[Irving Berlin] created what he had in him to create: the lyrics and tunes that went straight to the hearts of the millions who were like him, except they lacked his talent.—Wifrid Mellers
(Begins boiling all over again) I was watching that South Bank Show thing about fucking Blur—a moment of fucking weakness—and whatsisface, the singer was in one of his schoolrooms playing the piano and he looked around wistfully and went, ’(Solemnly) I have to leave this room, it’s where I failed A-level Music’. What?! Why fucking take A-level Music? What do you mean you failed A-level Music? Is there an A-level Music? How d’you do that!? ’(Double-solemnly) I got my Bach mixed up with my Beethoven’. Fucking Bach-hoven. Music’s in your fucking bones, man; it’s under your fingernails; you play one chord on a guitar and you’re a musician—end of fucking story.— Noel Gallagher
You’re better off learning some music theory. You’re better off having some feel for music that you don’t have to carry in your head, that you can write down.— Bob Dylan
In the character of the Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The four stanzas beginning ‘Yet even these bones’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it would have been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.—Samuel Johnson
Popular songs are the only art form that describes the temper of the times. That’s where the people hang out. It’s not in books, it’s not on the stage, it’s not in the galleries.—Bob Dylan
Forget the centre: the margins are where the signals are coming from. Everything is velocity and disappearance and mutation. [Tricky’s] Maxinquaye is a work of theory. There is nothing that theory can say that isn’t already embedded in this wily, uncanny text.—Ian Penman
And more: Samuel Johnson wrote in 1750 that ‘the task of the author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them’; Wordsworth wrote (and emphasized) in 1815 that ‘every author, so far as he is great and at the same time original, has had this task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’; T. S. Eliot felt by 1920 that it is ‘to be expected that the critic and the creative person should frequently be the same person’; and, after he and Kingsley Amis had edited an Oxford poetry anthology each, Philip Larkin wrote in 1974: ‘we shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end’.
The idea of the creative-critic, or critical-creator, belongs more assuredly in literature than music, certainly popular music, where expressing contempt for critics is more the done thing. Often smilingly evoked, as clue to its purposelessness and end of story, is the analogy that writing about music is ‘like dancing about architecture’; whereas both dance and architecture lie at interesting aesthetic tangents to music, dance its bodily translation, architecture a complex correspondence to the visualization of form. Such knowing disdain was not always so, and in Schumann, Tovey, Schoenberg, and Robin Holloway, there is a distinguished tradition of composers doubling as critics. Again, this is not so much the case in popular music, half-hearted exceptions like Patti Smith, Morrissey, and Neil Tennant apart (whose criticism was at best a springboard to the proper business of being a professional artist). This is a shame, and reflects several possible things: the bureaucratisation of creativity, in Britain at least, with certain kinds of music tied to arts councils and universities; a narrow philistinism in popular music allied to a romantic belief in genius; and the proximity of journalism itself to the needs of the marketing department. In my view, there is room for less professional creativity and for more informed debate over the direction and purpose of new music. Critics are in a very important position, denied creators, of being between text and context, context both as intention (production) and affect (reception): critics can wriggle around between those points and adapt their position tactically. Creators, on the other hand, are, in music rather literally, fixed in a position before the audience, with little room for manoeuvre, and often at the beck and call of the industry (something which tends to undermine their commitment to political views).
