Article Response: Sugababes

tom, doesn't the fact that i believed you make it true.

Journalistic standards? Fact-checking? Freaky Trigger larffs in the face of such fripperies.

OK I had not read the Wire, I'd skimmed through it in the shop. My assumption was that Peter Shapiro's piece would mention as an aside the mainstreaming of bootlegs given that it's the obvious big current development if you're writing something about them, and given that he'd singled out Richard X as auteur no.1 but according to Mark S this is not the case.

(I've said my bit on the Shapiro piece on another thread)

FWIW Tom, I think your piece and the Boom Selector one are both pretty darn good.

haha this is hilarious: i didn't say THE SUGABABES are NOT mentioned, i asked WHERE ARE THE SUGABABES mentioned, so i cd read it, since I had skimmed the *new* (OSWALD) issue (and actually almost nearly read the Oswald "piece") and not found mention. I haf still not read the issue Tom was referring to: Shapiro is a nice fellow but somehow his ideas abt music do not get me fired up enuff to find time to study em, unfair as this may seem. Anyway in the interests of journalism can someone please read the piece in question!!

(blimey - it's @ home but I'll re-read it for y'all tonight)

There was a thread about bullshitting somewhere as I recall...

it is abt three feet away from me as i post but i too haf "standards to maintain"

Hope this doesn't read like a criticism or complaint -- I'm just trying to work out what my response to the piece is.

I bought the single before I took the bus back to Oxford last Monday morning. Every time the song hit its climax - "It's all good for ME!" - I looked out the window and saw houses, tower blocks, shopping centers, and imagined the same song playing on the radios in them all. That feeling of community, the idea that I can have something glorious in common with people I've never met, is an illusion, maybe, but it's one of the best feelings I know - it shapes what I write, what I listen to, how I vote. Some records spark it off more than others, and for a week or two at least this is one of them.

I think you're correct to say that this is an illusion: but I wonder why that illusion appeals to you? It's not just trainspotters and cliquish elitists who see listening to music as a way to separate themselves from the world: they'll never be only one big teenpop act, for example, because then no-one will be able to have Beatles vs Stones or NSync vs Backstreet fites in the playground.

OK, I guess you're not saying that listening to the song makes you feel like you have something in common with *everyone* that you've never met, just some people that you've never met.

But I seem to be having trouble reconciling three distinct threads in the piece: a) the critic's sense of watching something happening, and being able to say things like "the Sugababes are at the nexus of three emergent trends"; b) the insider's sense of describing something happening that they feel part of -- FT and Sussed have been booted up for months; c) the individual listener's attempt to articulate an emotional complex -- song + moment + feeling.

I don't think these three threads necessarily should be separated; or perhaps even can be. But something in the way the piece ended puzzled / disturbed me, and I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be that the feeling of the illusion (everyone wuvs Sugababes, I am one with everyone for this moment) cannot easily be reconciled with the act of criticism (everyone could be writing about the Sugababes (not true -- at least not in as articulate and convincing a manner)): the result being a kind of tension between the ordinariness of wuving Sugababes and the the exceptionalism of writing about it.

I wonder if I would feel different about this if you were being paid to write about them, the media being one of the few other places where any kind of common cultural consensus is even imagined, let alone acclaimed.

I think you're correct to say that this is an illusion: but I wonder why that illusion appeals to you?
Because we're social beings. Rock: Us against Them. Pop: Everyone is hip to it. Wouldn't it be lonely to be the only one liking something? You want to share it. Your assessment (?) or appreciation needs to be confirmed, this make it more real.

(By the way I LOVE the article. Back to regular programming.)

Alex harass me to answer you properly. Every single senior person in my office has decided to hang around near my desk today so I'm reduced to hit-and-run raids on greenspun.

For some reason I cannot understand the appeal of this record. The combination of the Gary Numan track with the Adina Howard vocal line doesn't work particularly well IMO (at least not in the Sugarbabes' lifeless rendition, perhaps the bootleg works better...I've not heard it). Maybe that's the problem - I just hate the lifeless, limp, amateurish Sugarbabes.

I'm glad somebody hates it!!! (I don't, I think it grand.) Else some sort of utopian cosmic music love fest would occur and then surely the world would end 'cause we can't have the world not be a fucked up mess now can we?

yeah sugababes have a pretty lame idea of what 'sultry' is. boring boring boring and the new one is a right muntah. yuk scouse

i think they pretty much ruin any novelty kudos they may have fluked but hey who am i to stand in the way of new skool philistinism hmmm?

I must admit that I like the garage remix of the Adina Howard version a bit better, but sometimes that sounds like the best piece of music EVAH, so that's no fatal blow to dem ol Sugababes.

Tom's article is great of course. I'll have to reread it to remember what I liked specifically.

Tru Faith and Dub Conspiracy - is that what u mean? - if so I agree - it roX0r!! (that Matt 'Jam' Lamont comp is the best single album purchase I think i've ever made)

Yes Tracer (re Tru Faith & Dub Conspiracy, not Lamont's mix which I have not heard)! URGENT AND KEY have you ever been out clubbing when it's come on?!? The breakdown is the most awesome thing EVER EVER EVER.

