Popular Music and the Politics of Novelty CONTENTS Chapter 1
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Popular Music and the Politics of Novelty CONTENTS Chapter 1: 1899 and All That Chapter 2: If You Don’t Care to Remember ‘The Sixties’, You Probably Weren’t There Chapter 3: 1977, Year Zero (ish) Chapter 4: The Postmodern Turn, Turn, Turn Chapter 5: Badiou and the Popular Event Chapter 6: What’s Left for the Future of Pop? Conclusion Dedication To Onsind, whose songs make me optimistic for the future. Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to my colleague and friend Adam Fairhall who read large chunks of the text during its preparation, often offering extremely useful suggestions for improvement. Thanks are also due to colleagues in the Department for Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University who have supported me by reducing my normal teaching load in order to allow me to work on this book. In particular I would like to thank Martin Blain, Jane Turner, Carola Boehm and Jason Woolley. Thanks are due to Ally Jane Grossan at Bloomsbury for commissioning the book, and all those who have contributed to the production and editing processes. I am very grateful to the anonymous readers who offered comments on the initial plan for the book. 1 I would like to thank my former colleagues at Oxford Brookes University’s School of Arts: in particular Dai Griffiths, Jan Butler, Paul Whitty and all others within the Music team. The Early Career Fellowship which I held at Brookes in 2012-13 was invaluable for the initial development of the present text. I must thank the anonymous peer reviewers for helpful suggestions, comments and corrections. Comments from Matthew Worley have been particularly helpful during the preparation of the text, but I am thankful to all those who have looked at portions of the work, no matter how small. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Jo and our three wonderful children, who have given me the space to work on this but also have given me good reason to put work to one side at various points. Thanks are also due to my Dad, Jack Dale, as well as my three brothers and their families, for similar reasons. I would particularly like to thank my Mum, Mary Rose Peate, for reading through the completed draft and making helpful suggestions and corrections. Introduction The thrust of this book should not be difficult to grasp: my purpose is, in short, to explore the nexus of politics, novelty and popular music. Today, many commentators seem to feel that popular music is ‘all played out’; creatively, it peaked long ago and, although there may have been novel eruptions here and there in recent decades, popular music is now supposedly at an impasse where repetition of past glories is the best we can hope for. Is such pessimism well founded? And is it important – is it politically important – for popular music to do something 2 new? Alternatively, could some value be retained – some political power and/or influence – if the concern for doing something new is simply dropped from the popular music agenda? For pop to drop the new seems almost unimaginable. Doesn’t popular music predicate itself on offering something ‘shiny and new’?1 We can at least say that a sense of novelty has tended to be associated with this musical area, for a hundred years and more. Is new-ness necessary for popular music, though? If popular music today is simply delivering repetitions of past glories – precisely the complaint of many a handwringing journalist – does it follow, for example, that such aesthetic conservatism entails an acceptance of capitalism as (to use one of Slavoj Žižek’s favoured phrases) ‘the only game in town’?2 Alternatively, might it be possible for those who would wish for a radically different (and thus ‘new’, presumably) society to promote or even pursue such a goal without offering an ostentatious musical novelty? We cannot even approach these questions without unpicking some key terms. Firstly, then, ‘popular music’: a category so fraught with difficulties that an ex-colleague of mine, the incomparable Dai Griffiths, would routinely preface any reference to it with the caution that it is ‘so-called’.3 For Pete van der Merwe, ‘the term “popular” is an infernal nuisance’.4 The 1 Madonna, ‘Like a Virgin’, Like a Virgin, Sire, 1984. 2 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left(London and New York: Verso, 2000), p.95. Žižek uses the same catchphrase in his introduction to Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.xi. 3 See, for example, Dai Griffiths, ‘What Was, or Is, Critical Musicology?’, Radical Musicology, 5 (2010-11), accessed 19th March 2015, wherein we also read of ‘so-called classical music’ and ‘so-called contemporary classical’. 