Friday, 18th December 2009.

Riding the Nostalgia Train

As I put finger to key this December morning, the race for the Christmas No.1 is in full swing. It’s a two horse race: in the first lane, jogging along at a nice steady cantor, is Rage Against The Machine’s anarchic ‘Killing In The Name’. In the other is Joe McElderry’s ‘The Climb’, a tedious Miley Cyrus ballad nabbed as the winner’s song for contestants of The X Factor. This somewhat hotchpotch selection is down to a Facebook campaign by Jon Morter, who – in a manner reminiscent of last year’s campaign to get Jeff Buckley’s version of ‘Hallelujah’ to the number one slot instead of Alex Burke’s – is urging as many people as possible to download ‘Killing In The Name’ so that it might outsell the favourite. The irony of borderline fascistic regulation on this scale using a song that contains liberal use of the words “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” has not been missed, but Morter says he’s aware of it, and simply states that it’s “very apt”. The Rage track is at time of writing a couple of furlongs ahead of its rival, but ‘The Climb’ is waiting for the steroid effect of its CD release to kick in, and I suspect that come Sunday evening there will be no need for either photo finish or steward’s enquiry. It’ll be McElderry’s victory all the way and there is almost certainly very little we can do about it.

I say McElderry’s victory, but it’s really Simon Cowell’s. The identity of the actual winner in each X Factor series is fundamentally irrelevant, because the show has never been about creating distinctive, unusual music stars – it’s a karaoke competition with phone voting. It’s another way of lining Cowell’s back pocket, and has been since day one. If Nigel Lythgoe’s Pop Stars did at least allow us to glean some sense of sanitised, heavily censored knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes when these manufactured pop bands are constructed, it’s safe to say that the novelty had long since worn off by the time Cowell started up the X Factor juggernaut in 2004. Everything about the show – the phone voting, the competitions, the CDs and MP3 sales and live shows – is about making money, and it’s been this way ever since Steve Brookstein. Even the previous incarnations of the show have had the same commercial bent, and it’s ridiculous to claim that the obsession with bringing in the cash – perhaps more discernible than ever in the 2009 run – is a new thing.

Cowell and his cronies maintain that The X Factor is about giving ordinary people a shot at the title, but like doing tequila slammers on a budget, one shot is all that you get: a year or so of glittering stardom, and then it’s platinum-or-bust. The moment sales dip, the label drops you (in the case of Michelle McManus, this resulted in a small earthquake) and your future career is no longer relevant, as by this time the suited executives and the public en masse have usually found another object of affection – most of the time it’s that year’s winner. The show, all others like it and the ‘careers’ that the victories generate stand as the televisual equivalent of fast food: cheap, curiously satisfying in the moment and quickly attained, but lacking any real substance – and it isn’t long until you want another helping, usually with a slightly different flavour.

My other half and I gave up on the show two years ago, after the tediously dull and completely ineffectual Leon Jackson was granted victory over Rhydian Roberts in a clash of the saps. Our decision to refrain from watching the 2008 series was made simply out of boredom: every series was nigh on the same, from the heavily scripted and sneakily edited ‘auditions’ (in which hopeless wannabes are assured off camera that they are going to be brilliant, before being sniggered at by four millionaires) through to the tedious, overlong boot camp / private audition scenes, featuring long, drawn-out shots of worried contestants lounging by the ocean while Simon debates with Sinitta and we’re informed on at least thirty-five occasions that “the waiting is the hardest part”. (We know that; we have to endure it with you.) Then the live shows, which bring a new definition to Zoo TV, given that most of the cattle-like audience members were off getting a pie when they were dishing out good manners: every negative comment is roundly booed and jeered, as the obsession to say nice things about obviously crap acts who are nonetheless “trying their hardest” or “fun to watch” reaches its grizzly zenith.

The sense of public anger at the continual presence of Jedward was perhaps the single biggest controversy of the 2009 series, as Simon himself – their most outspoken critic, at least on camera – ducked out on an obvious chance to eject them, thus prompting a flurry of angry forum posts and poorly spelled text messages, as well as a stream of articles in the tabloids (and even a few in the broadsheets, who really ought to have known better). It was clear, fans and opponents of the show alike exclaimed, that Simon wasn’t interested in artistic integrity or talent – he was only out for the money. By keeping Jedward in the competition he’d generate more media interest, and more people would watch the show. This point being made, the armchair politicians would then retreat back into their dens, happy that they’d brought such a stunning revelation to our attention. Everyone else nodded, sighed and said “Yes, we knew that”.

