Home of the hits

“Hits are in baseball, singles are in bars and your royalty lives in a chateau in Europe.” So quoth Memphis-centric, North Mississippi-dwelling maverick Jim Dickinson, whose self-admitted non-career is as good a yardstick to measure your own musical consumption/attitude against as any.

I self-retired from writing about music a few years back, sick to death of the self-aggrandising nature of the industry, and close to losing my nearly lifelong love for the glorious sound of what old Shakey termed, “a thousand twangling instruments”.

From my perspective, any industry which has systematically undermined the basic perceived value of its own product to the extent that the music industry has over the past few decades thoroughly deserves to die. And the industry isn’t tackling this problem in the same way that the film industry has, with regard to falling cinema attendance – making it a unique sensory experience. This, admittedly damning, statement comes from the perspective of someone who has consistently involved themselves in taking music to the people (who are far more savvy than the industry ever gave them credit for), by the basic dint of playing in bands, DJing, promoting shows, editing magazines, putting like-minded people together simply because it would be good for them, and other ‘behind the scenes’ type of behaviours…
Sometimes, this means playing 45s in the back room of a pub, to one man and his dog, or dealing with coke-fuelled venue managers who don’t think you should be paid even as much as their glass collectors. Other times, this type of long-term boredom-avoidance technique has seen Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings become legit stars in Australia (their last LP sold 30k!), prompted the MC5 to reform, and resulted in being onstage at Shepherds Bush Empire (accompanied by a case of free beer!), spinning 13th Floor Elevators and Sister Rosetta Tharpe 45s to the assembled faithful who have come to grokk Arthur Lee’s “Forever Changes” in all of its symphonic glory.

The music press also deserves a painful death, because (as I believe Mr Richard Meltzer ascertained in 1972 or thereabouts), it doesn’t work. At all. Think back to the first time you put a 45 on the deck, were just blown away, and then put it on again, not quite understanding the synapse-frying explosion of sound and emotion that just took place. This is still how people react to music. But you would be hard pressed to find any real joy in the music press, especially when comparing it to the contents of the RBP archive, wherein musical life doth dwell, in all of its gloriously fractured, opinionated, random, hilarious glory.
Even a cursory interaction with the general public will tell you, a) the music press doesn’t speak to them, so they ignore it, b) there is a great amount of untapped general goodwill towards music, and c) folks like to hear a mixture of things they know and stuff that’s new to them.

From my experience, the knock-on effect from the music business’s ever-more-desperate (and expensive) attempts to maintain a public consensus (we know the means they employ, so no point in detailing ‘em) have resulted in the present 25-35 age group just liking set genres of music, or playing ‘keepy-uppy’ with the monthly glossies or such laughable exercises in stamp collecting as Pitchfork – and in falling numbers, as this kind of deeply unsatisfactory consumerism surely takes its toll and results in a palpable lack of joy on almost every human level. Happily, the deeply flawed ‘best album’ syndrome has little or no effect on young ‘uns, which is where the industry and press are failing deeply. Numerous conversations with peeps over the past few years have told me that, not unreasonably, they care not a jot for the very old-fashioned idea that (in anything other than a contextual way) it matters when a record was made, how many it sold, or whether the artist (loonie, liability, godhead – insert desired epithet here) even produced a Mojo-sized, editorially-approvable, South Bank Show-worthy canon.

The role of the music press is to put the great sweep of music into context for those who are interested. I’m a 21st century man, so what’s with this delineation into ‘new releases’ and ‘reissues’? Hell, if it’s new to me, it’s new! Happily, that’s the way young music fans feel, too…

So, enuff ranting, what have I been doing lately? Well, continuing my seemingly random musical voyage, I’ve been reducing my listening to purely “Gotta, gotta” (thank yew Mr O Redding) levels as (and this also goes for TV consumption) I find that a meandering, occasional trawl is somehow more satisfying than being in thrall to an overweening sense of obligation. I make no apologies for, what some would say, my ‘limited’ attention span and range of genres (I ain’t cool)…
I’m still amazed by “The Last Kind Words”, a comp of desperate blues’n’gospel skronk on Portland’s ever-marvy Mississippi label. I will get around to playing Kilburn & The High Roads’ “Handsome”, but am still chowing down on the awesome back cover and saving it for a rainy day (which is pretty likely to be soon round these parts). I’ve been strangely enthralled by the 45 of the Miracles’ “You Really Got A Hold On Me”, which is far more forceful and less trebly than the remembered version, and just grokked the amazing behavioural similarities between the final dance number at a grand 18th Century ball and remembered school disco reactions to “There’s A Ghost In My House” – handclaps, in both instances. Does the end of all collective musical interaction end with the dancers’ aural participation? Answers onna (virtual) postcard…