'What were we thinking?'
Mark Morris ponders the perils of irony and other distortions of pop history

(An apology in advance to non-Brits: this is piece is utterly UK-centric in its reference points)

Part I:
Not long ago, Channel 4 ran one of their popular Top Ten programmes about 1990. 1990, they informed us casually, was the 'year of the mullet' (the haircut, not the fish). Barney Hoskins, who was once a very fine writer about pop but is now the curator of the history of short-on-top, long-at-the-back-do, was wheeled on to talk about it. It's true enough that the mullet has been big in certain times and places. But 1990 in Britain was not one of those times. Its only prominence in 1990 came from the German World Cup squad, England winger Chris Waddle - who had his removed, and hapless DJ Pat Sharp, who has always been a man in a bubble. Peter Stringfellow still has one, but you wouldn't say that 2000 was a prime year for mullets.

As far as I can remember, in 1990 the most common male haircuts amongst those who actually change their hair year by year was either the 'Ian Brown' or the Caesar crop with long sideburns. But rather than rely on my fallible memory, I dug up The Face's round-up of 1990, which told me that the haircut of 1990 (yes, they had one) was the Sinead O'Connor, trailed by those sported by Tom from Inspiral Carpets and Shaun Ryder. All haircuts that were typical of something going on at the time. But clearly not as inherently comical as mullet.

So what? The Top Ten programmes are meant to be a laugh, right? You can tell: the 1990 show was presented by portly comedian Phil Jupitus. It's all about chuckling at our own naive past, no? What could be more English?

Well, I can half understand because I'm half English and therefore half find myself hilarious. But the question is who is laughing at whose past, why and with what effect. Let's start with Barney. Presumably he wrote a book about the mullet because in his younger, foolish days, he sported one of those unfortunate hairdos? No, he didn't. Oxford-educated, raised on Roland Barthes, deep soul and Gram Parsons, Hoskins would never have worn something so uncouth on his head. But in the world of ironic history, we all share a past of fashion mistakes, and Milli Vanilli records and hours spent watching 3-2-1 (a show that cropped up on two recent TV retrospectives). So that collectively we can gasp 'What we're we thinking?' And then giggle.

Now, I think - but wouldn't presume to know - that most of us have had a dodgy barnet or two, bought clothes we now regret, records that sound inexplicably bad in retrospect, enthused over books or movies that we now hate. Only Edith Piaf and Norman Lamont are free from regret. And most of us have been caught up in dumb fashions, or movements, or trends. But not all the same ones. And that's what the Top Ten of 1990, or '80s discos, or films like The Wedding Singer (which I really like, incidentally) do: they assume a common experience, in a similar - though more benign way - to the big lie of our national grief for Diana Spencer. So we sit back in front of irony-powered Channel 4 or BBC2 and are asked to wonder how on earth we once took Bruno Brookes or DLT seriously? Why didn't we realise that Paul King or Toyah or Paul Weller looked completely ridiculous togged up like that? Or that you that you look like a fool in an unstructured suit with a pink t-shirt, like Don Johnson used to do on Miami Vice? How could we have been so naive as to wear marblewashed jeans, or big bleach streaks in our hair...

Again, I don't want to speak for you, but I'm reckoning that both now and then you didn't dress like anyone on stage or in the audience on Top Of The Pops. And I'll take a guess that if you were in the fashion sensitive span of your life in the 80s, you probably never had much time for the Radio 1 ancient regime, never mistook Paul King for a style guru, and just maybe went a bit Vice crazy for a couple of months but came to your senses. Furthermore, anyone who actually bothered about these things in the mid to late '80s will remember that there was a striving for 'timelessness', an explicit desire never to be mocked by future observers in the way that people in the '80s mocked the '70s. This was the rationale behind 501s, MA1s, black polonecks, well-cut suits, listening to Marvin Gaye and James Brown, Chet Baker and Kind Of Blue-era Miles, matt black furniture and stereos. It was a retreat to quality, a will to pop cultural respectability so that posterity could never snigger at the way we sniggered at flares and orange wallpaper. Of course, it could and did go wrong - Absolute Beginners, Terence Trent D'Arby - but whatever it was, it wasn't naive.

