CONFORM TO DEFORM? (CRITIQUING CULTURAL ENTRYISM)

(...continuing 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“You talk a lot, but you’re not saying anything” 
- Talking Heads, ‘Psycho Killer’ 

“Being clever, how’s that working out for you?”
- Tyler Durden, 'Fight Club’ 

Of course some throw their purist hands up at the very idea of cultural entryism. (We generally call those people “Crass fans”.) But, truth to tell, it can be a valid pursuit. Beatles fans returning their copies of ’Revolver’ because something had “gone wrong” with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the ITV switchboard jamming with complaints after the fabled last episode of ’The Prisoner’, the furore the Pistols caused on the Grundy show – rupture points in the normal are to be celebrated, and the world needs more of them.

The problem is not with the concept, but the fact that Reynold’s chronology works better in reverse. The real era of cultural entryism was Post-Punk itself. The New Pop acts either defused what had been smuggled in, or simply threw straight back out again. Arguably, while Anarcho had been obsessive over building ‘alternatives’ outside of society (with Crass boasting of being “outside the machine”) Post-Punk had always aimed to undermine as much as it did confront.

Mark Stewart explained The Pop Group’s chosen name; “The whole idea was to be a pop group – an explosion in the heart of the commodity... If you wanted to get an idea across, you wanted to put it across in a big way.” Stevo of Some Bizarre perhaps more pithily summed up this spirit with slogans like ‘conform to deform’ and ‘use the music industry before it uses you’. He got the scarcely mainstream Throbbing Gristle offshoot Psychic TV signed to WEA via, among other tactics, sending them dildos etched with the legend ‘Psychic TV Fuck the Record Industry’. 

Band mainstay Genesis P. Orridge commented “I want to be part of popular culture, involved with everyday life and responses; not an intellectual artist in an ivory tower, thinking I am special, revered and monumental.” (Remarks ironically made while on trial for obscenity!)

As ever, Reynolds provides much of the evidence for this himself. For example, he says “Punk threw the record industry into confusion, making the majors vulnerable to suggestion, and fluxing up all the aesthetic rules so that anything abnormal or extreme suddenly had a chance.” Much of this was down to the clueless majors being unable to recognise Punk for what most of it was – traditional Rock and Roll played a little faster and a whole lot worse – but the result was the same. “You could hear the Fall and Joy Division on national radio and… groups as extreme as PiL had Top Twenty hits which… were beamed into ten million households.”

Of course, there was something wider at work than just hoodwinking a major. Chart placement was a tactic for some, of no interest to others. An early manager of Pere Ubu warned them they needed to smooth out their sound or, while they would continue to release records, they’d never transcend cult status. “Our eyes lit up,” remembers Thomas. “That sounds pretty good.” Yet not just Ubu but even more obstinate and esoteric ends of Post-Punk could shift surprising amounts of units, with the alternative charts of then often outselling today’s mainstream. And all this from a gang of bedroom operators who couldn’t tell a business plan from a signing-on day.

Of course New Pop sold better – but so what? Cultural entryism is about something of quality cutting through against the odds, and can’t be measured merely quantatively, by the mere accountancy logic of units sold. Scritti’s ’4 A Sides’ only hit the alternative charts while the later ’Cupid and Psyche’ won a gold record, but the former’s sales were still the bigger achievement.

It may help clarify if we compare Post-Punk to a music scene with no interest in cultural entryism. (And without Anarcho’s politicking.) Again, Reynolds does this for us! Comparing LA Post-Punk to its neighbouring free impro scene, he writes: “at a time when Punk had opened up the possibility for weird shit to sell substantial amounts this indicated a striking lack of ambition… [a] sub-cultural backwater.” He’s still with the cash registers, but here he’s close to striking the nail.

Scenes like free impro can have weaknesses. It isn’t that they’re too culty, too highbrow or commercially unsuccessful. It’s that they tend to operate in isolation, and so become insular and self-congratulatory. Post-Punk was to do with popular music, and popular culture is something to do with all of us. You may not be expected to like every popular music genre, but you are expected to get it. Just by being so labelled, it’s become a part of your world. 

Cult status is only bad when it becomes a closed system, with predictable releases selling only to a pre-set audience. Post-Punk was Cabaret Voltaire touring Sheffield in their van, insistently playing on the high street whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. Free impro by comparison was being played inside a room with an ‘invite only’ sign on the door.

In short, the true measure of cultural entryism lies not in aesthetics or any innate qualities, but in its effects. It’s significant, then, that in his second half Reynolds tends to sidestep such questions and retreats more into the standard mode of the ‘cultural commentator’, reading a significance into trivial details where it doesn’t belong.

On his website Reynolds exults that a bottlecap included on the photocopied cover of the first Scritti EP is reprised on the New Pop ’Anomie and Bonhomie’, but this time as an “ultra-glossy, hyper-realist painting”. This to Reynolds is a sign of ‘continuity’, that Scritti kept their early allegiances but just went about them in a different way. It’s like a cross between an evangelist finding a crucifix on the lapel of a lapsed believer, and a man diving into a po-mo soup of self-referentialism - a hermetic world made only of signs, which only ever point to each other and never to the world around them.

