Avant Pop

Crack magazine has extracted three short essays from We Call It Avant Pop, including my own contribution. The 288-page volume was curated by Sergio Ricciardone around the Turin festival C2C and is intended as "a manifesto for C2C’s understanding of avant-pop – as a concept that has deeply influenced the festival’s identity, a community it brings together, and an outlook that has pushed pop music forward."

You can go to Crack to read the essays by Jazz Monroe and Carlo Antonelli, but here for your convenience is my piece...

‘The Ex Factor’

By Simon Reynolds

“Can’t things just be… pretty?”. As much a beseeching plea as an aesthetic enquiry, this is how the mother in 20th Century Women reacts to The Raincoats’s "Fairytale in the Supermarket" as played by her teenage son Jamie and her punky young tenant Abbie. “So… they’re not very good, and they know that, right?” she further puzzles. The kids talk about passion overriding skill and how prettiness is a lie masking over an unjust society. You can almost see the wheels turning inside mom’s head as she grapples with the discrepancy between the plausible arguments and the grating DIY racket.

I’ve often wondered the exact same thing, albeit from the perspective of a convert to this kind of noise and this way of thinking who suddenly doubts his own unexamined assumptions. “Why do we need our beauty to be progressive?”. Embedded in concepts like avant-pop is the belief that it’s not enough just to please the ear: some sort of advance must be made. Hence the long-running canon of art-pop radicalism stretching from The Beatles and Bowie, through Kate Bush and Björk, onto The Knife and SOPHIE: self-conscious innovators always seeking the next cutting edge in music. They grab new technology, push it or misuse it. They hijack ideas from street sounds and make them weirder. Sometimes the interloper started out in the world of experimental music and moved into pop: David Cunningham of Flying Lizards, Laurie Anderson.

I teach a class in Experimental Pop at a California art school. One thing we look at is the question of who gets to call themselves “experimental”. Quality newspapers, art periodicals, and left-field music magazines alike are susceptible to a certain sort of pitch (borders being crossed, etc). Often these musicians were educated at institutions similar to the one where I instruct. Part of what they learn there is how to frame their practice. They become fluent in a language that’s essential when applying for grants and positions, but works just as well when making a case for what you do in the culture media.

But pop has always harbored its own internal experimental tradition, a vernacular and functionalist approach that doesn’t use the jargon and rationales of the art world. Instead it favors adolescent or street slang: dark, sick, twisted, fucked-up, fresh. Mark Stewart, late singer of the ironically-named The Pop Group understood this. Celebrating the electrofunk of LA label SOLAR, Stewart recalled how “they would slice up tape with a razor blade and do these amazing remixes. It was incredible, the most experimental thing I’ve ever heard. But because it’s Black and it was entertainment, it wasn’t considered avant-garde. But some kiddie playing a hosepipe going on about Dada was…”.

Separate from the Bowie/Björk line, then, you can trace a different avant-pop from Bo Diddley through King Tubby to the warped Auto-Tune madness of Migos and Future. The motivations are less lofty, more impure: they want to make money and blow minds. Every innovation is also a gimmick designed to grab ears and make bodies move. But just as much as the art school trained Raincoats, these street vanguard sounds have the power to make parents wonder why pop can’t just be pretty.