Free-Folk, Grime, R&B, the return of Hardcore – what defined pop music in 2005?
by Simon Reynolds and Dan Fox
The most striking thing about Pop in 2005 is how little conversation there is between black music and white music. Mainstream UK Rock, from Coldplay to whoever’s on the cover of NME this week has never sounded so bleached. The main effect of this (apparently, hopefully) unconscious drive towards sonic segregation is a grievous lack of rhythmic spark and invention. Catch some highly-touted Brit hopeful on the TV programme Later With Jools, and it’s instantly audible how the drummer contributes nothing to the music in the way of feel, tension, or dynamism, but instead just dully marks the tempo. He’s seemingly there simply because that’s what proper Rock bands have – a live drummer.
Things aren’t much different on the Rock underground, where the coolest thing around is Free-Folk (aka Freak-Folk, Psych-Folk … ). Ranging from beardy minstrels like Devendra Banhart to trippy jam bands like Animal Collective and Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, Free-Folk is a recombinant sound that draws on a whole range of historical sources beyond the obvious traditional music and Folk-Rock ancestors. It just so happens that none of them (apart from a trace of utmostly ‘out’ Free Jazz) are black. Free-Folk’s accompanying ideology – a mish-mash of mystical pantheism, paganism, and sundry shamanic/tribalistic impulses – places it in the same continuum as the hippies and the beats, but, significantly, it has broken with Beat’s ‘white negro’ syndrome. Elsewhere in the leftfield, there’s the neo-post-Punk fad, fading somewhat after a good three-year run. These groups engage in white-on-black, Punk-to-Funk action, but only by replaying genre collisions from 25 years ago. Whereas the true post-Punk spirit manifested today would involve miscegenating Indie-Rock with Grime or Crunk.
Because its internal socio-cultural dynamics force it to keep on generating freshness, black music has never really needed to borrow from white music. Hip-Hop has two advantages over Rock. It can draw on a deeply rooted set of black music traditions, characterised by a strong sense of regional identity (hence the plethora of new city-based sounds), and this ensures that it retains, even in this allegedly post-geographical era, qualities of a folk culture. Its other advantage is disadvantage. There’s an urgency to Rap music, fuelled by inequalities of opportunity, that results in ferocious competition between producers and between MCs and stokes the furnace of creativity. That said, the half-decade from 1999 onwards did see Hip-Hop giving itself an extra boost by ransacking the best licks and noises from Techno-Rave and Euro electronica. That pattern began to fade last year, with black Pop reverting to its usual awesome self-sufficiency. Which would be just fine, if the genre hadn’t also start to sputter. For most of the past decade, street Rap and R&B has been the engine of Pop culture, both in its pure form and various teenybop dilutions. Give or take a gem – Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’, Three Six Mafia’s ‘Stay Fly’, Kanye West’s ‘Addiction’ and ‘Crack Music’ – its remorseless rate of innovation stalled this year. And formal advance was always the compensation for its counter-revolutionary content of bling and booty-worship.
Grime would love to be the UK’s Hip-Hop, enjoying the sort of pop culture hegemony that African-American street music holds in its homeland. But you can sense the London scene’s self-belief is flagging. 2005 produced one immaculate scene-reflexive anthem, Kano’s ‘Reload It’, a celebration of Grime’s dog-eat-dog competitiveness; the MC hierarchy where rank is measured by how many rewinds your tune gets. Grime also produced two more low-key but equally inspired tunes about the out-of-reachness (‘Sometimes’, also by Kano) or hollowness (Lethal Bizzle’s ‘Against All Oddz’) of the prize that everyone on the scene is striving so strenuously for. Reporting a Grime story for an American magazine last spring, I was struck by how little presence it had on the streets of London in this, the year of its expected crossover, compared with the way Jungle streamed out of passing cars and Oxford Street boutiques in 1994 (the equivalent breakthrough year). As a critic championing Grime, one of my angles – beyond the sheer excitement of the music, the brilliance of the wordplay, the charisma of the MCs – has been ‘you really ought to check this, it’s the voice of the UK streets.’ But I suspect that not many people actually want to hear what the voice of the streets has to say: partly, because it ain’t pretty, and partly, because most people honestly don’t give much of a fuck. Twenty years ago, the likes of Kano or Bizzle would be NME front cover stars, no questions asked, purely as a matter of basic journalistic responsibility.
White and black music, then, seem to agree on just one thing at the moment: ‘you can go your own way’, in the immortal words of Lindsay Buckingham. But it’s not clear what conclusions could, or should, be drawn from this. After all, earlier phases of musical miscegenation didn’t, in the end, augur some multicultural Utopia of the future; the last major upheaval of mixing-it-up (Rave culture) was heavily dependent on chemicals. Nevertheless, if there’s any credence left in the notion that the times manifest themselves in music, then this increasing separate development within pop culture isn’t a promising portent.
