Freaky Trigger and the Lollards of Pop – Series 3, Week 7

Ha, I didn’t realise until I listened back that I was meant to say hello. I was concentrating far too hard on not dying…

What’s the Gucci Mane and Nicki Minaj track called? I liked that. They seem to have collaborated more than once. Um, if it’s the one with the very rude title, just say that.

More generally, nice show if more a series of reviews and arguments than an overview. Maybe you set your stall out too high with the opening (hungover) statements. The “trouble with pop is it’s not popular” requires an awful lot of unpacking. I got the feeling you were really saying the trouble is:
1. The ‘wrong’ pop is popular, or
2. It’s not popular in ways we can reliably measure any more.

I thought it was interesting however that Hazel and the Lex were essentially using rockist sticks to beat current ‘troublesome’ pop with, even if their canon is not the traditional Rockist’s one.

How can you say the first Spice Girls album wasn’t good? It is ALL KILLER NO FILLER.

I think the claim that 1 Xtra has caused some kind of ghettoisation of black pop in this country needs backing with proper evidence, not just a ‘we all know this has happened’ stance. The time when the broader British public liked black American music more than the home country was in the 1960s – since then we’ve liked the big stars (Michael Jackson, Beyonce) and adopted the odd act as almost our own (Three Degrees in the 1970s). But regardless of what may seem right and just to certain commentators here, there is certainly never been an automatic right of US stars to make it here – Biggie’s only reached 34 in the UK charts before he became a hip-hop martyr; and even Jay-Z has only made the UK top ten exactly twice – with his novelty hit and with the duet with the missus.
Also, the argument seems to lean hard on the careful exceptions tactic – “except for Timbaland and T.I. and Rihanna and Beyonce (etc), then there’s absolutely no black pop from the other side of the Atlantic getting any attention here…” Well, those are some socking exceptions.

Re 17: OK, a couple of things.

1) Since I haven’t listened to daytime R1 since the 1980s, I can’t comment on their playlist then and now. But I think your mention of “the pinnacle of garage” is interesting – we might be in the area of what populist stats heads would call “the so-called curse of the Sports Illustrated cover/manager of the month”*. Which is to say that Craig David/So Solid moment was unique in British pop history for the lack of distance between pirate radio and the mainstream, certainly in terms of actual identifiable acts rather than just one-off hits – it has happened before or since. I think the Poptimist fallacy is to expect that the conditions that prevailed in, say, 1998-2002 to be the norm rather than the exception.

2) The racist subtext rather disappears when you consider this was also the time of the creation of R6Music and R7 (following the successful emergence of 5 Live) – and also BBC Three and Four, and More 4 etc… Regardless of whether you like the development, niche broadcasting is the path most of the big media organisations have been following. Again, I’d like to see evidence that the R1 playlist changed in the wake of the creation of 1 Xtra.

*Briefly, sports fans traditionally puzzle over the strange fact that the moment a player or team’s great form is publicly recognised, they seem to go off the boil. There, is of course, no curse: all that has happened – say the stats folk – is reversion to the mean (ie, they stopped playing better than could be normally expected, this oddly hot run being what got them noticed).

I don’t know British people are always so eager to deny that race is ever a factor in anything. It’s something I’ve repeatedly encountered, and from someone who admits he hasn’t actually listened to the radio station in question in two decades? Take it from someone who was: prior to the creation of 1Xtra, r&b and hip-hop and UK garage and, before them, even bits and bobs of trip-hop and drum’n’bass, were all over the radio, in sufficient quantities for a public schoolboy buried in Somerset in a pre-internet age to be aware of them. And since then, their equivalents have been hived off away from the mainstream. The exceptions are mostly down to a change in sound, usually a dilution, away from the original genre – which is what all the acts we mentioned have done (Lady Sovereign, Tinchy Stryder, T.I.).

It’s true that whenever I look up the chart positions of 90s tracks I consider standards by acts I consider to pretty firmly entrenched in the pop pantheon – Snoop, Mary J, Biggie and so on – they’re often a lot lower than I expected. I’m not sure how well their albums did, though certainly hip-hop and r&b have tended to be a lot more album-orientated than they’ve been credited for. Really, though, a lot of this is down to their core audience not being one which has ever bought CD singles or been much bothered by where their favourite artist places in the chart (which has a lot to do with what the essence of that music is). This doesn’t mean that there isn’t an audience beyond that or that it should be ghettoised.

Even if what you say is true, it begs the question of why the UK – gatekeepers, public, whoever is responsible – is so closed off to ‘black’ forms of music, whether originating at home or abroad. (Clue: I don’t think the public does have an inherent dislike of it!)

Lex, I never said that race wasn’t a factor or that Radio 1 didn’t change their playlist policy in the 00s – I would just like bit of evidence.
I spent the ’90s writing about hip-hop – I reviewed the first Wu-Tang album and The Fugees’ The Score and dozens of other hip-hop and r’n’b albums for Select, and wrote one of the first things about Eminem in this country for The Face. And that time, talking to other journalists or record company PRs, we never expected these acts to be mainstream huge in this country. Take Doggystyle – for me, it’s the defining sound of that time, and lots of people would agree. But it peaked at 38 in the album charts (so no, they weren’t selling lots of albums), and Who Am I got to 20 in the singles, and Gin And Juice to 39 (yes, 39 for ever quotable Gin And Juice). At the same time, Mary J was nipping into the top twenty if she was lucky…
All that seemed to change late in the ’90s, and that’s what I am talking in terms to it creating a false perception of what the norm. Certain things go and out of fashion – that’s the nature of pop. And it’s a false equivalence to say, well Fiddy was big for a while so that Lil’ Wayne should be huge now – they are different people with different appeals.
If we look at the current top 20, we’ve got Ciara, Beyonce, Flo Rida, Akon and TI (leaving out the Noisettes and Eminem). That hardly suggests that black pop is marginalised in any real way – and also says that it is certainly closer to the mainstream than it was 15 years ago, though not six or seven years ago. There be no particularly reason to expect that the British charts should be full of black music, other than the fact that white British people have always liked and continue to like it. I can’t really see why you expect there to be even more of it in the charts…

Also, on the subject of gatekeepers, in pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør’s time the NME was consistently* pro-black pop (past and present), until they eventually regretfully concluded that could keep telling their readers that T La Rock was more exciting than the House Of Love (which was true) for another thousand years with it having the slightest effect other than to deep depressing sales of the newspaper.

*Not with much bloody internal debate.