GATEKEEPERS PROHIBITED

 

 

I have arrived at the conclusion that record collectors don’t actually like music. If anything, they positively hate it.

 

Speak to any record collector and they will slaver over the virtues of a sixty-year-old L.P. in a proper, thick reinforced cardboard sleeve with thick grooves. Ask their views about the music contained on that L.P. and they fumble and bluff. They would never dare do something as base and vulgar as listen to the music. It would mar the L.P.’s market value, strip the record of its virginity.

 

Instead they solemnly arrange their L.P.s – never anything as crass or impure as compact discs, never mind cassettes – on shelves, in careful alphabetical and chronological order, with nary a thought save the monetary treasure trove that they hopefully represent. Not for them a blissful slumber or the cosy company of their partner at four on a Saturday morning; they are already out in their cars or vans, heading for the car boot sales to systematically strip them of everything worth buying. Some will immediately trade them on the open market, while others are in many cases benighted record shop owners, slowly being squashed by the internet (and the squashing is not necessarily the internet’s fault), looking to beef up their stock.

 

You will hear them perorate endlessly about audio quality, crispness, fullness and so on forevermore, and little about how the music on those records moves or affects them, if it ever did. They actively despise the music for getting in the way of the record’s potential value. A perfect record for them would be The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan (1980) which is entirely blank on both sides.

 

Far, far worse is the fact that their cornering of the market cordons off so much potentially great music from ears which might be considerably more receptive. The endless limited edition treadmill is enough to turn people off buying records at all – which no doubt is the collectors’ intention. This inevitably means that music that could change people’s lives remains sealed off and unheard, and consequently changes nothing.

 

These puritan collectors – if taken to their logical extreme, puritans are what they be; as with the Khmer Rouge, they’d be eager to ban music altogether or confine it to joyless, sexless yea-worshipping traditional authenticity – throw their hairy hands up in horror when confronted with deceased entertainers from a different (and better) age, such as John Lennon or Steve McQueen, photographed listening to music with all their records in a disorganised heap. How dare they, yell those puritans at artists who achieved more in their brief lives with more talent than they themselves can ever hope to have – have they no respect for records?

 

Well, no, because respect for records was what your parents did – and I look at some record collectors and feel extremely relieved that they are not my husband or father – or what Joshua Edwards does with his ancient jazz 78s in Blackboard Jungle (of course, we know that was only a plot device; if you really did spend fifteen years painstakingly assembling a collection of hard-to-find 78s, would you run the extreme risk of playing them to a bunch of unruly kids, even ones played by actors in their twenties? These days you’d just activate Spotify on the laptop and there wouldn’t be any problem locating Frank Sinatra or Joni James tunes. In any case, “Jazz Me Blues,” which was a euphemism for “fuck me,” is a far more sexually potent record than even “Rock Around The Clock”). Whereas the whole point of the rock ‘n’ roll (not “rock and roll,” just as “drum n’ bass” was never going to be “jungle”) thing was to eject that respect right out of the window.

 

Pop music is, as many of its finest practitioners did and in some cases still do tell you, disposable in nature. You grooved and did all sorts of natural and outrageous things to a bunch of records for maybe three months, then got rid of them in favour of a new bunch. That was how it worked and everybody was happy. There wasn’t the time, space or will to look back. In 1967, radio’s idea of an oldie was to play something from 1965. There was no backlog of “stuff” to deal with, no “legacy,” because this wasn’t classical, folk or jazz music.

 

But now there are seventy or so years of “stuff,” of accumulated history, with which to reckon, and our reckoning warps that history until it is unrecognisable. Hence the scrupulous, or if you prefer (and I certainly do) unscrupulous remixing and remastering of old pop records specifically mixed to sound good on the technology most readily available at the time, namely transistor radios or tinny Dansette players with one speaker. Hence the Beatles’ music being ruined forever by their producer’s son, tinkered and messed about with to make it digestible to the scared ears of today. Rather than admit that the original Beatles records largely made brilliant use of, by today’s standards, severely limited studio technology, they want them remade by today’s standards, thus robbing them of all their charm, originality and spike.