Talking of Miles, Chet and Absolute Beginners, another problem with the chortle back through the years is that it demands that everything had to have been explicitly characteristic of its time. But writing about the US sitcom That 70s Show, Guardian writer Jonathan Romney pointed that the definitive US sitcom in the '70s was Happy Days, set in the 50s. Likewise, any attempt to insist that the sound of the '80s was all bad drum machines and synth brass sounds means you have to forget how much old music everyone listened to in Britain at the time, be it Ben E King topping the charts, Maceo And The Macks being the soundtrack to nights at The Wag, or indie kids listening to Velvets or The Byrds. Or idiots I knew taking their cue from Brideshead or Another Country. And I remember thinking at the time that the definitive '80s look had been achieved by Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart, Alan Parker's lurid and rather silly noir, which is actually set in the late '40s. What people dig up from the past, and how they use it now, tells us plenty about the present. But when terminally unamusing Phil Jupitus wants to look back in televisual mirth ten years later, that stuff just gets in the way. As does the messy truth that no era has been thoroughly embarassing, just as none has been immaculately cool as we imagine in retrospect. But that's all a little too complex to stuff into a 90 minute Saturday night schedule filler. And not as funny as pictures of men with mullets, really.

Part II:
Here's a prediction: as 2000 comes to a close, and people look back on the year in pop, you're going to hear people say 'This is as bad as the early '70s.' I've already heard it a couple of times this year.

Here's a suggestion: next you here someone say that: clobber them. The fools deserve no better. For some reason, although most everything else about punk has faded away, one big myth has stuck with us: the early '70s were pop's dark ages. For six bleak years, before the Pistols redeemed everything, pop stank. Which, frankly, is bullshit. It might have seemed that way to white Englishmen and white Americans paid to write for the rock press who couldn't get over the fact that they had missed the '60s, but they were wrong. Now, I'm not saying that were wrong in the music they despised: this is no plea for revisionism. The old party line on Pink Floyd, Yes, The Grateful Dead and all was correct. And I'll die happy if I never hear another Led Zep, Black Sabbath or Tommy-era Who record. Furthermore, I'm going to claim some of the supposed signs of life in a dark time - Bob Marley, Steely Dan - were pretty atrocious too.

But let's look at the other side of the balance sheet. Even if you're talking strictly in skinny white boy with guitar terms, the terms with which the argument was generated, then the early '70s means Big Star, the Modern Lovers, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs and Nick Drake. Oh, and ugly noise evangelists The Stooges and Captain Beefheart. Venture a little further afield, and you've got the heyday of Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, Serge Gainsbourg, King Tubby, Al Green, Ann Peebles, Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott Heron, Sly Stone, George Clinton, The Last Poets, The Watts Prophets, Glen Campbell, George Jones and Merle Haggard. I don't like all of the singers or groups I've just mentioned, but I can understand their claims to greatness. And that's just sticking to the reasonably famous, and not mention things I've never understood but certain right-minded people insist on proclaiming as genius, like David Bowie, krautrock and fusion-era Miles Davis. That's a dark age?

Which brings us back to now, and 'if 1973 wasn't the worst year in pop history, was 2000?' No, because the question is meaningless, and you probably couldn't answer it yet anyway. I would be very disappointed to think that I've already heard every good record made this year. I'm sure I'll be catching up with some of them three, four, ten years down the line. That's just the way things work. But I do know that there were some excellent singles by Dr Dre, Destiny's Child, Spiller, Craig David, Kelis and a whole bunch of others, and that I thought the Yo La Tengo album was fantastic, and the Cali Agents album is quality all the way through, and the Deltron 3030 album is definitely interesting. Even so, I spent a lot of the year listening to music made the early '70s, as well as the '50s, '60s, early '80s, early '90s. Because all of pop history is ours to play with. And we shouldn't let our vision of it be clouded by people who were so busy hating Pink Floyd that they didn't notice Curtis Mayfield.

© Mark Morris 2000