Music Banter

I’ve always quite liked the White Stripes. Not loved, you understand- their music’s ok, but it doesn’t quite grab me in the way other stuff does. However, I’ve always appreciated the spirit in which Jack and Meg White went about their business. There’s a sheer joy to them, and an exuberance in their music and their attitude to music, which others don’t have. Jack White’s also stuck by Meg through her difficulties. That’s kind of admirable, on both his part and hers- it takes guts to admit to something like that, deal with it and get back into the spotlight.

They’ve also been revealed, in this story, as people of principle, willing to make a fuss when their music is appropriated by others to sell stuff they don’t agree with. This happens all the time, of course- that familiar song in an ad which suspiciously doesn’t feature the lead vocal is probably a re-recording, which means that the ad company, basically doesn’t have to pay the band as much, and doesn’t have to get their permission. This has actually happened to the White Stripes before, when they didn’t to my memory make a big deal out of it. Of course, sometimes a band is happy enough to whore themselves out, but I guess if you’re Rick Witter from Shed Seven, dignity and integrity are things you left behind long ago.

This misappropriation has happened previously in politics- thanks to Ronald Reagan, everyone thinks that ‘Born in the USA’ is actually pro-american, for example. More recently, the Foo Fighters had a bit of a tizzy with George W Bush when his re-election campaign team used ‘Times Like These’ without their permission.

As with these previous examples, this situation doesn’t seem to be about the money. I think if anyone’s ok, financially, it’s going to be Jack White, unless of course he spent all the money on giant red-and-white lollipops or something. This seems to be about the principle that a military organisation should not be using their music to suggest that getting in planes and learning how to kill people with them. Fair play.

As for myself, I would also like to point out that the Military-Industrial complex trying to associate themselves with a ramshackle band who are deliberately archaic, tend to use old equipment and send two people to do the job of four.

I’m not entirely sure they thought things through.

Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time a US Military organisation has done that, would it?

There was a point on Saturday when I actually thought it wasn’t going to happen. I thought that a million grannies were going to buy a copy of that X-factor song for each of their grandchildren, and that everyone who downloaded seven copies of Killing in the Name Of was going to be disqualified and count for nothing.

I started to do that little backpedal in my own head of ‘even if it doesn’t win, they’ll have made their point,’ but I knew this was just lying to myself. I said so on here- it was going to be gutting if they lost, pure and simple.

But they didn’t. Oh, simple joy of simple joys, they didn’t. And now Simon Cowell looks like an idiot, and all that money that Sony spent on pushing the musical equivalent of raw tripe down the throats of the music-buying public has been entirely wasted.

That’s the interesting thing- this is the first Download-only Christmas number one. But it won’t be the last. In some strange way, you can see this as another part of the death throes of the old order. In the same way that a band like, say, the Arctic Monkeys, masterminded their meteoric rise through as crude a tool as Myspace, this is the sign that record companies just can’t BUY success any more, that unpredictable things crop up and succeed, and that the old tried and tested techniques for manufacturing success aren’t enough.

The media is dispersed enough that no-one is in control. Not really. That means good news for musicians, good news for fans, maybe not quite so good news for the people who are accustomed to making huge amounts of money from these two groups. That’s fine by me, honest it is.

You see, there’s always been music. There hasn’t always been a music industry.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Oh, there’ll always be infrastructure, and investment, and networking and promotion, of course there will. It’s just in the hands of the people now, which is what Tracy and Jon Morter realised.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there. If you’re a musician, you don’t need to do what they tell ya. You can just do it yourself.

I don’t buy much music these days. I listen to things online, I use Last.fm. and spotify, I listen to the radio and I swap mix-tapes with my mates, sometimes of music we’ve made ourselves. I don’t think I’m that unusual, either, amongst music fans. It’s just not necessary to buy music, any more. Maybe it’s just aging- I’m just the other side of thirty, and therefore on the slippery helter-skelter road to oblivion and irrelevance. Soon I’ll be at the final destination, sitting around amongst my CD collection and muttering about how pop music is just noise, and insisting that no-one knows how to write proper tunes since GodSpeed You Black Emperor! broke up. I can feel it starting to happen, too, that slow slide into the aged certainty that

I did buy some music this week. I hope you did too.

