Pop never happened. Is the world worse for it?

Answer: yes. But I'm more worried about the 'Latin countries' Nick has managed to dream up - I'm half Spanish and lived in Milan for three years, and have abiding memories of the awesome seriousness with which the Italians took Pink Floyd and The Cure - you could buy books with all their lyrics translated. Plus, of course, the existence of Eros Ramozotti, Zucchero and the guy who did Gloria before Laura Branigan. In Spain they are slightly less pompous, but worship Gloria Estefan. It's not a cultural thing: it's who you hang out with. If Nick had been going out with Roger Scruton's [crazed right-wing Pet Shop Boys- hating, social climbling philosopher, for those of you lucky enough not to have come across him] offspring, it would have been an equally pop-free environment. And a pop-free environment is never good.

You're going out and meeting people in Rome, Helsinki, Athens, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and everyone's talking pop music. Not about it maybe but through it, inflected by it, informed by it, and not just pop music but pop everything: the billboards the adverts the television. "It" is being "produced" and "sold" to "you", but at the experience level separating the You from the Them and from the It seems about as easy and useful as unpicking the hydrogen and oxygen in a bowl of water. Especially if you're the fish.

If you're under a certain age and you grew up in the West then you come to 'maturity' (whatever that is) through pop culture, through reacting to it, through letting it articulate you, through opposing it. What would be the point of being more 'adult' if everyone you meet still acts like a kid? 'Maturity' is relational, not an objective standard. You use the emotional tools most appropriate to your environment: living in Britain and listening to Italian political ballads and not to pop would make you an emotional recluse. Living in Rome, for that matter.

(And of course pop is the backdrop which gives the kind of Left Bank Theme Parks Momus is presenting the neccessary context to seem alluring, heh)

Yes, but what about the Left Banke themeparks? Or — more to the mis-spelled point — the Cryan Shames themeparks?

Truck Drivin' Baroque, trailer parks where "Next" blares from every door crack instead of "Dirty Deads Done Cheap," sporting events where "We Came Through" replaces "Celebration"... a very bizarre picture, indeed.

Mark: It's not a cultural thing: it's who you hang out with.

Spot on. Italy has tribes of kids who're into nu metal, boy bands, hip hop and indie congregating outside Benetton in the town centre after school, recognisable because they wear pretty much the same uniforms as their counterparts in London.

Not sure how popular Italian political ballads are these days. I can't think of music of a political nature that has more of an impact on the Italian charts than, say, Asian Dub Foundation have had here. Well, maybe you could include some Articolo 31 and early Jovanotti. It'd be interesting to find out if Berlusconi's control over practically all televisual media will affect what's played on TV there.

Life without pop? A common creative writing assignment at my school was Life In The Future. I used to get brain all twisted up with what ifs and yes buts so I ended up sticking to cliches and all my characters slept in pods and ate pills instead of food. Similar situation here, so I'll say we'd be quite happy listening to jazz thank you very much and have done with it.

Pop music used to mean it was "popluar" hence lots of people shared a common ground in that they at least could say they liked so and so, even though they mostly listened to Brahms or something. I see pop as an interestin g unifyin g factor in modern life. It has caused mafor social movements, kept flames of naive rebeliion alive in opressive countries. But the definition of Pop has changed to a point where it now a stylistic term, becasue there is no pop music anymore. Everyone has split into bubbles of specialization, because our sociey requires specialization and encourages individualism. THere will never be another Beatles. I don't know if the world would be better off if it never happened. I think worse off. It let mass sentiments expose themselves across the radio towers of the world. It created a gawdy and beautiful layer of life for our imaginations to roam and destroy.

It's the choice thing that's the bummer - I was originally going to say hell no, bring the brave new world on, but I think I like the fact that I choose Brel over Britney, Lou reed over Linkin Park, NIN over N'sync that makes me feel ok. Diversity's great - you get to slag off a lot more ppl that way.

Momus: I am Italian and live in Italy (well, most of the year at least) and I can assure you that no one listens to "political ballads" anymore. Mädchen is right, you can tell what a kid likes by looking at how he's dressed. The Hip-hoppers, The ones into dance (quite different from the uk-club-dance, it's eurothrash, Eiffel 65 and the likes...) and... well, there isn't much else. A couple of heavy metal freaks and punkers here and there but they're endangered species by now. We don't have real good music: there are a couple of talented songwriters left but the rest of the artist are just concerned with sounding "international" so that they can translate their songs in spanish and score a couple of hits in South America. (that includes Eros Ramazzotti, Lunapop, Laura Pausini....)

Obviously Mädchen is wrong about Berlusconi but I bet that she read that famous article in the Economist (a magazine that belongs to Pearson, which is seeking to buy Mediaset, which is Berlusconi's Network... a little more than a coincidence).

Back to the main topic: the world wouldn't be better off without pop but sometimes I wish more people actually listened to something else. Pop is fun and sometimes it's not even shallow but you can't hum silly refrains forever. Political ballads are welcome but frankly I don't like the leftist rhetoric.

Yo, Simone, some of us didn't need to read a smug, shallow free market-dogmatist rag like the Economist to have a problem with your chum Silvio. But when even a smug etc etc rag lays into a billionaire turned politician, that probably says something. But your Berlusconi-loving tendencies might explain your distaste for Italian political ballads. I just don't like them because they sound terrible ...

You have a problem with billionaires turning into policians? well, that's probably envy... I didn't know that people were judged by their bank accounts! I don't love Berlusconi, I simply distrust the Italian Left... just as many other people do on the basis of their job...

Er, I feel the need to defend myself. The only time I've never picked up a copy of the Economist is in the dentist's waiting room and I haven't visited a dentist for four years. And yes, I know that's a very long time and my Mum would not be pleased.

