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i went to an anti-bnp rally fairly recently. the thing that struck me was that the hardcore (Nf types / trade union types on the other) on both sides were two sides of the same coin. both totally disenfranchised.

― acrobat, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:01 (seventeen years ago) link

Did anyone see Stelfox's "Epiphanies" piece on the back page of the Wire this month?
"Real music listened to by Real people" - laughable.

I fail to see what the problem with this piece is, having just read it. Dave's describing a very personal set of experiences and feelings, detailing what it is that really drives his passion for music - he's not saying "all music should be made on a guitar or by authentic black peasants" or whatever. Yes, he confesses to having had a "very middle class, very white" upbringing and education, but if you're trying to accuse him of cultural tourism then his clear knowledge of the cultures he's moving in obviously comes from a kind of immersion that goes way beyond tourism.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:06 (seventeen years ago) link

I want to know more about the Stelfox Wire piece!

Dave talks about 'his unshakable belief that the best sounds are always found out in the world, where folks actually live. It could be shimmering highlife mixes played by Ghanaian taxi drivers in Toronto, dancehall and grime blaring out of bedroom windows in Hackney, a bus ride in Egypt unveiling the thunderous joys of shaabi, a first encounter with Puerto Rican reggaeton wandering through Brooklyn or the squalling dhols of desi tunes thumping out of 4x4s in Southall'. It's qualified by the next sentence 'But the best thing about it is that there's probably something similar causing a racket on a street corner near you, loudly and proudly telling our stories and saying that we're alive' but I still have the following problem:

where is NOT out there, where are people NOT 'actually' alive? If the qualifier is supposed to tell us to look in our own backyards and not become musical backpackers, then what does the first implied distinction between 'out in the world' and 'inside, away from the world' mean?

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:09 (seventeen years ago) link

hard fi on headphones in orpington

― acrobat, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:11 (seventeen years ago) link

Just to clarify: my only query is with the sentence 'the best sounds are always found out in the world, where folks actually live' because I can't square it with the rest of the piece, or with Dave's other writing. In context it kind of fits with his description of other musical worlds opening up his rural upbringing, but generalising this seems problematic. It could just be a badly written (or rewritten by editorial) sentence, though.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:12 (seventeen years ago) link

All he's doing, as I see it, is praising the idea of music as cultural goods rather than music as capital goods. And I'm totally alright with that. Dave has very different tastes and approaches to me but I think philosophically we're starting somewhere similar; we're both concerned with how and why people consume music, I'm just way more solipsistic than he is.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:17 (seventeen years ago) link

Actually the description 'the purest form of pop - real music that real people listened to' suffers from the same problem. Either he is making an unexplained value judgement or this is trivial (all music is 'real', all people are 'real'). If he means that he only likes music by people he perceives to be 'more real' than him, that would be a very interesting and honest thing to say, but it isn't clear that this is what he is getting at, and I wouldn't want to presume it is.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:21 (seventeen years ago) link

x-post

But what is an 'unreal' person?

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:21 (seventeen years ago) link

If a tree is playing bhangra in a forest and no one around to hear it, is it real music?

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:22 (seventeen years ago) link

Oh OK, that's always been a big motor in Stelfox's writing - it was one of the things that distressed him about ILM when he quit ages ago, he's never liked the idea of dilettantism, or the idea of imaginary communities (or even real virtual ones) as spaces where music lives and happens, at least not in comparison to street music.

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:23 (seventeen years ago) link

Even though all the examples he quotes are de facto impure hybrids with much dilettante input.

But again it all comes down to consumer's absorbing/assimilation of music > input of actual musicians.

Depends on how loudly the tree was playing the bhangra.

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:29 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't know but I'm very fodn of saying to (culturally conservative) associates who trip out "real music" cliches when faced with anything not from stock bread+butter rock origins that the idea of "unreal music" sounds much more interesting than "real music". They're all totally loaded terms and take in much more than just aesthetic building blocks, social background, and even the relationship between production and consumption.

I can agree that the concluding para is perhaps unsatisfactorily reaching for something meta when it should have got more personal.

