Will youth be fooled again?

young people ain't playing it safe, they're happy slapping old people! or posting at drownedinsound, nu-generation forums etc - from where it's clear that music changes people's lives.

this must be old farts corner! are you going to be grumbling about this when yours get to their teens?

there's a lot of ambiguity in that stubbs post, because he's *not* talking about capitalistically contructive stuff as alternative -- he's talking about "society-changing" stuff. he's come to the realisation that -- shockah -- the 60s counterculture did not end the vietnam war; similarly post-punk culture had few lasting achievements outside the narrow field of 'music' and 'the coutnerculture' which have done little to prevent all that has happened in the country at large. but at the same times he thinks ver kidz should believe the myth... the only question here is 'why?'

WOEBOT said:

David Stubbs:
No one would be dumb enough that the excitement pop or rock music can generate has magical, society-changing properties, any more so than can the buzz of a few lagers. Kids were fooled once, fooled twice; won’t get fooled again.

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Thinking aloud here, but is there really anything that has "magical, society-changing properties" ?

The Ebola virus?

It's demographic, innit?

Well what with the birthrate having been drying up in the western world over the last 20 years, there's not so many youth about now as there were in '68 or '77. And that's got to be a big factor. Kind of hard for them to feel like this awesome irresistible generational force when they're scattered so few and far between.

I think the second thing is there's a big cultural shift between the 60s and now. The "teenager" only really got invented in the 50s so in the 60s (and even 70s) young people were a bit on the margins of society - the old men were in charge and the "dad" was the powerful figure. But they're firmly in the centre now. Everybody wants to be young forever, and images of youth are everywhere, the rebellious kid is the one who is the rock the family stands on in the fables of today.

Young people are worshipped, so why would they wanna change anything?

And finally, Individualism, yo. It's "I'm gonna get mine" not "we shall overcome".

besides no-one's saying "rebellion" is necessarily useful.

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nelson mandela to thread

what was it wingco said in that piece he did on lexicon of love in the mm unknown pleasures booklet? something about 19 being an age where you care more about music than you do when you're nine or 29?

the best quote on this kind of thing was the one frank owen used as a regular meme in the mid-'80s - "music can't change the world, but it can change the way you walk through the world." yeah i'd agree with that.

once you get past 40, your attitude to modern music kind of changes from "ooh, wonder what that sounds like?" to "impress me then." obv simon being six months my senior might be the exception that proves the rule here, but i sometimes notice a tinge of "impress me then" when he's in one of his grumpier blog moods.

Rachel Verinder said:

the best quote on this kind of thing was the one frank owen used as a regular meme in the mid-'80s - "music can't change the world, but it can change the way you walk through the world." yeah i'd agree with that.

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Greil Marcus said that originally, at least the 'walk through the world' bit. frank was a great sampler, and remixer.


"impress me then" -- seems like a fair response at any age, really! you want to be blown away, surely? actually what's disconcerting to me is that i don't notice that much of a desire to be blown away on the youngers' part. i'm getting a sense that they're not expecting that from music, that's not their baseline demand. or perhaps i'm confusing the absence of blown-away/i've-seen-the-light responses with either A/ a declining faculty of capacity-to-be- blown-away (everyone knows too much in music historical terms to ever be ambushed again, or to invest so heavily in music, etc etc) or B/ a disappeared belief in very concepts of ambushing rapture/revelation/galvanically motivating sonic experiences as the crucial thing (i.e. the wearisomely never ending anti-rockist discourse, like a dog worrying away at a bone from which all nourishment and flavour has long been sucked). When in fact maybe it's actually C/ absence of fervent, blown-away/galvanized discourse as simply reflective of an objective dearth of music that would trigger them kind of responses!

i mean, it might actually be possible, scenario C/, mightn't it? there have been these dearth moments in the past, points where it seemed like everything was all washed up, in terminal entropy, beyond all hope of regeneration. the last one i can remember was when i was 22 so i'm not sure age has anything to do with it. (as per Woebot's comment, i'm ready, i'm willing, i'm able--the thirst for the blow-you-away stuff is still there. but recently the musical instances of it have been desperately marginal, way way on the periphery of the mainstream)

but yeah when i scan the music discourse landscape i don't see anybody exactly raving about stuff, getting all hot under the collar "mine ears hath seen the future!!!!" stylee. Do you? Tthe temperature on the blogs and elsewhere seems pretty tepid. i don't see people jumping up and down or so much as raising their voices.

nonseq said:

Thinking aloud here, but is there really anything that has "magical, society-changing properties" ?

