Thursday, November 17, 2022

Jagger versus Morley, or, The Life and Death and Living Death of Rock and Roll Music




While working on Retromania, I read a very interesting book, Is Rock Dead?,  by Kevin J.H. Dettmar. It's a scholarly but entertaining work that is not an attempt to take rock's vital signs, not at all,  Rather it's an examination of the decades-long discourse of rock vitality versus rock necrosis : the way that, almost from the very start of this music, fans, critics, and artists have fretted and fought over questions such as: "is rock dying?", "is rock already dead?", "it is about to be reborn?", "can we bring it back to life?", and sometimes even whether rock and its culture had degenerated to the point where it is something that needs to be killed off quickly and completely. Dettmar is fairly caustic about the impulse to proclaim rock to be ready for the knacker's yard, on its last legs, in terminal decline and decay. He characterizes that as a form of projection by the no-longer-young, with the babyboomers being particularly prone to this kind of "generational ethnocentrism". He diagnoses a syndrome in which the state of the critic's flabby, middle-aged body and depleting libidinal reserves gets fatally confused with the vigour of the music. In a Blissblog post spurred by Is Rock Dead?, I argued that the insistence on the possibility that a given music form could die (usually referring not to the exhaustion of musical resources so much as the genre's relapse into the blandness and respectability it once opposed) was actually a form of fidelity to the sheer force of its life in its emergence. Dettmar himself makes the  similar point that "the birth and death of rock aren't just coincident… they are, in fact, two different ways to talk about the very same thing."

Now just the other week I came across a beautiful chunk of rock discourse that totally fits Dettmar's subject. It's one of those confrontational interviews that ye olde music papers once routinely did with  even the biggest stars, simply because the weekly press still commanded the centre space of the  Rock Discourse and accordingly the stars craved the attention and - to an extent - even the adjudication that the critics bestowed upon them, hostile though it might be. Here, in the New Musical Express, June of 1980, it is Mick Jagger -  who could quite easily have not bothered with being bothered by some spotty young upstart oh-so-eager to shove him into a grave and shovel dirt on top -  who submits, warily, to a dialogue with Paul Morley. The dynamic between the two - the middle-aged myth gamely parrying the insinuations of irrelevance lobbed by the youth - is fun to watch. But the most relevant bit for this discussion is Morley's framing of the encounter - his intro and outro pivot precisely round the metaphorics of life and death.

(whole interview at the end of this post)

Throughout the interview, Jagger shrugs off the burden of all that the Stones - and rock, since the Stones are the quintessence of rock - have come to represent: the excessive expectations placed upon the music to its detriment, in his view.  Jagger insists that it's all been a drastic over-estimation; rock may not be just another form of Entertainment, but it's closer to showbiz than to being a vehicle for, or harbinger, of Revolution. Jagger says that Rolling Stones music is just the blues really, when you get right down to it. It's the band's favorite form of black music, which they've applied themselves to playing at once faithfully and yet authentically (not merely imitatively). Jagger discounts and downplays all the extra things that groups like the Stones brought to the blues - musical  things as well ideological and attitudinal baggage. Mick's a slippery fellow, cunningly yet casually evading Morley's angle of attack. So he'll acknowledge in one breath, the energy surge of punk, but then in the next he'll put it in its place, saying that just like the Sixties explosion the expectations around the New Wave got overblown, the movement was naive in its idealism, and none of the new groups really had the musical strength to sustain. 

Morley meanwhile is arguing that the Stones and the other key Sixties groups once manifested a vitality so excessive it was subversive. For them to simply carry on, professionally providing a milder version of their once electrifying energy, is to contradict everything they once embodied. Once they were living; now they are merely surviving ("survival" being a buzzword of the '70s). Indeed, they have survived, in the literal sense of living longer than their own peak of dynamism and relevance.  This  shameful continuance, the mere adequacy of their records (piss-took by the Stones themselves later with the compilation Sucking in the '70s) makes the Stones  - and people who still buy their records and turn up to their shows - into participants in a form of living death. The sparks of real life in 1980 are, Morley admits, small and marginalized in the scheme of things: almost unknown  (outside NME and Sounds) groups who make a raw racket in poky clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh,  Manchester, Liverpool... 

