Sometimes we stumble into where we want to be and other times the algorithm gets it right
As soon as Philippe Nash gets his bloody album out, I can listen to more than two of his songs. OK. I have found more of his music on YouTube, and some of those recordings are great. There’s something about the purity of one man and his rock-celloist friend in an empty house that resonates. From start to finish it seems like a pure commitment to creation, with no-one there to say well done. Simon and Philippe can afford to look smug and say, “Look what we just did.” But they don’t. One day they’ll get whoops and screams, but right now I don’t know if that’s big on their wish list. On my wish list is a version of Apple that has not got someone sniffing through the recording. The only recording of the shiver-inducing song I can find and the second half of the song is punctuated by sniffs. Imagine if the apocalypse gets here and all editing machinery is destroyed and the only version of the song has an uneditable sniff running through it.
I’d been busy lately and hadn’t listened to much. I also hadn’t been travelling much by myself, and that’s when I tend to do the most of my listening. I’m not too far removed from the teenager with a Walkman, listening to tapes that get chewed up, walking for miles in no particular direction, using a Bic biro to wind tapes to save me draining batteries. I found time recently to do nothing in my office-shed. And slumped in a beanbag, I listened to some Philippe Nash. Having not listened for a while, I thought, “How do I feel about Philippe?” Half a song in, I told myself, “Aaahhh, this feels like a place I want to be.”
Later that week I found myself on the tube into town, going down the rabbit hole of Spotify suggestions. Some were pretty good. The assumption was “If you like Philippe Nash, you might like Aunt Katrina, Legit Smitty and Neptune’s Core.” And I did. Well, I liked some of what I heard. I then started to think – I know who Philippe has toured with. Why am I not listening to Takeda? Fuck me. That first track, Sugar Mountain. I listened to it and it was full on. I can’t think of any guitar orgy modern tracks like it.
Spotify, for all its issues, can get it right. But it’s not like you can say, “Spotify. Hi. I’d like to listen to songs that sound like they are woven into the fabric of society.” And Spotify says, “Sure. Here’s Hold Me Now by The Thompson Twins.” The algorithm isn’t there yet. This feeling of finding music did take me back. It doesn’t matter where you find it. Finding it was the precious thing. I think of those second-hand record shops and the myth of them, of finding music there. I think this may be a romanticised memory. I never remember actually discovering music in a second-hand record shop. It was more likely to be shops. I have a memory of listening to R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People in the Basingstoke WHSmith’s. I first heard my favourite Muse song, Map of My Head, in Forbidden Planet in London. (That’s the song where Matt Bellamy, usually known for the sounds his guitar makes, makes some extraordinary cat-like howling sounds.) I miss milling about in Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus or the Oxford Circus HMV, discovering sounds.
But what are the channels these days? I can’t send you to Tower Records or HMV and WHSmith’s has never really been a place of discovery. TV seems a good option, depending on your taste. Music usually matches the vibe of what you’re watching. I can’t imagine anything better than Burn the Witch by Radiohead for one particular scene in The Handmaid’s Tale. Likewise, there’s an episode of House where Alexi Murdoch’s song Through the Dark makes the scene work. That scene is nothing without that soundtrack. SAY10 by Marilyn Manson combined with Amber Rose Revah being totally intense in Netflix’s Punisher gives me chills. The idea of hearing something in a TV show and finding it on Spotify seems to me to be one of the best channels when it comes to finding music. Manson and Radiohead don’t need the coverage, but someone like Alexi Murdoch must surely benefit from that kind of exposure.
Before TV usurped cinema, so much of the music I listened to came from film. Pump Up the Volume, a Christian Slater-starring film from the early 90s, was a good introduction to grunge. The film is about a young pirate radio DJ, calling himself Happy Harry Hard-on, and it needed a rebellious-sounding soundtrack. Happy Harry Hard-on wasn’t going to play you David Essex songs. And so I found Soundgarden and Sonic Youth and Pixies and Cowboy Junkies and Concrete Blonde. I had some exposure to Bad Brains and Henry Rollins and Above the Law. It was all grouped together by an attitude. Even if I wasn’t fully versed in all of this, I found a path to it.
I’ve often said that all the best stuff is buried. It’s underground. I feel like there was a path to the underground that was more obvious. Now I think about it, it wasn’t just that there were obvious avenues. It’s more a case that there were avenues with authority. There were publications like NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. Hell, there was Smash Hits for the teeny-bopper scene. Smash Hits is a guilty pleasure of mine, if ever there was. Of those, only NME still exists. I can’t speak for how much authority NME has and the fact that I had to Google if they still exist is either a bad sign for my music knowledge or for their standing in the music world. There would have been a time when all those publications seemed to offer music fans an inroad to various artists. That there was an Indie Chart and you could read about it opened your eyes to there being other music than what you’d see on Top of the Pops. Jools Holland, for the longest time, provided a way of exploring new music. Sadly, I often feel that the waters have been so muddied that I’ve given up looking through the murk to find new music. To say that they are muddied does not mean that I see nothing of worth at all. But I do often see promotion with a populist view in mind. What’s popular now that people want to see at Glastonbury or on Jools?
In the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body, the plot centres on a fictitious indie band who believe that sacrificing a virgin to Satan will bring them success. The lead singer has this justification for their actions:
“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we're all so cute and it's like if you don't get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you're screwed, okay? Satan is our only hope. We're working with the beast now. And we've got to make a really big impression on him. And to do that, we're going to have to butcher you.”