 

Quite often, we don’t want to know who did or played what and where or why. We nostalgically consider L.P. covers as they were, with a portrait of the artist on the front and a track listing and composer/producer credits – and occasionally a breathlessly brief sleeve note – on the rear. There was no history or contextualisation. You had to work everything else out for and by yourself. In his sleeve note to the original British ten-inch edition of the first Elvis Presley album, Bob Dawbarn went out of his way to make the music sound palatable to jazz fans, comparing Presley to Billie Holiday. The teenagers who largely bought that album and sent it to number one completely ignored the notes, and the jazz fans hated Elvis anyway, so what was the point?

 

That accumulated history drags upon our backs and helps to suffocate the future. So much record collecting has become not about assembling a library of music that one actually loves, but a furtive and frantic need to “own” everything, to have all the “essential” records (essential to whom, and for what? Records are not food, air or water) in as pristine and “pure” (subtext: virginal) a form as possible.

 

Even those collectors who profess or pretend to keep up with new developments act like junkies, so blinded by their self-imposed mission to “complete” their collection that they fail to see that the habit robs them of homes, careers, relationships and a future. This alleged completeness is not driven by any great will within the collectors other than a desperation not to be left out. They slavishly purchase new records which receive warm reviews in the media, failing to comprehend that music critics act only in obeisance to fashion, and praise that which they feel is the most fashionable music of any given time because that might keep them in work. Then they sit about for months, glumly waiting to “get it” and wondering why they can’t.

 

History has proved repeatedly that most records now universally acclaimed as “classics” were at the time of their release met with blankly confused incomprehension or dismissed with a fashionable sneer. Hence brightly-coloured entitled trash like West End Girl or LUX is praised because it’s considered fashionable to do so, whereas The New Sound largely generated “help Mummy, I don’t understand, he’s too clever for his own good” how-dare-plebs-show-us-up-subtextual whimpering. But the collectors usually tend to miss or skip the jewels and pick up the trendy minnows instead.

 

I can’t do any of that any more, even if I wanted to, because pop music is also essentially for teenagers and you’re supposed to grow out of it. I came to pop the other way round from most people in that I started with jazz and classical, then expanded my musical horizon. I think I understand pop better from that particular perspective as a result.

 

But I’m also in my sixties, a time when professing continued interest in modern pop music becomes distinctly creepy. Hence I’m marooned between two poles. The people with whom I grew up or worked in the past have, I suspect, largely stayed there as far as their musical tastes are concerned. Not that I’ve ever been invited to a school or old workplace reunion – not that I would accept any such invitations, since I’m not the same person now that I was then, or am perhaps too much the same person (it’s hard to tell at times) – but I think it safe to assume that my former peers would prove adherent to the music they loved forty or fifty years ago, when they were young and life had yet to happen to them, rather than having Moved On.

 

Extend that premise to, say, social media, and it’s identical; everywhere I see people reminiscing about something from the eighties or nineties – and it is ALWAYS white guitar-based indie music – rather than enthuse about something that came out last week. But talk about music of today and at best I am in receipt of metaphorical piteous stares. I can’t discuss it with those young enough to be my grandchildren. As I have never had any children – a combination of circumstances and choice - I can’t discuss it with them either.

 

I don’t really go into record shops any more. Bookshops, yes; record shops, not nearly as much. In my current state of health I find browsing in record shops awkward and painful – there’s never anywhere in HMV or Fopp to sit, and while Rough Trade East does have seats at its entrance, it’s too far out of my way to get to, is populated by smug hipster creeps, doesn’t take cash and sells the only copy they ordered of anything I like to Gareth Collect at 9:31 on the Friday morning that it comes out.

 

In addition, record shops – see also that saddest of arenas, record fairs – now resemble grim, grey morgues, with unaffordable and unattractive L.P.s in serrated ranks like an MI5 filing cabinet. When I was young, record shops were colourful, exciting and of the moment. Now they’re like museum photographs of record shops.

 

In any event, there’s no way I could venture into a record shop now and purchase anything by the latest pop sensation without provoking a lot of suspicious glances; what’s that old creep with the stick doing buying THAT’S SHOWBIZ, BABY!? Oh no, we order all of our CDs online now and just wait for them to come through the letterbox. It’s like Christmas every day with all those packages!

 

But we don’t “collect”; we listen to what we get and aren’t too fussy about its continued upkeep. We do have a sort of order in terms of where we put things but it isn’t a church. Moreover, streaming, for all its self-administered woes, actually defuses any urge to collect music; if there are a lot of new records out each Friday we just stick them on the streaming, listen to them and, if we like them sufficiently to want to listen to them without being interrupted by ads, buy them. We can’t buy everything because we’re not Elton John and there’s a limit to how many records most people can afford to buy (I do wonder, however, about the middle-aged bloke one occasionally sees in second-hand record shops in the middle of the weekday, busily buying up stuff – I’m on holiday, mate, but how can you afford to buy all of that; shouldn’t you be working in the middle of the day? I have my theories about how these people make a living, but…).

