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RIP J. Saul Kane - Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? That macabre sing-song sample - "*did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you a...1 day ago
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New Wavest (#3 of ??) - *Clock DVA *- a name one associates with industrial music. Well, they were actually on *Industrial Records*, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them...4 days ago
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RIP Shel Talmy - One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've inte...5 days ago
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Futuromania in Rough Trade's Books of the Year! - "A collection of compelling essays analysing the technological evolutions which have defined pop and electronic music and how this history intersects. Fr...1 week ago
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Dream on - Last week, I found it very hard to get down to the work I was supposed to be doing. Writing about music felt trivial, absurd. That feeling has passed - fo...1 week ago
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anti-theatricality + politics (the finale?) - *A wise person once said: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” Donald Trump is a clown. Let’s preve...2 weeks ago
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RIP Lillian F. Schwartz (1927 - 2024) - *"Resident artist and consultant at Bell Laboratories (New Jersey).... during the 70s and 80s Schwartz developed a catalogue of visionar...5 weeks ago
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haunty ha-ha, haunty peculiar - Sometime ago, *Vic Reeves* posted this on Twitter - if I remember right, it's artwork for a tour poster that was nev...1 month ago
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50 Favorite Songs - (for an Italian publication, 2009) The Eyes -- "When the Night Falls" The Beatles -- "Strawberry Fields Forever" John's Children -- "A Midsummer ...2 months ago
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angel delights - https://rada-ve.bandcamp.com/track/saturn-rings-songs *Go on* - listen to that gorgeous bubble bath of synthtronica! Another vintage release, with a vi...2 years ago
Curious use of the word "recent", considering he includes TVC 15. Or by "recent", does he mean "punk"?
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff. One of the revelations from you posting all these pieces from Sounds is how much great stuff they published in the 70s. I always thought of them as just the forum for the NWOBHM and Oi! But clearly they were much more than that.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that Eno felt no need at all to compromise with popular taste. I feel like a modern-day musician in that position would have felt the need to slip in something by the Sweet or the Jackson 5 or Led Zeppelin, just to show they weren’t a completely deracinated aesthete, blissfully unaware of what the masses were enjoying.
ReplyDeleteWould Led Zep have been seen as just an example of populist taste? Yes, they were ridiculously successful commercially and with a few disdainful critics (didn't Lester Bangs coin the phrase Dead Zeppelin?), but similar could be said about E.L.P., and nobody would claim theirs was a music of the masses.
Deletehttp://grantland.com/features/the-winners-history-rock-roll-part-1-led-zeppelin/
DeleteThis is the first part of a 7-part article considering rock from the perspective of the "winners" (that is, seven rock bands who became definable by their commercial success, unlike punks and shoegazers, for instance). Led Zep is the first band in the series, and the writer mentions the low esteem in which contemporary critics held Led Zep.
Were there any critics championing Led Zep at the time? When did critics start treating Led Zep as one of the great monoliths of rock? When Paul Simonon said that Led Zep album covers made him want to vomit, surely that stance reflected an anti-elitist position? Just how arty are Led Zep?
In music, as in other spheres, “elite” and “elitist” are slippery concepts. As you say, Led Zeppelin were massively commercially successful - they are the second-biggest selling band of all time in the US - but they never had much artistic cachet. Plenty of financial capital, not much social capital, you might say.
ReplyDeleteI was looking recently at the lists of Grammy winners, as a window into the tastes of the US music industry establishment. Led Zeppelin won their first award in 2014, more than three decades after they broke up. They were nominated in 1970 for best new act, but lost to Crosby, Stills and Nash. And for the rest of their career as a working band they were never even nominated.
(Some of this is thinking out loud, so please excuse that.)
DeleteBut how "artsy" were Led Zeppelin? A band can easily have rarefied artistic ambitions and still be a critical whipping boy, like E.L.P. In the genre of blues rock, let's put the Doors at one end of the spectrum as a full-throated artsy band always shovelling us allusions to Nietzsche and Burroughs, and Aerosmith at the other end as a firmly non-artsy band who'd've been happy to have kept playing Little Red Rooster every night at Boston dives. It strikes me that Led Zeppelin would be closer to the arty Doors end than the entertaining Aerosmith end. What do you think?
