The funny thing about the past is, as it gets further away, it starts to look different. Just ask Q, Mojo and NME
In musical terms, January used to be a month of forward-looking excitement. Now it's all about bemoaning the pernicious impact of the BBC's Sound of 2011 poll.
The truly disturbing truth for media professionals with navel-gazing tendencies (and what other kind is there?) is not the huge extent to which the annual tip-sheet jamboree distorts the marketplace or strangles careers in their infancy, but the tiny extent to which it actually makes any difference. After all, it wasn't anything the BBC's new music taste-making politburo did or said that ultimately stopped Ellie Goulding becoming 2010's Little Boots. The thing that stopped Goulding crashing and burning into did-OK-without-quite-leaving-a-mark mediocrity was the fact that her tastefully brazen cover of Elton John's Your Song was used in a John Lewis advert.
In Hillel Schwartz's book The Culture of the Copy, Gertrude Lintz, whose job was training chimps to act a bit more like people in Tarzan films, explained that her "apes were trying to become something else" ? a quote that seems to encapsulate pretty much everything which needs to be said about the recording of a successful cover version. And there could be no better context in which to watch Goulding deliver the subtle downward shift of lyrical intonation on "easily hide" that makes her version of Your Song actually work than as the backdrop to an improbably magical Dancing On Iceroutine by Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.
Listening to Harvest Revisited, the CD of Neil Young covers free with this month's Mojo, you can hear both Villagers and Sam Amidon just about getting away with the same intonation-shifting trick on their respectful tweaks of Old Man and The Needle and the Damage Done respectively. These three titles would previously have come quite high on a list of "songs that should never be covered" but, as with the statesmanlike Chris and the breathtakingly graceful Jayne, they have somehow passed out the other side of kitsch overfamiliarity and moved on somewhere else.
The funny thing about the past is, as it gets further away, it starts to look different. Under the circumstances, it was perhaps understandable that the prospect of Q's "250 best albums" of that magazine's life time should have prompted this paper's own Alexis Petridis to expostulate despairingly: "That's it. Enough with the past. Let's leave it alone." Yet beneath this particular list's stodgy pie-crust of Radiohead-loving stasis, there did lurk a juicy black cherry of self-renewal: in at No 16 with a bullet, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
The Q review pages might not have given this sturdy foundation-stone of pseudo-symphonic American indie the warmth off their piss on its initial release in 1998. Neither, I would imagine, did NME (which recently misremembered its title in placing it at No 38 in their 50 Gloomiest Records Ever). Like the first two albums by the Velvet Underground, it's one of those records whose subsequent influence turned out to be inversely proportionate to the warmth of its initial reception. And the persistence of this equation actually holds the key to approaching the annual new year hype-fest with an appropriate Zen serenity.
However hard anyone tries to convince you that the co-ordinates of 2011's musical epicentre will be defined by the sulphurous internal monologue of Ghostpoet, the enchanted pub-rock of Jonny, EMA's 17-minute Robert Johnson cover and the dandelion clock deep-soul of James Blake, the inevitability of their (oh, all right then, my) ultimately being proved wrong is the year's only real sure thing. And it's in trying to replace that life-enhancing certainty with the joyless mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophesy that the BBC's Sound of 2011 list does its only real harm. The thing we all want pop to do most in the year ahead is surprise us. And if we just give it a chance, that's exactly what it will do.
Look at the innocent delight on the wizened faces of those old music press lags who bought NME's 100 Best Albums You've Never Heard issue with a "Come on then, impress me" attitude, only to find themselves genuinely impressed (and not just by tales of Bj�rk's love for the Associates' Sulk or Pete Townshend buying 250 Sun Ra albums in one go, but by titles such as Spiderland by Slint, Performance's We Are Performance and Jenny Wilson's Love and Youth). Bask in the sense of relief and euphoria felt by the weary internet surfer who read the incredibly tedious debate about the necessity or otherwise of album reviews at Drowned in Sound then went to Village Voice's 2011 Pazz and Jop poll with their heart sinking at the idea of Altered Zones ? Pitchfork's kid sister site for younger non-consumers who find that more established elder sibling's attachment to the notion of aesthetic hierarchy just too last decade, baby.
Far from the dreary dance around the concept of "post-critical" that Drowned in Sound made it look like it might be (the days when adding the word "post" to another word somehow made it more interesting being long gone), Simon Reynolds's impassioned defence of the cadre of musical Unabombers who have warmed their clammy loners' synth-playing hands on the music of Ariel Pink is actually the best piece of music writing I've read by him ? or, indeed, anyone ? in ages (though Clover Hope's singing rappers article in the same issue is pretty good too).
Among the knee-jerk reactions Reynolds astutely ascribes to chill wave naysayers is the "invocation of nostalgia as a priori bad thing" reflex. And whatever pleasures the immediate future of pop holds ? whether we're looking back fondly to a time before the Brits Critics' Choice award, imagining Torvill and Dean as Ellie Goulding's parents, or wishing the Wire could one day write about superbly shadowy Anglo-Russian duo Hype Williams without using the word "hypnagogic" ? it seems likely that nostalgia, that fundamental human impulse scientifically defined as "the hypochondria of the heart", will be calling more than its fair share of the shots.
Marla Sokoloff Jennifer Love Hewitt Tina Fey Gina Philips Jamie Gunns
No comments:
Post a Comment