The point is that people have notoriously short memories, and anyone who maintains that Jedward’s presence caused The X Factor to jump the shark this year has obviously forgotten Chico. Or the Conways, who were brought under Cowell’s wing only to be ejected by them himself. Or the MacDonald Brothers, who managed one decent performance out of eleven. The finalists are typically manufactured so as to create a plethora of personalities: the lovable, doe-eyed twenty-something, the working mother who wants to support her children, the cocky but talented young man who is heading for a fall, the insecure teenage girl who blossoms over the course of the series, and at least one group who everyone hates. Such a mixture makes for compelling, almost pantomime-like television: the judges know from those preliminary auditions exactly who they want to go through, and they fix it so that it happens, thus keeping the ratings up and Simon’s supply of caviar well stocked.

My mother has discovered The X Factor for the first time this year, and is experiencing it with the same level of enthusiasm that Emily and I had when we started watching back in 2005. Love or hate it, the show is well-crafted, superficial but rewarding Saturday night entertainment: it’s karaoke, but karaoke with panache. There are many points of irritation – the excessive use of particular records to introduce contestants; the swooping, wind machine-heavy introductory videos; the emotional montages about hardship and trauma (dedicate a song to a dead relative and you’re guaranteed to go through that week); the drawn-out pauses before winners are announced; the manipulative editing; the way that every single highlight is showcased at least three times before we actually see it properly, thus vastly diminishing its effect; Louis Walsh’s diabolical maths (you can’t go over a hundred per cent, Louis, you just can’t) – oh, and the fact that the same established canon of crowd-pleasers are used in every series, which means you’ll get at least one ‘Without You’, one ‘My Heart Will Go On’, one ‘I Will Always Love You’ and a bit of Scissor Sisters thrown in for good measure. The more you watch the show, the more you notice these things, and I think that by our third series (and The X Factor’s fourth) we’d more or less got it down pat, which meant that any sense of novelty had long since been eroded without a trace.

While it lasts, though, it’s great fun, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that it needs to be anything else. My mother tells me that she heard someone on the radio the other week lamenting that the music industry these days was dead in the water, and that The X Factor was representative of this: we were bombarded with plastic pop and soulless slush and nothing good was out there. This is not only overwhelmingly negative, it’s not even close to true – and even if it were, you can’t blame it solely on Cowell and his champagne-drinking buddies. There has always been crap music, and there have always been unconvincing, soulless performances from artists who were clearly phoning it in, and there have always been saccharine-drenched ballads, and (here’s the big one) manufactured pop groups are nothing new under the sun. It’s just that we don’t choose to remember it that way.

As an illustration, let’s think about the concept of Greatest Hits albums. A band who’s in it for the long haul might release three or four studio albums and then a compilation of their best work. Typically, this will include the singles from the albums – work which generally represents the best of their career thus far. Now, flash forward a decade or so, when the band are older, wiser and have survived a press backlash after some poorly-received stadium gigs, the departure of their bass guitarist and the untimely (not to mention grizzly) death of at least one drummer. They’ve also released a spate of new albums, including a live compilation, and a few single-only tracks. The time is ripe, they decide, for another greatest hits compilation.

At this point they could do one of two things: firstly, release a double CD which contains everything from the first compilation, a handful from each of the subsequent albums and one or two live tracks. Alternatively, they could opt for a standard length CD, possibly a little longer than the last Best Of, that contains a chronologically broader but qualitatively more exclusive selection – in other words, taking out some of the weaker tracks that fleshed out the earlier compilation and replacing them with stronger material. For example, years after releasing the two-disc Red and Blue sets, The Beatles were able to produce an eighty-minute compilation that consisted exclusively of number one singles (although at least a couple were intercontinental). Subjectively, you could argue that their number one songs weren’t exactly their best work, but that’s not the issue: the more you have, the easier it is to cherry-pick.

