Sinister: the nothing new

[P F]

THE OWL SERVICE

'Jen' mentioned a 'twee' owl. To wit: too true. Here's an owl I've recently 
encountered in the fictional realm:

A wise old owl once lived in a wood,
the more he heard the less he said,
the less he said the more he heard,
let's emulate that wise old bird.

BARCLAYS? LLOYDS

Steady Mike referred to the NatWest experiments of the mid-80s. I was 
thinking he meant their sponsorship of Slough Town (March 1985- May 1986) 
till someone else's reference to The Littlest Hobo cleared up the mess. No, 
the gunge. Or am I conflating two different banks?

MAKE THEM ACCOMPLICES

Steady Mike - for it is he again - set out to defend the possibility of 
novelty in pop, and invited responses of a sort. I'm afraid that I've taken 
the shirlie, sorry, the pepsi challenge. I was keen on the way that he 
wasn't really polemical - that his defence wasn't necesarily a defence of 
the horse he was backing. (It ruined many a man the same horses). It was 
more fact than value. For that reason I'd largely back his non-polemical 
polemic, rather than yenning to blast him onto a new course. It's true: new 
things are appearing, if not all the time, then periodically and gradually. 
(Or would gradually mean all the time?) The radical novelty of what's 
radically new is, presumably, largely down to technology rather than to any 
new discoveries in the field of music more abstractly conceived (new notes, 
harmonies, etc). So 'The Future Of Music' - ie. the development of new 
genres, forward-looking directions, unwalked paths - would (I take it) lie 
with genres that have a very intimate relation with new technology - which 
is to say, 'dance music', 'electronic music', and other things so unfamiliar 
to me that I must needs surround them with inverted commas.

That presumably means that many people will not have much van, I mean truck, 
with these (actual or putative) new genres. For people thoroughly 
enmortgaged to banks and estate agents - sorry, I mean, to older genres -  
'rock 'n' roll', 'indie pop', 'folk music', 'opera' and the like - there may 
be much novelty in store, but nothing benevolently new under the sun, 
nothing much for them to look forward to. SM - for it is he again - is not 
of this company. Everyone else must take their stand or find their cave as 
they will. Personally, pop history stopped at about 1993 round my way, 
halfway through the intro of a Frank and Walters 45 as I turned the radio 
off to go to Tesco's. Not only will I never get anything out of any emergent 
new genre, I've got precious little out of 99% of 'new music' in vivid 
memory. I just meet a few entertaining people who know about it, and nod 
parsley - I mean sagely - when they name unknown names.

But SM also said something more nuanced, which I also agreed with. This was 
- if I may simplify for my own simplistic ends: yes, pop is apt to be 
drawing on loads of pre-existing elements - to be retro, eclectic, or what 
you will - but that this in itself probably doesn't tell you whether you'll 
like it ot not. Some very derivative music (and most music may be 
derivative) clicks, some doesn't. The influences get chopped and changed 
this way and that, hidden or not, used productively or not. And - SM didn't 
add - one listener's sense of whether it works or not is by anything but 
means guaranteed to chime with another's.

To try to sum up. 'New music' - does it happen? Yes, in the sense that it's 
new every time you pick up a chainsaw, sorry, an axe. Yes, in the sense that 
new genres and sounds are emerging. No, perhaps, in the sense that the 
musical score, the range of notes available etc, is relatively fixed - but 
that's debatable. (The frontiers of what's music and what's just noise might 
be mobile. If so, then more and more music is probably appearing as more 
noise is accepted into the realm of music.) Some of us have a lot of new 
music to look forward to. Some don't - but at least for that party, the past 
is a new country. They do things originally there.


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