Sinister: From The Top Of The Brill Building

[P F]

SYNGE AND YEATS ARE ON HIS SIDE

I see in queue, I mean, Q, on a station platform
(terminus, concourse, booksellers, or what you will.
It's like the 1840s happened) that MORRISSEY is
revenant, yes, 'returning', with a long-player, as yet
unrecorded, called IRISH BLOOD, ENGLISH HEART. This
will excite those academics and Jon Savage fans (they
exist, I think) who have long called on "M" to
acknowledge his gaylicity. I haven't done that, but it
will excite me, too, if it ever appears. But it does
raise (not beg) a question: what ever happened to the
Los Angeles LP of whose existence Michael Bracewell
was the first to inform us?

INDEPENDENT READER? I?

I have still yet, yet, still, to see any further
discussion on this list of the album THE NEGATIVES, by
the singer once known as 'The Singer With Soul Band
The Commotions'. So far, all told, I have only heard
the following, non-sinister comments - possibly
accurate, possibly not; you be the judge, jury, and
indeed executioner - on this LP:

1) It's called THE PARANOIDS
2) 'You' can 'download' it
3) It seems to be all about Los Angeles.

I'm afraid that this has not satisfied me. Why is
no-one talking about 'Man On The Verge', the song of
2000? Or 'Past Imperfect', the other song of 2000? Or
'That Boy', the third song of 2000? Goddamit, this
*is* the LLOYD COLE MAILING LIST, isn't it?, run by
and for LLOYD COLE FANS!!? Think about it.


HEARTBREAKER, by PAT BENATAR

Someone just mentioned Dave Eggers. Last night I read
Ian Sansom's review of his famed book, which naturally
I've not read (I don't read books). On the basis of
what Sansom (I.) quoted, I felt that his critical
faculties had taken a walk down a long pier. The tone
seemed waff and less intelligent, not only than it
doubtless thought it was, but than the estimable
Sansom (I.) thought it was. I think that only
Welthorpe (E.) can help me on this one.


I WAS BY THE WIRE FENCE, AND DODGING FLYING BRIDGES

Obliquely she reminds me: the other day I saw that
Mooro pitched in with a rare flight of provincial
romanticism -

>>> Stevenage, oh town of cycle tracks and my birth.
Zooming through the underpasses swerving past scared
early morning shoppers on the way to work at the
Lister Hospital. Walking the flying bridge from the
railway station through the Leisure Centre to the
pedestrian only shopping precinct with futuristic
clock tower, cars flying underneath like some torrent
in the St
Gothard pass.... [etc]

- that really cannot be allowed to go uncommended. It
was one of the best things I'd ever seen from Mooro. I
think he should write a 'concept album' or something.


TIME'S TIDE WILL MOTHER YOU

Genevieve W wrote something that I thought was pretty
sound:

>>> but how can Pop music be about longevity when all
of this won't be around in 40 years anyways. It's the
moments that count. I am remembering a 14 year old
girl buying If You're Feeling Sinister from a gorgeous
record store boy, and her not knowing anything about
the band she was about to hear. I remember her
secretly listening to Tigermilk on headphones in
boring 
classes...

As I hope shortly to say, I think Pop music can be
about longevity, shortlevity, and lots of other
things. But I think Ms W is on to something here. Why
(for instance) demand that B&S go on churning stuff
out, if they're not up to it (I have no idea, of
course, whether they are or not), when they have
already given us things to value and live by? We need
(I find myself formulating a provisional 'rule') to be
able to *value the finite*: for most is finite. And I
also happen to agree with Ms W that nostalgia -
next-door neighbour to love - can be a great thing in
the context of pop. Or of anything. When Ms W gets
older, she may sadly find that she finds it difficult
even to be nostalgic as she used to be. That is a bona
fide loss. 


CRITICISM AND ICONOGRAPHY

It is time for stormy weather. It's time to broach
once again this silly chestnut of the MFs vs B&S
question, as raised in the article to which the geezer
Miller, then Honey, pointed us all. I was going to
fall silent on this, but enough others have taken it
up that it seems to be worth having one last swing at
it.

A meta-comment first, on the geezer Pennington's
comment:

>>> This sort of thing infuriates me to no end.
Critics. People who seem to think that they are
illuminating us about our own opinions.

