Tony Blair silmultaneously showing Noel Gallagher his guitar stance and sex face. Gross
Wow, it certainly is interesting to see how a blog topic can mutate and change from its inception to production. I was originally planning a historical outlook at the relationship between music and politics in modern history, how each has influenced, benefited or harmed the other. That will still get a look in, but since we’re strapped for space, I’m gonna push towards a more insane rant regarding Tony Blair and New Labour’s courting of the Britpop movement.
Politics have certainly been an important part of music ever since musicians have been pissed off about things. Guiseppe Verdi’s ‘Nabubboc’ opera of 1814 has been cited as a very early example as a call to arms to Italians against Austrian domination (Moldenhauer, Hans and Rosaleen). From Pete Seeger to Dylan to The Doors to U2 the The Dead Kennedys to Arcade Fire, political or ‘protest’ songs (although I generally wince at that limp-wristed description) have seeped their way into the general consciousness, with varied results. I may be dangerously overgeneralising, but the combined power of most of these songs still have very little influence over a hegemonic political system, as much as they would hate to admit it. For all of Rage Against The Machine’s political ire and vitriol towards commercial greed, have they managed to overthrow, or even slow down, capitalism? I ask anyone who witnessed 20,000+ flag-wearing bogans shouting out “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” blindly at this year’s Big Day Out to argue that they’ve done much to manipulate ideologies.
It’s much more likely for politics to influence music, rather than the other way around. This may be in obvious ways like licensing laws, venue restrictions, culture building or whatever. I wouldn’t paint myself as a Marxist far enough to say that the economy and political structure control everything, but it’s not that far off. The other way is for politicians to actually just be seen WITH musicians (or subcultural types) for personal gain. John F. Kennedy hanging out with Hunter S Thompson, Mark Latham enlisting Peter Garrett, these are never altruistic acts.
Like the name suggests, New Labour was all about being ‘new’, fresh and vibrant. After 20 years of conservative rule, Britain was in shambles. The country was in a recession, strikes and riots were frequent and the youth were virtually ignored. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to introduce a fresh new vision of the Labour party. But how would they ever gain the support of those darn young kids who basically didn’t give a shit anymore? Oh, hey! We’ve got Tony Blair! Yeah, he owns a guitar, let’s have a photo of him strumming it! He smoked pot in college? Great, let’s leak it to the press! Then let’s have him chatting to Damon Albarn about schools funding (Harris)! Genius, good work people, let’s knock off and head home to the pub…
And it worked. Ridiculously well. Blair took a landslide victory, Noel Gallagher went to the afterparty and shook hand with the new Prime Minister and Damon Albarn sulked because he thought they'd actually be asked about policy implementation. And therein lay the genius of the deception. These young musicians were disaffected, distant from all generations preceding it...what they were really looking for was ways to make change. That's what the music was about (to some extent, even if the change was as little as 'taking back music from America'), so of course if some well-dressed educated Labour minister shakes your hand and asks for you thoughts, they were highly likely to go along with it. I probably would.
But when you really think about it - what Britpop was about - the thought of Blair getting chummy with Jarvis Cocker or Albarn is quite ridiculous. The music of that time and its figureheads were rather set on distancing themselves from the past (England and abroad) and carving out their own little world. So to see a political leader, a good decade older than even Cocker, show up at the Brit Awards to announce his love of Oasis would have made CCCS scholars empty their bowels. Did Margaret Thatcher want to invite Sid Vicious around for tea? Was Nixon seen passing the peace pipe to Jerry Garcia? If you have photos, I’ll pay handsomely for copies.
Ok, I’m under deadline for Rave, people are barking at me like rabid mongeese, so I’ll be brief. Just this once. The state needs to keep its dirty fingers off of music, just as it should (in theory) for religion. It’s sleazy, there’s power struggles that mount on top of each other in an already cutthroat industry and all you really end up with is some awful metaphors where boats equal the government and band X are an iceberg. And P Diddy telling people to ‘Vote or die’. Bravo.
Head on over to The Guardian for some more memorable moments of politicians wishing they could be rock stars and rock stars pretending they’re not stoned out of their minds.
Harris, Andrew, (2001), The Last Party: Blair, Britpop and the Demise of English Rock
Moldenhauer, Hans and Rosaleen (1978), Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work
Ok, let’s be brief here. This is now the…….3rd damn time I’ve written this introduction up, and it time it’s ballooned out to about 300 words of nostalgic waffling, tip-toeing around self indulgent dickery. Bottom line here: there were some great albums of the Britpop era between 1994-98, (If we want to be brutally streamlined here) and the covers that have graced them have become almost as memorable as the music inside. Here’s five of my favourites, with a little bit of history and a touch of analysis for extra poops and giggles.
