remembering the serious triviality of pop music

Something left unelaborated in my review of Echotone (from the last two posts: here and here) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music — the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends.  Although this isn't a new critique of post-punk music (i.e., music groups inspired by the DIY ethos of recording and distribution and/or the modernist impulse to push the envelope artistically and expressively), Echotone specifically highlights a quite contemporary context: indie-rock groups' affinity with "creative city" economic development schemes. 

But there's another context, also related to the so-called creative economy, and also urban in its manifestation, but maybe more pervasive across pop music culture and the generational zeitgeist.  It can be gleaned by comparing Echotone with another recent film about an urban music scene: The Beat is the Law, a 2011 documentary directed by Eve Wood about Sheffield, England. 

The Beat is the Law is the sequel to Wood's 2001 documentary Made in Sheffield.  Whereas the latter documents Sheffield circa 1978-83, focusing on post-punk (in the narrower, generic sense) groups such as the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Vice Versa (who went on to form New Pop icons ABC) and the sadly forgotten Artery, The Beat is the Law picks up around 1984 to tell the story of the Cabaret Voltaire-inspired groups like Clock DVA and Chakk; the acid house crews centered around FON Studios and Warp Records; and on into the mid-90s Britpop era with local heroes Pulp and the Longpigs.  This period specifically reflects the dismal depths of the Thatcher era, when the Miners' Strike tore Sheffield apart, and the effervescence of the New Romantics and the New Pop gave way to the kitchen-sink non-glamour of the Smiths and the C86 indie-pop shift.  The contrast to the subsequent euphoria of British acid house and then New Labour's electoral victories is stark, and it gives The Beat is the Law an emotional arc that its highly worthy prequel maybe lacked.

Watching the documentary, I was struck by a peculiar juxtaposition of sentiments concerning the role and value of music as recalled retroactively by various Sheffield musicians.  On the one hand, they refer to "all these dark, intense people making music in nightclubs" (to quote Pulp's Russell Senior) during 1980s Sheffield.  To some extent, this conveys the proto-industrial aesthetic of groups like Chakk, with their early attempts at "found percussion" (used more successfully by contemporaries like Test Department and Einsturzende Neubauten) and an earnestness toward their art that precludes crass rockstar ambitions (of the kind observed, say, in Liverpool groups like Echo & the Bunnymen or The Mighty Wah!).  Sure, such seriousness could also just be another word for youthful pretensions.  After all, take away the artistic adventure found in Cabaret Voltaire and its ilk, and you may be left with a lot of dour young men in their 20s expressing their dourness to other dour young men (and women!) in their 20s.  However, The Beat is the Law suggests this attitude is of a piece with the cultural climate in Sheffield at the time, particularly its tradition of labor militancy and its wide local support for a socialist welfare state.  This is a seriousness that draws on longstanding modernist impulses, found within art and politics, to cast out the old and usher in the new.

On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker remembers how Thatcher's neoliberal government and the sober Victorian ethos which it sought to resurrect viewed musicians at the time: "To be in a band in the mid-80s was, I guess because most people were on the dole, you just should have had 'loser' tattooed on your head, you know.  There was no respect."  This official dismissiveness suggests the limits of the seriousness described earlier could go.  Playing in a band is a trivial hobby, properly confined to leisurely pursuits and abandoned once work and duty call.  And Thatcher made the call for work and duty very loudly and clearly as she sought to eradicate the permissive "dole culture" and compel Britons to fend for themselves as individuals in the neoliberal labor market. 

I'm struck by how the serious triviality that Sheffield musicians understood their art to represent during Thatcher's England contrasts powerfully with the trivial seriousness that pop music seems to embody in the present day.  In 1980s Sheffield, the idea that music could be a dignified calling, much less a foundation for economic development, is completely absent.  And if punk and other underground musical expressions rejected the restrictive dictates of traditional authority, it's not clear that they necessarily challenged the limits between work and leisure that Thatcher emphasized; if anything, they sought to extend the boundaries of leisure over the domain of work in an undefined and, admittedly, not always thought-out way.