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for instance, if this sceptical attitude is at all common, that would explain a lot -- because the belief in that, those magical, society-changing properties, the transformative power of music--that was precisely what people in large numbers used to believe -- in the 60s on a mass generational level, waning (only slightly) into the Seventies, massively regenerated by punk, continuing strongly with postpunk... and then fitfully reviving (hip hop; rave; grunge) subsequently....

whether that belief is a delusion or not, is a moot point -- in the sense that Reagan/Thatcher wanted to discredit the Sixties as part of their ideological project, i would say that coming to regard that belief as delusional is in some sense a capitulation .... then again one could say that the "Tankys" (Stalinists who thought it was righteous when the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary in 1956) you used to see at left wing events waving banners saying "The Revolution Has Already Happened" were also an example of non-capitulation, people refusing to adjust or relinquish, refusing to be dis-illusioned

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the Jesus & Mary Chain are an interesting shift-point, on account of not just the retro-citational music thing but the riots -- the riots at their gigs, which were a huge part of the buzz and hype about them. But they were riots without content -- they signified a desire to have some kind of rock-as-media-panic/scandal, rock-as-insurrection type scenario -- they were meta-riots in the same way that the music was meta-music -- suffused with a postmodern pathos -- literally point-less

and J&MC were the touchstone band of that year aforementioned (when i was 22 -- 1985) when things seemed desperately disparate and everyone started pining for punk. (wasn't that also the year of The Clash and Cut the Crap, of punk retrospectives in the media -- maybe that was the following year, 10 years after etc).

at the time i actually couldn't see the point of J&MC at first, the first three singles seemed really not-wild, like a very stylized idea of anarchy -- nuttin' going on in the rhythm section. a bit later i did fall in love with them circa psychocandy but then as a pop band-with-feedback.

blissblogger said:

i mean, it might actually be possible, scenario C/, mightn't it? there have been these dearth moments in the past, points where it seemed like everything was all washed up, in terminal entropy, beyond all hope of regeneration. the last one i can remember was when i was 22

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yes -- but that was at most a 4-year dearth -- 1984 to 1988 -- and even then there was stuff developing beneath the radar

you'd think that with the internet, blogging, mp3's, etc, that things would develop faster these days

but compare garage rap and grime from mid-2001 to mid-2005 w/ rave music from 1988 to 1992

or think about how quickly post-punk moved

how quickly pop music moved from the beatles through, say, 1995???

despite enhanced communication, things have SLOWED down

has global communication hindered local expression?

or have local communities been replaced by internet communities -- see kid kameleon's remarks on gutterbreakz

and yet are internet communities an adequate substitute for the local???

i.e., perhaps it's the local that gives rise to distinctive modes of dress, rituals, favored drugs, etc -- all the things that attach themselves to music and are necessary for a full-blown music movement

or maybe all the alternatives have already been indicated, if not completely worked out

The charge of fogeyism wasn't meant without humour!

But I'd still argue it:

youth rebellion is a fairly pointless pursuit. leading a "sensible" life

When you get to the point where you have thoughts like this you're lost to childhood and therefore lost to youth rebellion, the ideal, and a lot of counter-cultural activity. Not having children myself I'm tempted to argue that this worldview hits especially hard when a person has children, because they cease to be motivated by self-actualisation, and drop down the hierarchy of needs to be motivated by the simple basics of food and shelter for their family. How many artists felt lifechanging to you before you had a child, and how many after?

Thanks to reality pop shows like Popstars and Pop Idol certain things to do with pop stardom which were once mysterious are no longer so. Youth/the general public is savvy about the role of marketing in a way that they have never been before. So mystique is harder to achieve, because more media/documentary coverage of the dull life of megastars (waiting around, hard hard work gigging, endless boring soulless interviews) has brought everyone to an understanding that the music business does have mechanics, that it is possible for an individual artist or a group to achieve a certain level of success simply by being hard-working and without requiring any spark, any amazing talent, any wow factor. In that sense I think the public in general is saying 'go on then, impress us' and to impress people it's generally necessary to show them some magic, something that they respect and believe they could not possibly do themselves.