Simon Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–84 was recently published by Faber. At blissout.blogspot.com he also operatesthe weblog Blissblog.
Dan Fox
Although a chronically male-oriented scene, the most significant things being done with loud guitars continue to be by bands pushing the envelope of genres such as Metal or Ind-ustrial. Perhaps better experienced live than on record (and I’ve not seen a more exhilarating live band in years), Lightning Bolt delivered another barrage of skittering, rabbit-punch drums and overdriven bass with their breakneck album Hypermagic Mountain (all releases 2005) whilst Black Metal deconstructionists Sun 0)))’s White 1 saw them further stretching their formalist approach to a maligned genre. Black Dice spread their noisescape blankets anew with Broken Ear Record, though to my ears the brutalism of fellow travellers Wolf Eyes currently provides a more fitting soundtrack to uneasy times.
How Long Are You Staying – the debut by Brighton-based Hardcore outfit Charlottefield – is a fierce fusion of Beefheart-esque rhythmic complexity, pent-up menace and occasional tenderness. At the softer end of the scale, Folk revivalism continues apace; the acid-campfire hysteria of Feels by Animal Collective (who sound like early Tyrannosaurus Rex) contrasts well with Vashti Bunyan’s pastoral laments on Lookaftering, which
sounds as if it could have been recorded any-time in the last 40 years. A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, meanwhile, reaffirms Smog’s special place in the hearts of late night melancholists.
Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop it Like It’s Hot’ is an elegant piece of sleek innovation with its tuned kick drum that doubled as the bass-line, strange vocal clicks and sparsely deployed, cheesy 1980s breakdown. There is an inventiveness too in the bubblegum Grime of MIA’s Arular; refreshing froth for the summer months. On a scuzzier, lo-fi front, the numerous manifestations of ‘cheap’ or ‘wrong’ music (made largely from computer game consoles) continued to flash above and below radar. Of note: US-based Nullsleep and Bitshifter, and KFC Core, by UK-based DJ Scotch Egg, for some real avian trouble.
A crop of interesting reissues surfaced. Moondog: The Viking of Sixth Avenue was a perfect overview of blind, itinerant composer Louis ‘Moondog’ Hardin’s work, comprising recordings made between 1949 and 1995 that along the way inspired such diverse musicians as Janis Joplin and Philip Glass. The Glasgow School, a long-awaited anthology of fey indie heroes Orange Juice, caused an outbreak of foppishness in my household, swiftly inoculated by the brilliantly titled Livin’ in Fear of James Last, a primer to the darkly humorous sound collages of maverick Industrial innovator Steven Stapleton, aka Nurse with Wound. Le Monde Fabuleux des Yamasuki, originally released in 1972 to promote Franco-Japanese cultural awareness, was resurrected in all its insane, Mikado-meets-Phil Spector glory. Reissued on CD was the 1969 album Black Woman by Free Jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock; the missing connection between Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra. Top of my list is Robert Wyatt and Friends; a moving document of the musician’s comeback London concert after the accident that left him paralysed in 1973.
Of artists’ excursions into sound, Sue Tompkins’ low-key performance at the Venice Biennale was a singularly memorable exploration of the outer reaches of vernacular speech. Fellow Glasgow artist Danny Saunders released his debut single Gold, featuring the track ‘Who Made the Takeaway?’ The Red Krayola’s 1981 album with Art and Language, Kangaroo?, was given a welcome fresh lick of paint, and Remixed Water – remixes by younger artists of music by Ned Sublette and Lawrence Weiner – must have similarly delighted many a Conceptual art geek. Both Brian DeGraw’s soundtrack to Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s Sonic the Warhol and Zeena Parkins’ composition for Daria Martin’s latest film The Loneliness of the Modern Pentathlon are intelligent approaches to the often-abused role of music in artist’s videos. With its voodoo chants and grinding bass Jack Too Jack’s CD release, that also accompanied recent films by Mark Leckey, was similarly satisfying. The Berlin-based Art Critic’s Orchestra should be nominees for best sleeve artwork of the year with their eponymous 12-inch picture disc, alongside Enrico David’s elegant design for Bonnie Camplin’s eerie Heavy Epic, released on Lucy McKenzie’s Decemberism label. A shame these didn’t make the list for ‘Vinyl’, the exhibition of artists records at Neue Museum Weserburg Bremen.
Finally, London-based duo No Bra deserve honorable mention for the most savagely funny lyrics of 2005, in their parody of hipper-than-thou desperation ‘Munchausen’: ‘I have an exhibition here in two weeks’, ‘Really? I’m doing a performance here in three weeks in which I throw chairs around then throw myself around then cut myself 23 times’, ‘Really? I haven’t had a shag in, like, 23 minutes,’ ‘Really? I haven’t been to sleep in ten years’, ‘Really? I used to live without electricity for ten years’, ‘Really? …’.
Dan Fox is associate editor of frieze.