So that’s the kids sorted: they can listen to stuff that will make their ears bleed and turn their souls black, and good luck to them. But what about us? What can I connect to that I’m not going to get sick of within weeks, that isn’t going to have its melodic weaknesses and lyrical banalities exposed by a Renault ad? It seems to me that, for my generation, country music serves the same function as death metal does for people thirty years younger: a pedal steel and a waltz time can still strike fear in the hearts of the timid. Country music is too embarrassingly sincere, too respectful of the past, to be absorbed into the year zero of boutique hotel lobbies; all the alt-country bands of the last few years retain just enough soil on their boots to deter most of the people who want to believe that the world is permanently shiny and new. And there will be other musical bywaters and back alleys too – singer-songwriters whose voices are too croaky and whose lyrics are too morose for commercial consumption, bands who want to combine the attitude of the 13th Floor Elevators with Neil Diamond’s melodic sensibilities – so it’s not like we’ll have to eat country for the rest of our lives; but God knows we need something that isn’t going to come apart in our ears through sheer overuse.
29 ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’
– the Avalanches
30 ‘No Fun/Push It’
– Soulwax
This, then, is the contemporary musical world – a world wherein no one plays or sings a note, but where new music is indisputably and unambiguously created nevertheless. I once presumed that nothing good – nothing great, anyway – could come out of the mixing and matching and scratching and cutting and pasting, and this was true while the approach of the cutters and pasters remained essentially plagiaristic: the contribution that, say, Eric B & Rakim made to their version of ‘I Know You Got Soul’ was minimal – it’s Bobby Byrd’s bassline and beat that define the track.
And any musical response that you might have to Puff Daddy’s ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ is actually a response to The Police’s pretty riff. You can admire the taste and the cheek, but not the creativity: to create music – to create any art – is surely to pull something out of thin air, to produce something where there was previously nothing.
But now the cutters and pasters have upped the ante. The Avalanches use so many samples to create something so indisputably their own that to accuse them of plagiarism is pointless: you may as well make the same case against a writer whose books contain words that other writers have used before. The Fugees copy great chunks of Marley and Roberta Flack out into their notebooks, and their achievement is all the smaller because of it: the music is overfamiliar, and in any case they don’t do anything with it or to it, they neither alter the flavour of it nor the melodic shape of it, subtly or otherwise, in order to make it become something else. Similarly, when R&B singer Angie Stone borrows the riff from ‘Back Stabbers’ for her song ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’, it strikes me as nothing other than an admission of creative bankruptcy, and a vague hope that someone else’s genius – and our recognition of it – will carry her through to the end of the track. Somehow we have managed to convince ourselves that this is simply what happens now, as if expecting a songwriter to write a whole new fucking three-minute tune is square.
But the Avalanches use scraps of things you have never heard in ways that you couldn’t have imagined; the result is that they have, effectively, created something from nothing. ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ consists of a beat, scraps of dialogue from old movies, a few daft noises, and a horn riff pinched from an old and presumably unfunky Bert Kaempfert record; from this unpromising material the Avalanches have created something that builds to a climax and rocks. (They even manage to find a rhyme in two unconnected lines of dialogue.) It’s reminiscent of Peter Bogdanovich’s film Targets, which was bolted together from, among other things, an old horror movie and a couple of days’ work that Boris Karloff owed the producers: there’s a similar sense of undaunted resourcefulness, the same determination to make the incoherent cohere – and cohere into something new – through talent and a simple force of will. ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ is funny, but also vaguely disquieting, because it creates a mood that you haven’t quite heard before (always disorienting in pop music, which you can usually count on for emotional familiarity): Kaempfert’s almost comically melodramatic horns mean that there’s this weird mock-heroic thing going on, a sort of pomposity that is undercut by the frivolity of the other sounds layered over them, but I’m not sure that this is why the track sounds odd. I suspect that the oddness comes about because, just as robots cannot feel love, music that has been produced from this number of samples cannot yet induce any recognition of mood in the listener. There was, one suspects, no one overwhelming sentiment that inspired it, and no particular response expected; this is music created for the hell of it, and it shows.
