Do we need individiual genius?

Oh, I quite agree, but the Reed/Cale qn wasnt intentionally about who was the 'true genius' in the Velvets - the Velvets were the true genius in the Velvets, shrug - but a comparison of solo careers.

Even those solo careers of course are not the product of a single presiding genius. But the fact remains that there is a string of records with the name 'LOU REED' on the spine and a string with the name 'JOHN CALE' on the spine, and these are discrete and you can judge between them.

It is, however, entirely arbitrary. I think individual careers can be a handy way to package discussion of musical artefacts. I think theories of individual genius aren't wrong, just not of much use.

no: we need collective idiocy

I think I agree with you about individual careers Tom, but with a proviso that this structure suits certain forms of culture more than others - Rock more than pop for example. Clearly this is not to do the genius of white males working in the rock form but to do with the economics of production, the relative cultural status of particular producers and the patterns of consumption.

The recent Channel 5 Pete Waterman documentary was a typical attempt to play up the individual as the real pop genius, ultimately playing down Stock, Aitken and the artists because of what they had achieved on their own… Yet the aural evidence still says to me that PWL with Divine, Dead or Alive and Mel & Kim exceeded by some way anything Waterman has achieved apart from his collaborators.

Great pop is nearly always collaborative. Rock too I think, since with some notable exceptions (Daniel Johnston) one man bands tend to be awful (Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield, Jean Michel Jarre), However rock tends to focus around the vocals and songwriting of one or two "talents",

Unfortunately whilst the individual career is a "useful" analytic tool it also validates certain dominant structures in ways that are less helpful – a feminist reading of "careers" would be interesting to read, because I suspect that the whole way we give narrative to it as a notion is masculine. Patti Smith’s return after motherhood has been interesting to watch for example because after the initial enthusiasm it has been read as a "comeback" . I suspect that a lot of the jokes about comeback specialists are aimed at women performers who take breaks.

This is a huge topic….

What I think is interesting is how much of a reflex-action it is to try and locate the talented man within a group of men, but with groups of women we try to find the man behind them. I say this while being guilty of it myself. Can anyone think of any powerstruggles between divergent creative forces in female bands or groups that can prove me wrong? I don't think The Spice Girls counts really, as I've never read an article that went so far as to pinpoint one of them as having creative talent.

Shaznay routinely gets pegged as the 'talented one' in All Saints.

When Geri left the Spice Girls there were comments as to how she had the most 'drive' and 'business sense' - but these weren't qualities attributed to her before she left, when IIRC Posh was generally seen as the 'brains' of the group. The mass image of them didn't allow for ideas of talent, though: Mel C had the 'best voice' but that was about it. Again with Destiny's Child - once people started getting kicked out of the band assumptions were made as to who was the most ambitious, though in this case it was Beyonce, who stayed, who ended up with the credit.

The Sugababes are an interesting case because integral to a lot of people liking them is their supposed relative autonomy (it seems to me): they write their own songs and have real talent, etc. Obviously this isn't entirely true - they are 15-16 and so can't have very much autonomy, and a quick look at the writing credits on their CD will show that there are plenty of other minds at work. But theyve cannily been sold as a credible pop band on this basis. It helps that their record is really good, mind you.

So writing songs seems to be a lot to do with it - or being perceived to write them.

Virtually every piece I've read about the Sugababes has emphasised the fact that they write their own songs and/or the fact they're real singers. This isn't irritating in itself, but the implication that it makes them automatically superior to yer run of the mill girl band certainly is. John Aizlewood's review in the Guardian particularly got my goat, banging on as he did about the Sugababes technical and songwriting ability lifting them above the 'risible' All Saints in his pantheon of pop.

As far as powerstruggles between creative forces in female bands is concerned, the example of the Throwing Muses comes immediately to mind.

Most infuriating vis-a-vis Sugababes is that these same people then go, oh, "Overload" is a classic pop single. Which it is. It's also the one thats not written by them at all.

From Sugababes to SugarCUBES, where you had a perceived male- female 'creative struggle' where the woman was seen as being much more essential (Einar basically has been retrospectively painted as a piss-about wrecker holding back Bjork's talent).