I get the social thing because the song sounds so perfectly individual, self-indulgent, and twisted that a broad pop appeal for it is delightfully and incomphrehensibly perverse. Hence "freaks like we" and the attendent contradictions of that phrase. Hence -- grandeur!

wrong mix alert - the version i have is by the wideboys

Alext said: "But I seem to be having trouble reconciling three distinct threads in the piece: a) the critic's sense of watching something happening, and being able to say things like "the Sugababes are at the nexus of three emergent trends"; b) the insider's sense of describing something happening that they feel part of -- FT and Sussed have been booted up for months; c) the individual listener's attempt to articulate an emotional complex -- song + moment + feeling."

For me, it's this wonderful article's ability to do all three of these successfully and blend them together that tempts me to get really, really carried away with praise for Tom. It's a tremendous piece of writing, and it's all true to boot.

i order that last pun be striken from the record!

Because we're social beings. Rock: Us against Them. Pop: Everyone is hip to it. Wouldn't it be lonely to be the only one liking something? You want to share it. Your assessment (?) or appreciation needs to be confirmed, this make it more real.

We may be social beings -- but we are complexly differentiated, or something like that. I can't think of ANYTHING more disturbing than a world in which everyone liked / said / did the same thing, even for a moment. If I can imagine it as a feeling that someone might have, I can only think of it as psychosis -- the inverted response to feeling absolutely isolated from the world.

The point about pop music -- and I include 'rock' music in this -- is that you know that someone else likes it, and you know that someone else hates it, or is just bored by it, or has never even heard it. Your reaction takes place in this matrix. So yes, pop = a shared phenomena, but not just an activity of sharing.

So I disagree that 'Pop = Everyone is hip to it'. Has this ever been the point of pop? Sure pop may have always projected a fantasy of its universal popularity as a unifying force, but only in uniting one group (the kids!) against another (their elder siblings, parents, teachers). So the pop fantasy of universal appeal always undercuts itself, whether or not it makes it explicit (what you call 'Rock').

Example: St Etienne's 'Join Our Club' -- openly Rockist pop in your terms, i.e. projecting 'Us Against Them' onto the 'Everyone is Hip to It' vibe. In my terms? Metapop, since it explicitly comments on the dialectic between the fantasy of one-ness and the necessary exclusivity which undermines that fantasy (NB: this is NOT a bad thing -- fantasy does not mean delusion or false-consciousness). The song's message -- and that of pop as a whole, perhaps -- is that anyone can join our club (but that if everyone joined it, it would no longer be a club). All you have to do to join is like the song / buy the song / worship the group or whatever -- but that act of self- selection, in responding to a pop song (ie. joining a club of other respondents (perhaps even Haterz)), cannot be universal.

Well "everyone" was an exaggeration of course. Also I don't equate Rock with Pop. I see Rock to be more reactionary. Us vs Them - the latter being the establishment. Pop is to me more an illusion, an escape, more positive. The whole point is popularity. Of course my statements are extremely simplistic and obviously in many cases there are overlaps.

OK, but if 'everyone' is an exaggeration -- as it may have been for Tom as well -- wouldn't the tendency to use that exaggeration support my suggestion that pop projects a universal fantasy which cannot be sustained? My disagreement with you and Tom would then be that a critical response to pop should involve not just embracing the fantasy (even momentarily) but a suspicion of it. This 'critical response' is not just a response by a critic, but a response already embedded in pop.

True. Unless you're delusional/blind, you always discover the vapid character of pop. That's what I like about the ending: He's aware of the fact it is fleeting, that he's merely dreaming. (Or maybe he didn't imply that and I am merely projecting my own feelings about it.) I think that's something you only realize once you grow older. Young children aren't so much aware of this, nor would they care about it, I think. It's the *now* that counts. We want to believe the illusion pop is trying to sell.

Re: The Shapiro/Wire/Boots thing - wasn't it prob. commissioned/written/published before the Sugababes rec came out (or has their version been floating round for ages)?

Shame that the Sugababes had to use a 'real' band for their CD:UK appearance - and shame they couldn't get Gaz NumNum to appear w/em ('cos I bet he finds the royalties most 'flattering'.) The gurlz themselves looked wonderfully bored w/ the song, the show, the audience, and, above all, with doing their little hand movements - combined w/ the song's sentiments and rough-and-ready production sound, it all seems quite punky to me. My flatmate also made v. funny comparison w/ the Oasis number one - the hook on both of 'em is a 20 year old riff.

Does Gary Numan have, like, other songs?

Yes, he does!

Surely you've heard "Cars"?

Strictly speaking of course that IS Gary Numan, whilst "Are 'Friends' Electric?" is Tubeway Army, who were ace.

I mean, apart from those two. Considering the amount yhey are sampled/discussed/worshipped, I'm suprised no one seems to have found merit in anything else he's done (which I know nothing about it).

You silly sod, Graham. *smacks him upside the head* A listen to "Where's Your Head At" by Basement Jaxx will reveal you are hearing the descending bass synth part from Mr. Numan's "M.E."

He has about...*thinks*...what, fifteen studio albums?

I don't know if anyone's mentioned it but Tom aren't you going on the presupposition (re:the S Club branding) that the Juniors are substitutes for the Seniors. That is if the Seniors dropped then the brand would hold as the consumers would switch. I'm not sure if this is entirely true. Perhaps a crude perspective on the respective audiences:-

S Club 7 - Under 11s, Teenyboppers, and 19-20 yr olds who fancy them.

S Club Juniors - Just the under 11s and fledgling Teenyboppers.

So they might be 'slight' complements rather than substitutes. (Also, underestimating the importance of a good tune re:the power of branding? I don't think you would but I'm not sure that's clear from the article, will re-read.)

"New Year" still makes me cry.