Pop Solipsism

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Even for me this is a nebulous thort so bear with me:

I was talking on another blog about vocals, specifically Bobby Gillespie's vocals, and I said:

"Bobby G is kind of a unique case because he - perhaps creditably* - tries to make his voice go along with a whole BUNCH of old-timey stylistic tropes: rawk vocals, psych hippie vocals (as here), even GOSPEL at times. And IMO he really doesn't have the voice for any of them - it's just too thin.

*though I don't think so: I think it's a symptom of a (very British?) punk overhang where the will to do something became more important than the ability to do it. So "This is our Stones track" was enough to make a track "their Stones track". "There's always been a dance element to our music" and "We're gonna be the biggest band in the world" and such statements (not by Primal Scream necessarily) are other examples. It's an extension of a solipsism which came in with New Pop, I think, and which made that particular scene so vibrant but has really not helped British music since."

Now I think I have a kernel of a point here, though "will to do something" isn't exactly it, and I don't think it's specifically British either: I remember reading some Kogan stuff about the idea of something standing in for the reality in re. 80s US punkers and indie guys, except he phrased it slightly differently.

And it ties in with Lex's recent complaints about how Lady GaGa seems to operate by saying "I am original and artistic" as often as possible until people believe it.

The New Pop reference is to the idea that in 1980-82 a load of bands said "Right, we are making Pop Music and we intend that the charts reflect that", and by luck and timing and judgement it WORKED and they actually did rush into the charts and take over (a bit). But since then it's more often been the declaration rather than the realization that's won people over.

This all boils down to "When is it bad to declare your ambition?"

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OK what is this New Pop! I have seen it referenced a grillion times, mostly wrt very arch songs, but I don't know precisely what it is.

It's never bad to declare your ambition if you can back it up. Hence Gaga's epic fail (La Roux, Florence and the Machine et al as well).

a symptom of a (very British?) punk overhang where the will to do something became more important than the ability to do it

ughhh this is a meme? this is a horrible way to think about music, it's just empty signifiers isn't it?

I think the strategy of Gaga et al wrt their statements of ambition is coming from a different place than Primal Scream (NB: if it's not, this is cuz I know nothing about PS). I don't think there's any philosophy underlying it as complex as "the will to do something is more important than the ability to do it" - I think she's just ahead of most people in the industry wrt how the media works. It's similar to how the Repubs seemed to be winning the media war at one point in the US presidential campaign - by throwing a bunch of rumours and lies out into the media w/flagrant disregard for truth or plausibility, knowing that the volume of media was so great that even blatant lies would catch on.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The will > ability thing is my summary of the effect of what I'm talking about rather than a philosophical principle.

New Pop in its broad sense = i. a bunch of acts who'd emerged 3-4 years after punk shook up the UK industry, saying "Actually, being successful and having hits is inherently a really good idea, and you can do this without compromising whatever artistic ideals you might have had." ii. a rise in the quality of 'manufactured pop' thanks to more attention to detail and style, better songwriting.

ii has happened many times of course, and there's always people talking the i game but very few of them actually succeed: the thing about New Pop was how many did.

....all of this basically in response to the decline of the weekly rock press and the rise of the style press, Smash Hits etc. as high-readership influential media.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

"The will > ability thing is my summary of the effect of what I'm talking about rather than a philosophical principle."

I think it applies to a lot of (mostly cheesy?) dance music tho, including much European stuff (e.g. Scooter) altho a lot of that suffers from a LACK of ambition perhaps.

otoh dance people trying to make it as career/album artists is often seen as bad. i have always been suspicious of this argument tho, even if it is true that there are many dud albums by many dance acts.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I think this is a very interesting discussion. I loved Primal Scream briefly, when I think some of their ambitions were fulfilled for a few tracks in collaboration with Andy Weatherall - this affection then carried over to considerable tolerance for their lame Stonesisms. I thought they sometimes succeeded in sounding like the Stones had the Stones not been any good - occasionally rising to say second- or third-rate. Rocks, for instances, is a decent enough second-rate Exile impersonation. This doesn't get many artistic achievement points, but I like it well enough.

