Another shameless plug here as Ian Inglis's edited volume on popular music and British television has just been released by Ashgate. I have to say, it's an impressive volume. Alongside my own chapter on the Sex Pistols infamous Bill Grundy interview (and the role of imagined memories), there is top notch scholarship from a range of academics working in the popular music field. Sheila Whiteley, for instance, has done a chapter on that most British of comedy series, Dad's Army. There also are chapters on various topics written or co-written by Andy Bennett, Tim Wall, Rupa Huq and a number of others. By exploring various themes and moments, the book will likely set new standard of debate in the area of popular music and British television.
F for Fake (1973) was Orson Welles' unique last film project. Drawing on his recurrent interests in dramatic art and psychological illusion, he used his filmmaking talent and cinematic charm to construct a tale of three charlatans: art forger Elmyr do Hory, biographer Clifford Irving, and himself as the familiar blustering, self-made director. As the film cleverly oscillates between storytelling and documentary it uses both archival and constructed footage. Along the way, F for Fake provides a masterclass on the meaning of fakery, with Welles reprizing his favourite role as the portly imposter, the ranconteur whose charisma is just real enough to string us along, even though, ultimately, we all know for sure that he is a fake.
Welles's discussion put me in mind of the constant debate in popular music over authenticity. Whether the discussion is about the verissimilitude of tribute artists or the bogus talent of 'manufactured' bands, enhanced vocals or X-Factor celebrities, biographers twisting the truth or "setting the record straight", studio gangsters or street credientials, white negroes or disco faking the funk, it seems that at every moment someone wants to separate "real" music from the marketplace's capacity to conjure up shoddy phantoms of the muse. Take Paul Morley, for instance, who, in a recent piece for the Guardian discussing boy bands, earnestly argued, as only he could, that, "They should not, though, be talked about as though they are anything to do with music, or music alone." Is Morley telling us that these singers are charlatans? That as an audience we need to be more discerning and accumulate more expertise, lest we be taken in by them and their fake music?
This clarion call to defend music as an object of purity seems obsolete in a culture of where the real is an unstable category and where 'faking' (of various sorts) has become not so much a criminal practice as an industrial norm. Against Morley - though not necessarily in defence of boy bands - I wish to recount some of the philosophical musings of F for Fake as I think they might help us advance the discussion on popular music authenticity. As Orson melts into the shadows from where he came, apply these questions like tools to your own particular project and see what insights they can help to deliver:
- If a faker leaves the authorship of their piece unclaimed, have the actually make a fake? If a faker admits faking, are they really a faker? Is a false promise really false if everyone knows it is false? A faker who admits what they are doing moves from criminality to honesty. If I draw attention to showing I am constructing something, am I really faking? Some fakers just want to be seen as top criminals. Can't unmasking one act of fakery simply serve to hide another?
- Can or should we admire a fake? Is a good fake better than a bad fake, or a bad original? Isn't a great faker themselves something of an original? Or have they forgotten their own identity - are they simply a parasite who is condemed to feel frustrated because they are unble to express any creativity independently? Does all their identity come from copying the work of another? Fakes could be seen to exploit originals, but don't originals also exploit fakes to cement their status? Sometimes a faker can (symbolically) destroy (the notion of) the original. Aren't original creators also in the habit of faking their own work? The original is really a function of our own needs.
- How do fakes (and fakers) manage to hide in plain sight? Faking is premised on rarity. Fakers are simply supplying (market) demand. As an audience we dismiss fakers but also collaborate with them. Good fakers are appreciated and have their own fame. Do we really care about facts when we are fascinated with mystery? Don't we also love to be shocked (by fakes)?
- If there were no experts would there actually be any fakers? In a sense fakers are jesters who unmask the stupidity of the experts who fail to discriminate the forgeries - so who are the real fakers? When fakes succeed are we dealing with great fakes or poor experts?
For some reason recently I have become academically interested in Judge Dread, not the 2000AD comic character ("Judge Dredd"), but Alex Minto Hughes from Snodland in Kent: a rather vulgar white cockney reggae artist who, inspired by Prince Buster, had a successful career on Trojan records in the 1970s. He had eleven UK hits, all banned from the airwaves.
In 1973 Hughes was interviewed in the NME by the jeering, bohemian, faintly Leavisite ego Nick Kent, who had him pegged as a "working class hero and the Robin Hood Of reggae." Kent's interview is full of the expected sniggering sarcasm and it frames the Judge as a joke. Hughes in turn, defends himself as a true folk phenomenon (he was rarely helped by TV or radio) who loved reggae and had his finger on the commercial pulse of popular taste.
