I've posted here before about Mick Farren's famous "The Titanic Sails At Dawn" polemic. Appearing in the NME's June 19 1976 issue, the piece is legendarily claimed to have played a precipitative role in the punk uprising. It identified a malaise in rock: the loss of its connection to "the streets" and "the kids" that traverse them; the recline and fall of a rebel sound into mere showbiz. And in the process it birthed a mini-genre of explicitly or implicitly Titanic-themed jeremiads, which cropped up in the pages of the NME over the next decade (as well as the pages of zines populated by NME-wannabes).
I've also noted here that six months earlier Mick Farren had written a very similar - and to my mind, sharper - argument in the first NME issue of 1976. A piece that no one seems to remember, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem to have any precipitative effect. Timing is everything.
Talking about timing... Well, here's a funny thing: turns out Mick Farren wrote yet another similar piece almost a year before the first of those 1976 pieces. The complaint is the same: the Seventies so far is a wash-out and rock's new superstar aristocracy - aka the Uncle Toms of Teendom - have "taken Rock off the streets and into the penthouse".
And here's another funny thing - four years after "The Titanic Sails At Dawn", Farren rocks up yet again in the page of NME with a polemic about the music's aesthetic bankruptcy and directionlessness.
I suppose four handwringing thinkpieces across five or six years isn't that excessive.
At Monitor, I must have written two or three with that vibe in just two years / six issues.
David Stubbs wrote a piece on that theme in virtually every issue of Monitor - hilariously vivid evocations of impending entropy.
And then at the end of '86 we co-wrote a rather gloomy overview for Melody Maker (the editor complained it was a bummer way to wrap up the year). Not one of our most coherent efforts, but maybe I should dredge it up as a period curio.
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Not forgetting Mick Farren's entire book on this approximate subject.... from a few years prior to the 1975 piece "The Kids Are Not Necessarily Alright". With the word "Kids" in the title.
At that point - most likely writing the book in 1971 - Farren still retained some optimism about the radical potential of rock and youth culture. The tone of Watch Out Kids is defiant - the gathering decadence can be turned around.
The story of "how Elvis gave birth to the Angry Brigade" promises the jacket copy.
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This is a genre of rock essay - the dispirited measuring of Rock's vital signs.
A classic example is this piece by Greil Marcus.
Some of Lester Bangs's most famous pieces are in that mode, albeit always pointing to green shoots of vitalizing vulgarity that defy the overall atrophy.
No surprises here, but I personally love the "The Death of ________" essay.
Every art form has its examples. E.g. "The Literature of Exhaustion".
The current state of hip-hop seems quite similar to rock circa 1975, with the mainstream dominated by bloated albums from artists resting on their laurels. Thus, we're getting a lot of thinkpieces about what this means. The Titanic keeps sinking and rising again.
ReplyDeleteOh really?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't surprise me though - does feel (from my admittedly remote vantage) like it's a pretty slack and flat sort of genre and has been for a while.
I feel like rap's probably been through a few Titanic-worthy moments, given it's long history at this point. The backpacker thing was a kind of a "it's gone off course" reaction formation and that was what, late '90s, early 2000s?
In some ways, a "death of...." article is a sign of potential life in the old dog yet, insofar as someone cares enough to write it and others care enough to react to it. A sense of crisis can be galvanizing.
It's when things just plod on, business as usual, that is probably more worrying...
Many thanks for posting the Mick Farren pieces. I didn’t know the name. I have given myself a crash course on whatever Farreniana I could find and he seems like a delightful character. I’m surprised so little has been written about him, though. His 70s writing seems remarkably in touch with the times and his work with the Deviants was…well, worthy of at least a tiny bit more ink than I’ve seen spilled on them. What do you think of his work?
ReplyDeleteI love his music writing. I haven't read any of the enormous number of science fiction novels he wrote, although I have The Texts of Festival, which is about rock, a sort of satirical allegory. His book Watch Out Kids is sort of amazing, but hard to read today precisely because of its still not-crushed utopian hopes for music / youth culture.
DeleteMusically, the Deviants don't really grab me, whereas their confreres Pink Fairies do. And I think on TV clips Farren comes across a little smug, there's a bit of "something's going on and you don't get it Mr Jones" vibe, the hipster sneer. Probably he shouldn't have smoke that spliff immediately before going on the TV debate with the Auberon Waugh types, all of them mentally crisp and trained in Debating Society battles.
I do want to read his memoir Give the Anarchist A Cigarette.
Ah! Thanks for the tip, my copy of Give The Anarchist A Cigarette is on the way.
DeleteI may give his DNA Cowboys books a shot. Although it's unverified (read: AI-regurgitated), I read that Alan Moore was a fan. The trilogy's description is intriguing: "The underground legend of 1976, influenced by everything from Star Trek, Kung Fu and the Marquis de Sade, this classic trilogy tells of a bizarre universe populated with pre-teen dictators, huge twin-brained domestic lizards and growing biocomputers tended by martial arts-practising monks."
I suspect it will read like the Illuminatus Trilogy: mildly enjoyable but not nearly as great as you'd hoped it would be.
It's a shame his rock-write isn't as well known. A quick check of mine showed he doesn't appear in the index of any of the prominent music books covering that era (notable exception, two quotes in "Shock And Awe"). Perhaps you can get a volume of Farren's rock-write published? "Foreword by Simon Reynolds" oughtta be enough to get it on shelves.