The point is not the bottlecap, and it never was. There is no point in treating a bottlecap like it’s some rich repository of symbolism, and that is precisely why it was used. The point of the first cover isn’t its content but its aesthetic, and the random accumulation of objects enhances the DIY nature of this aesthetic. (Green readily admits he used it purely because it was lying around.) The sleeve exists as, in Reynold’s own phrase while still in Mode A, “a snapshot of a lifestyle.” Fixating upon it as a bottlecap is like trying to understand Kurt Schwitters’ Dada collages through studying the history of bus ticket production.

But even supposing Reynolds was right, that all these signs and secret codes were in place and set to transmit just what he says - so what? It’s a tenet of Post-Modern thought that we live in a ‘post-ironic’ world where everybody is equipped with the correct antennae to decode all these signs. But to most people, Pop music is simply the soundtrack to an evening out. Upon such a crowd, what effect is “I’m only wearing this suit ironically” likely to have?

Of all the New Pop acts, only Gary Numan had any real right wing convictions. (And those rarely rose explicitly in his music.) The least Punk outfit of them all, Wham, played benefits for the striking miners and later effectively boycotted the music industry in its entirety. Yet none of that stopped New Pop becoming a soundtrack to the ‘aspirational’ Thatcherite Eighties, where everyone was free to feel good. Even pointing this out feels redundant, like re-iterating a painfully obvious cliché. If it was ever recognised at all, the clever phrases and name-dropping were just taken as a vague sign of classiness – like designer clothes, lines from art cinema or wine bottle labels.

Billy Childish famously said of BritArt that it successfully reflected its era, and that was its grant failure. It was smart-sounding but superficial and mercantile, just like its times. And the same is true of New Pop. Good art will challenge its times, not tell its viewers they are the fairest of them all.

At other points the pop-plugger places a very rockist stress on the importance of lyrics. When he starts venerating Depeche Mode’s anti-bigotry doggerels you half-expect him to drag in Culture Club’s ‘War is Stupid’ while he’s at it. This is not only absurd but also a refutation of a central tenet of Post-Punk, that radical talk crammed into the form of conventional music was meaningless. (“Wave your arms in the air if you’re against racism!” etc.)

Reynolds’ biases are again showing when he happily slates rock bands who went in for this (particularly targetting the Tom Robinson Band), yet praises Pop acts when they do the same! (And while TRB’s rouse-that-rabble rhetoric was often excruciating, at least it had slightly more content than “hey, let’s be nice!” Give me Wolfie Smith over Michael Jackson any day.)

Of course I don’t actually care about any of this, in the sense that I have no moralist objections. I’d rather they became Pop stars than New Labour ministers. And whingeing about alternative middle class people reverting to careerism is like complaining about the prices going up at Christmas. It’s simply that our intelligence is being insulted by the paucity of excuses on offer.

Green wrote endless screeds on why Scritti should ‘go Pop’, but like most people who talk too much he was actually avoiding saying something simple – he was sick of living in a run-down squat without a bathroom. I used to live in a run-down squat without a bathroom, so my most immediate reaction is to sympathise. I just wish he’d either cut the crap about it, or learn to lie more convincingly. At least John Lydon’s later career was honest (“I’m going over to the other side, Happy to have, not to have not”), but that’s something which gets him sidelined from the second half of this book.

Another of New Pop’s inheritances from Post-Punk which Reynolds is keen to stress is its wit and cerebrallism. He writes of how Kid Creole and the Coconuts “tried to bring to disco the sort of panache and sophistication last seen in popular music during the Forties”. New Pop may have the sweetest melodies, but from Post-Punk it gained the tang of irony, filling it with Wildean quips.

Yet the Coconuts are another band with no Post-Punk inheritance. And besides, mostly that stuff just plain got in the way. Julian Cope found the quote marks in Scritti’s ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ “annoying” and “clever-clever”, and he was right. The smartness of Post-Punk was devised as an antidote to rock’s self-mythologising about “keeping it real”, a put-down, a heckle. But by the Eighties Pop was so blatantly inauthentic and manufactured it counted for little to point this out, it was something you were better off suspending disbelief about. An ingredient in Post-Punk that had meant to defuse Rock, to draw out and pillory its unspoken rules, had ended up adding something – making music that, in exposing the clichés, escaped them. Similar notions were intended to enhance New Pop, to give it an extra coat of cleverness. Paradoxically, they just took away, with a neither-nor result that even as Pop music isn’t particularly memorable.

Reynolds often suggests Abba set the bar on New Pop, and perhaps they did. But Abba’s achievement was taking all their songwriting craft and sheathing it inside something that sounded shimmeringly simple and fresh. They don’t sound accomplished, they sound good. New Pop just reversed the equation, rapping about Jacques Derrida and feigning a ‘sophistication’ they rarely possessed, not that it would have mattered if they had it. What New Pop number can be said to rival, for example, the soaring majesty of ‘Dancing Queen’? 

The closest contenders were the ones who shed their Post-Punk baggage the quickest. Yet again, Reynolds tells us all this himself. The Human League uncoupled themselves from their “smarter-than-you” schtick by splitting with Heaven 17, and were then free to go all-out for Pop like it was the only thing on their minds. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is quite simply a song about someone not wanting someone any more, with Derrida conspicuous only by his absence. The same is true for all the other better New Pop acts. Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Soft Cell were the least cerebral, the most fresh-faced and the most willing to sing like they meant it.