What is interesting about the Judge is that he offered nothing redeeming: no creativity, no meaningful artistry, no utopian alternative, no deep soul, no revolutionary politics, no hip poses or super cool rock'n'roll swaggers; only obscene nursery rhymes done to a reggae beat, viral as Eminen and every bit as tasteless. And yet he had a huge record collection and was one of the few white men to run a disco sound system. He loved his chosen music genre, knew how to speak patois, and as an adept performer endeared himself to "authentic" black audiences in Jamaica. Yet it was back at home that he really mattered: he was as bawdy and English as Chaucer. In a Robin Hood stylee the Judge articulated an oppositional form of sexual vulgarity to launch a blue assault on middle class tastes.
I saw the video for his song Big Six, I think, on a documentary in the 1980s. The footage was shown just in passing, but I was still shocked at the style of it - the bad production values and topless dancers, his ebullient stance and silly gangster clothes. It was as if Hughes came swaggering out of nowhere, located perhaps only in the decadent Soho club circuit of the decade before, where cockney geezers might plausibly tell dirty jokes but never to an inter-racial beat.
Judge Dread was literally a rude boy, but given the permissive state of Britain by the early 1970s, at what exactly was he waving those two fingers? His microbial music seemed predestined to launch a moral panic without any real content. While casually revelling in the sexism of his era, he did something perhaps to challenge working class racism. He cultivated a knowledge of "uncultured" black music. Later Hughes released a charity single and died of a heart attack in 1998, and his legend died with him. We rely on meatier myths and more easily located footage to valorize our idols, but it's his slipping away from the canon that - given such commercial success - makes a million-seller like Hughes interesting. What I am saying is that the Judge seems antithetical to so much of what we are now. He was, in a sense, written out of the script for being the wrong kind of multi-culturalist.
Anyone stuck for 2010 Christmas present ideas? Continuum have just published a rather excellent edited volume on the German electronic music enigma that is Kraftwerk, edited by David Pattie and Sean Albiez. Yes, this is a shameless plug: I have a chapter on the racial politics of the group. I also genuinely think that more work needs to be done on the difference made by this outfit to dance music, post-punk and everything beyond.
With their unique blend of nostalgic futurism Kraftwerk caught the imagination of a generation. The music world might have been a different place without them. In Foucault's sense, they were therefore "transdiscursive authors", people who caused an avalanche of cultural activity in their wake. As we acquiess towards a strangely bloodless world of coke machines, sat navs and talking elevators - where computers monitor our every movement and soothing robotic voices steer us towards synthetic good behaviour - I can hear their echo: in a calm, teutonic voice it says, "Told you so."
Since I am off to Canada quite soon, I have decided to do a post about the country's most prominent patriot, the legendary Don Cherry.
For anyone who doesn't know, hockey is a Canadian obsession. By coaching the NHL's Boston Bruins (with its legendary player Bobby Orr), Cherry managed to earn himself a footnote in the national myth. He expanded upon that by being sports commentator for CBC and growling the macho catchphrase "Rock em, sock em!"
Slowly but tenaciously, Grapes, as he is known, took up his place beside Pierre Trudeau and Wayne Gretzky as a national cultural icon.
... So why the cult of Cherry? The truth is that if Don had been born an American, he would probably have sunk without a trace. What matters is the way he contradicts Canadian notions of national identity: the way he flatly ignores his country's reactive, introverted, intellectual, multicultural, ironic, anti-American wilderness mythos; the way he chooses to forthrightly pursue an unusual, viking version of Canadian nationalism. Those are what matter, because Cherry speaks directly for a mythic, beer-fuelled, hockey-obsessed common Canadian male. In doing so, some might argue that he simultaneously acts as a jaw-dropping curio for the rest of the nation.
Some key elements in the Don Cherry phenomenon:
1. Staunch patriotism (fighting for the underdog):
2. Occasional absurdist old school sexism ("You women are gonna get mad at me out there"):
3. Willingness to be a sport and make techno records (a bit like a Canadian Muhamed Al Fayed):
4. He can effortlessly wear a pink suit (while retaining his mythic aura of masculine power):
In a sense, then, Cherry's mythos centres around the strained couplet of "Canadian patriotism"; a phrase that seems contradictory in the context of a country defined by its subdued multiculturalist humanism. When read in that way, his hypermasculinity arguably articulates a sense of national insecurity that can only be quelled, temporarily, by talk of past victory and present braggadacio.
As Cherry's own commentator said, “He often has awkward moments, because he invites them.”
Tonight Manchester is staging a live tribute to Chris Sievey, the recently deceased creator of one of the city's most-loved comedy characters, Frank Sidebottom. Sievey made his career by donning a papier machee head that made him look like a kewpie doll, and then exploring a kind of happy northern amateurism. Predictably, it was not long before Frank disappeared into his own parody. From the 1980s onwards the big-hearted, big-headed figure straddled a line between underground and mainstream media. In his heyday he appeared on national TV shows like The Tube. Indeed, Frank's forays into comedy, TV presenting, cabaret and popular music were ongoing. Sievey had been in a band called The Freshies and there is now a campaign to get Frank's recent football song to the top of the charts.