Ambition with (artistic, usually) success is a great thing, but more of one than the other can be another matter - I'm all for artistic success without artistic ambition (though I think this is often simply hidden or secret artistic ambition), but ambition that isn't fulfilled in the end product is often contemptible. It's my problem with a lot of recent indie - the talk is often of artistic vision and integrity and so on, and the music is so dull and conservative. (I've specified artistic success because I think connection between artistic success and commercial success is a very different matter - they sometimes seem almost orthogonal concepts.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes, "i'm going to make this so well no one notice it's been being made" is all about ambition, except part of the ambition is that it never gets declared

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Also, I think loads and loads of people think that a claim to artistic values is the same as having them, and they think that that obliges you to support them - the 'world owes them a living' thing that Lex mentioned on the Ghost Town discussion. I remember being at a comic convention years and years back, and a young guy tried to sell me his comic. It was plainly shit, so I declined. "B-but it's SELF_PUBLISHED!" he said, as if the obvious and unimpeachable artistic integrity this implied must instantly overcome my aversion.

I am not inclined to give any act any credit for stated ambitions if what they end up doing is recycling other things (see Primal Scream after Screamadelica), and especially if they choose or execute those sources badly. Obviously a lack of artistic achievement is no barrier to my loving the record, but I guess it lowers the odds some.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

There was a terrible, terrible band on Sarah Records called St Christopher* who tried to make Scott Walkeresque music despite having the usual indie-of-the-time drawbacks: drums that sounded like soggy cardboard, a singer who couldn't sing and no 60-piece string section at their command. Truly, why bother?

I interviewed Embrace once and they told me that it was their firm plan to make an album as good as Pet Sounds within four years…

Re: Martin's point, my advice to the young is always "Don't follow your dream. Please."


*Of course, it will now turn out than one of them either posts here or is a great mate of someone's.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I actually find the declaration of ambition (beyond "I wanted to make a good record that was about trains" or something explanatory like that, since you have to introduce yourself somehow I guess) is kind of deplorable in music. And I know that's a bit of an "indieist" statement or whatever but I find it quite repulsive when bands (who, I might add, generally are indie/metal/rock) declare "we want to be the biggest band in the world and change every teenager to believe in indie/metal/rock!" or whatever. Equally, I find it repulsive if an artist declares that they're there for the money or the fame or to "put really real music out there that means something to people like me" (artists from all genres do this) unless the artist is forming a persona of being an absolute and total cock, in which case it's fully permissable as these are completely and totally cockish things to do. (eg: I do not mind someone like, say, Trina saying something like this because she doesn't champion it as a virtue, she says it as part of the nasty persona)

This is me being picky probably, though or some ancient punk sensibility rearing its head. I don't mind artists/bands being successful or having ambitions; I see these both as good things, I just think it makes everyone look like complete kn0bs if you all go around going 'I WANT TO BE BIGGER THAN ANYTHING IN MUSIC HISTORY.' Yes you'll still be just a band and someone bigger will come along next week, get the fvck over it.

As I say, this is probably just me being middle class and awkward though or something.

[koganbot]

The phrases I used back in 1987 were "symbol stands in for the effect" and "symbol stands in for the event." I tied the formula to my complaint that "music is reduced to symbols - the symbol almost replaces the music - the symbol gets in the way of the music - certain effects of music are reduced to symbols: e.g., a type of music symbolizes rebellion rather than provoking rebellion, symbolizes outrageousness rather than being an outrage, symbolizes fun, symbolizes intelligence, symbolizes protest. The result is music that is meaningless - the term 'meaningless' being used in the sense of 'does not matter' and 'has no effect.' The music sounds empty. (And music of the past gets emptied in its present contexts.)"

