May 1983 Marxism Today 37 VIDEO AND POP Paul Morley attention pop receives for multiples of wickedness, ridicule, discontent, eccentric­ ity, desire to thrive importantly in a genuinely popular context. Pop music can play a large part in the way numerous young people determine their right to desire and their need to question. It appeared that pop music's contem­ porary value was to be its creation or proposition of constant new values. Rock music — a period stretched from Elvis Presley to the last moment before The Sex Pistols coughed up Carry On Artaud — was easily appropriated by an establishment, the elegant apparatus of conservatism, that yearns for order. It was hoped that post-punk pop music, freed of the demands of over-excited hippies and usefully paranoiac, would evolve as some­ thing abstract, fluid, careering, irreverent, slippery, exaggerated — not on a revolu­ tionary mission, but non-static, not mean, a focus that supplies energy, as provocative and as changeable as essentially nostalgic twentieth century entertainment can be. A ringing variation. No destination, but a purpose. The video dumps us back into the most sinister part of the pop music game. In terms of pop as arousal the video takes us back to that moment before The Sex Pistols bawled louder than all the sur­ rounding banality. The moment of mundane disappointment. Some of us try an often brilliant best to resources can emerge that can help the The arrival, or at least the pop industry's prove to outsiders and cynics that pop audience release themselves from the misuse, of the video is a major reason, or music — what used to be known as rock unrelieving confinements of environment. I indication, why pop music is ceasing to music, a loud novelty — can be something know, or I dream, that pop music can move at all and beginning to suffocate. If more than a pointless, artificial diversion. search out limits, mock restrictions and post-punk enterprise suggested that pop One or two of us can be pleasantly cunning divisions, exorcise cultural nightmares, music could establish a fierce skittishness, when trying to persuade elders (outsiders) contribute to revitalisation of people's an aggressive self-irony, that would enable it and 'sensible' contemporaries (cynics) that thinking, disturb and inspire if only to transcend its manufactured state, video pop music is not just a clumsy mass through its unstable mobility, its readiness narcissism announces that pop has found fanaticism, connected to a deceitful to pursue apparently irrelevant links and an easy way to steal more cash from young enchantment totally lacking in moral private associations. It can somehow people and damage their natural desires. rigour. survive being inhibited and mangled by its The video becomes the flash symbol of I'm convinced, and I try not to be too harsh and stupid commercial chains, and what could be the final reduction of pop lenient, just a little melodramatic, that there is surely irreducible potential because into the most artificial of confections, the through pop music ideas, energies and of the 'star system' and the volatile most normal of conditionings. May 1983 Marxism Today 39 Instead of becoming a liberating addition Cult, A Certain Ratio, Yello can only be The video should be used by pop groups to pop activity, a major factor in its explained here as the idle indulgence of to confess only that they know too much progression, a sign towards new possibilities the pop writer, trapped in his small world about the mechanics and techniques of pop — a trigger — it is another elaborate — but if such a surprising mixture did music, not anything greater or smaller. plaything. Record companies and their happen the popular charts would take on a Anything more will come with 'time'. We largely docile new signings drag in techni­ more interesting, provocative texture for dreamers can hope that the video will end cally ingenious video directors who are outsiders, cynics and fans. As it is, up something harder, faster and craftier handed padded budgets to, often con­ video-protected pop begins to move than just an easy, expensive way to grab descendingly, construct quite complicated, between unprecedented 'extremes' of three minutes out of Top Of the Pops. accurately seductive video interpretations passivity and posing. Pop gets weak and For now, the video hovers heartlessly in of usually underwhelming singles. The boy selfish and sheathed by calculation. The the industry controlled no-man's land, pop group's post-Bowie, vague aesthetic likes of Southern Death Cult, The betraying the soaraway beauty of pop, yearnings, their frantic incoherent need to Birthday Party, even former chart regulars betraying the sacred beauty of people's appear experimental and challenging like The Beat, Elvis Costello and Siouxsie imagination, crowding their minds with despite their resounding caution, is trans­ and the Banshees seem more and more useless images, ending up creating more lated into sensationally senseless video alien within the chart