Lazy Friday reading

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

It's a quiet and sunny Friday here in the land of popsa, and I've been catching up on my reading. Although I'm sure half of you refuse to read the Guardian's pop coverage on principle and the other half read it with needing me to tell you, here are a few recent things that I enjoyed.

Interview/profile with Sly Stone: http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/08/sly200708

I am definitely one of those people for whom the Sly myth looms large. Listening to his stuff manages to conjure up some of that 60s magic for me, even though most of the time nowadays it makes me cringe. There's nothing earth-shattering, but it's nice to at least take a little bit out of the mystery of the last, oh, 20 years of his life.

Kitty Empire: "We won the indie wars - but at what price?"
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/07/we_won_the_indie_wars_but_at_w.html

Did I miss the discussion of this? I guess we talk about or around it all the time, and I'm not sure Kitty's post add much to what we already know. Are we "embattled and tribal?"

How Billie Jean changed the world
http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/comment/story/0,,2124636,00.html
I kind of vaguely remember this period, and so enjoyed someone writing a bit of big-picture cultural context around it.

"Billie Jean was groundbreaking because it introduced the idea that a single must be accompanied by a high-production video - preferably by someone who is a bit of a hoofer - thereby transforming a run-of-the-mill song release into an "event."

When did this period end (and why?)

Anyone else read anything interesting recently?

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think "embattled and tribal" is a fairly small part of the story though not an absent one.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I think it's the other half of the analogy that's more puzzling. Did Wedding Present fans really feel embattled in 1986 in the face of all the Wham!, Madonna and Five Star in the charts? Tribal, maybe. Smugly superior, much more likely. :-P (NB I don't exempt myself from this accusation.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well the classic 80s indie relationship to the charts always seemed to be:

i. "I hate the charts"
ii. Wild celebrations when the Mighty Lemon Drops scored a #43 hit.

If there was a contradiction in this people (or at least the people I knew) didn't see it at the time.

[(Anonymous)]

Unsorted musings on my largely wrong indie ways twenty years ago

We, which is to say my little gang, hated the charts not out of principle but as a matter of taste. In 1987 the days of the Buzzcocks and the Undertones getting high up in the charts were really only just behind us and my view was that "we", which is to say bands who were "on our side", could get back there.

This is why we insisted on calling the music we liked "pop", by the way, and always thought "indie" a disgusting term.

We were always very dismissive of indie fans who saw the charts as a fundamentally bad thing, thought they were fools. Our approach was sufficiently purist that we never had to make that sum add up. We could easily tell ourselves that we were carrying the flame for the true (pure!) pop in exile, the once and future King, because the bands we liked never stood a chance of testing the charts.

"On our side" is a fractal matter, or a Leninist one, of you prefer: from our point of view, the Mighty Lemon Drops were not "on our side" although they might have thought they were. The Shop Assistants were "on our side". This level of tribalness necessarily brings with it embattled-ness, I think.

bopkids

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The MLD were a placeholder for a band I was trying to remember, with a fan of whom I had this conversation in the late-80s.

I can now reveal that band to be the Railway Children.

[(Anonymous)]

Even less on our side than the Mighty Lemon Drops!

bopkids

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

whose side WERE the railway children on?

(haha i recall that the drummer of the R4ZORCUTS wrote them up glowingly in the nme -- so whose side were the
R4ZORCUTS on eh?)

i blame big flame

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i think they were on deacon blue's side...

[(Anonymous)]

I think (but I'm not sure) that D4vid 5wift was only invited to join ver R4zorcuts after that review.

The Railway Children were on the other side, whichever side anyone was on.

bopkids

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think a more interesting take on Kitty Empire's qn is - what emotional needs did "manufactured pop" fulfil for its consumers, and what's fulfiling them instead? (Also, what emotional needs does "indie" fulfil?)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

what emotional needs does "indie" fulfil?

JANGJANGJANG me girlfriend's left me

shurely?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes of course! BUT if so why are those needs much more, um, needy now?

I blame Facebook.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

oh i see, i thought you meant Indie, not indie...

this modern so-called indie is just "rock" though, most of it Adult-Orientated...

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

To me that's really kind of the same question as why emo is so popular now. Mostly emo seems to be just the same kind of whiney mopey ness of indie, with a strain of violence and mascara. I try to go back to when I was in high school and wonder whether a) all the "cool kids" would've been emos, or whether b) the world would've been turned upside down and i would've been be a "cool kid" and they'd have been the oustiders.

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

According to Ms Empire's "beddable" link, this should actually be JINGJANGJONG wtf?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

we didn't win the indie wars, oasis sacrificed indie to some demon and it became a dead eyed rent boy. a very very popular dead eyed rent boy.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

perhaps more that the a&r people (men) we have now were weaned on wasis rather than, say, supertramp, but yes, if only mcgee's train had been on time that night...

all aboard for torchwood

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

dead-eyed rentboy has some bad sense i'm not understanding?

Re: all aboard for torchwood

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

oh, dubdobdeepaws...

Re: all aboard for torchwood

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

:D :b X)

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I thought the 'indie wars' column was fundamentally but unsurprisingly wrong, in that it regards the whole business as an essentially dualist affair, Light v dark, Good v Evil, the eternal struggle, blah blah.

There's a lot of reasons why I could pick it apart, but on a personal level, I could never really be involved because, as goths, we (my circle, such as it was) weren't even allowed to *have* a side, no matter how interested we might also be in our indie (or indeed, our pop). And those lovely fey indie boys weren't so sweet and inoffensive when they were slobbering down your cleavage in a club, then taking the piss out of your hair. Anyone who's seen 'Career Girls' might know where I'm coming from - Mike Leigh's apparent caricatures were more accurate than one might expect!

Nostalgia is mostly bollocks. Things are better now. People don't care so much about their pointless aesthetic puritanism. This started sorting itself out on the goth scene at the start of the '90s and it was a breath of fresh air. Thankfully, it seems to be the way things are going everywhere, so we should celebrate it, instead of writing *another* article about how x type of 4 REAL music has, maybe, sold out.

In a sonic sense...

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

...the indie wars were 'won'. At the time (Dave Cav's book on Creation is very strong on this), the argument was that if you played anything as tinny as, say, The June Brides, on R1, the masses (with their ears trained to big mid-80s production values) would turn off in their droves. Oasis and their ilk, by contrast, were proper, sturdy rock bands. But the Libertines were as ramshackle and trebly as, well, Mighty Mighty, and that didn't seem hinder their tiresome rise. Conclusion: you could probably play Hang Ten! by The Soup Dragons on Radio 1 tomorrow and no one would be alarmed. Whether that's a good thing is a different affair...
(Apologies if I've said this all before...)