Chalk this contradiction up to the inconsistencies of youth if you want, but other musical forms have also asserted the centrality of everyday life (into which 'leisure' can be fit, although doing so highlights the fact of alienation along the way) over the demands of work and duty.  Think of folk music in the sense of people's music, or performers of religious music.  Composing and performing music can be the basis of a sustainable livelihood in these and other musical traditions, but rarely do they constitute the relations of production for an ascendant economic class as they do in the creative economy today.

And so we come upon the greater context for the instrumentalization of independent or underground music today.  Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy.  Austin today, by contrast, is very much part of a creative economy — or, if you're skeptical about the spirit of empowerment that the term implies, then an economy in which the production of entertainment, design, and services are the chief value-added activities in highly developed nations, regions and cities.  Music has been swept up in this economic shift, with little critical awareness or effective response by musicians on the whole.  Indeed, indie rock musicians have especially let the 'serious' task of making a living colonize their music, lifestyles, their generational references, even their affective repertoire (melancholy, irony, nightlife exuberance, etc.).

It's in this context that we should be troubled by the otherwise sensible priorities of many musicians today to make musical creativity their full-time job, for instance, or to protect their intellectual property from piracy.  Not to keep the finger pointed solely at musicians, of course.  To return to a conclusion from my last post, so long as the entertainment industry and other sectors extract surplus value from musicians' creative activity, such priorities can make sense in some circumstances — they can even have the whiff of "fighting back against the corporate machine" about them.

It's an axiom in economic geography that, in their form as material, empirical activities, economies don't magically encompass the whole of a nation-state; economies are always unevenly developed, which among other things opens the door for talking about regional and urban economies.  To extend the example I used earlier, if Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy, London at the same time was already part of an emergent symbolic economy.  Of course, the production of culture has always been a key role for cities, like London, so prominent as to be deemed cultural capitals.  By the 1980s, London's music sector had already been well integrated into a broader industrial commodity-producing economy, a point that's evoked in Paul Morley's response to a question by Simon Reynolds (in the latter's 2010 volume, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews).

OK, Paul, now you have to explain to me that Manchester jingoism thing you all go in for, the absolute contempt for London!

London is a metaphor.  It represents everything that's conservative about that business approach to culture and art and entertainment.  A laziness.  Back then it was so pronounced, you really felt like the country was slanted, physically slanted at a gradient, so that everything slid down to London.  You did feel annoyed about it.  I've never been as vociferous about it as Tony Wilson.  I wasn't so much pro-Manchester as anti-London.  I often say, 'No great band has come from London,' and then people say, 'The Stones and The Who.' But I say, 'Since then...'  And it's sort of true, when you think of the bands that came out of London, like Spandau Ballet.

There was something about the favouritism too.  You felt like if a band came out of London, they'd be signed.  In Manchester, the sense that you could do it yourself led to a greater amount of independence.  The Buzzcocks doing Spiral Scratch on their own label New Hormones was quite a stalwart thing—you thought, 'My God, what an astounding thought' (pp. 326-7).

This suggests the setting in which musicians might challenge the economic overdetermination of their art could be urban in nature, pursued in the geographic pockets left behind by the creative economy.  These spaces and communities can be found all over, albeit beneath the global complex created by musicians selling music (which conceivably can be "made anywhere") in the global commodity market.  All of this is to say, musicians creating in these places probably won't make a living off their art.  