[Funnily enough a show like X Factor actually makes the public more hungry for genuine amazing artists because it shows them how even amongst tens of thousands of wannabe participants there is not one amazing pop star AND it also does the great service of showing off how rare it is for someone to be a genuinely amazing singer and also to write genuinely amazing songs.]

So it is harder to impress and yes I too think there is less genuinely exciting music at the moment; but I think part of this a hiatus while we all get to grips with the democratisation of music making and distribution via music software and the web. So your average punter has realised just how easy it was for Leftfield to make an average album track and 25% of them are probably capable of doing that themselves in a week with FruityLoops or Reason and a sample CD.

[I can't remember who said this but I read an interview with an electronic music artist 5 years ago who said basically people sat round playing with games consoles for 6 months before sitting down and making an album in a month in order to meet their 7 month deadline, it was piss easy.]

Because there is much more music available it follows that there's much more average music available. But websites like myspace are home to bands and artists that do become established like Feable Weiner and Pink Grease; look at Plasticman's Soundclick pages with his MP3 beats (http://www.soundclick.com/bands/6/section7.htm). Without passing comment on the value of these artists I think that as a public we will continue to learn how to process this high volume of tracks and perhaps the general public's critical analysis of the value of these works will get quicker and sharper. IE people will be able to distinguish 'audio information' from quality music, which will remain a tiny percentage of the total number of available tracks.

At the same time because the public understands the mechanistic nature of 'music' promotion and marketing so much better because of its demystification, I would disagree absolutely that the "turning-rebellion-into-money" strategies of pop culture is what has waned with time. In actual fact the current climate, as always, favours the musician-entrepreneur, which is an extremely rare breed (creativity not often going along with organisation, negotiation, thick skin etc) that has always been necessary for long-term success (bowie, u2, rem, linkin park, aphex twin, elton john, robbie williams).

OR perhaps, because the mechanics are increasingly transparent, where we MAY see the mysticism reignited is in the musician that is triumphantly NON-entrepreneurial, that eschews the money side of things, who delights in being unfettered and doesn't worry so much about being exploited by 'the evil business'. This is because in a society which is so materialistic and grasping, not caring about material 'just desserts', 'gettin' paid' etc is the holy grail for the average punter.

I have a feeling it was ever thus actually (Syd Barrett, Tim Buckley etc), having just spewed all that..... but I don't see that the dialogue of youth rebellion has completely evaporated, I do see that people are still changing their lives through music and by the way fogeyism is absolutely compatible with a thoroughgoing thirst for new music, youth is still capable of being transfixed and escaping to music by The Smiths and Led Zeppelin and The Beatles and scouse house.

blissblogger said:

when i scan the music discourse landscape i don't see anybody exactly raving about stuff, getting all hot under the collar "mine ears hath seen the future!!!!" stylee. Do you? Tthe temperature on the blogs and elsewhere seems pretty tepid. i don't see people jumping up and down or so much as raising their voices.

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silverdollarcircle has been two years of jumping up and down and hyperbole upon hyperbole!

simon silverdollar said:

silverdollarcircle has been two years of jumping up and down and hyperbole upon hyperbole!

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this is true, you're one of the exceptions ( (plus you're shouting about grime which is one of the exception genres in terms of shout-about-ability!) plus you're on hiatus at the moment!

generally though i think the tone across the whole music-discourse scape is cooler -- the most you get is a sort of quiet enthusiasm, very localised (genre-specific) enthusiasm leavened with expertise and knowledgeableness.

but perhaps what i'm talking (or even wildly generalizing!) about is less a deficit of mad-eyed enthusiasm per se (you do get some burbling, some frothing) as an element of claims being made, import being attributed. it's the enthusiasm + content combo that I don't see in any abundance

of course, there are quite possibly good historical reasons perhaps why people have learned not to do this, why it's reached this diminished-expectations state... but the end result of a lot of people not wanting to look uncool through being fooled is a general discourse-temperature level that's cool.

if 'the kids' are united um ah etc...

actually what's disconcerting to me is that i don't notice that much of a desire to be blown away on the youngers' part. i'm getting a sense that they're not expecting that from music, that's not their baseline demand.