 

Nevertheless, we love music, Lena and I, and love it enough to want to try and keep it out of the grasping hands of those who would silence it for the sake of a quick and easy profit because that really isn’t what music – of any kind – ought to be about. Consider how Joshua Edwards bought 78s as opposed to painfully-annotated boxed sets, and was happy to nod his head to Stan Kenton on the bar’s jukebox. While a fool for the sake of plot convenience, he was still the type of record collector which has most likely long since headed the way of the dodo.

THE END OF END-OF-YEAR LISTS AND FOR THAT MATTER LISTS

 

In order that I don’t ruin anybody’s Christmas, I should now confirm that I won’t be doing an end-of-year album list for 2025.

 

Now, there are plenty of music critic-friendly reasons not to do one. These include my feeling that this year hasn’t really deserved an end-of-year summary. It’s been one of those unglamorous consolidatory years for music – another 1969, 1974, 1983, 1992, 2002, 2012 (so many twos in there; does that indicate a cycle?) – with lots (and lots) of meaningful activity but little if anything in the way of actual breakthrough. A year of moments – we used to call them “singles” – has 2025 proved to be.

 

Another, more elemental reason is that I got it so spectacularly wrong last year. I listed Geordie Greep’s The New Sound as merely one of hundreds of very worthy also-rans (not to mention Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal) whereas I have continued to come back to it far more often than anything produced this year and it has proven to be one of those very rare albums that the listener is compelled to inhabit, to explore every last architectural and emotional corner.

 

You know, like we used to do with albums when we were teenagers. If nothing else (and be assured that there is a lot else), The New Sound has very firmly put paid to the idealistic, or more likely convenient, theory that once we “grow up” we don’t listen to albums in that way any more; they come, make their modest impact and retreat to the seldom-visited shelves.

 

The New Sound is an album in that profoundly uncommon order of Escalator Over The Hill, Rock Bottom, Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and The Lexicon Of Love, and I think my reaction to it has been the most intense and concentrated reaction I’ve experienced since Time (The Revelator) nearly quarter of a century ago.

 

In the nineties I had this sort of experience with a lot of albums, mainly because I walked everywhere, including to and from work, and listened to them repeatedly on Walkman headphones until I knew them as thoroughly as they could be known; this certainly applies to the first half of the nineties, if not nearly as much their second half.

 

In addition I was in my late twenties, going into my early thirties, at that time, and quite demonstrably hadn’t “grown up”; half a lifetime later, I’m not completely sure that I ever managed, so I’m uncertain how effective a case study this might be. What I am trying to say is that – I think it was albums that changed, not me. I didn’t get beyond the urge to absorb myself in an album’s fibres, but albums perhaps grew up or regressed instead. I don’t listen to albums the way I used to? At the age of sixty-one, The New Sound has instantly cured me of that popular misconception. The inquisitive magic in my mind still exists and prevails. The albums just needed to be…right, and the careful listener should expect to wait months, if not years or even decades, before they can feel themselves able to assess an album as it should be assessed.

 

Which latter of course hardly ever happens because capitalism demands immediate return on investments, hence we must react to albums immediately they happen because otherwise nobody will know about them or indeed buy them (hence they won’t make any money and the musicians won’t be asked to make another one), they will sink into benign oblivion and the musicians will be obliged to waste their creativity doing “real jobs” in order to remain alive. There are racks in record shops still to be filled, journalistic quotas to meet.

 

But there is a third and deeper reason for not compiling an end-of-year list in 2025, which is something that’s been nagging at and irking me for several years now; the fact that all of the end-of-year lists you see elsewhere look…awfully the same. The same records, the same new artists you’re expected to love, the gnarly old-timers whose new offering really isn’t going to rock anybody’s boat but they’ve served their apprenticeship, God bless them, the transiently-hyped, the antique favourites from when the music critic was at university and life had yet to impose itself on them.

