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Tyranny
of the talentless
Talent, achievement, practice and learning no longer command
deference. Everybody is a star. Andy Warhol said that everyone would have
fifteen minutes of fame, and nonachievers by the millions are demanding
it as a birthright.
- William Henry, 1994.
Every few weeks in my office I publish an internal on-line spoof newspaper
(modelled a little on
The Onion) and in the last issue one of the headlines read POP GROUPS
NOW INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ACCOMPANYING DANCERS. The story concerned puzzled
fans emerging from an S Club 7 concert, convinced that the band had twenty-five
members, and only able to identify the lead singer because she was the
one ...well, singing.
What bothers me about this is how little I had to exaggerate in order
to nudge the truth into complete absurdity. Thus, in today's music industry,
the gap between the two is shrinking.
I'm not a big pop music fan (this essay will reveal a little about why):
I wouldn't buy NME or Q; I've only been to two rock concerts in my life;
and I have a small CD collection. But, from the lack of revulsion around
me, it almost seems as though I'm one of the few who has noticed (and
is alarmed about) the disaster that has befallen the top 40 in the last
ten years. Simply put, it seems to me that there is almost by definition
something drastically wrong when the most successful bands in the music
industry today are those who are unable to play musical instruments. No
small number of these bands are Irish
It is difficult to point to a watershed moment from which it all began
to go suddenly wrong, and to which we can trace the origins of the current
artistic debacle. I seem to remember three phenomena, however, from the
early eighties and the late nineties. The first is House music, which
introduced a beaty, often lyricless type of tune that would be a surefire
hit on the dancefloor. By the time I was in college (1992) it had become
Rave. By now it has spawned so many offshoots and subspecies (one hardly
distinguishable from any of the others) that talented singers or musicians
no longer seem to matter: their place has been taken by DJs, most of whom,
again, are unable to even play an instrument. Their talent lies in cannibalising
bits and pieces of other people's work, irrespective of how incongruent.
And so you wind up with Samuel Barber's magisterial Adagio for Strings
'remixed' so that it sounds as though it were composed by Underworld.
This kind of thing which would have been laughed out of the charts in
the (supposedly cheesy) eighties has become quite normal. Even popular.
Sky One's fly-on-the-wall programmes about the world of rave clubbing
(for which an endless supply of English twentysomethings with speed-limit
IQs seem available) will probably ensure for another while the ongoing
popularity of this kind of music.
The second phenomenon which helped to usher in our current era of bottomless
mediocrity is the influence of record producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman
(once monikered Stock-take 'em & Slaughter 'em). The cultural carnage
wreaked by the likes of Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan is
hardly worth thinking about. All of a sudden a pop star could be created
overnight by mere money, and not deviating from the winning number of
beats per minute. SAW even had a one-hit wonder by a couple of Irish girls
that was essentially their mission statement. The song was called 'I'd
rather jack (than Fleetwood Mac)', and I remember the lines 'Who needs
Pink Floyd, Dire Straits / That's not our music, it's out of date' if
only for their stupefying arrogance. Can any of you remember the Reynolds
Girls? Didn't think so. They sang this song, and it looks as though they
went out of date about three seconds after it exited the charts.
As I write this, Kylie is making a calculatedly raunchy comeback. Only
now she is forced into the humiliation of having to do so via the crown
prince of mediocrity himself Robbie Williams, who, I couldn't help noticing,
made quite a show of pointing his face into her cleavage when they duetted
on stage recently.
The third phenomenon is the cover version. Covers of songs were quite
rare in the eighties: the only one I can think of right now is the Pet
Shop Boys' 'Always on my Mind' a fast remix of a slow song that somehow
worked. In the eighties and before, the best way to do a cover version
was to select a song quite some years old, preferably not very well known,
and give it a re-recording that significantly changed it. Thus, the original
was merely the nail upon which the new version was hung.
The early nineties turned all this on its head. Cover versions are not
rare anymore they are everywhere. Today, if a hit song is released on
Monday, we may not be surprised to find a cover version of it in the charts
by Wednesday that sounds almost identical. Today, the point of a cover
version is to pounce on the popularity of a hit, reproduce it as exactly
and unadventurously as possible to limit risk, and thus wring the last
few drops of money from a money-maker. The result? When future generations
examine the hits of the nineties, they will really be looking at the hits
of the eighties, badly sung, and with three times more vocal inflections
per square inch lest anyone think a cover version was an almost exact
copy.
The low point in cover-version culture was reached with the success of
the band Under Cover, who released several similar-sounding remixes of
old favourites, including Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street'. Bearing in
mind that the proliferation of covers to this extent is a sign of the
music industry unashamedly acknowledging a vacuum of originality, the
success of Under Cover, though brief, was a worrying development. Remember:
this was a 'band' whose stated gimmick, embodied in their name, was not
to record anything new, but to recycle old hits by pasting on a virtually
identical backbeat each time. And we thought Hooked on Classics were bad.
