K-punk on indie

TECH-NO 

Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is what people see - and hear - in it: I'm genuinely puzzled about what people feel they get from Indie these days.

To answer my own question: it's all about authenticity isn't it? The Indie fan rejects chartpop because it is too plastic and too manufactured; rejects house, techno, garage because they are too synthetic; he/she cleaves to Indie not because of musicianship per se, but because of what musicianship is taken to signify: authentic self-expression. In fact, and this takes us right back to Philip's original comment, this is a direct inheritance from lumpen-punk's ur-igingal error : its confusion of ham-fisted bluster with a pure expressiveness and its eschewal of all other means of expression beyond guitar-bass-drums. 

Who's interested in lumpen-punk now? It was a fundamentalist misreading: ur-punk was only significant in that it blew open a space for post-punk. And: if you want to talk about technique, well, it's astonishing how proficient some of the postpunk musicians were: Levene, McGeoch, Adamson, Wobble. But it wasn't just technical ability that made them unique: it was their (modernist?) refusal to repeat or recapitulate the past, their conviction that if you weren't getting new sounds out of your equipment, you had somehow failed.

And this is it, really: you can be a master of technique without producing any new affect . Conversely, you might have no technical ability, but a tremendous capacity for discovering new sounds, riffs, stabs... And that's what Pop - in the broadest sense - is about: new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving. 

[date unknown - 2003 or 2004 - the very early days of K-punk blog, which don't seem to be up on the internet - I found this in an old document of cut-and-pastes from his blog I'd made, as I did with several others blogs at that time. Lucky i was a hoarder, eh? With a presentiment that so much on the internet might disappear - already some bloggers had abruptly deleted their blogs.... more from the K-punk early archive soon]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mark is really talking about landfill indie here - the post-Britpop slop

But "Indie" is just as capable of inventing "new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving", despite its relative lack of technique

Shoegaze is a case in point

And it's something I have riffed in the UK talks last week: starting with the idea that someone at Dissensus made, that critics are sensualists, identifying the new forms of pleasure, the new intensities

As do musicians too of course 

So for instance, hearing My Bloody Valentine with conventional ears, you might think "this is badly recorded rock music, badly played guitar, with barely-there / barely audible vocals".

And this was a common initial reaction even from people who became fans - Patti Smith heard Loveless and she told me that at first she thought there was something wrong with the CD player - others have similarly testified that they thought it was a damaged CD or a badly pressed vinyl record

But then you realise that it's deliberate and that it sounds better than conventionally well-recorded, well-mixed rock

It's the new form of sonic ecstasy

Perhaps you need to be guided by the critic-sensualist towards that understanding (cf hearing jungle as more than just a chaos of rhythm, hearing Auto-Tune trap as not a cheap, nasty, over-used effect but as a emerging field of aesthetic action)

Overall, "indie" is an entire genre that could be dismissed as badly played, badly recorded rock music, sung by people who aren't singers. 

But that becomes its own aesthetic - a set of possibilities opened up by bypassing conventional ideas of musicianship, fine playing, clean production, powerful vocalisation. 

Musicophilia

"What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster."

"I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity."

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

Musicphobia slight return

“the things I detest, for instance: italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought. Then background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music. Concise dictionaries. Abridged manuals. Journalistic clichés: ‘the moment of truth, the moment of truth!’ Humility.”

- Nabokov

 

John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction  (1978)

Merdistes! Love it - I wonder if it is his own coinage? And who did he have in mind? 

Letter to a Young Music Critic

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptions

Nothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Because gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoirist-ic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it

Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. E.g. piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler and calmer in tone)

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff. Mark Fisher was good at that! He called it nihilation. For that to come off, though, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are decrying.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism - positive and negative -  has gone out of a fashion a bit. Or at least the younger generation don’t do it as much.  Music writing today seems quite hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and also positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artist's’career moves, what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written, but feels dry to someone of my generation.

What’s too often missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can lacerate you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and they produce work that is well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music. There should be at least a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, surely, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with this element -  listen to things and try to think, why do I like this so much, what is it doing to me?

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.

‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."

 T.J. Clark, 2026

 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ 

-  Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 

"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."

 - De Kooning, ibid

:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."

De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972

 

from T.J. Clark's critique of Clement Greenberg