I have an awful confession to make: I think I may be falling out of love with music. It’s been quite a gradual process over the last few years, becoming more obvious since I moved to Nottingham in 2007. But try as I might I can no longer deny it. Maybe it’s just that I’m older now and I’ve grown out of my prior infatuation with music or I’m getting jaded about everything.
The worst thing now is to compare my current mood of spent passion with a few years ago when I had a desperate almost pathological dependency on certain records. Records which I absolutely relied upon to lift me out of my despondency or gloom, out of myself when being myself wasn’t too much fun. All the time I was infatuated with a song I would treat it like it held some kind of essential truth about whatever was going on with me at the time, to which I had to keep referring back incessantly; I was always conscious of just how music was a mood altering substance for me.
I had phases when I latched onto different records or bands or musicians, leeching off as much emotional sustenance as I could from them and then dropping them. My nervous reliance would eventually wear itself out dropping from its initial intensity, through different stages till it reached a kind of bored indifference – most of the music I was obsessed with about 10 years ago I can take or leave now. There is a roll call of names: the Beatles, the Black Dog, the Aphex Twin, Suede, the Pixies, John Fahey, Neko Case, Coil, Current 93, the Smiths, Van Dyke Parks, Love, Built to Spill, the Go Betweens, Josef K, Shack, Elliott Smith, the Wildhearts, Richard Thompson, the Afghan Whigs Galaxie 500…It was an unhealthy lecherous relationship that I had with music. But I would always discover some new artist or album to rekindle the previous excitement once I had grown weary of a current favourite or even a whole genre of music. There would always be a replacement, even the Replacements.
Right from the off, from when I started seriously getting into music, it was never a communal thing for me. Listening to music was almost exclusively a solitary pleasure, like onanism it was something I got most out of alone and secluded in my room. The few times I ventured out from my sanctuary to a live gig I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I would go alone, because I had no friends, and just stand self-conscious near the front feeling my bladder filling up, and unwilling to pass all the way through the crowd to go to the toilet.
As a kid I followed the NME (this was in the mid 90s just before it became completely unreadable) and kept an eye out for whichever bands were being hyped up as the brightest and best. A little later I started to consciously make more of an effort to seek out music I thought might impress my peers; but I soon enough discovered they didn’t care what obscure unlistenable rubbish I pestered them with, and that my musical tastes did nothing to endear me to them (precious little did actually – I was too far gone into my personal weirdness at that point).
See, I’d been labouring under the belief that the music you listened to spoke profoundly for who you were, just as much a matter of identity as the clothes you wore or the company you kept — and for a lot of folk, music became the entry into a whole new cultural, tribal affiliation. So since it was such an important constituent of your public persona, maybe even the key to a whole lifestyle, you had to really work at your taste in music, cultivate it and filter out all the shite that stood out from the rest, so that it was all seamless and fitted in neatly with the rest of your posturing.
But that didn’t work out for me – I couldn’t use my musical acumen to compensate for my many asocial defects – so I abandoned most of my prior extra-musical criteria when it came to choosing what I listened to. Instead I decided that I would just follow my gut and seek out whatever gave me the most pleasure. So that the realisation that I impressed nobody became a liberating one and I resolved to spurn the shallow dictates of musical trends and fashions. Actually this turned out to be problematic for me. As the music became a more and more intimate thing for me, more of an indulgence, it increasingly served to reinforce my already strong inclinations towards introversion and solitude.
Overall it seemed to work out alright, I could listen to Coldplay, Limp Bizkit, Orson and other fun insincere throwaway shite all day – though there was plenty of piles of steaming insincere shit that I stayed away from because it was no fun at all – and I didn’t need to pretend that I was doing it ironically since I’d given up evangelising about my music tastes: so if no one cared about the cool stuff I listened to why the fuck should I be self conscious about my “guilty pleasures”. No one cared about my music tastes full stop so fuck ‘em all.
Of course I couldn’t totally escape the influence of trend makers and hype merchants when it came to seeking out music to listen to, but I thought I was doing alright. Actually turns out I wasn’t too far off prevailing trends: the clamour to reappraise each and every musician who’d made anything halfway listenable any time during the last 50 years without regard to the intervening layers of critical orthodoxy coincided, perhaps not coincidently with my own such attempts.