Also, when did the critical volte-face on Led Zep occur? When did critics embrace them? Anyone got any info?
On your spectrum, Led Zeppelin were definitely towards the Aerosmith end. They had some arcana: Jimmy Page's Aleister Crowley fixation, the half-assed mysticism in the symbols and cover art on Led Zep IV, later expanded in the movie The Song Remains the Same. But they were very definitely not a band that came with a reading list.
DeleteAs for when critics embraced them: that was in the 80s, I guess. It was probably the combination of hip-hop discovering When the Levee Breaks, The Ocean, etc, and the wider acceptance of Metal, including bands such as G'n'R and Jane's Addiction that could never have existed without Zeppelin.
Surely Led Zeppelin's folky nonsense puts them on the artsy side of my spectrum? Would Aerosmith have ever conceived of anything as droning as The Battle of Evermore or Kashmir? A wilful drone is a neon sign indicating an arty band. And bands citing literature is not a foolproof measure of artiness: do you trust every rock musician claiming Blake as a huge influence?
DeleteGood point. Maybe Led Zeppelin are more in the middle of your sliding scale. Perhaps we should try to place a few other bands as reference points!
DeleteBut my original point was not really about whether Led Zeppelin were actually "arty" or not. It was about whether they were admired or even respected by the rock critical establishment of the day, and I think it's pretty clear they were not. Rolling Stone panned every album from the debut to In Through The Out Door, with the honorable exception of a rave for IV in 1971 by Lenny Kaye, bless him.
And, having been one of them, I can assure you that the denim-clad suburban teenagers who formed the core of Zeppelin's fanbase were never anyone's idea of the cool kids.
The great Lester Bangs on Led Zeppelin III in 1970: "Their music is as ephemeral as Marvel comix, and as vivid as an old Technicolor cartoon. It doesn't challenge anybody's intelligence or sensibilities, relying instead on a pat visceral impact that will insure absolute stardom for many moons to come. Their albums refine the crude public tools of all dull white blues bands into something awesome in its very insensitive grossness, like a Cecil B. DeMille epic."
DeleteA nice analogy with "ephemeral" Marvel comics! Historical irony alert....
To fill out the artisness spectrum, I’ll first try to define artsiness. I take artsiness to be the tendency to conscious displays of highfaluting artistic ambitions. Thus the Doors’ The End is a paradigm of artsiness, and the antithesis of artsiness is Status Quo’s Caroline. That done, here’s my reckoning of how artsy some acts are (for brevity, all prog and post-punk are artsy).
DeleteBeatles – ended up artsy (for all the talk of their differing personalities, the only Beatle not arty and sensitive was the gregarious, down-to-earth Ringo)
Rolling Stones – not artsy (yes, Sympathy for the Devil has its Master and Margarita nod, but Mick’s too canny a businessman to risk a bold experiment, especially after Their Satanic Majesties Request)
Beach Boys – Brian grew artsy, but not the others (Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art)
Jimi Hendrix – artsy (1983 and The Star Spangled Banner are classics of artsiness, and the albums started off somewhat artsy and ended fully artsy)
Eric Clapton – not artsy (it’s all about craft, not art, with Eric)
Who – artsy on the concept albums (Pete was the only one artsy and sensitive, surely?)
Velvet Underground – artsy (are they artsier than the Doors? I might argue that this notion of artsiness stems from these two bands, especially since their debut albums were near-simultaneous releases)
CCR – not artsy (the artsiest element to CCR might just be their appropriation of southern rock iconography)
Byrds – I don’t know. Can anyone tell me?
CSNY – ultimately on the artsy side (perhaps they saw themselves more as songwriters than artists, but all had artistic temperaments)
Love – artsy (though not as artsy as the Doors, obv.)
Stooges – artsy (codifying punk is very artsy, especially in Iggy’s formulation of modern urban white blues, plus we have We Will Fall and LA Blues)
Black Sabbath – Very difficult to determine, I find. Inventing a genre is artsy, but it feels deeply wrong to call Ozzy artsy.
