utterly forgotten but NOT OBSCURE

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

by terming david byrne "obscure", alexmacpherson touches the exact, interesting nerve i think -- maybe even more than with his legendary "why SHOULD i have heard of john wayne?" argument

which is that in every generation (wait, that's how BUFFY starts!! -- er er focus) in every generation there are figures very well-known to all who have just VANISHED from mainstream radar by the next cycle

it's not that they're still popular but currently unfashionable; it's more that "what they meant" is no longer part of the pop discussion -- is that right?

so why has byrne vanished this way? or is it just not making "the right kinds of records" any more?

(disclaimer: i LOVED LOVE LOVED early TH and have i think every record they made --- BUT i went off them INCREDIBLY fast, round abt "true stories", and it took me years to rediscover any fondness)

Comments

[juror8.livejournal.com]

Clap Your Hands say "Hi".

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Hi!

er

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If yr saying what I think you are (not having heard CYHSY I don't know for sure) - CYHSY are still big fish in a small pond, which wd place their chief influence on the same area of the radar as say Nick Drake - a name to drop but not much else.

This is a major step down in fame for Byrne who was, as Mark suggests, famous and spoken of in the 80s WAY beyond his record sales.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

He's not made an essential record (or even a record called "essential" by Mojo say) for a while, but he has kind of been in the spotlight as a curator.

One mistake he made - even if only in terms of being Known By The Lex - is backing the wrong Brazilian horse: he went for quirky post-Tropicalia stuff instead of (say) baile funk or even drum n bass - entirely reasonable given that what he likes is quite Heads-ish but he missed a niche to carve himself.

Yr story about liking TH reminds me of the very rapid fall-off in my liking REM (I have not yet got back to 'fondness') and that makes me realise that STIPE will surely be one of these suddenly forgotten figures.

Who were they for me I wonder? We'd be looking at contemporaries of Bowie who fell off the radar, I guess. Alex Harvey maybe? FRAMPTON? I remember being quite surprised to find that Stevie Wonder had ever been an official genius but I don't think he ever became obscure in this way.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i would quite a like (personalised) list of them:
"people whose now-forgotten importance you were surprised to discover"

or some such

i am trying to come up with some for ME but i think i am so old that i predate the dawn of art or something

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Michael Stipe was on Placebo's last album, you ignoramuses!

I think the sun has set on Alex Chilton, though I don't know how famous he was.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think one reason that I haven't heard of what'shisname is sheer luck! I mean, I had heard of his band, and in fact had been meaning to Get Around To Them for a while, it's just that I didn't know the lead singer's name and Hackney Library happened to have Nico and Scritti Politti when I looked.

There is not much rhyme or reason to the Old Popstars I have heard of/heard/like.

I have never heard of Alex Harvey or Frampton. I have heard of Stevie Wonder and like what I have heard from him (not a great deal) v much. To date I prefer all Stevie Wonder samples in modern r&b to the originals though.

Do you like the Tori Amos Chas'n'Dave covers?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

The Lex did not know what a Playstation was until recently = he is a bad barometer of stuff disappearing intergenerationally.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but he only howls and wriggles when it's music stuff, he really doesn't give a fvck about his lack of knowledge of eg computer games. Or rather he+his audience (which of course was ILM, biased to the other end of the spectrum).

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

I suppose David Byrne is still pretty well known in ways, but definitely not in the 'household name' way.

I'm finding it interesting to think over who the '90s/'00s equivalents might be - Bjork, Jarvis Cocker maybe? I imagine a lot of people today and in the future would be pretty unaware of them, and yet ten years ago they were household names. Also, they were famous as much for their personalities (okay, for being a bit weird) as they were for their music, bit like Byrne.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Jarvis in 10 years time = Mark E Smith according to the Damascene revelation I had at the dull start of the Fall gig yesterday.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

I think Peter Frampton could be the best example of this. I first heard of him in the early 80s because he was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the biggest selling album ever or whatever it was, but at that time – only six or so years later – he had vanished. It was only years later that I heard anything by him, and I still reckon I've encountered Baby I Love Your Way more often as a cover version than the original. But for a moment or two, he must have been huge... I have no idea what kind of recognition factor Frankie Goes To Hollywood, say, have now, although we do now exist in a perpectual present in pop culture.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

does costello blong here at all?

