A kung fu fighter in a disco

NB "God Save The Queen" doesn't count as it was a deliberate attempt by Lydon, Mclaren et al. to game the Jubilee, rather than a song "catching the mood of the times" (to use a rather weak phrase).

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damnspynovels.livejournal.com

Three Lions, summer of 96?

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Again vis a vis "God Save", I think songs specifically written to relate to national events don't count. (see also "Candle In The Wind 97")

As with many -isms there is a lot of vagueness to work through here!

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koganbot

The charts do - somewhat - reflect the state of the nation, but what they reflect is the state of the nation's musical preferences. There's not always a strong correspondence between the musical preferences and the nation's TV-news-watching preferences. (I assume that the TV news is the closest most people ever got to the "riots that were sweeping the nation.") (Btw, pop stars in rehab is sweeping the nation right now, if you're in the U.S.)

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Yes, it occurs to me that I mean "state of the state" more than "state of the nation".

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koganbot

Why wouldn't they count? Esp. given that "God Save The Queen" was a national event. (The Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama 1956, was a calculated event, but still reflected the society, right?) And how is "Ghost Town" not also written to relate to national events (though it has a local focus, of course)? The music that people say relates to "national events" skews towards things like "Ghost Town" and "God Save The Queen" and away from "I'm Comin' Out" and "Bette Davis Eyes," but I don't see why the popularity of the latter is less indicative of what's going on in the nation i.e. in people's lives (not that it's necessarily all that indicative)?

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"Ghost Town" wasn't written with foreknowledge that there were riots coming up.

"God Save" was written with foreknowledge that there was a Jubilee coming up. (And "Three Lions" in foreknowledge that there was Euro 96 on the way.)

That's the distinction I want to make. The former is a song becoming linked to events by coincidence (or psychic affiliation). The latter is a song muscling into and transforming or setting the tone of an event - which is also fascinating, of course!

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bah i have to go out! i want to talk abt this!

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koganbot

And also reflects "the mood of the nation," hence would be grist for Carmodism, I'd think? (Is this an Authenticity thing, Tom? Where if you're calculating your impact it's not as real as if the impact just happens? Either way, why doesn't the fact that people are willing to feel the impact reflect what's going on in the nation?)

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No, you're right, both of these are Carmodism as I phrased it.

I guess what I'm interested in on this thread isn't the impact on the mood of the nation (I don't believe unintended impact is more authentic than intended, either), but the way a critical story (or Hero Story - am I using that right?) builds up around the record. And the stories are different depending on the intention.

What interests me about "Ghost Town" is that the Carmodic interpretation - Ghost Town is great because it reflected the riots - has become so accepted: I'd guess the majority of critical writing on GT tells or references that story. I'm interested in other songs where those kind of interpretations do or don't become part of the story of the song.

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koganbot

The problem I often have with analyses that link Popular Culture to the State Of The Nation is that the latter is taken as a given, so the former merely "reflects" it. And therefore, any answer you give is "right." E.g., during the early years of the U.S. depression, Hollywood put out lots of fun, madcap entertainments. This reflected people's desire for escapist entertainment in hard times. Whereas the pictures that dealt with poverty, unemployment, etc. were also reflecting the depression by dealing with it directly. So everything reflects the depression. Which isn't necessarily wrong, but how do you test such a thing? And therefore, how do you learn anything surprising from the movies and music that are supposedly doing the reflecting?

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koganbot

Ah, I see. But also, Robin isn't altogether unsubtle. So what I often see in his analyses is something along the lines of "Britain's relationship to the U.S. - how much of it is subservience and how much is sustenance? - is the giant pink elephant in the room, so how do all these songs I'm recounting on my livejournal accommodate or orient themselves to that elephant?" (Robin, I hope I haven't misrepresented this.)

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alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

Riots?

Is there a "you had to be there" aspect to 'Ghost Town's appeal?