When I wrote about Berlusconi, I had half a mind on how the French government passed a law dictating that a fairly large percentage (the figure escapes me - 30%?) of music radio airplay must be French language songs (not just songs of French origin, so Kelly Watch The Stars and One More Time don't count). If they can do that, it's possible the media could be manipulated in similar ways in other countries.

Mark: Interesting you should mention Roger Scruton, I just read an essay by him attacking kitsch as part of the preparations for my Cute Formalism essay. I find him truly repugnant, but I must say I'd love to read his attack on the Pet Shop Boys. Can you be more specific? Is it online somewhere? I doubt Scruton would advocate the non-pop 'theme park' I'm positing, since it's a communist one full of troublemakers who actually have to be jailed, tortured and killed by the government, like Jara was.

Answer to Simone (the rest of you can skip it): Uh, yes, I have a problem with billionaires turning into politicians. A very big problem with it. Especially when they have an series of monopolies to protect. Envy? I think not: getting rich from building horrible suburbs on the outskirts of great cities, or running the world's worst TV stations, and being friends with stinking crooks like Craxi wouldn't make me proud. Nor would cosying up with nasty little fascists like Fini and Northern (ne Lombard) League guy whose name blissfully escapes me. In fact, the only thing I can think of remotely in Silvio's favour is that his money bought him some pretty fair football sides for a while... and then that fell apart too...

Nick/Momus: Brief summary of the Pet Shop Boys vs Scruton court action here: http://www.cnn.co.uk/1999/SHOWBIZ/News/12/21/showbuzz/

I am, naturally, aware that Rog wouldn't be too happy with a Victor Jara-filled theme park: I was just making the point that disdain for pop exists as much in the Anglo-American world as it does in southern Europe...

I hope this theme park will be better than Thorpe Park. That place is rubbish.

I dunno, but the original post all seems a bit Theodore Adorno. I need to ask are the people in this 'utopia' happy? Whats wrong with a bit of escapism, superficality, and apolitical arts?...I don't think I'd stay in this alternate universe, I'd rather go somewhere which was a little more balanced. So, yes a world without pop(ular culture) would be much worse, it all seems joyless and pretentious.

I do like James' point. Perhaps to spin it out a bit, they do actually seem happy, but are they excited? Is there is a thrill? Momus' past three scenarios bespeak gentle appreciation, not active interest. It also assumes (understandably in the first two examples, less so in the latter) that people are only ever going to listen to that -- an approach that frightens me like any kind of aural restriction, the more so because it's self-imposed as much as inherited, from the sound of it.

Both Tom and Momus' worlds are too narrow to be realistic, because obviously the world is neither dominated by nor devoid of pop music, and both options would probably suck if they were actually realized.

I think it's also important to note (as others here have) that no cultures that I am aware of have had access to pop music and rejected it outright. Pop must naturally speak to a basic like or dislike that transcends borders, because why else would everyone the world over listen? I think the only way for humans to live without pop music/culture would be to fundamentally change our DNA. And if pop is base and worthless when compared to other arts, which I don't think it is, then the argument becomes similar to the one about a world without sin/unhappiness/misery. A world without sin would be pretty damn boring.

Do you ever get the feeling that no matter what questions you ask, the answers are always the same and life is just coming up with interesting ways to phrase the questions?

OK then:

Labour defied all predictions to win a tiny majority of 2 in the 1959 election. Hugh Gaitskell became Prime Minister, but died a year later. A puritan socialist faction took over the party, established a kind of elective dictatorship, and all pop music was banned - commercial TV was abolished, the BBC was forced to drop which few pop programmes it had, and Radio Luxembourg's transmissions were jammed as the BBC World Service and Voice of America were in Communist Eastern Europe. Sales of pop records were restricted to an illegal underground, where one Elvis single cost, in today's money, around £100. A far-left council banned pop altogether in Liverpool, and all imported R&B and soul records from US servicemen were turned away at the docks, with the result that the Beatles' recording career amounted to two albums of socialist workers' songs, neither of which made a significant register on the "chart" of records approved by the state. Britain's contribution to pop is no more significant than Albania's.

What kind of Britain? What kind of pop? What kind of world?

The fact that all that glitzy, vular, corporate product still has the ability to affect and to speak to large amounts of the population shouldn't be ignored. Momus's world seems to be one in which music is reserved for the mature, intelligent individual. As Canada of Boards put it- Children have the right to music, too! If a group of plastic- faced, harmonizing youths can force a tear from the eyes a 14 year old girl at her school dance ( or even help her get her freak on) while reaching into her back pocket, then so be it. Pop might be often be ugly,stupid and naive but these are inescapable characteristics of life, too. So perhaps if we could all escape to lives of endless romanticism, passion and political leftism then maybe pop will cease to be useful. Then again, I've yet to see a booty being shook to a political ballad. And what says passion more than a salaciously wiggled posterior?

Is this like saying "what if low art never happened"? I have a feeling that's not exactly your question Momus but I can't put my finger on the difference.

First, Latin countries cannot get enough of cheesy Salsa, if my neighbors on 4th Ave. are any indication.

Second, the cello cases, political ballads, deliberate invocation of folk traditions, etc. are a necessary consequence of pop, in that I think by and large they're a movement away from it, a reaction to it. In the heyday of orchestral music, the Classical and Romantic periods, musicians were the bohemian riff-raff equivalents of today's journeyman guitar shredders. It was pop, in the sense that those same instruments were probably pressed into the service of local dances and neighborhood get-downs far more than for the all-too-infrequently commissioned "great works", which were likely a reaction against the popular dance music and lewd ballads of the time.