 

And it’s cumulatively very tiring. The same dogmatic orthodoxy, the pained emphatic reliance on a specific form of music which really has nothing to offer anybody any more, the equivalent of those New Yorker short stories which are…yes, I know, it’s in the top three of music critic clichés, but…DULL AND WORTHY. No excitement, mischief or real joy (and certainly no sex – if anything, the presumed apotheosis of this kind of music is asexual). Palliative restraint for the old folk, whether in age or spirit. No thrills; watch that pacemaker. Nothing to which any pissed-off thirteen-year-old could relate. Bix Beiderbecke doing “Jazz Me Blues” (which, from title on down, is actually one of the sexiest pop records ever made) except the pupils now just slope off to TikTok instead of rioting and search for something else on Spotify.

 

I cannot and will not relate to gently glum funereal meditations about dying, impermanence and bereavement; De La Soul’s Cabin In The Sky, probably the second greatest album of their career, and typically released too late for anybody’s end-of-year poll, is a brilliantly profound and importantly also very funny (and infinitely more heartfelt) retort to that whole line of anti-thought, as well as putting a lie to the fable that old people can’t make great music any more (tell that to Suede or Stereolab, who also released some of the best work of their respective careers this year).

 

“The Silent Life Of A Truth,” Cabin In The Sky’s fourteenth track, is also a timely refutation of one of the deadest, most dishonest pop albums I’ve ever heard (sorry, Barney Hoskyns in the NME of 1984 talking about Spandau Ballet’s “I’ll Fly For You,” but those words were too good not to remix – and anyway, I owe you an apology, B.H….you were absolutely right about her), a record which we knew was instantly rotten, released not by the world’s biggest pop star, but by a madwoman who thought she was the world’s biggest pop star. And I had placed her previous album joint second in my 2024 list with brat. I needn’t have bothered. Is she still the most important pop star ever? My feeling is that she is now out to assassinate pop music.

 

Yet there is a fourth reason for not doing a list of albums this year, which far dwarfs the other three. That reason is that I am sick to my front and back teeth of lists, of rankings. Confine rankings to taxi stops. This craving to put everything in a comprehendible order is actually killing the thing we’re ordering (about). Yes I know, life is random and scary and in the absence of a convenient figure such as God the only way to make sense of something that is innately insensible is to make lists, to determine what is better than what else.

 

I mean, what were charts for (that could be a question on Mitchell and Webb’s Quiz Broadcast, couldn’t it – “what was hope?”) if not to place things in order, not simply for the benefit of the music industry, but also appealing directly to the “If so many others like this, so should I, else I am ABNORMAL” herd instinct (paraphrasing what Charles Shaar Murray, also in the NME but in late 1980, said about Top Of The Pops) – and we all possess that instinct; don’t kid on that you don’t, it’s part of the human condition – and our basic need to understand what’s what?

 

But there’s something also very juvenile about making those lists, isn’t there, about obsessing over where something “comes” in the imagined grander scheme of things, instead of simply enjoying the music. Yes, Older’s a great album – but what are “your” top five George Michael songs RANKED and IF NOT WHY NOT? Like William Holden’s Max in Network, I long ago put that sort of thinking away in the school playground, where it belongs.

 

If you look at most contemporary end-of-year album lists (i.e. at the time they were compiled), very few of what are now thought of as the accepted great albums turn up in them. Mostly they are transient favourites, solid fifth or eighth albums by long-serving reliables, placebos to their assumed (by the all-conquering marketing and accounts departments) consumer demographic, rather than future classics. That’s because most great albums don’t immediately bounce towards you bearing grandiose claims to greatness – see this year’s overhyped and overfunded fashion show soundtrack masquerading as avant-garde art – but take time to disclose their innate greatness. They, to use an ancient term, grow on you.

 

Whereas end-of-year lists, or any lists when you come to think of them (tip: don’t), are mostly assembled for purposes of commerce. The assemblers are businesspeople seeking enhanced trade. Which is, or ought to be, inimical to the essence of what art, including music, is about. I have no time left for lists; I’m living in stoppage time as it is. Stop trying to order things. Embrace the delighting chaos instead. Recommence tracing that random pop map you conceived in your twelve-year-old mind and carve out your own, independent road, which in the end is the only road worth taking. Where, unlike school, there are no rules, as opposed to lists, the presumed necessity for which is something that is generally impressed upon the minds of children in school. And we left school a very, very long time ago.

