Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it.
*why yes, it WAS an all-male party, why do you ask?
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#28 – RE Nick Cave – I liked ‘No More’ and the like, then went on to utterly love ‘Abattoir Blues’. Probably helped that I hadn’t really heard his early stuff, which I’ve now gone back to.
#21/22 – Pete – along with The Who IMHO.
Cliff Richard?!
If we stick to recorded material, I’d probably rule out Prince, not because he hasn’t had better and worse periods followed by better periods(which he clearly has), but because of his general, almost unabated tendency, for much of his career, to exercise far too little quality control or editing, and to release excessive quantities of material, meaning that, even when he was absolutely on top form, it was still necessary to do a fair bit of sorting wheat from chaff.
Not enough counting on this comments thread: viz if acclaimed artist x makes two lousy records then three good ones is that ONE or THREE returns to form. Surely the “most” returns to forms = the most up-and-diwn like a yo-yo?
Also koganbot is right when he points out — without saying it out loud — that there’s something very questionable about the kind of artist we are on the whole holding this accolade back for…
joan jett <---
Paul Weller:
1978 – All Mod Cons
1993 – WildWood
2008 – 22 Dreams
Very good/exceptional albums after bouts of mediocrity.
“something very questionable about the kind of artist” — er yes what i in fact mean is “something very questionable about the very narrow range of KINDS of artist”
(and by questionable i probably actually just mean INTERESTING and worth exploring)
The choice of Weller is backed up by stringent internet research into Britain’s leading exponent of returns to form:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aqthemusic.com+%22return+to+form%22
^^^actual internet science at last (.feat.THE FUTUREHEADS)
Re 34 – And how to assess the re-evaluations that happened between releases is also very important. “Black Tie White Noise” was hailed as RTF for Bowie at the time, and then quickly became rather less hailed.
Which meant that “Outside” could also be an RTF. And so on, but were those both right? Both wrong? One of them only?
Beastie Boys
@35. Hang on, The Jam’s first single was in 1977 – a year’s a bit quick to find form, lose it then regain it, doncha think?
@37. Checking that link, Q cites Massive Attack’s recent work as a possible RTF, but fans don’t see it that way (anymore than Portishead’s fans do with their stuff). 100th Window felt a bit odds-and-ends-ish (hence unlikely to garner any new fans) but was otherwise a fine record (assuming one liked MA in the first place). MA’s principal issue is their slowness not their wild inconsistency which I take it is what normally prompts RTF observations.
Thinking some more about RTF ideas…. I think it’s basically a sporting (maybe even a race-horsing) idea that only fully makes sense when there’s a pretty singular dimension along which output gets measured (ideally something as simple as ‘time around a track’). In performance arts where aging is a real factor – so that even if you in some sense have a RTF then you won’t be doing anything like what you did earlier – then the number of dimensions along which one’s measuring form to enable comparisons explodes. I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing). Musicians tend to be an interestingly muddled middle case – they’re more like directors than actors at least in some ways, but not in all. It feels to me that as though we do salute Neil Young or Marianne Faithful or the Stones or whomever for figuring out some way to gracefully grow old in a very public, youth-worshipping medium in roughly the same way we do for Michael Caine or Mirren or Angelica Huston or Hackman without burdening them with any simple notion of form they may once have had and now must try to return to, etc..
@36 Good point. Dylan rules the RTF league because he invented the type of artist who is allowed an RTF: serious, album-based, self-expressive, capable of progress and growth.
Elvis had an RTF, but only after Dylan made it possible.
It’s all totally rockist, of course.
Exceptions? Bobby Womack with ‘The Poet’ and ‘Poet 2’, maybe, which was a Soul RTF. But he fit all the criteria for seriousness, album-centrednes (album-centricity?), etc.
As robotsdancingalone suggests, Kylie is a good one. The RTF panel apparently makes an exception for her because of sentimental affection for ‘Neighbours’, or something.
Re 41: “I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing).”
