Stanley Yeah Yeah Yeah

The Story of Modern Pop
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28198-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 800 Seiten

Modern pop began in 1952 when the first British chart was published and the first 7' singles were released. It ended (perhaps) in 1995 when Robson and Jerome reached the top of the charts with the first number one not to be available on vinyl since 1953. The internet age ushered in the death rites of over 40 years of pop. A Complete History Pop describes the journey that leads from 'Rock Around the Clock' to 'Crazy in Love'. Raw, thrilling, surprising and sometimes downright dangerous, the Pop moment almost always clocks in under 3:30 and is initially, immediately recognised by a teenage listener. Billy Fury. Chuck Berry. Sonny and Cher. The Troggs. Glen Campbell. Bee Gees. Roxy Music. Chic. Slade. Sex Pistols. Adam and the Ants. Pet Shop Boys. New Order. Madonna. Bob Stanley's A Complete History of Pop documents the rich soundtrack of the last six decades as it has been heard on radios and jukeboxes across the land. There have been many books on pop but very few, if any, have attempted to bring the whole story to life from rock n roll to house and techno in all its various sub-permutations. Audacious and addictive, A Complete History of Pop is a one-stop pop shop for the music lover everywhere.

Bob Stanley is a writer, musician, DJ, and film producer. Since founding influential pop group Saint Etienne, Bob has enjoyed a parallel career as a music journalist, contributing to publications such as the Times, Smash Hits, NME, the Guardian and the Face. A former artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, his films have been shown at the ICA and Royal Festival Hall, and he has curated several seasons for the Barbican. He is the author of Yeah Yeah Yeah, which was the Sunday Times Pop Music Book of the Year and a Rough Trade Book of the Year. His previous book was the critically acclaimed Excavate: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, co-edited with Tessa Norton.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stanley, Bob

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

I remember reading about a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, who used to spend Saturday mornings lurking in the Vintage Record Centre on Roman Way in North London. He would watch the old Teds and the young rockabillies, the dandified fifties revivalists and the single middle-aged men walk through the door, thumb through the racks, and all ask for the same record: ‘Do you have “Cast Iron Arm” by Peanuts Wilson?’ The answer was always no. The kid was in awe of this record. It must, he figured, be the best record ever made. What could it sound like? Who was Peanuts Wilson? Why was the arm made of cast iron? This would have been in the mid-seventies and there was no way he could find out the answers to these questions, or even get to hear the record because it was so rare, and so in demand. He dreamed about it, tried to imagine how it might sound: harder than ‘Hound Dog’, sharper than ‘Summertime Blues’. For this kid, in its magical elusiveness, ‘Cast Iron Arm’ embodied the wonder of pop music.

In the twenty-first century anyone can type the name Peanuts Wilson into YouTube or Spotify or iTunes and hear ‘Cast Iron Arm’, with its honking sax, comic interludes and thunking backbeat. The same goes for the rarest British hard-rock album, by Leaf Hound. Or ‘Carry Me Home’, a still unreleased Beach Boys outtake from their album. This wasn’t possible in the pre-digital age, when information was passed around pop fans via music papers and radio shows, fanzines, cassettes and word of mouth – analogue technology, airwaves, printing presses, everything in perpetual motion. Before the arrival of Napster in 2000, the gateway for iTunes, it had been this way for the best part of five decades: this was the modern pop era.

There have been many great music books written since 2000, on genres, micro-genres, single albums, even single songs. But there hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been a book on the whole of modern pop’s development, none to explain when and why things happened, the connections, the splinters, what has been lost or forgotten along the way.

My intention with is to give the reader a feel for pop’s development as it happened, by drawing a straight line – with the odd wiggle and personal diversion – from the birth of the seven-inch single to the decline of pop music as a palpable, physical thing in the nineties. Chronologically, I will explore how each new era brought with it new icons and iconoclasts, the arrival and excitement of hot sounds, and how, when they began to cool off, several different styles developed and myriad subgenres were created.

From the fifties to the nineties, pop was personal and private. You could live in its wider world but also shape it to your own ends by amassing a collection of vinyl, making tapes of singles in the order you wanted to hear them, then passing on the secret to fellow travellers. I had exercise books in which I’d write down the new Top 20 every Tuesday: at 12.45 we’d have the radio on at school, and friends huddled together to find out whether the heroic Altered Images had dislodged the dreadful Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin from the top of the chart. It was a religion. I didn’t feel the need to go to church.

My first published work was in a fanzine called in 1986. I sent a copy to the and they sent me off to review a Johnny Cash show in Peterborough. Since 1990, I’ve been fortunate enough to see the pop world from both sides, as a fan, a writer, and also as a member of a pop group: I was twenty-five when Saint Etienne started, and we had the remarkable good fortune to appear on , on the cover of the and on stage around the world. For the last dozen years I have written for and the , which has given me the opportunity to interview stars and – equally important to me – to shine some light on records, singers, writers and producers who I thought were undeservedly obscure.