context, and the wrong, still security. When we watch the dramas. A weak, forgettable, sensationally possibility for listeners to cut themselves on pop promotional video we feel even more orthodox pop song — Vienna by Ultravox, protruding edges — that needn't necessar­ than just before The Sex Pistols cut Musclebound by Spandau Ballet, Hungry ily be supplied by supposedly 'nasty' music progressive rock and 'adult' stability to Like The Wolf by Duran Duran — is — less and less likely. Video aids bores to ribbons ... we feel the moment of smoothly boosted into apparent epic glory pretend they take risks: video blocks true mundane disappointment. by dazzling but deceptive video trickery. adventurers. When today's conventional boy pop group Ultravox, empty and ignorant, can hook — China Crisis or Belle Stars — laboriously themselves to the video and pretend to be assemble their warm wet hit single they will masters of higher things. Orchestral be considering the type of video that will Manouevres, who long ago used up their SIR accompany it. good ideas, anchor themselves to the video The video champions the idea that the to appear cryptic and suggestive. Video WILLIAM pop single is something purely to be sold, it should confirm today's boy pop group's WALTON destroys the lingering belief that a single can extensive inadequacies. Instead, in a world be composed and packaged because a few grimly weighted byacareless undemanding Malcolm Barry people feel a violent need for that song to media, video enhances their plain glamour be thrust abrasively into the world. The and encourages their evasive pretensions. video claims that the pop song is a canned The video helps the boy pop group, docile The death of Sir William Turner Walton in object, not any kind of event. The video and unimaginative, like Duran Duran to March gives rise to one certainty — removes pop music's need to be anything look down on their fans: and the fans look Michael Tippett and Alan Bush are now other than slightly whimsical. Video can up, awe-struck for no good reason. And the the Grand Old Men of British music. Yet offer to performers an exotic impression of video of Olivia Newton John's Lets Get Tippett remains one of the most eternally superiority, covering up their powerful Physical that unashamedly revels in its own youthful in looks and preoccupations while dullness. transparency has more 'value' than the Bush's perpetual search for renewals, in We can see what has happened to pop 1984 boy pop group cavorting through mist, both music and personal senses, are a music since The Sex Pistols dropped their shadows, forest, Boots, pretending in the model to younger musicians. Walton, it last pair of shit stained trousers by viewing most pathetic way that it is doling out seems, was the reverse — middle aged the standard pop video, the one colouring purifying art. The video doesn't allow pop throughout his career, a span which Top Of The Pops or early Saturday child music to accept itself as 'entertainment' embraced a childhood in Oldham and a shows or Switch. These videos exhibit how and subvert within that context: an 'art' graceful autumnal existence on a the promising post-punk shifts and twists orgasm must be faked time and time again. Mediterranean island. Like Gracie Fields, are being tidied up. For me, an anxious It's not necessarily negative to consider another Lancastrian who 'made it big', pleasure seeker, pop music must mean visual imagery as much as song construc­ Walton's career demonstrates the power of chart, commercial, televised, popularly tion and content — its an aspect of the accommodation — the enfant terrible or received singles. Pop music only exists inevitable self-consciousness enveloping popular entertainer gradually becoming an totally, finally, as a popular event, as the today's pop. Videos can be used within the establishment figure and, in the process, cracking communication. Groups such as chart context in a buoyant, insidious way losing the bite and vitality of earlier Yello, Fad Gadget, The Birthday Party, A — Devo, Grace Jones, David Bowie, Rip offerings. Certain Ratio are terrible private excite­ Rig And Panic, Madness have in their ways In the 1920s Walton's association with ments and the passive mass, droned into produced refreshing video packages that the Sitwells and his comparatively strait­ tedium by Duran Duran and Wham, is not suggest how pop videos can bring discon­ ened financial circumstancecs made him touched. The dying ideal dream I have of certing values to large audiences. Psychic eclectic and modernistically inclined. clever, clear thinking, stimulating groups TV, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo have made Whether orchestrating for a jazz band or like Culture Club, Madness, ABC, Jobox- brutally prosaic and scrappy investigations composing Facade, Walton demonstrated ers dominating the pop charts along with into how video can be used as confron­ at once the desire to 'ape the bourgeoisie', the sterner, obsessional Southern Death tation.