BILLY JOEL IS NO BRITNEY SPEARS

 

 

Rockism was a joke. A one-liner. Race Against Rockism. Pete Wylie having a laugh with fellow scouser Paul du Noyer nearly forty-five years ago. Two seconds in the pub. Probably neither man thought anything more about it thereafter.

 

Not that an amusing bit of banter was ever intended to become the foundation of a manifesto. But there was no telling that to Stockport’s Paul Morley, who in May 2006 wrote in The Guardian or possibly The Observer Music Monthly (it’s over nineteen years ago; I had other things to think about) that: “Suddenly, you had a word that you could use to swiftly (sic) and (sic) yet fairly dismiss (sic) Phil Collins, a word you could use to explain why Wire were better than Yes. If the idea of rockism confused you, and you lazily thought Pink Floyd were automatically better than Gang of Four, and that good music had stopped with punk, you were a rockist and you were wrong.” The standard sort of thing that frustrated twenty-three-year-old men come out with, without first thinking it through because the latter is for dreadful old people, one of whom I, Paul Morley, will never become if I can help it.

 

I mean, why waste valuable Ant time considering exactly why or if “Wire were better than Yes” (the former did Document And Eyewitness, the latter gave us “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”), let alone what magic former Yes roadie Keith Levene managed to weave by recontextualising a few old Steve Howe riffs on Metal Box (as opposed to recycling an entire Steve Howe solo concept album about getting lost in a computer, much of which turned up on Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome)? The thirteen-year-old me of October 1977 loved “Wondrous Stories” just as devoutly and fully as he did “From Here To Eternity,” “Holidays In The Sun,” “The Name Of The Game,” “Complete Control,” “No More Heroes,” “’Heroes,’“ “2-4-6-8 Motorway,” “Turn To Stone,” “Black Betty,” “She’s Not There,” “Best Of My Love,” the reissued “Virginia Plain” and whatever else was in or surrounding the pop charts of that month (see my forthcoming Young Punctum blog entry for contemporaneous words on all of those). He didn’t realise that this wasn’t “allowed.”

 

Oh, and lazily thinking that Pink Floyd are automatically better than fellow EMI recording artists Gang Of Four is in itself lazy thinking. In 1983 The Final Cut was certainly better than Hard, and Pink Floyd did their best to look after Syd, making sure he got all his royalties, etc., as opposed to Hugo Burnham being summarily dismissed from Gang Of Four with a “golden handshake” because they wanted to look “good” and have hits. Comparing the two, however, is like squaring the Beatles up against the John Coltrane Quartet. They’re…different. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Entertainment – and why does it always end up being “either/or,” this tired old tribal game most people should leave behind in the school playground and may yet end up killing us all?

 

I certainly didn’t think “good music” (which really is nothing more than “music I like”) stopped with punk – consider that wording, because many people did indeed think it. Dance and soul music in particular were in great shape but since most of their practitioners were Black they were excluded from the “discourse,” which only seemed to focus on pale white males.

 

Somehow New Pop was deemed to have emerged from this morass, although the starting pistol had inadvertently been fired by Ian Curtis in May 1980. Many “post-punk” practitioners wondered aloud what the point was in carrying on preaching to the converted when that’s how you ended up. Moreover, the pop charts of mid-1980 (and indeed for another year afterwards) seemed stuck in 1974. Hence the need to go overground became a pressing one – if we musicians were serious about wanting to change people’s minds and magnifying the greatness and adventure of pop music, then we had to get ourselves into the main market square and show people how we could do it bigger, smarter, sexier and better than any of those miserable cowards clogging up daytime music radio.

 

It didn’t help that most observers conflated, and continue to conflate, New Pop with New Romanticism. These were two parallel but separate movements which sometimes overlapped but were on very decisive courses of their own. Not that it initially mattered because up to the summer of 1981 the Top 40 was essentially marooned between 2-Tone and Stars On 45.

 

But when New Pop really began to filter into the aorta of mainstream pop, things became better, more attractive and more exciting. For proof, look at the charts between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. We lived through that period, bought the records as they came out, heard them being played on the radio, saw them being performed on peak time television, bought the magazines (Smash Hits was colourful and smart, while the NME was thorough, persuasive and, in the adjective’s least hackneyed sense, eclectic).