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as a younger, it's my impression people (not internet people) still get juiced on music, but it's lost all connection with a 'counterculture' or with politics. partly because there are few political movements among the young. i'm trying to think of bands who have got behind, say the nologo/anticapitalist/fair trade thing, and have come up with: coldplay and plausibly black eyed peas. the artists who made anti-war records include george michael but to my knowledge no fashionable new york or london bands.
but at the same time *isn't* the 'political' angle of much political post-punk music a bit thin? i'm especially sceptical about the value of the 'meta' school, of the 'laying bare the device' thing. it strikes me that what happened there was much like what happened to art cinema in the late 60s: it 'got political', which was exciting, but also involved hella posturing of the worst (maoist) variety. obviously public enemy is another example where the fact that they made politicized music sometimes overshadowed the specific content of same.
it's terrible that musicians don't engage with social problems, or even let the world turbulence in, but on the other hand music critics are very quick to call bands earnest or sting-like if they go in this direction: radiohead are probably as oblique as they are because of all the crap u2 comparisons.
meantime *a lot* of the praise for grime relates to its ability to channel that turbulence. part of me wonders how much that would dry up if grime artists made more "consciously" politicized music, if their music wasn't thought of as 'channelling', but actively commenting on, grim social conditions.

henrymiller said:

as a younger, it's my impression people (not internet people) still get juiced on music, but it's lost all connection with a 'counterculture' or with politics. partly because there are few political movements among the young. .... it's terrible that musicians don't engage with social problems, or even let the world turbulence in, but on the other hand music critics are very quick to call bands earnest or sting-like if they go in this direction: radiohead are probably as oblique as they are because of all the crap u2 comparisons. meantime *a lot* of the praise for grime relates to its ability to channel that turbulence. part of me wonders how much that would dry up if grime artists made more "consciously" politicized music, if their music wasn't thought of as 'channelling', but actively commenting on, grim social conditions.

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your points are true and/or suggestive -- but i wasn't really talking about music in that narrow political/politicized sense particularly ... but more in the broadest sense of music as a thing that changes behaviour and mobilises people.... for instance that power to mobilise people could result in something that outwardly is depoliticized or only very obliquely political, e.g. rave culture... but is nonetheless quite extreme, it entails commitment and strenousness and fervour, it's a belief system.... there's been points where music itself has been so galvanising that it's become a kind of cause in itself, w/o need to attach itself to other causes

it's hard to say whether the political/politicized thing you reference has actually faded away, and if it has been retreated from by smart folk it's probably for good reasons (very hard to do it w/o coming a cropper one way or another)

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one exception (doubtless one of many) to all this is metal which is all about commitment, rabidly earnest seriousness, etc etc

to me as an outsider it's largely just a pantomime of inherited and played-out gestures and signifiers of danger, rebellion, going-crazy, darkness, anguish...

but not to those in thick of it, obviously

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by this point i'd welcome grime going beyond "reflecting" and into "commenting/critiquing" or even "preaching"

I think there's a problem of overavailability: that's one of the things that comes across very strongly in Rip It Up. How postmodernity in pop was very much about the simple availability of the past - many records we'd consider classics now were not very easy to get hold of in the post-punk period. Modernism in culture was about the moment, the unrepeated broadcast, a Now that was indifferent to its archivization. Now people increasingly seem to experience things ONLY if they are mediated and recorded. The fact that you know you'll be able to get the DVD with full production details in a short while means that, for instance, there is no real need to watch the broadcast the first time round - and therefore no possibility of it becoming an Event.

What is largely missing - and I really, really don't think this is an 'old fogey's perspective' - from Pop atm is that sense of Event. It's like thre's a direct, inverted relationship between 'techniques of archivization' and (to adapt a Badiou-ism that doesn't work too well in English any way) 'eventality.' Morbid attention to one's own place in history goes along with a revivalist approach to the past.

Part of the reason why I'm interested in goth is that it precisely has that sense of rabid commitment, of a worldview that determines how you think and behave in all aspects of life. (Not for nothing is there a goth/ metal crossover). Most of our interesting white students are goths, for instance. However, quite what the role of music is for them is unclear; most in fact seem to like old music. Strikes me there's a MASSIVE gap in the market for contemporary angsty goth disco.