Before The Flood

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a poll about John Peel's Festive Fifty, 1976. Just tick all the songs you like from the list of 50 (counting down from #50 to #1, as it happens). I've put it up because i) I'm curious about the results, ii) I'm probably writing a pitchfork column about the F50.

[Poll #1137239]

And some more general questions I'd like to think about - they're quite big questions though:

- What does rock do better now? What does it do worse?
- How does the stuff that won respect and adoration on this poll differ from the stuff that critics and fans enjoy now (a VERY broad formulation, I know)?
- Where's the modern equivalent of the audience suggested here - Pazz and Jop? the Pitchfork Readers Poll?
- What were Poco and can we eat them?

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well this is what I'm interested in when I ask "what's changed" and "who were the audience anyway". Cos of course 'punk' has historically been presented as a reaction against a lot of this stuff. And also of course there were big big strands of thinking about pop music COMPLETELY unrepresented by the picks of Peel's listenership, many of which surfaced and became more mainstream afterwards. And Peel's listenership changed a lot (or did it?)

(Also, loads of this is very good, even if the overall picture it presents is a joke.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes: what continually frustrates me is how people like Peel get to do the representing, the canonising; so eventually the pop music unrepresented here gets sidelined, at least in terms of how/how much people talk about them. As the great Julie B said in an article I have permanently on bookmark (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,321755,00.html):

I've always loathed John Peel. It started in the Sixties when I was a child, still staggering under the first blow of benediction by black music. All day long on Radio 1 - most of all, on Tony Blackburn's show - you could hear great creamy earfuls of it: Motown by the mile, Philly by the furlong. But at night Radio 1 became a white desert. It became 'intelligent'. That is, it became male, hippy and smelly - it became John Peel.

HEAR FUCKING HEAR.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What are your favourite Philly tracks Lex?

An understanding that there are different audiences to her has never been a Burchill strength.

One crucial point though is that Peel DIDN'T get to do the canonising or the deciding - the F50 was a listeners poll and he moaned about its contents regularly (did you see the quote I put up from him last week?). He was as much victim as beneficiary of canonising forces - turned into the sainted Godfather Of Indie when there's no evidence he wanted that at all. The canonising process is a lot more subtle and tough to work out than that.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think JB does understand that there are different audiences to her - she understands that they are WRONG!

I don't know much about Philly, that quote resonates with me more because I see the same parallel process happening today.

[cis.livejournal.com]

you don't know much about Philly because PEOPLE LIKE PEEL mean it was shoved out of the canon to make way for more BORING WHITE TRIPE

is surely what you mean here!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

That is precisely what I mean! It also applies to disco, soul, freestyle...probably vast swathes of stuff which I have no idea about. If I'd known any of that even EXISTED back when I actually cared about discovering old music...but instead all I got pointed towards was this shit.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this I can sympathise with, as this list also looks very much like the stuff I was lent by boys at school when I asked what good music was (and I didn't protest and I liked some of it and not others - NO ZAPPA ON PEEL'S LIST is a big bonus IMO).

In a weird way it doesn't feel quite like a living canon though, I don't get a great sense of any of this music dominating the public sphere of rock thought in the way it maybe used to.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think that's more reflective of the dissipation of the public sphere of criticism? I rarely feel the direct shadow of this specific music but its values still loom large over crit-friendly pop.

[koganbot]

its values still loom large over crit-friendly pop

You might be right, but the argument to support this would have to be very subtle and complex, and my guess is that you're not the one who'd be able to make the argument persuasively, given that you don't know the music on this list very well, you don't know the divisions that this list represents - the people voting Beefheart, Richman, and Legendary Stardust Cowboy (!) are not likely voting for much else that's on this list, and they're the ones most likely to be giving scattered votes to the girl groups and Motown and funk and garage rock and bubblegum and glam and Detroit punk (which was very r&b based) that don't register in the results - and you don't know what critics of the time were saying: criticism of course was all over the place in its attitudes but there was a large contingent that would be objecting to this list in much the manner that you do (you have no idea how much you remind me on this thread of Dave Marsh circa 1974, though you're smarter and more engaging and a better writer); in fact this list is much more representative of the rock audience than of rock critics, who were often in conflict with that audience. So the subtle and complex argument would have to be about how people who would be very averse to what they think this list represents and who would plump for very different music nonetheless are something of the latter-day equivalent of the sensibility that produced this list.

In other words, you need to read chapters 12 and 13 of my book. Not that those chapters make the argument I'm envisioning here (which I'm not sure is right anyway), but they're a template one could start with to make such an argument.

[koganbot]

the people voting Beefheart, Richman, and Legendary Stardust Cowboy (!) are not likely voting for much else that's on this list

Er, I mean people voting for Richman et al. in 1976, not poptimists voting for them in this poll.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

In the decades I spent listening to Peel, he played more soul than any other DJ except was it Trevor Nelson with his specialist soul show. He also played more hip hop than anyone but Westwood. He was where I first heard Pink and Kelis too. You shouldn't get the idea that he only played boys with guitars, just because that was just about all his audience-consensus threw up.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I only ever actually heard his show a few times (because those times, I hated it) - maybe if I had heard the techno or d&b or hip-hop I'd've stuck around. If he did play lots of that as well it seems a pity that his legacy is entirely bedroom indie, and that his audience for the most part didn't seem to have been turned on to any of the non-indie genres he played.

[cis.livejournal.com]

haha I've always hated that article, I think the hatred starts from her trying to imply that she's the first person ever to suspect that the sixties' narrative of sexual liberation was a male attack on growing female freedoms (srsly people were saying that at the time! and constantly after!) and then extends in both directions to cover pretty much every other thing about it (esp the hanging-a-lantern on her hypocritical attack on his hypocrisy)! I really think she could have written such a strong convincing anti-Peel screed - the points to attack him on are all there, and she's a good writer - and somehow ballses it up horribly!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

JB's OTMness always comes with a healthy dose of screeching ego (but she's still OTM).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://freakytigger.livejournal.com/175998.html that's the quote I was talking about.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

If I'd been him, ie the one in the position to change that, I would never have handed my listeners any power at all, and would have been dispirited and also ANGRY at them for being so racist.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Replacing racism with facism, then?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

YES

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think he was! It came to a watershed a couple years after where he cancelled the Festive Fifty entirely because it was so predictable (Nirvana at #1 etc.)

And what else do you think he could have done - he played the other stuff, hip-hop and house and African music and extreme metal and what have you - all the time! He still liked indie so for him not to play any would have been cutting off his nose to spite his face.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Well this is it isn't it, what else can you do? You can link to great music and talk about great music and write about great music and find that people still go "who is Trina? I like Morrissey".

How did Peel's listeners react to him cancelling the chart?

[cis.livejournal.com]

I kind of feel that if you're OTM in a poorly-executed manner you're not actually OTM?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

She executes screeching ego better than almost anyone!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Julie B != grebt.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Peel regularly cited his enmity with Tony Blackburn, his conviction that in the future Iron Butterfly and It's A Beautiful Day and so on would be adored and revered by millions whereas the likes of Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and so on would be forgotten, as evidence that you shouldn't trust his (Peel's) judgement.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Bah my comment below was supposed to be a reply to this but I couldn't find it.