You see, this week, people decided that they were going to do something rebellious, something a little bit childish, and very funny indeed. They were motivated by a number of reasons, mainly a dissatisfaction at the seemingly endless string of bland karaoke nonsense that the TV show, ‘The X Factor’, was foisting on the British record-buying public at the Christmas number one.

It’s been one of those David versus Goliath stories- one one side is a husband-and-wife team with no resources whatsoever, who merely started a group on Facebook, suggesting that everyone buy Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ in the week of the 11th to the 19th of December, thus getting the 1992 hit to Christmas number one. The refrain from the end of the song, in case you didn’t know, is the repeated ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ which makes it the perfect rebel anthem.

No-one put any money into the marketting of this campaign, no-one put out huge ads everywhere, it just spread through word of mouth. It’s a totally do-it-yourself effort.

On the other side, is Joe McElderry, the winner of a TV show which ran on prime time TV for several months, and whose face has been plastered across billboards, advertising displays, and websites at great expense by Sony.

At the time of writing, I don’t know who won. What I DO know is that last night when I bought the song from Amazon, different versions of it were number one, number three AND number twenty on the list.

If it doesn’t get to number one, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll feel a bit like Simon Cowell, a man who I view as something roughly equivalent to Satan Himself in musical terms, has won.

What I do know, however, is that this has been something of an embarrassing week for Simon Cowell and the people he represents. If you spend all that money and get a serious challenge from a bunch of people who hate your music, is it really worth it in the end?

For Simon Cowell, and Sony music, the answer is probably yes. At the end of the day, they’re in business. If they make money, it’s a good thing for them.

That said, it’s nice to know that people can still really annoy the powers that be. It’s nice to think that rock and roll hasn’t lost its ability to be annoying, teenage, truculent and disobedient.

Fingers crossed.

Pete Doherty has done something stupid again

Back in the day, the Libertines were something, well, interesting. New. There really wasn’t that much good quality music about after Britpop died and Nu-metal ate everything in sight (thank you, Zane Lowe, you cretinous shouting buffoon, thank you very much indeed), and Doherty’s first band was a breath of fresh air, almost a response to the Strokes (US alt-rock’s first stirrings back into life), which said yes, bands can be interesting, bands can be lyrical, their gigs can be spontaneous events worth attending rather than scripted, slick soulless affairs crafted in record company front offices. There was a pleasing chaos to them, which reminded me of the way that when Oasis started out, there was an average of one hilarious news story about them per week. I’m no great fan of Oasis, but those tabloid headlines? Priceless entertainment. The Libertines were the same. They were young, wild, reckless, and sometimes flashed brilliance. There was the suspicion that behind the two frontmen there was a certain competence, an artificial messiness carried out with great control and precision by their rhythm section, but I’m still convinced that for Barat and Doherty, it was real.

And then, things go a little bit… darker. Heroin happened. Things went wrong.

After a while, you started to look at their gigs, not as explosive and interesting, but as something akin to a train wreck. Things intensified when Doherty left the band and Babyshambles. People started turning up to see whether or not Pete would be wasted, not for the music.

Worst of all, Doherty seemed to be loving it. Buying into his own myth, thinking he was in control of his own image as the ravaged poet of ‘what became of the likely lads?’ and ‘what a waster,’ and playing up to it.

In other words, he turned up to a stupid self-deluding junkie nobhead.

I remember seeing him interviewed on Newsnight (Newsnight, for god’s sake!) and when confronted about the cost of heroin in lives, in women from desparate circumstances forced to carry bags of it through customs in their stomachs and hunt for it in their own excrement afterwards, Doherty said ‘well, yeah, I guess that is a problem. You couldn’t grow your own, though. The cost might be a bit prohibitive, so.’