George Clinton – artsy (but in a consciously accessible way)
Queen – artsy (but in a consciously accessible way)
Aerosmith – not artsy (obv.)
New York Dolls – not artsy (probably just a bit too thick to be artsy)
David Bowie – artsy (obv.)
Roxy Music – artsy (obv.)
Marc Bolan – a bit artsy, but not remotely as artsy as Bowie or Roxy (indeed, Bolan became less artsy as he went on)
Ramones – not artsy (obv.)
Patti Smith – artsy (obv.)
Television – artsy (unusual time signatures in new wave for double artsy points)
Sex Pistols – I can’t say right now, I need time to think. (Jones, Cook and Matlock were resolutely not artsy, but Lydon had a fierce artsy streak. Although, the artsiest figure associated with the Pistols was McLaren, so are they artsy because of his conception of the band as a living sculpture?)
Clash – ended up artsy (curious how the Clash mirrored post-punk’s genre mongrelism with London Calling and Sandinista whilst simultaneously mirroring prog rock’s grandiosity)
Motörhead – not artsy (obv.)
Van Halen – not artsy (obv.)
Jam – flashes of artsiness on Sound Affects, but that’s about it
Smiths – artsy (aside from the lyrics, the return to the simple three-minute pop song after post-punk was consciously an artsy move)
Prince – artsy (to be honest, I’m no fan of Prince, and I really can’t stand his artsiest work. Who on earth would want a triple album of Prince’s jazz-funk guitar improvisations? Those last nine words sound like what Dick Cheney would call an “enhanced interrogation technique”.)
Stone Roses – a little bit artsy, but not much (the longer and weirder tracks, basically)
Happy Mondays – a little bit artsy but not much (there’s the New Order connection, and being the only group with a fondly remembered dancer has surely got to be worth something)
Guns N Roses – Axl became artsy as his ego grew, at least
Nirvana – artsy (obv.)
Blur – not artsy (though Gorillaz is well artsy)
Oasis – might actually challenge Status Quo as the least artsy band imaginable
Love your list, and I agree with almost all the judgments.
ReplyDeleteThe one I would disagree on, though, is Blur, who were artsy as hell. All that "regular geezers down at the Walthamstow dog track" stuff they put on was pure affectation.
Yeah, I was thinking that was probably the wrong call with Blur whilst walking to the chemist (looking on Wikipedia, I see Damon once called Parklife a "loosely-linked concept album" and cited Martin Amis as inspiration for it).
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, "artsiness" does not equate with either "goodness" or "badness". I much prefer classic Oasis to classic Blur. But it'd be a strange individual who'd both comment on this blog and harboured a distaste for artsy bands. I would say, though, that with non-artsy bands, you often have to stress the importance of rock n roll heavily when extolling them.
I turn my back for a second and a huge debate erupts!
ReplyDeleteI think there could be an essay done on the subtle semantic difference between "arty" and "artsy". The latter is definitely a derogatory term, yet in certain circumstances - and from certain people - "arty" could also be wielded as a negative term. (The way that Mark E. Smith said he always hated the Soft Machine and the Canterbury bands and how rock was ruined "when the students took it over".)
I interviewed Can and Holger Czukay, attempting to differentiate themselves from prog band, said that Can was not about the "artsy and fartsy". Charming bit of mangled (only slightly mangled) English.
Yet shows how complicated it can be, because all they were all about repetition, primal monotony, "the high art of reduction", "restriction is the mother of invention", in another sense Can were very arty - one or two had studied under Stockhausen, they did clever things with production, Czukay had done the ethnological sampling thing and then reintroduced it into Can with his use of Dictaphone. Then he did Movies with similar sample/soundbite/ethno stuff that can probably traced back to Stockhausen's Hymnen.
Now I think of it, I once gave a talk on this syndrome of arty / art school people who use "art" as an insult. Lennon was one of the first; while actually at art school he took pleasure in playing up the idea of himself as a proletarian rock'n'roller, a hooligan. He would take the piss out of the other students for being into jazz.