Wordsworth’s ‘creating’ of taste need not be restricted to influencing popular opinion, but can also attend to quite simple and material things. In the world of OK Computer I’ve inhabited, the websites, interviews, and audience debates were of relatively little concern; what I came to value was, of all things, and quaintly I admit, the ‘score’ of the music produced by the publishers. In the sleeve-notes to the album, Radiohead make a well-deserved and funny joke about reproducing the lyrics ‘by kind permission even though we wrote them’, and it’s a pity that, by extension, the name of the person who does all of these transcriptions is seemingly withheld. He or she should, as a first step, be given credit: the transcriptions are useful and dependable. However, they exist only as guitar tablature, and I suggest that some of the band’s efforts should go into producing fuller ‘study scores’. Not performance scores, note, though they could end up being similar things. What is needed are the following: bass parts, outline drum parts, piano parts where the piano takes lead (as in ‘Karma Police’), backing vocals, and other prominent guitar parts and sound effects (though these are often there already). The score would be a variable thing, sometimes with many parts, sometimes few. Piano reduction must be avoided at all cost. I also think that not too much energy should be expended on pitch accuracy. I can tell that the guitar of Bob Dylan’s ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’ on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is out of tune, and I imagine that Dylan or John Hammond were aware of this and preserved the mistuning for effect. But there’d be no reason to make a song and dance about its being anything other than an out-of-tune G chord. Notation became closely associated with ‘classical’ music and being taught to play or sing, as opposed to popular music’s more heuristic or improvised ways of learning. Noel Gallagher and Thom Yorke may not be able to read music; be that as it may, in describing a track, some aspects, not all, are best captured through notes and chords, and notation is the easiest way of conveying that information. The very earliest music that survives represents a hard-won human achievement, and it’s erroneous to equate the popular of popular music with the avoidance of notation. There’s still every need to learn how to read music: not being able to do so is another indication of the lazy, slobby aspect of computer- and tv-centred life, which also plays straight into the hands of scummy, dumbing-down capitalists. Asked if knowledge could inhibit spontaneity, Paul Simon replied that ‘certainly in popular music and rock and roll, that’s not the problem. The problem is people don’t know enough.’ Resist it: learn to read music and speak Welsh! Learn to dance the polka, paint flowers, identify trees in the garden, and speak Finnish!
The way a piece of music remains in the consciousness is a complicated historical process balanced between personal taste and an inherited sense of value. Each person’s life maps onto that deal: the records one first hears carry significance partly, I think, because they get played often since there are few competitors in the collection. The attributes ‘classic’, ‘great’, ‘recommended’, must prey on some people more than others: Nick Hornby’s splendid novel High Fidelity suggests that it may have something to do with gender. Nevertheless, there’s every reason to be sceptical of any such claim or description, made up as it is of these partly contingent factors—and even, for critics, an impending deadline! It’s worth remembering Chuck Eddy’s observation: ‘the idea of genres can be way more interesting than the genres themselves’. Rating and actually playing, estimating and actually listening, can be different things. The memory of how good Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, or was, especially when I first heard it, lots of times, suffices. When people declare Shakespeare the greatest author, they’re probably not double-checking Titus Andronicus, the sonnets, and Love’s Labours Lost before voicing that view. A lot of pop music estimation is based on that sort of ‘memory-bank’ knowledge: I doubt that those called on to rate records necessarily sit back and experience the thing afresh. Best record ever: click, Pet Sounds, click, Revolver, click, OK Computer. That too is part of the problem of the way pop music is written about, overly contextual, overly sociological, and, increasingly, tied to the demands of marketing and photography: there are in truth few ordinary pieces of writing that make you want to listen to the records again.
If earlier we asked ‘what is OK Computer?’, we now ask ‘what survives?’ Here lies an essential distinction between records and songs: records survive by being played, songs by being sung. When Bruce Springsteen says that ‘all popular artists get caught between making records and making music’, he’s capturing this basic distinction. More accurately, all people who make records get caught between records and music, technology and technique. In fact, we hardly need the adjective ‘popular’ at all. The key guarantors of a record’s survival, to date, have been DJs, either on radio or in clubs. Once the songwriter dies, then the protectors are other singers—the song’s ability to be ‘covered’ or ‘continued by others’ becomes an important element. ‘May your song always be sung’, sang Dylan on ‘Forever Young’, giving voice to the songwriter’s great hope. ‘Live forever’, as the Gallagher boys say. But consider ‘Adeste Fideles’ or ‘Stille Nacht’, two songs that are unquestionably doing well.
Death matters, and death’s matters too, since up until that point the songwriter has a stake, financial if nothing else, in insisting that his or her own songs be heard or played. The death of the song, the end of its copyright life, is an important marker. According to Dave Laing’s entries for copyright in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, it would seem that the record copyright for OK Computer will run out in 2047, when there’ll be cheap and cheery copies at your local newsagent. However, the publishing rights will continue to reside with the heirs of the five people listed on the sheet music, until seventy years after the death of, presumably, all five of them. Joke about copyright permission they well do (‘not waiving but waving’ in Christopher Ricks’ great pun), but in publishing terms, on the sheet music, Radiohead is a group of five decent chaps in suits called Thomas, Edward, Philip, Jonathan, and—no change—Colin. However, this is all a right mess, with those death-figures (fifty and seventy a lawyer’s lucky numbers?) applying only in countries with the requisite degree of concern, and the internet throwing the whole thing into confusion. Copies are now of a quality no longer discernibly inferior to an original. Sheet-music photocopies now have their aural corollary. One of the British retailers, HMV, through the last ten years wrapped its records in tight and annoying tape marked ‘security protected’ to dissuade shop thieves: Thom Yorke, in a splendid joke, drew attention to the irony of this given that so much larceny, of a kind, is now happening flagrantly in the virtual world.