I like this passage very much, and think it's on the right track, but even when I wrote it I knew it was problematic (I'd prefaced it by saying that it raised more questions than it answered). Its most crucial drawback is that, while it was true that almost all postpunk music of the time that symbolized rebellion wasn't actually provoking rebellion, most postpunk that symbolized outrage wasn't actually an outrage, etc., it doesn't follow that the music as a whole had been reduced to symbols and that it had no effect. It just meant that the music didn't have the effect it claimed to have. I think the music was relatively empty in comparison to both its predecessors and to most other music of the time, but this term "empty" isn't very clear. What's the difference between "empty" music and "rich" music? How can you tell?

One of my theories is that the music functioned as a draw for social gatherings (at that time indie-alternative was very much a live phenomenon, a rock-club/shitty-bar phenomenon), and to be a draw it didn't have to really do much more than be a symbol. ("And what's wrong with that?" you might ask. My complaint would have been that the music wasn't offering enough to the gathering, wasn't stimulating events or changing them enough. This wasn't very generous of me, but I was really disappointed that what had several years ago been my music had turned into such lame bullshit.)

Believe it or not, the source of my idea was François Truffaut's critique in the 1950s of the French "Tradition Of Quality" and his championing in its stead the filmmakers he considered "auteurs." The distinction he was drawing was between filmmakers who scored a bunch of cheap verbal points that were written into the screenplay (you might think of them as turning the movies into illustrations of their scripts) versus those whose vision permeated the entire staging of the movie, from camera angles to actors' pronunciations to scenery to editing. The difference might be between, say, a scene that makes you think, "Oh, he turned his back to her; that means he's alienated," and a much richer scene with a lot going on, including the fellow's not quite knowing how to connect, in this way or that.

But that's not the most precise distinction, is it? The word the auteurist critics used for the general staging of a movie was "mise-en-scène," which was never a very clear idea, but that doesn't make it useless.

My thoughts about how to counteract the tendency to reduce music to symbols were probably best expressed in my use of the terms "free lunch" and "context of abundance" in "The Disco Tex Essay," while my best attempt to apply mise-en-scène to music was in my discussion of James Brown in "Death Rock 2000."

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"The will > ability"

I still think this is a slightly different beast than what you were tackling, though. I feel like the "symbol standing in for the event" was by and large addressing a kind of rejection impulse -- rejection of "someone else's" value system in a way that wasn't rejecting effectively, or wasn't justifying its rejection (was taking its rejection as self-explanatory). And this had to do with it being more of a club and live culture, a place where people could get together to not be weighed down by the constraints that they felt in other parts of the culture around them.

Whereas what this seems to be about is, rather, some kind of "demonstrated effort" either overshadowing the recorded output. Or, another possibility, a framework not connecting at all to the recorded output, and these are two separate issues that are still different from a framework or big idea overshadowing the output.

So here's a list of possibilities brought up with the equivalent example in, e.g., a cover version of an existing song: (1), call it the "unironic indie cover of pop staple syndrome": effort of attempt > result [cover version: frameworks are similar], (2) the Lady Gaga syndrome: framework =/= output [cover version: framework challenges existing one], (3) the lonely hearts syndrome: framework > output [framework challenges existing one].

Lady Gaga's framework simply doesn't connect to her music; I absolutely don't hear an artiste in the music, so the statements on artistry, etc. don't compute. Ditto Animal Collective, who belong in the same category, I think -- the critical discourse of experimentation vs. pop leanings just doesn't seem to connect to the fairly ineffectual mess of their music. It's mistaking a middleground for the exact center point in a more interesting binary ("experimental" vs. "pop," maybe).