I think perhaps your question is getting more at the capitalist exploitation of desire. Desire for "real" music that doesn't speak above your head, desire for access to a national continuum of culture that doesn't demand a college degree. The desire is valid and natural in an age of national identity and media-connectedness. But the ruthless exploitation of that desire for nothing more imaginative than shifting units is unforgivable and the world is worse for it. The record labels, as you might say Momus, are definitely in the wrong hands.

Ian thorpe has a theme park? Yumm...

*sigh...* I WOULD be in love with the daughter of a Spanish lecturer...

Why do children have a 'right' to anything? Civilization has been getting soft and weak since Rousseau. Music should be made more difficult to obtain. Builds character.

Trolls never happened. Is Usenet worse for it?

Momus is speaking of exoticism, the mystery and intrigue of that "other" world- a place that's still alive. Living in an increasingly corporate-driven world we've long forgotten what true vigour, what true *living* feels like. We're hopelessly addicted to this narcotic called "Pop" and it's dulled our senses to the degree that we now gleefully accept Timbaland or Radiohead or Daft Punk as providers of excitment and insight. So this is what it was all about: The cute, candy-coated Japanese synth-pop, the multilayered ironies, the postmodern genre melding- Momus is trying to force Pop Culture to choke on itself. Then, unadulterated ART, all blazing intensity, will stand proudly above the putrid corpse of pop. It won't work Momus! People can't live lives of unending authenticity! Greedy and vulgar is what we are- there's pop in all of us. Maturity does not matter here. We'll take our passion in MP3 format.

I feel a strong affinity with what Momus is sort of kind of saying. The invention and deification of the teenager makes me feel exhausted. Pop and capitalism makes sex and love boring and tiring.

On the other hand, there is the folk element of pop. When I was a teenager secretly reading James Joyce which embarrasses me now and I went to the houses of acquaintances who had university educated parents, they never asked me anything because they assumed I wouldn't know because of the way I spoke. I retreated backwards into the simplicity of The Troggs and so forth because it was a simple and perfect aesthetic that could never be touched by their idiotic snobbery.

What is frightening I think is that that dark, dirty, folk, whatever element is vanishing, or being eviscerated, it's like people, even at the bottom, are becoming more and more vapid as money becomes more and more important, well of course I suppose, both desire and resignation count for less and less.

. . . ie what Mitch Lastnamewithheld said above, except for I don't get why we can't live lives of unending authenticity, isn't inauthenticity harder in a way, like Mark Twain sort of said?

Maryann, I think in our world it's not always easy to distinguish the authentic and the inauthentic, so I don't know if it would be easier to be authentic when so many of the myths about what is authentic (and what is not!) are mass media fictions. Intellectualism, however, is also subject to these myths. As others have pointed out, you can't have this sort of righteous polemicizing without a "base" "low" culture that you can sneer at.

One thing I've learned in my short and mostly illiterate life is that sometimes you know things before you can articulate them. It sounds anti-intellectual, but this truth keeps coming back to haunt me. The ability to articulate things is power, but it isn't necessarily wisdom. It simply helps you communicate what you've already witnessed. Becoming literate and learning to articulate things has given me power, especially the power to get inside the minds of masters, but it hasn't made me any wiser. Certainly, intellectuals must confront the fact that knowledge and literacy are commodities in Western society.

Is the purpose of music always to uplift and edify, or should it also make life simply bearable? I have problems with consumerism and capitalism, but the difficulty of living honestly or living well didn't start with those things. That said, in my case, a few million thrown my way might help...

Maryann, I'm feeling the same way as you. Now, more than ever ...

Let's not forget that the Sistine Chapel would not have been painted were it not for patronage, ie. big, sweaty wads of money. And it's guided by that days equivalent of a big corporate power- the Church.

'In the room the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo...'

I think what I was trying to capture, with the examples in my question, was a sense of rooms; private spaces where, astonishingly, pop had not penetrated. The apartment in Rome, the Spanish lecturer's house in Edinburgh, the Paris conservatoire. These rooms are astonishing because I pretty much agree with Tom's portrayal: 'New York, London, Paris, Munich, Everybody's talking 'bout... pop musik'. (Lit critic Larry McCaffery is pretty good on this subject, how pop culture has become the new common culture, which literary culture has to reflect, or perish.) Because we take pop so much for granted as a kind of cultural background radiation, those pop-free rooms haunt us with their otherworldliness. They have a heavy, passionate, serious, joyous atmosphere. It's not that we want to live there. That would be like living in a museum. It's just that they throw a different light on 'Top Of The Pops'. Maybe they make it seem more exciting. Maybe they make it look shrill and tacky.

Of course, I framed the question with the hypothesis 'Pop never happened'. Robin's account of exactly how the nascent pop culture might have been aborted -- a political coup, cultural repression -- reminded me that in my family we were absolutely forbidden to watch the commercial channels in the 60s. So that parallel pop-free universe really did happen for me. Not in society, but in certain rooms. Not enforced by the government, but by the person in charge of the remote.

It's always struck me as an exciting part of the way we each interface with our music choices that we start with a silent room and a music- playing device, and are free to remake the world, at least in that room, however we want. We can fill it with African finger pianos, Euro- communist ballads, recontructions of pre-baroque dance music, anything. While the music plays, it convinces us that it is real. Yes, we are socially 'maladjusted' if we use music to escape our society's values. Yes, no doubt listening to the Spice Girls would make us better citizens, more inwardly obedient. But we have chosen, in a quiet, private way, to deviate. There's plenty of pop in the other rooms, the places where we can't choose what to play. Meanwhile we are choosing, from time to time, to live in these rooms 'as if pop never happened'.

I think Momus makes his point really well here. I hope he won't think I'm trivializing his big argument if I say that this - the need for alternative spaces to make your own sound - is true *within* pop (as broadly conceived) too. I mean, one needs a room of one's own to hear Lloyd Cole too. Or Momus, for that matter. What room do they play Momus in?

