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Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of t... -
Onto the third installment of this series - the NME 's list of the Greatest Albums of All Time, published on October 2 1993. Here, it... -
I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular mo...
Using this as a place to add some further suggestions on the B.R.A.
ReplyDeleteI have three to offer:
1) I don't want to sound complacent, because clearly the UK has enormous problems of prejudice and inequality. But I do think it is less bound by some of the hang-ups around race, gender and sexuality that constrained the US, especially in the 60s, and that are inimical to the spirit of rock'n'roll. The Beatles and the Stones could listen to Black music in the late 50s and early 60s as unashamed fans, and try to emulate their idols, in a way that must have been still very difficult for most white Americans.
2) You mentioned Britain's art schools. The other great institution that supported many bands in the early stages was the dole queue. At least until the 90s, young people could eke out a living on benefits, keeping body and soul together while they practiced their art. There used to be a fun meme going around about how Margaret Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance Scheme, intended to finance small business start-ups, was used by many to help get their bands off the ground.
3) Unlike Germany, Italy, France and above all Austria, Britain is a country without a well-developed Classical music tradition. It is no accident that the man who is probably Britain's best-loved home-based composer, Handel, was a German immigrant. In those conditions, anyone with a slight amount of musical aptitude or talent might be more likely to go their own way into popular music of some kind, rather than being co-opted into the Classical establishment.
Britain was famously described by the German critic Oskar Schmitz as "a land without music". The full quote is instructive: "The English are the only cultured nation without its own music (except street music)." Schmitz would no doubt have been amazed to discover that it was the street music that turned out to be what the world loved the most.
Yes it is very annoying that I can't activate the comments beneath Blissblog posts - apologies for that.
DeleteGood point about the dole culture. Back then claimants didn't have to fill out 26 applications per week to prove they were 'jobseekers' rather than spongers. They could use their state stipend to fund long periods of creative exploration - develop their sound. The government indirectly subsidized the arts. There was also a squat culture that further helped people avoid work or work only sporadically, leaving time for creative endeavours. And the squats might provide rehearsal space for bands.
That's a great quote from Oskar Schmitz - the "street music" is a brilliant, revealing nuance. But is it really true that Britain has no classical musical tradition? Purcell, Elgar, Holst, then into the 20th Century with Ralph Vaughn Williams, Britten, Birtwistle, Maxwell-Davies. Okay it can't compare with the Austro-Germanic tradition. What are the explanations for this lack or failing?
I just looked up a Wiki list of English composers - Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern - and it's a vast plain of names I've never heard of and even the ones that ring a faint, faint bell, I don't think I've ever heard their music!
Yes, calling Britain a land “without” music is clearly overdoing it. But I don’t think it’s crazy to think that the classical musical tradition features less centrally in cultural life in Britain than it does in some other European countries, especially Germany and Austria, as you say, but also including Italy and France. So there isn’t a British Mozart, which is perhaps inevitable, but there isn’t really a British Debussy or Verdi either.
DeleteAnd on a global stage, when you think about what Britain is known for internationally, it is mostly its writers, not for any of its musicians before the Beatles.
Your Schmitz bit inspired an insta-blogpost!
ReplyDeletehttps://thinkigekru2.blogspot.com/2023/06/das-land-ohne-musik.html
Assuming this is now the officially unoffical comments section for that essay:
ReplyDelete1) I think the 'land without music' comment is, if I'm remembering my Alex Ross correctly, a comment not on the lack of working English concert/opera composers so much as the lack of distinctively English composers - prior to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the composers you just named started trying to create a real native music, British composers were generally regarded as competent imitators of their more original continental peers.
2) Your theory of the attitudes between recordings and live performances rings very true to me - thinking about it now, one underrated reason hiphop became the dominant US electronic music is that it placed live vocals front and center, and later changes have tended towards making it still more 'live' (more spontaneous and involved beatmaking/sequencing/programming; more live instrumentation, etc.)