People may respond to this by saying that this new era of awfulness is
not a separate phenomenon in itself, resulting from some kind of revolution,
but just an arbitrary point we are currently at on a long slide towards
increasingly lower-quality music. Some may even want to go one further
with a relativist thesis: since every generation of music fans seems to
revile the tastes of those that come after them, how can we determine
what is tasteful or talented?
My response to the second point is that from a lack of agreement on a
matter it does not follow that there is no answer to it. An objective
ideal of good quality music can still exist independently of differing
views on it. In response to the first point, there are two reasons why
modern pop music is not merely 'not as good' as yesterday's, but quite
different in character, and for the worse.
The first is that not only do the most popular groups not write their
own songs, they do not even have to play instruments. Thus the minimum
requirement for being considered a 'band' (i.e, a collection of musicians)
has been removed, and it isn't even a problem. Remember the Flying Pickets?
In the eighties this band had a couple of hits precisely because their
shtick was that they didn't play instruments: much of their 'music' and
percussion was backing vocals. They became a briefly popular curiosity
item because of the novelty of a pop band with no instruments. That novelty
is now the norm. Imagine if a member of Atomic Kitten was killed tomorrow.
What would the remaining band members say? Oh no, we've lost our drummer?
The second reason is the particular type of trend that this new generation
of nonentities represents. Previously, aspiring pop stars felt inspired
by the abilities of other pop icons: the incomparable talents of Jimi
Hendrix on guitar is just one example that comes to mind. The mentality
was: 'I wish I could play like that', an attitude which engendered a drive
towards excellence. Nowadays the reverse is true. Aspiring pop stars look
at the success (remember: success, not talent) of bands such as Take That
and say: 'If they can become famous doing that, why shouldn't I try?'
and thus the spiral of decline is set in motion. The success of talentless
stars convinces even more talentless individuals that they should be able
to do likewise. Since there are more untalented people in the world than
talented, such a trend partially fulfills the aim of making everyone a
star for fifteen minutes. Thus we see a whole generation deliberately
aiming below the mark of excellence, because they have seen it work for
others.
This, in fact, is precisely how Boyzone came into being. I vaguely remember
them years ago openly saying on the Late Late Show debut that made them
(thank you, Gay) that since Take That had become a success, why shouldn't
they? And of course Boyzone gave birth to Westlife, who can barely remember
which camera to gape into.
Westlife are an interesting case. They represent the absolute nadir of
popular music. If a pop group comes along that surpasses them for sheer
awfulness, it will indeed be an astonishing sight. Because of Westlife,
instead of hoping that things will get better, I'm now perversely curious
about what could follow them that could possibly be worse. Normally the
quality of pop music is a matter of opinion, difficult to make a definitive
statement upon. But Westlife's awfulness transcends opinion. It is as
good as a fact that they are terrible. They really are five individuals
picked from nowhere, spared a career in burger-flipping, whose emptiness
and ordinariness are so nakedly obvious it is jaw-dropping to behold them
as celebrities.
Yet consider this. They are the only group ever to have their first five
songs debut at number one. Even the Beatles did not achieve this (a useful
rationale to carry around in your pocket when parrying criticism). This
can mean only one of two things. Either Westlife are better than the Beatles,
or the top 40 is meaningless.
The latter possibility was precisely the issue debated some months ago
in the Guardian's sic et non section by NME editor Ben Knowles and Steps'
producer Pete Waterman (yes, that Waterman), also using Westlife's success
as a starting point. Waterman counter-argued with a number of non-sequiturs
and irrelevant points, culminating in the bizarre statement that his eight-
and ten-year-old daughters know more about pop music than he does. Ordinarily
I'd read this as a figure of speech, but when I look at the acts he has
produced, I'm not so sure. During this debate, Waterman stated that he
would have done anything to make Steps number one that week. I believe
him. For one thing, he seems to have shown no hesitation in sellotaping
them to the side of a Kinder Surprise egg. Even missing schoolgirl Sarah
Payne's liking of the band was used to keep them in the limelight. Of
course, since the Sarah Payne story didn't have a happy ending, their
involvement in it has vanished from memory.
It's all about money, of course. It always was. But never as nakedly and
embarrassingly so as it is now. The Spice Girls are not so much available
on CD, cassette and vinyl as on deodorant, crisps and instantmatic camera.
Can you imagine Mick Jagger advertising the Stones-Cam? Neither can I.
Copyright © Gary J. Malone,
12 February 2001.
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