thesunbrothers

Band Aid, politics and pop music

I was discussing the re-recording of the Band Aid single with someone yesterday. Rather than objecting to the flimsy nature of the song or the impossibility of repeating moments of creative action with those of contrivance, they pointed out that to record a song about an old humanitarian crisis when quite different ones were currently going on was actually somewhat misleading and misled. Having trouble with not linking absolutely everything back to pop music history, I then started to wonder if it is actually possible to write a contemporary sounding pop record about specific political issues and create something that wasn't terrifyingly bad art.

As pop music has progressed since the arbitrary cut off point of the birth of rock & roll, it has become clumsily entangled in the many strands of its past. Overt awareness of tradition has gradually mutated into a rock & roll rule book. Whether this is something as seemingly trivial as the fourth single from the album is a ballad law for the expansion of record sales, it is part of an implicit and haphazardly formulated code of conduct which exerts a stranglehold over the entire medium and the way it is created and presented. An art form which briefly engaged in, reacted to and even sometimes set the agenda for society around it has become torn away from from it, dangling now only from the tattered thread of fashion. It is now a medium which looks backwards and inwards, the opposite directions to those needed for a response to the world around it.

This need to feed of rock's past has also made its creators cripplingly aware of the ghastly taste errors made by luminaries of yore through their constant regurgitation in print and on TV. In fact this awareness is almost a psychotic desperation not to be judged unfashionable in the future. In the last five years, this has led to a movement in production to values of classic simplicity and overall to a desire to be as little related to the surrounding times as possible so as not to run the risk of becoming dated (not that What's Going On, for example, a record indelibly marked by its historical context, has dated too badly). Even those artists keen to reflect their world  attempt to fracture and encode those references  in a willfully cool fashion which actually resembles gaucheness (sadly even Radiohead are an example of this phenomenon).

Or perhaps it's not pop's fault. Maybe it's hard to squeeze a decent chorus out of  the current global political themes. Maybe it's easier to get films out of say American cultural imperialism than it is records (though this is of course a hilarious example seeing as rock & roll is American cultural imperialism). Taking a deliberately obvious comparison, the unpopularity of war in Iraq drew far fewer reactions within the medium than the Vietnam war. Perhaps, with far more information available to those interested in following what could broadly be described as political events, the songwriter is either overburdened with information, or stuck for hours in front of hundreds of news sources weighing up their opinions and hence somewhat distracted from putting pen to paper about it - at least for a song. After all, as the Band Aid recording that sparked this chain of thoughts shows, it is not for a want of political interest from contemporary musicians that there is a dearth of interesting political music. There is a reluctance for this concern to appear too noticeably in their art however. Yes Chris Martin has had a stab or two at saying something vaguely political in song, but he's not exactly a linear narrative listen to every word I say type of lyricist.

Overall though it might be the age of the medium itself. It's fifty now - middle aged, plump and not that interested in being very radical anymore. It's not ashamed that it used to dress like The Clash and go on rallies, but these days it prefers to stay indoors, do the garden and give to charity at Christmas.

 

Warmth

I've just read another article about producers making records sound warm by recording to tape. I think this is largely untrue. The same goes for general trends in searching out wobbly old valve gear to get closer to the warmth and spirit of old records.

If classic old records have a warmth about them it is because of arrangement, spirit and playing techniques not what they were miked up with or recorded on. Taking the tape point, I more than understand the technical argument - tapes overload and saturate when you record so that you basically get more sound for your money etc. - but that's just limiting and frequencies - and I don't think that's what the argument's about.

I was reading in sound on sound (I would link to the article but it's subscription only) that the Keane album was made by recording the drums to tape for this reason. Yet on that album, the drums sound very tidy, lifeless and dull - and really just like a decentish drum machine. The piano sounds on the other hand are far more interesting - they're subtly spacious and make a huge dynamic contribution to the sound of the record. They were recorded using a hotch-potch of techniques and millions of layers, on pro tools yet they actually sound "warm".

Of course they do - that was a proccess of trying to make a new sound and trying to do something original (mainly fill in the space other bands might have filled with guitars). It's nothing to do with rack fulls of old gear or mixing desks that Pink Floyd nearly recorded on, warm records in that sense have to do with sounds and ideas that were put together for a specific purpose to make that individual record sound good - in other words (and other words might be useful) the warmth one hears is more to do with the sound of people trying to do something new and beautiful or exciting than it is to do with the frequency spectrum. Usually in fact, those records were made with the newest technologies available - indeed frequently these were only developed for that purpose (like Abbey Road engineers apparently inventing Automatic Double Tracking (chorus basically) , amongst other things, to save the busy Beatles from having to double track their vocals).

