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]

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.