That’s a brilliantly concise one-line way of saying what I was trying to say in this now horribly dated piece.
so why don’t we want to apply form to singles and singles bands like the jam (who made just one good-ish LP ever, so never even reached “album form”)? there was — especially with louis armstrong — something of a watch on, from the 30s, to see if/when he’d produce work again that matched the hot fives and the hot sevens (which periodically he did): rockwrite is bad at seeing and knowing that many of its shapes and habits preceded it in jazzwrite, but some of them surely did
i think it’s less about “seriousness” per se, than about the achievement of some quality assumed not to usually inhere in the (popular?) art-form the artists under regard are working in (sustained aesthetic value?) Doesn’t RTF also imply the stamp of approval of “return to relative popularity”? i feel there’s an implied paradox involved; it’s a validation of the overall project rock critics are involved in, because it affirms that value and accessibility and public recognition of both can all (sometimes) combine
what about novelists? painters? poets? (i don’t mean, do they or don’t they have peaks and troughs — ans = yes obv — but do we respond in the same way?)
In actual salaried music crit speak RTF usually means “give us an interview.”
haha a desire which certainly reflects perceived return to popularity
except there are perhaps also artists whose face on the cover might depress readership? bobby brown on the MM? (cilla black on the NME was notoriously the best-selling issue of the decade, by an enormous margin)
@45 Or “I’ve been taken to Antigua to hear it”?
“The Brothers Karamazov” was decidedly a RTF (and widely recognized as such) after the thin and excessively lengthy gruel of “The Adolescent” (a.k.a. “A Raw Youth” a.k.a. “An Accidental Family” a.k.a. doubtlessly other translations or interepretations of the title none of which have stuck so minor is the book in comparison with the author’s other major works)
Re: The Jam @ #41: Second album (This is the modern world) got panned as a lazy retread of the first and the band were reduced to supporting Blue Oyster Cult on tour in America. All Mod Cons was hailed not so much as a return to form, but of the flowering of Weller’s youthful talent.
Most proclaimed RTFs: Oasis. But only by Noel Gallagher. Every album was preceded by an interview promising the best album since Morning Glory (later this was backdated even further to Definitely Maybe once everyone decided that was the only half decent Oasis album) and everyone wondered how long before they dropped this embarassing charade and got on with cranking out the old hits for the fans.
No more RTFs for them: http://remhq.com/news_story.php?id=1446
This is enthralling, and I can’t keep up.
Right at the beginning, Tom says “Applied to pop, this question … proves surprisingly complex”, and yeah, it does. At #44, there sure is “an implied paradox” in pop.
Essentially, I think this is because in Pop we try to embrace two marginally separate meanings of “form” simultaneously. One meaning expected high quality (in sportspeak “in form”) and one meaning a series by which we’d evaluate what to expect (in sportspeak “form guide”).
In other fields, the “form” sometimes includes all the peaks and troughs, sometimes not – but it’s easily understood, often implicit; in pop, it tends to mean something vaguely like (paraphrasing much of what’s upstream) ‘doing more of the type of work that this artist has already done well, critically and commercially’* .
The paradox (for me) is manifold and it’s a itch I want to scratch. Really, I can’t though. This is longer than an average post as it is.
I summarise, thus, apologetically aware of a similarity to others, esp #44: Every few years an artist of long-standing will be permitted by the media to have new material taken extra seriously*, and it will be propelled to unusually high sales through media interest. Far from returning to form, this defies form – bluntly, it reverses decline. Except, of course, for the fact that permission to defy form is the new form. So when the sales decline again following an album lauded as a RTF, that’s the real return to form. But no-one ever says so. That would be too rude.
And yes it is (almost?) always blokes, and always albums:
Costello, Neil Young, Bowie, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Dylan, McCartney, Duran Duran, Ozzy Osbourne…
* see #45. It means interviews.
huh Duran Duran, that implies their having a form to begin with!
RTF to me has always sounded like the sort of thing one says about a racehorse, which may say something about The Industry.
Racehorses but also criminals! “This scrote has form as long as your arm, let’s feel his collar” etc.
In fact come to think of it “Let’s feel his collar” means “We need to interview him”
From a literature point of view, the return to form I am most looking forward to is William Boyd, whose output has been on the whole really rather great, and then turned out the astonishingly poor “state of London” novel Ordinary Thunderstorms. So one of the tensions within return to form is in creating the great feeling of discovering someone great only for them to go off the boil. Does the talent run out, does the material/novelty run out or does just time pass.