Pop music is not objective - it's about connecting with people subjectively and more often than not, letting the listener read what they like into the music - it's a chunk of emotion that you react positively to if it calls up a related feeling in your mind/body. An honest attempt at novelty or just a desire to make a record more exciting and more engaging, or even just louder and brasher than any others before is much more likely to achieve that response than a polite attempt to make a record that sounds neat and tidy like a minimalist loft conversion and is determined to fit into strictly pre-determined radio station genres.

I know this latter point is not entirely the fault of sound engineers, but it is an example of how false consensus ends up robbing contemporary artists of an ability to make music that sounds as good as their predecessors. In music of late, the trend has been that an idea is tried, becomes a success, becomes a fashion and then a lazy rule. If this habit ends up dominating in the studio completely, it will be impossible for those arists who don't produce their own albums to make ones of any lasting quality without wading through hours of twaddle about valves and engineers running about rewinding huge spools of tape.

That said, I would love a big humming heap of old compressors or a massive echo chamber in the roof - but that's just twisted lust.

Callaghan's missing children

Does anyone have a clue what happened to our generation - I'm 26 and so I'm referring roughly to people born during the time Jim Callaghan was prime minister - people somewhere between about 25 and 28 who have left no noticeable mark whatsoever on the planet.

I spent the afternoon thinking about this while slightly bored at work. It's something that has occasionally troubled me before but it started because of trying to think of good records made by people who are roughly my contemporaries. I suppose that almost includes Supergrass but they've not done anything great for years - other than that it's people who make safe genre music like Ash and Coldplay (not being lazily bitchy you understand - just trying to work out any generational characteristics which might help my search).

Anyway, based on my own experience they probably spend a lot of time in pubs and communicating electronically with their friends, or watching rubbish TV and doing an unhealthy amount of lying about and aren't massively bothered by much more than their personal lives (oh and occasional earnest ranting about Bush & Blair). If this is the case I'm both amused and horrified by my contemporary folk. I have a suspicion that such inertia is the result of seeming to have far too many choices in life and of an unprecedented amount of exposure to ironic pop cultural cynicism. Or perhaps I'm just exposing my own personal failings.

If this is not the case and all other people roughly my age are enjoying cultutrally rich and fullfilling lives of trailblazing excitement and creative bravery, would someone let me know where it's happening so I can go and join in (or at least stand at the back with a pint making lazy sarcastic comments)?

It Took A Long Time To Get Here...

Well we haven't posted on here for about six months due to being enormously busy. Firstly mixing the album, then setting up the label, getting the records made, doing unbelieveable amounts of admin, getting the record on sale, getting the website sorted and now getting download copies on the fantastic audioscrobbler. All of which has left very little time for much else except eating and drinking too much and celebrating the fact that after three years, a year of which was spent in the studio, we've done what we set out to musically.

We've been working together for seven years now - since we were very little indeed and I must say when we started I had no idea it would take us that long to do something that we thought was any good. I also had no idea that we'd make our first album without any one else working on it, in our flat around doing our day jobs. Nor did I ever imagine that doing it this way would be so fun. But then I also never imagined seven years ago that the music industry would get so inefficient and unresponsive that we'd want no part in it.

It occurs to me that none of the rest of our posts have been about The Sun Brothers despite residing under the name, so perhaps I should just explain who we are and what we do. There are two of us and we write and record music together. That much is obvious. We listen to lots of records and believe in writing about small scale experiences over the top of huge scale pop songs - that much is probably obvious from some of our other posts.

We used to want to be a big successful world dominating pop band ended up realising that all we actually wanted to do was make records that sounded as much like we wanted them as possible. The rest of it was actually of very little interest. We learned this a rather difficult way - in the middle of doing some demos for a major label. The world of the desperate to be exploited artist is not for everyone and has virtually nothing in common with an ambition to make great records.

Firstly we wanted to show that you can make widescreen pop songs on a computer in a flat in west London, and now we want to show that you don't need a huge advertising budget to let people know about them. This may be a flawed ambition, but for us it's a very exciting one.