Some nine months later, Morley will have a similar encounter with a living (just barely) legend of the Sixties -   Jerry Garcia - during the course of which he tells the bemused guitarist about a group from Edinburgh called The Fire Engines, who play 15-minute-sets, into which more zest and vim are crammed than in four hours of noodling slow-build intensity from The Grateful Dead (a name that rings out oddly in the context of this discussion). 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In 2013, reviewing the Stones as septuagenarians headlining Glastonbury, Morley slipped back into this register: contrasting the Viagra Swagger of Jagger's pantomime of his lusty younger self versus the anachro-necro "liveliness" of groups like Arctic Monkeys on the same stage: 

"For better or worse, [The Stones] are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive.

Perhaps in this piece, Morley surprised himself by now feeling sympathetic to the Stones's persistence in the face of decrepitude.... After all, he too is an elder by this point: a legend still treading the boards of rockwrite, a couple of generations worth of whippersnappers sniping at his heels... 






















12 comments:

  1. Dunno though, because I think something like "Start Me Up" has dated much better than "Satisfaction". The Stones music of the early sixties has dated quite badly due to its basic crudeness and the cheap production - it sounds tinny and cardboardy, like the musical equivalent of a Charlie Chaplin film.

    Also, a strange thing, is that Jagger has actually become more energetic as he has gotten older, probably randier too. I think the age = decline paradigm is becoming more complex, with actresses such as Jennifer Aniston actually becoming more, rather than less, attractive with age. I don't think this is simply The Denial of Death; there is also a realisation that ageing is to an extent a psychological condition as much as a physical one.

    A lot of the impetus in Morley's thought, which I also share myself, is a certain yearning for neatness and clear lines of definition - a kind of "this era ends here, and that era begins there, and this genre is separate from that one" etc. So Jagger still gurning away even today is something that I really tend to not only dislike, but also consider "not on". But then like Morley I've been acculturated into a certain mode of 20th Century thought that doesn't really apply anymore.

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  2. Well, speaking as someone a year off turning sixty, I'm all for this "60 is the new 50 is the new 40" notion. The "you're only as young as you feel" / age ain't nothing but a number idea.

    Old age as a demarcated zone of life doesn't work anymore quite like it did in the '70s or '80s. Old people and indeed many middle aged people seemed utterly clapped out - decades of smoking and not exercising (in the majority of cases) plus hard, usually tedious and unfulfilling work really ground them down. Nowadays a fairly typical old bloke might be fit and zesty - like one of those wiry, taut-buttocked, alarmingly calves-muscled chaps you see in tight-fitting cycling gear, doggedly chugging up some steep-gradient hill.

    But also in terms of their cultural references, old people were a species apart, cut off from the contemporary popular culture in a really stark way. My gran, bless her, used to say of pop music, "it's all just beat". And by modern pop music she meant Beatles onwards. All she could hear was the drums overriding everything else. Lord knows what she would have made of Timbaland R&B or trap.

    Nowadays you have cool parents and even cool grandparents, who were hippies, or punks, or ravers, or into rap - and they actually turn their kids or grand kids onto Velvet Underground or Joy Division or the Smiths or Aphex Twin. They'll have kept some of the mental and aesthetic flexibility that goes with being into that music, so they will get into some of the new music their kids play to them. For a good while now, you've had the phenomenon of parents and kids going to gigs together, or going as a bunch - a friend group of kids, plus each kid's parents - to stay overnight at a festival. That would never have happened in my youth. Your parent might drop you off and pick you up at a concert maybe.