X-post with MattDC, Tom and Marcello.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:29 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't necessarily draw that conclusion.

i read 'real music by real people' as an oppositional to eclecticism, dilettantism, the endless muddying of the waters, where everything is like everything else

I read 'real music by real people' as genre-purist. Not trying to cross-fertilize with other things. For me the best reggaeton/country/jungle sticks within its boundaries, doesn't attempt to become something else. it represents a constituency, cohesion, togetherness, sociality

I dont think it implies some people are 'more real' than others at all. I think it implies that reggaeton people are 'more reggaeton real' than interlopers and outsiders, and that country people are 'more country real' than others. its a constituency, a cultural community, its real, and the music that comes fromm it, and speaks to it, should also be real

i read it as wanting to hear reggaeton music done by reggaeton people, not outsiders 'experimenting' with the form, 'make it better'

Music ISN'T just music. its not in a vacuum. Music is people too

― frankie driscoll, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:29 (seventeen years ago) link

Oh OK, that's always been a big motor in Stelfox's writing - it was one of the things that distressed him about ILM when he quit ages ago, he's never liked the idea of dilettantism, or the idea of imaginary communities (or even real virtual ones) as spaces where music lives and happens, at least not in comparison to street music.

See, I think I agree with this slightly, which is why a lot of music that I love is solipsistic in itself (Patrick Wolf, Battles, Talk Talk, whatever).

X-post.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:31 (seventeen years ago) link

i had a period where i was more interested in unreal music than real music. It has its place. But everything i come back to, everything i love in music, i think of as as real music

perhaps community or consensus music is a less loaded term

― frankie driscoll, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:32 (seventeen years ago) link

though on the other hand Marcello is correct to point out that most of these genres (actually, surely ALL genres) started life as hybrids.

There is room for innovation, novelty, dilettantism. I wouldn't want to get rid of it completely. but by and large i like music that sounds the same and is easily defined, more than that which is individual and undefined

― frankie driscoll, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:34 (seventeen years ago) link

It's not an unsympathetic position at all - I mostly don't agree with it because it doesn't fit with how I like to live my own life.

What interests me about Dave S is how he feels how own contribution to the music - writing it up, hyping it, loving it - affects its 'realness', or rather how he balances doing that with not being an 'outsider/interloper'

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:37 (seventeen years ago) link

"how own" = "his own"

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:37 (seventeen years ago) link

I read 'real music by real people' as genre-purist. Not trying to cross-fertilize with other things. For me the best reggaeton/country/jungle sticks within its boundaries, doesn't attempt to become something else

yeah i basically agree with this, but this often metamorphoses uncomfortably into condemning dilettante listeners - i feel that the musicians i listen to should be confident enough in their genre not to strive to pretend it's something else, or at least when they are influenced by other genres, what they borrow should be assimilated into what they are rather than a pathway out of it which turns into a dead end. the best hybrids are the former rather than the latter - eg bubba sparxxx's 'nowhere', that borrows so heavily from country to such good effect, but it's ultimately fundamentally hip-hop. but timbaland working with the hives is a conscious attempt NOT to be hip-hop...which makes me think, why don't you want to be hip-hop? are you unconfident in it as a genre? are you ashamed of where you came from? etc.

but as a consumer/listener i think it's incumbent on anyone who is fascinated by MUSIC, generally, to be a dilettante, to dip into reggaeton and house and r&b and hyphy and everything, i can't imagine anything more cluastrophobic as a listener then shutting myself into one genre. which is why i approve of genre specialists but don't want to be one myself (though uh oh i am heading in this direction anyway).

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:39 (seventeen years ago) link

but timbaland working with the hives is a conscious attempt NOT to be hip-hop...which makes me think, why don't you want to be hip-hop? are you unconfident in it as a genre? are you ashamed of where you came from? etc.

Yeah, Lex, black people need to learn their place and keep it, don't they?

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:43 (seventeen years ago) link

but timbaland working with the hives is a conscious attempt NOT to be hip-hop...which makes me think, why don't you want to be hip-hop? are you unconfident in it as a genre? are you ashamed of where you came from? etc.

Surely the Timbaland thing is a result of overconfidence? Eg "I am the best producer ever, I can do everything, look at me rock out". Rest of world "please stop, this is rubbish".

