Elton -- not pop's friend

But exchanging David Gray for Steps is not my idea of progress, I have to say. I *really* hate it when somebody makes stupid claims like these because they're just talking about one heavily marketed set of groups in place another -- does Elton even try and listen to stuff not already on a major label?

He namechecks the Hives and Groove Armada in his interview.

I like how for the caption for David Gray's photo they put the phrase "quality artist" within quotation marks, as if to assert the dubiousness of Elton's claim.

This isn't quite as deliciously ironic as Sporty Spice hitting out at manufactured bands, but anyone involved in "Can You Feel The Light" has very little credibility in such areas.

Tim, if you actually mean "Can You Feel the LOVE", then I'm with you 110%. Elton, dahling, working for Disney places you inside the glasshouse you're stoning, I believe.

Is this & Elton's supposed retirement the musical equivalent of a mid- life crisis?

i wonder why he didn't include dave matthews as a quality artist. elton should listen to the new allen clapp cd, it sounds like elton but this does not keep it from being lovely.

Though he doesn't use the word, Elton, bless 'im, is talking about commodification. The labels are run by people with no interest in music, artists are discarded after one flop album, records are treated like packets of cereal...

The BBC asks in its follow-up thread 'Is pop music too manufactured?' Of course it is, I mean, how much more manufactured could it get? But maybe that's precisely what people like about it. And maybe its built-in obsolescence, its tendency to commodify everything it touches, has something in common with life. Maybe that's why all those people watch Pop Stars.

Maybe those teen bands that peak for a year before going 'down the dumper' are just caricatures of the people who buy their records: they use the same hair gel (just slightly more of it), they flirt and primp (in front of a TV camera rather than a mirror), celebs date other celebs the same way the plebs date other plebs... Culture and nature are following each others' contours, money and biology both crave what's fit and fresh. Your parents met and mated to Brotherhood of Man, and you meet and mate to SClub7.

Elton says if he was King there would be a ban on pop videos. He would give the bands the money to spend on music equipment. They'd do long apprenticeships, playing second on the bill to Derek and the Dominos and The Kinks (as he did) until they were good enough to warrant a long-term career. Then they would be supported by the labels forever. It's a familiar theme: it's what the old and established always tell the young. It's the guild system: 'Pay your dues, I paid mine!'

My take: In a diverse world of music, nobody can agree on what's good. The people who are all buying the same thing tend to be conformists. So they're the ones who show up in charts and record company sales figures. They're often schoolkids, because a school is a big sausage factory churning out conformity of thought, and the most febrile meme-incubator there is. But we're wrong to pay too much attention to charts and sales figures. The popular successes of 1890 are totally unknown today. The pop groups selling millions in Japan (Morning Musume, currently) are of no use to anyone outside Japan. The history of any genre tends to be a history of exceptions and innovations. Acts who sell only small quantities are probably defining the era right now. Acts who make more export than domestic sales define their nation the best. Elton John may or may not be remembered in 100 years time, but at least he's likely to have heard of some of the acts who will be.

We should also consider that, although the history of music will not remember the Spice Girls, the history of marketing may.

I said on the Brits thread this wasn't interesting enough for its own thread, but:

a Polydor spokeswoman said: "He just mentioned S Club 7 in passing - he wasn't slamming them"

clearly I was wrong. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

The question is though - why do you have to consider the era you live through from this perspective of 'future historian'? (not least because it's a fool's errand: contemporary history is often interesting but generally and inevitably wrong). Your generalisation about 'what's remembered' falls down too: look at the mid-19th century in literature say, defined to us now by some who were unsung at the time but also by the mega-selling populist Dickens. And how popular were Gilbert and Sullivan?

There's no direct correlation between talent and success, but there are times when talented people and 'the conformist mass' are in better sync. Dickens, yes, and The Beatles. This seems to happen in times of economic growth when people are upbeat (the 60s, the heyday of the British Empire) or when there's a sudden slowdown (Bowie co-incided with the three day week, the oil crisis, etc, punk followed). At other times art reverts to playing second fiddle to reproduction: bodice rippers and love songs.

And I wonder how much Elton's homosexuality has to do with his criticisms. There's a limit to the extent to which you can twist the blatantly hetero function of girl and boy bands to homo ends. Trying to shift the emphasis to 'music' and 'talent' may be Elton's way of expressing (wholly understandable) alienation from the 'music for breeders' clogging up the charts.

But Dickens and the Beatles *are* bodice rippers and love songs - or at least built their reps and audiences on them before going off to make Bleak House and Revolver. Also saying, well art and the popular coincide when the economy is booming or, um, when it's not, seems a bit catch-all. And I still don't see why documenting the present is less important than second-guessing the future in terms of value- judging.

Okay, let me hit you with another scenario. The early 1900s, Paris. The rents on Rue Lafayette are high, and people teem in the Galleries Lafayette, buying home furnishings, including kitschy paintings of landscapes. A mile or two away, in Montmartre, the rents are low. Picasso is working on 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon'.