    I disagree about the '60s Stones, I think it's imperishable, but "Start Me Up" is for sure fantastic. The idea of them as battered but still randy sods is inscribed into the sound of the record, the way the groove seems almost to stagger and stumble but is indefatiguible, and then the lyric contains that idea in it - the innuendo of "start me up, I'll never stop". And - apropos the theme of this blogpost - there's the line that's just audible in the fade: "you make a dead man come". The video too - I remember that they seemed haggard, ancient, but they must have been 20 or more years younger than me now in it.

    Is there anything after "Start Me Up", though? Not that I can recall, although I do remember being taken with the improbably vigor of A Bigger Bang, but can't remember a single tune off it.

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    1. I recall all the jokes that were made about the Stones' relative ancientness when they reformed in 1989 (!). Then again, during the 80s, it was hardly uncommon to see middle-aged veteran pop stars at the top of the charts (George Harrison, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, even Rod Stewart was having hits into the early 90s). That doesn't happen now.

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  3. I think the "Undercover" album was pretty good - it was certainly rated at the time, although I haven't listened to any of it in ages.

    One of the oddest experiences I've had recently is watching this video for Orange Juice's "Rip It Up":

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzPh89tD5pA

    There's all these passers by in the street scenes that look like they are from the 1930's. At first I thought it must have been filmed somewhere out of the way in Scotland - Inverness or Stirling or somewhere. But it isn't, it's filmed in Central London!

    I remember 1982 very well, so this puzzled me as my memories of this period do not consist of loads of old people looking so dated, and I remember it feeling very modern. The only way I can explain this is that at the time I must have been unconsciously screening all the oldies out, in the same way I screened out lamp posts or something.

    But it's an absolutely fascinating video to watch, as it shows that there was a real continuity within British society from the pre-war years right up to the eighties, and which hasn't really been recognised. I think one of the big unacknowledged changes in British society happened in the early 90's when cheap sports gear started to be imported from China and the Far East and shops like JJB Sports appeared. It promoted the biggest change in how people dressed that the country experienced in the post-war period, and it had nothing to do with fashion or youth culture. It also as a by-product erased much of the generational gap, as this stuff was cheaper than the trad garb that older people had hitherto tended to prefer and demarcate themselves with.

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  4. This reminded me of something I'd totally forgotten.

    When I was 14 in the mid 80s my dad dragged me along to an Everly Brothers concert in Melbourne (Maybe my Aunty had caught flu or something). I was such a stubborn twat I pretended to fall asleep through half of it. I felt like I'd let my generation down by being there even though I knew every word to every song. The funny thing is now what's way more embarrassing are the youngsters impersonating such rock n roll legends.

    Oh and RE: Stones, I loved "Undercover Of The Night" single from 1983, specifically the 12" mix...although I've not heard it in years...it might be naff.

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  5. Life and death would have been very much on Morley's mind at that point, of course: Ian Curtis had died only six weeks before this was published. I don't think the Jagger interview gets mentioned in Nothing, IIRC, but it would have been an appropriate incident to weave into the story.

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  6. "Nowadays you have cool parents and even cool grandparents, who were hippies, or punks, or ravers, or into rap - and they actually turn their kids or grand kids onto Velvet Underground or Joy Division or the Smiths or Aphex Twin." All true, and as you suggest some festivals seem to have built their business models entirely around that fact. The Latitude festival in Suffolk, for example, will have Manic Street Preachers and Snow Patrol for the fortysomething mums and dads, and Phoebe Bridgers and Fontaines DC for the teenage kids who can be allowed some carefully sheltered freedom while their parents are on site.

    But surely all that means is that the locus for the generation gap has moved away from popular music. I recently heard an advert for a podcast that said: "We cover everything you need to know about all the latest trends in popular culture: YouTube, anime, video games and hip-hop*". And I felt a sensation of profound relief, to think that all this was stuff I didn't need to catch up with and never would, because it is just Not For Me. The young people are doing their own thing, and the fact that it seems boring / silly / pointless / annoying to me is exactly as it should be.