A list or two of good records

I find it very difficult to compile my favourite 20 albums (and even harder to compile my top 10), however, it is something I greatly enjoy doing, primarily perhaps, because however much it is based on other people's work, it is, essentially, motivated by a desire to think about oneself. Probably.
I think the reason it is so difficult to do is because of the ever-changing emotions one feels and consequently the ever-changing tapestries of sound it is comfortable (or perhaps challenging, irritating, motivating, cathartic, etc etc) to immerse oneself in. So therefore, unless one has a continually growing list of "my favourite records", a favourite record list of a predetermined, limited number, can only be a combination of some records which you hold dear, which will always be in your top 20 (or at least remain there ensconsed for a long period of time) plus a selection of records in addition to these, which you have perhaps been listening to a great deal in the recent past, or ones which, for some reason, you feel closer to at that particular moment, for whatever reason that may be.
Other difficulies to overcome when pursuing this most important of tasks must be the criteria with which you are compiling the list. Is it my favourite 20 records at the moment? The 20 records I'd take with me to the grave or to a desert island, if I had to pick 20, and only 20 records to listen to ever again? Should I allow just one record per artist? Does Wings and solo McCartney count as two artists under that ruling? Would anyone ever consider taking either of the above to a desert island, unless they were going to leave the island immediately, leaving the record behind for ever? Actually, that said, I think Venus & Mars is rather good, though it would never reach my top 20. The dilemma is never ending.
It becomes ever more difficult when you then attempt to rank the records one to 20.
I have probably rambled for far too long on this subject, so I may as well just present to anyone vaguely interested, the current 20 albums that I would take with me to a desert island, presuming they had a fairly decent stereo, and gave me permission to use it. I made this list barely a month ago (7-12-03), and already I disagree with most of it. (It is not the records on it, but their rank order I find galling.)

Sam's top 20 records

1 Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
2 Joni Mitchell - Court & Spark
3 Scott Walker - Scott 4
4 David Kitt - The Big Romance
5 The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
6 The Beatles - The Beatles
7 Ben Folds Five - Whatever & Ever Amen
8 Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns
9 The Divine Comedy - Regeneration
10 Radiohead - The Bends
11 Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
12 The Beatles - Abbey Road
13 Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
14 Joni Mitchell - Blue
15 Stereolab - Dots and Loops
16 The Divine Comedy - Promenade
17 Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
18 Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left
19 The Divine Comedy - Liberation
20 Lambchop - Is A Woman

And no favourite records party (a party on a desert island obviously - they'd allow that too - as well as the stereo - and borrowing the place for the purposes of such a curiously self-obsessed project) is complete without two disturbingly identical lists of preferred listening, so to that end, here is my own contribution, conceived on the same (evidently rather unoccupied) day (not in rank order - sorry about the brackets festival) (and the hyphens):

Julian's top 20 records

Joni Mitchell - Court & Spark
David Bowie - "Heroes"
David Bowie - Station To Station
Divine Comedy - Liberation
The Smiths - Hatful Of Hollow
The Beatles - Revolver
The Pet Shop Boys - Please
Robert Palmer - Pressure Drop
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
Stereolab - Dots & Loops
Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds Five
Suede - Suede
Morrissey - Bona Drag
Scott Walker - Scott 4
Carole King - Tapestry
Radiohead - The Bends
Dexy's Midnight Runners - Searching For The Young Soul Rebels
Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon

Sorry to interrupt again (again?) (it's Sam, by the way), but I must level with everyone a couple of my month-on disagreements with myself. Promenade is a vastly superior album to Regeneration, and there is no way on earth that Is A Woman is a better record than Revolver (apart from Yellow Submarine and George's ridiculous Love To You). Well, I'd love to continue to argue with myself, but I did limit myself to "a couple" of disagreements, so I will have to stop there. Oh, and For The Roses isn't my favourite album anymore. But I don't know what is.

That's why I avoided rank order altogether - like many of the most terrible sins, however, it is deeply tempting.

We must stop.

Reading books and that

I've just read If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor after having it recommended to me very kindly in response to one of my posts below. It's quite wonderful, but I'm not going to write a half-arsed book review, rather just go on some equally half-arsed mental ramble.

