160gig blog: February 2017

Tuesday 28 February 2017

Labels, what are they good for?

What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon. Siouxsie Sioux
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"What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black & white, the cartoon... Siouxsie Sioux

Last night there was the usual musical discussion in the bar and a friend announced "I like the 70's at least up to 1977, it all went wrong with punk".

Really? I was 13 in '77, he wasn't, so my musical wonder years were soundtracked at least partly by Punk, whatever that was. I was a Peel listener, not one of the 20 million who say they were listening the first time he played the Ramones, but not long after that. As with all new "movements" quality control was not always the big concern for punk bands, but Ramones, The Clash, and The Stranglers were great, and still are. But, are they a movement or just a bunch of bands who appeared at about the same time?

Punk quickly morphed into new wave, and I learned the term "Power Pop". The best definition of Power Pop I have seen is "a style of pop music characterized by a strong melody line, heavy use of guitars, and simple rhythm". Sounds like a lot of what was going on around 1978 to me.

So three labels for much the same part of the musical landscape. Punk/New Wave/Power Pop was a varied mix of music, at least as much as what had gone before. The difference at the time was the labelling of different micro genres was vitally important, mostly to NME & Sounds but also to mark your tribe out from the "old farts" who listened to Yes, Genesis & Led Zeppelin.Over the years around the turn of the Eighties the music seemed to shift to accommodate the labels. The Mohican & bondage trousers end of punk turned into Oi!, the clue's in the name, with bands like Sham 69 & The Cockney Rejects leading the charge. New Wave splintered into most of the factions that ruled the early 80s, synthpop, goth, even some of the more banal U.S. "college" bands all grew out of New Wave. Power Pop headed by The Jam became the mainstream of guitar based pop, fusing elements from Nuggets style garage bands with Punk & Pub Rock.

On the iPod labels or genres, are part of the basic classification. I have 23 at the moment. The largest is alternative, a label that seems to cover Nirvana, Coldplay, Oasis & Arcade Fire making it pretty much useless as a way of defining what you will get when you press play. So, labels what are they good for? A way of sorting the wood from the trees, of feeling connected to your peers, or just another marketing tool? Personally I use them to find music that suits my mood, but I know that my inner librarian also wants to keep things in the right place, but after New Wave fractured into a hundred subsets that right place could have a dozen names.

I'll talk more about Power Pop another time but for now visit Pop Geek Heaven, Bruce Brodeen's resource site for anything with a jangly guitar and a catchy chorus.

The record sleeves on this post are a few of my favourites from the late 70's. Things I can still listen to now.

Saturday 18 February 2017

I Think I'll Make A Playlist or How I Learnt to Love Weird Stuff.

When I started taking music seriously in the mid/late 1970s money was at a minimum so I had my cassette recorder attached to the radio much as everyone else did. So my early listening was nearly all playlists, made up of tapes of stuff from Radio 1. Early on I got organised and had the contents of my tapes written down in exercise books so I could find a given song when it was required. The random nature of recording stuff off the radio meant that the tapes weren't planned and as I always had a fairly broad taste you could find Punk next to Prog next to Pop.

I think the broad taste came from early exposure to some slightly unusual choices of early records and most importantly the radio. Having a Dad who owned a TV shop meant I had a rather better stereo than many 12 year olds, but not much to play on it. My first (proper) single was nearly 'Bohemian Rhapsody' but John Menzies in Keynsham were out of stock so Mum came back with 10CC's 'Art for Arts Sake' for god's sake. My first L.P. was a copy of The Moody Blues 'In Search of the Lost Chord' that got left in our shop, I played it for a few weeks, failed to understand what was going on and moved onto my first album choice E.L.O's 'A New World Record'. Then the world shifted. I started listening to John Peel in the middle of 1977, and was hooked quickly. Received wisdom says he was playing punk and only punk then, well over the first year or so as well as the first play of the Sex Pistols album with the thrill of hearing 'God Save The Queen' then "banned" on the BBC, I heard him play Little Feat's 'Waiting for Columbus' which remains a favourite, Bob Marley's 'Babylon By Bus' folk, country, Viv Stanshall and Ivor Cutler.

At the same time I was listening to Alan Freeman on a Saturday afternoon. The Friday Rock Show Wiki has some show lists of Freeman's programmes as well and this is a typical one. I could have made that playlist. There was also on Radio 3 of all places a "popular" music show called Sounds Interesting (mmm nice!) hosted by Derek Jewell who introduced me to Joni Mitchell's 'Don Juan's Reckless Daughter', Weather Report's 'Mr Gone', and above all Steely Dan. Aja remains one of my top 5 albums and is as fresh now as when I first heard 'Home At Last' on Sounds Interesting in 1977.

So playlists were important then and important now. I have artist related ones and genre related ones, although these never seem to stay in the categories I tell them to, but the best playlists are still the ones with the unexpected meeting of songs such as Yes' 'Leave It' meshing perfectly with Abba's 'Dancing Queen' , try it you'll see I'm right.

I think Steve Jobs must have had similar early listening experiences to me, how else would he have come up with shuffle feature on iPods. Is it just me or does your iPod have a sixth sense when it comes to shuffling, mine never seems entirely random and often throws up music I wouldn't have picked but suits my mood exactly. Paranoid? Me?