Music is in rude health. This is a wonderful thing. Admittedly it means nothing. Music is part of the fabric of life. As soon as man figured out how to stretch animal hide over a piece of wood or whittle a hole into a twig and blow, music has been a fundamental part of our daily existence. As my last essay postulated, music isn’t the problem, it’s the music business that is. However, as a new year comes upon us, another thought strikes me, one more profound than the concerns of a behemoth of an industry facing up to the fact that its glory days are over.
The BBC announced its list today of the fifteen brightest hopes for 2009. Some I was previously aware of, due to various heads-up from friends in the business, some not. But what surprised me when I clicked on the various pages and links to the artists’ work was how young they all were. In reality they aren’t that young at all. They’re the normal age for kids starting careers in bands, the same age I was when I signed my first record deal. What’s different... is me. I am now a lot older, not much older than I was last year, but something inside of me has appreciably shifted. Because for the first time in my life, when I looked at these musicians and singers and listened to them speak, I thought to myself, “My God, these are children!”
This of course says far more about me than it does about them. But as I clicked and observed, something else came to my notice. None of the music being made was particularly interesting to me. That’s not to say it didn’t have energy or imagination, much of it did. But not one of the 15 artists on offer had created anything that made me want to investigate further. And I had to admit that out of fifteen of the best for 2009 that was a pretty poor ratio.
Wondering what it was about these bands that left me disinterested, I came to the conclusion that it was the age-old problem. Everything they were doing I had heard before, in another era, in a purer format, and in a context where it made some sort of political and social sense.
The electro of the Eighties came out of the development of new technology - the synthesiser, the sequencer, the sampler - coupled with a reaction against a previously drab and strike-ridden decade. Shiny, shiny, bad times behind me. The folk music of the 60’s & 70’s was inspired by a Peace movement turning away from 50’s consumerism which had led to the Vietnam War, a misguided attempt to halt the spread of Communism and perpetuate the American Dream. The psychedelic scene which ran simultaneously was motivated by the same sense of rebellion but with better drugs.
For some reason, these seem to be the musical forms most prevalent amongst the current list of hopefuls. There are a couple of tedious rock bands ploughing the early Simple Minds/New Order furrow, but they can be dismissed as a last hurrah of bedroom bloke-dom.
Watching these youngsters raid the cultural dressing-up box, I find myself smiling. There’s no harm in what they’re doing. It all looks like fun. And if I had children I would be encouraging them to join in. Boxing Day was in fact spent teaching my 8-year old nephew the riff to James Bond and the chords to ‘Highway to Hell’ on his scaled-down Fender Strat copy.
But the big difference, when it comes to the music performed by this new crop, is that as opposed to what came before, it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it doesn’t set out to. But it only means something by proxy, a reflection of its own lack of meaning. And this I suppose, is what makes men of a certain age frown and mutter over their lovingly-maintained vinyl collections. Or worse, gives them something to ponder as they spend months downloading the entire catalogue onto their 120GB Ipods. The new garden shed, as I call it.
The kids don’t give a damn either way. They’re simply too busy plundering. Much in the way of a fashion designer. To anyone who follows fashion it has become clear for the last twenty years, that apart from the occasional bum-cleavage revealing pair of denims, there hasn’t been a single original idea. Designers instead plough through history books and travelogues, picking something from here and mixing it with something from there. It’s not a question of brain surgery, just a sharp eye and a quick pencil.
Pop music has now reached the same impasse. 60 years since the days of Bill Haley and the beast has been flayed to a pulp. It doesn’t help when prime-time talent shows reduce the history of the pop song to meaningless pulp. But the public don’t seem to mind.
Pop music has long ceased to be anything truly worth caring about. Of course it still is to to the 30 and 40-somethings who write about it and desperately continue to try and sell it. But to anyone born after 1980, and that means just about everyone on the BBC’s list, music is simply part of the disposable junk of life. Like a top from Miss Selfridge, worn today, binned tomorrow.
The young generation don’t pay for music. They don’t examine it. The only stars they are interested in are the ones that implode. The gig is simply an excuse for a night-out and a sing-a-along. All the stadium acts of the last ten years have built their careers out of songs with chants for choruses rather than lyrics. Woohs, Lahs, and Eh-Oh’s have been the order of the day. So much for revolution.
And the reason? Teenagers have studied the generation that came before. Us. With our angst-ridden hopes of music being able to change the world. How absurd. Pop music is really about emotion. It’s a way of figuring yourself out. Finding out where you fit in. How you want to dress, where you want to hang out. And in that regard, the kids who are checking out the bands for 2009 are doing exactly the same thing, unencumbered by any notion of meaning, potency, or important point of view. They’re using music as something to play with. To dress up to. To have a laugh. The lyrics of these new acts are funny, smart, reflective, cheeky... and they speak to the experience of being a teenager now. Not one from times past.
And if this all feels irrelevant, empty and pointless to anyone over the age of 25, then so it should. This is a fuck-you to us. Through greed and exploitation we reduced Pop Music to a soulless pile of regurgitated nonsense. This generation is smart enough to celebrate that fact and make something useful out of it.
It’s day-glo, it’s third-hand, it’s amateur and shambolic. It’s ramshackle, half-arsed, indulgent and comedic. There’s a knowingness in its stupidity. The mix and match appropriation of everything from Kate Bush to Afrika Bambaataa is done with an irreverent verve that would make Malcolm McClaren proud.
But more than anything, it’s fun, it’s specific and it’s all about now. It’s self-defining. And if anyone old enough to be these children’s parents is still using Pop Music to define themselves, I suggest they get themselves into therapy pretty damn quick.
© Simon Fellowes 2009