Faking it (Lessons on authenticity from Orson Welle's 'F for Fake')
Phonographic moments(Why vinyl works on the big screen)
Phonographic moments(Why vinyl works on the big screen)
Thursday, January 6, 2011
DJ Mamy Rock
Over the festive period, I was surprized that it was my parents who told me about the latest stirring in club culture: the sweet old lady who used to run the haberdashers store in my home town had reinvented herself as an electro-rock DJ! Of course I could hardly believe it, but check this out:
Ruth Flowers (aka DJ Mamy Rock) cleverly plays with our percepetions of age and popular music. She is not exactly a gimmick as she can actually DJ, create and release dance music, impress crowds with her live set, and tour internationally.
Instead of being a gimmick she is a professional DJ act based on a gimmick: the notion that such an old person can be a central part of a youth cultural scene.
Unlike the middle-aged hippies of European fringe culture she claims none of the cultural capital of a counter-cultural old-timer. Instead Mamy Rock is a commercial act, blindly innocent (as her Terminator shades suggest) of the culture of intoxicants that fuel her youthful audience. What we don't understand from all this is exactly how they see her. Young clubbers are giving her a serious listen, so does she indicate a refreshing lack of age-prejudice? What gives Flowers an experiential ticket into their world of youthful hedonism? Does her age not matter because she can really feel the music? ... Also, I wonder, how does her own peer group see her antics?
There are two stories of her emergence. In the one she tells, she gate-crashed a club night held for her grandson's birthday and just loved the music. In another version, she was a model who was put in DJ gear as a joke by a photographer, then made her into a business project by a clubland entrepreneur who spotted the picture. The distance between the romantic and industrial versions of her biography indicate the cultural work upon which her image rests.
While the DJ Mamy Rock phenomenon seems novel in clubland, one wonder whether elsewhere we haven't been here before. Often sporting elements of her combination of chains, shades and wild white hair, several disparate characters spring to mind: Andy Warhol, Phil Spector, Karl Largerfeld, Pete Waterman and, yes, Jimmy Saville. While it seems that style (and product) is what gives the aged their long-stay ticket as celebrities in the glamourous world of youth culture, what Mamy Rock has at the moment is a refreshing lack of a track record. She can therefore enjoy herself as an innocent abroad in the dirty world of electro: growing old, as some might say, disgracefully. This brings us on to a final stereotype that DJ Mamy Rock's image again negotiates with ease: that of the old rebel who stubbornly refuses to face those tranquil, twilight years.
It's an old person's world - expect a movie of Ruth's life story soon!
Ruth Flowers (aka DJ Mamy Rock) cleverly plays with our percepetions of age and popular music. She is not exactly a gimmick as she can actually DJ, create and release dance music, impress crowds with her live set, and tour internationally.
Instead of being a gimmick she is a professional DJ act based on a gimmick: the notion that such an old person can be a central part of a youth cultural scene.
Unlike the middle-aged hippies of European fringe culture she claims none of the cultural capital of a counter-cultural old-timer. Instead Mamy Rock is a commercial act, blindly innocent (as her Terminator shades suggest) of the culture of intoxicants that fuel her youthful audience. What we don't understand from all this is exactly how they see her. Young clubbers are giving her a serious listen, so does she indicate a refreshing lack of age-prejudice? What gives Flowers an experiential ticket into their world of youthful hedonism? Does her age not matter because she can really feel the music? ... Also, I wonder, how does her own peer group see her antics?
There are two stories of her emergence. In the one she tells, she gate-crashed a club night held for her grandson's birthday and just loved the music. In another version, she was a model who was put in DJ gear as a joke by a photographer, then made her into a business project by a clubland entrepreneur who spotted the picture. The distance between the romantic and industrial versions of her biography indicate the cultural work upon which her image rests.
While the DJ Mamy Rock phenomenon seems novel in clubland, one wonder whether elsewhere we haven't been here before. Often sporting elements of her combination of chains, shades and wild white hair, several disparate characters spring to mind: Andy Warhol, Phil Spector, Karl Largerfeld, Pete Waterman and, yes, Jimmy Saville. While it seems that style (and product) is what gives the aged their long-stay ticket as celebrities in the glamourous world of youth culture, what Mamy Rock has at the moment is a refreshing lack of a track record. She can therefore enjoy herself as an innocent abroad in the dirty world of electro: growing old, as some might say, disgracefully. This brings us on to a final stereotype that DJ Mamy Rock's image again negotiates with ease: that of the old rebel who stubbornly refuses to face those tranquil, twilight years.
It's an old person's world - expect a movie of Ruth's life story soon!
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Popular Music and Television in Britain
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.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Faking it
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?
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Judge Dread
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.
Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop
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."