ReplyDeleteIt's a running thing through rock history - first there's the move to claim art status for rock, and then there's the counter-reaction, where the smarter (but also rock-truer) move is say that rock is better when isn't pretentious or aspirational, at least in the sense of taking on conventional High Culture assumptions about value etc
in that move, rock'n'roll is at its most artisticially potent when it has the least truck with "art" or "artiness".
For the purposes of this debate, I wasn't using the word "artsy" as a pejorative; I didn't want to use the word "arty" because non-artsy bands produce art, and "artsy" was directly at hand. Though I take your point about artsiness being a term loaded with negative connotations. Is there a more neutral term? I do think "artsy" conveys both the selfconscious and grandiose aesthetic aspriations of the standard artsy band, the sense that they were deliberately making art.Even Doors apologists like me (every Doors fan has become a de facto apologist for them nowadays) must accept that the Doors were quintessentially an artsy band, and perhaps the platonic artsy band.
ReplyDeleteAnd by the definition I'm employing, it's obvious Can were artsy. It's just, as you said, artsiness is seen derogatorily, and to appear a pseud in an interview is to appear a wanker. (That said, in terms of treating a slur as a benefit, the founding myth of Can has a random, acid-fried hippy shouting at Jaki Liebezeit, "You should play more monotonously!")
"Art" as insult - surely it begins with Dada? Perhaps the Dadaists lacked the accusation of pretentiousness in their jibes, probably because that would fix the target firmly on themselves (people in pubs still get wound up if you describe Duchamp's Fountain to them).
It may be instructive to compare how artsy and non-artsy acts have used the term "rock 'n' roll" in their work. Non-artsy bands just say rock 'n' roll is great and they're doing rock 'n' roll: Rolling Stones' It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, AC/DC's Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution, Motörhead proclaiming that they just play rock n roll, Oasis' Rock n Roll Star. Artsy bands seek more to comment on rock 'n' roll, use it figuratively or use it sardonically: John Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll as an exercise in nostalgia, Bowie's Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Lou Reed's long and complicated relationship with the term, the Killers' Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll. Note that the artsy/non-artsy distinction is a post-rock 'n' roll distinction (I said earlier that I date it to the Doors and Velvets' debuts). In that light, it's the inheritors squabbling over the legacy. (By the by, Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll, using "rock and roll" in its traditional meaning of sex, means it's a bit artsy). Logically, that makes the artsiest move the utter disavowal of rock 'n' roll (a common post-punk claim).
Just saw your posting on "baroque and roll". I think that ties in nicely with my latest comment. When was "art rock" first used as a catchall term for the artsier psychedelic, glam, prog, punk, post-punk and new wave?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the artsiest move being to reject rock 'n' roll, perhaps one reflection of this is how artsy bands began alluding to classical music, and on occasion trying to make classical music. The Doors' Alabama Song, John Cale, Macca digging Stockhausen, E.L.P, the krautrock conservatory pipeline, even PiL's Swan Lake. This reminds me that I haven't mentioned Zappa, and Freak Out was released in 1966. Zappa's sophomoric (and tiresome) humour as a shield against wholly justified charges of artsiness? That's a given, surely?
“Non-artsy bands just say rock 'n' roll is great and they're doing rock 'n' roll.” I think that’s exactly right. The anti-artsy rockers Simon talks about protest too much, methinks. Just knowing about the existence of arty / artsy people means you have at least a toehold in that world, however vehemently you might try to deny it.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of a fantastic caption, I think in Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic, on a picture of prime 1970s AC/DC: They never took themselves so seriously that their “sincerity” became “important”. (Quotation marks in the original.) The question of being artsy or not simply never entered their heads.
Maybe these are exceptions to the rule, but the Stones stepped back from artsiness when they realised they couldn't really pull it off. Also, Lemmy was the bassist in Hawkwind, and it's not that ridiculous to treat his cowboy wisdom as a deliberate philosophy of non-artsiness (maybe a wee bit ridiculous though). Artsiness is a spectrum.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I was wondering, considering the conditions I outlined, must I logically conclude that the artsiest band of all is the Electric Light Orchestra?
Is the quality of a Michael Jackson song inversely proportional to how artsy it is?
ReplyDelete