Fame has a lot to do with it, as well as gender perception. Le Tigre, for example, tends to be seen as Kathleen Hanna's new band rather than as a three-way collaboration.

Okay so I obviously didn't think hard enough before I wrote that last post. With All Saints, I find it funny that one of my favourite singles by them ("War Of Nerves") was actually written by the Appleby sisters. As for The Sugarcubes, I used to agree that Einar spoilt everything. Then I discovered The Fall, and realised that Bjork just joined the wrong band. If "Birthday" had never been released I don't think anyone would have resented Einar, who I think becomes more likable the more you listen. And anyway The Sundays came along and largely filled the void "Birthday" had created.

When Geri left the Spice Girls there were comments as to how she had the most 'drive' and 'business sense' - but these weren't qualities attributed to her before she left, when IIRC Posh was generally seen as the 'brains' of the group.

I think Geri Halliwell being pegged as the most astute in business terms had some basis in fact. This also seems borne out by the relatively buoyant state of her solo career compared to the others (apart from Mel C). Posh was never seen as the 'brains' as far as I'm aware, only as the most...er 'posh'

having yr goat got by john aizlewood is like being irritated by 13-yr-olds who think slipknot is "punk": probably i'm old enough to have sired him (i didn't, actually) but he is Krowned King of Dadrock, no? (plus a major fuckwit of many years standing)

we can widen this thing, you know: in re brains-behind-the-operation, what do James Brown or George Clinton or Capt Beefheart – all non-musicians - actually DO in the respective muthaships? Clearly their absence wd be felt: yet their contribition in terms of, er, intellectual property rights wd be VERY hard to establish

I'd somehow never encountered Mr Aizlewood before he started writing pop pieces for the Guardian a couple of months ago and even then I'd not properly read anything he'd written until the review in question. So I reckon my goat getting got by it wasn't all that unreasonable in the circumstances. Saying that, given the calibre of music journalists who have written for the paper in the recent past (Caroline Sullivan and Tom Cox for example) I suppose I shouldn't expect much of its music writing anyway.

music writing in the guardian is excerable.

Like Beefheart and Brown, Mark E Smith manages to make anyone who plays with him sound like the Fall.

However these three would all be signed up members of many people's genious group... The point I was making about collaboration was slightly different - that when collaboration works the sum of the result can vastly exceed the sum of the talent.

As far as I know for example there was no individual genius in The Sonics but 'Strychnine' is a brilliant record. Pop is jammed with examples like this. Many of the best, most brilliant most pure genius records were made by non-genius groups who did not have 'careers'. It was just that the collaboration for that single or that album really gelled...

In fact the genius, hall of fame, approach leads to people going on far too long getting ever more self indulgent...

wrote my first posting ("collective idiocy") when bored at work and feeling naughty and anti-thinking. Maybe I shd be bored at work more often, because the more this topic gets thrown around, the more "collective idiocy" looks actually like the answer, to me. Obviously it's what L.Bangs was trying to get at in his Count Five piece + what Dave Marsh invented the work "punk" for in ref. ? and the Mysterians. Meaning: nothing wrong with intelligence per se, it's just not the factor which truly juices an interrelationship: every human on the planet is the same idiot when they're in love, clever or not in their dayjobs, good with words, bad at business or vice versa - and good bands are always polyamorous love-of-the-young mental-physical gang- bangs, affairs most often heading for the brick wall, as x, y, z and ringo get older, wiser and jealouser.

Since - can we agree on this? - few writers of rock biogs have yet been henry james, the one thing we generally don't get, in discussion of what made who how why, is the oomph of the drummer, say, on the bassplayer, when they're talking porno at the back of the tour bus (or whatever it was kept the Velvets sane). There's talk of music and sometimes of money; of "influences" and "tendencies"; but not the, um, dialectics of intimacy, except obliquely

weirdly enough - and you have to cut through bodyfat yards of self- regard to get to it - one person who isn't totally unJamesian on this topic, when discussing the recording of music (or anyway the recording of LPs by James) is Eno in My Life with a Swollen Head, or whatever it's called. Course he was a vital ineffable what-he-do-then? cog in one of the great bands-as-curdling-multipart-marriages: Roxy Music

