hard to imagine one man in the chain-gang leading the singing – the bandleader – and the others joining in at the end of each line with the refrain. And once we are imagining this, we are looking back to the birth of the verse and the chorus. As such, popular music was shaped under the whip.

 

Work songs echo through the early blues recordings, recordings that retain the ability to shock, enthral and captivate. The voices, inevitably badly recorded, come down to us now as haunted, desperate howls, bathed in the oppressive heat of the south and the hiss of the wax cylinders which caught these sounds. Listen to Leadbelly sing, “In the pines / In the pines / Where the sun / Never shines / I’ll shiver the whole / Night through,” and the hairs will stand up in the back of your neck. The immediacy and longevity of this music is no better demonstrated in the fact that Kurt Cobain, in his last recorded work, sang a heart-stopping version of this very song (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”)

 

This extremity of emotion still forms an integral part of popular music. Blues dictated that lyrical subject matter, reflected in the yearning tone of the music itself, must deal with the heartfelt and the emotive. Just as contemporary music has inherited the structure of blues, it has also inherited its tone. However, the result is that now we have music that apes this style of emotive delivery as a matter of course, but that has no real reason to do so. None at all.

 

And so multi millionaires stand on stage with faces contorted in wincing pain, fists clenched, guitar slung about them, and they wail into the microphone about the hardships of life. Meanwhile other men, some of whom are the CEOs of their own recording, distribution, promotions and clothing companies, stand on stage dripping in jewellery and talk about how hard it is to live life on the streets as a down-and-out with no prospects, all the while knowing that they have a Bentley to take them home at the end of the night. On other stages, there are children, driven by an almost pathological desire to become famous, who pump their fists and wail and emote and display all the symptoms of a hard, exacting life we know they have not led.

 

This is popular music today – a practice removed from, and stripped of, those elements that made it effective – and even worth while – in the first place. The effect and appeal of blues was, and still is so far-reaching because it deals with eternal human themes, deals with them realistically and does so without cloyingly sincerity. Blues is honest without being earnest, if you like. Contemporary mainstream popular music, however, is not realistic. It has nothing to do with the people that create or perform it or the environment in which it is generated. It does not deal with eternal themes, either human or otherwise (Robbie Williams, for example, seems content to write albums dealing exclusively with celebrity and his difficulty in coping with it) and it is, without doubt, consistently cloying earnest.

 

What this shows is that there is a distinct difference between, on the one hand “entertainers” and on the other “artists”. It has been the cultural vogue to treat these terms as interchangeable. They are not. This is in part the fault of a super-charged entertainment media, a stunningly developed machine that catapults individuals to the summits of success in the click of a shutter, and, having sent them rocketing up into the troposphere immediately starts looking for the next catapultee, leaving the previous victim to land where he or she may. So take Hear’Say for example, a group of affable young things who had some hit music squeezed out of them; who were taught how to sing, how to dance, how to dress, how to deal with the media, and who were then unleashed upon the public. They were flung to the dizziest of heights; they were to be the pop stars to end all pop stars. But now they are gone, and all of the implied future greatness that awaited is gone with them. Now the smoke clears, we see them for what they really were. They were entertainers – entertainers in exactly the same mould as Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsythe or any other all-singing, all-dancing acts.

 

This is not artistry. This is not art of any sort at all. It is craft, but craft designed specifically to be mistaken for art. It is dressed up in all of the recognised regalia of musical art – the emotional substance, the strict adherence to blues-based precepts of musical form – but it is not art. But of course, Hear’Say and their ilk (Boyzone, Take That, Robbie Williams, the Pussycat Dolls, Girls Aloud, etc etc) are extreme examples. The same can also be said, however, of more subtly crafted acts. Coldplay's songs deal with an existence filled with turmoil, uncertainy and angst, and yet the band members are rich, upper-middle class, successful, and the lead singer is married to a Hollywood megastar. In this, they are joined by other middle class, super-rich mourners such as Keane, Snow Patrol et al who have taken musical conventions inherited ultimately from the blues, and used this as a start point to create a body of work that in no way relates to the world around them, or life as they live it. 50 Cent, the multi-millionaire businessman who raps about street life is another example of this stellar craftsmanship masquerading as artistry, as are the hoards of other CEOs who present themselves as the gritty talent of the hip hop scene (Puff Daddy (or whatever he’s called today) Jay Z et al.)