It made me stop and think: Yes. If the music industry was saturated with Boy-Indie-Bands, would the most natural step forward be slaughtering teen girls to get your music out there? If only there were more ways to get your music listened to, then we wouldn’t have to go slaughtering virgins.
Spotify should be a revelation. And often I do think of how amazing it is that I live in a time where I can think of any song, any piece of music and have it to listen to in seconds, all at the low low cost of £9.99 per month. Where I think it becomes problematic is when it becomes like having a huge table with a buffet, but this buffet has everything you could ever think to eat. I think at first you’d be terrified by the amount of choice. This would naturally speed up the way you choose. Listen to this one. It’s good. But is it amazing? Is it as good as Hold Me Now by The Thompson Twins? Hhhmmm. What’s next on the list? In the buffet scenario, you don’t ever get to eat a meal. You take small bites from this and that, and you probably forget what you’ve nibbled on ten minutes later.
Is it that we have no single authority that we can trust to show us what’s available to us? An algorithm isn’t the same. You can’t always find something new based on the stuff you’ve previously liked. People are not shopping baskets.
“Because you liked this you must also like this.”
“I like American football, 2000AD comics and Shakespeare. Spotify, what you got for me?”
“Here, please listen to Hold Me Now by The Thompson Twins.”
Although I’m being a bit facetious, if you were to ask me what music I like, I’d have a type. But I don’t know if I need anything to fill the gap where there once would have been New Order and Radiohead. That’s the problem with algorithms a lot of the time. They allow for little deviation from what you already know and like.
Unexpectedly, the loss of MTV was huge. I usually had MTV or M2 or VH1, on in the background. I shared a studio flat in South End Green with MTV there in the corner of the room all the time. But many years before that, I would record hours of MTV and discover music. In the early 90s, I was hooked on a song called Mistadobalina by Del the Funky Homosapien. It just struck a chord with me. It was a catchy-goofy-rebellious track. It was me through and through. And then I never found my way back to Del. Likewise I never found my way to some of those artists on the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. I guess this shows some of the limitations of those channels into certain musical territories. Maybe I needed to be a bit more committed to the Dobalina.
This is all new to me. I’m used to there being a recognisable map of the musical landscape. I remember The Tube, No Limits and the Chart Show on TV. The music came to you. I grew up with NME and Sounds and Melody Maker. Sometimes you went to the music. I may not have liked everything that was written in them. But, if there was a band I’d like, I’d buy the paper and read it. Sure, I had an unhealthy Tracy Tracy fixation, but then I’d read everything else and find out about The Sugarcubes or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin or Half Man Half Biscuit. I might not know anything about them, but they occupied the musical world that I was aware of. Half Man Half Biscuit remains my go-to forever if I have to come up with an obscure band name.
How do we find out about Half Man Half Biscuit’s track “All I Want for Christmas Is a Dukla Prague Away Kit” in this Twenty-First Century technology-induced state. (And that exhausts my knowledge on the band. It is the only song of theirs that I know, and I only know it because my mate Ian, nicknamed Village, as in short for Village Idiot, told me about it. “Village” was always and always will be the smartest Village Idiot you’d ever meet, proving that smarts don’t need to come from school, not when you have football and music and a knowledge of geography built from travelling the world to see Aldershot F.C. play). That leads me to another thing that I personally feel the loss of. I don’t really talk music with friends. Films, TV, Video Games? Yep. But I hardly ever talk music. Do people still talk about music? Maybe. Maybe I just don’t talk about it like I used to.
I confess, this is such a SolidWall take on things, and I’ve said this in so many ways. The issue is that we need to turn it over to the work. Test it. Trust the music. Let the music itself do its thing. If you are writing and performing for the algorithm, then I’m not really sure what you’re producing. I say it like I believe it’s a sentient monster. I don’t. The algorithm, which I’m not opposed to, needs to do something more than say, “You like this. But have you tried this?” It should actually be saying, “You like this. Here’s more of this. And because you like this you might want to know more about it. Here’s some sleeve notes from the musician. Here’s a sign-up to their mailing list. Here’s why you’re struggling to find their work online. But here’s a link to a really cool clip of one great performance, complete with sniffing sound from the guy filming it.”
There’s also a mindset that we have to get into. We need to realise that the thing to change is – us. This is a collaboration: musicians make music that they believe in, that comes from them, and says what they want to say, whether it be from their guitar or from their mouth, or from the pit of their stomach, where some guttural noise erupts from. I think people know when something seems authentic. And even if there’s not an original thought that’s gone into the work, the performance can be authentic. I’m pretty sure no-one connected to The White Stripes ever had an issue with a woman called Jolene stealing their man, but Jack White sings it and plays guitar like Jolene has really done him wrong. That cover of Jolene lands perfectly in White Stripes territory. The point being that I don’t think that Jack White was thinking, “Doing a cover of a Dolly Parton song will really get us some new fans.” I guess the man just wanted to do his version of the song.
How, where and why you listen to anything should not change how you choose to listen to it. Our part in all this is to see what happens if we listen. What happens if we listen to an album from start to finish? I’m not asking you to listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall from start to finish. Although that is one emotional journey worth taking. The infinite buffet that is Spotify does make you ponder if seeing so much food puts you off eating. The knack is to take your plate, choose your food, and sit in a bean bag and take time to go – This is really somewhere I want to be.
Where next?
→ If you want to follow another trail through music, memory and the cultural landscape, On a bus in Camden. Fight Club era
→ If you want to explore why we can feel something before we fully understand it, Understanding not necessary
→ If you want to explore how culture finds us through unexpected routes, The Simpsons did not make me part of the intellectual liberal elite
If the writing resonates, stay with it.