Little Man, What Now?

He has produced possibly the best and most astonishingly all-encompassing LP in pop history.

That's him behind the new Jay-Z album, then? I salute him.

Yeah Ned, right on. The J-Lo album is amazing too.

The way you're phrasing it sounds to me like a purely commercial question.

Yes, there are people who will never escape being labelled as 'that guy who wrote [x]', but this is mainly a surface reading. If the next record is just as great there will be some who will feel the need to delve deeper.

The only solution is for the artist to Just Not Care. Or be proud that the work captured the public imagination.

Artistically is a whole other question. For myself, I think the best way to avoid being pigeonholed is to not make some pathetic variation on a theme and claim it as new, but to go the whole way- Stephin Merritt goes d'n'b, for example. I was actually arguing with someone that Iggy Pop should have done this and started to play laptops, but I don't think they were very impressed with the idea.

Or you could quit the music industry while you're ahead and go live in the mountains.

Iggy Pop is far too comfortable with himself to ever play laptops, and his fans are far too comfortable with him to ever listen to them.

Yeah, I just don't like the fact that people don't move on. When you're successful you spawn a load of shite-hawking soundalikes, and when you stay doing the same thing you're running the risk of being nothing more than they are.

The laptop thing was kind of a joke, too.

There is a theory about baseball players that could be extended to apply to rock musicians: that they wear their hair the way it was when they had their moment of greatest success.

emil.y's got it, it seems to me. Just solve a different puzzle if you aced the first one. Easier said than done tho.

Tom, I think 'The Idiot' was the 1977 equiv. to 'playing laptops'.

What I mean is...he was at a stage where 'playing laptops' carried a far bigger risk for him than it would now. Not for the electronics, for the poptunes.

1. Emily: the question has nothing to do with commercial considerations; 'purely artistic', whatever that means.

2. Tracer H says: when you've sorted one thing, just do another. That sounds glib to me. For one thing, artists, in general, can't do another thing like they can do the first - so they will just produce inferior work. I don't think that's a very good justification for 'taking risks'. For another, re. the specific example of Merritt - what else can he do? Is there a game he hasn't won yet?

Interesting case history - Roxy Music (two diametrically opposite phases, so much so that each 'phase' has devotees who are fiercely antagonistic to the stylistic values subscribed to by the other)

The sort of dead-end-collision you're probably thinking of usually happens to people for which eclecticism is their MO. (Merritt, Prince, Todd Rundgren, some might say Zappa. Though oddly enough, Ween and Mr Bungle just get better all the time!) of course the key is balancing between maintaining a signature style while maintaining the requisite liquidity. (Then again, to avoid becoming INXS and U2 and being caught out at this game, the speed at which you must move increases exponentially, like in a videogame. Many have tried the 'long-layoff' technique, but it's never worked, though some will say Scott Walker pulled it off. If Sly Stone came out with an album this year that was better than he was doing in 1971 that would be the greatest day in the history of music.)

Who is 'Little Man, What Now?' about?

From It May All End Tommorrow, a Morrissey/Smiths lyric site...

Mixed in from Alsatian Cousin. A reference to Morrissey's love of 60s kitchen-sink dramas, ATV was a popular television channel in the UK. On reflection, one of the weaker tracks on the first album, although its clever placement on the track listing (providing a link from the ferocious Alsatian Cousin to the chartworthy Everyday Is Like Sunday) redeems it somewhat. The title comes from a 1934 German film which was based on a book of the same name, by Hans Fallada. The song itself is reputedly about Jack Wilde on ATV's "Look Familiar".