Now, this was a band that aimed for the spectacular from the beginning. Within seconds of this album starting, you’re subjected to walls upon layers of thunderous guitars and anthemic choruses sung by mono-browed dole bludger that was more than convinced that he was the greatest singer of all time. Whether you believed them or not, they WANTED you to KNOW that they knew their music, as their album cover was littered with references and cheeky asides. There’s pictures of Burt Bacharach and Manchester United footballer George Best littered around the room, the TV shows a scene from The Good The Bad & The Ugly, and each band member is present but not facing the camera. This is a group who wanted their faces to be known. This may actually me the most obvious readerly text of the whole bunch, one that makes grabs at authenticity and a CCCS example of spectacular deviance.
Portishead - Dummy (1994)
A polar opposite from the wide eyed optimism of the guitar-rock bands that were exploding, this Bristol trio wrote an album as lush and warm as it was dark and discomforting, cementing their hometown as the land of trip-hop. As for the album cover…well, if you asked me to describe it to you, I could give it a shot but only get as far as “there’s a fat chick…kinda”. A much more stark and minimalist approach to a front cover, unlike Definitely Maybe there were no band members pictured. And being a debut album, you couldn’t draw many contextual conclusions like you could with Parklife. The heavy use of blue may have been an attempt to enter the trip hop scene, but that sounds a little lame.
The Verve - A Northern Soul (1995)
Taking my blog title from this albums soaring opener, the cover is almost reminiscent of the classic portrait shot a la The Beatles 2nd proper album With The Beatles, with the evocative addition of a silhouette figure in an open door. Putting the door closest to Richard Ashcroft, the principal songwriter at the time, may be inconsequential, but the door itself begs the reader to look for meaning. Is someone entering or exiting the door? Is it a slightly smarmy metaphor for new beginnings, or is saying something about the bands increasing use of drugs (both hallucinogenic and amphetamines). Regardless, one only needs to compare this cover to their final album (Urban Hymns) to understand the deteriorating relationships in the band. But they’ve reformed now. Gleeeeeeee
Pulp - Different Class (1995)
For another band that initially shied away from the Britpop tag (particularly because they’d been around in some form since the early 80s) but eventually became one of it’s biggest stars, we have Pulp and their biggest album, simultaneously their most clear embrace and condemnation of British class culture. You want a mid-90s analysis of class in Britain? You ask Jarvis Cocker, he shits all over Anthony Giddens. The wedding photo album cover, appearing to be in the 70s theme with bandmembers appearing as interspersed cardboard cutouts, is in stark contrast to the kaleidoscopic music contained inside. As Sorted For E’s & Wizz so eloquently asked about the idolizing of a new age, combined with the stupidity of commercial culture “Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?”
Perhaps album packaging, with the increased use of digital music downloads, will go the way of the vinyl record: a new superior (seemingly only superior at the moment in terms of portability and possibly affordability, certainly not sound quality) product becomes increasingly adopted, so the former product becomes more of a boutique, luxury item (Jones and Sorger). As a believer of music as an audio-visual experience, this is a harsh reality to face.
But some people aren't as pessimistic as me, thankfully. Anthony Bruno, an arts and technology writer for Reuters wrote a positive analysis of digital album packaging at the beginning of 2008, detailing a couple of informed suggestions he had to include album art, liner notes, lyrics and special features into a download folder. In some examples, they would merely be reproductions of physical albums, in others they would actually be superior products (not unlike extras on DVDs), and it's rewarding to note that some larger legal download sites have started including these new features into some big name products. Time will tell if this will trickle down to the majority of releases, or just whatever new hot tripe Rihanna or Timbaland puts out.
For a more optimistic review of album art, with examples of bands still putting much love into packaging (the Spiritualised album is a particular thing of beauty), check out http://sleevage.com/
Be Here Now, the third album from Brit-pop behemoths Oasis, marked the moment when they turned everything up to 11, ingested enough Columbian Marching Powder to transform Tony Montana into a slobbering mess and singlehandedly toppled a musical subgenre. But it may not be as bad as you think. Or it may be even worse. Let's see...
Now, it may not seem like the most logical approach to describing a subgenre by detailing its demise, but that's just the kind of album Be Here Now is. Overblown, self-indulgent and sometimes barely listenable, it represents all the failings of Britpop in about 71 minutes. That's right, 71 minutes, this puppy barely squeezed into a CD, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it would be even longer (somewhere in the realm of a three disc set) if they thought people would fork out the extra cash.
