Relics from a deadly decade “the 80s at their best amounted to a few Madonna singles and the Smiths’ solipsistic neuroses. The decade simply hasn’t weathered well”: the biggest-selling musical style internationally is club-oriented dance music. The biggest-selling style in the USA is hip-hop. Both these styles had their roots in the late 70s, but flowered creatively and commercially in the 80s. Like them or not, and I’m sure a sad old punk like Caroline Sullivan doesn’t, but it’s apallingly lazy, with that in mind, to reduce the 1980s to a few synthpop bands with haircuts which look funny now.
All articles on 1980s music come down to one iconic video: Duran Duran, on a yacht, doing “Rio”. I can sympathise with the idea that when rich pop stars flaunt their wealth they tend to do it in crass and tasteless ways, but it’s hypocritical for journalists like Sullivan to pick on Duran Duran and not on the monstrous ostentation of, say, the Stones, or Noel Gallagher’s mod-target bathtub. Conspicuous consumption in pop wasn’t confined to the 80s.
And anyway, when I recently saw the video in full, I was amazed: it was obviously a joke, a self-parody. Everyone remembers Simon Le Bon on his yacht, nobody remembers him falling into the sea after striking his windswept pose. And one of the band is shot drinking a cocktail underwater, for goodness’ sake - this is a band taking the piss, not flaunting it! But I forgot, that can’t be the case: irony in pop was invented with Beck, and Duran Duran were thick Midlanders. How stupid of me.
Would they have preferred To Rococo Rot?: “She said that if the orchestra had “known more about the many movements in modern music and pop music, they certainly would not have co-operated with the Scorpions” “. Will symphony orchestras never learn?
MY BLOODY VALENTINE
So why has it taken Kevin Shields so long to make a follow up to Loveless, eh? It’s not as if he doesn’t have the time, seeing as he’s gallivanting about the world lending a touch of gutted-whale noize cred to Bobby Gillespie’s radical-chic pantomime. In fact his current Screamular employment suggests mostly that Island have lost patience with his self-indulgent delay tactics and cut off his cashflow: no more tooling around in purpose-built home studios for you, Mr. Shields! “Great!” think the MBV-lovin’ kids, “Now he’ll have to make a new record!”. Well, um, no. Shields is the Clapton of the weird-sound crew, obviously happy as a pig in shit to go round the world pumping out ‘contributions’ (i.e. noise) and ‘remixes’ (i.e. noise) on other people’s records, happily resting on the enormous piles of laurels critics have seen fit to garland him with. And if the implied self-comparison to Sun Ra is anything to go by, he’s as arrogant as Clapton, too.
Or maybe he’s the Derrick May of indie rock, never making a new record because he doesn’t think we’re worth it. It’s not that we’re not worth it, though, it’s that a new MBV record wouldn’t be worth having anyway. Because Loveless is, in essence, a novelty album, a sound-effects record with ideas above its station. Wow, here’s a crazy noise! Wow, here it is again, and so on with rapidly diminishing returns. (Though we should be thankful even for that: as a quick listen to the wretched warblings on Isn’t Anything indicate, you wouldn’t want to listen to MBV for the songs). The appeal of Loveless is the cheap appeal of a street magician - how did he do that with a guitar? (An FX box, probably) But Shields radically expanded the vocabulary of the intrument! Well, I can radically expand my vocabulary too, by inventing the words “gribzek”, “ptok” and “bvgrd” - it doesn’t mean any other fucker will want to use them. MBV get talked about as putting some kind of ‘full stop’ on rock music, but who’d want to follow a blowsy mess like Loveless? The one big breakthrough on the record - marrying Shields’ guitar blurtings to something that slightly resembled a beat - was roundly ignored by the hosts of successor bands on contented cottage labels like Kranky, who’ve happily churned out identikit drifty, billowing Valentine-esque stuff ever since, for the diminishing number of people who still give a damn.
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