Is Mr P saying that 'critics' are a bad thing? I think
he's wrong. 'Criticism', which has of course been
historically defined any number of ways, does all
kinds of different things: but one thing that (for
instance) it can do is to make us see an artefact
differently: to see it more clearly, perhaps; to see
it in a relation to other things that we hadn't
thought of; to get a bit more out of it. Saying that
'critics' are bad because you don't like some
'criticism' is like saying that pop music is bad
because you don't like some pop records.

>>> Most people realize there cannot be objective
standards for music.

Or, I take it, for any other kind of aesthetic
judgement? You may well be right: though even about
this I do not feel sure. However, it is, I think, a
good pragmatic presupposition, which makes it less
likely that you'll cause needless offence.

>>> But the bare fact is that no one is capable of
writing 69 quality songs in that short a span of time.

What span of time? If I'm not mistaken (but I could
easily be mistaken), 'Papa Was A Rodeo' was written
around the time of The Charm of The Highway Strip. In
any case, your case is not proven, and not easily
proveable.

>>> It's all very interesting as a concept but
piss-poor as an album if you ask me. 

I think you are quite, quite wrong: but you have
already pointed out that this is all subjective stuff,
so fair enough.


STRANGE RELIGIOUS TRACTS

Anyway, on to the geezer Fitchett (AF) himself. I
don't really know the geezer; he may be a splendid
soul, generous, funny, intelligent, erudite and all
the rest of it. I expect he won't mind - I daresay he
won't care at all - if I find fault with his work. I
don't care for the style of the thing: I find
sentences like 'Or maybe I am. I have no idea.'
annoyingly slack. This, too: 'it's useful to draw 
parallels because… because… because. Because.' But I
don't want to get bogged down in that marsh, Rodney.
What about the substance (2001)?


- PEOPLE DON'T LISTEN TO FYHCYWLAP ALL THE WAY THROUGH

I find this a perverse line of argumentation indeed.
If AF doesn't like the LP, fine: but he must know that
thousands of people have listened to it all the way
through hundreds of times. I don't like it all equally
(who does? who does with any LP?), but I do find most
of it (I suppose there could be exceptions: 'The
Chalet Lines'?) rather *easy* to listen to. This is
not a criticism: I find Lloyd Cole terribly easy to
listen to. And the question which surely arises is:
how often does anyone listen to 69 Love Songs all the
way through? However much you admire it, you'd have to
set aside three hours of listening time. It's not that
the album doesn't deserve our attention, but that our
time for doing such things doesn't readily come in
three-hour blocks. Anyway, I find the whole 'all the
way through' idea somewhat spurious, for I think
there's a case for *not* listening to things all the
way through. Listening to, say, The Queen Is Dead all
the way through - let alone a Smiths 45s compilation -
you get acclimatized to it, get used to it: its
strange wonders have, perhaps, that bit less effect.
Isn't there a case for listening to songs you really
love *one at a time*, with intervals, not all in a
row?

- MURDOCH SHOULD WRITE EVERYTHING IN B&S

Some agree, some disagree - but this is a very old
chestnut. I think a fresher question might be: what is
the current state of Murdoch's own creative powers?
Imagine that the next B&S LP has 12 songs, 9 by
Murdoch, 3 by 3 other people. If you really don't like
those other songwriters, you can skip them - but the
crucial question for you will be, has Murdoch
delivered the goods on *his own* songs? That's what
will matter most, if said LP ever turns up.

- MAGNETIC FIELDS ARE BETTER THAN BELLE & SEBASTIAN

As it happens, I agree - but are such polarizations,
hierarchies and stand-offs that useful? I also think
that the Beatles were better than the WHO and the
Smiths better than the HOUSE OF LOVE, but I wouldn't
want to be without those 'lesser' outfits. Part of the
fascination of culture is all that proliferation of
variety, of voices which can't help but be different
from one another. And I would never have heard of the
MFs without B&S, anyway.