    (*To be fair, I do have an interest in hip-hop, but what they mean by it is not Biggie and the Wu-Tang Clan, or even Kanye, but Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert. My kids play me some of that stuff and I do quite enjoy it, but it is never going to take over my life. Again, it's not for me.)

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  7. Cheap sports gear - yes that totally changed how regular folk looked. In the 60s, 70s, into the '80s, an older working class bloke would probably have a shirt, tie, and jacket, or coat, even when off work, relaxing. And probably some ways into the '60s would wear a hat as well. Then you have this casualization of leisure wear which as you say, Phil, dissolves the generation gap.

    Mind you, something I see often when I'm in the UK is a bloke in denim jeans with longish hair straggling over the collar. I'll be approaching from behind and it's only when I get closer I realise that it's an old age pensioner.

    Musically I can find common ground with my kids fairly often - one is all about soundcloud rap and hyperpop and micro-genres, the other is basically into indie and singer-songwriter. So I'll like or half-like something they play me, am able to correlate to older things I understand. And vice versa: they'll dig older rap and electronic stuff in the one case, or The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, in the case of the other. But yes as you say Ed, all the other stuff they're into, I find pretty flummoxing - TikTok stuff, memes, etc. I don't know if it's actively designed to bewilder the elders but it is effectively incomprehensible. The churn of it is also too fast. Some of the music gets like that - hyper-ephemeral nano-genres. But it's really the non-music stuff that is inaccessible and too fast to get a fix on, and this is the new locus of the generation gap.

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  8. 1. The London talk makes me think about Bowie leaving in 74, always talking vaguely about moving back someday but ultimately never doing so because he felt there was no point - it had already changed enough when he first went back for an extended period in the mid-80s, and by the time he started thinking about it more seriously in the mid-late 90s (during his Toy/hours-era retrospective phase) it was unrecognizable enough that there was no point in indulging his nostalgia (he said in a later interview that he moved to New York because he knew it better than the new London)

    2. I love the Morley/Garcia interview, because you can feel the former's deep frustration at actually liking the latter as a person as much as he hates his music and what it supposedly stands for - the 'how dare this old bastard still be coming here and doing this' piece would've been so much easier if he was a hostile reactionary or a clueless burnout instead of someone genuinely curious, articulate, and willing to engage Morley and his direct barbs in conversation, and it's to Morley's credit that he reflects that

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  9. Surveying the generations in my life, my wife's grandmother and great aunt are 101 and 102 respectively. And they do come from a different era. Their idea of pop music is Andre Rieu (of whom they are massive fans). Also massive fans of cheap 'n' nasty tracksuits. Comfort is everything. My mum is nearly 80. Pop music is completely alien to her. I think there's this belief that everyone in the 60s was rocking out to The Beatles and The Stones. And a lot of people weren't (my parents were conservative Christians). My wife's mum (nearly 70) is generally in lycra cycling gear (until COVID, her idea of a relaxing holiday was cycling from Paris to Moscow). Then there's my wife and I (50ish) still listening to the music of our youth - and the music form before - and the some of the music after. Then there's my teenage child. Who is more into YouTube and video games than music. They would be mortified by the notion of going to a gig with us. Which, frankly, is as it should be.

    If you were born in the UK in 1925 then the average life expectancy was 58 years (i.e. you would die in 1983). If you were born in 1980 then it was 73 years.

    Another thing to note would be that the elderly are much richer than they used to be. Spiraling house prices, triple-lock pensions. So both the number of people over 65 and their share of national wealth has increased.

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  10. 60 is actually the new 56 according to this medical study I found at The National Library of Medicine.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5897168/

    It is referenced in this fascinating yt video "Did People Used To Look Older?", about retrospective ageing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjqt8T3tJIE

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