This is not to suggest that ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ is without merit or achievement, because it’s not. Indeed, something that’s made with this degree of patience is awe-inspiring, in a way: something like, say, ‘Yesterday’, which is supposed to have come to Paul McCartney in a dream, and seemed so familiar to him that he thought it must have already been written, seems almost unearned by comparison. But if most music is about self-expression, then the self expressed during its composition and performance is invariably a feeling self (even if that feeling is alienation, or ennui, or confusion) and it’s disorienting to hear something as emotionally imprecise as this. Maybe we’ll become used to it, and learn how to translate and interpret songs drawn from a bewildering number of sources; or maybe collagistes like the Avalanches will be able to refine their art, and make the music they make fit the moods we know. I kind of hope not, as long as people go on making music the straightforward way.
Meanwhile the bootleg phenomenon, whereby DJs slice a couple of songs lengthways and lay one on top of the other, begins to look like the most cheerfully nihilistic musical movement since punk – although as even punks had the sweetly old-fashioned urge to create their own music, you could argue that they only paid lip-service to the ideals of nihilism. People like Soulwax and Freelance Hellraiser (who fused, with unpredictably brilliant results, Christina Aguilera and The Strokes) are telling us that it’s finished; they’re using the scraps we have left for firewood, so that we have something to huddle round while the hell of the modern musical world freezes over. I’m not sure I agree with them, but Soulwax’s Too Many DJs is compulsive listening anyway, and the decision to pair up Salt ’N’ Pepa’s energy with The Stooges’ ferocity was especially smart, a music fan’s dream: squashing hip-hop on to garage punk is like those arguments boys used to have about what would happen if Spider-Man and Superman teamed up. If you think about it, bootlegging is more democratic than punk. Yes, we could all go out, steal a guitar and learn our three chords, but most of us would still have sounded more like Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds than The Clash; this way allows those of us who have no talent but love our music nevertheless to create something that sounds great. All you need is software, a pair of ears, and great taste: finally, the true genius that is fandom has been recognized.
31 ‘Pissing in a River’
– the Patti Smith Group
Patti Smith’s show at the Union Chapel in Islington, just down the road from where I live, came at the end of a good week. It was hot, a little island of brightness and warmth in the middle of a grey, wet British summer; I was enjoying my work, adapting a book I loved with a good friend, and we were getting on well and producing something we were proud of; Danny’s bad stomach had temporarily cleared up, and he was as sunny as the weather.
And Patti Smith was just great. I hadn’t expected much; it was an acoustic show, a fund-raiser for the beautiful chapel, and it featured poetry and an auction (half an hour before hitting a whole series of musical peaks, Smith was attempting to flog off a couple of roof tiles and an autographed drumstick). I had presumed that, at best, there’d be a little flash of phosphorus and we’d be given a glimps
e of what made her great, once upon a time. I certainly didn’t anticipate seeing a riveting, inspiring, occasionally chaotic performance which never once suggested that Patti’s best days were behind her.
