poptimists | Public Carmodism

freakytigger.livejournal.com posting in

Discussion on the tournament thread about GHOST TOWNE by the Specials - is this the biggest example of Carmodism being generally accepted and written into the executive summary of rock history?

(Definition of Carmodism for the 99% of you who won't know what I'm on about: the belief that the state of the charts reflects the state of the nation, or at least the belief that it makes for more interesting analysis to pretend it does. From Robin Carmody, cultural critic and high practitioner of the art.)

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From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

.. is a much more elaborate and ambitious examination though:

i. every record in the charts (inc.its placement) is a snapshot of the "state of the nation" in a fairly particular way, this being an analogue of the way that ---
ii. --- every by-election is a snapshot of the "state of the nation"

so there is a double-grid of reference, for starters (you have to recall that robin seems to have an exact map of the blue-red-yellow colouring of EVERY SINGLE UK POLITICAL CONSTITUENCY since the 1940s, as well as the names of successful AND defeated politicians, and which sector of the party they are fitted into, in class and policy terms) (and more impalpable things, like the meaning of the lure of a given cultural influence) (ie what did it mean to be attracted to americanism in 1957, 1967, 1986, 2007)

so his snapshots jigsaw together to present a complex history of flows and surges and shifts and changes -- and the two grids of refence TAKEN TOGETHER highlight subtle stuff going on in each separate grid, that wouldn't otherwise be visible necessarily

what makes it so fascinating is that he basically takes the idea that "music reflects society" as the given: and follows through in genuinely astonishing detail -- to such a degree that you do become very alert to that aspect of music which relates to affirmation of (broad) cultural-political allegience

i don't think it matters that it isn't the only thing a song's about -- it's part of what a song's about; it's not not there

(in ref lex's point abt personal lives -- people's politics is very much part of their personal lives, and Carmodism is an examination of exactly that, the personal and half-expressed dynamic within public discussion) (robin also has a very strong judgemental layer, in regard to right and wrong politics -- this you don't have to agree with at all to learn from it as a method; besides, who the hell wd commit himself to his degree of knowledge of local political minutiae if they didn't care a lot abt politics in terms of what should and shouldn't happen?)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

(the exact red-blue-yellow map is IN HIS HEAD as far as i can tell)

From:

koganbot

i. every record in the charts (inc.its placement) is a snapshot of the "state of the nation" in a fairly particular way

But this points up a confusion I got from the way that Tom worded the question: to say that state of the charts reflects state of the nation is not the same as to say that a particular song reflects the state of the nation. And to say that songs and charts occur on a sociopolitical landscape (which is probably the real point to be made) doesn't imply that either a song or a chart will reflect that landscape as a whole, esp. given that the landscape isn't a steady state but rather a land of conflicts and tensions. And the same song can be used differently by different people: e.g., "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" being played in a working-class pub and being played to screaming American teens and being played on a portable tape player by a G.I. in Vietnam and being played by a pickup band of high-school students at a summer camp I attended in 1966 and being played (on piano?) by two middle-class New York Jews as they were composing the thing.

From:

koganbot

Also - and I don't know how much this has to do with Carmodism - there was the really irritating "unemployment causes punk rock" tendency in early "reporting" of the British punk movement. Maybe there is a connection, but to say that dole queues somehow caused or are reflected by, say, the Clash's "1977" and the Pistols' "Seventeen" and "Pretty Vacant" and such is to ignore the fact that those songs were following a lyrical template created in a college town in Michigan in 1969 ("It's 1969, okay?, all across the U.S.A./Another year for me and you/Another year with nothing to do") if not NYC 1966 ("Oh, Mama, can this really be the end/To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again").

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

Also, the 3 million unemployment 5 years later caused, erm, "Wham Rap" (which is actually a terrific song about unemployment, but doesn't fit any kind of dole-to-punk theory obviously)

From:

koganbot

One difficulty in relating electoral politics and the charts is that (1) if I vote for a candidate and he wins, he then goes and does something, whereas (2) if I buy a record, I then go and do something with the record, whether the record charts well or not. In elections, you've got a number of people voting for a candidate, not all for the same reasons, and what the candidate does won't always have a lot to do with people's reasons for voting for him (and at least in the U.S., many voters will never notice this, since they don't pay much attention to what the candidate actually does). On the charts, you've got a number of people buying a record (or, in the U.S., being the sort of person who radio programmers think will like the record), again not all for the same reasons, and then going and doing a number of different things with the record, which most likely will have something to do with their original reasons for buying or listening to the record, but this isn't guaranteed.

From:

robincarmody.livejournal.com

I think I've forgotten a lot of the blue-red-yellow stuff since the height of our ILM days (maybe it originally came from having grown up in the M25 corridor, i.e. the "rootless" places whose swings made '79 and '97 what they were; my relationship to that area is as you know deeply conflicted and sometimes very strongly critical, but it at least partially made me what I am today, and you knew that you were living in a place which profoundly affected national decisions, which was the model for an entire country's attempted psychological remaking of itself, right down to the fact that it was ostentatiously ahistorical while still retaining displaced echoes of an earlier order in that it had stuck with a selective rather than comprehensive secondary school system; the Thatcherite dichotomy - anti-traditionalist without being egalitarian - epitomised). But the basic sense and feeling it gave me remains, but has been redefined and reinvented (I find most of my early online stuff VERY VERY VERY hard to read now).

My adoption of that approach for my chartblogging - which itself started in response to what Marcello Carlin was doing on ILM, just lifting the charts from a similarly-conceived show on a different station - was born out of a frustration with my early pieces in such a vein, which (like much of my work at the time) were in the shadow of an icon, in this case Marcello himself. I knew there was potential in what I was doing, but I felt I was merely a pale imitation without the life experience; hence all the constant references to "The Other" and the like. So it was basically a means of stepping out of Marcello's shadow, and finding my voice (something which you said happened to you when you wrote a Wire piece on The Fall at, interestingly, pretty much the age I am now). It's something that nobody else is doing; it gets lonely, but it's more satisfying that simply parroting what is already said (there is a narrow set of Received Wisdom which is pretty much the closest thing to "Public Carmodism" in widespread currency - the Beatles representing Escape From The Fifties, the Pistols as rebellion against stagflation, Stock Aitken Waterman embodying a set of 80s values, but crucially probably not referring to those ideas as "aggressive individualism" as I do - and I try to avoid that stuff, and concentrate on rarer tributaries: the old shire order already being threatened as early as 1959 by the calm, *ordered* perfect life (as opposed to the bumbling *ostentatious unprofessionalism* of shire Toryism) of "Living Doll", or USING OTHER IDEAS PLEASE re. "Relax" and putting it in the context of John Betjeman's death between its twin peaks and Mike Read's simplistic, Mail-esque appropriation of JB). I don't see it as definitive or absolute; I just see it as something that might be interesting to do (perhaps now more than 20 years ago precisely because what remains of the music press has been locked in self-perpetuating, simultaneously aggressive and hermetic, "rock'n'roll" cliches for so long; back then, the Monitor clique at MM could be seen as anti-political when in fact they acknowledged pop's interactions with the wider world far more than any print hacks in at least the last 10 years have dreamed of; they usually still pretend that hating the old anti-pop establishment is still the most rebellious thing in the world because anything else would involve asking serious questions about both pop's role and their own position, and that is more than their life's worth).

I might be too judgemental these days, compared to when I was on ILM, but these are desperate times, and you have to redefine yourself for the climate and atmosphere and threats surrounding you, and my writings are *far* more balanced than I can sometimes be offline (I don't, usually, snap online like I used to).