My point is that if you’re going to look back at the music in a past decade, it’s going to be relatively easy to pick out a substantial collection of great tracks and say that music today pales in comparison, because you’re consciously ignoring the dross. There have been plenty of compilations of great sixties / seventies / eighties music that is collected and they all include the same records, because they’re the ones that sold – and why would you fill a compilation with bad songs, unless you were Keith Chegwin? It’s easier to ignore music of poor quality the more you’re able to distance yourself from it chronologically, and this has the effect of making us believe that the only music we used to listen to was great music. But if bad music is all around us now, that’s nothing new.

All too often I see this on Sunday mornings. The church we attend is evangelical in spirit and leans towards the modern for its worship choices, concentrating predominantly (although by no means exclusively) on material from the last ten or fifteen years. Occasionally they will delve heavily into retro, with almost entire services dedicated to Graham Kendrick, but for the most part we use an established canon of Stuart Townend and Matt Redman and various other names that will probably mean nothing to anyone outside the bounds of organised Christianity. Townend in particular produces catchy (if frequently derivative) melodies with clear, memorable lyrics that are eminently suitable for wedding services, being as they are Church Songs For People Who Don’t Do Church.

There are, however, a whole bunch of new songs that are picked up at that year’s Spring Harvest and Soul Survivor and other annual religious gatherings. Some are good. Many are not. The ones that aren’t are lost in the mists of time and never sung again. However, it can take years for this to happen. We generally sing them a few times until we realise that they have no staying power. Elevation to ‘classic’ status does not happen overnight; it is a fallacy to describe anything as ‘iconic’ until it’s been around at least – ooh, twenty or thirty years, and you can’t really measure the true worth of any sort of art until you can judge its effectiveness years after the moment. And we also need to remember that there are plenty of third rate hymns that are hundreds of years old that we no longer sing because they’re not particularly good. We’ve simply forgotten they exist, or we never knew about them in the first place.

I accept that there are standards, but it’s nonetheless very easy to dismiss contemporary art – whether we’re talking about music, literature, cinema or painting – as cheap and superficial compared to the classics. It’s a tempting, but ultimately unreasonable comparison, rather like weighing up an episode of Neighbours against a Noel Coward. Because time erodes, we assume that what we remember of decades past is all that is left, which is undeniably false. Instead, humans come equipped with an in-built filter that enables us to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles – or through ash-tinted ones where we need to. There is seldom any middle ground for the nostalgic, nor is there any for those who choose to shun history: they see their pasts as alternately beautiful or horrible, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

Brian Matthew is a prime example – Sounds of the Sixties has been going since I was in secondary school, and shows no sign of slowing down, but while the programme showcases plenty of great songs, popular and obscure, from what is typically viewed as the nation’s favourite music decade, there is also a fair amount of rubbish. This is largely because there needs to be: even with the wealth of material from which Brian can select his two-hour Saturday playlist, there are only so many times you can hear ‘Norwegian Wood’ without lighting a few small fires yourself. It would be easy to compile a list of classic songs – the sorts that grace every sixties compilation known to man and which are staples of every wedding disco, pub quiz and Spot The Intro trivia game known to man. But it would get deathly dull, and so Brian frequently thumbs through the back catalogue for the lesser-known artists: the one-hit wonders, the unconventional covers of well-known tracks, the album fillers and all manner of other things. The result is a show that is always interesting but not always very good: it’s nice hearing the obscure stuff, and I welcome the variety, but at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning you sometimes find yourself wishing he’d dispense with the Johnny Mathis and just play some Led Zeppelin.

Besides, anyone who thinks that the older stuff was unilaterally better than the new has never listened to ‘Deck of Cards’. Or ‘The Deal’. Or Bobby Goldsboro’s insufferable ‘Honey’, in which a syrupy lover laments the passing of his wife, supposedly from cancer or such but in all likelihood a death that was faked in a last-ditch attempt to escape from his insufferable droning about trees and puppies. Or Paul Anka’s ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’, an active celebration of nausea, mood swings and fatigue (epitomised by Anka’s “I love what it’s doin’ to ya”) which even gets in a passing reference to abortion. Or anything by Phil Collins. The worst part is that many of these records are held up as classics in their own right, albeit of the so-bad-it’s-great variety. Wouldn’t it be more honest to just concede that they’re all shit?