One of the things you can’t help but love about Smith is her relentless and incurable bohemianism, her unassuaged thirst for everything connected to art and books and music. In this one evening she namechecked Virginia Woolf and Tom Verlaine, William Blake and Jerry Garcia, Graham Greene and William Burroughs; Peter Ackroyd even got a dedication, a thank you for his biography of Blake and his history of London. (One doesn’t want to be snooty, but I’m guessing that you get a shorter bibliography at, say, a Bryan Adams show.) I began this book by writing about ‘Thunder Road’, and there is a sense in which, despite their collaboration on ‘Because the Night’, it’s right that Springsteen and Smith should be at opposite ends of a book, because there is a sense in which they are at opposite ends of a certain musical spectrum. It is not hard to detect in Springsteen’s work or in interviews with him an anxiety about how he earns his living, a constant questioning: Am I entitled to this? Can I represent people while at the same time standing in front of them? How will this look, how do I sound? And these questions are important, at least to him, as maybe they should be to anyone who is paid good money to express themselves, but they can be a little constricting. Smith, meanwhile, clearly doesn’t give much of a shit. I don’t mean to imply that she is irresponsible – her political engagement is evidence to the contrary, and during the Union Chapel show she rapped hypnotically about the foolishness of a possible war on Iraq – nor that she is self-indulgent (although I heard later of one writer who walked out of the show, appalled by the poetry – which from a Leavisite point of view is understandable, but which misses the point of Smith as a beatnik, an instigator of Happenings, one of the last keepers of the countercultural flame). It’s just that she seems blissfully untroubled about her status as an artist: she just is one, and it requires no further contemplation on her part.
I couldn’t remember having heard ‘Pissing in a River’ before, or if I had, it had made no impression on me. That night, however, as Smith hit the electrifying declamatory climax of the song – ‘Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you / Oh, I’d give my life for you’ – swaying in the blue light, with the church pulpit and the beautiful stained-glass windows behind her, you could feel the whole audience fall in love with her, and the song, and the evening. It was one of those rare moments – miraculous, in the context of a rock show – which make you grateful for the music you know, the music you have yet to hear, the books you have read and are going to read, maybe even the life you live. You can’t ask much more than that of your twenty-five quid (chapel renovations included). And though it’s too much to expect an epiphany of this kind on a regular basis, it seems to me a worthwhile thing to pitch for.
It’s easy, in fact, to get carried away after an experience like that – to demand Smith’s kind of commitment and fiery vision from all music. ‘I don’t care who you listen to, or how good they are,’ you want to say to kids who are about to embark on a lifetime of listening, ‘just make sure that whoever it is means it, that they’re burning up in their desperation to communicate whatever it is they want to say.’ But that’s not how popular music always works. Gerry Goffin and Carole King sat in an office in the Brill Building and treated songwriting as a day job; they bashed out ‘Up On The Roof’ and ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ because they needed hit records. And I doubt whether Bjorn and Benny would have self-combusted if ‘Dancing Queen’ had gone unwritten and unrecorded – it’s a great song, but it doesn’t sound as though anyone’s life depended on it. Pop’s indifference to motive and conviction is one of its joys. (And in any case, one can think of dozens of bands or singers whose artistic ambition is boundless, who are almost consumed by the importance of their work, but whose songs stink.)
Even so, listening to ‘Dancing Queen’ is unlikely to leave you wanting to read, or write, or paint, or go to a gallery, or run fast, and that’s the effect Smith had on this member of the audience (and, I suspect, on quite a few others). That kind of inspiration is rare, in any area of the arts. And yet now I see that this book is going to end here – because I wanted to try and surf out on the high I felt during the gig, in another attempt to get music to do something that words can’t – I’m a little ambivalent about it: maybe it’s a little too High Culture, what with Woolf and Blake and Ackroyd and the chapel and all. Maybe I should close with ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’ or ‘Surfin’ Bird’ or ‘I Hate You So Much Right Now’. On the other hand, the song was called ‘Pissing in a River’; and it was played on guitars, and it lasted four or five minutes, and its emotional effects depended entirely on its chords and its chorus and its attitude. It’s a pop song, in other words, and like a lot of other pop songs, it’s capable of just about anything.
Discography
‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’, Teenage Fanclub
If you have no Teenage Fanclub at all, then you might want to start with 4766 Seconds – A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub, a 2002 compilation that includes both the songs I write about in this book. They’re also both on Songs From Northern Britain, which, if you’ve already got Rubber Soul, is the next best comfort food you can buy.
‘Thunder Road’, Bruce Springsteen
You know where to get this.
