“[M]usic” includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.
~ UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 63
Obviously, a person who regards music as nothing more than an arbitrary succession of irritating sounds, or who values music solely for its social or practical usefulness, will have no difficulty rejecting music on moral grounds.
~ Michel Faber, Listen - On Music, Sound and Us.
As we established in the 1950’s, rock ‘n’ roll is the Devil’s music. That is to say, it belongs to, is possessed by if you like, the spirit of rebellion. When rebellion is absent in an artform, it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. Most rock music today isn’t rock ‘n’ roll, and a great deal of contemporary music that could only be defined as rock by drawing a long bow is very much rock ‘n’ roll.
This reversal of values happened briefly with punk, but punk, made from the same technology as rock, self-destructed easily, subsumed into rock to redeem it for another decade or so. It happened more convincingly in 1987/88 when DJs brought rave culture, and someone less honoured brought the MDMA, back from Europe. Rave music relied in large part on automated technology, and relied little, at that time, on live singing. It was an excitement of machines that appealed to humans. Human musicians get tired, and even when not tired will take pauses to change tempos and tackle new subjects. Ravers wanted to enjoy the same tempos and subjects – sex, drugs, rebellion and dancing – for as long as the E lasted, in a continuous feedback loop of pleasure and escape. When the dawn arrived, Thatcher’s Britain was still there, but its famously unhappy people had left it for a good time.
Raves were noisy, and the spontaneous organization and mass movement of young people, many aligned with the existing network of class-war activists, plus the advent of little understood new drugs, in a society that had long refused hallucinogens the respect they are beginning to enjoy today, sparked a serious moral panic. 839 people were arrested at a single party, Love Decade, in Leeds in June 1990, the largest mass arrest in British history, and attempts to suppress raves altogether lead to police being given the wide-sweeping powers of disruption, seizure and arrest listed in the 1994 crimes act cited above. That it wasn’t just about noise and “disorder” was demonstrated by the UK board of Trade and Industry’s policy of refusing licenses to radio stations devoted to rave music, resulting in a new culture of pirate radio.
In 1998, Tony Blair’s new Department for Culture, Media and Sport set out to legitimize raves in order to enhance their ‘potential for wealth creation through the generation of intellectual property’, leading to the gentrification of the once-intolerable. Accidents, crime and drug deaths at raves were now just the unfortunate aspect of a profitable business model.1
In this period, rave music didn’t really cross over into rock music, or vice versa, but there were exceptions; New Order’s house-influenced hits were precursors, but the rave act that most comfortably sat alongside Nirvana on those late-night TV video playlists was The Prodigy, the brainchild of Liam Howlett. I can’t better Peter Shapiro’s description of their music as “the best example of how hip-hop got translated by British youth from ‘black America’s CNN’ into a music expressing nothing but sensation.” 2This sensation combined rock and electronic dance into a series of body hits, using the “reductive” method, in which the essence of excitement, as revealed by the passage of time, within some pre-existing body of work is first isolated, then magnified. Making a dance-rock music both minimal (because repetitive and constant) and maximal (because its elements have not been chosen for subtlety), The Prodigy presented themselves like a (punk) rock group, with a front man, Keith Flint, who seemed to have modelled himself on Viv from The Young Ones. The breakout hit ‘Firestarter’ sampled The Breeders, while the follow-up ‘Breathe’ harmonically resembled Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ (1992).
I’ve been trawling through The Prodigy’s back catalogue because, trawling through contemporary pop culture TV in search of meaning, I came across their song ‘Spitfire’ in season 3 of Chucky, and the fact that this 20-year old song sounded more 2024 than the 2024 track the show’s producers would probably have selected otherwise got me thinking, and looking for the X factor that prevents innovative music from dating.
With The Prodigy, it’s that fusion of rock ‘n’ rave, because the future they promised us hasn’t really happened yet. It will, but they’re still leading. And it’s Liam Howlett’s commitment to pure sensation. The third single from Fat of the Land, ‘Smack my Bitch Up’, is a good example; Shahin Badar’s alap improvisation, the vocal that drops in halfway, is the essence of Orientalism, a Cinemascope signifier of Eastern power and passion stripped of ethnographical context. Exactly the kind of usage smart people get trained to deplore, but all the better for it. Which could also be said about the song’s title, and its state-of-the-art bodycam video, which made it the winner of the “most controversial” awards for decades to come.3
‘Smack my Bitch Up’ has survived, it’s become an artifact. Even ‘Baby’s Got a Temper’, an inferior song (disowned by Howlett, who wasn’t completely immune to criticism, or perhaps reflection, after ‘Smack My Bitch Up’4) with an even more outré video, seems to have managed this trick, and wouldn’t be out of place today on an arthouse cinema bill between Scorpio Rising and Pink Flamingos. Art, it seems, is what survives, whether you like it or not. That stuff which, in Laurence Sterne’s words, “floats down the gutter of time”.
