Part One: The Death Of Pop, by Alex Thomson
Like the death of art, to which it may just turn out to be related, the idea of the death of pop seems to have been around forever. Its names are legion. The threat of technology to real music; the rise of faceless dance robots; the lament over commercialisation; the failure of British acts to sell records in the USA; the impact of piracy: all these and more, coming to newspapers and magazines that really should know better, over and over again. Whether you want to blame boybands, bootlegs or beep beep music, perceived crisis is a pop-culture staple.
By no means do we live in exceptional times: Radio 1 is in crisis! Top of the Pops is in crisis! The whole music industry is in crisis (or so says Radio 2)! It must be true, I heard it on the BBC. Or read it in the Guardian, where Paul Morley discusses the death of the single. Nor can this simply be explained by the fact that cataclysmic decline always makes for a better story than some losses balanced by modest gains, or even just plain old change.
The concept of culture itself is intrinsically linked to that of crisis. After all, the idea of culture, intended to describe what distinguishes us from that state of savagery we have supposedly escaped, always inextricably draws us back towards barbarism. If culture appears a flimsy safeguard against anarchy, might that not be because the concept draws its own urgency from the menace from which it promises to deliver us.
A crisis always claims to be systemic, all-embracing, unarguable fact. But it is a commonplace that such a crisis will, with equal regularity, turn out to be only partial. A crisis is always relative to the standpoint of the observer: it might even be true that the experience of ‘crisis’ can only result from forgetting that fact. What’s true of our personal lives is true of cultural crises: while it feels like the world must come to a stop because my heart has been broken, it never does.
Today’s supposed crises illustrate this perfectly. The idea of the BBC is intrinsically tied to a particular notion of a unified national culture. Falling audience share for the venerable Beeb in an increasingly diversified market tells us nothing more than that one paradigm’s time may be up. Trying to turn back the institutional clock while the world around accelerates into the unknown would be the last and most foolish of Auntie’s bloomers. Because things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. When the rise of cable music TV meant seeing new videos lost its magic, CD:UK replaced The Chart Show and started beating Top of the Pops at its own game. Nostalgia only holds us back.