And that thing in bold up the top about toppling a subgenre wasn't used for drama or hyperbole...you can ask anyone who was anyone of importance around 1997 (and even regular chumps like yourself and I...but mostly me). It's rare that you can pinpoint the end of a genre to a single act (with possible exclusions being Cobain shooting himself, the Sid and Nancy massacre and Bob Dylan realising he despised hippies and beatniks), but an album causing this is almost unheard of. On the superb Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of Britpop documentary, popculture journalist and author Jon Savage sums it up pretty matter-of-factly:
"The end of Britpop was, if nothing else, that Oasis third album be Here Now, which actually isn't the great disaster that everybody says...there're two or three really great songs on it, but it was supposed to be the big, BIG triumphal record. Labour got in, Oasis were preparing their big statement, and it comes out three or four days before Princess Di is killed"
Ok, so he doesn't seem like much of a fan, and given his high praise throughout the rest of the doco, it would appear that he's making this judgment fairly objectively. But he is still, however, a 'popculturalist', which in my opinion is often akin to someone saying 'well, I watch a lot of TV and know stupid trivia so I figured I'd make a career out of it'. So let's look at two sources that you assume would be characteristically biased in their opinion of the album, who also happen to be the only original members of Oasis: Noel Gallagher (principal songwriter) and Liam Gallagher (principal drunken oaf with minuscule moments of idiot savant-like brilliance). On the same documentary, Noel describes the album in this way:
"It's the sound of a bunch of guys on coke, in a studio, not giving a fuck...all the songs are really long, all the lyrics are really shit, and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word there's a fooking guitar riff in there in the Wayne's World style...air guitar gone mental. But Liam thinks it rocks".
Liam Gallagher, the enigmatic peacock frontman of the band, counters it with "At that time we thought it was fooking great and I still think it's great...it just wasn't Morning Glory". Well, to be fair, Liam Gallagher probably thinks his morning defecation is 'fookin great', so i'm still not sure who to believe.
Perhaps a little historical context is also importance to understand this album's place and fractitious nature. 1994 saw oasis release Definitely Maybe, possibly one of the most exciting debut albums to ever be releases, signalling a young band with zero hopes under the mundane existence of Thatcherism who wrote optimistic music for the everyman; universally specific subject matter with anthemic dreams. 1995 saw the bands follow-up (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, slightly treading water with similar songs, but still managing to break the highly sought after American market, something that had eluded most other Britpop bands (Blur, Supergrass, Pulp) with their characteristically ethnocentric 'English' songs. Riding this popularity, Oasis lived the rock n roll dream they imagined since living in squats in Burnage as children. Their partying became notorious, their onstage and offstage fighting even more so. Drug-taking reached mammoth heights, Liam would fornicate with any creature that didn't have an Adam's Apple, and somehow Noel (coked out of his mind) still got invited to meet Tony Blair at a function to celebrate his recent rise to Prime Minister with New labor, a political movement which went to considerable lengths to appear as 'fresh and vibrant' by sidling up to key members of Britpop. The much publicised feud between Oasis and Blur seemed to either have been won or called to truce, it was time for Oasis to return to the studio, put their considerable money where their constantly flapping mouths were and create a true masterpiece. Sadly it didn't happen like that.
What we instead find on Be Here Now is the biggest band in the United Kingdom (and arguably, at the time, fair chunks of the world), not being told what to do. It was like giving the keys of a 24-hour candy shop to a bunch of preschoolers, telling them to behave themselves but not checking up on them for six months. And just like what happens when preschoolers get too much sugar in them, the monumental drug abuse around the time made these five kids irritable, hard to put to sleep and with a desire to kick everything in their limb radius. The honest to god truth is that Noel gallagher was running out of ideas, the burden of being sole songwriter was wearing away at him and he basically locked himself in his room for days until he came up with what he thought could be drawn out to an entire album. Well, to some extent he was right, he definitely made an entire Oasis album...it just happened to be the amalgamation of the first two albums. Stand By Me was an attempt at replicating the flag-waving anthems of Live Forever or Don't Look Back In Anger, All Around The World was this albums Champagne Supernova, while Fade In-Out showed that celebrity friends and collaborations aren't always a success (the track features slide guitar from Johnny Depp and *ahem* some brilliant tambourine work from Kate Moss). Even the album cover, with props referencing Keith Moon's Rolls Royce incident, the beatles and even more of The Who, signaled a creative dead end. Magic Pie takes lyrics from a Tony Blair speech...what was their editing process like?!?