4 Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.3 3 constitutionally problematic nature of the couplet is reflected in the publication by the Popular Music journal of a ‘virtual symposium’, conducted by their international advisory editors, enquiring as to whether the first term of the equation should in fact be dropped.5 In conclusion of the symposium, Richard Middleton (who remains the most radical of musicologists who have taken an interest in so-called popular music, I would suggest) proposes, after Lacan (via Žižek), that ‘(The) Popular music does not exist’.6 A cynic might want to complain that this follows a remarkable pattern amongst academics: similar to E.H. Carr’s question What is History? and also the discussions of ‘real numbers’ amongst advanced mathematicians (thus implying that numbers could be other than ‘real’, and that History also is not a given, doubtless to the dismay of many an undergraduate student), a critical observer might object that Middleton has simply followed suit by throwing into question the very object of enquiry.7 I would argue, as would Middleton I’m sure, that there is a bit more to it than this. Popular music is a problematic category because, amongst other difficulties, it has so often been used as a catch-all for that which escapes the other large categories of music. At its most broad, (so-called) popular music can include everything beyond ‘classical music’ (whatever that is). This book is not intended as an intervention into the various debates about what is, isn’t or might/might not be classified as popular music. A sledgehammer point of principle for what follows, however, is that it is completely unsatisfactory to treat everything which falls outside of, say, ‘world music’, folk and European-descended ‘art music’ categories as 5 Simon Frith et al, ‘Can we get rid of the “popular” in popular music? A virtual symposium with contributions from the International Advisory Editors of Popular Music’, Popular Music, 24/1 (2005). 6 Ibid, p.144. 7 E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). 4 one thing, a single genre: popular music. There are so many popular musics that, in practice, the term can seem virtually useless. In an academic context, that said, the gradual acceptance of ‘pop’ as a viable object for scholarly consideration has been immensely beneficial to countless young people to whom the music feels important. Popular music is plural, then – hence Middleton’s emphatic bracketing of the ‘(The)’ above. For our purposes, however, a difference of trajectory can be observed between two (or, arguably, four) general tendencies within the field: some popular music feels more politically and/or aesthetically conservative whilst other species of ‘pop’ would seem to be more politically and/or aesthetically radical. The scare quotes around pop are necessary here because some of the most radical popular music would seem an ill-fit with this descriptor: are Throbbing Gristle pop? Crass, Buffy Saint Marie, Manu Chao or Pete Seeger – is this really ‘pop music’? Is Billy Bragg just a ‘popstar’ – or is something rather different going on here as compared with, say, the Osmonds, Britney Spears or Bruno Mars? Hopefully the reader can agree that there are differences of intention and aspiration (desire, dare we say?) at stake; differences which are identifiable and worth talking about. The difference of trajectory in question, though, is of course far from constituting any absolute dichotomy. On the contrary, one should quickly concede that every creator of music mentioned in the previous paragraph has retailed products in exchange for cash; and even though records, money and food have been given away free of charge by the likes of Crass, it is obviously the case that philanthropy cannot defeat capitalism. Quite the contrary; the two have been bedfellows for centuries now. What can defeat capitalism, though? Hopefully the question is not entirely risible. A further sledgehammer declaration may be required here, and it is worth adding that I do not hesitate to make it: I would contend that popular music can make valuable contributions to the search 5 for an anti-capitalist future. The question, though, is how? What should left wing music sound like, today? What aesthetic compass might it best use? These are the core questions of this book. Above all, I want to ask: should popular music aspire to being new in order to contribute to resistance to the current ideological and societal structure (capitalism, that is; or ‘late capitalism’, ‘globalisation’, ‘neo-liberalism’ – the state we’re in, in other words)? In order to approach that question, we need to extend the initial clarification of terminology. What, then, is the ‘novelty’ mentioned in the book’s title? To some extent, the term refers simply to ostentatious new-ness: novelty is the new, or the felt to be new; the sensation of unfamiliarity which one sometimes feels or, perhaps, the object which kindles that feeling.