Music

Ann Powers
Chief pop critic for the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America (Simon and Schuster, 2000) and, with the artist, Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (Broadway Books, 2005).

Simon Reynolds
Author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–84 (Faber and Faber, 2005) and Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop (Faber and Faber, 2007).

Simon Reynolds One of the striking things about 2007 compared with, say, a dozen years ago, is the absence from mainstream pop of figures such as Björk and Courtney Love, and also Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, who back then seemed on course to have a similar level of mass-culture impact. Scanning today’s mainstream, I don’t see anything comparable in terms of their wildness or creativity. There are figures that resemble Courtney, not musically but in terms of her twilight-of-an-idol out-of-control phase: Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. The latter could conceivably be celebrated for being the female Pete Doherty, claiming for women the right to be fucked up (her music is actually the opposite of a shambles; it’s classically controlled in its retro-ness). Then there was that whole drama of Kelly Clarkson telling ‘the Man’ to get stuffed, which I couldn’t buy into because the allegedly uncompromised music was so tame. There are plenty of creative and charismatic female musicians around, but with a few exceptions (Lily Allen and Lady Sovereign, although admittedly her career’s gone down the toilet) they’re not operating anywhere near the mainstream. (The only magazine cover PJ Harvey made in 2007 with her album White Chalk was The Wire!) Looking at what does reign over the charts, you have genres like emo – almost by definition a male-only thing, for some reason. From a feminist viewpoint pop music right now presents a discouraging picture. Please dispel my gloom!

PJ Harvey, 'White Chalk', recorded live in September 2007

Ann Powers The best I can offer is cautious optimism, in the face of a pretty daunting backlash. The move away from ‘out’ feminism is part of the larger US trend toward conservatism, which has ramifications far more serious than what’s in the pop charts. Ever since we (sort of) elected an evangelical Christian as president, women’s lib has, unsurprisingly, suffered a set-back. The knowing vixens of the pop mainstream – Britney, Fergie, the Pussycat Dolls and, in the good-girl role, Carrie Underwood – embody that same virgin/whore paradox that worked in the 1950s, the last era in which we all hid under our desks, anticipating international doom.

But then there’s Alicia Keys. And Beyoncé, who plays the good girlfriend in public but makes records that scream independence and serious musical smarts. And Allison Krauss, who made the Golden God himself, Robert Plant, bend to her will on their new duets album Raising Sand. On the underground side there’s the great M.I.A., Feist (the new Carole King), Joanna Newsom, Jenny Lewis and Santogold.

I’m heartened by the number of smart, confident women making music right now. I’m less happy about their general unwillingness to directly address sexism. Many are too young to know what life was like pre-Roe v. Wade [the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court abortion case] or even pre-Patti Smith. I fear they don’t think they need to speak truth to power; they seem to figure they’ve got power whipped. But history has proven the danger of blithe confidence. Women in the 1920s were pretty confident too. Then there was a war. And then … the 1950s.

This raises the question: what does ‘political music’ mean this year? I’m about to embark on a project to tally up the songs out right now that mention Iraq: there are a ton. Yet we’re not marching any more. Is this diffusion of activist energy connected to the fact that today’s pop icon isn’t an artist but a distribution system – the iPod? (And for the record, I believe in streaming, not downloading.)

SR That’s certainly a more positive angle on the state of (women in) pop. Perhaps what really pains me is an overall dearth of sonic spikiness and strangeness in the mainstream. Alt-rock’s sole living legacy, in chart terms, is emo – so Auto-Tuned and precision-ProTooled it’s like some ghastly, plasticized simulacrum of punk. Also, what on earth’s happened to all the bolshy females in hip-hop? Missy Elliott, Eve, Ms Dynamite – they’re all lying low. I’m not 100 percent sure about the conservative clampdown having direct impact on pop and its representations of gender, but something equivalent seems to have happened within rap. Perhaps it’s related to a general leaching-out of risk and imagination in overground hip-hop, going-through-the-motions of booty and bling. Things have got so inane that the relative realism of coke rap – essentially a reversion to old-style gangsta rap, when it was focused on the means of wealth production rather than the flaunting of it – seems almost radical. Yet it’s the kind of ‘negative hardcore’ that Public Enemy would once have decried as counter-revolutionary.

I wonder if all your Iraq-referencing songwriters really think they can motivate activism. Almost as long as I can remember there’s been a steady erosion of the notion that speaking out in pop has any effectiveness. The idea was starting to get worried away at even in the post-punk days of Gang of Four and The Beat. But nowadays if you talk to someone such as Robert Wyatt – a diehard (if kindly) communist who has approached the political song from virtually every angle and on this year’s marvellous Comicopera sings tunes from the perspective of both the bomber pilot and the victims below in the blitzed bull’s eye – he’ll say he’s got no problem with the idea of preaching to the converted: he enjoys the solace of like minds. Either it’s confirming opinions already held, or a therapeutic way of expressing anger. ‘Better out than in.’