'raw spice' was good also: ie what does Sporty do? She's the peace- maker. Who's the "genius of the group"? The "genius of the group" is the intense love-hate competitiveness between Geri and Scary. Who's the main comedienne? Posh: no brainbox, sure, but physically a deliberate charmer-amuser

(my theory as to why they didn't want this doc shown - which baby admittedly said not true on the priory - is that they considered it unhelpful that it be so obvious that they were in effect in control from so much earlier than it was helpful to them to have us assume same: and the managing menfolk were ALWAYS useful clods, for anwering phones and hiring hotels, and being required to act the svengali, albeit inadvertently, whenever the spicers themselves required to cloak their serious awesomeness in silly triviality)

Bands are threatened by strong (actual heterosexual) marriages. Bands get worse - how much worse cf Genesis c1990 - as their constituent parts grow into and make intelligent reasoned compromise with the lunacy of their early mad-for-it plight. I've hated the Jam longer than some ILM-ers have been alive, but I can hardly deny the rightness of their trio-ness up till at least 'Going Underground': and - tho I'd rather fricasee my tongue than have to spend time with them - I've always felt a pang thinking of the dumb animal hurt Rick and Bruce presumably still feel when Weller divorced them (for Mick Talbot!)

Tom: WTF did you hear that Posh was the "brains" of the group? If that's the brains, I'm very, very worried ;)

Anyway, to answer the question, I am someone who needs an individual genius. See: My intense dislike of McCartney, Gary, Nicky Wire, the entirety of Joy Division besides Ian Curtis, Sullivan (well, not really on that one but I'm sure it could happen), so on and so forth. I can't explain it though, just that I am acutely aware that I do it. I just like having a bad guy. It certainly doesn't HURT that these people all made awful music after their collaborations with the "geniuses" ended, though - so maybe it's something founded in fact. The results post split are so varying from the original work, that people are going to be pulled to one or the other.

Ramblings.

"Polyamorous": I couldn't agree more. As often as not 'genius' seems to arise as much from group dynamics as from some individual's vision. I am struggling to think of a great pop group (come to think of it, group in any musical genre) which is no more than the sum of its parts.

I often feel that identifying a single individual in a band as the genius is the lazy option, a displacement of trying to work out how a piece of music affects me onto something unknowable (it's pretty obvious that genius and madness are, for these purposes, the same thing). And if we're going to gaze at unknowables, then collective creativity / genius / madness is much more interesting to me than an individual's.

Apart from all that, I remain more interested in my reaction to a piece of art than in how or why the piece of art came about. The genius is in the listener, in how the listener listens. That must be true at least some of the time.

Despite all the clever things that have been said thus far: yes, we do.

As far as I know, most great melodies are not written by committee, though many vital and admirable democratic judgements at local council level may very frequently be.

But I think the point is - well, my point is - we need individuals to create the music but does that help us talk about it or enjoy it more?

The word genius once meant a special sort of talent: "she has a genius for woodwork". I would agree that we need that kind of genius, although it's not very interesting.

Now it's a term applied by critics to their artistic super-heroes, which exists in mutual justification with an agreed canon of classics. Others might feel they need it, I don't.

OK, I'm sure that you two are on good points here. No, I don't think that calling someone a genius gets us very far 'critically' (hard to see how it could). My response was merely to the 'question' itself (as, possibly, or possibly not, was the much-praised response 'no, we need collective idiocy'): that is, I do want there to be talented songwriters with gifts that no-one else quite has, and that are all different, and who work on and think about their talent and how to use it, and maybe at some point hand over what they've done to someone else to do further interesting things with it, which nonetheless don't negate the 'genius' who happened to start the thing off. I don't want an account of pop music which cannot accommodate this frequent and, from my point of view, vital pattern.

Mind you, it was only "much-praised" because I myself put up a second, very long posting praising it muchly (story of my life, if you don't blow your own blah blah blah). Or was that what you were remarking on?

Um, no - I was remarking on the fact that some very clever folks that I met in a railway carriage thought that your phrase about 'collective idiocy' was very good and apposite. I somewhat agree with them, I expect; but I also think [what I said above], which I may be wrong in thinking is an increasingly 'unfashionable' (perhaps that means 'supposedly discredited') way of discussing pop music.