I am really sceptical about Carmodism, I don't believe particularly in "states of the nation" (always written in retrospect, by people mapping their own perceived sense of collective on to others who may or may not have shared it, and who for whatever reason aren't involved in the writing of history). In the past, oh, 10 years, only two events even stand out as even being considerable for State Of The Nation status - Dianadeath and 7/7. The first - I didn't feel anything and neither, I suspect, did most people here. The second - I felt it but I was on the spot. And I left London the weekend after, and (fairly obviously) the "state" of Brighton was v different from the "state" of London. "State of the nation" is a means of exclusion, while pretending it's about inclusion.

And I don't really believe any one song is big enough to capture any putative state of the nation in any case. Unless it actively tries to, in which case that will make it irritating.

Plus, like Frank, I place more importance on people's personal lives.

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dickmalone.livejournal.com

Yeah, it seems more interesting to look at how broad trends had a practical influence on popular culture. Like, how did the actual economics of the depression change the movies that were being made? Could you make the argument that the depression was actually lengthened because of popular culture, because pop represented an economic inefficiency that stood to further drag things down, or was it the opposite (movie-making as an economic engine that carried things forward)? Etc. etc.

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dickmalone.livejournal.com

Best US example of this I think would be U2 and 9/11.

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dickmalone.livejournal.com

(well, not the BEST, but certainly one that springs to mind right away.)

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damnspynovels.livejournal.com

We Are The World?

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.. 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?)

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

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"you had to be there" is the opposite of "stands the test of time" -- you should be pro it, lex, it is VERY POP

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skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Just got my first issue of Star -- the REHAB issue!

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

Not exactly the same thing, for a number of reasons (e.g. some people still like(d) Bush), but clearly part of the story there is that things were so bad that even these eternal teen-clowns were turned into rock-opera writing political activists. (It feels very different to me than those points when, say, Bryan Adams got on the Amnesty bandwagon and wrote a "serious" album, although - as suggested above - there's probably something to talk about around those moments as well.)

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

My gut tells me that the reason the Carmodic interpretation has become so accepted is for the reason that you and Frank clarifying here - the reason the riots have been linked to the song is exactly because it foreshadowed them and didn't retroactively describe them. Or, in other words, its impact was unintended* and therefore more authentic.

*But Dammers was totally political, wasn't he, so "unintended" doesn't the right word here. But I'm nitpicking, so just ignore me.

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awesomewells.livejournal.com

D-Mob - They Call It Acieed

I haven't read a single broadsheet article about acid house that doesn't explicitly put it up against the backdrop of the late Thatcher government and this is usually the record they pick.

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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.

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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").

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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)

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koganbot

In the early '70s there was a sudden surge of socially conscious black music, aligned with funk... and reflecting what in particular? The previous 400 years of history? Sly Stone had produced Bobby Freeman's dance-pop "Come On And Swim" in the mid '60s and the Great Society's original version of "Somebody To Love" in 1966, which hit in the Jefferson Airplane's version in spring 1967, foreshadowing the Newark and Detroit riots (just kidding; but the song is at least as punk as it is hippie - "When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies" - given that the hippie freaks were more punk than hippie, a lot of them). "There's A Riot Goin' On" was 1971.

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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.

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Because it was the one that got onto TOTP, that reached the mainstream consciousness (what heightened it is that it was introduced on TOTP by *a Blue Peter presenter*, namely the late Caron Keating, thus connecting it, albeit one step removed, with something so symbolic of Middle England). I'm pretty sure it wasn't a credible record with those who were actually involved in The Scene, that in those circles it was seen as a watering-down, a dilution for the masses (Reynolds compares it to "Rock Around The Clock" vis-a-vis that song's black sources which would, of course, have been completely shut off from most of the people who heard RATC by informal apartheid in the US and "massive cultural quarantine", to use a Mark S phrase, in the UK). But the fact that it was a dilution of its source is precisely what made it important in a wider social context. It impacted the lives of the Sun readers, the Belinda Carlisle and Glenn Medeiros fans, the floating voters (who "owed cultural loyalty to no-one" - Sinker again) who'd jump on the Blair bandwagon after Murdoch said it was OK, and that's why it's cited today.

I'll post a few more things here in a moment (ah, egotistical googling).