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:45 (seventeen years ago) link

Timbaland/Hives is admittedly the equivalent of Nile Rodgers/Duran Duran in '86 - producer long since past their peak/doing it for the money - but he's pop and avant-pop before he's hip hop. Given the generally miserable state of current hip hop it's perhaps just as well.

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:45 (seventeen years ago) link

Marcello that is such half arsed sub-C4rm0dism even when not directed at THE LEX of all people who would hardly recognise making a rock record as 'bettering oneself' or whatever cobblers this argument is about again.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:47 (seventeen years ago) link

I agree with MattS there, BUT Timbaland's oft voiced fondness for Coldplay suggests that he may view rock as some kind of superior form.

X-posts.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:47 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't think he views rock as a superior form - but the kind of sweeping gestural lighter-waving emotionalism of Coldplay is something his own music has generally not been able to do so I can see why he responds to that, or is at least curious about it.

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:49 (seventeen years ago) link

He does it very well on the JT album! Better than Coldplay do at any rate.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:51 (seventeen years ago) link

Good point! Maybe that came out of his study of Coldplay though.

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:51 (seventeen years ago) link

maybe timba perhaps not the best example? actually a good example would be the press release i got about the new digitalism album - basically went on and on about how, yeah, they tore up dancefloors with 'zdarlight' et al, but what they really wanted was to be a ROCK BAND.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:52 (seventeen years ago) link

Haven't they learned from past ignominious failures like Jesus Jones and the Klaxons? All speed into the future but hey we still want to write songs like the Kinks in '65 'cos we're eclectic/need that all important Radio 2 airplay.

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:53 (seventeen years ago) link

Good point! Maybe that came out of his study of Coldplay though.

timba's been doing it for ages! continuum goes from brandy's afrodisiac through a couple of kiley dean songs through the new nelly furtado ballads through, yes, the justin album. and yes it's all come out of his study of coldplay, from the samples and namechecks on the brandy album to working with chris martin himself on the furtado album.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:55 (seventeen years ago) link

the justin album is probably the worst timba-does-coldplay material yet (though it's been a v successful sound for him generally i think)

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:56 (seventeen years ago) link

Anyway here's where I don't agree with Stelfox (huge apologies to Dave if he does read this for using him as a straw man).

My model of liking music: there is the music, and there is my experience of the music - which is necessarily influenced by what I understand of the context of the music, its provenance etc. If I decide that I only want to hear non-eclectic or 'community' or 'real' music, that's an aesthetic and possibly an ethical choice, but it doesn't change the music/experience flow.

My understanding of Dave is that he goes further though by including someone *else's* experience of the music as a defining factor in his response to it - the 'real people' who listen to the 'real music'. And I feel sometimes he wants those experiences (as he understands them) to override and overwrite his own. The anthropological approach to music has a self-erasing component which I just don't feel comfortable with.

― Groke, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 10:59 (seventeen years ago) link

i read 'real music by real people' as an oppositional to eclecticism, dilettantism, the endless muddying of the waters, where everything is like everything else

I read 'real music by real people' as genre-purist. Not trying to cross-fertilize with other things. For me the best reggaeton/country/jungle sticks within its boundaries, doesn't attempt to become something else. it represents a constituency, cohesion, togetherness, sociality

I understand where FD is coming from here - the kind of non-committal bland global broth which usually arises, as opposed to the natural societal evolution of genres, e.g. Parker doubling the tempo in '39 just because he felt like it. Though on many occasions it only takes one strange, distant accident to change things, e.g. Elvis wanting to sound like Dean Martin for his mum and inadvertently inventing something else in the process.

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:02 (seventeen years ago) link

frankie are you gareth?

First paragraph from Lex re bubba sparxx/timbaland pretty much accords with my view on purism vs dilettantism, at least in music production. That said Lex youre critical rupture w/r/t justin seems misguided. I prefer the works of the younger lex on this topic.

The choice between purism vs dilettantism as a listener seems to me like an imaginary one - only dilettantes have this debate, and what they're debating is different forms of dilettantism.

― Tim F, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:03 (seventeen years ago) link

Tim OTM.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:09 (seventeen years ago) link

i don't know much about stelfox, so is his position here coming from a "reactionary" place i.e. "know yr place" or something more progressive i.e. respecting and understanding other cultures? also tieing in with nick's stuff up thread, is his point perhaps about taking music outside of economic consumption, celebrating music which seems to have functions above generating profits?