Can you return to form when you have jumped the shark?
@41 and @43 – is this why people are so annoyed by Stephen Soderbergh on the one hand and David Gordon Green on the other (the latter pulling the great trick of indie auteur darling moving to grossout comedies!)
Re 56: I think people are baffled as much as annoyed by Soderbergh overall, although there is a feeling that the Ocean films are tremendously lazy (I find if you wait until they turn up on TV and catch them half by accident, they’re reasonably enjoyable). But he gets as much stick for some of his more off-beam projects… I’m not sure, though, whether there’s a clear sense of what the director-aware audience would want from him – apart maybe something a bit more like Out Of Sight.
With DGG, it’s much clearer (and more like an indie band stumbling into the mainstream). He turned up with such a distinctive look/vibe – Malick goes to modern America’s forgotten rusty places that it did seem a bit jarring when he joined the Apatow conveyor belt (although he did try a serious film with proper-ish movie stars in between, just nobody saw it). I sort of enjoyed Pineapple Express, but it’s not a great film, and Your Highness in its way is as much a product of personal vision as George Washington – it just also happens to be dismally unfunny. I think the problem is that not so much that he’s making gross-out comedies, it’s that unlike, say, Greg Mottola, who also went from micro-budget indie director to Apatow employee (over a longer time span), he’s not very good at mainstream movies.
Hang on, The Jam’s first single was in 1977 – a year’s a bit quick to find form, lose it then regain it, doncha think?
Not necessarily. If the moment matters in a particular way, and the performer matters, then a year can be an eon.
Wasn’t paying attention to the Jam, but it truly did matter to me that the third and fourth X-Ray Spex singles, and the album, live up to the first two. And they didn’t.
Wasn’t aware of making the point that Lord Dubdob says I was. And (@42), I don’t think that being album-based or perceived as serious in a standard way is what makes Dylan eligible. Without “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” he isn’t part of this discussion (even if I may or may not have been even more moved by “Visions Of Johanna” and “Sooner Or Later”). Dylan’s eligibility comes from his seeming to have reinvented the world, reinvented what matters, what it looks like and what it sounds like. The need for a Return To Form is a need for him to confirm the reinvention, or to reinvent anew. Dylan exacerbated this by periodically turning his back on his achievements and his audience. In the ’70s, not only did we get Dylan’s supposed Returns To Form, we got new Dylans as well (Springsteen and G. Parker and Elvis Costello merely being the most prominent; anyone else remember Elliott Murphy?) (btw, for those who believe in transmigration of souls, I’d say that Dylan’s most emphatic return to form was The Marshall Mathers LP). So something needs to be perceived as at stake beyond “artistic regeneration” and “impressive mastery” and ilk.
Of the performers I’ve mentioned, the one I’d link Dylan to, in regard to how people needed him to return to form, are Cher Lloyd and Elvis. Elvis’s most famous Return To Form was his 1968 NBC-TV special, which is now known, tellingly, as the Comeback Special (and which I paid absolutely no attention to when it happened, don’t recall even knowing it had happened, which tells you how ignorable Elvis was to teens in ’68; more ignorable then than now). Cher Lloyd came on as a gawky teen with attitude and style and almost no chops, and she gave two surprising (and I’d say her Shakespear’s Sister cover was stunning) performances – the urchin finding transcendence – seems clueless as to what to do next, and is finding all sorts of ways to fall on her face. So a Return To Form is both desired and plausible, given how implausible she was in the first place.
As for actual returns to form, for which I consider artistic regeneration and impressive mastery quite sufficient, the Bee Gees and Neil Young are credible choices; but since I never paid persistent ongoing attention to their work, further detail would be welcome. Van Morrison might qualify as well, but I paid him even less attention. Miles Davis? Brian Wilson? Randy Newman? Willie Nelson? For all I know, Reba McEntire may be hitting her peak (which is to say I only know a smattering of her previous output; I’m surprised to like her recent album as much as I do, given that at one point I compared her voice to a frightwig).
@58 “the one I’d link Dylan to” = the ones I’d link Dylan to