That was the moment for me, when I gave up on him as an artist, and started seeing him as an idiotic, self-deluding, self-obsessed idiot machine, spewing out half-formed poetry about ‘Albion’ and the romance of the gutter.

We’re all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars? Not true. Some people are actually in love with the gutter.

The final act in Doherty’s transformation isn’t quite complete, however. He still needs to lose his teeth, appear stoned on a chat show, and write a self-mythologising christmas anthem about two people on the skids in New York city.

Then, and only then, will his inevitable transformation into this Generation’s Shane MacGowen will be complete.

It’s getting to the end of the year, and you know what that means in the world of popular music- it’s lists. The Best Songs, Best New Faces in Music, Best Albums, Most Entertaining Haircut, Lamest Controversy and Sexiest Male/Female/ Artists of 2009 are going to be debated and discussed in magazines, blog posts, articles, and pubs the world over.

But is this really worth it? Is music really a competition? Can’t we all just admit that your taste isn’t my taste, and all just get along?

Maybe. Competition has created wonderful music, however. McCartney, for example, writing Sergeant Pepper because he wanted to top Pet Sounds. Oasis versus Blur, whilst it didn’t produce some of the best music by either band, was really entertaining. It’s also good fun to argue who’s best- Bat For Lashes versus Little Boots, whether or not the MGMT are actually serious.

This business of lists, though. It’s dull. It’s mildly obsessive. It’s all a little bit Nick Hornby, a bit trainspotter. Whilst I’m as bad as the rest, I want more from music journalists. I don’t want them to settle my music arguments for me. Admittedly, those lists do start arguments, so I guess that’s something that can be said for them.

My theory on this is that it’s the easiest way possible to write about music. Let’s think about this. You’re the editor of a magazine. You’ve got a hundred pages to fill. You’ve got twenty writers. You could hope that if you send them on out to interview people, find new bands and music you’ve never heard before. Maybe they’ll come back with something remarkable.

Or maybe they won’t. Maybe three or four guys will come back with something, the other seventeen will be junk.

Maybe then you go ‘oh, sod it, here’s a list of a hundred albums, arbitrarily ordered. Each of you write five generic puff pieces and we’ll know how much copy we’ve got.’

Laziness. Ease of formatting. Pandering to the advertiser. Rubbish.

This is why music journalism, at least in its print form, is dying.

Well, it’s one of the reasons, there’s a lot more besides.

Maybe I can do you a list.

Rock and roll is about perpetual adolescence. It’s about that group of inseparable mates in the corner of the playground or the back of the bus staying together and taking on the world. It’s about the abdication of responsibility and ‘sensible’ choices in favour of doing whatever the hell you want. 

This state of endless childishness is perhaps the reason why rock stars feel the need to feud with each other. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. Stones-Beatles, REM-U2, Blur-Oasis, these are just some famous feuds in music. The recipe is simple- take two bands having success at the same time, with slightly differing musical personalities. Thus, you get the Beatles’ wild experimentation versus the Stone’s instinctual raucousness, U2′s impassioned shout versus REM’s delicate whisper, Blur’s ironic, single eyebrow versus Oasis’ neanderthal monobrow. 

For the fan, taking sides in a debate like this, where one side slags the other, is about picking what view of music you stand behind. I remember as a teenager feeling like my opinions on what music I liked helped to more clearly define who I was. I love band feuds. 

Not too sure about this latest one, though- if you’re in a mildly successful group, like, say, The Fiery Furnaces, you might want to aim a little smaller than, say, Radiohead then you might just be biting off a little bit more than you can chew.

Plus, you might want to get your facts right before you slag them off

Then, of course, once you’ve dug a bit of a hole for yourself, it’s really quite a good idea to shut up and stop digging. you’re probably only going to make things worse, especially if you try and talk tough

Especially if someone else calls your bluff

If that happens, then pretty much everyone will be laughing at you