 

Craft disguised as art is bad. Craft disguised as art that in turn has no basis in experience is even worse. Music is, of course, made up, invented – it is from the interior, and as such is pertinent to, and is the product of, an individual. In this respect, music cannot hope to cover all experience.

 

But the thing is, some of it has come very very close. Listen to John Lee Hooker singing “I Cover the Waterfront,” and it will change you. Listen to Louis Armstrong singing “Basin Street Blues,” and it will warm you to the core. Listen to the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout,” and it will make you want to scream. Sometimes our post-blues music can transcend its medium and take on an almost uncanny greatness.

 

Today though, there seems very little of this musical greatness. It seems, in fact, that the majority of music on offer lacks those elements that have in the past made music so exciting, vital and personally important to its listeners. In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of singles had to be sold for a track to reach number one. Conversely, the record for the fewest units sold by a number one single was set in October 2004, when a Swedish DJ sold just 23,519 copies of - of all things - a Steve Windwood remix. The reason for this? We are surrounded by entertainers performing songs that are, in terms of tone, structure and melody, pastiches of an earlier musical form. These acts are forced through the music industry meat grinder at such a great speed that there simply isn’t the time for an audience to decide that they like them or not. The resulting music is empty, deracinated, overly-earnest, dishonest and, worst of all, disguised as and presented as artistry. It is the product of financial greed.

 

And so we are saddled with 'accelerated talentlessness'. Having realised this, this Spinoffite stepped out of Blackfriars Station, and went to work.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

One of the many, many comments directed against the newish MP for Bethnal Green and Bow (shortly, it seems, to be caught with his expensive pants down over oil for food unless he manages to prove that the entire world really is plotting against him, which seems unlikely but possible) is his taste for expensive flash suits and an all-year tan. How, the reasoning goes, can you be a man of the people and yet go about wearing Armani suits?

 

This question broadens into an argument about acceptable pursuits for a leftie; something like 'I understand why the left likes conceptual art, but not why they like opera and ballet'.

 

There's a peculiar type of political/cultural schism here. Political allegiance somehow gets linked with cultural enjoyment: poshos (and, by extension, the centre right) like high brow pursuits like rugby [Ed. – rugby? High brow? Perhaps ‘stock broking’ more apposite. Or poss. ‘shooting poor people’], dressing in good clothes, the opera and classical music; lefties like football, shell suits, The X Factor and conceptual art.

 

It's a division maintained as much within the groups as outside them: some kind of obscure class solidarity implies that if one is, for instance, an Eton/Cambridge/Guards person one should not like - for instance - graffiti art; and conversely if one is a banner-waving ecowarrior, one should spit on Donizetti and Verdi.

 

It is time to get rid of this cultural stereotyping. It is perfectly possible to wield a banner in the morning and go to the ballet in a suit in the evening (this writer will be doing exactly that) much the same as it is to work in an investment bank during the day and attend outsider arts events at night (one of this writer's friends). The idea that the underprivileged (or the northern) should leave 'high art' to the wealthy south is undermined every time Opera North performs, or another museum opens in Gateshead.

 

What's brought this on? Since you ask, it was a raised eyebrow during a comradely discussion during which the subject of ‘going to the ballet’ was mentioned. The left, the discussion continued, should support art 'of the people' and leave 'high art' to the privileged few and their statist government funders. And it is that statement which contains the false premise.