But is that such a bad thing?  In the era of Occupy Wall Street, should we direct music to the 'serious' undertaking of careerism?  Will the solidarities needed to mobilize against unfettered financial capital and growing social inequalities necessarily originate out of the trivial commonalities of lifestyle and sensibility?  Perhaps we can commit art once again to express and inspire the particular experience of life — as it did in Sheffield 1980s and, obviously, so many other places — rather than heed the call of value-adding and economic development in a creative economy.

the end of the line in Sheffield: Sex City? a review of Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp by Owen Hatherley

With the horribly regressive debt-ceiling legislation passed by the U.S. Congress today, the West took yet another step toward making the neoliberal dream — gutting social programs, enshrining the market as the means and end of social well-being, idealizing upward mobility and the consumer good life, and leaving the lower classes to their own fate — the only game in town.  Do we even count these steps anymore?  Is there any point?  There is no alternative, Margaret Thatcher said of the amoral economic world she helped set in motion, and the liberal opposition seems only too eager to believe it.

It seems now might be an appropriate time to revisit the remarkable music of Pulp. 

 

Luckily, we have an excellent gazetteer on this journey: Owen Hatherley's slim little book, Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero Books, 2011).  An erudite and excitable writer, Hatherley has two useful qualifications for this task.  First, he was born in 1981, around the same time Pulp began recording.  This means that at the band's artistic zenith up to and through the heyday of Britpop, he was at that impressionable age when a young personopens up emotionally and socially to the promise of music, discovering the performers they'll likely deem their all-time favorites through much of their later lives and gearing up for fuller participation in pop culture in their coming years of autonomy.  The appearance of this book indicates Pulp was the group for Hatherley, notwithstanding that by the first time he saw them in concert, they "were as distant as any stadium rock act, a speck far, far away in the stratosphere; yet at the same time they were constantly in your living room" (pg. 88).  Evidently he's spent the second half of life obsessing over Pulp, and his distance from the whole span of their career along with his general acuity as a cultural critic lend him a useful perspective which to assess the highs and lows, the singular achievements and unexpected failures, across Pulp's 30 years as a pop group.

Second and perhaps uniquely, Hatherley is a prolific and insightful architectural critic.  He's thus especially qualified to illuminate the physical landscapes and everyday objects that singer Jarvis Cocker recites and mythologizes in his sometimes hilarious, sometimes savage lyrics.  He specializes in the study of architectural modernism, especially the post-WWII Brutalist variation that Pulp's hometown Sheffield is famously built in.  The urban environment provides the crucial supplemental text with which to interpreting the places, material goods, fashions, leisure activities and ways of killing time associated with Britain's working classes that inhabit Cocker's lyrics and even inform the musicians' choices of instrumentation and genre (e.g., their 1991-94 run as a "rickety glam-disco band").  The music of Pulp, Hatherley demonstrates, constitutes a historically concrete and aesthetically charged urbanism, the explication of which is Uncommon's distinctive contribution.

It is no coincidence whatsoever that Pulp were from Sheffield, the provincial city that, perhaps more than any other in the UK, attempted to create a viable modernist landscape between the 1950s and 1970s, before the money ran out when the steel industry restructured itself and sacked most of its workforce, and a council attempting ‘Socialism in One City’ were squeezed of any funds. Its wildly overambitious Brutalist buildings, left in ruins or demolished altogether in the 1990s, provided — still provide — a landscape where there’s space to dream of what could have been, and to move from there to thinking of what could still be. From their earliest records in the early '80s to the early 2000s, there’s a persistent, direct and occasionally too-close-to-the-bone attention to male-female relations in Pulp’s work, but it’s when they leave this town at the end of the decade – and return there, to write about it, suddenly seeing it anew – that their work transforms, that they become a band worth writing tortuous monographs about. From Separations (recorded mostly in 1989) to 2001’s ‘Wickerman’, Pulp excelled at the evocation of a devastated but still very much alive post-industrial city, and the lives, loves and explorations that go on inside it. It’s arguable that their determined urbanism — as opposed to Britpop’s suburbanism — was informed by having been told, throughout their 1970s childhoods, that their city would be the site of the future, something that is far harder to believe if you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s. Alongside that is the collectivity of the city itself; as often as the protagonist of a Pulp song is a voyeur, he or she is also entirely of the crowd (pp. 12-3).

