Where Worlds Collide

A post on Harry’s Place compares the world of Blogging with the world of punk rock in the 70s.

In the late Seventies fanzines printed diagrams showing readers how to hold down three chords followed by an exhortation to go out and form a new band. The equivalent now is established bloggers pointing commenters in the direction of the Blogger Template and challenging them to do better if they don’t like what they see.

The growing number and diversity of blogs today does remind me of the inky, enthusiastically scribbled fanzines sold in record shops 25 years ago. That same DIY spirit mutated into an explosion of independent record labels which provided a way for new bands to bypass the approval of satin-bomber jacketed A & R men who had, until then, been the gatekeepers to record pressing plants.

Commenter Effra , though, begs to differ:

Yes, I too have often been struck by the similarity between blogs and punk music:

(1) Almost no girls or non-whites are fans. The performers aren’t very gifted and the music is technically backward (blog design versus MSM).

(2) It isn’t genuinely popular. (A recent chart of Britain’s Top 100 selling singles found not one punk track among them- not even ‘Anarchy in the UK’.

(3) It appeals chiefly to middle class teenage boys who fancy a bit of prolier-than-thou, licit bedroom rebellion: rude words (gobbing in print), vandalism and body-surfing (DOS attacks, spamming etc).

(4) For years after the brief craze has fizzled out, those same boys- now thick-waisted middle aged meejah nostalgics- fondly hark back to their little bit of revolution, and go on churning out books and documentaries about it as if it had been a major social trend.

(5) Disco and glam rock- the real mass tastes in music in the 1970s- get stigmatised by these aficionados in the same manner as the dreaded Mainstream Media are put down by bloggers.

Punk was for the Nathan Barleys of 1975, and Joe Strummer was a public school toff.

I find myself nodding in agreement with ‘effra’. I’ve always thought the influence of punk rock has been overstated, both musically and culturally. All it really achieved was to get up the noses of the cultural elites and frighten a few over-excitable Daily Mail readers. What influence there was on music was as much negative as positive. Just like too many bloggers it was deeply reactionary; a puritanical insistence that you weren’t allowed to use more than three chords, and any displays of instrumental ability were self-indulgent and decadent.

Punk burned itself out within the space of a couple of years; by the mid 80s corporate rock was back with a vengeance, only far blander and less ambitious than anything from the wrongly-maligned early 70s. I suspect the real reason punk is overstated is simple demographics; the height of punk corresponded with peak of the British baby boom, a decade or so later than the American one. Just like America’s boomers, this generation thinks that history revolves around them.

The ultimate irony is that today, it’s the prog-rockers who are the do-it-yourself artists, releasing self-financed records on obscure independent labels. And the music being release by major record companies is a sort of watered-down sanitised version of punk.

Time will tell if blogging will go the same way. Will the talented writers in the blog world end up working for the MSM they once despised? Will the effect of blogging be to make the MSM blander, afraid to have a strong opinion on anything lest they suffer the fate of Dan Rather?

“Octane”, as the name implies, is neo-proggers Spock’s Beard’s eighth album, and their second without former mainman Neil Morse. “Feel Euphoria“, their first Neil-less opus proved the band were far from a spent force without him. Is Octane as good?

I think the answer has to be yes.

The first half of the album is made up from the seven-song suite “A Flash Before My Eyes”, a superb piece of work. The album opens with a swirl of Mellotron leading us into the classic SB wall of sound; an archetypal rock opera style extended instrumental overture. These seven songs cover the whole range of the Beard’s sound, from atmospheric ballads and Floydian instrumentals though grindingly heavy guitar workouts to the symphonic closing section, “Into the Great Unknowable”. The closing instrumental theme, played on horns and backed by strings has to be the most memorable hook on the album (we’d previously heard it on piano, Mellotron and guitar). The guitar on ‘Surfing Down the Avalanche’ and ‘She is Everything’ is close to being the best I’ve heard from Alan Morse.

After “Flash”, the quality tails off a little in the second half of the album, with a couple of weaker songs teetering on the edge of being filler, although the instrumental ‘NWC’ and the hard-rocking closer ‘As Long as We Ride’ still deliver the goods.

In overall sound it’s maybe a little less ‘proggy’ and closer to mainstream rock; there’s not much in the way of complicated time changes, and no sign of off-the-wall quirky bits recalling Gentle Giant that we heard on their early albums. Neil Morse fans wanting to hear another “Beware of Darkness” will probably be disappointed.