But at the same time — and I’d kind of realised this before but hadn’t properly taken it to heart — a lot of what makes rock music so compelling is bound to its essential newness, to the ephemeral, disposability of it all. That’s the nature of the beast. It’s the statement that’s being made in the here and now, which will always be tied to some particular here and now as it spins away into a hazy past, that gives or that gave ferocious life to so much of popular music. As joyous and wonderful as it is to listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ it can’t ever capture the thrill of hearing it when it first came out, and that impact of knowing how much of an almighty sneer Dylan was cocking at his audience’s expectations; similarly you can’t distil the wonder of the Velvets first LP into a pure aural experience separate from its seedy black and white New York milieu.
This music is *about* a certain time and place, it derived from a joy and recklessness of feeling that came from tramping down prior generations’ staid conventions and obsolete thought patterns, in a word it is disrespectful. Rock would be nothing, a heartless and soulless shell, without the sneering postures and attitudes of rebellion, the guttural promises of dissolution spat out in the face of an uptight establishment. I mean, it just isn’t Mozart or Mahler — whatever its pretentions it can never have the same depth and it will never evoke the same breadth and range of emotions that “classical” music does, so it doesn’t have that going for it. But then modern popular music rarely ever really attains or even attempts to attain to the timelessness of folk music: precisely because at its core it is antagonistic towards its antecedents. The more it moves away from that spirit of nihilism the more tedious and artificial it becomes. The more it becomes a part of the same establishment it once strove to scorn and provoke — and ultimately the less it means anything. It *should* be music for outsiders by outsiders.
Because in the end, the clothes and the haircuts these fuckers wear, their music videos, the legions of girls/boys they like to fuck and the drugs they gorge themselves on — all the debaucheries and the subsequent mock penitence or the getting religion — each aspect of the now clichéd rock mythos is an essential part of the whole performance, each is integral to understanding the art, to understanding why this music is so compelling and so awesome. This is why Bowie was such a genius; he understood all of this and then consciously, artfully, encompassed it in his art. But in the midst of all the pandemonium and the trips to rehab and the coke and the groupies you can’t neglect the music for too long – unless of course you’re a genius and have already delivered some scant bare proof of your genius to the world, but despite the widespread empty bandying around of the term in praise geniuses are seldom to be found in nature.
And that’s why Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are such cunts, they got one little taste of the adulation and the worship and the attendant lifestyle, all the shit that came from heading up the zeitgeist, and ended up just dive bombing into their own personal horror movies—and FORGOT ABOUT MAKING ANY KILLER TUNES. You can only indulge these idiots for so long, sooner or later we get tired of the cheap voyeuristic vomit laden thrills they keep offering up and then they need to start coming up with the musical goods.
OK maybe it’s a lot more nuanced than what I’ve just spouted in the last few paragraphs, there’s jazz, soul, R&B, various hybrids of different musics that aren’t necessarily focused on iconoclasm, but I still think that in the end the spirit of defiance should be and once was the engine of popular music post the second world war—and yes that rebelliousness was manipulated from the start but there was still some substance to it. So anyway I guess my mission to extract as much joy as I could from the annals of recorded popular music, to listen to records on their own merits divorced from the immediate circumstances of their creation or inspiration, missed the point by a pretty large margin and I was doomed to failure from the start.
And then the more music I bought, downloaded, streamed, the more I gorged myself on just on the process of just gathering stuff that I could listen to later, the more I just got bored of the actual music. A lot of stuff I listened to and if it didn’t have that immediate visceral impact the first time, I would just discard it and never bother listening to it again. Of course there were records that absolutely shone through amongst all the tiresomeness and that gave me much succour. But these were few and far between, and I was demanding more and more from those I did manage to find. And then there is no contemporary music that I could really get excited over, lose myself in again – I keep hoping there will be and I’ll get reeled back into being a proper fan. Of course I love bands like the Cribs, the Fleet Foxes, and the Twilight Sad and I’ve really started trying to keep up with new music again. But I can never escape the feeling with these newer groups that they’re all retreading old ground that’s already been retread at least once before already. Take the two CDs from my collection that I’m currently most enamoured with: Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, and the Inner City compilation “Good Life: The Best of Inner City”. This music was created around 20 years old, it is part of the sound track of 1989, and yet it could have been released last week because sonically it hasn’t dated at all. And yet in 1988 or 1989 pretty much everything released 20 years prior with a few exceptions sounded *old* and of its time to those ears.