Song or record? As the twentieth century drew to a close, there was useful sleeve-note comment on this situation from two old hands of singing and songwriting. For Bob Dylan, on World Gone Wrong, an album of covers released in 1993, ‘technology to wipe out truth is now available’ and ‘there won’t be songs like these anymore, factually there aren’t any now’. The songs he referred to were old, and he seemed to include one or two of them during most ‘live’ performances on his seemingly never-ending tour. They’re old or they’re ‘multiply timed’: some of the songs sound old as the hills, emerged from an oral tradition, were recorded in the late 1920s, issued by Harry Smith in the early 1950s, influential on the generation of folk singers of the early 1960s, and re-released in the 1990s. Dylan seems to understand that the survival of a song is dependent partly on its circulation, a process in danger of being erased by technology, perhaps against the background of a free-market industrial attitude that couldn’t care less. This is what fired Dick Gaughan: on Redwood Cathedral, issued in 1998, he commented:
I have watched with alarm the trend of pushing singers into only singing songs they have written themselves. This is simply the record companies trying to maximise profits from song publishing and has two built-in fatal flaws: first, all songs will die with the writer; second, the crafts of songwriter and singer are entirely different and skill in one does not necessarily indicate skill in the other. The whole notion is absurd.
They’re good and salutary statements, both, and seem to me to point towards the importance of the cover version and understanding what it is about songs that make them straddle time and place.
The specific question to be asked of a song is, in this sense, how coverable it is, or how music moves: moves us and moves across space and time. My guess would be that Radiohead songs are resistant to being continued: they’ll always sound like Radiohead. A tribute album called Anyone Can Play Radiohead exists already: if anything, the covers are (to my mind) more interesting when the tracks get messed with, usually as a transfer between wings of pop-music’s genre prison. ‘Creep’ becomes a dance track, ‘Fitter Happier’ is bunged onto an indie song, ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ gets ‘fucked with’ in solidly earnest, industrial-music fashion. On the other hand, there’s a tendency— Alanis Morissette was the first, so far as I know—for female singers to perform the slower, ‘torch songs’ faithfully: ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ from The Bends may well end up echoing down the subway platforms of the world. On the tribute album, ‘No Surprises’, ‘Exit Music’, and even ‘Climbing Up the Walls’ from OK Computer are all treated this way. Another interesting record is Strung Out on OK Computer, a ‘very Kronos’ project (only in LA) by a string quartet called The Section, the first violinist of which, Eric Gorfain, also did the arrangements. They’re good and musical: the systems at the start of ‘Let Down’ are performed with admirable precision. The things that cross over very well are—it may seem surprising—the sound effect sections (the slow interlude of ‘Electioneering’, for instance), reinforcing the idea that what you can do with guitar strings isn’t so far from what you can do with strings per se. This also applies to the motivic work (’Electioneering’ again), for something of the same reason. ‘Airbag’ becomes very quartet-like, a reminder that we were hearing motivic material in the bass guitar part. The chords and pieces work well enough, much as they might do arranged for anything: Christopher O’Riley plays Radiohead songs as a classical pianist, often taking the music, tunes, and chords, down roads where Chopin and Debussy used to live. The problem is harmonic-formal: why on earth would a piece of music without words repeat a verse section? More interesting is when the arrangement does the equivalent of pop-music’s genre change: on the quartet version, ‘Exit Music’, always liable to sink from its pace, gets pepped up by a ‘character piece’ rhythm. Really, to make songs work as instrumental pieces, there’d need to be harmonic or motivic development, in which case better not to make the record a tribute (or rendition) and more a reinvention (or appropriation): but then the question, why bother at all? Answer: in order to make something up, using the resources or technology available.
