In the midst of the last Blogger Book Club, Corey passed me this quote from an essay by Andrew O’Hagan covering new books on The Smiths and Morrissey. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but this was my hook:
Pop music is nostalgic in its bones–it is part of Morrissey’s gift always to have known this–and fans who adhere to its magic are in love with something that was passing as soon as it was made. True fans live in exile: that is their nature, their glory and their tragedy. People who love Elvis actually love a time when it was possible to be defined by your love of Elvis; people who continue to admire The Undertones want to believe they recognise an essence that defies the present.
A few days later, my pal Daphne let me page through her copy of Go Ask Ogre, a collection of intensely personal letters a young woman wrote to the front man of Skinny Puppy. In her distress, she confided in a stranger who it seems she felt closer to than most, if not all of the people around her.
Long before you could be “friends” with artists on MySpace and stalk them on Twitter, you could join their fan club, buy posters of them to paste up on your wall (your real-life bedroom wall) and feel that you belonged in their special circle even though they had no idea who you were. (You may have had Bye Bye Birdie fantasies, but for most, that’s not really how it went down. You signed up for the dream, not the reality.) Often the artist, as much as or even more so than the art, represented safe harbor, conjured a sense of identity, bridged confusion and pain (with or without a heavy dose of cliché, depending on your tastes), and offered companionship not in silence, but in songs that never asked for anything back.
I got lost thinking this over, tried to get unjaded enough to follow my gut on this and see how much people need music to actually survive in modern society, but even more so, depend on and cling to musicians.
You can sing along with them if you want to. No one else will care.
We will always need our shamans. And not everyone is up to the task. Great Gods don’t ride small horses.
…people who continue to admire The Undertones want to believe they recognise an essence that defies the present…
maybe people who admire the Undertones in this day and age also remember the fractious background they came from.Maybe there’s an understanding of the ‘Derry’ scenario, the backdrop of violence and bloodshed that not everyone was a party too. Maybe there’s an understanding and appreciation of their 2 minute pop driven singles that a 50 year old Londoner can get to grips with. Teenage kicks?
I do not have much “rock fan” in me, in that sense of the term that encompasses my friend who, seeing ZZ Top in 1984 at a then-famed Dallas bar, approached their bodyguard to say “could you just tell the guys how much I love the song ______________?”.
Yet I have a memory painfully sharp in what it is to be 21. In 1980, I did my “Summer school in the UK” Summer. It was a great time. My own favorite artist at that time was Bill Nelson, and it was a thrill to buy his new single “Do You Dream in Colour?” on his little indie Cocteau Records label when it would not be available back home for ages.
Yet there was that tangy, red-faced dilemma–should I try to get in touch and ask to meet him? After all, he was by then an entirely indie artist. It would have been entirely possible that an earnest letter would have yielded a result–a chance to visit the studio, to hear him play. Yet the awe I had for his work kept me from doing just that. In the event, the only concert he played during that time was just after I left. That tang of doubt and of hope–that was the one-way penpal-ism of everything that kept people joining fan clubs and citing lyrics in conversations as ways to express feelings. Indeed, though I never tried to contact the artist, I did visit his home town of Wakefield in an unsuccessful hunt for his earliest indie releases. It was a joy to visit a town not touristed, Goldsmith aside, where a rural carnival was in action.
Now that I am 50, I tend to listen to ambient and electronica artists with whom I can e-mail at will or meet at places like the chatroom at stillstream.com. I’m friends with some of them. Some of them are listeners of mine. No more idols, no more heroes, only people who share music with one another. In Creative Commons netlabel culture, we eschew seeking even money for work, because that sharing is a value in itself.
I am impressed with modern acts that “get” the safe harbour nature of the rockstar experience, while still being a bit more accessible than the old model. Many friends from around the country have their own John Darnielle/Mountain Goats story about having had a meaningful chat after a show.
Yet from 1980, I remember standing in the Hammersmith Odeon with thousands upon thousands of fans, singing “Waterloo Sunset” and “Lola” and the rest of the entire singalong Kinks catalog, with the Davies largely just letting the audience “sit in” as vocal session players. I wonder if that kind of communal, water cooler connection with a band exists anymore. Yet in 1980, the other great show I saw was a small bar performance by Clive Gregson and Any Trouble, a cult act then and a cult performer now. I like that in 1980 and in 2010, little bands doing fun work will be in Time Out, and then play to packed houses of 35 fans who love their niche.
Thank you for sharing this post, and for waking in me a fandom within long buried, but worth remembering.