Clever Dick Pop (invented genres 1 of ?)

Love this tune by J Dilla

Imagine my surprise on discovering that it is very largely composed out of a single 10cc song, "The Worst Band In the World".

I much prefer the Dilla reconstruction - because he took the most exciting elements of the original and dispensed with the clever-clever conceit that the original song is built around.  The bits that he doesn't use are without exception the insufferable parts - the vocal harmony bollocks. What he keeps is the thrilling gimmickry and off-kilter playing. Dilla activates a latent violence in the record that is barely discernible because smothered in cleverness. 

This got me thinking about what exactly 10cc were about - their raison d'etre - and what category they could be assigned to. 

Art-pop doesn't sit quite right - they are too mercenary and gimmicky, and there's no real expressive element, the sense of tortured emotions or wayward perversity as there is with Bowie or  Byrne or Billy Mackenzie or Bjork. 

Rather than "art", the word "craft" seems the apposite one - crafted and crafty is the way they go about things.

Craft's for craft's sake. 

What defines 10cc and their ilk is the absence of inner fire... there's an anti-Dionysian, non-primal approach to music at work here -  a kind of sonic hobbyism. Tinkering in the studio. 

So here is the first of several retroactively invented genres I will be positing and posting about:

Clever Dick Pop

As important as "clever" is the word "pop". Operators in this area are dead set on having hit singles. They love and revere the tradition of the 3-minute radio song.  

(Prior to 10cc and even prior to Hotlegs, the boys had worked as a kind of anonymous hit factory, operating out of their own Strawberry Studios in Manchester and churning out bubblegum tunes at an incredible rate for American producer-writer team Kasenetz & Katz).

So Clever Dick Pop is not the same as Prog - there's no 10 minute tracks with multiple time-signature changes and segmented parts.... no side-long song-suites. Clever is not really trying to impress with musicianship or edify the mind. It aims to amuse. To tickle the ear.

The patron saint, the forefather, of Clever Dick Pop is Paul McCartney. Think of the complicated but always cloyingly catchy contraptions on side 2 of Abbey Road.  Think of much, maybe most, of his solo career and Wings.  "Silly Love Songs", "Let 'Em In", "Band on the Run", "Coming Up" (especially with the video).... 

Still, McCartney did have, now and then, some real feelings to draw on. 

10cc, with only a couple of exceptions, seem completely heartless. 

The big exception would be "I'm Not In Love", which does makes you believe there's actual pained self-deception, dependency-denial, going on in there. That is the record where the incredible construction skills of the vocal layering are put in service to, melded with, something that approximates to "soul".  It's a song that could be mentioned in the same breath as that other Apollonian ancestor alongside McCartney - Brian Wilson. Craft in service of religious feeling. 

But as for the rest.... "Life Is A Minestrone," "The Wall Street Shuffle", "Rubber Bullets". "Clockwork Creep", "Un Nuit A Paris"....  Fuuuuuuck off. 

(Just as boys reach sexual awakening at different times, so too with musical awakening... a friend of mine got into Pop Music before I did... I remember him one day insisting we listen to The Original Soundtrack in his room, with the curtains closed - a lovely summer's day it was too: how I'd rather have been up the woods or running through the bracken on the Common. I sat there politely bemused as he enthused about the sound effects and stereophonic jiggery-pokery) 

Out of the foursome, Godley and Creme are the real Clever Dickheads... the other two, Gouldman & Stewart, who  persisted as 10cc after G&C clever-buggered off (see appendix at the end), they seem to be a bit more in touch with the feelings side of pop (it was they who wrote "I'm Not In Love"... and back in the '60s Gouldman wrote stuff for the Yardbirds like "For Your Love").  But then the post-G&C 10cc did do "Dreadlock Holiday", which might I suppose be based in real feeling (racial paranoia) but is certainly clever-dickery of a high order (if also a decent slice of cod reggae). 

Who else belongs in this clever-clogged genre? 

Buggles. (Trevor Horn was a big fan of 10cc. Later worked with one of them in a reconstituted Art of Noise. And in between carried on his clever-Bugglesry with Dollar - a thrillingly empty reveling in plasticated overproduction)

M, as in "Pop Muzik", "Moonlight and Muzak", etc. 

Electric Light Orchestra, although people no doubt find some of their songs moving (I for one was deeply touched by "The Diary of Horace Wimp")

Roy Wood (Clever Dick Pop has a relationship with Pastiche and Parody, since this is a jejune pastime that the  brainy adolescent with precocious genre knowledge loves to do.) 

