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From http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1300413,00.html
The slow death of punk
The well-adjusted, polite, politically inert, prize-winning Franz Ferdinand is the ultimate bland band
John Harris
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian
Roll over Sid, and tell Joe Strummer the news: whereas the kind of British musicians who attracted words like "alternative" were once duty-bound to affect a mixture of rage, debauchery and indolence, their modern heirs are a terrifyingly well-adjusted bunch. Tuesday evening provided conclusive evidence: when Alex Kapranos, singer with the allegedly iconoclastic Franz Ferdinand and fan of the word "fantastic", accepted the Nationwide Mercury Prize, his speech proved that the last embers of punk attitude have been long since snuffed out.
"We didn't really expect to win this," he said. "We are truly gobsmacked. It's fantastic. We feel very chuffed, very honoured - particularly this year when we're surrounded by such fantastic music. The bands this year do reflect a trend in the UK towards fantastic music."
His words were rather reminiscent of another ceremonial oration, made at the 1996 Brit Awards: "It's been a great year for British music. A year of creativity, vitality, energy. British bands storming the charts; British music back once again in its right place, at the top of the world." Tony Blair said that.
The fact that Franz Ferdinand are fond of such un-rock notions as politeness, humility and a New Labour-ish sense of national renewal shouldn't be a shock. Though their music (designed, in Kapranos's words, "for girls to dance to") marks a welcome break from the kind of drab balladry that dominated the airwaves in the slipstream of Britpop, it is not as revolutionary as their champions are wont to suggest. To this slightly cynical mind, their records and videos are suggestive of a school play about the early 1980s. Scabrous guitar lines, side partings, a bit of stilted white funk, some Dadaist intellectual exotica - older listeners will find themselves back in the world once defined by the likes of Wire, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio. That Franz Ferdinand are a pretty good group is beyond doubt, but in historical context, they're also depressingly conservative.
Coverage of the Mercury Prize,as with the current discourse of what remains of the music press, was couched in terms of a British musical renaissance: a belated return to the glory days of Blur and Oasis, and a revival of the national myth, whose source lies in the story of those four young godheads from Liverpool. In terms of such mundane requirements as hummable tunes and high chart positions, there might be something to all that. But listen to the varied work of lauded groups like The Zutons, Kasabian and Keane, and the deficits that tie them together become clear. British rock has become scared of technology, retreating into an arid world of old-fashioned instruments, analogue recording equipment and supposed "honesty".
It has divested itself of most of its old pretensions to social comment and political dissent: something best illustrated by the fact that, aside from the relatively geriatric Radiohead, not a single high-profile British group has written a song pointedly about Tony Blair. For those of us whose insurrectionary instincts were stoked by the music of the 1980s - Stand Down Margaret, Margaret on the Guillotine, innumerable covers of Maggie's Farm - that seems flatly bizarre.
Then there's one of modern rock's most glaring shortcomings. Where have all the women gone? As the Mercury Prize suggested, where once there was the idea that a new, feminised kind of rock might one day seize the initiative from guitar-fixated boys, music's gender-line now seems more rigid than ever. On one side stand the women: solo artists, backed by session musicians, and expected to squeeze themselves into low-cut frocks on requisite occasions (cf Amy Winehouse and Joss Stone). On the other are the lads, united by stubble, functional casual wear, and the pleasures of life within a band.
Naturally, blaming the musicians for all this is a little unfair. The fact that they seem trapped in pastiche is traceable to our residence in a world in which an endless past is built into the present: how do you slough off the hegemony of The Beatles, Stones, Clash, Smiths et al when their supremacy is fixed by CD reissues, DVDs and those nostalgia-crazed TV stations? When it comes to their dearth of substance, it's hardly the bands' fault that 21st-century pop culture is built on a mix of political quiescence and gormless machismo. Underneath that, one encounters another explanation: a seemingly endless economic boom, and the seductive effects of multi-coloured consumerism.
So, our beloved rock may well have drawn to a halt at the same point at which modern jazz arrived in the late 1960s: hamstrung by an exhausted vocabulary, largely cut off from the everyday, and content to chase its own tail. It might have had its guts excised by the multinational corporations on whom it depends. The wash-out that has so bedevilled British music, however, seems to me to have its roots in the inclusivist, well-behaved, cosseted place that the UK has largely become. Think about it this way: have you heard any good Swiss music recently?
· John Harris is author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock
[email protected]
What the Guardian said about the nominated records
17.10.2003: Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash
03.10.2003: Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress
30.01.2004: Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
07.05.2004: Keane, Hopes and Fears
01.08.2003: Snow Patrol, Final Straw
16.01.2004: Joss Stone, The Soul Sessions
07.05.2004: The Streets, A Grand Don't Come for Free
19.09.2003: Ty, Upwards
17.10.2003: Amy Winehouse, Frank
26.09.2003: Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland
16.04.2004: The Zutons, Who Killed ... the Zutons
Recent live reviews
10.12.2003: Basement Jaxx, Leeds University
20.07.2004: Belle and Sebastian, Somerset House, London
16.04.2004: Franz Ferdinand, Academy, Liverpool
19.02.2004: Keane, Joseph's Well, Leeds
31.03.2004: Snow Patrol, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
02.02.2004: Joss Stone, Academy, Birmingham
17.05.2004: The Streets, Apollo, Manchester
12.01.2004: Ty, Jazz Cafe, London
05.12.2003: Amy Winehouse, Bush Hall, London
19.01.2004: The Zutons, Islington Academy, London
11.06.2004: Jamelia, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton
Useful links
Mercury Music Prize - official site
More on the 2003 Mercury Prize
More on the 2002 Mercury Prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1300413,00.html
The slow death of punk
The well-adjusted, polite, politically inert, prize-winning Franz Ferdinand is the ultimate bland band
John Harris
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian
Roll over Sid, and tell Joe Strummer the news: whereas the kind of British musicians who attracted words like "alternative" were once duty-bound to affect a mixture of rage, debauchery and indolence, their modern heirs are a terrifyingly well-adjusted bunch. Tuesday evening provided conclusive evidence: when Alex Kapranos, singer with the allegedly iconoclastic Franz Ferdinand and fan of the word "fantastic", accepted the Nationwide Mercury Prize, his speech proved that the last embers of punk attitude have been long since snuffed out.