Perhaps the biggest complaint of contemporary music is that it’s dull and tedious and offers nothing new, but dull and tedious records are as old as the hills – it’s just that no one remembers them. If you tune in to Classic FM you’ll find an unimaginative and highly predictable playlist of works that regularly grace commercials for M&S, and every classical compilation on the market. Seldom will you hear any Penderecki or Stockhausen. But more to the point you will also miss out on the thousands of more obscure works by lesser-known composers, the ones working parallel to their more famous contemporaries, but who eventually drifted into obscurity because they were generally derivative or uninteresting. Typically, these pieces now end up on Associated Board exams for graded instruments, alongside occasional more famous works by Mozart or Grieg. The same thing happens in pop: there have been a great number of second-rate works over the years, but they’re only ever played on Sounds of the Sixties.

Too often, nostalgia is just an excuse to ignore the issues of the day by maintaining that everything was better. I’ll admit that there have been peaks and troughs of creativity, and that something like Sgt. Pepper could never be recorded today in the sort of drawn-out, experimental six month hubbub of creativity that originally spawned it, because studios no longer work that way. I accept (and lament) that genuine rock and roll behaviour seems to be on the wane, and that we no longer get stories about notorious drummers choking on their own vomit, or throwing pianos into swimming pools – these days we’re supposed to be outraged by Mariah Carey’s rider demands, or the news that Amy Winehouse is off the wagon. (You can almost picture Amy walking into her record company headquarters, shambling and shambolic, like an Enfield vagabond, after a night on the tiles, requesting taxi money with the words “Spare any change, please?”. The receptionist fixes her with a cold, sceptical eye and says “I’m not giving you any money. You’ll only spend it on booze.”)

While Winehouse’s behaviour, however sad and self-destructive, is if nothing else an indication that there’s life in at least some of the business’s icons (Chris Martin’s very talented, but honestly, he’s so boring), I refuse to accept the assertion that modern music is in decline. The MP3 has threatened the influence of the album, and – as Bill himself said – it’s very possible that “all recorded music has run its course”. But even if the act of recording itself is perhaps in need of examination, the fact remains that there is a great deal of great music being recorded today by real artists with real agendas and real emotional impact, who play real instruments, write real songs and have the same crazy lifestyles, wild tours and creative angst as Pete Townshend, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. You only have to do a little digging to hear Bat For Lashes, Eels, Lambchop, Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Joan as Policewoman, Paolo Nutini, and any number of great artists who would much rather be interesting than commercial. Even Robbie Williams’ new stuff is great. Music wasn’t better years ago. We just think it was. Sandy Thom expressed a wish to be a punk rocker, with flowers in her hair, but her irritating dirge is just a glorified list song about a world that never really existed in the manner that Sandy (who wasn’t even there) would like to think it did.

There’s a passage in the book of Haggai that illustrates this point: the Israelites have been sitting around for decades not wanting to get on with the job of building the new temple, largely because it looks too big, and also because it probably wouldn’t live up to the wonders of its predecessor. Sixty six years ago, the temple that Solomon built had been destroyed: there probably weren’t many of them who’d have been around to see this, or who would have remembered the original temple, but stories and oral tradition were incredibly important to the Israelites – they still are – and they would have heard all about it from their parents and grandparents. And there probably would have been the fear that when they’d finished the new temple it would have been a disappointment – all sparkling and new, but just “not as good as the old one”. It takes God himself – via Haggai – to ask them “Who among you is left who saw this house in its former glory?”

Chief among the accusations levelled at The X Factor is that Simon Cowell is destroying the soul of pop music, but if anything the only real sin of which he’s guilty is that of destroying the race to the Christmas number one slot – which, due to manipulation and marketing, is now more or less guaranteed to be filled by an X Factor winner’s song. Cowell’s defence is that he’s actually doing the great British public a favour: “We all have this belief,” he said, “that the Christmas No.1s were just amazing songs. But actually over recent years it was Bob the Builder, Mr Blobby…we were getting to a point where it was all becoming like The Millennium Prayer that was knocked from the Christmas No.1 slot by Westlife.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that Mr Blobby was actually produced by Cowell, and concede that he does have a point. The Christmas No.1 has been filled by great songs in the past – and even as recently as 2003, when Gary Jules’ minimalist, ethereal cover of Tears For Fears’ ‘Mad World’ became one of the last seasonal chart toppers that wasn’t a product of the Cowell hit factory. But there have been quite a few novelty songs up there – Jimmy Osmond, Benny Hill and the execrable St Winifred’s School Choir were some of the worst offenders in the seventies, and let’s not forget that the Spice Girls dominated the charts in the late 1990s to relatively few complaints, even though the songs were crap. In the days of The X Factor’s reign, you may at least guarantee that the Christmas No.1 will at least be a serious song, sung seriously, by a serious person.