Ok, now the good stuff.............................................ummmmmmmmmmmmm *cough* Oh yeah! D'you Know What I Mean, for all its 8-minute pomposity, fucking rocks and served as a perfect first single. There, I said it: there's a drum loop from N.W.A., Noel uses a Flying V in the filmclip (itself a bombastic mess of helicopters and a massive budget), but the idiotically simplistic chorus created one of the most swagger-worthy tunes of the 90s. Likewise, Stand By Me has moments of transcendent beauty, but those moments probably should've been edited into a 3 minute song. And don't go way, written after Noel learnt that his Mother had a cancer scare, finds his typically bulletproof confidence touchingly wounded. Actually, on second thoughts, if this album was cut down to about half its length (like the first two), you would have a tidy package, a distillation of their prowess that would overpower the feeling that you'd heard it before. Too bad their producer, Owen Morris, was good friends with the group and just as big a coke fiend as the rest of them, so he never mustered up the balls to just say "hey, you know what...do we really need this 2 minute feedback intro or 64 bar guitar solo?"
It's still sold 8 million copies worldwide, so it clearly couldn't be the disasterpiece that everyone remembers it as. It did a lot better than, say, The Stone Roses' Second Coming. But no, it's now somehow become nothing more than a footnote of musical history, with the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll only feeling fit to say that the album "with its '70s arena-rock sound, was met with mixed reviews and relatively disappointing sales". Piss poor, Rolling Stone...you gave more attention to Milli Vanilli!
And my final verdict? Wow, I'm still undecided, even with my unwavering adulation of this band. It fell on its ass due to the inevitable build-up and high expectations of a nation and its bloodthirsty media, something that the band didn't ask for. Ok, sometimes they did, but even The Beatles were not subjected to this much scrutiny (case in point: Let It Be is still heralded as a masterpiece, merely because of its shoddiness and documentation of the world's greatest band imploding in on itself). So Be here Now is very much this bands Let It Be, a symbol of their youthful enthusiasm and dreams for world domination going head-to-head with an immovable object (the public). Perhaps all we need is thirty more years of analysis and retrospection for Oasis' fall from grace to be put on an equal pedestal with Definitely Maybe or (What's The Story) Morning Glory.
Noel Gallagher himself has spent much of the last decade distancing himself from the album, scarcely allowing those songs into live performances and leaving out any tracks from their 2006 compilation. This may be for practical reasons, given the sheer length of most songs located herein, but a part of me believes Gallagher has moved on from defending the album, preferring to focus on present and future projects like the highly-enjoyable Don't Believe The Truth or whatever they're tinkering away on right now. I think the best you can do with Be Here Now is grab a couple of favourite tracks (I would suggest the first single, Fade-In Out for its curio factor and All Around The World for sheer pomposity), append them to their other works and only dust out the full album when you want to get drunk and kick chairs over at a house party. It's actually even more fun than it sounds.
Who makes up the messages in fortune cookies, and whether they ever thought that would be their calling
'hey, did we hook up at some stage?' (verbatim, eye contact and slurring optional)
If a person is pregnant (female or male, the answer will not be good)
if you can have a strangers phone number and/or home address (particularly if you're on some sort of public transport or the other person is wearing a tin foil hat and you can't see both of his/her/its hands
Whether a friend has found Jesus
Why I'm creating and updating this blog at 9 o'clock on a Saturday night. Dang, I'm gonna answer it anyway, you've pilfered it out of me. If you must know, i'm in the midst of a marathon game of what I like to call 'assignment task-avoidance'. Going on about 70 hours straight now, which is coincidentally about how much time I have left till the due date. But I did learn that Freaks And Geeks is a pretty cool show, and you can't put a price on learning, right? Oh wait, they did, it's about $2000 a semester. Tremendous.
Ummm we were supposed to say something about our blog, right? Ok, well, this blog is my blog, it's different to yours because it's mine, not entirely sure what it will entail or what I will write about, or the general level of quality that it will achieve...too early to call
But the subcultre/genre I'm pondering at the mo is Britpop, specifically from about 1993-1998. The list down the bottom is some good starting points, stuff that has very rarely left my internal high rotation list since the first listening. Drop us a line if you wanna be a dork with me and over-analyse Common people and Bittersweet Symphony, while shaping conspiracy theories about the British Conservative Party killing Princess Dianca to slow down the juggernaut that was Tony Blair. And in case you were wondering, Oasis are better than Blur. Deal with it. And I write too much; that's my thing
And this photo? Well, nothing like some truly horrifying image to sign off your first post, right? Richard D James, you brilliantly disturbing man... HOLLAH!
Tony Blair silmultaneously showing Noel Gallagher his guitar stance and sex face. Gross