 

We genuinely thought that we had never had it better. And we, as individuals born in the sixties but too young to participate directly in them, felt we were right to think that. I’m sure that if you were seventeen or eighteen in, say, 1966, you’d feel the same, and with hindsight you’d probably be right in thinking so. Our 1982 selves, though, were far too busy with the indomitable wonder of Trevor Horn’s remix of Spandau Ballet’s “Instinction” to spend any time on dozy old student favourites like Led Zeppelin or even Jimi Hendrix (didn’t stop me from buying Robert Plant’s Pictures At Eleven or The Jimi Hendrix Concerts later on in the year, though). That was considered “yesterday’s music.”

 

It was “our moment” which is essentially what pop music comes down to – that moment, when you’re still in your teens and learning about the world and other human beings, when everything absolutely and solidly clicks. The feeling wasn’t as strong as that when you were a child, and the strength steadily recedes as you “progress” into adulthood and other people and things begin to take precedence in your life – so you have to grab, grasp and celebrate the moment as and when it happens. Not twenty or forty years later as a repackaged and airbrushed memory, or memorial.

 

Nevertheless, you could tell when the New Pop anaesthetic block was beginning to wear off – especially as its cheerleaders decided, as all tribes do, to erect fences and barriers. That Quick Before They Vanish May 1982 top ten review by Morley in the NME was highly, if superficially, amusing at the time, but the gates were already being locked. In that piece Morley had an extended go at his colleague Richard Cook under the guise of a commentary on “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag.” Hadn’t the gigantic success of the latter been part of the whole point of New Pop – that uncompromising free jazz could be played by DLT on lunchtime Radio 1 and make the top three (at least for those who didn’t recall “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” at number one three-and-a-quarter years earlier)? Wasn’t that as great and decisive a clarion of intent as “O Superman” only being kept off number one by, essentially, Hatfield and the North?

 

The music press, as was their wont, fucked up. In the NME of early 1983 Pigbag spoke bitterly of Richard Cook, saying he was never interested in them as a group and viewed them only as a conduit through which Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago could get into the charts. On one hand, that was never going to happen; on the other, David Bowie.

 

But no, Pigbag – and Junior Giscombe (to piss off whom? Paul Weller? Paolo Hewitt?) – were to be excluded from the New Pop Bastille stormtroopers, in favour of wan, slender Scottish or northern English fellows. The NME and specifically Morley never forgave Gary Numan for topping the charts and not being Howard Devoto, and not in that order. A man who spoke little – because nobody realised at the time, least of all the man himself, that he was on the spectrum – versus a loud-mouthed Anthony Blanche-style blowhard. One serviced the needs of the music press far better than the other; never mind that the other proved, in the longer term, the more influential and “important.”

 

Still, not everybody was going to be invited, and therefore the point of New Pop became muddled and vague. The pages of the early eighties music press are filled with sneering dismissals of anyone who didn’t fit in firmly with any of the tribes mooted at the time as fashionable. Those who were adjacent to New Pop, as opposed to being New Pop fundamentalists, got especially short shrift from the movement’s champions (although there may only have been one), whether they were Duran Duran or the Birthday Party, A Flock Of Seagulls or Kate Bush. Meanwhile, those of us who hadn’t lost touch with our feelings mostly shrugged our shoulders and got back to enjoying the best pop music of the period, regardless of who made it or why they made it.

 

I never put rock on a plane above pop, or vice versa. My schoolmates, if they remember me from almost half a century ago, will recall me as a vocal cheerleader for everyone who was worth cheers. When poptimism came stumbling into view almost a quarter of a century ago, I wasn’t particularly charmed or convinced by it, and that feeling intensified when certain North American commentators began systematically stripping the notion of any residual charm or conviction.

 

Poptimism arose a year or two before its reactionary cousin “guilty pleasures” and as a first-hand witness I confess that it was a puzzle to work out what it actually meant or represented. Over time it became apparent, in practice as opposed to theory, that what poptimism meant to its London and Oxford-based originators equated with pop music that they liked at the time – who remembers Sunshine Anderson now without prompting? – and which tallied with their hardwired notions of guitar-based indie music; hence the lionisation of Busted and McFly, because they appealed to what was basically a Belle and Sebastian fan club mentality - I was there (hello, James Murphy) at Club Poptimism nights when the dancefloor immediately filled with Morrissey-type routines to the strains of “Where’s Me Jumper?” and “I’m A Cuckoo”; the writhing of overgrown indie fans in acute denial.

