{"id":211,"date":"2011-11-03T19:35:41","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T19:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=211"},"modified":"2012-11-10T03:36:12","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T03:36:12","slug":"remembering-the-serious-triviality-of-pop-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/11\/03\/remembering-the-serious-triviality-of-pop-music\/","title":{"rendered":"remembering the serious triviality of pop music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Something left unelaborated in my review of\u00a0<em>Echotone<\/em>\u00a0(from the last two posts:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/10\/23\/losing-austins-weirdness-a-review-of-echotone-pt-1\/\">here<\/a> and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/10\/24\/creatively-exploiting-the-austin-scene-a-review-of-echotone-pt-2\/\">here<\/a>) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music \u2014 the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends.\u00a0 Although this isn&#8217;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),\u00a0<em>Echotone<\/em>specifically highlights a quite contemporary context: indie-rock groups&#8217; affinity with &#8220;creative city&#8221; economic development schemes.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;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.\u00a0 It can be gleaned by comparing\u00a0<em>Echotone<\/em>\u00a0with another recent film about an urban music scene:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebeatisthelaw.com\/\"><em>The Beat is the Law<\/em><\/a>, a 2011 documentary directed by Eve Wood about Sheffield, England.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2011\/11\/The_Beat_Is_The_Law_2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-608\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2011\/11\/The_Beat_Is_The_Law_2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"443\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2011\/11\/The_Beat_Is_The_Law_2.jpg 443w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2011\/11\/The_Beat_Is_The_Law_2-221x300.jpg 221w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 443px) 100vw, 443px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>The Beat is the Law<\/em>\u00a0is the sequel to Wood&#8217;s 2001 documentary\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sheffieldvision.com\/aboutmis.html\"><em>Made in Sheffield<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 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,\u00a0<em>The Beat is the Law<\/em>\u00a0picks 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.\u00a0 This period specifically reflects the dismal depths of the Thatcher era, when the Miners&#8217; 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.\u00a0 The contrast to the subsequent euphoria of British acid house and then New Labour&#8217;s electoral victories is stark, and it gives\u00a0<em>The Beat is the Law<\/em>\u00a0an emotional arc that its highly worthy prequel maybe lacked.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Beat Is The Law - Fanfare For The Common People: Trailer\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/24459843?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 On the one hand, they refer to &#8220;all these dark, intense people making music in nightclubs&#8221; (to quote Pulp&#8217;s Russell Senior) during 1980s Sheffield.\u00a0 To some extent, this conveys the proto-industrial aesthetic of groups like Chakk, with their early attempts at &#8220;found percussion&#8221; (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 &amp; the Bunnymen or The Mighty Wah!).\u00a0 Sure, such seriousness could also just be another word for youthful pretensions.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 However,\u00a0<em>The Beat is the Law<\/em>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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Sheffield: &quot;the most important thing you could possibly do&quot;\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ihd4jaqLwpc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker remembers how Thatcher&#8217;s neoliberal government and the sober Victorian ethos which it sought to resurrect viewed musicians at the time: &#8220;To be in a band in the mid-80s was, I guess because most people were on the dole, you just should have had &#8216;loser&#8217; tattooed on your head, you know.\u00a0 There was no respect.&#8221;\u00a0 This official dismissiveness suggests the limits of the seriousness described earlier could go.\u00a0 Playing in a band is a trivial hobby, properly confined to leisurely pursuits and abandoned once work and duty call.\u00a0 And Thatcher made the call for work and duty very loudly and clearly as she sought to eradicate the permissive &#8220;dole culture&#8221; and compel Britons to fend for themselves as individuals in the neoliberal labor market.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jarvis Cocker: &quot;loser tattooed on your head&quot;\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lACnnl1M5eI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m struck by how the\u00a0<em>serious triviality<\/em>\u00a0that Sheffield musicians understood their art to represent during Thatcher&#8217;s England contrasts powerfully with the\u00a0<em>trivial seriousness<\/em>that pop music seems to embody in the present day.\u00a0 In 1980s Sheffield, the idea that music could be a dignified calling, much less a foundation for economic development, is completely absent.\u00a0 And if punk and other underground musical expressions rejected the restrictive dictates of traditional authority, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Chalk this contradiction up to the inconsistencies of youth if you want, but other musical forms have also asserted the centrality of\u00a0<em>everyday life<\/em>\u00a0(into which &#8216;leisure&#8217; can be fit, although doing so highlights the fact of\u00a0<em>alienation<\/em>\u00a0along the way) over the demands of work and duty.