Hailing from the mythic town of Timperley, Frank was already the stuff of nostalgia. He will now be able to take his place alongside Tony Wilson and others to become part of the cultural pantheon of the city. The character's larger than life head branded him as an icon, and now he can begin to find his place as a minor but very welcomed legend. Tonight's tribute show is being headlined by fellow Manchester eccentrics Badly Drawn Boy and John Cooper Clarke.
The odd thing about Sievey's death is simply seeing the man behind the mask; during Frank's heyday you never did. Credit must go to the late Mr Sievey for his struggle against the slick professionalism of the corporate media to construct what became a genuine folk legend. One wonders if, like some mythic superhero, the character might return with his huge head on fresh new shoulders, propped up by a heroic yet anonymous citizen who agrees that entertainment should remain a genuinely public service.
James Dean, Jackson Pollock and Princess Diana died in them. Jim Morrison was supposedly traumatized by watching one. JG Ballard thought they were sexy. What am I writing about? Car Crashes. I can remember some years ago there was a headline in my local paper, "Double Death Smash: Wall of Silence." Since then, I have been interested in the social symbolism of these violent accidents and the way they resonate in popular culture.
I should say right from the start, this has nothing to do with the immense personal tragedy of real crashes; real horrors that nobody wants and that have touched the lives of many I know. Ironically, popular culture glamorizes what in real life can only be experiences of deep personal shock, pain, loss and bewilderment.
To focus instead, then, on the mythos...
Catastrophic, momentary and spectacular, car and motorcyle accidents have inspired stories, films and many, many songs. So how do we explore this complex subject? I want to argue here that the mythos of highway crashes romanticizes them as tragic comments on modern society.
To understand the crash, we have to start with the car. Cars are, in some senses, the ultimate symbols of modernity. They are machines for living in which represent the triumph of Enlightenment science and the will to create new technology as vehicle for social progress, but also the flip side of the era too: alienation, the belief that science can solve human problems and the submission of the individual to mass consumerism. Henry Ford's famous Model-T is still resonant here as symbol of massification and advanced form of industrial cloning.
As expensive commodities, cars have become both gendered and sexed up by the advertising industry. They have also been customized, used symbols of individualism and personal style. In America, they represent the steel horse: a vehicle for men to negotiate the new frontier. The pleasure of driving a car on the open road marks an obsession with power, control and speed. To recklessly and aggressively push the limits is a characteristically masculine response... In a sense, then, the car crash can be read as a catastrophic implosion that is actually an inbuilt in contemporary society. The mythos of the car crash therefore positions it as burn-out: an ironic fulfilment of patriarchy, the military-industrial complex, and commodity culture.
On top of this, there also is an inherent ambiguity in crashes: was the glamorized tragedy a complete accident or macho suicide? The way that celebrities die is often taken to be an indication of how they lived. James Dean's troubled mind was projected into the violent crumping of his Porsche Spyder. Diana's last moments already placed her as a victim hounded by the paparazzi. In the same way, car crashes in popular songs and biographies have become symbolic of their era or particular. Take Jan and Dean's famous surf tune 'Dead Man's Curve' from 1964: the song is about wreckless, adolescent boy racing in the face of mortal danger. In a similar way, The Shangri-La's 'Leader of the Pack', from the same year, paints the death of a motorcycle gang leader as a romantic melodrama. The ideological message in these tunes suggests that those who epitomize wayward youth will come acropper before they can enter the more mundane realm of adult responsibility. Two years after 'Dead Man's Curve', Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident near Woodstock was represented as an epiphany which alerted him to the absurd pressures of the celebrity machine: "I realized, " he said, "that I was just workin’ for all these leeches." The smash jolted him into a moment of personal authenticity that was represented by the spartan folk of his LP John Wesley Harding.
Another high watermark in the cultural history of the traffic crash was in 1970, when JG Ballard released The Atrocity Exhibition: a bizarre, fragmentary novel that made reference to President Kennedy's televised motorcade assassination, from which the author drew emotional intensity because he indirectly associated with the death of his wife. That book, and the 'Crash' story that came from it (made famous later by David Cronenberg's screen version) featured the idea that car crashes were orgasmic experiences. Ballard's perverse metal-on-metal sensuality combined an air of futurism with a cryptic critique of modernity: the end point of all this fetishization of logic and machines, he said, would be pornographic. It would be about as human (or rather as dehumanizing) as an alienated sexuality. Ballard's tactical implosion inspired a wave of creativity in postpunk music led by both Bowie and, more famously, The Normal's missing-link electro track, 'Warm Leatherette'. The cover featured crash test dummies, which in turn vouched for crashes being a normal part of the industrial process (and of course crash test dummies then being idealized as post-human citizens).
That shock wave, I think, pretty much brings us up to the contemporary era, where the road is no longer entirely real. If we live in the era of the "information super-highway" (already a tawdry cliche), then the crash is now between the virtual and the real. As we implode across the unnatural terrain of cyberspace, we will encounter unforseen curves and new injuries to our humanity.