Now, any investor of the time would probably have thought the Galleries Lafayette was a better investment than the Bateau Lavoir, where Picasso painted. And yet not only do we not remember the kitschy paintings they sold at the department store, they are totally eclipsed economically by the value of a single Picasso. Picasso is more significant on a money scale and as a sociological indicator -- his painting heralds both the violent rupture of the First World War and Modernism, the dominant style of the next 50 years.

Are you saying you think the middle management buyers at the Galleries Lafayette, with their taste for ornate lampstands and Victorian tat, have the same importance as Picasso? (Now of course those same people are ordering Picasso reproductions, which have become the kitsch of our time.)

I actually think Elton's retiring because his voice is GONE.

On the Newsnight article they spewed forth an number of bad statistics *implying* that Pop Idol etc were rubbish and old Reggie woz right cos sales are falling (5% down, apparently). What would have been better is if they'd broken down the sales further, so we could see exactly where the sales have been dropping off.

This story surprises me cause last time I saw him on TV he was being filmed doing his weekly massive record shop and was buying LOADS of pop singles. He said he'd heard all the Strokes hype but found them a bit backwards-looking. He was especially fond of dance music, as I recall (poss UK Garage?)

He namechecks the Hives and Groove Armada in his interview.
Clause 6, paragraph 22, section 8 of the Popstar Interview guidelines clearly states that "...Popstar in question must namecheck any recent new pop group in order to retain his membership in the Malevolent Order of Popstars, Local 667."
Hence, he was only doing it so he could keep his fuzzy antler hat and a place in the firehouse buffet line.
But if you've seen him lately, he really doesn't need any more buffet.

And he probably has a whole closet full of (non-compliant) antler hats already.

Re: my Picasso parallel above.

Can we imagine Picasso grumbling in an interview (in the 30s or 40s) about the kitsch painters in the Galleries Lafayette? Elton appears to be disillusioned about the major labels, but his mistake was in ever being 'illusioned' with them in the first place. He seems to think that in some golden age (around about the time they signed him) they were benign and nurtured talent, and now they just go for a quick buck.

That's like proposing a parallel world where Picasso licenses reproductions of 'Les Demoiselles' to department stores in 1910.

"Acts who make more export than domestic sales define their nation the best" says Momus.

By those criteria Enya best defines Ireland (doubtful, though what I think she does define is the rose-tinted view of it that so many sectors of the US are taken in by), Wang Chung, Naked Eyes and The Escape Club best defined Britain in the 80s (an absurd suggestion), Bush best defined Britain in the 90s (really?) and Anastacia and Fun Lovin' Criminals best define modern America (an even more absurd suggestion than any of the above).

Oasis were basically a UK phenomenon and they defined, for better or worse (I say worse) a lot of the Britain of their moment. Bush sold millions in the US and very little in the UK and didn't capture anything of Britain in the mid-90s, or for that matter anywhere at any time. Or am I completely misreading Momus here?

'Can we imagine Picasso grumbling in an interview (in the 30s or 40s) about the kitsch painters in the Galleries Lafayette'?

This very same question was posed by Adam Ant ('Picasso Visito el planeto de los simios') and the answer is not very flattering to Senor Pablo!

Momus's Picasso bit is all very well, but a more recent comparison would be revered British DJ John Peel's 1960s arguments about history's judgements of the music of the day with idiot colleague Tony Blackburn. Peel's expert view was that It's A Beautiful Day and Iron Butterfly would be the idols of millions in years to come whereas Blackburn's favoured Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson would be on history's scrapheap. Predicting isn't that easy. I love DJ Shadow, but whether he'll be regarded in 30 years as Iron Butterfly are now or as the Velvet Underground are is not knowable.

'Manufactured' pop makes up much of the greatest music ever recorded - Motown, Spector, Shangri-Las, Monkees, Sweet. And I'd rather listen to Steps and Britney nowadays than the whining dirges of Stereophonics, Coldplay or David Gray, more conservative and retrograde than S Club 7 or Hear'Say.

Peel's expert view was that It's A Beautiful Day and Iron Butterfly would be the idols of millions in years to come whereas Blackburn's favoured Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson would be on history's scrapheap.

It could still happen. That's the nice thing about 'years to come', there are so many of them. Almost anything you say about the future might come true, as well as its opposite. There's a good David Byrne song (but no good Elton John or Steps songs) about this.

I repeat: Picasso's just mad 'cause his brush is broken.

sclub = "music for breeders"? in whose bonkers world? anti-"manufactured" = oldest code in pop crit for kneejerk homophobia => this is just more of elt's monumental self-loathing

as for history vs the spicers, it all depends if i ever FINISH MY BOOK doesn't it haha

The question isn't about the importance of Picasso or the kitsch paintings in hindsight - hindsight's an easy game. The question is: what should have been talked about and written about and praised or damned at the time. And my answer is "both".