Atomic Razor

C and I like listening to Scouting for Girls eponymous debut album Scouting for Girls while do things in the kitchen. I was listening to the album a few Sundays and couldn't find the Michaela Strachan song. So I looked up the album on the FoAK and discovered that "Michaela Strachan You Broke My Heart (When I Was 12)" is, in fact, a hidden track. The Wikipedia page lead me to this amusingly vituperative review of the album.

Now it is interesting that the reviewer contrasts The Beautiful South and Danny Wilson (Danny Wilson? Danny Wilson!) favourably with SfG. For me, The Beautiful South have long been the exemplar of MotR dinner party/coffee shop/easy listening radio music. In my early days of buying CDs, I actually bought a Beautiful South album (Blue is the Colour). I quite like their songs and I quite the like album, but I still lie awake at night wondering what on Earth possessed me to buy it. And to compound the error, on the suggestion of my life coach a few years later, I bought a Dido album, a David Gray album and even a Coldplay album. What was I thinking and what would someone think who saw them on my CD rack?

Consider, for instance, the copy of NME that Andrew Greenwood had when we went to Keithcon I in July 1997 (at least I think it was then; it was possible that it was the earlier than that or even that it was at Pandacon in 1998 - the "and" referring, naturally, to Mr G himself, who saved my life by stopping me choking to death on my vomit after drinking about a third of a bottle of cask strength whisky - my God, it's all coming back now). Andy would have been in his mid-thirties then and I did feel to me that perhaps he should have moved on, but I am 40 now and although I suspect that a 2009 copy of NME would interest me even less now that one did then, I know now were Andy was at - and even if I didn't, I'd hardly be in the place to criticise. Anyway, the particular issue under discussion contained a letter dismissing Radiohead as "middle class, white boy axe-wankery" (that might not have the exact expression and Google offers no clues; NME does not appear to be as well archived as the NYR), presumably in contrast to whichever hip hop artist was particularly popular at that time. I do have a copy of OK Computer and one might somehow feel there is something more ideologically sound about Radiohead than Coldplay, but it is not very clear to me what that something might be. Surely it is all "middle class, white boy axe-wankery"? It's just that some of it is more plangent than the rest.

One might say Radiohead are the real thing. One might say that Coldplay are pretentious and affected. One might say SfG as manufactured. One might claim that The Housemartins spend years gigging around Hull, honing their craft, before they ever made it big (although it is pretty clear that it was not, in fact, many years). One might say that the songs on Scouting for Girls all sound the same. One might say that the songs on No Angel, all sound the same, but one might say that SfG's songs all sound more the same that Dido's do. One might say that SfG's lyrics are banal, but then (pretty much) all pop lyrics are banal. One might agree with Noel Coward that it is "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." One might say that it is even more banal than usual to write lyrics referencing 1980s (and earlier) pop culture. Leaving aside the fact that some of us may have a great deal of emotional investment in 1980s (and earlier) pop culture, we might reply that they are fucking pop songs and that if I want profundity I will fucking well go and read bloody Geoffrey Hill. SfG's songs are earworms - both the musical and lyrical hooks catch the ear and burrow into the brain. They do this more than Dido or David Gray or Coldplay or the Beautiful South. I like them in the SfG's songs in the way that I like wine gums: they are not great art, but once you've had one you want another. Until you've had too many.

The thing about music (or cinema or television or sport) is that it is something that is done to you. This contrasts with reading, which is something that you do to the text. The ideas in a book can be exciting (sometimes I feel as though my head is going to explode), particular sentences or paragraphs can provide a visceral frisson, but reading rarely provides the intoxicating, immersive experience that can be had by listening to a three minute track by David Bowie (in his Ziggy Stardust phase) or Motörhead or Scouting for Girls at maximum volume before a night out. The purpose of art is to induce emotional and intellectual states in its receptors. The question of modalities arises. Most people in Aristotle's time would have experienced poetry being recited, which is quite a different thing from either reading poetry or prose silently. It might be possible to obtain from words something of the violent, visceral, energised excitement we get from hearing music (or watching cinema or television or sport) when they are read to us rather than when we read them. But generally speaking we read books. A different cognitive apparatus is invoked and the emotional state induced is, generally speaking, of quite a different, but no less profound, character.  

These days one can listen to music pretty much all the time. 15 hours a day, average album length of 45 minutes, that's 20 album listens a day, 140 a week, 7000 a year. Applying a 80-20 Pareto distribution, that's 2800 albums a year. If you're listening to that many albums you are necessarily going to be exploring some pretty remote byways. Those Moravian paleoprogressive purplemoss bands that you discovered last week really are the Greatest Thing Ever. And you can listen to the albums Over and Over Again just to make sure you were right. You can't do that with books. You can't read a book (or a writer) Over and Over Again. Some people claim they do, but they are skimming or eliding, and if they are or want to be writers themselves, just what the hell are they doing anyway?

There is more to it than that. There is the communal aspect of music. Live music always sounds better than recorded music and has a much greater emotional impact even before adding the resonance of hearing a particular band at a particular place at a particular time with particular people. Reading is slow (and tiring), even for the fastest reader, and reading a novel, particularly a long one, is a private experience spread out through time and space - very different then from hearing "The Song Remains the Same" with your best friend at Knebworth

 in 1979. And then there is the tribal aspect of music. Now, of course, sf is a tribe or rather a collection of tribes, and poetry has something of the tribal to it, but these are somewhat the exception among the divisions of the Republic of Letters. But whether you are looking for a way of life or just a goddamn hobby, music offers an vast and constantly evolving array of prepackaged possibilities from which to choose - the attitudes, the clothes, the hair, the language, and, yes, even the books.

Scribbling angst-ridden prose poems behind your bedroom door does not make you Arthur Rimbaud, but playing bass in your garage door does make you Pete Doherty. Most people can't play an instrument so simply being able to play one at all, no matter how badly, gives one immediate rock'n'roll cache. But the thing about rock'n'roll is that it is distributive. You don't have to be in the band to have the fun, you just have to be with the band. And even being at the gig lets a little of the glamour attach itself to you. Of course, you can get something of that my hanging around near Neil Gaiman at an sf con, but generally speaking, the penumbra of writers falls fairly close to them. One might get a frisson from attending a poetry class with Craig Raine in his "airy front parlor in New College Lane, Oxford, seated immediately beneath a strikingly realistic painting of Craig Raine seated in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford", but it's not quite rock'n'roll. Martin Amis, on the other hand, at the MA at Manchester. Well, perhaps if it were 1979 and we in the Bursa Kebab House on a Friday afternoon. But it's  2009. I think I'll stick with hysterical realism, maximalism, recherché postmodernism and, when I'm doing something in the kitchen, the occasional listen to Scouting for Girls.