two weeks pass...
three months pass...
one month passes...
Years & Years and The 1975 don't sound alike, but there is a strong structural resemblance between the pro- and anti- factions in respect of both bands.
The fact that Lex likes the first and hates the second actually quite neatly encapsulates all the differences between the two: Y&Y less indebted to rock or indie except in the broadest sense, and concomitantly more thoroughgoing in their grounding in dance music; Ollie's voice has limitations but does not carry a strong white Brit regional inflection; the lyrics romanticise the abjection of gay adolescence rather than the abjection of straight adolescence, etc.
But if Lex is the tipping point state in this equation, more broadly the typical reactions to each group tend to turn on a lot of the same dynamics - the way in which they occupy a space between good taste and bad taste, between "real" and "fake", such that even some people who are comfortable embracing (say) chart-pop will blanch at what they consider to be an objectionable blurring of these boundaries (though they wouldn't necessarily phrase it in those terms).
I'm reminded of an excellent Tom Ewing article from the dawn of time:
Proponents of Proper Music criticism tend to talk about rock and pop records being ‘real’ or ‘fake’, and the assumption seems to be that its ‘realness’ lends a patina of quality to a Shelby Lynne album which is absent from a Shania Twain one. I don’t hear it myself but if that’s your thing, fair do’s. On the other hand as I say I’ll take the transparent bogosity of a Shania over the veiled bogosity of so many indie rockers any day.
Anyhow, the real/fake distinction might have told apart the Monks and the Monkees back in ’66, but in today’s ultra-referential industry it needs refinement up a level. So we can now talk about records which are Real-Real, in other words which mean it for purposes other than making money off people who want their records to mean it. Depending on how cynical you are, this category might stretch as far as Nirvana on one hand and the Dead C on the other, or may not actually exist at all. It’s the easiest type of music to think about, is Real-Real, and the toughest to actually identify.
We can also, though, talk about records which are Fake-Real, whether by design – Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” – or by misjudgement – The Manics’ “Masses Against The Classes” – or by simply being trapped in rock history like a mammoth in a tar pit, like Primal Scream’s recent work. Even when Fake-Real records start life with the noblest of intentions, there’s a crucial gap between their desire to say or be something uncompromised, and the abilities of the people involved to pull it off. Bad Fake-Real songs never lose the unmistakeable whiff of the second-hand record shop: when I listen to Primal Scream’s “MBV Arkestra”, all I want to hear is MBV or the Arkestra, not the lumbering mess of noise which actually squats on my turntable. But there are good Fake-Real records – comedy ‘punk’ like Jilted John which twenty years on sounds easily as nervy and felt as the Buzzcocks, or the Magnetic Fields’ many superb forays into rhinestone synthpop. These have an exciting awkwardness to them – their cynical imitation of genre formulae feels arrogant and tentative at the same time.
Real-Fake records, meanwhile, include commodity pop and little else. But unlike coca-cola, the secret formula for pop changes weekly, and throwaway commodities soon enough become ‘design classics’. Chart pop is often described as lightweight – a more accurate description would be low-density, because it stays mercifully free of interrogation and interpretation, of the creative traces and authorial intentions that listeners love to cram rock songs with. With rock – the Real-Real – the life being lived through the songs is, vicariously, the artist’s, and not the audience’s. How could it be otherwise, given the Real-Real’s professed indifference to whether anyone’s listening or not? Pop is blanker, but more open too.
The Real-Fake is public domain and ephemeral, which is only to say that the media forgets about it quickly. But the D.J.s remember, and so do the fans. Stick with a Real-Fake song long enough and you might end up its only friend, all its tawdry public meaning now yours and yours alone. That’s why the fan clubs for one-hit-wonders are often more passionate and fulfilling than any Beatles or Stones fandom could be, because they’ve turned the tables, shifted the balance of power from star to consumer.
And finally the Fake-Fake – the Elephant 6 bands, the power-pop perfectionists and bands like Saint Etienne, who get called ironists when they’re really only know-it-alls. Fake-Fake is what happens when pop steps out of its context and into history. It tends to be remarkably enjoyable: its only flaw is its sense of propriety, of – as Josh would have it – “pop as a style” bounded by certain rules. This is a necessary fiction – the only rule in Real-Fake pop is an accountant’s slide rule, but Fake-Fake bands tend not to sell many records – but it’s a fiction nonetheless, and it accounts for so many groups’ entire careers having a slightly fusty, pointless air, like people whose hobby is putting ships into bottles.
Do I really believe that this taxonomy works? Not a jot – although it’s as good as any other system of pop I’ve seen. The only way to define pop is by listening to it, even if for a lot of people, pop is simply whatever they don’t want to listen to. Mutable, capricious, and cash-driven, pop – contemporary pop – is the most compromised, controlled kind of music there is, but it’s also the freest from long-term stylisation of the Wilco/Wynton variety, and its appetite for novelty drives innovation in the musical marketplace (all the fastest-moving scenes from the 50s on have been singles-driven, and so in some way working on the pop model). In the end, we need it as much as, and because, it needs us.
Tom's taxonomy was very influential on my somewhat bluntly popist thinking circa 2000, incidentally. But (and this is not a criticism) it doesn't cleanly apply to groups like The 1975 or Y&Y (or many other groups and artists obv, but stay with me here), who don't really fit into any of its categories - "meaning it" too much to be clearly real-fake or fake-fake but carrying too strong, too obvious and self-acknowledged a whiff of inauthenticity to be real-real or fake-real (which can be inauthentic but is premised on trying to obscure that fact). They've got an extra fake or real chromosome which muddles up the classification process.
So the praise and criticism of each group (at least here) tend to mirror each other in their opposition: haters say, "I see what this music is trying to do but it fails in its attempts, it is a hollow shell of better music", while fans say "this is like a lot of awful music but somehow redeems all those terrible impulses."
― Tim F, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:43 (seven years ago) link