It’s definitely one of those albums that gets better the more you listen to it. On the first few listens I thought the album was a bit patchy. On repeated listens, although some of the later songs still fail to take off, the high points more than make up for the lows. Overall, a good album, not perhaps their best, but far from being the worst either.

Over the years I have accumulated a vast amount of both Swiss and British N-gauge rolling stock.

Much of the Swiss outline stock from the likes of Fleischmann, Minitrix and Kato is still light years ahead in both detail and running quality compared with the available British outline equipment, even with Bachmann revamping and retooling their range. But with the amount of time I’ve spent researching operations in Devon and Cornwall, including several holiday’s worth of site visits, there’s no way I can abandon Britain completely, model-wise.

The problem is, though, in a relatively small house, I only really have room for one layout. I’ve toyed with having multiple portable layouts sharing components such as fiddle yards, but such things increase the complexity of construction.

So I’m intrigued by the idea of the layout “Doppelbahn” in this month’s N Gauge Society Journal. The concept behind this layout is to have the trackwork and basic landscape capable of representing either a British or (in this case) German prototype, then have two sets of buildings which can be swapped over. I also realised that in both the Swiss Alps and in Cornwall, the predominant rock is granite, so dual-use scenery might be feasible with a bit of thought.

It’s in the details where the problems start coming out. I have managed to come up with a trackplan, which, while it doesn’t resemble any specific place in either Cornwall or Switzerland, doesn’t look ridiculously wrong for either. But I realise that the complete station platform have to be swappable, since a compromise height between high British platforms and much lower Swiss ones will only succeed in looking wrong for both. Not only that, but I’ll also have to work out a way to make the Swiss-style overhead catenery removable, and the same for the WR lower-quadrant signalling.

Doesn’t make the plan a complete non-starter; if I spend my modelling time making the buildings, the effort won’t be wasted if those buildings ultimately end up on separate layouts.

Should have mentioned this one a few days ago: The results for Normblog’s The greatest songs of rock ‘n’ roll poll are now up.

Sadly, the only choice of mine to make the top 100 was Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” at 30. At least it was one higher than anything by The Smiths…

From Perverse Access Memory.

1. What’s the total size of music files on your computer?

Only a few Mb, consisting of a few free downloads. I haven’t ripped any of my extensive CD collection.

2. What is the last CD you bought?

I bought three CDs over the weekend, “Novella” by Renaissance, “Agaetis Byrjun” by Sigur Rós, and Spock’s Beard’s latest, “Octane”, the last of which I’ve yet to listen to.

3. What is the last song you listened to before you read this post?

That would have been the last number from Rammstein’s show on Sunday night.

4. Name four songs that you listen to a lot or that mean a lot to you.

I’ve recently listed my top ten all-time favourites; these four are songs I’ve been playing a lot lately.

Mother Nature by Mostly Autumn. I’ve been listening to this band more than just about anyone else over the past few months, this is their best song.
The Return of Pan by The Waterboys. A great song from a decidedly average album.
Bless this Child by Nightwish. One of the all time great intros; A choral chant that builds until it’s suddenly cut through by powerchord guitar.
Hysteria, by Muse. Just about the only ‘fashionable’ British band who I find not only listenable but entertaining; this is the best song from their best album.

5. Which three people are you passing the baton on to and why?

Scott, Steve Jones, Silkenray, selected more-or-less at random.

On Friday night, my brother phoned up and asked if I was interested in seeing the mad German metallers Rammstein at the Manchester MEN Arena on Sunday night; he’d found out there were still a few tickets left for the show. Having heard reports of the theatricality of their live show, I decided this was a show worth going to.

The support act were the four crazy Finnish cellists Apocalyptica. Accompanied by a live drummer, they tore through their mix of instrumental Metallica covers and original compositions with a tremendous amount of energy. It’s weird how much they made the quiet bit in the middle of ‘Master of Puppets’ sounds like 18th century chamber music. They closed with a manic take on Greig’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King’, a weirdly rock’n'roll version of a classical piece played on classical instruments. Is this the new rock’n'roll?

Rammstein preceded their set with what has to be the longest intro tape I’ve ever heard; something like ten minutes of Krautrock-style drone before the band launched into the opener, ‘Reise Reise’.

The stage resembled the famous inner sleeve of Blue Öyster Cult’s “On Your Feet Or On Your Knees” crossed with the set from an 80s science fiction movie; the backline spread right across the back of the stage, with the drummer on top. Most of the band started the set on top of this backline too before being lowered down on hydraulic lifts to join singer Till Linderman, who spent the first number prowling the stage below on his own.