The banning of commercial TV within individual households - broadly, those that saw themselves as consciously middle-class in the British sense - was a commonplace in the late 50s, 60s and 70s in the UK (and there was a reason: compare Ready, Steady, Go to early TOTP, or Oh! Boy to Six-Five Special). Its descendent is the belief that the satellite dish is "vulgar", and, yes, its intent is to exclude yourself from what is increasingly seen as a given, the fundamental starting point of modern culture. Though this, at least in the UK, has tended to start from a middlebrow Scrutonian fear rather than anything neo-socialist or bohemian.

Like Momus I find it tantalising to visit places where pop never happened, even if they are not in themselves ideologically amenable to me - a meeting of the Marxist or Communist parties, an ancient Orthodox church, a National Trust property (love-hate relationship again). Not that I'd want to live in such a place - as Nick says, it would feel like a museum, a means of keeping out the entire modern world - but I can imagine choosing *as an experiment*, for a period, to live as though pop wasn't happening; part of me feels an admiration for the old puritan socialists who tried to shut out whatever The People liked (I still feel angry with, and insulted by, New Labour when it embraces Britney or Geri) coupled with a realisation that their straightforward commitment was based on a certainty impossible now.

And FWIW I put that forward because it included the ultimate parallel- universe scenario (probably not on ILM, but certainly still in most places; indeed ILM is the exception that proves the rule): a world without the Beatles.

Does it exist? PLEASE tell me how to get to it!

One of the things I like about some Brazilian music (such as the Tropicalistas) is that it combines political commitment and a love of language, with contemporary pop idioms. Of course, that was 30 years ago, but the stuff still sounds fresh, so it is possible. It's just that I can't imagine this sort of thing working in English (especially in the US) and I don't know why.

Has there been a Brazilian thread on ILM? I haven't seen much mention of Brazilian music here.

Gareth's question received curiously few replies.

To take DG's question literally, such a world could only have been reached if Britain had had a communist coup in the early 60s. But you don't have to listen to them, and you can always talk about music here, and in the other places, which *don't* think of the Beatles as The Great Immovable.

A world [without The Beatles] could only have been reached if Britain had had a communist coup in the early 60s.

But weren't they released on the Soviet label Melodiya? (Or was that the Stones?) I think it may have taken more than a communist coup to stop the blighters. In the parallel world with the communist coup, the Beatles still exist, they just retitle 'Back in the USSR' 'Anarchy in the UK'.

Of course, to be very sceptical about the idea that The Beatles were "The Best Band Ever" is a good idea. A VERY good idea. However, the snip, snip of noses being cut-off to spite faces is becoming deafening. In other words, I just can't see why people can't enjoy The Beatles as just a bloody good band (one of MANY). I love The Beatles, but not more than say, The Au Pairs, Joy Division, Daft Punk or The Zombies. The don't have to cast a long shadow over everything else, unless of course you believe all you read in Mojo magazine.

These comments are not aimed at any specific ILM regulars, there just appears to be a kind of ill-founded anti-Beatles bias around which bubbles up from time-to-time. Obviously some people genuinely don't like them - no problem. I just get the feeling that the 'cool' thing is to dislike them, which is a pity.

I dont dislike the Beatles at all, excpet for that Bastard Ringo. I find them useful it that they represent a time when media was certralised and one group appealed to many kinds of people. I think that's the "pop" we talk to in this discussion. But I always think of pop as a musical style, detatched from actual popularity. And I 'd hate to loos e that. I think the "rooms" discussed earlier are now online also. Chat rooms, websites, forums. I think despite overconected ness, there still exists islands of online thought. Thats the beauty of the web, mutations and mistakes.

Plus, George Harrison wasn't a very good lead guitar player, so the Beatles contributed to the decline of musical dexterity. Also, they were too democratic to be possessed of genius.

Hmmm. I've just returned from Venice, where I've been bobbing along like a prosecco cork in the hi-lo culture meld that is the Venice Biennale. So Nick's question is pertinent and I'm fairly familiar with his attempts to dry-hump the seriousness of Europe, the mystery of Japan, blah blah.

In Venice, my hostess was a young assistant director trying to help the director/producer of the Italian TV programme Superquark cross over to documentary feature cinema, mostly by fixing it for him to enter these ancient Scuola (institutes) where there are C16 libraries so that he may film in authentic surroundings. She was a very modest, charming and completely unpretentious person who did not tell her guests that she had just published a book about the use of Philip K Dick in the cinema and that her father is basically head of the university in Venice. Obvously this is a very 'serious' girl, but she had stacks of records (lots of overlap with mine) and the bed in the guest room, which had been hers as a child, still had DAVID BOWIE inked on the headboard next to where her pillow would have been.

Her friends - architects I know in London - made a big dinner party for all of us and while the Avalanches, Dreem Teem and an Italian loungecore offering played we discussed the merits of the different nations' art offerings and translated the name Giles to some Italian guests by referencing Buffy the Vampire Slayer (it worked - they all howled. Poor Giles). Pop culture crosses barriers that other forces would try to erect. All culture does. Try to take it away from people and just see what happens.

There is always this big cliché that the yoof in mainland Europe don't have a youth culture; they're like miniature Radio 4 listeners who sit around and talk about philosophy, art, architecture, and cinema all the time. Oh, and politics. With their parents. Obviously they do, but not all the time. Not all parents are self-conscious aspirants to a 'European' ideal of intellectualism which they then foist on their kids just so they can feel smug on the school run, or on Parents' Day.

To me that's just as nasty as the proud anti-intellectualism of the English-speaking suburbanite who hasn't heard of all that funny brainy stuff with big long words and tries to make those who have feel like it's a waste of time because it's 'obscure' (meaning they've never heard of it and don't want to be seen as ig'nant, so they say things like 'well lah di dah'). Know the type?

