English Settlement

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My latest column for Pitchfork - http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/46485-column-poptimist-9 - talking about consensus in the UK music industry and its impact. (and talking about a few other things too). There is a lot of stuff which I didnt have space or time to explore and hopefully I will get the chance to write some of that up here or on FT later today.

EDIT: I did! http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I know - the concluding paragraph is perhaps a little too compressed!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Bvms where did my comment go?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

How weird - I didnt delete it!

[koganbot]

Was your comment about glockenspiels?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

that simon garfield book is the first book i read as a recorded talking book for my mum. am i right in thinking it was reissued with extra 'update' chapters?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Did you do all the voices?

I don't know! I was a bit surprised it was still in print actually - I should have linked to it on Amazon but was busy thinking about hauses this w/end.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

oh god the voices! because this was the first one, so didn't have a settled 'reading style', and because the earliest chapters include JOHN PEEL, the temptation to do THAT VOICE was all too much. and yes for a few sentences i did indeed try, before giggling and stopping. but it kept veering back, and i had to make a conscious effort to stop.

i think i am more prone to this than most, as i am afflicted with 'accent-drift'

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

That's a really great column, Tom.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[koganbot]

Interesting thing is that I have little clue, if I were to call something "punk," what an American would think I mean by it. (Also no clue what a Brit would mean by it, but I'm thinking about Americans at the moment.) Seems to me that publicists these days, pushing a new band, would mean something somewhat retro, like the Distillers, or even more retro, sounding like the Pistols or Ramones; or they'd be talking of someone who thinks he's in a line going back to hardcore punk. In other words, a fairly narrow range, and not really contemporary music (and not so much diy creativity) though you're talking about what people think of not of how publicists market.

Whereas I still think of punks as, you know, being punks, and I think of the American as being more destructive than the Brit. Was there any Brit equivalent to the Stooges, Contortions, GG Allin, Psycodrama, where "audience interaction" evolved into assaulting the audience (and I don't just mean assaulting art audiences that are into being challenged, I mean going after bikers and strangers and people prone to hit back)? I know there was all the spitting and stuff in Britain. Slam dancing came from America, right?

And I'm thinking of no wave as being a more extreme "rip it up and start over" than anything out of Britain, though no wave had trouble getting out of its downtown club ghetto, and probably registered to the few outsiders who heard it as too arty.

I do think that Rocket From The Tombs and the Electric Eels (early to mid Seventies Cleveland bands) managed to integrate noise into what was essentially pop song structure (by "pop song" I mean "rock song" too) in ways that didn't come across as "art"; whereas in the New York scene (which ended up drawing a lot of people from Cleveland) or even the Cleveland bands that stayed (Pere Ubu) the "noise" would end up more a part of good old art and creativity. And the noise in hardcore punk in the early '80s (which was more an L.A. and D.C. thing rather than New York, and then it was a nationwide lonely hearts club) was actually a unifier, a shared trope, though still connoted violence.

This doesn't have much to do with your article. Just some thoughts.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Good thoughts though - the "punk as yr zero" thing is something that keeps niggling at me. I think your comment about No Wave is important - maybe because it tried harder to follow through on its year zero it couldn't break out of its location. Whereas with UK punk everyone got the Big Fact about its destructiveness but that destruction never really happened - it just became an acceptable stick to beat whatever you like with (the day I turned the copy in there was an article on digital music in the paper and lo and behold there was some 20-year-old myspace kid saying "oh its like how punk blew away prog" - it's absolutely accepted as part of UK pop history)

A column I started writing was about punk in Britain and DC Comics' "Crisis On Infinite Earths" series in the 80s, which was a rip-it-up-and-start-again move designed to stop readers being put off by 40 years worth of old stories. So they destroyed their old universe and started again, but of course they still HAD Batman and Superman running around, it was just a version of Batman and Superman with a 40 year published history which writers couldn't directly mention but could allude to or rediscover, and it ended up being a total mess. Anyway I didn't write this column because only about 40 people care enough about pop and comics to follow what I would have talked about.

[koganbot]

Also, reading your piece I was asking, "What about disco, what about metal, what about Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)?" Not in relation to the British market, obviously, but in relation to innovation patterns. And hip-hop, for that matter.

Also, Simon Frith once told me that in Britain audiences were created/differentiated by magazines whereas in America they were created/differentiated by radio. In the U.S. punk and new wave would have been a big exception, since punk was somewhat invented in U.S. magazines, which created the punk audience.

[koganbot]

Simon was saying this in the late '80s or early '90s. Obviously the pirate and offshore stations played a role in Britain in the '60s.