‘Firestarter’, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ are all tracks from 1997’s Fat Of The Land, and I know them well from music TV though I never owned a copy of the album. ‘Spitfire’ is from an album I missed, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, which Howlett made, after much hiatus and struggle, in 2002 without Flint and the Prodigy’s other vocalist Maxim Reality.
Those swooping vocal lines which give ‘Spitfire’ wings, are, Wikipedia tells me, from Juliette Lewis, ‘90’s It grrrl actress, first seen by most of us slaughtering a bar full of “rednecks” to the sound of L7’s ‘Shit List’ in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), in a scene that might as well have been a music video; possibly inspiring Katherine Bigelow to cast her as a rock singer in 1999’s Strange Days, convincingly delivering songs composed for her by PJ Harvey. Today it’s almost de rigeur for an actress to have a singing career that’s at least as important as the acting to her fans, e.g. Suki Waterhouse, Selena Gomez and (Charli XCX’s favourite) Sky Ferreira, but in the 90’s this transition was harder, the industry less sympathetic (E.G. Daily had a voice that would be killing them today, but the only copy of her album I’ve seen is the cassette I found in a dumpster). Lewis came closer to making it, her ability showing on her other notable contribution to Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, ‘Hotride’, as she growls her way through the chorus from Jimmy Webb’s ‘Up, Up and Away’ over a guitar riff that’s somewhere between the ‘Peter Gunn Theme’ and Fat White Family’s ‘Whitest Boy on the Beach’, with, as if that wasn’t enough, a verse sung by Hannah Robinson, whose biggest hit as a singer was the #1 rave track ‘Give Me Your Love’ with DJ Carl Cox, and who’d go on to write ‘Lolita’ with Lana Del Rey for Born To Die.5
There are two ways in which people can be offended by Art. The tritest method is visible every day on Twitter, the rush to narcissistically insert oneself into any creative process you can and sniff about some aspect of it, to demonstrate one’s learning and usefulness, and the correctness of one’s moral-political posture, to one’s tribe.
It’s more honourable to be offended by, or take pride in not being offended by, deliberate provocation, the old rock ‘n’ roll game of “sticking it to the man”. But provocation isn’t what it used to be – we used to enjoy a commons in which everyone braved offence, now you can seal yourself off from it. Or, with it. So it’s rare for an artist today to achieve what Katy Perry has with ‘Woman’s World’, that is, a piece of music demanding instant condemnation from the likes of The Guardian and Pitchfork. The song itself, while crap, isn’t the worst she’s inflicted on us, landfill disco schlock, brightened up with a synth groove, over the usual over-determined rhythm that leaves nothing for your imagination to dance with. Perry has claimed that Charlotte Rutherford’s video was “satirical”, a claim the haters have had a hard time believing, but that isn’t too far-fetched, if it’s satirizing the moronic way “feminism” is exploited to sell us rubbish, including the song itself.
I’m currently reading novelist Michel Faber’s fascinating book Listen – On Music, Sound and Us, which covers subjects I’ve touched on in this blog, including musical prejudice, and the role of musical taste in defining and enforcing herd membership. In this spirit, I want to enjoy Katy Perry’s music more, because she’s offended a sensibility that I’d like to see offended as often as possible, yet I can’t, due to my structural bias, AKA, taste. Her music has always seemed crass to me – as if, had she had been born a little sooner, she’d be belting out showtunes. Perry has one good song, ‘I Kissed A Girl’, but if I want to hear that I’ll play the “nightcore hardstyle (sped up)” version by SICKCVNT (now, for some reason, known as SICKLEGEND) every time.
Back in the day, when Poppy was young enough to own both Katy Perry and Ke$ha CDs, and demand to play them on long car trips, Ke$ha’s was always the preferred option. ‘Tik Tok’ still sounds like, well, all you need really. Its imperishable production is by Dr Luke, who’s tried and failed to work his magic again on Perry’s latest clunker. And surely Dr Luke’s participation is the only bone of contention within ‘Woman’s World’ that ought to resonate outside the narrow, irritating, life-depleting world of PMC take-mongering.
“Kesha sued him in 2014, alleging he drugged and raped her nine years earlier and psychologically tormented her throughout their working relationship. She said he harangued her about her weight, denigrated her voice and lorded his power over her career.”
Fuck that shit (since settled out of court). Perry, who was once married to Russell Brand, is a Christian (and her devotional music, recorded under the name Katy Hudson, might just have something her pop songs don’t). Why do Christians keep forgiving bad people? It's a mystery. Some of the criticism directed at ‘Woman’s World’ relates to the fact that most of its credited authors are men. Hey, maybe Dr Luke penned the lines “It’s a woman’s world, and you’re lucky to be living in it”. Let’s hope so.
In other new music news, Alice Glass, a pioneer of gothic vocal electronica who left Crystal Castles in 2014 accusing her male collaborator of abuse and control, has a fine new single collaboration with rapper CLIP, ‘Remains’, which follows a Smashing Pumpkins cover, ‘Drown’.