This book picks up the threads that connect doo wop, via Philly soul, to house music, or – possibly less obviously – ones that link Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ to the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’ to the Prodigy’s ‘Everybody in the Place’. I want to give a sense of how the web was woven. Where does Frankie Lymon fit in? More to the point, in a world where Nick Drake is considerably better known than Fairport Convention, how were both perceived at the time, and how did they affect pop’s climate? Chronologically, I explore how the technology not only interacts with music, but helps to start the era (the portable record player), then kill it (the compact disc as Trojan horse), and how modern pop was built up by communication, the distribution of information, the secret world of music papers and fanzines, late-night or illegal radio broadcasts, and stolen moments on TV shows.

I wanted to write this book because there is no such guide. I wanted to argue that the separation of rock and pop is false, and that disco and large swathes of black and electronic music have been virtually ignored by traditional pop histories. This situation has changed considerably since Saint Etienne formed in 1990, though rockism still exists, and snobbery is still rife. At the other extreme, some purists don’t think of albums as pop at all, but I’m not going to be a seven-inch fascist – albums were an essential part of modern pop’s development.

What exactly is pop? For me, it includes rock, R&B, soul, hip hop, house, techno, metal and country. If you make records, singles and albums, and if you go on TV or on tour to promote them, you’re in the pop business. If you sing a cappella folk songs in a pub in Whitby, you’re not. Pop needs an audience that the artist doesn’t know personally – it has to be transferable. Most basically, anything that gets into the charts is pop, be it Buddy Holly, Black Sabbath or Bucks Fizz. So, Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ is pop music (UK no. 2 in 1981), as is Waldo de los Ríos’s ‘Mozart No. 40’ (UK no. 5 ’71), and the Marcels’ ‘Blue Moon’ (UK and US no. 1 ’61). The charts are vital social history. It is much harder to recover the menacing impact of ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ or future shock of ‘I Feel Love’ without hearing them alongside contemporary hits: the former shared a chart with Mel Tormé’s ‘Mountain Greenery’ and Ted Heath’s ‘The Faithful Hussar’; the latter entered the chart sandwiched between Alessi’s ‘Oh Lori’ and the Muppets’ ‘Halfway down the Stairs’. Context is everything.

What creates great pop? Tension, opposition, progress and fear of progress. I love the tensions between the industry and the underground, between artifice and authenticity, between the adventurers and the curators, between rock and pop, between dumb and clever, between boys and girls. A permanent state of flux informed the modern pop era and taking sides is part of the fun. Some saw punk, for instance, as a way of rewriting the rules completely, as the Futurists had done in art, while others read 1977 as a return to roots, the excitement of first-wave rock ’n’ roll revisited. Both sides had a strong case. On the one hand you had Malcolm McLaren’s Debord-quoting art-school insurrection; on the other you had the Clash and Joe Strummer’s ‘cut the crap’ ideology. In pop, the conservative can be seen as cool. But pop music isn’t there to be contained. It isn’t school – it only has unwritten rules, and they’re all there to be broken. The energy and insight of pop comes from juggling its contradictions rather than purging them. Queen may have proudly printed ‘no synthesizers’ on their first few album covers, suggesting they were all rock, no artifice, but when they changed their minds in 1980 for ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ it gave them an international number one, and became an early source for hip-hop samples; pop moved forward and everyone was happy.

So is modern pop just chart music? Well, partly, as the magic of the charts is that they can be perfect time capsules, and can cover all pop genres with no favouring the hip or the entitled, the homebodies or the voyagers. Yet the charts did not always reflect emerging movements. Instead, the new music would percolate, inspire and – eventually – burst into the chart at a later date: the UK’s chart stats don’t bear out the influence of the Velvet Underground (one UK Top 10 hit for Lou Reed), or Marvin Gaye’s (none of the four singles from it even reached the Top 50), or the Smiths (none of their singles went any higher than number ten). It may seem contradictory to write about the hitless Johnny Burnette Trio or the Stooges or Minor Threat or Juan Atkins in this book, but they emerged in the modern pop era and their influence on it, and the music of the future, is undeniable. Outliers get absorbed into the mainstream. Pop is a decades-long love affair. Opposites attract.

When did the modern pop era start? In 1952, as I will soon explain. The end point is more complicated; the start of the digital age is much blurrier, and the tail-off is gradual. I’m using the end of vinyl as pop’s main format as a line in the sand. When Culture Beat’s ‘Mr Vain’ reached number one in the UK in 1993, it was the first chart-topper since Lita Roza’s ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window’ in 1953 not to have been issued on a seven-inch single; soon after ‘Mr Vain’ came the first number one not available on vinyl at all, only CD and cassette – Celine...