Barney Hoskyns - ICA Rock Week - January 10, 1981 - New Musical Express

 

A counterview to the "instruments of discourse" idea in the previous post (Steve Sutherland in '87 remembering Josef K and an allegedly different climate of rockwrite).

I didn't read this Barney review at the time (came across it much, much later) but got the drift from his subsequent writing on....  everything, really, but especially The Birthday Party and the marshalling of his personal Dionysian  pantheon that enshrined The Stooges above all....  but others too (the Stones, Suicide, etc) (see closing peroration here).

The basic drift: music should not be a vehicle for social comment or critique, for meta-musical positioning.

It should be "about" nothing except the ecstasy it grants us -  access to sacred frenzy. 

Hence the call for a new kind of Rock Theatre of Cruelty. (Reminding me I still haven't got around to reading Artaud).

The stance here is not unlike the "irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of music" line that Bill Drummond took in the early '90s, inspired by rave. Except in this 1981 bit o' rhetoric, it's more a case of "earnestness and reference points are the dark destroyers of music". 

Integrating this credo into my own way of hearing, I eventually ended up with the bliss-rock polemic and then (finally escaping the forefather's vision! or at least sufficiently transmuting) the ardkore years ("ecstasy" conjoined with literal Ecstasy).

Despite regaining some love for the postpunk way of (over)thinking, it remains a consistent base-line of expectation and demand. 

Reactivated most recently with the frustrations expressed about conceptronica (where's the release, why won't it let loose? - well, I know why.... but I'm a greedy listener) 

As with the ICA scene - a.k.a postpunk - that Barney critiques, the music is trammeled by its own articulation and positioning.... which becomes a form of self-repression

(The comment about how "art is replaced by subsidy" and jibes at the ICA as institution also anticipate  the conceptronica critique). 

Where does this greedy listener find the bliss?

Not many places at the moment...  but around the time of conceptronica, it was this stuff, floodingly so... 

chiglo

Steve Sutherland - Josef K - Young and Stupid / Endless Soul - July 18 1987 - Melody Maker

 

When I first read this review, of a group I'd almost forgotten the existence of by 1987, I was really struck by the phrase "instruments of discourse." as used by Steve Sutherland to describe Josef K and other groups of that postpunk-into-New-Pop moment. 

Not so much as a revelation, but simply as recognition.

For that was the way I habitually processed music almost from the start of reading the music press.  

As much as they made music, groups existed to be conversation-starters. They would initiate a conversation, or they might try to disrupt the existing conversation, make it swerve off course -  go somewhere different, somewhere new.  In the hyper-conscious climate of postpunk>>>New Pop, music-making could be a form of active criticism.  Which Steve conveys here with his sharp line about how Josef K "recorded reviews, not records. They could / should have all been journos..." 

The unspoken corollary of that, though, is the disorienting thought that criticism, at its utmost, could be a kind of unsounded music-making*. A real contribution to the evolution.  

The thing that puzzles me now about this review is why Steve situated all this in the past - six long years ago, a lost golden age of discourse fever. 

Why the elegiac long-face, Mr. Melody Maker Features Editor Sir?  For surely the pages of your own magazine at that very moment teemed with "instruments of discourse." What was A.R. Kane if not an intervention, a gauntlet thrown down - a purposeful polarizer of a proposition. As were, in different ways, with different degrees of intentionality, Throwing Muses, The Young Gods, and others...   Groups then in the process of formation would in time reveal themselves as mirroring the rhetoric and write-ups that framed the late Eighties surge, as much they were reflections of the surging sounds themselves.

"Spotty, unshaven visionaries"** -  Steve was surrounded by them. Because he'd hired them. 

* C.f. Christopher Small's idea of musicking --  a term he invented to convey and encompass the ways in which a music culture is sustained not just by the craft and creativity of musicians but many other kinds of contributions and activities: fans and listeners, critics and reporters, A&R and publicists, photographers and record designers, managers and booking agents, radio deejays, promoters..... We are all musickers.  

** Morley, clearly. 

Late Addition: Forgot that I reviewed some Josef K reissues a few years later and picked up on Steve's line. From October 20 1990