When a post-punk band (model 3) claimed rebellion or outrage that wasn't there in the music, it may well have been there in the social sphere, in a mindset or framework. Your main point is that the music isn't doing the ideas justice. But what I'm wondering is what happens when music isn't positioning itself opposed to the thing that it's commenting on (the music in model 1): and I think the results are inevitably figure-it-out-as-you-go...I still really hate Ted Leo's cover of "Since U Been Gone," but I don't on principle dislike indie types doing pop covers without the vocal or instrumental or production chops. However I'm less certain now than I used to be that there's anything wrong with Leo's framework, it's just the particular execution seems weak, in part because it can't escape comparison from the original. This is the paradox that Model 1 people get into -- if you're covering the song without real comment, and you add nothing to it, why shouldn't you essentially be judged by the wedding band test?

[koganbot]

I don't think Lady GaGa is necessarily relevant here, since "Just Dance" as dance pop doesn't state her artistic ambitions - or at least doesn't state her artistic ambitions in anything other than the same way that the Danitys and Pussys and Stupid Shits state similar artistic ambitions in their music (have only read short excerpts of an interview with GaGa once, but she might well think that what she says about the potential for art in her music/performance applies every bit as much to Danity Kane and the Pussycat Dolls and Girlicious as it does to her; if she's consistent she ought to think this). A listener who believes in the Madonna-Warhol "everybody is a star/you know who you are" ethos may believe that it's implicitly contained in all dance pop that has lead vocalists, even if the Danitys and Girlshits have never thought to apply the word "art" to themselves. That doesn't mean that the ambitions announced by their music can't be considered art ambitions. (I have no idea if Danicous and Girlypiss have ever used the word "art" in reference to themselves; the Pussyshits may well have.)

Whereas the sound of Primal Scream's Stoneish (or Black Crowesish) music makes promises about being like the Stones. And our ideas of Animal Collective's sonic ambitions comes from listening to them not from reading interviews, right?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is true. Though I think category 2 in my little chart up there doesn't necessarily need to come from interviews per se -- it can also come from a critical discussion. When Lex and Mike (and to a lesser extent I) say stuff like "we don't hear what you're hearing," we're basically saying "the conversation about this music is not syncing up with the music we're hearing." It's that does-not-compute thing, except the issue is that it's easier to dismiss a single person/artist's statements than it is to dispute a consensus among individuals who ALL claim the statements we find problematic (to the extent that we don't find it in the music).

The 1-2-3 model was intended to remove certain artists from consideration of your particular framework -- that is, I'm saying Lady Gaga doesn't belong in a conversation about "symbol for the event," etc., and that in their own way, AC don't belong in that conversation either, though they're closer than Gaga, who seems more like an anomaly to me.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*dismiss consensus, not dispute. It's actually quite easy to dispute!

[koganbot]

if you're covering the song without real comment, and you add nothing to it, why shouldn't you essentially be judged by the wedding band test?

Is it possible not to add anything? What's lost in Ted Leo's version is much greater than what he adds, but it is very much Ted Leo singing it not Kelly Clarkson, and I suppose a fan (or rationalizer) of his version could say that what he adds is his effort to get at notes that are somewhat beyond him and that by taking away the studio compression and precision of the original he's adding something more personal. And for me that's the symbol standing in for the event, the feeling that his effort makes it personal by definition - even though, actually, not a lot of personality or a lot of the song comes through in his version. The guitar playing is rather good, and percussive in a way that the original isn't. In any event, I can see his version being accessible/acceptable to some people for whom Kelly Clarkson is neither (though what in the hell are they actually accessing?), but my point is something is being added in his version, both musically and socially, even if the additions make the song worse.

(I've liked some Ted Leo that I've heard, but he really is shitty on this one.)

[koganbot]

But a point I was making over on Lex's Animal Collective thread was that among fans of a band there's always an engagement, usually quite visceral, with the sound; and presumably, unless the band is cynical, it is as engaged as its fans. And they'd likely believe in whatever symbols there were, and I'd say that they'd feel the symbols to be true. A band doesn't have to explicitly state its ambitions. If a band plays a certain kind of rock and dresses in a particular way, that in itself becomes a statement of ambition in regard to the show or the CD etc. Given that it's impossible for a rock band not to play a certain kind of rock and dress in a particular way, the band doesn't have any choice but to state ambitions.