If the songs aren’t necessarily going to travel, then it’s for the records to last. That depends on people playing the tracks from OK Computer and, if the album is to survive as an album, still playing it as an album. DJs have been to date the great protectors of the legacy, selecting tracks for radio, presenting tracks in clubs. The time of writing is well under a decade from the album’s appearance, and so these are extremely early days. The great model to emulate is Dark Side of the Moon (1973). I do think that some of the centrality of the sound of that period had something to do with the relation, deep inside British musical culture, of ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ music, and this is something that Radiohead may have recalled. (Then again, Homer Simpson once said that ‘everybody knows rock attained perfection in 1974—it’s a scientific fact’.) A more hard-boiled version of the future will see OK Computer survive not as an album; in this version, all classic albums are idealized nostalgias of unities that were never the case. Radiohead splits up, someone leaves, and the band is invariably reduced to a greatest hits collection. In that scenario, much as I’m the sort of slutty listener for whom Pablo Honey was always simply ‘Creep’ with a recklessly generous number of filler tracks, ‘Creep’ gets again to dominate such a compilation, with OK Computer reduced to its singles, ‘Lucky’, ‘Paranoid Android’, ‘Karma Police’ (ending again with its noise rather than ‘Fitter Happier’), and ‘No Surprises’, possibly ‘Airbag’, ‘Exit Music’. The editing is already underway, for all I know, in Radiohead’s live shows, in friends’ download compilations (’album’, again), in the numerical indicators of the record corporation. I don’t think it is a matter of five-CD box sets and availability: until body technology actually makes us last longer, the desert island principle of selection will still hold sway.
Another argument sure to surface eventually is that OK Computer was rated highly, extremely quickly, because everything else around at the time was rubbish. It’s not that OK Computer was so good, more that everything else was so bad. I don’t think this really holds. But to set this assertion in context (and with thanks to rocklist.net for filling out a few gaps), in the appendix you’ll find the New Musical Express and Melody Maker ‘best of the year’ selection for an over-the-top number of years surrounding 1997. You’ll see that the diversity of the 1980s and early 1990s eventually disappears as MM dies and the NME becomes more focussed on rock music, and niche marketing seems to have become the norm. But something else that can be suggested is that a judgement in the present doesn’t necessarily survive: MM’s choice of The Young Gods in 1987 is only the most egregious case of an album that seemed great at the time but seemingly not lasting, Sugar’s Copper Blue for NME in 1992 another. The point is that, at the time, these would have seemed pretty sensible choices. In fact, there was even for a time the sense that many bands were actually influenced by the recordings of Radiohead: the high and expressive voice became a notable sound, in singers like Chris Martin of Coldplay, Matthew Bellamy of Muse, and Martin Grech. The music sociologist may one day wish to consider what this said about masculinity at the close of the twentieth century.
If indeed OK Computer is already a classic album then, boy, that’s very much a version of the word ‘classic’ glimpsed in passing as the videotape reels fast-forward. The interesting question about the demotic classic, the democratic classic—classic cars, classic kitchenware, classic albums, classic episodes of The Simpsons—is how we recognize whether or when any of this stuff is really, no really, a classic: when do we take the leap into saying that Pet Sounds is up there alongside the Sistine Chapel? Or that OK Computer lines up alongside the Missa Solemnis? Time, perhaps: the Beatles have lasted for nearly fifty of Beethoven’s 200 (though, unlike Beethoven, they’ve yet all to die), a mathematical proportion changing by the day. Scale, perhaps: the ‘dangerous bigness’ of the romantic sublime. Here’s an important assertion by Edward Macan, in a book essential for anyone keen to emphasize Radiohead’s leaning towards progressive rock:
Effectively tying together twenty or thirty minutes of music on both a musical and conceptual basis is a genuine compositional achievement, and a well-constructed multi-movement suite is able to impart a sense of monumentality and grandeur, to convey the sweep of experience, in a manner that a three- or four-minute song simply cannot.
Scale, length, prolixity: format, again. It’s worth emphasizing that albums, long-playing records, aren’t the whole story, and we tend to over-estimate them, much as one might automatically rate the novel over the short story, the symphony over the short piece. We then project the lack of albums back into a lack on the part of the artist themselves, which is potentially ludicrous: there’s no doubt that Chuck Berry could in theory have come up with the ‘great American novel’ of albums, but he tended simply to produce terrific singles. The overvaluation of albums plays, in what was for many years a ‘structural’ or systemic way, against black music and female singers. Even where goddesses like Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin produced what can retrospectively be seen as great albums (Dusty in Memphis and Young, Gifted and Black, say), that’s only rather to skew their output as a whole. You can almost smell the sweat of relief on the rock critic’s bandana when Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye finally get round to classic albums in the 1970s, crisp charmers like ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ and ‘How Sweet it is (to be Loved by You)’ mere B-roads pointing to the motorway ahead. This is a deep and complicated point, but it’s worth saying: classic albums are white-boy terrain, and behind it lies ‘art’ and some deep memory of what ‘classic’ could mean.
