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| Too Much Stuff |
I turned on the television last weekend and Supergrass were on stage at Glastonbury singing “We are young”. I remembered buying that song when it came out, and how much that line – the cheek and celebration of it – meant to me. They were about 20 and I was in my 30s, but I felt young because of new-found freedom.
I realised that Supergrass are older now than I was when I first heard that song. A lot older.
The Glastonbury festival, or at least the version we get from the BBC, seems to focus your attention on age. Or it did from where we were sitting. There’s that old cliché about “policemen getting younger”; you could say the same about musicians. And there’s the continual temptation to say “music was better in my day”.
If Glastonbury is a cross-section of what’s happening in popular music at the moment (it might not be; I’m making an assumption), then I’m quite glad I haven’t wasted time trying to keep up. That’s on the basis of what I’m seeing on the telly. There might be some hidden gems on iPlayer. I might go and look for them, if I can be bothered. I’ve asked Twitter for recommendations, and most people have said “Jesus and Mary Chain”, which kind of misses the point.
My husband watches the telly with his hand on the remote control. I tell him to wait and give things a chance. “It’s good for us to hear new, different things,” I say. “But they’re not different,” he complains. Well, that’s because he’s giving more time to guitar bands, on the basis that the other stuff is “not really Glastonbury” (but it is these days, I say, it’s supposed to be eclectic).
He’s right about the guitar bands. It is pretty difficult, after all, to do anything different with a guitar band these days. I see men around our age on Twitter saying rightly that the new bands, to anyone who’s been around a while, seem “over familiar and formulaic”.
One makes the good point that “The 22 years of the 21st century are, in terms of rock/pop development, a mere fraction of say the years 1965-68. It's almost like they only count as six months.”
Which means that by not keeping up, I haven’t actually missed much.
They continue the conversation by wondering “where genuine innovation would come from now”. And I wonder, as I often do, if I'd recognise it if it happened, on account of being old.
Husband is wrong about the other stuff. I see someone else on Twitter (a woman this time) addressing the men who grumble about Billie Eilish: “She’s not for you old men, get back to your Eagles CDs.” (Yes, we have an Eagles LP – not CD – in the house. And it’s not mine.)
Even if I might not recognise the new, I am open to discovering it. (As long as I don’t have to try too hard.) And I liked Billie Eilish. Who is she for? Well, women for a start.
While Husband snoozed on the sofa, I marvelled at seeing all the young women and girls in the audience so absorbed in Billie’s performance. When I was that age we had no role models like that. And as the weekend continued I continued to marvel at all the women musicians on stage, just getting on with it, as if it was normal. That feels like progress.
How we listen to music
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we listen to music. I’m reading concurrently David Byrne’s How Music Works and Jude Rogers’ The Sound of Being Human. I’ve also been enjoying Justin Lewis’s new “textcast” First Last Anything, which broadens out conversations about music in interesting ways.
David Byrne’s book has some interesting things to say, although it says them in a quite uninteresting way. It’s pretty dry, but maybe that’s his personality (strangely, the dullest bits are about his own work). Rogers’ book says different, equally interesting things and is warm; maybe that’s her personality. I could turn this into a “women write differently about music” discussion, but I won’t. I think they do, but I think we are also talking about individuals.
How Music Works looks at the external factors that affect how we make or hear music. Rogers’ (which I plan to write more about later) goes in the opposite direction, exploring the neuroscience of how music affects emotion and memory. Reading them together works well, in fact.
Byrne talks a lot about context, which is important in any discussion of an art form. This includes some practical reasons for things we take for granted, like our notion that three minutes is the perfect length for a pop song. He discovers that people have always worried about our relationship with music: even in 1906 John Philip Sousa wrote that technology was turning people from creators into consumers.
Sousa calls the tech of the time (the record player) a “tireless mechanism” and Byrne has some interesting thoughts on this. The gap between performances, he says, might be just as important as the performances themselves. “The time when we’re not being entertained are as important as the times we are. Too much music, or too much continuous music, might not be a good thing.”
This chimes with me, as someone who embraced No Music Day.
After three nights of Glastonbury, I’ve turned off the telly again.
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