Basically I guess what I'm saying is that I found the cultural appreciations of my new Italian friends wonderfully integrated - it's all culture, it's all vital, if it's new, even better. There was no hi- lo, bullshit culture divide like you get in Anglophone places and maybe that explains the lack of other gaps too. If pop never happened at point X it would definitely have happened at point Y. Il cantatore can be bouncy beat-obsessed boffins; as for politics, I should probably drag out the Emma Goldman quote about not wanting a revolution you can't dance to while putting on some old cold war fave like Bambaataa & Lydon's World Destruction.

Now if you will excuse me, I must go do something about this awful sea- legs feeling I'm having!

Dr C is right about the Beatles-dissing. I understand the impulse in wanting to take them down a peg or ten, but a lot of this is starting to feel like kneejerk attitude-over-music crap. A few days ago, someone here (Tracer, I think) said something positive about the Beatles (something about how his taste for both pop and weirdness comes from stuff like "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-da" and "Revolution # 9" being on the same album) and I had to read it again 3 or 4 times 'cause I was stunned that there was no hidden putdown there. "The Beatles suck cause critics like them and many people think they're important" is as lame a statement as "Eminem sucks cause he gets played on the radio and MTV and sells a lot of records".

"Attitude over music"? OK how about this - J Lennon was a real cool guy with his sneering put-downs and questing cynicism (how's THAT for an oxymoron), and even P McCartney was a way-cool highbrow-lowbrow avant-garde dilettante(the REAL musical oddball of the band)/shameless commercial ho - but their guitar player sucked, the rhythm section was about hammering nails into a wall and as for the psychedelic touches, they aged faster than most airport lounges! Their rock'n'roll covers were entirely free of any groove, and the ballads - can you imagine Craig from 'Big Brother' trying to get away with 'Long & Winding Road'? But then, they had 'tood!

Nick: I'm sure Beatles records ended up being released officially in the USSR before 1989 (maybe in the Glasnost era) but I'm sure they initially became popular there through the black market. I suppose my point was that they *could* have been nipped in the bud had Britain had an extremist communist / puritan socialist coup (which certainly would have been a very bad thing, incidentally).

Suzy: I used to subscribe to the cliche of mainland European yoof not having a youth culture (superb post BTW: I agree with its every word). But then I had an absurdly rose-tinted view back then about anywhere I wasn't ...

Patrick - I don't think I ever said anything like that.

Re: the Beatles: "the phenom" was only possible because of a relatively centralized mass media culture in the 60s. Maybe in a world of 100 channels and 10 different charts the Liverpool boys cut some records but they don't get the screaming girls and ring of cops - or the virulent hatred of ILMers 30 years after the fact.

Maybe that's a tautology somehow. Oh well, carry on - you were saying?

My view on The Beatles is simply I don't like the music (it just does nothing for me), so they wouldn't matter to me in the slightest if it weren't for the cold dead hand of baby-boomer nostalgia continually pointing to The Best Band Ever, Yes The Best, All Music Since Has Been A Waste Of Time, No Really, All Your Modern Rubbish Is Just A Footnote In Musical History Compared To John, Paul, George And Ringo. That's what gets me, you see.

(Such a lovely thread!)

The children come and go, whistling the "Bolero"...

...There were or are these two artists in Manhattan who sometime during the 1980s decided to start living in the nineteenth century, allowing nothing built or invented since 1900 in their pristine, museum-like rooms. Like employees at a historical theme park, they had to dress, talk, and act as if it were 1888 (or somesuch year), but one wonders how they coped at the grocery store. Perhaps they permitted themselves a wax-cylinder player and some player piano rolls for entertainment. This was of course their "art work," but how wonderful it would be if all of us could choose any random year and recreate that world around us as much as possible. I know another artist who won't allow anything made since 1950 in his house, since it was his grandmother's, and 1950 was when she died. I might choose 1979, just so I could keep on hearing Wire's "154" for the first time every day.

...The idea of rooms in which to (re)create landscapes or sonicscapes was investigated in Harold Budd's last CD. I don't have it yet, but it seems to be once again about equating space with memory. And then I know there's a novel out there I once read or heard about which was divided into "rooms" instead of chapters. Some of Stephen Milhauser's short stories are much more concerned with describing rooms and evoking eras than with plot. Did anyone else see "The Red Violin," a movie where in the face of the Cultural Revolution a Chinese Communist party member creates a secret room where she can practice the violin and worship Scarlatti?

...For the last several weeks I've been travelling across the upper United States--listening on the car CD player, coincidentally, to lots of flamenco and Greco, as well as Donizetti and Momus--and I'm struck by how many Amish and Mennonite (and related) colonies are still out there. These are people who very purposefully try to eradicate nearly all that is "modern" and "decadent" and "pop" from their lives, right down to eschewing buttons for toggles. No cars, no electricity, but even if TV were mule-powered they'd do a parental lock on every channel. They, too, want to create another year and another world to live in. At Niagara Falls I was followed for blocks by a whole gaggle of bearded (but not mustached) men in collarless shirts with suspenders and their "womenfolk" in aproned pinafores and bonnets--I looked to their feet, expecting high-laced boots, but to my astonishment saw they all wore black Reeboks. One wonders if the young boys among the clan were wearing Insane Clown Possee t-shirts under their gingham. All utopias have their rebels (just ask Lucifer). And I wondered what they thought of me with my digital camera and Tevas.

