Rules Of The Game #5: What's Wrong With Pretty Girls

[koganbot]

Latest column. Comments welcome here.

What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

This intersects some with an article I wrote ages ago about Al Green's version of How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? - I talked there about auteurist ideas and genuine feelings and ideas that certain kinds of music come from the soul and others don't. Al wrote most of his own hits, and as a soul singer the default assumption is of authenticity and sincerity, but I think that is nothing to do with what makes that record great.

I'm not sure that thinking about class really helps us towards why the Beatles are revered and the Monkees are often dismissed. I think the idea that writing your own songs is important kind of started or at least was established firmly in the public mind by the Beatles.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

here's martin's tremendous article which he is too shy to link: everything they say about soul is wrong

i think to decouple class from contempt as per frank's argument you have to actually address the specific line of logic he uncovers in nathan's series of positions: which reveals reverence for the beatles as a kind of a red herring -- yes it's the quasi-grounding for the introduction of the "stand-in issue", but the actual issue is why is non-auteurship a shoo-in for the justification of a generalised dismissiveness

(bearing in mind when frank says class he doesn't "class" he doesn't simply mean what a simpleton marxist or a doctrinaire sociologist might mean)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

on other words, yes it's almost certainly true that the vast success and popularity of the beatles totally changed the game but why was the world-that-wanted-the-game-to-be-changed drawn to THIS reason as a stand-in for the arrival of "better" cultural value (why for example was it not spotted as contrary evidence that such conditions didn't exist within soul)? (or apply to elvis, say?)

the issue of the control of the means of cultural production IS fairly old-fashionedly a class issue -- one of the things going on here is a scrim of aspirational identification being projected onto the loved object, and elements that threaten that ease-of-identification being demonised

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Your first paragraph is something that particularly interests me, and I'm not sure I have an answer. I remember talking to a music teacher when I was a schoolboy in the '70s, and he was telling me about his music teacher ten years or so before making a big deal about the Beatles writing their own songs, about the sound almost classical skills on show, and so on. I have a feeling this might have been the first place in pop where a chunk of the cultural elite both liked what was being made and found their traditional way of discussing musical talent, i.e. a heavy focus on composition, found they could apply their paradigms with minimal adjustment and no great embarrassment to a big pop act - Sinatra, Elvis and so on were 'just' singers, and Louis Armstrong and jazz had taken their place a large step nearer that old High Art Music than pop long before.

On top of that, the general public were probably quite keen to latch onto anything that validated their love for pop music, that enabled them to regard it as something more than disposable crap, as something artistically worthwhile. The importance of composition takes a central role in this, as does judging artistes on their longer works - symphonies rather than short songs, LPs rather than singles - so we start getting more focus on the idea of the album, which had already been trickling in from jazz via people like Sinatra doing a concept album in the '50s, arguably several such (suites of thematically linked songs, anyway).

The authenticity bit that partly ties into writing your own songs and composing longer sets is basically the modern idea of what art should be like - it kind of kicks off from Van Gogh in 'fine art' (he is painting's Beatles!), from the modernists at the turn of the century in literature (Kafka is perhaps the iconic figure here)(and I hope I use iconic reasonably aptly!), and so on. The idea that inner necessity, a burning need that can't be denied by the marketplace, and so on, are what art is all about becomes part of Western Culture. It had already been applied to the tortured geniuses of classical music, and then to jazz (what's that story about someone asking Louis Armstrong "Do you want to be great or do you want to be rich?"?), and here was a partial opening for it in music (though the Beatles acted as if they were having the times of their lives, rather than being tortured, of course, at least until Lennon later on). This ties it all together: an auteurist view, sincerity, artistic ambition (most easily seen/shown in a concept album rather than a single) and all that, all towards the artistic status of a Picasso rather than the Monkees. Lennon certainly got that in the wide culture, and would feature high up in any poll for the great geniuses in the arts of the 20th Century (not that I'd vote for him).