The mix hints at a hard trap sound at first but imbedded in this is a softer pop song, messed with by CLIP’s glitchy, ghostly contributions. ‘Remains’ has got me listening to Glass’s 2022 solo album PREY/IV again (the IV in the title positions PREY as the proper sequel to the albums I, II, and III Glass recorded with Crystal Castles). Hearing PREY/IV again after Brat convinced me that it’s a darker version of the same thing, full of original, danceable beats (concocted with producer Jupiter io). There are some songs, like ‘FAIR GAME’, that provide harrowing insights into her past, but plenty that take her far beyond it, including ‘BABY TEETH’, a spirited take on Grimes’ style of dance tune, and the definitive ‘THE HUNTED’, with its pouncing earworm melody that’s the objective correlative of its lyric, and quintessential witchhouse trap sound.6
One of the most effective vocal tricks that Glass uses is to overdub a soft, beguiling voice with an autotuned banshee howl. A similar vocal interaction is present across Fire, the new album by storied all-girl nu-metal band Kittie, not lauded enough in their heyday to reach my ears, but in very good shape for the 90’s nostalgia boom (thanks to Chris Philpott’s substack for this tip). If you asked me to name a nu-metal band, it’d be the egregious Korn, unless Linkin Park are nu-metal, but dipping into Kittie’s back catalogue reveals nu-metal, in its day, to have been a supple thing deserving of respect, gothic arpeggios crashed by bulldozer riffs smashing into and out of rap-metal tantrums or grinding into a bestial crawl.
Fire has less of the rap-metal sound (I suppose it was the inclusion of hip-hop elements – breakbeat rhythms and faux-scratching electronica - that made metal into nu-metal) and takes the band in a black metal direction, deepened death metal growls contrasted with clean singing. If Kittie didn’t have a nu-metal pedigree, would we be calling this nu-metal? Whatever, Fire is thoroughly convincing in its power.
Ridiculous And Full Of Blood, Julie Christmas’s first solo album release since 2010’s The Bad Wife, is another sort of metal altogether, undogmatic and independent-minded as to what “metal” means, home-forged and handcrafted, quantized and compressed less than usual, riding to battle on horseback as it were (whereas Kittie, clearly, like to drive tanks), a simplicity that suits the ancient, elven quality of Christmas’s remarkable voice, her old-world melodicism, and her wryly literate lyrics. Even so, on the under-two-minutes ‘Blast’ she gives us what may be her interpretation of a nu-metal tantrum.
Truth be told, I haven’t yet wandered far from the theme of giving and taking offence. The body-horror imagery and vivid representation of mental illness in gothic genres, including metal and horror films, has the capacity to offend, because we all have varying degrees of tolerance for it. The level of such content that’s therapeutic for one person may be traumatic to another. The opening montage of retro horror comedy MaXXXine (2024) documents a period in the 1980s when heavy metal bands and horror film producers were subject to legal repression in the USA, which surely had much to do with lawmakers’ visceral responses to the newer sounds and sights that thrilled (by definition) lower-class audiences, no less than the putative social harms of such low art. For reasons including genetics, childhood development, trauma etc. we’re made to feel squeamish (or not) about different things, even before peer pressure tries to turn these feelings into prejudices or shame them out of us (if you’re perceived to be prejudiced today, some stranger may well diagnose you as suffering from a phobia).
Is there a correlation between the ability to tolerate the shocking in Art and the ability to tolerate the “Other”? The Nazis certainly thought so.
In other news, my review of Norman Meehan’s Jenny McLeod biography has been published in the Summer 2024 edition of The Kapralova Society Journal here.
Algorithmic outrage – Kid Rock, ‘American Badass’, RNC version.
I can’t help thinking of the overnight acceptance of riding on the footpath, and the occasional dead or injured elderly pedestrian, in this country almost as soon as someone worked out how to turn a profit from it. Seems it wasn’t so bad after all, and many generations of children could have enjoyed a safer ride to school had adults then known what they now claim to be obvious. Ka-ching!
Peter Shapiro, Drum ‘n’ bass - The Rough Guide, 1999, p. 164
“Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up”, sampled from ‘Give the Drummer Some’ (1988) by The Ultramagnetic MCs, should make sense to more people in these days of autotune.
Flint’s lyric “We love Rohypnol/She got Rohypnol/We take Rohypnol/Just forget it all” had become irreversibly open to misrepresentation by the time the song was released.
“Up, up, and way in my beautiful balloon” – I’m pretty sure those are supposed to be NOS-inhalation breaths following that line.
Some excerpts from FAIR GAME:
I know you don't know this
But you're a cliche
You screw up everything
I'm so embarrassed for you
I'm so embarrassed for us
You ruined everything for us
Everybody laughs behind your back
If everyone knew you
You wouldn't have any friends
(You screw up everything)
I didn't want to tell you
But I have to
I have to because I care
I'm the only one who cares
Where would you be without me?
Where would you be without me?