No, I don't want to be Marcello Carlin. But I do take a lot of notice of what he says, and have a sense of expectation whenever has has a new post on his weblog (link at right) similar to that I used to get around 1981 whenever an NME turned up in the old cream can that served as a letter box back on the farm. And yes, if he told me to put my head in a fire I probably would. (Mostly who I want to be is Harold Ross, founder of the New Yorker and its editor until his death in 1951.) Nevertheless, I do have some minor concerns about some aspects of his finely wrought piece on NYLPM about the state of pop in 2004. As to the specifics of his argument, well, nobody has been further out of the loop, popwise, than I have since the onset of children and our move to Canberra five years ago. Nevertheless, his main thesis, that the pop charts a year or two after a watershed year are a barren wasteland, brought about by the inevitable record company-induced law of diminishing returns, i.e., what was a good idea two years ago when first revealed soon becomes a pale shadow of itself, is worthy of further study. Certainly, everything that was bad about 1984 can be traced very closely back to everything that was glorious about 1982. But is this scenario confined to the rarefied atmosphere of the pop charts? In other words, what about non-"pop" watersheds? I remain convinced, for example, that the years 1977-1982 were a time of ever-increasing quality in modern (c.f. "pop"?) music; each step forward was followed not by two steps back but two more steps forward. If you assume that (from memory) 1978 was the year that punk vaulted through the earth's crust and into the charts, why then was 1980 (and 1981, and 1982) an even better year?
I suspect that what I am doing is confusing movements with phenomena. The answer might be that punk (and, more crucially, what came after) was itself drawing on earlier musics (garage, mods, rockers, dub) and gave rise to healthy cross-pollination in the form of a "scene" (albeit highly fragmented), whereas the kind of music he (and I put my hand up here, he's not the only one) looks back to from 1982 with such fondness really appeared from out of nowhere (as much of the best, and most lasting, music does) and, having exploded in the sky, had nowhere to go to but nowhere. Or, as Carlin says, to Howard Jones (much the same thing really).
None of which was what I really wanted to say. All I intended to do was add a couple of slight caveats, one general, one particular. General first: the danger in taking up a rigid, immutable stance against a particular aspect or trend in popular music is that, for most of us in this corner, music is about emotional responses, and, as any fule no, it is unwise to second-guess the ways of the heart. He who rails against Rachel Stevens's "Some Girls" today for the way it cynically picks up on the current vogue for all things no wave and post-punk and moulds them into stick-in-the-head chartbuster may well find himself helpless in the face of a song he might hear tomorrow that crawls out of the same swamp and pushes the same buttons, but in a way that produces in him, for reasons he cannot explain, paroxysms of pleasure instead of anger. One thing that I have found about turning 40 is that it lets you open up and allow onto the radar music that was previously Now Allowed for reasons of "style", "attitude" or (usually) "disco sucks". One thing, for example, that I can now do that I couldn't do a few years ago is absorb large quantities of disco music and begin the process of sorting out the good from the unecxeptional (and just how good IS Silver Convention's "Fly Robin Fly"?).
As to the particular, I found a copy of "Some Girls" floating in the digital ether, and I must say that on a few listens it seems a pleasant enough kind of pop song. I actually like the way it borrows liberally from Gary Glitter and from the class of 1982, but beyond that, well, I just like it, and who can really say why? (Maybe if one was in London and hearing it 15 times a day, one's attitude might be different. I gave it three spins in a row while typing this, and that was quite enough.)
Oh, and by the way, thanks also to Tom Ewing, also on NYLPM (link at right), for finding and reproducing Paul Morley's piece from 1982 on the state of the pop charts then. I was at that time coming to the end of three years of reading every word of every issue of the NME, so I must have read it at the time, but I don't think I really appreciated at the time what he was saying (did anyone??), so it is nice to read it again now, with the benefit of a further 22 years of real life behind me. How did Morley, Penman etc get to be so wise so young?