(not for me obv)

i think anyone i name will likely be a pre-rock figure -- jim reeves for example

one of the interesting dimensions of punk is that it was the last moment that rock culture wasn't niche-divided safely off against itself, so in the year-zero-fication of everything, EVERYTHING came back into play to be rejudged (apparently)

except for a handful of oddball one-hit-wonders maybe (thunderclap newman; python lee jackson; andy fairweather-low) -- who were none of em more than nine-day-wonders in the shadow of something else anyway, i don't think

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Costello: yes! I reckon he is a v.obscure figure to anyone below the age of abt 30, maybe. I don't really know much by/abt him at all (apart from Oliver's Army, obv, and Shipbuilding via Wyatt), despite being moderately clued up when it comes to pop history from the mid-70's onwards. What I have heard seems v.dull and uninteresting.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

also no one much is following up my "symbolises something that no longer matters to pop" idea -- which i think is probably more interesting than "currently not active in the marketplace = forgotten"

(i would probbly place p.sarstedt here if his one-hit-wonder weren't so MASSIVE still)

jacques brel?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

p. sarstedt is only massive today ;)

what about peej harvey? she disappeared and took "shouty wimmin with a guitar" shaped pop with her, didn't she?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Something of the spirit of Brel lives on in the LYRIC INDIE which I occasionally fulminate against - Starry Srah and I went to a club at which she was DJing and witnessed a performance by one Philip Jeays who was billed as 'the English Brel' - barrysarll is a huge fan - I found it well outside my comfort zone and all a bit arch.

But I think the micro-subcultural level on which all this takes place (despite Jeays having memorable tunes and well-crafted words; see also Momus, at least on the words front) actually proves your point that this tradition has been - in the US and UK at least - erased from pop.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i LOVE jacques brel!!!

(nb i have never heard him perform his own songs)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if a demographic is served by someone who is MUCH BIGGER than what s/he follows, s/he can hide it altogether -- ie elvis effaced his own r&b roots; the beatles effaced the various strands of pop they drew together etc

another of the effects of the "punk --> niche marketing" evolution in the late 70s was to dig back before the dawn of "rock" (1965?), to re-evaluate and re-establish forgotten or under-regarded precursor modes (exccept this may be less an "effect" of punk than a "cause" actually)

weird example of how it was in the later 60s = shanana at woodstock

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I only caught on to TH near the end, so I don't know how correct this is, but it seems to be the answer is that TH/Byrne were basically a musical dead end -- they tried a lot of interesting stuff and were loved for that, but they didn't spawn a legion of (successful, anyway) imitators and like-sounding bands. Because they were unique, once they were over, they were gone.

[juror8.livejournal.com]

Out of interest, and Lex's claim that Byrne's press is easily outweight by Bush's, here's some old musician results from GoogleNews. News stories from the world's 4,500 major news sources mentioning the following in the last month:

Bono: 2,510
David Bowie: 630
Elvis Costello: 549
David Byrne: 191
KRS-One: 126
Michael Stipe: 111
Kate Bush: 105
Rick James: 70
Nick Lowe: 35
John Lydon: 13

[juror8.livejournal.com]

And inevitably:

John Wayne: 914

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i don't know about the accuracy of applying this principle to byrne but why not try it out?: maybe he has become more obscure not for like world-historical reasons or just because his creative powers declined, but because he began pitching his efforts too directly at his existing fanbase i.e. meal ticket - the listeners who established artists can invariably count on continuing to buy their records ten years after anyone else thinks they are worthwhile or relevant (and, also, the listeners who weren't there the first time around but who get roped in by all the praise for the historical figure releasing a new record).

i guess this is a way of asking you to be more elaborate about the various possible causes.

also i think british/american asymmetries are complicating this discussion.

I find this discussion confusing

[koganbot]

I find this discussion confusing for the following reasons:

(1) Please. David Byrne was never a household name anywhere. Ever. Jeesh.