Rammstein’s music matched the stage set; monstrous walls of guitars leavened by slabs of symphonic keyboards, topped by Till Linderman’s Darth Vader vocals. Sung, of course, almost entirely in German.

If the overwhelmingly heavy music wasn’t enough, Rammstein put on one of the most theatrical shows I’ve seen since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall‘ many, many years ago. With jets of flame you could feel the heat from, and enough fireworks for November 5th, spectacular pyrotechnics accompanied just about every song. During ‘Mein Tell’ (otherwise known as ‘that the song about the cannibal’), Linderman wheeled out a metal cauldron in which he trapped lederhosen-clad keyboard player Flake Lorenz, who he then ‘cooked’ by hosing the thing with a flame thrower. In another number Till himself stood beneath a firework, singing while covered in a shower of sparks. Then in set closer ‘Amerika’, Flake, having escaped the cannibal’s cauldron, spent the song playing while trundling round the stage on a Segway. At the same time the moshpit at the front getting covered by red, white and blue tinsel.

Before the show we’d all known Rammstein only by reputation, and hadn’t heard any of their actual songs. We didn’t quite know what to expect, but we certainly weren’t disappointed by this over-the-top performance. Even though it later transpired that he and a mate of his had made the decision to go to the show following a few beers…

Two things wrong with the BBC2 drama The Rotters’ Club. Firstly the stereotypically negative portrayal of prog-rock (Why couldn’t we actually hear some of Tales from Topographic Oceans?) And why was the train from Birmingham to London hauled by a split-box ‘Peak’?

Will classical music be the new rock’n'roll? Martin Kettle, upon reading a new book by South African scholar Peter Van der Merwe, seems to think it just might be.

But at the moment, it’s very much in the doldrums. In the 18th, 19th and into the early 20th centuries, classical music was the most significant music in western culture. But somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, classical music took a dramatic wrong turning:

At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory - often political theory - and away from its popular roots.

The pioneer figure was Arnold Schoenberg, with his theory of the emancipation of dissonance (which, as Van der Merwe cleverly points out, also implied the suppression of consonance). But it was after Schoenberg’s death, in the period 1955-80, that his ideas achieved the status of holy writ.

The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer’s lack of communication but the public’s lack of understanding.

Into the void came first Jazz, then Rock, which gave the public what they were no longer getting from classical music. The sorts of people who might been writing symphonies and operas had they been born a century earlier instead gave us some of the rock canon of the past half-century.

But now modernism shows signs of dying out, perhaps allowing a new generation of composers who’s music can resonate with the general public. Perhaps now the time is right?

Classical music’s second coming, if it is to have one, could hardly be better timed. The popular music that once filled the place it vacated seems in turn to have largely burned itself out. Here, too, creativity is at its lowest ebb since the early 50s. The space awaiting good new music of any kind is immense.

As a rock fan, I find I have to reluctantly agree with that paragraph; Rock no longer seems to be doing anything new, and is reduced to endlessly cannibalising it’s own past. While a lot of good music is still being released, it’s no longer evolving or progressing; I haven’t heard anything much in the past few years that could not have been released two decades earlier. The British scene in particular has become extremely hidebound and conservative, a complete contrast to the heady days of the 70s and 80s.

What will happen in music in the next fifty years is probably anyone’s guess.

Update: The Ministry of Information has some thoughts on the matter.

It’s very true that if one looks at the particularly creative bands of that period, namely prog/art rock and neo-prog, they are extremely stale now - that’s the very reason I loathe them. However, that only means it’s the wrong place to look for creativity, not that such creativity is absent everywhere.

Contemporary ‘rock’ music is evolving and progressing, but one has to step away from the tired rehashing of ‘classic’ and neo-prog - I’m not sure Tim meant to say so, but I agree that that branch is dead.

I wasn’t so much thinking of the neo-prog bands, most of whom don’t try to pretend that they’re doing anything new, and have just as much right to exist as trad jazz or rockabilly. And I love IQ’s last album.

I was thinking more of the post-Britpop indie-rock which has effectively become what passes for mainstream rock nowadays, which I believe has now become very boring. So much of it is locked into the four-chord verse-chorus-verse-chorus format with an occasional strummy middle eight that doesn’t quite have the guts to be a proper solo. This might be acceptable if they could come up with some memorable melodies, but many of them are pretty tuneless as well. Indie fans will probably accuse me of missing the point, and insist that the important thing about these bands is the lyrics rather than the ploddingly uninteresting music.