Quantum Jump (and later Rupert Hine efforts)

Bebop Deluxe / Red Noise / Bill Nelson

Queen have Clever Dick traits...  Brian May has tendencies that resemble Godley & Creme (see later) e.g. using a guitar to painstakingly simulate the sounds of other instruments, horns, violins, what have you. A layered and lacquered sound. But Freddie's ham melodramas generally blast through the intricate constructions. Clever Dick is never camp, and Freddie is camp, is Theatre. 

Outfits that possibly only I in the whole world remember existing:

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, Clive Langer and the Boxes, Fischer-Z, City Boy.

Antipodean contingent: Skyhooks, Split Enz

Split Enz bridge the Old Wave and New Wave eras, and as we get into the New Wave era, a lot of Clever Dickery is going on within the new aesthetic's strictures - the idea that you can write about other things than love -  buildings and food and bureaucracy and organisations and transport - lends itself to cleverness of all sorts. Also smug social comment.

So we could include:

XTC with their tunes about being a helicopter and roads girdling the globe and Generals and Majors

Thomas Dolby (his image is bespectacled egghead scientist)

Squeeze perhaps although Glenn Tilbrook's sweet plaintiveness feels heartfelt even when the words are overwritten and the arrangements a bit too fussy. "Cool For Cats" is perfect Clever Dick material although you sense there's some kind of roughed-up-by-life feeling lurking within. 

Are there any Americans in this Clever Dick genre?

Todd Rundgren certainly has the overproduction and over-arrangement, the excessive studio craft, the increasingly goofy subject matter and then later the Godley & Creme-esque interest in cutting edge video techniques (and didn't he also get into CD-ROM?!). But equally there's probably some emotion and spiritual yearning in there. 

Sparks would seem to fit ("best British band to ever come from America") but actually there is among the conceits and whimsy, a fair amount of personal anguish (Morrissey in Autobiography wrote that Ron Mael's sex songs are like prison cell scrawlings). "Amateur Hour" is awfully clever but the subject, sexual inexperience and bed humiliations, is raw beneath the conceit. 

I am thinking there must be a fair amount of European stuff that qualifies. 

Clever Dick Pop - where every song is an aspiring novelty hit? 

 

( I've just remembered another ancestor besides Paul McCartney - Jonathan King)

(There's also The Turtles, who did a whole album in which each song spoofed a different genre, complete with different imaginary band names)

So who are the descendants, the later exponents, the people who carried on the Clever Dick tradition?  Oddly most of the names I'm thinking of are American.

College rock has its quotient - Game Theory. Let's Active.

Ween?  

They Might Be Giants?

MGMT?

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Appendix: An Ancient Post on What Godley & Creme Did Next

On the subject of alternative history for music, one blogpost I never got around to writing up was trying to imagine a world in which Godley & Crème’s 1977 album Consequences was as massive as the record company thought it was going to be.

Consequences was this concept album the duo did immediately after leaving 10c.c. at the zenith of that group's success ("I'm Not In Love" etc). 

A triple LP, in a deluxe box (like a classical box for a Wagner opera or something), with a 20 page booklet and four full-colour illustrations outlining the Concept.

It was made using the Gizmo, or Gizmotron to give it its full name: this sort of reinvented guitar they’d developed to simulate orchestral textures.

Consequences was a huge production, blurring the lines between pop, radio play, and comedy (Peter Cook was involved).

Now this is what interested me: the record company, Mercury, actually priced it even higher than a triple LP needed to be. They thought it would sell as this quality, high-cultural thing, a prestige purchase. They were thinking, I guess in the wake of Mike Oldfield and so forth, that this was the direction music was going.

But it took so long to make--18 months--that by the time it came out in the autumn of 1977, punk was all the rage. The album was a total bust.

That got me thinking about what circumstances would have had to prevail for Consequences to be a Tubular Bells level smash. I concluded that punk would either have had to not happen at all, or happen earlier, in a smaller way, such that it was all over by 1977.  It was just bad timing for Godley and Crème, their record came out at the worst possible moment.  The Wall was massive a few years later, as was Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds (similar in many ways –  double elpee, lavish booklet, use of actors and spoken word, beautifully detailed and spacious production with lots of stereophony and alien electronic sounds  – a movie on wax, basically, with a cast of dozens).

My thinking was that there was a structural necessity in the music scene (and record industry) for something like punk to happen - the erosion of that whole level of small-club music that created intimacy and community between fans and audience;  the need for something that reflected teenage lives and frustrations, working-class real life; the gap for an aggressive hard rock with hooks and easy-entry levels of musicianship etc etc.  But what if all that came about earlier?  Say, in 1974, and had happened with less fall-out in terms of  political resonances and repercussions.

A premature punk, lacking the ideological content that span off into the massive renewals of postpunk, DIY, anarchopunk,  etc.  Such that it had all blown over by '77.

