The Parental Voice in Pop

 

"We gave her most of our lives.... never a thought for ourselves..." 

"We only wanted to be loved"

(always taken it to be meant as a clinging motherly or grandmotherly voice, a mixture of sponge and limpet... although others bits of the lyric suggests it's more about the mutual braindeath of matrimony: Rotten's last stand of cynicism before hitching up with Nora, for life)

"Nigel's whole future is as good as planned"

And now for something completely different... 

Ray Davies playing truant from his role as Head of the Family, keeping his head down and turning a blind eye... 

I am sure there's other examples of the parental voice in the Kinks songbook, must be something on Village Green Preservation...

Not a parental voice but perhaps a social surrogate for the parental - the congressman in "Summertime Blues" - "like to help you son, but you're too young to vote" 

Harry Chapin of course...  

Not forgetting Cat Stevens's "Father and Son"

Maternal voice internalized as spectral super-ego, not heard but invoked in "Triad" 

I love you too

And I don't really see

Why can't we go on as three

You are afraid, embarrassed too

No one has ever said such a thing to you

Your mother's ghost stands at your shoulders

A face like ice, a little bit colder

Saying to you, you cannot do that

It breaks all the rules, you learned in school

But I don't really see

Why can't we go on as three

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update 12/2 late night

Lots of good suggestions in the comments, but this one I remembered myself -  it dramatizes a dispute between a dad and his fruity, freaky glam-rock loving kid.

The full skit below concerns a teenager (Tommy Chong) who wakes up and listens to a song by "Alice Bowie" (Cheech Marin) and then his father (also played by Marin) yells at him to get ready for school and they have a fight.

[song]

My mamma talkin' to me, tryna to tell me how to live

But I don't listen to her 'cause my head is like a sieve

My daddy, he disowned me 'cause I wear my sister's clothes
He caught me in the bathroom in a pair of pantyhose
My basketball coach, he's done kicked me off the team
For wearing high-heeled sneakers and acting like a queen (queen)

The world's comin' to an end, I don't even care
As long as I can have a limo and my orange hair
And it don't bother me if people think I'm funny
'Cause I'm a big rock star, and I'm making lots of money
Money, money, money, money, money
I'm so bloody rich, I own apartment buildings and shopping center
And I only know three chords, watch me burn you fools

[skit starts]

I said turn that thing down and get ready for school
Hey, what are you trying to do? You ruined my record, man, I just bought it
I don't care what you just bought
You get your little fanny perpendicular and get ready for school
I'm not going to school
What do you mean you're not going to school?

It's what I said, I'm not going to school
And why not?
Because I'm sick, that's why not
Sick, you're sick, all right
What's wrong with you now, prince charming?
I got an earache

Earache, my eye, how would you like a butt ache?
Now, get your little fanny out of that bed and clean up this room
It looks like a pigsty, you hear me?

(oinking sounds)

All right, that's enough, that's enough
You pushed me far enough, young man, you're gettin' punished
Now stand up, no I said stand up!

Ah, let go of my hair, man
Now, young man, I have talked to you and talked to you and talked to you
Til' I'm blue in the face, and I'm done talking to you
Good, does that mean you're done spitting on me, too?
Shut up, I'm not done talking to you, now turn around and bend over
Or what are you going to do, you pervert?

Pervert? What are you snobby little
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow
Oh, shut up, I haven't even touched you yet
Now I want you to know this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me
Oh wow, that didn't even hurt
Oh, yeah?

Oh, wow, what are you trying to do, tickle me?
Tickle you? Yeah, I'll tickle you, ow!
Oh, is that tickle, huh?
Come on, I'll tickle
Come on, lock it up, honey, come on
Oh no more, no more

All right, now you're gonna do what I tell ya?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
You gonna talk back to me?
Yeah, yeah, 

what?
I mean no, no, no, no, no
Alright, now you get your clothes on and get your little butt ready for school right now
Do you understand? 