‘I’m Like a Bird’,Nelly Furtado
From the album Whoa, Nelly!, which doesn’t really offer anything quite as good as ‘I’m Like a Bird’.
‘Heartbreaker’,Led Zeppelin
From Led Zeppelin II, the best Zeppelin album for riffs (‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘The Lemon Song’, etc.).
‘One Man Guy’, Rufus Wainwright
From the album Poses. ‘One Man Guy’ is atypical, however: Rufus seems to derive more inspiration from showtunes than from folk or pop, which is fine by me.
‘Samba Pa Ti’,Santana
If you feel compelled to buy a Santana album, then a greatest hits should be more than enough for you. There’s one great Santana solo, however, on an album called Havana Moon, which I would never have come across had Jerry Wexler not introduced me to it; the song’s called ‘They All Went To Mexico’ (Willie Nelson sings it), and the solo is lovely, disciplined, elegiac and – fear not – short.
‘Mama You Been On My Mind’,Rod Stewart
From the album Never a Dull Moment, the one with ‘You Wear It Well’ on it. Both this and Every Picture . . . stand up remarkably well.
‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’,Bob Dylan
From the album Biograph.
‘Rain’,The Beatles
From the album Past Masters Volume Two, although annoyingly you’ll probably have all the other tracks – ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Lady Madonna’, etc. – worth having.
‘You Had Time’,Ani DiFranco
From the album Out of Range, which contains the lovely ‘Overlap’. On most of her albums, however, Ani prefers to rant and rap, and more power to her – but it seems a little perverse, given how few people are capable of writing songs like ‘You Had Time’.
‘I’ve Had It’,Aimee Mann
From Whatever, Mann’s first solo recording. All her albums are good (as are the last couple of efforts from her band, Til’ Tuesday), but on her new one, Lost In Space, her writing seems to have become even sharper.
‘Born for Me’, Paul Westerberg
From the album Suicaine Gratifaction. Westerberg’s solo stuff is as patchy as his Replacements work, which is one of the reasons why he isn’t more famous. There’s a worthwhile Replacements anthology called All for Nothing/Nothing for All, and the good songs on that will go some way to explaining the passion of his devotees.
‘Frankie Teardrop’,Suicide
Everyone should listen to Frankie Teardrop once. Get someone who owns Suicide’s first album, which is available on CD, to tape it for you.
‘Ain’t That Enough’,Teena
ge Fanclub
See notes for ‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’.
‘First I Look At The Purse’, the J. Geils Band
From the album Full House – “Live”, one of the very few records to have survived every vicissitude of my musical tastes.
‘Smoke’, Ben Folds Five
From the album Whatever and Ever Amen. I can’t believe the number of reviews I’ve read which have compared Folds to either Billy Joel or Elton John; this is obviously and blatantly pianist.
‘A Minor Incident’, Badly Drawn Boy
From the soundtrack to About A Boy. Novel available now from Penguin Books.
‘Glorybound’,The Bible
You can’t find the version I like. There’s another version on an odds-and-sods album called Random Acts of Kindness, but it really doesn’t have the same swing. Boo and Neill can’t find the recording I refer to.
‘Caravan’, Van Morrison
From the live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now. The BBC once showed a fantastic film of this concert on The Old Grey Whistle Test – someone should show it again.
‘So I’ll Run’, Butch Hancock and Marce LaCouture
From the album Yella Rose.
‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, Gregory Isaacs
From the album Reggae for Kids, which also features a pretty good ‘This Old Man’ by Yellowman. If your kids are listening over and over again to stuff that makes you want to smash the cassette recorder, then try the Music for Little People series: there are great kids’ CDs by Los Lobos, The Persuasions, Buckwheat Zydeco, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, etc.
‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3’, Ian Dury & the Blockheads
From the greatest-hits album Reasons To Be Cheerful, which closes with the overlooked and gruffly beautiful ‘Lullaby For Frances’.