I think all this makes it a lot easier for people to admit to huge admiration for Holland/Dozier/Holland rather than the Supremes, and maybe Xenomania rather than Girls Aloud*: the performers we see are regarded as actors moved by the auteurist writer-producers, like actors in a Bergman movie or some such, and of much smaller interest and importance. This seems to happen more easily with female performers: I deliberately cited the Supremes rather than the Four Tops - both were dressed and trained and so on by the Motown machine, both had their songs written and produced by the same people, but Levi Stubbs voice is credited with a depth of soul and passion that Diana Ross's never was. I can't think of any counter-examples where the boys were dismissed and the girls praised, which I guess is just the continuing state of the culture as a whole, rather than being much to do with anything specific to music.

* Sugababes are a slightly special case, in that they got big play for writing their own stuff early on, and that credibility boost has kind of stayed with them even when their hits are written and produced by Xenomania. Acts finding fame with their own material and then turning more and more to pro songwriters is something of a rarity.

[koganbot]

There are two - well, more than two, but let's concentrate on two for now - impulses here that combine to "validate" the Beatles. First, is the standard art classic cred, e.g., they write their own material, they are artists, they create masterpieces, etc. And the second is they write their own material because they are rebels and they are saying things the Man would not allow. (And the Beatles material changed as they [or Lennon anyway] became more willing to see themselves this way.) And of course the rebel is part of the image of the artist anyway, but the two cred impulses don't quite get along, and there's probably something of a counterstrain as the Beatles seem to be progressing away from rock 'n' roll, which could be seen as progressing away from "commercial pop" but could also be seen as abandoning working-class rock 'n' roll.

[koganbot]

But a crucial point of the class I'm calling the freaks/artsy-fartsies is that they were born in sin, that is; they were born mainstream, most of them middle-class. They all had to be born again as freaks, and there was the fear (quite justified, actually) that they could slip back to normality. And this is one of the reasons that soul in general, even obvious producer- and owner-driven operations like Motown, escaped a lot of the opprobrium aimed at "commercial" music. "Black" fundamentally meant not born in sin.

And of course the freaks' attitudes towards the working-class was very equivocal. Freaks actually came from all classes, and there was a huge biker element in the following of bands like Big Brother and Santana and the Grateful Dead. There was probably a difference among the kids who felt at odds with their middle-class parents and those who felt at odds with their working-class parents. But I do think most freaks were from the middle-class, and were probably confused as to whether "working-class" was a validating trope or not. Attitudes towards Elvis would have been quite ambivalent.

But anyway, Opposition To Authority (ill-defined though the opposition and the authority are) is much more crucial as a validating trope than is They Write Their Own Material.

Auteur

[koganbot]

Minor point, but auteur once upon a time being a term of art amongst the Cahiers crew and Sarris et al., auteurism as I learned it there and elsewhere is very much a reason for NOT dismissing commercial pop. Don't get hung up on the fact that the auteurists tended to valorize directors. It's not at all crucial to the concept that authorship be confined to a director or an individual. In fact, what archaeologists do in trying to make sense of ancient artifacts and what cops do at crime scenes are basically what auteurists do with movies: try to learn what the film/artifact/crime tells us about the people who made it.

The issue I'm trying to raise is what's going on in a subterranean and way when it's implied (but not stated or necessarily believed) that a particular class is considered capable of art and other classes are considered incapable of art?

Whereas, the thing about auteurism is that it can be applied to anybody doing anything, as long as there are differences. (E.g., what does it say about these people and their world that they fired their pottery in this way rather than that? What does it say about Britney Spears that she "apologizes" in this way rather than that?)

Re: Auteur

[koganbot]

what's going on in a subterranean and way = what's going on in a subterranean way

Re: Auteur

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Yes, but how many uses of the ideas of auteurism have stuck with that? It's kind of what I am getting at in my Al Green piece when I say that I don't care how much of the thought and intelligence was Al's and how much was Willie Mitchell's.