(2) Influence and name-recognition belong to different species. May also belong to different genuses and families.

(3) The phrase "what David Byrne meant" is not self-explanatory; I have no clear idea whether "what David Byrne meant" is or is not part of the current pop discussion. Does "being part of the current pop discussion" mean being discussed on message boards? Does it mean being wrestled with by musicians, producers, and songwriters? Certainly can be both.

(4) Elvis Costello rose to prominence as the frontman of an act called "Elvis Costello." David Byrne didn't rise to prominence as the frontman of an act called "David Byrne." This could have something to do with why Lex had heard of Costello but not Byrne. (Obv. sometimes frontman's name can equal or overshadow band's; e.g. Janis and Big Brother, Courtney and Hole, Jim Morrison and Doors; but here we're talking about cultural gods and goddesses and devils and shamans; Byrne was never remotely close to this category.)

(5) Given Byrne's relatively low name-recognition and relatively nonoverwhelming impact in his time, I think he's probably stayed on pretty well both as a public figure and a musical influence.

Anyway, I once met a "curator" who referred to David Byrne as an important "composer." (I suggested to her that James Brown was a more important composer.) Talking Heads' music also got played in discos and at college mixers and on mainstream rock stations. This is a pretty wide cultural range. I don't think name recognition for "David Byrne" followed across this range. (Mostly would have stopped with the curator.) Where Byrne did have his greatest impact and greatest name recognition was among new wave rock bohemians and among dance-club bohemians. This is why it's surprising that Lex hadn't heard of Byrne. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the performers Lex has played and a lot of dancers he's played for have heard of Byrne. As Lex says, it's probably owing to chance that he'd heard of Debbie Harry but not David Byrne.

Hard to say what Byrne's actual influence was. He was a singer in a rock band that moved in an r&b/funk direction, but he sang in neither a rock-tough nor an r&b-soul voice. Rather he sang in the voice of a harried white civil servant. This is where he still has a large ongoing impact, even if the impact doesn't come with his name attached. Not that people are copying his voice so much as they're using various white dorkboy voices that they might not have felt free to use if Byrne and a few others (Mark Mothersbaugh? Fred Schneider?) hadn't jumped to white dorkboy voices back in the '70s. To give a few examples that might surprise you, when I hear Bowling for Soup's "1985" and the Jonas Bros.'s "Year 3000," I hear Byrne in the vocals' ancestry, though I doubt that anyone would say, "Oh yeah, Jonas Bros. and Bowling for Soup: Talking Heads imitators."

Re: I find this discussion confusing

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha I had no idea Janis Joplin was in a band at all!

I agree and am heartened by all of your post. I also still think the fact that DAVID BYRNE is a really ordinary name is a factor! If an article or person mentions Elvis Costello or Green Gartside or Ari Up or Exene Cervenka in passing these are names which will stick in my mind even if I don't have a particular interest in them. David Byrne is, like, one step up from John Smith. There are CURRENT bands I love whose singers' names I forget because they're boring!

[koganbot]

Dinah Washington. Possibly the most famous r&b singer of the '40s and '50s. I've barely heard her music and so can't tell you of her ongoing impact, but I'm sure that "what she meant" - whatever that was - almost immediately vanished from the cultural "discussion" once the '60s got rolling.

[(Anonymous)]

i'm not ALL the way thru this thread yet but mark and tom seem to be saying byrne IS obscure on the basis that the lex hasn't heard of him!

BIG logic gap.

i'm only about two years older than lex and I KNOW WHO BYRNE IS. and HAVE DONE SINCE I WAS LITTLE.

hkm

Perhaps I have too high a bar for what meets the definition, but...

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

To my mind, "not a household name" is not at all the same thing as "obscure." X is obscure is when I have to WAY GO OUT OF MY WAY to find out something about X. If I can buy X on amazon.com, it's not obscure. If Wikipedia has an entry about X, it's not obscure. If Time Magazine had a cover story about them once, uh-uh. If I have to swim through the microfiches at the New York Public Library, if I have to flip discs in dusty bins, if I have to go to another country to interview people just so I can find out out something in-depth and concrete about X -- yes, obscure.