I used to be tediously passionate about rock (pop, indie, hip-hop, folk, call-it-what-you-like) music. I could hold court for hours, boring everyone to death with what I now know were jumped-up opinions and rather blunt insights. I sneered at established artists who were ‘staid and middle of the road’ and championed the unsigned, the avant garde, and, in some cases, musically inept. Reader, I was embarrassing.
Now I am 32 I like to think I have some perspective.
It’s clear that since it all began in the 1950s rock music has produced a small pantheon of greats; artists who ‘mattered’ in a wider cultural or social context, artists who moved things forward or significantly raised the bar. They probably number fewer than 50 and we all know their names: Chuck Berry, Elvis, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Lee Scratch Perry, Bert Jansch, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Sam Cooke, Michael Jackson, The Clash, Bacharach and David, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Nirvana, Morrissey and Marr…
It is also clear – from where I am standing at least – that popular music as a progressive art form is over, kaput, and it probably has been since Kurt Cobain fired a bullet through his skull 16 years ago. But whenever I suggest this, I am greeted with gasps of indignation from my peers, who ask me if I’ve ever even heard of Fleet Foxes, Little Boots, or Noah and the Whale! Have they heard of Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Human League, and Donovan?
If Cobain’s death marked the ‘end of pop music’, then Britpop was the funeral cortege; the first major pop movement that was entirely backward-looking in nature. The whole shebang was Union Jack-draped nostalgia for the swinging 60s, with Damon Albarn playing Ray Davies to Noel Gallagher’s Lennon and McCartney. At no point did any of the artists involved sit down and say, ‘this is about us, this is our era, let’s do something amazing.’ Whereas the sixties folk revival was about taking the genre forward, using working class music to politicise the middle classes, Britpop was all about raiding your parents’ record collection. That’s not to say it was all bad ( Damon Albarn is a creative wunderkind by anyone’s mark), but it certainly wasn’t new. And that’s my point.
When you think of the defining moments in rock history – Elvis at Sun Studios, Jimmy at Woodstock, The Who at Leeds, The Sex Pistols on the River Thames – the chart battle between Oasis and Blur begins to look pretty phony. Unfortunately Seattle, April 8, 1994, has a more authentic ring to it. Rock music is at its best when it is ruffling feathers and subverting the mainstream, when it has a genuine political (with a small p) edge, when people aren’t sure how to take it, when the music sounds new, fresh and vital. None of these qualities has applied to rock music for a very, very long time. How could they? Our parents have been there and done it themselves. There is no old guard to rally against, no relics of the Victorian era to scandalize. In many ways rock music – having served its purpose as the throbbing soundtrack to a cultural and sexual revolution – has lost its…er, wood.
So in 2010 rock is just a retro fancy-dress competition between lots of very nice, very polite, and very boring music school graduates who have absolutely nothing to say. They are all reinventing the wheel musically. No one’s to blame. There’s only so much you can do with six chords afterall. But, really, how anyone can reach their 30s and still be fascinated by the latest offering from the Ting Tings or Bright Eyes is beyond me. I mean haven’t they heard it all before? Have they never ventured back into the annals of pop history? I often suspect they haven’t – which is why they salivate over lightweights like The Killers and sneer at the genius of Springsteen. It’s a shame, because the greats really were…
James Lancaster 