[koganbot]

The classes I mention in the piece are freaks/artsy-fartsies vs. cheerleaders and mainstream girls. And I don't mention it in the piece, but the basic attitude of, say, anti-Monkees people would be that the performers are people who can go either way, can be artists/freaks/one of us or they can sell out and be tools for the biz, and the Monkees supposedly chose to sell out. Writing vs. not writing your own material was only an issue because there was seen to be a class difference between who writes the material. E.g., the Jefferson Airplane doing a Dino Valenti song was not considered selling out. The point isn't that the Beatles wrote their own material but that they were seen as having social commitments that differed the British biz people who'd have written British-Invasion-sounding hits for Brit Beatle imitators except that they didn't know how, whereas Beatles and Kinks and Zombies and Stones et al. did know how. Of course, "class" here is a very equivocal term and the Beatles probably had to learn from folkies like Dylan and even from their own fans that they were members of a new class, and I think the Beatles were too smart to ever quite believe this. (As really were Stones and Dylan.)

I am in Connecticut visiting my parents and at the University of Connecticut Library about two miles from the house where Peter Tork grew up, son of an economics professor, upper-middle class. I think Mickey and Davey were showbiz kids; Michael was another musician like Peter. And the show and music producers weren't clearly NOT committed to the freak thing; Rafelson and whoever were definitely into experimentation a la Hard Day's Night. And at least some of the Brill building alumni who wrote the songs probably believed the anti-establishment homilies they put into song lyrics such as "Pleasant Valley Sunday." The thing is, the Monkees got outflanked on the left by people who understood the freak thing in their bones: Airplane, Doors, Byrds, Dead, Hendrix. And most of the garage rock bands were outflanked in a similar way.

The write-your-own-lyrics thing was a red herring 'cause it was never used as a critique of the Stones, who did mostly covers on their first three albums, and the Animals, who hit with songs written by the same people who wrote for the Monkees. And it was never used to praise, e.g., Neil Diamond, who wrote his own songs (as well as writing for the Monkees). The sound of the Stones and the Animals - hard rock - gave signals about the apparent social commitments of the people who made the music, put them on the hard left socially no matter what they may have felt as individuals. The Monkees, of course, went both ways, went hard on a few songs but did ballads for the little girls, too. So they were equivocal, ocmpromised. And the Beatles were very equivocal figures, actually, whom many considered to be pop sellouts for sounding pop.

[koganbot]

seen as having social commitments that differed FROM THOSE OF the British biz people...

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I certainly remember statements, I think from Jagger and/or Richards, that the way the Beatles were seen made them feel totally pressured into writing their own songs, so I think that period totally supports what I was saying.

You're right that there are exceptions: the idea of writing your own material was never all that counted. It seemed to me more that rock acts felt they ought to write their own material, or most of it; and this became part of what rock was supposed to be; and the quality was subsumed into the genre, so a band that clearly sounded like they were part of the same scene as the Stones and all that could get away with not doing so.

I'm not sure the Monkees went both ways at once on their first few gigantically successful albums - there is the odd 'okay Mike, we'll include this song of yours' moment, but they are pretty straight pop until they decided to play their own instruments and all that. Yes, some tracks are fast and some slow, but I don't think there was any sense that they belonged to different genres. Obviously they are an extreme case, both in outselling the Beatles during the latter's highest artistic rep, and in being so blatantly, publicly manufactured.

[koganbot]

The phrase "pretty straight pop" wouldn't have meant much in 1966. Were Love's "Little Red Book" and "Seven And Seven Is" pretty straight pop? Was the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" pretty straight pop? Was Sam The Shams' "Little Red Riding Hood" pretty straight pop? Tommy James' "Hanky Panky"? The Troggs "Wild Thing"? I don't see how the ears can do the distinguishing, either at the time or in retrospect.

I mean, if "Steppin' Stone" and "Last Train To Clarksville" are pretty straight pop, it's hard to argue that "For Your Love" and "Paperback Writer" aren't pretty straight pop.