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... 

ghost slavery (the revenant meme)

Seem to be on the verge of meme-isis with "ghost slavery" which pops up regularly when the subject of pop holograms of deceased performers gets an airing

viz, this Washington Post piece on the profitable afterlife of Whitney Houston by Steven Zeitchik

interestingly if you flick through the comments below the article, the vast majority find the whole phenom creepy, morbid, unsettling, exploitative

it is the ultimate expression of Momus's retro necro

here are choice portions of the WashPost piece, with incredulous outbursts from me in BOLD

"The Grammy-winning legend died more than nine years ago. But in Las Vegas beginning this week, Houston took the stage with a complement of breathing performers, shimmying and shimmering and of course singing some of the most famous pop songs of all time in “An Evening With Whitney,” a live concert with a Houston hologram.

"This is what Pat Houston, her sister-in-law and manager, wants; this is what BASE Hologram, run by the former Clear Channel executive Brian Becker, wants. Soon enough, we will find out if this is what America wants — whether we crave Houston in colorful regalia on a buzzing stage, delighting audiences as she did so often when she was alive, ascending us to new heights of afterlife performance, or, maybe, just plummeting us straight into the uncanny valley.

"The show in many ways shatters the norms of techno-illusion. A two-minute deep fake is one thing. The dead dancing for us is another.

"“I don’t see it as resurrecting the dead but as celebrating a life,” said Becker over Zoom last week, pushing back, a little. “We want to build a great live show around her.”

"The “live show” is made up of a four-piece band and four dancers. “Her” is a computer-generated face of the singer in her prime that has been digitally grafted to an actress body-double, choreographed and shot months ago and now projected onto a scrim. Nothing on performance night can go wrong.

".... Several performances were held in the United Kingdom in early 2020, before lockdowns did to its star what death could not. The pause gave BASE and the creative team time to regroup, and now they are back with an open-ended, $80-a-pop run in Sin City.

"If all goes well, a tour will follow in 2023, delivering Hologram Whitney to one American road stop after another. 

"... The singer walks around the stage, she salutes the band and crowd, she slinks and dances, all in a dynamic, human-seeming performance. Oh, and there are wardrobe changes.

"... Holograms are not new in pop music. Nine years ago, at Coachella, Tupac appeared, via an old trick known as “Pepper’s Ghost.” (Technically, it’s an optical illusion.) They popped up again last year after Kanye West gave Kim Kardashian the holographic gift of her late father.

"They’re also not new to BASE, which has had hologram tours with Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison and Maria Callas.

"Some see exploitation in conjuring dead performers by hologram — “ghost slavery,” the journalist Simon Reynolds has termed it — either by damaging their supernal essence or by simply forcing technology to stand them up again and again on stages they never meant to grace. In America, you cannot defame the dead. But you can overwork them seven shows a week in a Vegas club.

"Pat Houston objects. She sees the production as a dream realized — a chance for a person to do in the virtual afterlife what she could not do while on earth.

"“Whitney would have loved the size of the venues and the ability to be in a smaller, more intimate setting,” Pat Houston wrote in an email. “Whitney’s touring was of course so massive when she was alive that she was playing arenas and stadiums and Super Bowls. But we often discussed the smaller venues and the ability to connect with an audience. She grew up singing in the church, so the connection to an audience was so important to her. She would have loved this show for its ability to be intimate with an audience.” INTIMATE!?!? YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING

"Becker points out that it would be hard to call it exploitation when the estate is involved creatively and sharing in the profits. HUH? THAT'S THE POINT, THE FAMILY CUSTODIANS ARE MILKING IT

"Reynolds also sees in the form a kind of disruption to the music ecosystem, since instead of new artists rising when old ones die, the old ones never clear out.

"The show offers a chance for people who never saw Houston in concert to do so. But their language is not yet developed. When the image pauses before a song, claps cheer her on.

"“It’s weird — like, you can’t encourage a hologram,” said Becker. (If the Whitney tour works, he has plans for other icon shows, estates-permitting; he also envisions living artists appearing by hologram in multiple cities on the same night.)  OLIGOPOLY AHOY!

"The social-media backlash has been noisy. Becker theorizes it is the boldness of the experiment, but something more primal may be at work: Seeing a late icon vital again reminds us of the thin line between life and death.

"To contemplate the Whitney Houston hologram is to feel instantly better about life — how nice to be reminded so viscerally of all we once loved — while also coming face-to-face with the uncomfortable truth at its center: It all goes away. Technology’s tempting of mortal physics touches deep.

"Harris’s experience is that the crowd softens as the show moves on. “They’re very quiet at the beginning, like, ‘how are we supposed to react to this?’ And then a few songs in they’re clapping and getting into it,” he said. “By the guitar solos, they’re cheers-ing and crying.”

"This, of course, is the goal. Watching Houston, we are meant to slip, if only momentarily, into the ecstasy of her presence, her talent, her alive-ness...." NO PRESENCE, NO LIFE, HERE!