Media Slag
July 2007
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This issue Thomas H Green froths at the mouth about good old-fashioned cultural conservatism
There was a feature in UK broadsheet The Guardian lately entitled ‘Meet The Future Of Pop Music’. The idea it put forward was that there is no longer futurism in pop but that everyone harks back to older styles, pointing towards Mika’s Freddie Mercury fetish and (the most excellent) Amy Winehouse’s borrowing of Motown tics. The article bizarrely holds up Simple Kid as one of the only artists who dares to stare innovation in the eye and queries whether it is still possible to create original music today after all that heritage since 1955.
Well, fuck ‘em, I say, of course it is. You know who’s to blame for any retro streaks? It’s nothing to do with Mika and Amy and all to do with the endless shite bands that sound like guitar music has sounded for about 40 years, the ones that get touted by every broadsheet and the NME week after teeth-grindingly predictable week. You know them – a bunch of dressed-down lads with nothing original to say. The people responsible for keeping the true futurists down, of course, are the very media themselves, the ones asking where they are. Most successful journos are just career professionals. As in any branch of work, those who toe the line and kiss arse succeed. Like every tier-system profession, journalism is innately conservative, ruled by those above who have worked their way gradually to the top with their tired old perspectives. What these top dogs are looking for is a comfortable relationship between PR, publication, advertisers, editor and journo. They may want to discover the latest thing but only as long as it’s easily digestible and fits the marketplace. From the none-more-angry thrashcore of Watchmaker, the most interesting interviewee I’ve encounted in a year or two, to the supremely delicious rustic chillage of Nathan Fake, it simply doesn’t come wearing a tie that says ‘sexy’ to those that run the show. The truly good original music might get a paragraph or two upon release but there s a denaturing conspiracy that eventually falls back on traditional formats that mentally middle-aged editors love – the likes of Razorlight, the Kooks, even better gear like Arcade Fire or Rufus Wainwright who have nothing in common with the last mentioned bands.
We live in the most exciting times for music in years but you’d not know it from the high turnover media. Writers, including me, have blamed the record labels for the firework bands that burn bright and burn out, but it’s not only the record company’s fault, I’ve realised, it’s the media. They’ve always loved it when a new band arrives before quickly moving onto the next thing but now, as the broadsheets stick their snouts in the rock’n’roll trough, it’s a day by day rather than year by year process. Take the example of Gotan Project. Their second album was OK rather than fab, but their two compilations ‘Inspiracion Espiracion’ and ‘Ya Basta’ are impeccable and they remain a band doing something rather different. But as far as the media is concerned there’s nothing going on – “Are they still doing that tango thing? God, they were doing that five years ago – where’s the story?” One wishes they’d look at the opera and say, “Are they still doing that Wagner thing? How two centuries ago.”
The truth is that the media will always love a traditional band over something that’s harder to recognise and pin down. I know what it’s like trying to interview some studio-bound electronica weirdo who doesn’t have anything to say for themselves but is creating some of the most exiting music around. Does it have a readily marketable label? Does it have an easy definition we can squeeze in to a headline? No? Then forget it. No! Fuck them in their guitar-centric ivory towers. Even now they’re sitting there pretending the 1990s was about Oasis, Pulp, Blur, et-fucking-cetera because they and their innately conservative predecessors a decade back hyped up some retro ‘60s tiredness while the rest of Britain raved on to faceless DJs and groups such as Orbital, Underworld and The Prodigy, music that was sci-fi innovative by comparison and also contained the vital spirit of punk. Ah, who cares. The internet is gradually rendering them all irrelevant anyway. In any case, there’s always been something cool about preferring more offbeat music to their cyclically peddled generic crap. I like to think so at least, in my own Ivory Tower full of twisted drugs and weird bleeping.
