Music

Feel old now!

economic crisis, Music, video
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This is thirty years old now:



unemployment is rife. The political and economic parallels between Britain in 2011 and 1981 may be self-evident, but musical reactions to today’s tempestuous times are conspicuous by their scarcity. Thirty years ago, however, there was one anthem that defined that summer of discontent. On 11 July 1981, the Specials’ “Ghost Town” hit the top of the charts, where it stayed for three weeks – the day before it reached No 1, rioting erupted across Britain. It was an elegiac portrait of the band’s Coventry home town, but its message resonated far beyond the Midlands, chiming with a country feeling the bite of Thatcherite cuts and galvanised into unrest by April’s Brixton riots. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf … No job to be found in this country,” Neville Staple and Terry Hall memorably sang to a backdrop of strident brass, haunted-house organ and loping bass, the groove’s eerie Middle Eastern flavour as unsettling as the lyrics. Meanwhile, to compound the disquiet, the video offered a road trip through post-apocalyptically empty London streets.

DO I have to say his name? DO I have to speak his name?

Music, video
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There will be a hell of a lot of Bruce and E-Street Band fans tonight who’ll be listening to some variation on the song above, in memory of the Big Man, King of the World, Emperor of the North Pole, Clarence Clemons, who died this Saturday due to complications from a stroke. Only 69 years old as well, way too young to die.

It was his saxophone, as much as anything that defined the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, always there in the background, driving the songs and sometimes in the foreground, making them. Rosalita is one of these songs, a concert favourite, unthinkable without the Big Man there to lay down the horns. Jungleland is of course the other one:



Sometime in the mid-eighties Clarence Clemons also had a rare hit without Bruce and the rest of the E-Street Band, working with Jackson Browne on their own album, coming out with a song so very eighties that it makes me happy each time I hear it:



Goodbye Clarence; you’ll be missed.

History repeating

Art & Criticism, Music
Published on 1 Comment on History repeating

W. Kasper comes to that inevitable point in the rock critic’s lifecycle that he has to bemoan the kids today:

The most interesting, fruitful aspect of British pop in the 90s was when it was, well, mixed race; if not physically at least sonically. Any innovations (however minor), and the sense that you were hearing something said differently, was related to this (Two Tone had a more important social impact than punk: discuss). Considering this, Britpop was even more hideously reactionary than many assume, which may be why Gorrilaz are more listenable and inoffensive (in a good sense) than Blur. The chronic social/racial stratification of British pop (since the end of the 90s) sealed the lid on its coffin as anything relevant. If experience is anything to go by, ‘the kids’ are now more starkly divided into ‘indie’ (white) or ‘urban’ (black), with all the class division that implies.

Really? I’m not sure this last complaint is a) true or b) different from any other point in British pop history. 2-Tone was only a blip and its most succesful band, Madness, wasn’t all that multiracial. If you look at it from far away British pop has always been about a few pioneers getting inspired (stealing) Black music and making it palatable to a white audience, followed by a backlash as it all becomes a bit too mixed: hence Oasis, or a few years earlier, The Smiths, or even earlier The Kinks: all self-consciously English bands as response to a pop culture that had become too un-English, too American and too dancable. Crossover has always been more rare than coexistence, yet the reality of most people’s musical experience is much more pick ‘n mix than their self indentification as “indie” or “urban” suggests.