Yeah, alright

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Update: 12/ 3

how could I forget this one? 

sourced in this anti-drug single (as mentioned in the comments) 

4 Hero's sequel to "Mr Kirk's Nightmare"

Deconstructive Artwork

 

There were a bunch of other permutations - probably a tour poster.  Update 1/8/2025 here's a gig announcement advert

The cassette had a different wording, mentioning "cassette inlays" rather than record covers. 

When the compact disc was invented, they adapted the text again for that.

 And then there was this XTC Go 2 era rarity which Andy Miller posted not so long ago on a social medium

All the handiwork of Hipgnosis, adapting here quite smartly to the New Wave way of doing things, dropping their proggy sub-surreal tableaux thing.

Made me start to look out for other examples of this and so far this is what I've found. 

"The Buzzcocks Range of Quality Goods" 

Then there was also the Fast Product angle. Here a disagreement about the artwork for Gang of Four's release is documented on the back cover, a gesture at transparency (Bob Last went with a different concept for the front cover).

Last and Fast also put out some non-music releases that were playing with the idea of the commodity, packages filled with clipped out magazine images, pieces of orange peel (soon to rot) and other consume detritus. One called The Quality of Life, the other SeXex.

The idea of "product" being forefronted in the name Fast Product - this here is a commodity that you've purchased - a reveling in the fetishisable husk in which music reached consumers - is something Bob Last copied from New Hormones and Buzzcocks.

The tabloid newspaper packaging of the debut Public Image Ltd single also fits - as does the Vogue style glamour shots on the debut angle. 

Or indeed the very idea of presenting yourself as a Limited Company - the band as corporation.

See also British Electric Foundation. And to a degree The Tubes - at least for one album

Perhaps imitating PiL's we are a communications company, not a band idea, World Domination Enterprises talked about becoming a corporation, sparring with the kind of pollution creating multinationals they critiqued in song and protested with their busking tours outside huge corporate office buildings and government institutions involved in environmental destruction. 

Other exponents

Sudden Sway - Phil wrote a fascinating essay about Peterborough's finest some years ago.  The packaging element was nuts - wasn't one record some kind of board game? 

And I suppose the very first to make a stab at this was The Who with The Who Sell Out - although that was a parody of pirate radio, then synonymous with commercials and commercialism, rather than undergroundism as we'd understand it with the subsequent history of pirate radio. The people behind pirate radio in the Sixties were canny entrepreneurs, in favor deregulation, wanting the UK to be like America. Future Thatcherites many of them 

Subsequently lamely echoed by Sigue Sigue Sputnik with their attempt to have actual ads as opposed to pretend ones between songs on their album. 

Win - formerly The Fire Engines ( again associated with Bob Last, this time with his post-Fast label Pop Aural) - had a whole consume-us, we-are-shiny-baubles, fizzy-drinks to guzzle kind of thing going, which then became (as with Sigue) increasingly humiliated and desperate when no one wanted to buy their particular product.  But that was already there in the Fire Engines days too - "Get Up and Use Me", "New Things In Cartons", even "Candyskin" in a way. 

Pop as units of stimulation, "modern drugs", disposable buzzes, sugar highs. 

But there must be loads and loads more examples

There's a Brechtian term, isn't there? "Expose the device", I think.  

Bob Last was a theatre student and Brecht had a big revival in the 1970s.

The Who - it's from Warhol and Pop Art, presumably. 

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Some more recent things in this approximate zone

Imaginary soft drink / pop star from the PC Music squad

And further back in time, The Pop Tarts - American Pet Shops Boys with Baudrillardian hyperconformism / simulation pop elements - named themselves after a sugary treat and talked a fine talk about starting their own line of spin off products - truffles, fragrances what have you (this long before pop stars and rappers routinely diversified and turned themselves into brands). The Tarts were caustic about the pseudo-alternative rock of their day, R.E.M., the illusory concept of authenticity et cetera 

Frank Owen (oh think what I could have achieved if I'd had his motormouth pushiness!) browbeat the editors of MM into putting the Pop Tarts on the front cover, with - I think - exactly zero releases to their name at that time. 