In fact, it seems Hatherley's very career as architectural historian and cultural critic owes a significant debt to Pulp, as strange as that might seem.  One of the book's best passages recalls his trip north to Sheffield, home of famous modernist edifices like the Park Hill council housing estate, to take in the setting for Pulp's notorious 1992 b-side, "Sheffield: Sex City".  I quote this section at length because it conveys the texture of Hatherly's criticism and because, well, this is what blogs are good for, right?

When I was 16, I and my girlfriend were completely obsessed with this song, and we walked around willing ourselves to see the teeming, simmering, carnal city described, peering up into the L-shaped windows of the tower blocks, past the twitching curtains of the semis, imagining the couplings and perversions inside. It also soundtracked something fairly momentous between us. It is, more than anything else, the reason why this book was written.

Jarvis intones a series of Sheffield place names, with luridly sensual relish - from ‘Intake’ onwards, each one of them emphasised for any possible double-meanings. Frechville, Hackenthorpe, Shalesmoor, Wombwell. The next voice you hear is Candida Doyle, deadpan and Yorkshire, reading — of all things — from one of the sexual fantasies in a Nancy Friday book. Here, as in ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ (to which it is, according to the sleevenotes, ‘the morning after’) the city itself is the focus for all libidinal energies. ‘We were living in a big block of flats...within  minutes the whole building was fucking. I mean, have you ever heard other people fucking, and really enjoying it? Not like in the movies, but when it’s real...’. Then, the ‘sun rose from behind the gasometers at 6.30am’, and we’re on a tour of the carnal possibilities in a post-industrial city.

Park Hill, Sheffield

The most important sounds in it (aside from Jarvis’ own increasingly astonishing groans, howls, gasps and ecstatic squeals) are hers, too — the banks of synths, taken from the same jumble sale ransacked at the same time by Stereolab, interspersed with some more recent artificial instruments. It’s these smears of indistinct, tinny keyboard atmospheres, the arpeggiated stutters, the repetitious house vamps and Russell Senior’s queasily treated violin, which simulate the vertiginous feeling of nervousness, anticipation and mania which underpin the ridiculous, magnificent lyric, an obsessive, clammily sexual ambience. Underneath, a metronomic kick drum pounds, and deep, relentless low-end throbs, which the group got Warp’s in-house engineer to lower to sub-bass levels. As it pulses, the whole city is ‘getting stiff in the building heat’, and Jarvis walks through its entire extent trying to find his lover. So overwhelmed is he by the sheer sexuality of Sheffield that he finds himself ‘rubbing up against lamp-posts, trying to get rid of it’. The places made sexual are exemplars of non-utopian everyday life, as we traverse the semis, the gardens, and hear ‘groans from a T-reg Chevette — you bet...you bet...’, and in a particularly memorable moment stop to penetrate ‘a crack in the pavement’. This transfigured space is cut with moments of frustrating mundanity; ‘crumbling concrete bus shelters‘, and tedious nights indoors watching television. The pursuit is interrupted, because ‘the fares went up at seven’, our protagonist loses his lover while ‘sentenced to three years in the housing benefit waiting room’. The frustration and fascination builds and builds and builds to the point of explosion, leaving the city’s topographical extremes as location for the final consummation, with the city abstracted below them. ‘We finally made it, on a hilltop at 4am. A million twinkling yellow street lights. The whole city is your jewellery box. Reach out, and take what you want...’ The city has not survived its orgy, and our lovers survey the wreckage left over. ‘Everyone on Park Hill came in unison at 4.13AM, and the whole block fell down. A tobacconist caught fire, and everyone in the street died of lung cancer.’