...Is this world we conveniently call "ours" and "today" worse off because of pop music? Only a subjective answer could do--it would depend on to what degree any one person has been affected--or one might say, infected. How could I know what person I would have been had I never bought "Electric Warrior" or sat through innumerable showings of "American Bandstand" on the Saturday mornings of my youth? Pop music had even invaded church--and what we called "nuns with guitars" regaled us with "Imagine" but no Gregorian chant. I thought I was a rebel with my records, but how can one really rebel when even then pop songs sold you both God and deodorant? Then again, several of my sisters have never bought a pop record in their lives, yet I think they've been touched by consumerist values in ways I never have. They care about having satellite TV and the Internet, which is to say they're concerned about satellite TV and the Internet. Me, I've turned out an old-fashioned elitist and prefer my libraries to be filled with morocco-bound, not DVD jewel cases. Marc Bolan's guitar in a way led to me to a deeper appreciation of both flamenco and Glenn Branca. Would John Hinckley have fared better if he'd kept his music criticism to himself? Would Timothy McVeigh be alive if he'd written protest songs instead?

...A novel I'll probably never write has been bubbling underground for too long, but I'm trying not to think of Philip K. Dick's or J. G. Ballard's alternative universes. What about a world where "classical" or "serious" music is what everyone, especially teenagers, listens to--and where what we call "pop" music is listened to only by intellectuals and other sociopaths? Where Oasis will forever be an obscure little band of musicians ignored by the Xenakis- adoring public. Where Strauss's "Salome" is top of the charts, but Madonna CDs sell next to nothing and she must make a living by playing second violin for the Philharmonic. Where The Beatles never existed because John thought composing symphonies was the only way to communicate his joy and sorrow to the world. But, alas, that's where my pseudo-paradise vanishes in a puff... Because the fact is, Academia and Mass Media have already co-opted all that is "pop" in the name of Cultural Studies and Entertainment Weekly, thereby taking away that age-old fun of finding something illicit and death-defying and world-shaking in that which your parents hate and peers relish-- and when you put a pin to a balloon, it goes...

The trouble i always have with the "cool" kneejerk anti-Beatles stance is that it's so BORING. Yes, maybe wanking about in 1976 claiming to hate the Beatles was Clever and Dangerous, but as with so much supposedly Alternative Criticism it's about 25 years out of date - see also claims for Punk, calls for "Glamour" in music (what, 20 years out of date?), claims to be Experimental (at least 30, or in the case of Radiohead, 80) and of course Being Pop (precisely C-15)...

ANYWAY, i was going to GO OFF on one about this, BUT in brief the net effect of (say) Paul not turning up to that Fete that day would BE:

LESS OF: Funny Haircuts, Guitar Music, Bands Composing Their Own Songs, The Studio As An Instrument, Independent Record Companies, Acceptance of the Avant Garde in Popular Culture, Acceptance of Popular Culture as "Art", Popular Culture.
MORE OF: Cover versions, Motown, Cliff Richard in America, Bloody JAZZ, International Cultural Diversity, Dance Steps, Producer Pop.
ABSOLUTELY NO: Electric Folk Rock, Punk, Glam, Glasnost, Lyrics on Record Sleeves, "Whooo!", -mania, Writer-owned publishing companies, Vanity ROCK poetry, Symphony ROCK, or indeed records recorded by a band that that band could never even hope to play live or make any pretense to.

Oh yeah, and of course about 10% of the world would have conceived their children at entirely different times, and that would REALLY have made things different.

― MJ Hibbett, Tuesday, 12 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Check out Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for a place where MUSIC never happened. And never will, if the rulers of that country can help it!
Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to telepathically hear whatever sound vibrations are going on in people's heads there, that will never be heard?

Wow, XYZ, I really like your last contribution; I think you should check out House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski -- that is, if you haven't already. It sounds like the book you're trying to recall.

I'm from Minneapolis, and every time I go to the airport there are usually small groups of Mennonites waiting to catch link-flights back to their enclaves in Iowa and Wisconsin. In fact, this is the only context in which I've ever seen them and I wonder how they rationalise using airlines. Is it like those Orthodox Jews who construct an Eruv - a zone in which all the normal Sabbath prohibitions are suspended, ie. driving - to make it easier to get to temple? They create this by marking out the boundaries of the eruv in white string around the tops of power-poles. It's so unobtrusive but when it was attempted in Golders Green in London, local Gentiles (all seven of them) made a big stink. Pah. It's interesting that these isolationist communities have had to rule-bend to cope with C21 life. And I must confess I've thought of making an eruv around Hoxton and Shoreditch to make the artists safe from invasion by City dickheads. Whoops, I'm too late!

All this talk of alternative zones and contrived rooms necessarily brings me to the work of the British artist Mike Nelson, who was the talk of Venice for his offsite installation in a disused factory. Within this, he constructed small chambers with a multitude of doors and no directions available for getting between them. Those who came to view the work had to navigate between them, which felt like being in some kind of abandoned dollhouse. Within each room, the hint of a 'story' made the viewer try to build some kind of narrative or construct some kind of path; there was also a mezzanine (which I couldn't find) where the participants could view the confusion of people trying to navigate. It was absolutely brilliant and my friend thought, also, a metaphor for the labyrinth qualities of Venice to boot.

Nelson's just been nominated for the Turner Prize here so UK-based ILM types should basically hotfoot it down to Tate Britain to see what he'll do there; also his work will be at the ICA in September.

My other favourite was a collective of three ex graf-artists called (I think) Supermarket who exhibited in the Corderie section of the Arsenale. They built a Little Tijuana of shabby convenience stores where the shelves were full of tins of Shame and there were rolls of Lottery scratchcards called things like Just Walk Away or Fuck You, Boss. They also skewed their graffiti into images that looked like Japanese folk woodcuts, strange howling spectres on the walls behind.

