Public Carmodism

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

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.)

Comments

Re: full-on carmodism...

[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).