 Park Hill

This tumultuous collapse was our favourite moment in the song, and we always imagined it taking place in the vast slab block which loomed over this particular courtship (did they have similar fantasies, looking down on us?). It was a bit of a revelation a few years later when, developing what was then a part-time interest in architecture, I found out just how famous and important Park Hill was, and saw photographs of this enormous, snaking collective housing estate, with its wide streets in the sky, its interconnecting decks thrusting out of each block, its form rising to different storeys depending on its place on the hill; the longest walkway has for the last few years had the graffito ‘I LOVE YOU, MARRY ME’, as if in tribute to ‘Sheffield: Sex City’ itself. It was absolutely perfect, a visual emblem of the familiar 1960s-built city turned into a utopian, libidinal megastructure (pp. 43-5).

Park Hill

Is it far-fetched to imagine that the program for Hatherley's two prior books, his 2009 architectural treatise Militant Modernism (which the Guardian praised as "an intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism") and his 2010 Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, was born in some part from this romp through "Sheffield: Sex City"?  

Of course, the backdrop for Pulp's potent mix of lust, ennui, perversity, solidarity, and bitterness wrapped up in a retro-70s aesthetic is hardly confined to Sheffield landscapes or even the cities of Northern England.  Hatherley recognized the same urbanism in his Southern coastal hometown of Southampton, where the juxtaposition of building scales and architectural eras meant different classes lived next to each other, charging daily interactions with class consciousness and status competitions.  More to the point, Pulp's subject matter was never exclusively urban in a topical sense, and Hatherley is a fine interpreter of their domestic vignettes (where the suburban protagonists are often from higher if still anxious strata) and ambivalent generational anthems (a genre the group especially took up during the Britpop era, e.g., 1995's double A-side single "Mis-Shapes"/"Sorted for E's and Wizz").  Still, Hatherley deftly and consistently ties together their lyrical references, musical strategies/accidents, thematic developments and (less so here — this isn't a typical band bio) career arc into a concrete, coherent worldview that the reader can discern and appreciate as urbanism.  Even if the reader won't recognize the specific cultural references and social codes as well as a British native (or well-versed Anglophile — I'm neither), Uncommon is an inspired, often exemplary work of documenting and criticizing a musical urbanism. 

Beyond this architectural/urban analysis, Uncommon seeks to articulate the utopian project that Pulp both aestheticized and embodied.  For anyone with a modest familiarity with the group's biggest hits like "Common People" (much less song titles that give it away, like "Cocaine Socialism"), Pulp's politics — an old-school socialism of universal entitlements and public education; a defense of the arty, the intellectual, and other embattled outsiders in British society; their disdain for the sheepish masses and uncritical solidarities celebrated by Britpop and New Labour — aren't exactly a mystery.  Yet Hatherley is too smart a critic to dwell at the surface levels of Cocker's lyrics, and he insightfully engages the peculiarly British retro aesthetics that the group exhibited in their music, self-display, video and performance.  Pulp's project was never the nostalgia of Britpop, a self-conscious resurrection of the country's 1960s Swinging London-era hegemony in pop culture that by the 90s stood in for older imperialist, "Britain for the British" impulses.  Instead, the group's aesthetic focused on the 1970s, in all its qualities good, bad and ugly.  Its tawdry materialism, artificial fabrics, and discotheque hangovers didn't age well, of course; here the 70s offers veins of desperation and disdain mined by some of Cocker's more loathsome protagonists.  But the 1970s, coming as they did before Thatcherism's neoliberal project, also provided the group a vision of things that that could have been.

For Pulp, the imaginary 1970s were a portal, a transforming force, not a real remembered thing. Pulp were the first major carriers in Pop of what has since been called Nostalgia for the Future, a Futurism that is dated to the 1970s as the last time that viable political, urban and stylistic alternatives really existed; and which has since been codified as ‘Hauntology’, via a landscape of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Pelican Books, public information films and Municipal Modernism bent awry through the gaps and aporias of memory, with half-remembered horror films shaking the stiltedness of BBC English into uncanny incantations. Almost all of the above were present and correct in Pulp’s work, but the persistent sexual and personal urgency of their music – not to mention the lack of ‘ghostly’ signifiers – sets them apart from its snugly contemplative warmth. If much hauntological music can sound like a means of filling the time while we wait for the future to start up again, then Pulp’s persistent desperation, their sense of time running out, demands that the future-past resume itself immediately (pg. 11).

