Sinister: and then they'll *really* look like a Start-Rite kid

[P F]

ladybirds, ladybirds,


Never let it be said that I live in the future. I've been heading backwards 
as fast as my magic boots will carry me for as long as I can remember, no, 
anticipate. And I finally drifted so far back that I found that Tim Hopkins, 
once, possibly in another century, maybe in a galaxy, or possibly just a 
Capri, far far away, said:

--------------

the last thing I remember Reynolds writing was that we had had enough
(too many?) fantastic songs and that what music needed was a load of
noise that superceded the song (he wouldf justify such babble by going
on about 'jouissance' and 'the demolition of self' and suchlike which is
all very well until you realise he's doing it because, basically, he
likes the Young Gods).

No doubt he'd hate Belle and Sebastian for the reason that they
are the best songwriters operating in the whole of pop music today. Or
he'd slip into the easy stereotype of calling them twee and childlike
and then bung that stuff about how the whole enterprise is the pop music 
version of anorexia, which I always thought was a duff argument (to broadly 
summarise, he said that anorexia was all about refusing one's status as an 
adult and the consequent pressures and responsibilities of the world; he 
then identified Talulah Gosh as doing the same thing).

------------------------

I was struck on reading this, because I've finally read the piece that TH is 
referring to, after many years of having it quoted to me, well nigh 
verbatim, by my Stevenage collispondent. I wonder, though, about TH's 
argument. As it happens, I like his first para, especially the use of the 
word 'babble' - the most casually effective put-down that I've encountered 
since an Irish foreign minister remarked, 'Ian Paisley should go away'. But 
TH seems to be saying that SR disliked indie pop, and thus likened it to 
anorexia in order to put it down. (I can now imagine the wrath of TH as he 
corrects me re. this interpretation of his rich, nay, polysemic, non, 
jouissant words.) I don't think that that was SR's take at all, not back 
when he made the argument - as long ago as 1986. Here he is again:


------------------

[Indiepop's] return to romance is oppositional. Chartpop has grown ever more 
'adult' in its treatment of relationships - either more explicit and 
suggestive or mature and 'progressive'. The idea of a redemptive / 
devastating love has come to seem a superstition in this age of yuppie 
self-management and self-sufficiency.... The indie scene is interested in 
precisely the jeopardising or loss of self through terror or awe, precisely 
the absolute investment of the self that is forbidden in this secular 
economy of self....
     By a strange process we've reached the point where 'purity' seems more 
radical than libertinism, more transgressive than sin. The indie scene is 
obsessed by a dream of purity - of 'pure love', of a 'pure' or 'perfect pop' 
that evades the taint of the Eighties.... And where all these ideas converge 
is in two (very much linked) periods - childhood and the Sixties. The 
Sixties are like pop's childhood, when the idea of youth was still young.

('Against Health And Efficiency', in Angela McRobbie ed, Zoot Suits and 
Second-Hand Dresses, 1989)

--------------------------

blah, blah, blah. I shan't go on - but even TH must admit it's an 
interesting article; even, I'd have say, an *exciting* one. Fourteeen years 
on, I haven't seen the meanings of this stuff given a better reading; it's 
striking how relevant and comprehensible it all remains. But my point to TH 
is, surely SR wasn't knocking indie pop? He does anatomize it, as Stevie T 
has said, from a height that is itself (like the indie scene, according to 
his description) somewhat aescetic - but I think it was more a supportive 
analysis than a critical one.

Which is, I suppose, to say, in response to the original question: yes, SR 
would probably knock B&S today - but only out of a sense (right or wrong) 
that they had failed to progress from what he was analyzing way back when. 
(My own view, needless to say, is that progress isn't a virtue - cf. my 
first paragraph.) The terms of his original analysis wouldn't give any 
ground for knocking B&S (the anorexic speculation is thrown in in passing, 
not made as an accusation); but I do think it still helps us to understand 
some more of the things that B&S mean - which is quite an achievement for a 
text written when Neville Southall was playing regular top-flight football.


What's that?

Really?

Never!


f2
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