3) Same with the UK vs US version of punk - Alexis Petridis had a smart piece tied to the 40th anniversary of the Ramones debut about this - how they were viewed as endearingly snotty good fun inspired by Mad Magazine and underground comics in their home country, and as a much darker prefiguring of nihilistic social chaos across the pond https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/28/ramones-40th-anniversary-super-deluxe-edition-review
Important addendum - there are a lot of stories, either firsthand from blues-oriented English guitar players or secondhand from bemused American guitar players, that the latter 'hadn't listened to the right records' and were therefore straying too far from the source material. That seemed ridiculous to the Americans - in all likelihood, they had listened to many more blues and R&B records than the English players had - but it makes sense if there was a disparity in how they were listening - the English with less available listening both more intently and, as you put it, diagrammatically to these precious relics; the Americans having plenty, but hearing it as a living music they were participating in and feeling more free to blend it into other genres (the racial element plays its own part here, too - with black artists already playing across the proverbial road, it was considered both unnecessary and a little unseemly to try and match them exactly - that only came later when American kids started imitating British guitar players instead of Black American ones...)
ReplyDeleteAh that is fascinating.
DeleteI get the sense that if you are learning the music as much or more from seeing the bands live - looking at how they use their instruments, the overall sound, the feel and swing of it - it does create a different relationship with the music. More organic and more incremental. I think of the difference in sound between Allman Bros and Black Sabbath.
The diagrammatic way of envisaging sound is related to a certain stiffness to British rock maybe - relatively, anyway. Carducci has a line about how Hawkind were the only Brit band of their era to have a looseness and organic feel akin to the Stooges etc etc, and it took a ton of drugs for them to reach that.
Talking of the effect of hearing the music first and foremost as records, there is a story that the sound of trad jazz in the UK was affected by hearing the original New Orleans music as shellac '78s on Victrola players. So they heard it as faster and tinnier and shriller than it would have been when heard live - and that sound of the recordings is what they attempted to reproduce. There was also an interruption during the WW2 phase of American jazz bands getting over to the UK. Actually now I think about it, I might have garbled this and it was something to do with a Musicians Union policy. But at any rate, there was a long-ish period when no American jazz bands were playing in the UK and accordingly ALL the input was coming from the recordings, with no live performances to provide an experiential counterbalance.
"Incremental" meaning in terms of how the music evolves.
DeleteMind you, you could probably find exceptions in UK music to what I'm arguing - we didn't really have jam bands or Dead-type bands (a group like Man might be closest, rollicking and loose). But we did have the whole pub rock movement, which has bequeathed very little in terms of recordings anyone would want to listen to, but was (so it's said) able to generate performance heat in a crowded, sweaty pub. But the lack of innovation in pub rock (except for Dr Feelgood) comes as much from the thing they had of not being too bothered about original material, instead doing lots of cover versions.
And there are American exceptions, who do have a visual or cinematic, highly contoured sound - Beach Boys, and the Doors.
The difference becomes less discernible with passing decades, but I do think it's notable that the UK created bands like Queen, 10cc, Electric Light Orchestra - an extremely produced, layered, almost lacquered sound - groups whose natural habitat was the recording studio. Well, Queen could rock a stage admittedly....
Yeah, I started thinking of exceptions to my own theory as soon as I posted it - Beach Boys and Doors are good examples, the latter emerging from UCLA film school under von Sternberg, probably the closest thing to art school any of the 60s American bands attended; and Wilson pretty much being sui generis, a modernist composer reminiscent of Copeland, Bernstein, Gershwin, and Ives who spontaneously emerged from LA studio-session pop, film scoring, and big-band-driven vocal groups and mood music
ReplyDeleteThe closest thing to an exception in the UK for me would be electric folk - if deliberately not in sound, then in the ethos of pluralism guided by roots (the quasi-ethnomusicology of groups like the Incredible String Band or Pentangle being mirrored by US artists like Ry Cooder or Taj Mahal, with both sets of groups coming from their respective folk revivals)
Three more exceptions I just thought of - Zappa, Beefheart, and Lowell George - van Vilet and George actually did attend art school, while Zappa had his childhood/teenage worship of Varese and Stravinsky to draw on, and all three were recording diehards as well as road warriors. One of Beefheart's band members later said that the sound of Trout Mask Replica was inspired by an engineer friend who had taught himself to edit tape by doing primitive beatmatching from recordings in wildly different keys; George later wrote songs by doing a similar thing with edits from his own demos
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