What I realised was that I've not *read* a book in a ages. I've watched some whilst turning over the events of the day in my mind, or covered pages whilst trying to work out how they got the bass drum sound on the record I'm listening to, but not really read. I felt the same when I first heard Whispering Pines by The Band, that I was very much listening. Usually, when I read or listen I am doing a lot of the analytical things I've been trained (or trained myself with music) to do. That and working on placing it in my opinions of fashion, people, social class, history, whatever it may be. But on this read (and that listen) none of that seemed even slightly important

Perhaps the bast thing you can say about a creative work is that you have nothing to say, that it's said it all, all you can do is recommend it. We talk a lot in our little studio here in our winding down after recording having a lager and smoking too many cigarettes looking at the clock and counting the hours of sleep we are losing before work tomorrow sessions about the point of creating things. In fact I mentioned it the other day. But I've been thinking further now about whether what makes a reaction like the above is actually an objective brilliance of the work or just the perfect end of subjectivity. Not that my normal distractions have silenced, just that the work I'm enjoying has chimed in with them so perfectly that I am actually reading/listening to my preconceived feelings read back to me.

So what am I saying? Many things spring to mind, not all of them very sensible and mainly just that I've read a really good book.

Thoughts too large for this morning's brain

I have woken up with my head not quite in a beer cloud, but certainly a light mist. I have no idea why. Only a couple of drinks were enjoyed during a post mortem of Tuesday's failed vocal takes. Anyway, it is partly our reason for scrapping them that I've been occupied with chewing over this morning in the shower. Apart from the odd tuning defect, the problem was really that the tone didn't fit into the song properly - not on a technical level, just an emotional one. This is not the first time that inexplicable emotion has ruled our hands regarding which takes do and don't work.

A little while in recording studios large or small (or in your front room in west London, whatever the case may be) and the expression feel rears it's ugly head. I suppose that this is the standard term for the concept I'm describing. What it leads me to suspect though is that music (and probably many other forms of creativity - but yet again I plead a certain ignorance of this broad "others" category) behaves like an energy - it is not really created or destroyed so much as discovered and harnessed. Moreover, creating it is perhaps a discipline of controlling and shaping instinct.

This is quite a big frustration, especially when writing. When you write a good song, the ego is barely involved, but when you write something rubbish you usually believe at the time that you are doing something deeply important* (* a survey of n=2 I must admit, but never mind). The worst part of this is that the times when you really *need* to write are usually the latter - when you are clouding the operation of the subconscious and putting barriers in the way of your real ideas. Which, to be frank, is a bit of a bitch.

The love of genre

We seem to have developed an obsession with categories. In music (for I know about little else, I'm afraid) this roughly translates as an almost rabid obsession with genre.

If you happen to write or record music, one of the first questions you usually get asked is "What do you sound like?". Then begins the inherently negative process of genre selection. Musicians are encouraged to respond to this (both through reading interviews with proper bands and through the terrifying pages of musical self-help one finds all over this medium) by naming a genre or a list of other bands they sound like(or preferably three they sound like and one unfashionable one that they don't just to add that extra bite of eclectic chic) .

Call me a foolish old pedant if you will, but doesn't that negate the idea of novelty or originality before a note has even been played? It doesn't take much of a genius to notice that since the general theory that everything's already been done and a creative artist is only a sensitive magpie became the consensus, most mainstream music has turned into a glossy extended advert for whichever lifestyle subgroup that band happens to dress like.

Not that I'm denying the relevance on the sensitive magpie theory (often shovelled into the bag marked postmodernism), more just pointing out that such a mechanism does not particularly facilitate freedom of thought and exprssion - one of the things I always thought was a pretty large part of the point of creativty.

The Sweetest Pleasures Are The Smallest

Man cannot avoid the small scale. However important the person or the situation we are always living in the small scale. A world leader having a meeting to decide an issue of major international importance is still at any time quite likely to end up thinking "I wonder if I need the loo" or "I'd love a chicken sandwich". Not that there's really any problem with that, it's just raher amusing how much of our lives we spend trying to pretend it isn't true.

I remember sitting at school once when I was about ten on some grey grimy winter morning (much like today) and under the flourescent glare of the strip lights being told that a dot drawn in the middle of a square would be trapped there, locked in two dimensions and unable to find any way out. So we have one more dimension to enjoy than it, but the case remains pretty much the same.

That is why art should reflect the small scale (and by art, I basically mean records, novels, good comedy and some poetry). It's not a duty, more that I can't imagine why anyone creating it would not want to; would not see the frustration and joy of the small scale as the source of their most important personal concerns. After all, our tiny personal dimensions provide us with our biggest emotions - all the love and the hate, the boredom, excitement and tranquility are played out there. In one sense it is pretty much the only scale we have.