In fact what have been the main musical innovations of the 00’s apart from everything getting more shite?
Essentially the big revolution that has taken place has had nothing to do with how music actually sounds or which new genres have sprang into being and everything to do with how music is formatted and distributed, and the CD fighting a pathetic last stand for the physical formats against MP3s and downloading – and consequently everything to do with how easy it is for folk to take a hold of music (thieve it) and share it amongst themselves and thereby elude the grasp of the bloated and complacent music industry. And this has changed how we listen to recorded music, but more especially how we value it, first of all financially and then spiritually.
It’s a bland truism that for most things (aside from perhaps crack cocaine) the easier they are to come by the less you value them. For music certainly scarcity lent whole albums and bands and even genres (e.g., Krautrock) a whole other aura of seductiveness, being elusive and mysterious upped their cache no end amongst those with even the barest aspirations to being trendy. But then I can also relate too many occasions when I bought an album or a compilation for the sole purpose of hearing just one song as against the fact that I’d read in the NME or something that rest of the record wasn’t up to much; and my shelves are now cluttered with this kind of stuff. Nowadays I don’t bother listening and making my own mind up on the whole album. I can avoid opening myself up to chance, I just find that one song I want to hear on pirate bay or spotify and play the fuck out of it. There was sheer joy to be had picking through racks and stacks of dusty CDs in charity shops or scouring badly lit indie record shops (I never got into vinyl so I was never cool enough to rifle through boxes of LPs or singles) in anticipation of finding something rare by a band or a musician you saw namedropped a few times in some old interview, that might potentially open up a whole new genre of music for you, or finding a song you’d caught the tail end of on the radio and which was never played again, the thrill of the find often eclipsed the actual pleasure to be got from listening to the music itself. Usually you found fuck all, but you were sustained by the memories of glorious past finds. Now compare that with the scenario where the name of a song pops up in your head and a few minutes later you’re streaming it on spotify, like I just did just now with the song Encyclopedi-ite by Sammy.
And talking of abundance now music from every corner of the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, has become readily accessible and most probably has some kind of market outside of its previously limited geographical confines. Also too the archives are continually being turned out in the quest for more reissue fodder, and we’re all hungry to discover neglected masterpieces, to what had been dismissed before when it felt like there was a surplus of good music around – and all this on top of a music scene which, although it may not be thriving, is still producing enough intriguing music that you shouldn’t really dismiss it out of hand. In the end this all leads to a surfeit of choice, which can be kind of wearying – for me at least.
And of course, the other thing that has really fucked music up has been the total triumph of corporate cynicism, the co-option of everything, giving us the apparent paradox that the more money flows into an art form via corporate sponsorship the less everything is worth artistically. Obviously the men in suits have always had a major hand in things. It would be foolish to suggest there was ever a time when they weren’t standing somewhere off to the side pulling the strings and gleefully manipulating what was supposedly a spontaneous expression of youthful spirit and clamour sacrificing art to the profit motive. Equally it’s impossible to deny that the marriage of business and creativity was ultimately responsible for some of the most wondrous, life affirming, superlative music ever recorded.
But the fact is that, whereas before there was some kind of struggle going on between the dictates of the bottom line in opposition to the imperatives of art, that battle is now truly over and was decided quite some time back squarely in favour of mammon. There were times when the corporations hadn’t totally consolidated their grip on music when musicians had money thrown at them and were still allowed a lot of leeway, with the understanding that sooner or later the record labels would recoup their money – without marketing everything to fuck and without the demand for instant monetary gratification. The Beatles, Bowie, the Stones all were products of this kind of latitude. Turns out that all that time the corporations were busy working away, figuring out the optimal ways to manipulate youth culture to suit their own nefarious ends.
For example corporate sponsorship today is in effect a parasite leeching off of the credibility and the spirit of a youth culture, that once seemed to stand for more than the latest make of mobile phone, or clothes line or alcoholic beverage but which no longer can claim to. A subculture that once flowered precisely because it offered up an alternative to mainstream purgatory is now fatally compromised.