\u00a0 Think of folk music in the sense of people&#8217;s music, or performers of religious music.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>And so we come upon the greater context for the instrumentalization of independent or underground music today.\u00a0 Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy.\u00a0 Austin today, by contrast, is very much part of a creative economy \u2014 or, if you&#8217;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.\u00a0 Music has been swept up in this economic shift, with little critical awareness or effective response by musicians on the whole.\u00a0 Indeed, indie rock musicians have especially let the &#8216;serious&#8217; task of making a living colonize their music, lifestyles, their generational references, even their affective repertoire (melancholy, irony, nightlife exuberance, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;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.\u00a0 Not to keep the finger pointed solely at musicians, of course.\u00a0 To return to a conclusion from my last post, so long as the entertainment industry and other sectors extract surplus value from musicians&#8217; creative activity, such priorities can make sense in some circumstances \u2014 they can even have the whiff of &#8220;fighting back against the corporate machine&#8221; about them.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an axiom in economic geography that, in their form as material, empirical activities, economies don&#8217;t magically encompass the whole of a nation-state; economies are always\u00a0<em>unevenly developed<\/em>, which among other things opens the door for talking about regional and urban economies.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course, the production of culture has always been a key role for cities, like London, so prominent as to be deemed cultural capitals.\u00a0 By the 1980s, London&#8217;s music sector had already been well integrated into a broader industrial commodity-producing economy, a point that&#8217;s evoked in Paul Morley&#8217;s response to a question by Simon Reynolds (in the latter&#8217;s 2010 volume,\u00a0<em>Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews<\/em>).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>OK, Paul, now you have to explain to me that Manchester jingoism thing you all go in for, the absolute contempt for London!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>London is a metaphor.\u00a0 It represents everything that&#8217;s conservative about that business approach to culture and art and entertainment.\u00a0 A laziness.\u00a0 Back then it was so pronounced, you really felt like the country was<em>slanted<\/em>, physically slanted at a gradient, so that everything slid down to London.\u00a0 You did feel annoyed about it.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never been as vociferous about it as Tony Wilson.\u00a0 I wasn&#8217;t so much pro-Manchester as anti-London.\u00a0 I often say, &#8216;No great band has come from London,&#8217; and then people say, &#8216;The Stones and The Who.&#8217; But I say, &#8216;Since then&#8230;&#8217;\u00a0 And it&#8217;s sort of true, when you think of the bands that came out of London, like Spandau Ballet.<\/p>\n<p>There was something about the favouritism too.\u00a0 You felt like if a band came out of London, they&#8217;d be signed.\u00a0 In Manchester, the sense that you could do it yourself led to a greater amount of independence.\u00a0 The Buzzcocks doing\u00a0<em>Spiral Scratch<\/em>\u00a0on their own label New Hormones was quite a stalwart thing\u2014you thought, &#8216;My God, what an astounding thought&#8217; (pp. 326-7).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This suggests the setting in which musicians might\u00a0<em>challenge<\/em>\u00a0the economic overdetermination of their art could be urban in nature, pursued in the geographic pockets left behind by the creative economy.\u00a0 These spaces and communities can be found all over, albeit beneath the global complex created by musicians selling music (which conceivably can be &#8220;made anywhere&#8221;) in the global commodity market.\u00a0 All of this is to say, musicians creating in these places probably won&#8217;t make a living off their art.<\/p>\n<p>But is that such a bad thing?\u00a0 In the era of Occupy Wall Street, should we direct music to the &#8216;serious&#8217; undertaking of careerism?\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Perhaps we can commit art once again to express and inspire the particular experience of life \u2014 as it did in Sheffield 1980s and, obviously, so many other places \u2014 rather than heed the call of value-adding and economic development in a creative economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something left unelaborated in my review of\u00a0Echotone\u00a0(from the last two posts:\u00a0here and\u00a0here) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music \u2014 the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends.\u00a0 Although this isn&#8217;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),\u00a0Echotonespecifically highlights a quite contemporary context: indie-rock groups&#8217; affinity with &#8220;creative city&#8221; economic development schemes. But there&#8217;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.\u00a0 It can be gleaned by comparing\u00a0Echotone\u00a0with another recent film about an urban music scene:\u00a0The Beat is the Law, a 2011 documentary directed by Eve Wood about Sheffield, England. The Beat is the Law\u00a0is the sequel to Wood&#8217;s 2001 documentary\u00a0Made in Sheffield.\u00a0 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,\u00a0The Beat is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43678,43699,43651,16,43646,43693,43663,43660,43673,43771],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alienation","tag-austin","tag-creative-city","tag-documentary","tag-indie-rock","tag-leisure","tag-london","tag-music-industry","tag-music-scene","tag-sheffield"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":607,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}