I wouldn’t credit too much to the iPod; in many ways it’s the culmination of a whole range of convenience-oriented tendencies in music consumption. Yet all these advances in consumer empowerment seem to go hand in hand with a disempowering of art, in the sense that music becomes something you use. Another massive transformation that the iPod is implicated in is the abolition of pop’s history. If music from all eras is equally available to us in this instant-access form, it becomes as ‘present’ to us as something from the actual present. The effect of that, I think, is to weaken contemporary music’s ability to reflect or connect with the Zeitgeist. Meanwhile, out there, History rages on regardless.

AP The upside to this availability is that avid listeners are growing more engaged with historical material. That’s led to more revivalism from artists, which I agree makes for a confusing Zeitgeist, but it also means historical figures such as Bert Williams and Karen Dalton get rediscovered. But does engaging with the past destroy a new generation’s ability to make its own statement precisely because most generational statements are simply blithely unaware twists on what came before?

SR The 1960s’ folk revival was a prime example of how reworking the past in a self-conscious fashion could be integral to one generation’s attempt to respond to the present. That fed into rock via Bob Dylan, resulting in things like The Band singing about the US Civil War or late-19th-century farm unions. But that historical turn in late-’60s’ rock is not quite the same as retro, which is rock recycling its own history. The sheer availability of archival material – not just the music but visual footage, via DVDs or YouTube – means that it’s possible for new bands to replicate the sound and the look of a period with uncanny precision.

AP It can be confusing trying to identify what’s strange and new in music. Is the new Britney Spears album, Blackout, truly avant-garde, for example, or does it just rehash old electro sounds and Timbaland experiments? My objection to that album is that I don’t like the message it sends. To my ears it creates a portrait of helpless, out-of-control, monstrous femininity that is totally distasteful and reactionary. It’s debased, just as ‘coke rap’ is debased. This weird repositioning of conservative imagery as cutting-edge is what stopped Missy and her ilk in their tracks.

One thing I see happening is an extreme turning inward, crafting your own little corner as the only way to survive amid the maelstrom of communication. Recently, I went to see a band I like – Of Montreal. They put on quite a show, complete with costumes, mimed skits, swordplay and a roadie dressed as a wild beast. All very entertaining. It took a lot of effort, though – effort that might have gone into exploring issues beyond the band’s little scene. It occurred to me that much indie rock culture is like that: elaborate, hand-crafted and self-serving. It goes beyond music, too, encompassing the preciousness of the McSweeney’s scene and the general trend towards homespun crafts and organic food that’s taken hold in US indie outposts such Portland, Oregon. Dave Eggers has helped set up many community writing centres for kids, and plenty of these kinds of bands have played his benefits. But it’s hard to see how this world-view can expand to include a mass movement. And that may be part of the reason there’s no real organized anti-war movement – just small, if meaningful, gestures.

The rise of the hand-crafted underground is, in some ways, a response to the corporatization of identity politics and political activism: Bono and Gap branding the AIDS crisis in Africa with the (Red) campaign, and Oprah and Ellen modelling the racial and sexual Other on prime-time television. The radical spirit is hard to trace amid all the product placements. Pop’s effect on mass-movement politics is often minimal and, at best, symbolic: Gang of Four’s Entertainment! (1979) is, ironically, the ideal soundtrack to a treadmill workout. But plenty of idealists still try to defy the odds and say something with conviction and impact. Not so much right now, though. And I find that a real bummer.

SR One of the most fascinating things about white bohemian undergrounds like freak-folk, noise or drone is their attempt to re-enchant the commodity, through personalized decoration and releasing music in tiny limited editions. The fetishization of analogue formats like vinyl – and increasingly cassette – is part of the same hankering for a grainy tangibility to the artefact. The analogue and artisanal are equated with a sort of spiritual integrity. Yet you don’t have to be especially cynical to notice that this culture of handicraft economy parallels the sort of ‘anti-consumerist’ consumerism of buying distressed-looking furniture, artisanal cheeses and Americana antiques. The milieu around bands like Broken Social Scene from Toronto expend a lot of energy in ritually acting out their principles of egalitarianism and intimacy. That’s understandable, maybe even laudable, but it feels like a retreat from pop’s hurly-burly, the fray of fighting it out with other versions of reality. I love a lot of the music made in these various undergrounds (to which list I’d add electronic dance sounds like dubstep, plus the trans-global network of what we’ll soon have to start calling post-metal). But I can’t imagine living full-time in any of them.

AP Artisanal cheese! That needs to replace ‘twee’ as the catchword to describe high-minded indie rock. To return to your earlier question of whether we should still hold out hope for pop as a meaningful source of inspiration, if not as a catalyst for social change, a reasonable argument can be made that the 20th-century-model pop machine doesn’t provide enough interactivity to engage today’s youngest ears. Everything effective about music, beyond the recording industry, better serves this need to participate: video games like Guitar Hero, talent shows like American Idol, and GarageBand software, which enables everyone to become bedroom stars. Critics today are looking for solid ground amid all these tremors, but I suspect we won’t be able to say anything definitive until the quake settles. Until then, we have to enjoy all the uncertainty and momentary movements toward the next thing.