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?
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