 

For all art, visual, performed, literary or whatever, almost by definition, is 'of the people'. It challenges, inquires into, investigates, exposes and explains the essence of the lives we are all living, whether in gentleman's clubs in St James's or on an estate in Salford. One can gain an insight into one's own condition as easily in the stalls of the Royal Opera House, a gallery in Hoxton or a grime club in Dalston.

 

The true barriers to entry are economic, and schismatically cultural. While stalls seats for 'Siegfried' at the (part publicly funded) Royal Opera House are going for £160 a pop (three weeks of full income support), the rich have access to them by default. Because people on low incomes cannot attend high cost events, such events are seen as high brow (though, of course, an annual season for - say - Chelsea home matches costs and arm and a leg).

 

But this is bogus. The question is not art, but access to art. While cultural solidarity is seen as patronising the same arts events as ones cultural peer group, the disconnect between popular and high art will remain. Art - all art - is liberating. Its cost is not: and this is where the battle should be fought, not over whether a particular type of art is 'our class'.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

A couple of days ago, Spinoff's resident Redaktionsführer set a little task. Write something about 'why I'd never vote for David Cameron'. Always up for a challenge, especially one as easy as this, this writer provided fourteen reasons in the space of five minutes. All of which were knocked back, because they were 'emotional rather than reasoned'.

 

OK, back to the drawing board (never challenge the editorial director, it's not worth it: he plays a mean game of cricket and anyway I'm in debt to him for a few rounds of beer).

 

One frustrating weekend later, one conclusion is obvious. This writer, normally quite clear headed on most things, though subject naturally to the normal biases in an op-ed author, cannot write about the Conservatives without becoming emotionally involved. And this emotional involvement normally takes the form of visceral, unbridled loathing. No matter how sensible they seem, no matter what policies they advance, there's a mental block with the Conservative party.

 

What on earth have they done to provoke such a reaction? Well, in part, it's because of a northern background. Seeing one's town - and, indeed, county - devastated by the collapse of heavy industry, seeing grown men crying because they cannot get jobs, seeing the rows of bailiff's vans literally queuing up our street, leaves an impression. Yes, it was uneconomic; yes, coal from Poland is cheaper; yes, sweatshop labour is more economic than unionised labour in British factories. But hundreds of thousands of people were forced onto the breadline by the economic policies of the last Tory administration, and that's left a scar.

 

Sexual sleaze, which the last administration was good at, is less worrying than the overweening arrogance of the truly dishonest. Mandelson apart, this administration has not (yet) repeated the errors of the last, where ridiculous arrogance led to Archer, Aitken (the sword of truth and the shield of British fair play? That's what got you in clink, mate) and Hamilton.

 

The brutality of Margaret Thatcher's attitude to the people who elected her changed politics from an engagement between the people and the government to some kind of elective dictatorship. And that spilled over into a state where there 'is no such thing as society, there is only the inidividual', which is the most disgraceful statement made by any leader of a democratic country. What is democracy about if it is not about society? What are our fundamental principles based on if not the mutual support of each other for the common good?

 

No-one is arguing that Labour is perfect. The website backingblair.co.uk is the best of many that makes the point that the current administration is in fact a Tory one, under a different name, and that rescuing the Labour Party from the clutches of the Tories who are now running it is one of the key objectives of any socialist in the UK.

 

All well and good, but - despite the attractions offered by infighting, schisms and endless theoretic discussions, as well as the opportunity to call perfectly normal people 'comrade' - the people don't want socialism. What they want, judging by the results of recent elections, is to be left as far alone as possible and let someone else deal with this politics thing.

 

And this, I think, is where the Conservative administration of 1979 - 1997 is really to blame. By being overbearing, by encouraging individuality above all, by refusing to listen, they made people think that politics, selflessness and involvement in society is of no value. A whole generation of people are out for themselves, and believe they are right to be so.

 

That is enough on its own to justify hatred. And it's not likely to be forgotten, either - not just by this writer, but (hopefully) by the electorate when it next comes to an election.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.