― acrobat, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:41 (seventeen years ago) link

also i haven't actually read the article

― acrobat, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:42 (seventeen years ago) link

i still remain to be convinced that 'virtual communities' are anything more than a representation of disassociativeness and anomie

take off the pegs and you have to throw your coat on the floor

― frankie driscoll, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:47 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't know, maybe I do have more of a problem with this than other people seem to, but by 'problem' I mean 'I am intrigued' rather than 'I must protest'.

To me, it looks as if Dave is saying 'real music is elsewhere' and 'real people are elsewhere'. This implies that the critical intellectual or whatever you want to call him / her can only look from the outside at real life -- as if the function of being the observer who reports detaches you from life as it is lived, music as it is listened to. Now, I actually AGREE with this part of it: the one thing I cannot be when I write about music (or listen to it, pretty much) is un-selfconscious.

But it seems a partial argument. I am detached from life = I can observe it, or observing life detaches me from it: we need to go one step further, otherwise we risk implying that the 'real people' aren't themselves observers of their lives, or reflective and critical listeners.

(I don't think DS does mean this, it would be an unwarranted assumption on the basis of his piece which foregrounds his own point of view rather than making any grander claims, i.e. we could reasonably say that other people appear real to him.)

So the further step is to say that the other people aren't real either, because they are also critical/reflective listeners. Which doesn't mean 'OMG nothing is real' just that after we think the problem through, the difference between 'real' and 'not real' which seemed substantial at one point, can no longer be treated as such. But obviously the experience of other people's experience seeming 'realer' than one's own is itself real: this is where a useful Hegelian distinction comes in, and we might say that although it is real (I feel it, my senses don't deceive me) it is not actual (since feeling it implies a partial view of the situation, whereas if I could see it from the outside (which of course I can't, I can only conceive of this position rationally) I would see my feeling in perspective). Blimey, eh!

I think it's an interesting piece because it explores one side of this movement; I think it's (minor) weakness is in not completely following the dialectic through.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:58 (seventeen years ago) link

i really want to read this piece...

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 11:59 (seventeen years ago) link

it just makes me want to dig out the Pirosmani camel pic

― Ronan, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:02 (seventeen years ago) link

Stelfox is very much about respecting and understanding other cultures, NOT "know your place" (which is what my very old misunderstood point re; Chris Martin was - he doens't "understand rock", and thus should either learn about it or leave it alone [only his success suggests he does understand it, in another way, obv.]).

I was thinking while out for lunch about the nature of the anthropologist - no matter how long the anthropologist spends ensconsed in an "other" tribe, how close the middle class ragga fan gets to ragga culture, he is ALWAYS observing as long as he is reporting back to whence he came, and thus is still disassociated in much the manner of the virtual-community dilletente, if not as solipsistic.

Triple x-post.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:03 (seventeen years ago) link

To me, it looks as if Dave is saying 'real music is elsewhere' and 'real people are elsewhere'.

I think rather than "elsewhere" he's saying it's "everywhere" if we just look around a bit more.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:07 (seventeen years ago) link

I think that's what he wants to say! What he actually says is 'out in the world' (which must imply 'as opposed to in here'). The 'street corner near you' thing says 'everywhere'.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:09 (seventeen years ago) link

Of course, I also think he's wrong because the music on the street corners near me is The Proclaimers, and they're shit.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:10 (seventeen years ago) link

sorry Leith.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:10 (seventeen years ago) link

Don't hurt me when I go out to pick up a can of juice in a minute.

― byebyepride, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:10 (seventeen years ago) link

You don't even wanna know what the music on the corner is here; my office is in the campus of Exeter University.

― Scik Mouthy, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:12 (seventeen years ago) link

Excellent post byebyepride - the longer one further up I mean.

I was thinking some of the same things about the "realness" of other people's experience - how it seems more real because we don't witness people reflecting on their enjoyment, feeling doubts about what they like and why...

― Tim F, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:13 (seventeen years ago) link

Bonus £5 to anyone who hears any music championed in The Wire on any street corner.

― Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 12:13 (seventeen years ago) link

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