My Horlicks is getting cold

In his uncovering of Grand Funk Railroad as the perfect sound to accompany that slide into oblivion after a hard day at the office, school, shops, wherever, William Crane suggested that ‘It is a widely documented and accepted fact that the creation of art requires a great deal of inspiration and a large expenditure of energy on the artist's part.’

What he doesn’t say is that such a widely held accepted ‘fact’ is in fact a dangerously limiting preconception, and like the myth of ‘creativity’, helps keep Art up somewhere out of reach, safe in the ivory towers. The preconception demands that ‘real’ Art, or ‘good’ Art has had a lot of time spent on it, a lot of blood sweat and tears. Demands that the artist puts the hours in like every good worker should. Of course in terms of painting the Abstract Expressionists were maybe the dubious pinnacle of this ‘triumph’ of muscular, macho physical and psychological struggle; their large works giving face to the turmoil of years of repressed sexuality and the spectres of existential ennui. In terms of popular cultural music, Rock in the widest term could be seen to have been fulfilling a similar need. There are blurred boundaries and definitions in both areas though: Abstract Expressionism is still largely met with mistrust by ‘the ordinary man in the street’, as indeed is most non-representational or conceptual art, simply because you can’t see the craft of the artist. You can’t SEE the hours spent painting the goddamn picture, and since we still live and breathe by how much we earn in terms of time, well… it’s only natural to think that way is I guess what I’m saying. And ditto music, and Rock in particular and in even more particular,
Progressive Rock and what I’d call its antecedents Heavy Metal, or Nu-Metal or whatever is this week’s flavour.

What’s interesting (although of course it isn’t interesting at all) about the Rock music of mass acceptance is that same demand on musical proficiency, even if it’s only skin deep, illusory proficiency. How hard is it really to play those tricky guitar and drum solos? Probably not that hard at all, says he who can’t play a single goddamn note, but it sounds like it’s the hardest thing in the world. So it should come as no surprise that the visual art beloved of Rock fans is full of sexually evocative (and of course largely sexist) imagery, depicted in bewildering, overwrought detail. I mean, come on, how many kids have you seen trying to copy that damned Iron Maiden skeleton type thing over the years? Kids just love that kind of shit; seduced by the surface veneer of things but insistent that there is some deep meaning under there if you only know where to look.

Pop, on the other hand, eschews (or at least pretends to) all those notions of worth equating to hours of graft, and celebrates instead the very wonder of those surfaces, insisting that the surface IS the interest and not needing to rely on those hidden, made-up meanings. The irony being of course that dorks like me love nothing more than to take it apart and make out that, hmmm, in point of fact there IS meaning here after all, and that it’s a much more profound meaning than anything to be found in anything that proports to be deep and, ahem, meaningful. It’s the old argument that says Radiohead, for example, are the keepers of a flame of worthwhile Art that professes to explore worthwhile concepts versus the argument that says Radiohead are just as guilty of explicitly manipulating a structure to elicit predicted responses from a target audience as, say Westlife or The Backstreet Boys. And clearly the second argument is the correct one.

Which brings me to my favourite line this week from school; from a fourteen year old girl who said ‘I hate Rock. They can’t play their instruments and they can’t sing.’ I thought it was just great, the more so because from my point of view she so massively missed the point, the point being of course that who CARES if they can play or sing when all that matters is the song, the moment, the escape into the ether of noise? The added delicious irony of course being that all the Rock kids are saying exactly the same things about Pop. Except clearly they are more wrong than right, because at least in the realms of Pop it’s largely accepted that it DOESN’T MATTER. I mean, you’re far more likely to get some Rock bore defending their fave artist from questions of their musical proficiency than a Pop fan. Which is of course as it should be.

All of this train of thought could then could leap off into the realms of process driven Art and music, and I’d wind up by saying that Pop is pretty much the most-process, formula driven medium there is, which is why I adore it so… I’d be saying too that records like the bewilderingly, astonishingly beautiful Water On Mars album by Overflower is as fine an example of a genuinely intriguing rock/Pop axis that swings around the formulas inherent in the likes of Talk Talk and the early Blue Nile as you could possibly hope to discover in 2002. That it is the single most surprisingly delicious sonic confection I’ve heard in a long time, and that it’s its very effortlessness that makes it stand out. No histrionic demands for attention, no in your face proclamations of worth and proficiency, just a quiet, gentle but awesomely assured composure.

I could be telling you all of that, and more, but I’m not. Because it’s getting too late and my Horlicks is getting cold.


posted by duke harringay at 9:11 PM

‘I don’t care if you think I’m strange, I'm not gonna change…’

Longterm readers/sufferers will remember my ranting notes last summer about Freaks and Geeks, the TV show that beamed in from heaven it seemed to cheer me in end of the season and back to school blues. Well the good news is that it’s back, back BACK. At least if you live in the UK. And have satellite or cable or digital or such wonderful new media technologies at your disposal. Saturday afternoons, five o’clock on the otherwise dreary E4 channel (only other, debatable, saving grace is its Star Trek original series reruns at 6 each weekday). So set those video-recorders to stun… or ‘record’ at least, and sit back and enjoy. And no doubt my re-treaded words from summer 2001 on the subject will be appearing as a new and improved Tangents article sooooon. Sorry.


posted by duke harringay at 9:06 PM

The sound of rain

You and me and rain on the roof… there it is, falling and tip tapping, or rather hammering on the window. The sound of rain.

The Lovin’ Spoonful and the Go-Betweens. What better combination could there be? HM would suggest Vodka and the Velvet Underground and of course she’s be right, but there you go.




posted by duke harringay at 9:05 PM