So besides absolutely tons of video art it was easy to see an emerging sensibility of strange rooms and weird enclaves where a shift of only a few degrees away from so-called normality produced feelings of claustrophobia, wonderment, alienation and not a little humour. Supermarket will be in Liverpool in October and I'm basically buying my train ticket now!

What this means for pop, I don't know, but it was interesting to see a certain synchronicity of ideas in the work of these artists, an affinity that wasn't the product of scene-watching or collaboration and especiallly in the case of Supermarket, raised all kinds of objections about the brashness of unequal, mainstream society by using commercial parody.

The Best Band Ever, Yes The Best, All Music Since Has Been A Waste Of Time, No Really, All Your Modern Rubbish Is Just A Footnote In Musical History Compared To John, Paul, George And Ringo.

Who on ILM ever said anything resembling that ? Does anybody whose musical opinions you respect even think that way ? Why people let the way they see music be so affected by idiots who obviously don't give a shit is beyond me.

Of course, *I* *do* think that the Beatles were the best band ever.

Even better than the Commotions.

Patrick - I don't think I ever said anything like that.

Sorry Tracer. I wish this forum had a search engine so I could find who said it.

No Patrick, I didn't mean that any ILMer had said that, but it is an attitude I've come across elsewhere. And quite a prevalent one at that. I'm not trying to be hip or any shit like that in my anti-Beatles stance, I JUST DON'T FUCKING LIKE THEM. There isn't ONE Beatles song that does anything for me in any way. I like to think that without the Beatles we wouldn't have endless shitty Lennon fanboy bands...you know who I mean.

This much is undeniable: George Harrison's contributions are much lauded by my freind to my great consternation as I find them dull crap. SAvory Truffle indeed.

Errata: I got my assassins and would-be assassins confused, of course--that's Mark David Chapman who was Lennon's harshest critic, am I right? (Charles Manson is another example of a fan-turned- critic; he both wrote protest songs and practiced what he thought others preached.) Also, I know I've quite happily confused Amish, Mennonite, Shaker, Quaker, and every other pacifistic agrarian splinter sect. And it's MilLhauser, with two L's.

Suzy: I'm amazed but not surprised after all that you're from Minnesota. Would it be self-serving for this Iowan to say that despite stereotypes Midwesterners seem to be some of the most intellectually open-minded people I know? After all, David Sylvian and his wife choose to live in Minneapolis, while they could have chosen Japan or anywhere else... How I wish I'd been at the Biennale with you. Conceptual art that explores the heart of what a "room" is and means might be the future, if not the now. I've seen "House Of Leaves," almost bought it, and now know I must get to it. (And if by chance you don't know Millhauser's work yet, get thee to a library. Much of his work sounds like the literary equivalent of Mike Nelson. Tomorrow I'm finally going to the combined "Superflat" and "American Folk" exhibit at the MFA, so I'm happy.)

Ethically ambiguous but brilliant: The idea of "Eruv" should be universally adopted and applied whenever we see fit; I'd like a portable Eruv of a fifty-feet radius around my person which would protect me from both snobs and anti-intellectuals and allow me to rant unimpeded. (The Catholic equivalent of Eruv, I suppose, was getting papal dispensation to eat poultry instead of fish on Fridays.)

Final note: It's interesting to think we're conditioned to think pre- pop or post-pop, when in truth we've always been inevitably mid-pop, from Greek cithara to Arp Odyssey. But if Public Enemy is epic, that makes Homer a rapper. (No, I'm not referring to the one on "The Simpsons"!) Excuse me, was someone discussing The Beatles? Poor, George, when I think he really went about as far out from pop music as possible at the time--1968--by singing with an authentic Indian band on "The Inner Light" and recording that album of Moog doodlings when most people hadn't even heard the word "synthesizer" outside biology classrooms. Wasn't he, for all his faults, trying to create a room as far distant from Abbey Road, swinging London 1960s, as he could?

Postscript: Those remarks on the Taliban are brilliant. Their efforts might be in some tiny way laudable if they'd honestly tried to create a post-pop country of Zenlike silence, instead of one filled with the sighs of their veiled women and cries of all those stoned to death.

Yet another postscript: it's not that Afghani music never happened--I have some fine music from the crossroads of Asia. But certainly it has been demolished almost as completely as those gigantic Buddhas.

Yet another postscript: Strictly speaking, it's not that Afghani music never happened; I have some fine examples at hand. But the post-pop Taliban do seem to have eradicated almost all music as completely as they did those monolithic Buddhas.

How's that for a second take? Sorry, I didn't think the first post had submitted correctly, and I do so love the opportunity to improve myself...

Curious, interesting thread. Provoked no small amount of introspection, excuse the resulting 'confessional posting'. Thanks to parental censorship I grew up in a decidedly no-pop, no-TV evangelical Christian environment until my pre-teens. Handel's Messiah, Wesleyian hymns, Gilbert + Sullivan operas, Beethoven, Mozart, piano lessons. In retrospect the middle-class aspirations rather jarred with the working-class reality. Only my Dad had a Buddy Holly album which spoke to me in ways no other music did, as later did The Beatles. Strange tantalising shafts of light from a different universe. I've long mused on the why? Youthful rebellion + longing for Forbidden Fruit, doesn't seem to sum it up. Listening to The Specials in early 80's I concluded pop music, for good or ill, touched more powerfully on what was going on around me than other music did. Perhaps that is a poor excuse. I do listen to Mahler, Wagner, even Bach but right now Matmos, for instance, feels a lot more immediate and real.

xy Zedd, the midwest is intellectually open minded? In Kansas City too?

I said "some;" but since the author Evan S. Connell (who has grown increasingly avant-garde) is from there, I'll say of course, at least some of the populace. (Connell however lacerates his background in "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge.") Mainly I'm trying to fight against people's presumptions; I've heard far too much negative criticism of the "heartland" from people who've never been west of the Hudson.