I return once more to the timings. Songs seem to me to have a certain rhythm to them which to an extent determines their content, and record formats don’t necessarily define what a song should be. Reviewing the re-release of Randy Newman’s first album, Ian MacDonald stuck his neck out and called it a ‘flawless masterpiece’; I might have saved the approbation for the second album, Twelve Songs. The latter is an album more like the collection described earlier in this book by Philip Larkin, with comedy, strange love songs, political comment of a certain kind, and, in ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’, an amazing cover version transformed through time. But observe these timings: 2’32”, 3’03”, 2’12”, 3’15”, 1’55”, 2’40”, 1’52” (that’s the cover), 2’19”, 2’40”, 2’08”, 3’00”, 2’15”. Twelve tracks, under half an hour (29’52”), averaging about two and a half minutes per track. Even on a marvellous recital of his songbook issued in 2003, and now including more extended forms in songs like ‘The World isn’t Fair’ and ‘The Great Nations of Europe’, Newman gets through eighteen tracks in 47’20”, still averaging out about just over two and a half minutes. (There are a few really short tracks based on film music, though.) The point I want to suggest is that the range of references, as well as musical styles, in the Newman album are vast. But they’re songs first and foremost, working through the material and not staying a moment too long.
Of course, Randy Newman and a piano can’t match Radiohead and a lorry-load of technology for sheer, visceral power: it’s the three-guitar assault which surely defined the appeal of Radiohead at this point. There was a problem for Kid A and Amnesiac, the ambitious records that followed OK Computer, in that their musical material seemed to imply a different, and possibly more visual, performative context (film, gallery) than the ‘stadium rock’ pattern which was the band’s daily bread. But the world of left-field popular music isn’t exactly easy to please, open to visitors, or welcoming of the converted. Debates in The Wire magazine in 2001 illustrated this perfectly, the charge having been led by Ian Penman in a characteristically terrific and vivifying review of Amnesiac. Despite having Yorke on the cover only two years earlier, The Wire appeared altogether to ignore Hail to the Thief, and the album was nowhere to be found in the copious lists of critical choice for 2003.
In conclusion I’ll predict, no less, that OK Computer might in time be a focal point for historians of life at the close of the twentieth century. ‘This is what was really going on’. You want to know what 1997 felt like? OK Computer: tracks six-eight. Pushed for time?— track seven.
These characters are the aesthete, the therapist, and the manager. Both aesthete and therapist are as liable as anyone else to trade in fictions. With the manager it is quite otherwise. For besides rights and utility, among the central moral fictions of the age we have to place the peculiarly managerial fiction embodied in the claim to possess systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality. But what if effectiveness is part of a masquerade of social control rather than a reality?—Alasdair MacIntyre
By the way, if anyone out there’s in marketing or advertising: kill yourself. You are Satan’s little helpers: kill yourself, kill yourself. Kill yourself, now. You know what bugs me, though? Everyone here who’s in marketing is now thinking the same thing: ‘Oh, cool. Bill’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a huge market.’—Bill Hicks
Lyrics used by kind permission even though we wrote them.—Radiohead
Plan X is sharp politics and high-risk politics. It is easily presented as a version of masculinity. Plan X is a mode of assessing odds and of determining a game plan. As such it fits, culturally, with the widespread habits of gambling and its calculations. At its highest levels, Plan X draws on certain kinds of high operative (including scientific and technical) intelligence, and on certain highly specialized game-plan skills. But then much education, and especially higher education, already defines professionalism in terms of competitive advantage. It promotes a deliberately narrowed attention to the skill as such, to be enjoyed in its mere exercise rather than in any full sense of the human purposes it is serving or the social effects it may be having. The now gross flattery of military professionalism, financial professionalism, media professionalism, and advertising professionalism indicates very clearly how far this has gone. Thus, both the social and cultural conditions for the adoption of Plan X, as the only possible strategy for the future, are very powerful indeed.—Raymond Williams
Top managers were enriched in proportion to the amount of power and security that workers lost: this is the single most important point one needs to know to understand corporate thought in the nineties.— Thomas Frank