a grammar

“I’m with the Genremongers”

Tom Ewing’s latest Guardian column begins like this:

There are two kinds of music fan – those who get excited by new genres and those who treat them with disdain. Back in the 90s the UK music press was notorious for its addiction to micro-scenes and flags of convenience – fraggle, new grave, collision pop. Some were absurd, some were successful, some were both. (When the internet came along, it was rather a shock to find that America had taken shoegazing seriously for years.)

I’m one of the Americans he’s talking about there, in the parentheses. Maybe you’ve heard people joke about the genremongering he has in mind: for a while, especially, in the 1990s, the UK’s music papers were furiously trendy, popping up every week with new scenes and hot bands that were changing everything … at least until next week. When it comes to this stuff, I feel like there’s a funny overlap between my experience and Tom’s: we both like that. But we like it in totally different contexts, and from different sides of the Atlantic. For instance: I’m guessing Tom was enjoying it amid a lot of British indie fans who found it tacky, commercial, or superficial — too much like pop.

And later on, when I first read Tom talking about how the pop charts could be colorful and tumultuous and full of ideas flying every which way, this was one of the other places I understood that dynamic; I’d felt it in those music papers, the same way I’d felt it watching new-wave on MTV as a little kid, and the same way I got it out of college radio as a teenager.

Here’s the funny part: a lot of the music those UK papers talked about in the 90s was just terrible. If I’d lived in the UK and actually heard a lot of it, I’m not sure I’d have enjoyed everything so much. But I was broke and in high school and lived in a very small town in Michigan, so I did not hear much of it. I would pick up two-month-old issues of Melody Maker and the NME from a bin in a record store, for a dollar or two each. And I have never read comic books, but I think it’s safe to say I read those magazines like comic books. Or watched them like a cartoon. Every week the papers would be describing these amazing new acts, complete with photos of them and their particular new visual style, and interviews the musicians were essentially using to posture, to act out a role in front of the press: we’re the punk ones, we’re the smart ones, we’re the stylish ones. And as Britpop moved closer, more and more of the content and humor became, well, really British, full of references and gestures and slang I could only vaguely try to sort out from context — stuff that might as well have been the imagined world of some comic, you know?

Keep in mind here that I’m sitting in a small town in Michigan, a kind of Ford truck and Carhartt-jacket town. So the density of this British style stuff seemed really head-turning; all these style issues felt so much more concentrated and visible over there. I’m always reminded of this stuff when I watch The Mighty Boosh, a British comedy show. Of the two main characters, one, Howard Moon, is stolid and serious and likes jazz and sort of plays straightman. The other, Vince Noir, is happy-go-lucky and stylish and modern and always working on his hair, into electro one week until goth comes back the next — he’s sort of the epitome of that NME/MM week-by-week trend-chasing mentality, and in fact he subscribes to a style magazine called Cheekbone that gets delivered every three hours by a ninja footman, because the one from three hours previous is out of date now. In one episode they’re going to a cabin in the woods for a few days, and he wants to bring several closets full of clothes; Howard picks through them and says, you know, do you really need this Jacobean ruff? To which Vince says: definitely, I have a feeling they’re going to come back in style over the weekend. And sure enough, as they’re driving out, a ninja runs up alongside the car and passes his Cheekbone subscription through the window, and it’s right there on the cover: Jacobean ruffs are back!

The UK music press was a little like that for me. So was twee pop. So have been lots of things. Rap mixtapes and blogs are great for it! Which is to say: it’s not just a quality of some scene, or some press — I think it’s more about you and where you find what you’re looking for.

I was talking yesterday, and will talk more today, about how maybe we could afford to reframe the way we imagine the “underground” or “counterculture” working, or learn to look for it in different dynamics. Tom, in another post, says one thing he might miss about the gut-level pull of the “underground” is the sort of passionate rhetoric it brings out of people, that line-drawing where talk like something just blew up the world. So here’s another funny question: do we even do that as much, anymore, with our genremongering?

Because when you look at the creation of a genre like “witch house,” which Tom uses as an example in that Guardian column up top, it’s really quite … reasonable. It feels like everyone’s learned the lesson of the breathless hype issuing from those UK papers in the 90s; nobody wants to be Vince Noir for serious, right? So our outlining of a new trend tends to sound very realistic, almost apologetic: “This is just a catchall term for a loose idea, it’s interesting and small and underground, we’re not so foolish as to say the world has changed.” All of this has the great advantage of being completely true. But compared to that kind of comic-book music world I liked in the papers, it’s obviously a bit less fun — the whole thing that everyone mocked those papers for was the sense that as soon as someone came up with “witch house” they’d put two of the bands on the cover for a feature story that said FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW ABOUT MUSIC, WITCH HOUSE IS THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING, and then two issues later they’d have some punks on the cover with a quote line like “WITCH HOUSE IS SO BORING, THE FUTURE IS US.”

It’s hard to compare though. If I were 16 again and living in a small town in Michigan, or 15 again and living in a medium-sized town in Colorado, I might get the same comic-book feeling out of reading pop blogs, downloading rap mixtapes, seeing Pitchfork’s latest Best New Music — maybe out of being into music in general. Or off the pop charts themselves.