Needless to say, this future never came to pass — at least it hasn't yet, a fact provides the animus that fuels Pulp's class-based criticism (see "Common People," "Wickerman") and vengeful scenarios ("I Spy," "This is Hardcore").

Another early 1990s NME interview makes it especially clear just how much of an effect this construction and destruction had on the future members of Pulp: ‘’Sheffield’s full of half-arsed visions of cities of the future that turn into a pile of rubbish,’ Russell Senior reflects, standing on the biggest traffic roundabout in Europe. ‘We grew up reading the local paper and seeing ‘Sheffield, city of the future,’ with a map of how it’s going to be and pictures of everyone walking around in spacesuits, smiling. But we’re the only ones who took it seriously...’ ‘When I was younger I definitely thought I’d live in space,” says Jarvis Cocker ruefully. ‘But when you realise you’re not going to, it colours your life; you can’t think, ‘It’s alright if I’m signing on because I’ll be on Mars soon’, you have to try and get it down here.’ What runs through all of this is the lament of true believers in modernism, holding the present to account for its failure to create a viable future, and the pinched vision of the possible that then instils in those born after the future; as Cocker would yelp in 1998, obliquely apropos New Labour’s workfare schemes, ‘we were brought up on the space race — now they expect you to clean toilets‘ (pp. 48-9).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is embodied in the band's very existence.  Uncommon extends an argument that Hatherley recently made in briefer form for the Guardian: After 30 years of neoliberal attacks on public education, the dole, subsidized housing and other collective entitlements, there may very well be no more British bands like Pulp.  For Hatherley, the group represents the last great art-school band, in which working and lower-middle class individuals could be trained and then, upon graduation, be economically supported and physically housed while honing their idiosyncratic craft free from the pressures of the market.  The demise of this lineage (represented by "The Kinks, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Japan, Associates, Soft Cell, Kate Bush, The Fall, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, amongst others") is captured by a startling statistic: "in October 2010, 60% of British artists in the UK top 10 had been to public school, compared with 1% in October 1990" (pg. 2). 

 (Readers of this blog might recall I found comparable patterns of private-school educationat the college level for NYC's indie-rock bands.  My data were much more DIY and impressionistic, and I'm envious of Hatherley's source of data, if it's as systematic as it's presented to be.)

While the well-fed and well-educated dominate the pop charts, the working-class dreams that have replaced are equally troubling insofar as they offer no room for the odd, the intellectual, and other outsiders.  Presciently, Blur foretold the world of Simon Cowell, Simon Fuller, Pop/American Idol and in the music video for their final single, "Bad Cover Version":

pop as reality TV... was one where the unexpected, fantastical, vivid and vehement things which Pulp had consistently found in the everyday were completely and conclusively sidelined. The main virtues were, first of all, a compelling ‘story’ (although with their decade and a half of failure before fame, Pulp certainly had that), and secondly, an ability to mimic the gestures and the melismatic acrobatics of more famous singers – which, taken together, created an all-pervasive culture of conformity in pop which made the likes of Oasis and Menswear look like paragons of originality by comparison. Rather than being changed or upended, the British pop charts after the 1990s had reached a pre-1960s level of conservatism which was previously inconceivable; and the ‘alternative’ world was hardly in better shape, with the album charts and the rump of the music press dominated by the grossly sentimental epic anthemic balladry of ‘landfill indie’. The ‘Bad Cover Version’ video was horribly prescient, in imagining a pop landscape made up solely of impersonators, other people’s gestures, and the death of the weirdo pop star as anything more than a heritage reminisce. That something so bitterly angry, so musically off-message as ‘Common People’ could have been an enormous hit as recently as six years ago seemed absurd. The lineage that Pulp inherited died with them (pp. 126-7).

This is a bleak thesis, but there are bleak times.  Where will the next Pulp come from?