Not sure if The Pop Tarts ever did any deconstructive artwork though, as I'm not sure they ever released a record.... 

And there was the whole U2-goes-pomo phase of Pop and "Discotheque" and Bono-as-McPhisto

They did a tour called Popmart and there was some kind of launch event or press release in an actual K-Mart. 

Never sounded less convincing or more ill-fitting than in this phase, U2.

Even Rattle n Hum was less undignified, and it was abjectly inapt and jive. 

It began with Zooropa, right, this postmodern / we-are-products-in-the-pop-marketplace era?

Whereas Achtung Baby did work, was a valuable loosening up and widening out of U2, after the pious roots-maneuver of Rattle "n' Stinks

After Pop, they had no choice but to rebuild their virginity and go back to their forte, their true lane, with "Beautiful Day" and whatever that album was called. 

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Andrew Parker points out the Spiritualized packaging in the style of generic chemist's packet of tablets. Playing cleverly on the old Spacemen 3 idea of music-as-analgesic, "the perfect prescription" etc. 

Very clever - "may cause drowsiness"

Now I have this somewhere and I have a feeling I never even opened it, having exhausted my interest in the record with the cassette advance. Perhaps it's valuable? It's probably a bit bashed about in transit,  over the years, though.

The compact disc sealed up in a foil sachet like an actual tablet - love it.

The credits styled as pharmaceutical style information, active ingredients, dosage instruction, side effects, warnings etc is very clever 

Ed mentions Flipper's play on the generic, off-brand product lines in supermarkets, which was then - he says - ripped off by PiL (if true, perhaps fair enough given Flipper's debts to PiL)

The kind of generic product Flipper have in mind is specifically pharmaceutical - the own-brand medication sold by the likes of CVS and Rite Aid and Target. 

And so there is some proto-Spiritualized fun had with this idea on the record labels and the inner sleeve

Probably fancifully, some - Flipper themselves? I'm not sure - thought that Public Image Ltd  ripped off the Album idea for Album

I doubt it - I think maybe it's Virgin Records folk memory of XTC's Go 2

See PiL have the XTC style variants for different formats

However they messed up here I think, since "album" is not a format per see but a type of work, defined by its composition (usually if not invariably multiple tracks) and duration. The cassette and compact disc versions are also albums. They should have called it LP or Long Playing Record or maybe Vinyl LP for total specificity. 

Wouldn’t calling a release different things - Album, Cassette, Compact Disc - screw up your chart shop returns and chart position?

Did "Rise" come out as "Single"? 

Why yes it did!

And they even copied XTC with the label 

But what happened when the second single was released from the album? Was that also called Single? Or maybe Another Single. 

Nope they kept the font - and the sort of Sainsbury own brand style design - but they used the song title this time. 

I bought  the limited edition double-pack version, 2 seven-inches in a gatefold. I guess because "Rise" was included. Can't remember anything about "Home".

]

They missed a trick here - if they had done a couple of new tracks to round it out, they could have titled it EP or Extended Play.  Then again, per my comments above about "type of work" versus "format", maybe not. 

Flipper got their "own" back with this live album Public Flipper Limited

In a Sudden Sway like gambit, this album can be turned into a board game

Phil mentions Scritti with the 'how to make your own record' information and recording costs on the sleeves. Does he seriously think that Scritti just slipped my mind?  Me, who has been described as a Scritti-stalker!

The Peel Sessions EP (above) actually has the contract they signed with the BBC as the ground on which the demystification info is printed. And for utter transparency there is also a written account, on the left, of how the process went down with the Peel show (within the limits imposed by the BBC, which didn't allow them to discuss the negotiations). This is juxtaposed (on the right) with the ir own production costs for the vinyl EP.

On The Mekons Story, they have a friend of the band reading out snippets from their contract with Virgin in between songs... 

Desperate Bicycles fit in somewhere too.

Andrew Parker mentioned these Pop Art we-are-product style covers