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I was thoroughly indifferent to the Cult of Diana; in retrospect, though, I've come to see her as symbolic of the forces diluting both pop culture and the old bourgeois culture, which has become a central theme in my writing (I was too young/interested in other things/*not wanting* to realise it to see just how important she was at the time). There's a whole genre I think of as "Diana music": basically anything by the British members of the Live Aid Rockocracy. And I dramatise the conflict between right-wing consumerism and right-wing traditionalism in terms of the battle between Diana and the fervently anti-pop Charles (someone who I never understood at all until I started researching the inter-war Agrarian Right, an earlier area of interest for me; then it all fell into place). I think I first did that when writing about Wham!'s "I'm Your Man" (a song with a particularly fervent anti-gentleman-amateurism hook, although maybe I'm just parodying myself there) on ILM.

I don't think, though, that the actual chart singles *of the time of her death* can be related to her or her death in any way; by 1997, "Diana music" had been in decline for some years, its place largely taken by what you might call "Blair music", namely Oasis and their followers, the music which represented the dilution of what had been vaguely called "indie"/"alternative" which I see as analoguous to the dilution of the Labour Party (like many Carmodic ideas, this was in fact first stated by someone else; I vividly remember Simon Price drawing the analogy in Melody Maker just before the 1997 election). But despite the disconnection between her and the driving forces in chartpop by the time of her death, she's an absolutely key figure in the change in what pop is, relative to the "official culture" ("state of the nation" *is* a means of exclusion of dissenters; that's precisely why I find it interesting, to analyse precisely why there is a desire to see certain people excluded). I wouldn't rule out the possibility that had we had unswervingly traditional young aristocratic women marrying into the royal family during the 1980s, people who ignored pop culture altogether and were happy to hunt, shoot and fish, we might not have James Blunt et al now ... but then the fact that we had Diana rather than a stereotypical Country Life "girl in pearls" is for me basically a result of Thatcherism (and I also see Diana as an analogy for the drift of Thatcherism from pretty much unbridled neo-feudalism to an unprecendented radical-reactionary hybrid - "radical-reactionary" is Sinker again, sorry - and the ideological confusion and breakup of the British Right since the Leaderene fell; c.f. my Flambards piece passim).

Part of Carmodism is undoubtedly a result of my Asperger's Syndrome; in other words intellectualisation of everything and an immense difficulty in relating to people as people or in terms of their personal lives. But also it's a result of my loathing for the cultural and intellectual compartmentalism which is so dominant in Britain, now the most baneful legacy of the old class system (which in practice has now been largely replaced by an American class system, i.e. something about finance rather than culture, and has been twisted around by time so much that, as I once got into a *lot* of trouble for suggesting, the hard Left are in some ways the last High Tories in terms of their belief in who "should" and "shouldn't" do certain things; that may be a Blair/Reid belief, but there's a grain of truth in it). I may be wrong, but I don't think there'd be anything like as much wariness of my way of seeing things if I was French and was debating them mainly with French people.

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From an American perspective, it's not a misrepresentation at all. It must seem obsessive, and to be honest it often does to *me* when I look back at my posts, but that is Asperger's Syndrome again: single issues, assumption of universal meaning where it might not necessarily exist, conspiratorial tendencies ... I should be more subtle, more willing to let songs acquire their own meanings, to show ambiguity, to let my readers think for themselves, but I think I'm getting better in all these fields (compare the *unanswered questions* and conflict of my recent piece on New Musik's "Living By Numbers" to my early livejournal entries; clearly the work of a much more rational, balanced man). I often shudder to think at how incomprehensible my postings must be to non-Brits; even British people often don't get most of the references, although I think that a lot of people in the rest of Europe would feel reassured by my stance, and wish that more British people thought like me (a lot, but certainly not all: cult followers of Alec Empire, if there are any left, would probably consider me a neo-fascist).

To get back to the original subject, I'd hardly call the most widespread interpretation of "Ghost Town" Carmodistic, in that it was around - and very much the norm - long before I started doing this. I think it's just *blindingly obvious* in that case (and of course there's other stuff it can be analogised with; Charles and Diana as Official Distraction). It's one of the few cases where a connection is so clear as to overpower the usual residual impact of Great British Compartmentalism.

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