The acquisition of a second-hand paperback by the much-missed Dr Magnus Pyke recently prompted a post on my own blog, Cultural Snow, and an inevitable YouTube trawl for that Thomas Dolby track. Which, in the way these things happen, led to a trek back to a virtual yesterday where pop music seemed to the preserve of drama students pretending to be mad scientists, or maybe vice versa.
It may be tiresomely academic to impose a retrospective genre on some of these records, but here goes: let’s call it Postmodern Futurism. The artists combined the arch self-awareness of Baudrillard with the fascination for technological progress expressed by Marinetti. Careful readers will have spotted a degree of ideological crossover with the mini-manifestos that Paul Morley developed for the ZTT label (which of course took its name from Marinetti’s writings) but much of ZTT’s product is too glossy to fit, with the honourable exception of the Art of Noise.
So what are we looking for? A raised eyebrow, certainly; but also a delight in the mechanics of pop; think of it as music that doesn’t mind having its wires exposed, its working in full view. Or, indeed, a step on from Barney’s post about meta-songs; just as those works contemplated the craft of songwriting, PMF at once interrogates and embodies the whole process of pop. It’s about the transmission and reception of music, the cultural and economic circumstances in which it exists; but above all the technology that makes it possible, and by extension all technology.
It started somewhere on the astral flightpath between Lee Perry and Kraftwerk, although one could make a persuasive case for seeing conceptual foreshadowings in The Who Sell Out (1967); had its annus mirabilis in 1979; and only really began sputtering to a halt when confronted with the roll-up-your-jacket-sleeves earnestness of Live Aid, although there were still suggestions of it in some of the kitchen-sink sample fests released later in the decade. (Of course, hip-hop artists were pioneers in the use of samples, but hip-hop, with a few exceptions such as Steinski and Coldcut, has always been better at talking about its own mythology than its own mechanics.) The KLF started from the same aesthetic, but then took it to the logical extreme, progressing from deconstruction to demolition. Whereas Buggles or M celebrated pop, albeit between inverted commas, Cauty and Drummond decided that in order to save pop, it was necessary to destroy it.
Fatboy Slim and the Skint stable offered faint echoes of the genre in the 1990s, as did acts such as Daft Punk and Air, but the increased sophistication in sampling technology means that these days, you can’t see the wires – which removes the whole raison d’être of PMF. Mash-ups such as Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head’ (or, on a larger scale, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album) demonstrate that two classic pop songs can be fused together to pleasing, often amusing effect, but don’t tell us anything else.
Anyway, this is the sort of stuff I’m talking about:
- Kraftwerk: ‘Die Roboter’ (1978)
- M: ‘Pop Muzik’ (1979)
- Devo: ‘Devo Corporate Anthem’ (1979)
- Flying Lizards: ‘Money’ (1979)
- Buggles: ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ (1979)
- Landscape: ‘Einstein A Go-Go’ (1981)
- Trio: ‘Da Da Da’ (1982)
- Thomas Dolby: ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ (1982)
- Neil Young: ‘We R In Control’ (1982)
- Heaven 17: ‘Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry’ (1983)
- Art of Noise: ‘Close (To The Edit)’ (1984)
- The JAMs: ‘All You Need Is Love’ (1987)
- Eric B & Rakim: ‘Paid In Full’ (Coldcut remix) (1987)
- Fatboy Slim: ‘Everybody Needs A 303’ (1996)
- Air: ‘Radio #1’ (2001)
Feel free to add – or, if you aspire to inhabit Professor Dolby’s Home for Deranged Scientists, invent – your own.
PS: Moderately relevant interview with Karl Bartos at Quietus.
