I’ve been reading the biography of Will Oldham and thinking about behaviour and regret. Re-animating this blog, linking back to my old articles, and taking a moment to reflect on some of my early writing.
When I stopped arts criticism as a profession, around 2016, I felt like I’d said just about everything I wanted to say. Well, at least about music. I’d penned this grand idea about Fordist economics and the function of recorded music, how the two relate and how economics and manufacturing were central to aesthetic worlds.
In a report for the Independent newspaper, I wrote at the time:
“At the primordial soup of London’s record industry, a trio of businessmen loomed over the cauldron. One manufactured typewriters looking to branch out to gramophones, the other had a patent to make records, and the third wanted to put these products to market. The way they did it was to employ a popular contemporary opera singer of the time, Enrico Caruso, and record his voice and music. That way they would find the market to sell their products: notably records and record players, and crucially not music. Over the hundred years in-between the finding and recording of the music would become outsourced and new technologies would drive the industry, from cassettes to CDs and the rest. Through the decade long trauma of mortising digital formats new revenues have been created, revenues that are closer to the industry’s prototype than ever before.“
By this stage I’d succumbed to the idea that recorded music had arrived at the very place it started, as a pure instrument to connect audiences to products. A point from which it would struggle to recover, both commercially and creatively.
It all made sense to me. How industry erupted in the seventies. The investment and support that was given to exceptional artists, who were provided a scale and a platform that had never previously been seen. At the time I was listening to every Bobbi Humphrey album gorging on the rich instrumentation.
I was reveling in the wild heights of Black Sabbath’s ‘sabotage’. Specifically track ‘thrill of it all’ which to me sounded like a band standing on the shoulders of giants. And allegedly a quarter-million dollars of cocaine to see them through the recording sessions. Covered by the recording contract, determined to keep them in the studio.
Even people struggling to make a living were dedicating themselves to “getting a break”. The Philadelphia sound. The image of poor working class musicians saving up earnings from their factory jobs to pay the studio rent. Hoping that when they go in there, it was their moment to make a hit record. I think about that workmen like attitude and the industriousness of the bass parts.
I was thinking about the prog music and the cultural reading that punk found its audience because other music forms had become too highfalutin. Johnny Rotten once wore a t-shirt with “I hate Pink Floyd” across the front and since this narrative is too tempting to decline. Punk was out to dismantle the pretentiousness and excess of the recorded music industry, commercially and aesthetically.
This cultural event happened at the moment that record sales peaked around 1978. After that you can charter the birth of efficiencies and technologies. Small groups, the rise of hip-hop, streamlined productions. House music. Even through to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. While in the 90s there was a resurgence in record label spending for the biggest stars, by this point a DIY undercurrent had been established. Smarter production lines. Cultural insurgent practices like jungle and grime. Independent labels.
Today we may talk about the culmination of this decline. The struggles musicians face to feed themselves from the revenues of their work. A lack of access for musicians without financial support. The lack of support offered to new musicians by record companies. All of which drives bedroom music, recorded on a laptop for which there are countless examples. James Blake ‘limit to your love’, or the charming footage of Alicia Keys and Sampha recording ‘3 hour drive’, wonderfully published in the Netflix series ‘song exploder’.
I appreciate that the above is a cantor through the entirety of twentieth century recorded music, of disparate vignettes that shadow many bigger less useful truths. But the macro narrative remained: investment and support for new talent had been in decline and by 2015 this feeling felt terminal.
Once you have a thought that reaches the heart of something you’ve tried to express, albeit so poorly, tangentially, and even avoidingly for such a long time, the idea spreads to every inch of your body. What’s more, I found myself not wanting to write about music. All I was doing from this point onward was repeating, avoiding, or skating around this prevailing issue. Each article was an oblique metaphor that could sit within this grand narrative.
When I read back on so much of my writing – especially the stuff from when I was a teenager – the language is shocking. I frequently sought to scanadalise the crowd. To speak truth to bad music, and to make stupid jokes about good artists because their princely status offended me.
In the 7 years since, every cell in my body has been replaced by a newer one. I have drawn out the spite that vipered through me. I’ve cleansed myself from the press releases, from any obligation to produce content, nor any aspiration to make a living out of this environment.
Established in a new career to exhale my punk enthusiasm, I was hoping to find some solace in my own writing again. To use it as a tool to go deeper into the art I love. And to document how I feel through it, for anyone to see, swears and all.
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