And that guarantee is essentially the problem. Because while Cowell’s assertion about novelty acts is at least partially correct, he’s missing the point, which is that the Christmas No.1 slot was never about what song was there – it was about what song might be there. The race to the top of the charts was half the fun of things: there were always three or four hot contenders, as well as a few outsiders that have on occasion managed to greatly upset the favourites (and the bookmakers). In fact, placing bets on the top seasonal record is now a complete waste of time, because there is only one winner – such is the devastating success of the X Factor hype machine. The euphoria of having a song you liked scale the heights of the Top 40 at yuletide was unmistakable, but it came second to the excitement of the race – the waiting may be the hardest part, but it was also the most fun. If anything, the Christmas No.2 has become the new Christmas No.1, so perhaps we should concentrate on that instead – or simply bar X Factor singles from the chart. Simon Cowell has become the Michael Schumacher of the pop world: victory is so assured that the only solution is a complicated series of rule changes and new regulations that will make it harder for him to win.

It’s a problem, then. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of the music business. It’s not headline news. It’s not even NME headline news. It’s a page seven by-line, a filler article, an afterthought. It’s not something for the armchair politicians to beat themselves into a frenzy about, or a reason to retreat into your shed and listen to nothing but Sex Pistols records. This whole thing would really only be a big deal if the singles chart still had any impact, but the rise of the download, the decline of the CD single and a gradual shift in focus has rendered the Top 40 more or less redundant – and as much as we may wish to believe otherwise, the Christmas No.1 stopped being really mattering some time before Shayne Ward started the trend of winner’s hits that looks set to continue this year. Perhaps the age of the MP3 has posed a serious threat to the integrity of the album as we know it, and perhaps all recorded music has run its course. But if popular music as we know it is currently at something of a crossroads, no longer sure of its aims, ethics or the direction it should follow, I seriously doubt that anything The X Factor could do would make any serious long-term impact upon it: there are still plenty of real musicians making genuine music, and Simon Cowell couldn’t stop that even if he wanted to (and I’m quite sure he doesn’t). He may have saturated the British entertainment business with his manufactured slush but he hasn’t killed decent music in Britain or anywhere else in the world – the public backlash alone, misplaced as it may be, is proof that people do at least still care about it.

There are issues with the top 40, and the packaged feel that hampers a great deal of contemporary pop, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have concerns about The X Factor’s hold on the market and the fact that our culture is absolutely saturated with an obsession to be famous for fifteen seconds. Perhaps too there is an issue with his status as media tycoon extraordinaire (and seriously, the man has to stop using that tanning machine) and perhaps he is in danger of having a monopoly, but there will always be decent musicians as long as there is the desire to make music, and Ben Elton’s prophecy of doom as documented in We Will Rock You is not even close to fruition. The X Factor is an irritation, but is a source of pleasure to many, and a harmless one at that. There’s probably nothing wrong with a harmless Facebook campaign, even one that’s been described as “cynical” and “stupid” by its chief target for abuse, and if viewed as a bit of seasonal fun in the same way as, say, Bill Nighy’s bid for the No.1 slot in Love Actually, it’s quite amusing.

I also seriously doubt it will spoil the fun for Joe McElderry, not really, and I don’t expect it will harm his career any more than the ceremonial dumping by his record company that is certain to follow within the next eighteen months. But it would be wrong of us to think that a serious protest about the state of the music industry that is conducted in this manner is actually going to do any good – I’d like to believe that this was harmless, but there’s a genuine feeling amongst some of the community that this is the first throes of a revolution, when it’s really nothing more than a reactionary stunt, and to be honest a rather childish one at that. Whether or not our concerns are valid, we’re not going to solve the problems in the music industry through raging against Simon Cowell – and certainly not Rage Against The Machine.

[Author's note: I was wrong about the chart placing, as it turned out. And pleasantly surprised.]