- STEPHIN MERRITT IS GOD

Believe it or not, I have as high an estimate of
Merritt's songwriting as AF does. But I don't think
that this 'god' stuff is that useful. For one thing,
as another listee has pointed out to me, it has a very
dodgy Rock History (Hendrix, Clapton, etc); but more
generally, it's just so vague, so reach-me-down, as to
be uninformative. Saying that someone's 'god' is a
poor substitute for detailed description and analysis.
Does AF give us those things too? Maybe.

- CLAUDIA GONSON COULDA BEEN A STAND-UP COMEDIENNE

If I'm not mistaken, CG is energetic, garrulous and
very talented. That is not the same as having the
qualities (whatever they may be) required for
stand-up.

- TO HEAR 'ACOUSTIC GUITAR' IS TO HEAR JULIE LONDON

This is a *bit* intriguing, but I'm not quite sure
that I understand it.

- BEGHTOL, KLUTE AND SIMMS SING LIKE ANGELS

I find this a peculiarly unhelpful claim. For one
thing, there is, I think, a vague convention in pop
thinking that 'singing like an angel' means something
like: ethereal; high; dreamy. Examples presumably
include Fraser, Wheeler, Berenyi/Anderson, etc etc.
Now, I admit that this is a limited-looking use for
the term, a mere convention, and perhaps AF is trying
to break out of it, turn the idea of 'singing like an
angel' into something else. But is that worth doing? I
think not, because - like 'god' - it has been so used
and overused that it no longer seems to tell us much.
There are so many *detailed* things that could be said
about the unusual voices of Beghtol and Klute (I think
that AF does quite well on Simms - whose performance
blew me away, and about the spelling of whose name I
am never entirely sure): the 'angel' thing is a cliché
that, once again, substitutes for those details rather
than summarizing them.

- THE NATURE OF POP IS...

The nature of Pop is, according to AF, lots of things,
which may or may not cohere. He frequently gives us
another of Pop's defining characteristics, another
reason why something is untrue to Pop - of which the
most contentious example round here was 'Pop is Not
Democratic', so B&S are bad. Miller says that that's
wrong, because Pop *is* democratic. I think they're
both wrong, because they're both right. It seems to me
very likely that pop music can be, perhaps even should
be, 'democratic' (ie: with creative input from lots of
people) in some cases, 'undemocratic' (ie: dictated by
a single talent) in others. This 'Nature of Pop' stuff
always seems to narrow the field of pop in
unnecessary, indeed illegitimate ways. If I'm not
mistaken, there was a lot of talk about this stuff a
while back - on sinister in the early days (I wasn't
around), on other websites perhaps, at pub tables
where Tim Hopkins had just got a round in, etc.

Beyond the geezer AF, I'm not entirely sure who has
spent a lot of time issuing definitions of The Nature
Of Pop, or whether anybody still does it - though come
to think of it, I seem to have heard Welthorpe do it
occasionally. But despite having no clear target to
aim at, and at the risk of shooting a dead horse, I
submit that 'Nature of Pop' talk can be a mixed
blessing.

- On the one hand, it seems to have released, or
stimulated, a lot of valuable energies: to have got
people thinking seriously about pop music and why and
how they love it; which I cannot think a bad thing. If
the forging of exclusive definitions and rules is what
it takes to get that to happen, so be it.

- But on the other hand, talk of The Nature of Pop
usually seems to amount to saying 'I like this... and
it's Pop', and 'I don't like that... it's not really
Pop'. In a word, it is, of course, an *evaluative*
discourse: but it wears the garb of a merely
*descriptive* one. It seems to me that there's an
unnecessary confusion of language games here. 
Furthermore, reading AF's meditations on Pop made me
imagine coming across a website full of people
earnestly debating whether, ooh, Tony Harrison, Dave
Eggers, Samuel Beckett, John Keats, Laurence Sterne
and John Buchan were !LiTeRaTuRe! or not, formulating
rules for the literary which amounted to jealous
defences of certain authors that they loved, etc. I am
afraid that I would find such a discussion somewhat
absurd, because it would appear that it was wasting
time on these matters of definition, boundaries,
exclusions, etc, rather than simply describing the
pleasurable, treasurable particularities of any number
of instances of the vast and unwieldy field that is
pragmatically called the literary.

Those who have come this far may be glad to hear that
that is, at last, all I have to say; as well as being
roughly, as Raymond Williams used to tell committee
chairmen, what I came to say.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+