Stevo's "confessional posting" is especially poignant. I grew up in somewhat the opposite environment, where all that was pop was allowed and to listen to Bach or Gilbert and Sulivan might seem counterculture. And yet I concur about Matmos. Somehow, at least sometimes the sounds of rhinoplasty affect me at a more gutteral level (sorry about the anatomical mismatching) than even the best of Beethoven.

Sorry to thwart your intentions, Momus! I'm afraid I'm posting far too much and continuing to help unravel this thread...

Wait, wait! I forgot to add, Stevo, that it was my MOTHER who gave me "Never Mind The Bollocks" for Christmas, 1977. How can you honestly rebel against that? Oh, right, anything unpop--and I did.

Minneapolis, of course, is waaay different from the rest of "the Midwest". And I can say that because I'm from there.

The Midwest, that is, not Minneapolis. [sorry]

XYZ: are you aware of the following Iowa joke?

Q: Why do all the football stadiums in Iowa use Astroturf?

A: To prevent the cheerleaders from GRAZING.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm glad somebody besides me pointed out about the dichotomy between Midwestern mall rats and, well, the people who have to live with them involuntarily. The Mall of America is like this great big Jeff Koons installation with Martin Parr interference and I like the moments of high comedy afforded by idiots in El Caminos with man-mammaries who yell "nice hair!" to Kids Who Wear Black, throughout recent history. There are a lot of good things about Mininoplace, but it's still the kind of place that provides rocket fuel for one's trip out. Also, shoveling snow SUCKS. I generally wing in for the thrift shops, Vietnamese food, late-night scene and the amazing Walker Art Center. And about coastal prejudice; I'm pretty lucky to have come from one of those places with good public schools (in the American sense) with lots of value-for-taxes, pro-active (and often Jewish, thus I know my schlemeils from my schmucks, despite my 'status' as Heinz 57 WASP) parents who'd kill their kids for voting Republican more readily than doing their heads in over lifestyle issues. We were not the ones who voted for Dubya, or Bush I, or (insert name of keep-the-baby, kill-it- later GOP arsewipe ). Best of all, it's a pretty egalitarian place. If it wasn't, I would never have been able to move 5,000 miles away from it.

Mike: Kansas City is pretty cool too, judging from what you leave here, if that's where you came from. Most of my college friends from there hung out with gay boys and drove to Lawrence A LOT. I got the impression lots of the people were good at making their own entertainment.

Please don't worry about unraveling Nick Currie threads.

*Rolls eyes*

Trust me...it's good for him.

Suzy--thanks for the laugh and your keen observations again. I could tell you some Iowa vs. Minnesota jokes, too, but, well, I'm too much of a gentleman...

Hee hee, Minnesota jokes from Iowans. Oh, yah. Bring 'em on because I'VE NEVER HEARD ANY and I'm foxed as to what the general tenor would be. If you don't wanna disturb the board feel free to send direct.

I keep forgetting to add that David Sylvian has moved from Mpls. to somewhere in the Napa Valley. I think he lived way outside of the Twin Cities when he was there...

Order, order! How did a thread that began 'You're staying at a friend's house in Rome' turn into Iowan jokes about Minnesotans? It's like Europe never happened!

For those, like me, rather keen on these parallel world scenarios, Mark Sinker has a good one going about punk. See you there, possibilists (and Minnesotans)!

Ordure, ordure! Nicholas, it was a brief aside, acknowledged as such. Stop putting the 'anal' in analysis. Europe is happening in all its blessed diversity!

Q: Why did the Scotsman jump from the airplane without his parachute?

A: Someone threw his wallet out the exit hatch.

I won't ruin this sketch for a pound. 75p.

OK I shall try to steer back to the path. I am not from Kansas City I am from ALbany, NY. I have been considering following internet romance to KC, MAYBE to live there. I guess I am hoping in a way its NOT a littel room where pop never happened, but then again, soemtimes I wish I could go somehwere where you can hear the snow fall and not have to worry about being assaulted by boomin systems. I guess rooms of cultural isolation could be either a prison of small mindedness or a freedom from the collective conscioussness. It reminds me of the attic/bedroom of the summer house we rent in Maine. Although its stuck in the seventies, not pre pop times.

Nicholas, don't be ridiculous. You can probably get twice that out of any Minnesotan if you ask for change. (Weak attempt at joke.) Suzy, sorry, I am just as bad at repeating jokes as I am creating them, though I do KNOW them. Mike, good of you to steer us back to the subject, which as I see is still going gangbusters on that other thread...

Come on, isn't anyone going to be rude to me about my Beatles hatred? How disappointing.

Too predictable, DG. Try Can or My Bloody Valentine instead ;)

i grew up on old time country adn folk . some light classical, hymns . I never had any pop music and i have wider tastes then anyone i know , when you grow up outside of the sominat culture you become obsessed w. finding varitons .

if you dont like the beatles then you cant like music.

you like collecting record covers and being controversial on messageboards, but you dont like music.

go listen to those TUNES and come back here and honestly say you dont like the beatles

I don't like the Beatles

All of a sudden I really wish I didn't like the Beatles. Is that a Jack White paraphrase?

Crieky DG had to wait eighteen months to be told it's not possible to not like the Beatles. Is that some kind of record?

I don't much like them either, which I suppose is a fault on my part, eh Alistair? It's probably genetic.

Though there are some Beatles covers I like so maybe it's the RECORDS not the TUNES.

Tim = OTM

The Beatles had very unappealing voices and frequently unappealing arrangements. That's why they don't do it for me.

i am afeared to go back and read my posts to this thread

God, if I thought the world would be better without "pop," I'd probably listen to a lot more Momus. But I don't so I can't go with the man on this one.