Sneak previews

Expect these new blogs: 


1) More on Retromania--but my Reynolds reading was interrupted when I picked up Patti Smith's Just Kids, so I'll probably discuss this first
2) I just finished writing an essay on the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, for a collection of essay on the group's 50th anniversary. I plan to post some outtakes from the essay here. 
3) In honor of Mick Jagger's 69th birthday, a post on the cosmic significance of the Stones' cover of Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down" (from Exile). Sneak preview: What do these two songs have in common, aside from being released within one year of the other? 

All will be revealed; stay tuned. Until then, ponder this: the Sly song was a No. 1 hit single in 1971. 

Pop music, Nation, and PiL

Yes, I know: Danny Boyle managed to incorporate the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" into the gala celebration of Britishness that was the Opening Ceremony for the Olympics. 

Proof to be sure, that along with the music of British Invasion Groups, '70s punk has become a vital part of National Heritage discourse, despite all of its anti-establishment rhetoric. 

Rather than bemoan the fact, or even remark on it, I thought I would mention the canonization of punk as a reminder that John (Rotten) Lydon cannily anticipated the recuperation of his band by establishment culture as soon as he left the band. For at least five years or so, Lydon successfully constructed a self-consciously alternative musical identity, with the ironically named Public Image Ltd., or PiL. (I know that he does dairy commercials now, and the person who posted this "Country Life" ad blasts Lydon for it: but I think they're pretty funny. Besides, the new PiL record is great). 

That the SP eventually received an establishment imprimatur seems less remarkable to me than the fact that Lydon, along side visionary musicians like Keith Levene and Jah Wobble, created a musical mode that resisted appropriation at the time, and still does to this day. 

I'm pretty sure no one thought of using this song at the gala event last night: 

Or this: 

JImmy Cliff

Back and desitively kicking ass. I heard this on the LOFT following Jimmy Cliff's "Struggling Man" (1972), and prefer the new stuff! How often does THAT happen with a veteran performer?


"Struggling Man" :

And here's "Reggae Music" (2012). I could only find the live version on YouTube, but this gives you the idea: 

RETROMANIA

Summer's here and the time is right for -- catching up on your reading before the Fall Semester hits you like a ton of bricks! I've finally had a chance to start reading Simon Reynold's latest book, Retromania, on the meaning of the nostalgia fetish evident in recent pop music. 


Reynolds' book addresses our current situation of music overload, now that digital media has made it possible to both access and archive music in vast quantities. This technological capacity means that the musical past is always with us, and in fact, Reynolds argues, has become a killing burden on the present. One consequence of accumulating music is that it's become, as Mark Paytress notes, "increasingly detached from everything but itself." Disconnected from any social reality other than the desire of "exquisitely discerning consumers" (Reynolds), pop music has become literally monstrous, i.e., no longer existing on a human scale. 


It's not just that pop musicians have given up on originality; they've also renounced the attempt to imagine the future. Such progressive projects used to be the pop singer's raison d'etre (think of David Bowie in the 70s). Currently, Reynolds argues, pop music at its best recasts the musical past, and at worst, merely recycles it. 


I will try here and in future posts to consider some of the broader implications of Reynolds' argument. If Reynolds is right, I think we need to reconsider the claims Simon Frith puts forth in Performing Rites (1998). Here Frith argues that behind every music genre lies "an implied community." Music serves a primary social function, binding the individual listener to a larger collective. Yet does looking over the virtual shoulder of your Facebook friends to discover what they're listening to on Spotify constitute community building in any meaningful sense? Frith's sociology of genre would seem to presume a now outmoded psychology of listening. It no longer describes the  current moment, where music mostly refers to itself, not the world. I incline more to Reynolds' opinion, that we mostly listen to music in ways that tend to isolate us. 

Reynolds combines his argument about pop nostalgia with a fascinating alternative history of rock music, relevant to my own work on 60s British rock. Reynolds make a point of differentiating hippie subculture from the genuinely progressive moment of British rock circa 1965-66, represented by the Yardbirds, the Who, and UFO era Pink Floyd.  


By the feedback solo here: 

Or this long form improvisation: 

Or the sonic collage/guitar solo here:

Severing the Who from hippie makes sense given that band's always ambivalent relation to the movement, despite their having played the two signal festivals of the hippie era. 


Contrary to a consensus that maintains that hippie looked forward to utopia, Reynolds maintains that the subculture was nostalgic: for "authentic" indigenous cultures, fin-de-siecle graphic art, and "vintage" clothing. And despite received notions about punk as anti-establishment, Reynolds argues that Malcolm McLaren was as nostalgic as the hippies he vilified. Before there was SEX, McLaren's first business venture was Let It Rock, a vintage clothes store specializing in Teddy Boy fashions. The self-declared pop Situationist was also looking back, obsessed with the Teddy Boys he recalled from his boyhood in the late 1950s, revering them equally for their style and hooliganism.   
If you don't know what the Teds were about, click here: 

(end part one)

Just sharing, and slightly re-arranging a set of songs I heard on Deep Tracks Sirius yesterday. These fit together surprisingly well: at least it surprised me. 


From the wonderful, and wonderfully diverse, Untitled (1970) by the Byrds:

then this, from Led Zeppelin III (both released in October 1970--whoa, I think we're having a Crowley moment here)

Finally, this from Get Your Wings, four years later.

Put 'em all together, and you have: I'm not sure yet, but I like it. 

Hearing "On Your Own" by the Verve on satellite radio, it flashed on me that the British group, the Verve, ended up in a very interesting place on their last record, Urban Hymns (1997), achieving a remarkable blend of indie rock and early seventies mellow soul. You can hear the transition in "On Your Own" from Northern Songs (1995); I hear Curtis Mayfield in the resigned lyric, the melancholy vocal, and above all, in that silky-smooth groove that you want to go on endlessly. Unlike so many of the countless other attempts by white rock bands to do something soulful, it doesn't seem self-conscious at all.   

In the same vein, from Urban Hymns: 

Not that I don't equally admire the style of the early Verve, and their mash-up of U2 (U2 trying to sound like Zeppelin that is, i.e., "Bullet the Blue Sky) and Can. It's just that I don't feel the mellower Verve is any less powerful.