 

By the end of the noughties it had all curdled off, as had its parallel, the overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged inhabitants of Dissensus and similar who pretended to like grime but, as Greil Marcus had already done in the seventies – read his essay and notes on Sly Stone and Staggerlee in Mystery Train if you doubt me – were disgruntled at Black musicians going “bourgeois” (i.e. making records that people liked) as opposed to remaining “edgy” and obediently “other.” I clearly recall commenting on the Poptimists’ LiveJournal page in 2009 about how the incoming tide of new country music, including the band now known as Lady A and, by name, Taylor Swift, was going to come in and re-atomise pop. The wearied response would have shamed the Garrick Club in 1953. The poptimists had adamantly refused to move on from their moment.

 

“Guilty pleasures” was reactionary precisely because its central aim was to recast music of the recent past and “rehabilitate” those musicians and records which at the time were ridiculed, principally for the benefit of the streamlining music industry. Hence ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees were elevated to gods, whereas punk was this nasty and inconveniently adolescent stain on the wall, a remnant of youthful aberrance that we were encouraged not to think about.

 

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with the music of ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac or the Bee Gees, writes one who loved and spoke up for their music at the time. Their best music is some of the best music there is. But the logical conclusion of this brand of thinking has been to elevate corny MoR tripe over art, to prize trash over value. This is reflected in so many places today and not just in certain internet radio stations. Always Chas and Dave, never the Associates. Always Frank Sidebottom, never AR Kane. Always “We Built This City,” never “New Day Rising.” Always Scott 3, never Tilt. Always “Raspberry Beret,” never “Condition Of The Heart.” Always the matey laugh, never the cold revelation. Always the Wonder Stuff, never My Bloody Valentine (Hup finished just one place below Loveless in the NME’s 1991 critics’ album poll). Always clinging on desperately to the residue of “your moment” in your mind to hide the fear that you are going to die in not too long a while. Always being a child, never wanting to grow up.

 

Over the last decade, poptimism seems to have been positively downgraded, and much of this is the fault of poptimists. The author of what was considered by many to be the manifesto of poptimism in October 2004 was most recently glimpsed in the whimpering pages of The New Yorker defending supporters of Hitler. In May 2017 Michael Hann wrote complaining that the movement had become what it beheld, i.e. reverse rockism. It may well be of course that readers of broadsheet newspapers have little interest in the brand of post-Americana puritanical nothingness that only music critics seem to like (“why all this fuss about the Beatles when you should be writing about…Mick Softley?”). But Saul Austerlitz of the New York Times Magazine had already gone further in October 2015, when he proclaimed, in a tone redolent of Lord Reith a century before, "Should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?"

 

Well…yes. Because that’s who pop music is actually for. Young people. Children and teenagers. And I note that, in 1982, Paul Morley, who was then twenty-five, stopped writing full-time about music for the NME. He possibly should not have written anything about pop music after 1982 – there he is, in BLITZ magazine in late 1984, the time of Zen Arcade, Double Nickels On The Dime and the first RUN-DMC album – all out in the same week! – moaning about young ‘uns not being interested in the new Pete Shelley record or an Australian T Rex box set. Where did I put those Bix Beiderbecke 78s?

 

 

 

So there’s a really strong case for arguing that adults, gainfully employed or otherwise, shouldn’t be writing about pop music at all, or at least stopping writing about it when they reach a certain age because then they inevitably and invariably curdle into pub bores cackling about not “getting” Charli xcx (you wish, is all I can say to them). Or perhaps just go into writing about films and books like you always really wanted to do. No sin in that; I myself have reached the age when books are immeasurably more important to me than music (although I haven’t stopped listening). But just be honest with yourself – if you don’t get one of those new pop records (in small case) it’s probably your fault yet not even strictly your fault; humans age and that’s what happens. But the pop that’s happening now constitutes somebody else’s moment, not yours, and you have to acknowledge that.

 

Otherwise, simply accept that pop music is what it is – a biologically developmental form of music intended for developing young minds (“developing” as adjective, not transitive verb) and, mainly, fun. Possibly the worst way to approach pop is to regard it in the same manner as a book or film; witness the regularly depressing and I’d argue life-denying writing one sees in The Singles Jukebox, where various anxious observers with an overinflated sense of their own importance mark down pop songs like schoolbook exercises, complete with 3/10 and “see me” written in red ink, with writing so pompous, self-righteous, laborious and indigestible it would be enough to drive anybody off to classical music by just looking at it. It’s like having your records reviewed by your parents. Isn’t that what pop music, new or old, was never about?