One scenario I came up with: what if  The New York Dolls had happened, had lived up to the hype, established a huge popular audience rather than the cult following that largely consisted of rock critics and people like Morrissey and the brothers Sylvian and Jansen? What if "real kids" rallied to them?

How could that have happened? The only way I could see was  if one of the original members whose role was, shall we say, "decorative" went missing early on in the band's existence, through misadventure of some kind. And the replacement turned out to be their Glen Matlock figure, a proper tunesmith and anthem-builder. Like say a future Ramone, maybe.

If McLaren found this Ramone-enhanced Dolls a little sooner, and perhaps even had the bright idea of steering them into the hands of a Chapman / Chinn...

Leading to a wave of Dolls-copyists across the UK, managing to vent pent-up aggression / frustration effectively but non-consequentially (in comparison with punk), and taking a lot of the actors and prime movers of 76/77 out of the equation early.... Causing Mick Jones to form a Dolls/Mott type band, something as poppy and insignificant as Generation X, and Strummer to molder on in the Grove squatland, becoming a Tymon Dogg-like figure, a raspy busker.

But the innate self-destructiveness of the Dolls would probably have won through anyway... meaning that the moment would pass quickly...

Going back to Consequences (and another problem with my counterfactual is the, er, limitations of the material itself in terms of its mass appeal), I love this story about some of the studio shenagians G&C and their engineer got up to:

"Three days were spent producing a saxophone sound from an electric guitar; each note of a guitar solo was recorded separately and faded in on the track, which was then sent through a speaker and out of a rubber hose with perforated cigarette paper at the end. Enough pressure was displaced by forcing the sound through the holes of the cigarette paper to give the rasp of a saxophone."

Wouldn't it have been much easier, and cheaper, simply to hire a saxophone player?

Of course there is a further level of the alternative rock history scenario which I never got around to thinking about - what would be the consequences of Consequences being consequential - actually selling and being popular? Would the Gizmo actually have become part of the standard arsenal of rock and pop groups going forward? One of the accusations leveled at the record at the time was that it was little more than a demonstration record for the new instrument, an advertisement....  G&C imagined they would be selling them by the thousands.

Creme and Godley write a memoir - in 1981.

A punter recommends:

It's hard to believe now  but back in October 1981 'The Fun Starts Here' was banned by a significant number of book chains; W.H. Smiths, John Menzies and Hammick's were amongst the stores refusing to stock it. Your humble correspondent, finding it liber non grata in the small (minded) town he was living in, had to hop on a train to Reading to obtain it. What was it about this book that sorely offended stockists? The answer, my friend, was flowing from the pen. Godley & Creme's illustrated story of British rock'n'roll circa 1957-1980 is, to misquote Nigel Tufnel, "One lewder": It's a scabrous, satirical, merciless laying-bare of the madness and ecstasy, the hypocrisy and egomania, of Da Biz. No turn is unstoned - not even the authors.

Their unforgettable images - a trouserless manager on all fours securing the 'best deal for his client', a teddy boy teen-dreamer strumming willy guitar in his bedroom mirror, a marijuana-mashed groupie having her knackered knockers autographed by the likes of Jimi, Macca, G & C themselves and 'Eric' who exhorts her to 'Keep on suckin'', a satin tour-jacketed, stack-heeled, perm-haired, middle-aged rock star in his mansion's mirrored toilet defecating gold discs into the bowl ("Success Hasn't Changed Me At All") - make the political cartoons of Gerald Scarfe, by comparison, as savage as a pastel watercolour of daffodils.

It's an uneven book - a couple of the stories are self-indulgently long-winded, shaggy-dog pointless, or not particularly funny - but genius was never a guarantor of quality control and these minor, infrequent lapses do not overly detract from the overall mesmerising brilliance of invention, inspiration and artistic execution. Although art schools were the breeding ground for the most imaginative of British rock musicians - Townshend, Ferry, Eno, Lennon, Mercury, Ray Davies, Keith Richards, McLaren, Uncle Syd Barrett and all - Lol and Kev were rare in applying their visual skills in their musical careers and to such a unique and devastating effect.

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All their subsequent solo albums are Clever Dick in excelsis - and the promo for "Cry" is state-of-art video-clever-dickery 

The song itself seems to be an attempt to say to Stewart & Gouldman, "look, we can do our own 'I'm Not In Love'.... yet it feels very much like a hollow vessel....  it's hard to imagine anyone in the world actually being brought to tears by this song

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Okay I did quite like this one at the time

Today it strikes the ear as a bit like a sickly souffle, a creme caramel (pun unintended, LOL)

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Further reading - the Glam / Prog / New Wave intersection