"We didn't really expect to win this," he said. "We are truly gobsmacked. It's fantastic. We feel very chuffed, very honoured - particularly this year when we're surrounded by such fantastic music. The bands this year do reflect a trend in the UK towards fantastic music."
His words were rather reminiscent of another ceremonial oration, made at the 1996 Brit Awards: "It's been a great year for British music. A year of creativity, vitality, energy. British bands storming the charts; British music back once again in its right place, at the top of the world." Tony Blair said that.
The fact that Franz Ferdinand are fond of such un-rock notions as politeness, humility and a New Labour-ish sense of national renewal shouldn't be a shock. Though their music (designed, in Kapranos's words, "for girls to dance to") marks a welcome break from the kind of drab balladry that dominated the airwaves in the slipstream of Britpop, it is not as revolutionary as their champions are wont to suggest. To this slightly cynical mind, their records and videos are suggestive of a school play about the early 1980s. Scabrous guitar lines, side partings, a bit of stilted white funk, some Dadaist intellectual exotica - older listeners will find themselves back in the world once defined by the likes of Wire, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio. That Franz Ferdinand are a pretty good group is beyond doubt, but in historical context, they're also depressingly conservative.
Coverage of the Mercury Prize,as with the current discourse of what remains of the music press, was couched in terms of a British musical renaissance: a belated return to the glory days of Blur and Oasis, and a revival of the national myth, whose source lies in the story of those four young godheads from Liverpool. In terms of such mundane requirements as hummable tunes and high chart positions, there might be something to all that. But listen to the varied work of lauded groups like The Zutons, Kasabian and Keane, and the deficits that tie them together become clear. British rock has become scared of technology, retreating into an arid world of old-fashioned instruments, analogue recording equipment and supposed "honesty".
It has divested itself of most of its old pretensions to social comment and political dissent: something best illustrated by the fact that, aside from the relatively geriatric Radiohead, not a single high-profile British group has written a song pointedly about Tony Blair. For those of us whose insurrectionary instincts were stoked by the music of the 1980s - Stand Down Margaret, Margaret on the Guillotine, innumerable covers of Maggie's Farm - that seems flatly bizarre.
Then there's one of modern rock's most glaring shortcomings. Where have all the women gone? As the Mercury Prize suggested, where once there was the idea that a new, feminised kind of rock might one day seize the initiative from guitar-fixated boys, music's gender-line now seems more rigid than ever. On one side stand the women: solo artists, backed by session musicians, and expected to squeeze themselves into low-cut frocks on requisite occasions (cf Amy Winehouse and Joss Stone). On the other are the lads, united by stubble, functional casual wear, and the pleasures of life within a band.
Naturally, blaming the musicians for all this is a little unfair. The fact that they seem trapped in pastiche is traceable to our residence in a world in which an endless past is built into the present: how do you slough off the hegemony of The Beatles, Stones, Clash, Smiths et al when their supremacy is fixed by CD reissues, DVDs and those nostalgia-crazed TV stations? When it comes to their dearth of substance, it's hardly the bands' fault that 21st-century pop culture is built on a mix of political quiescence and gormless machismo. Underneath that, one encounters another explanation: a seemingly endless economic boom, and the seductive effects of multi-coloured consumerism.
So, our beloved rock may well have drawn to a halt at the same point at which modern jazz arrived in the late 1960s: hamstrung by an exhausted vocabulary, largely cut off from the everyday, and content to chase its own tail. It might have had its guts excised by the multinational corporations on whom it depends. The wash-out that has so bedevilled British music, however, seems to me to have its roots in the inclusivist, well-behaved, cosseted place that the UK has largely become. Think about it this way: have you heard any good Swiss music recently?
· John Harris is author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock
[email protected]
What the Guardian said about the nominated records
17.10.2003: Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash
03.10.2003: Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress
30.01.2004: Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
07.05.2004: Keane, Hopes and Fears
01.08.2003: Snow Patrol, Final Straw
16.01.2004: Joss Stone, The Soul Sessions
07.05.2004: The Streets, A Grand Don't Come for Free
19.09.2003: Ty, Upwards
17.10.2003: Amy Winehouse, Frank
26.09.2003: Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland
16.04.2004: The Zutons, Who Killed ... the Zutons
Recent live reviews
10.12.2003: Basement Jaxx, Leeds University
20.07.2004: Belle and Sebastian, Somerset House, London
16.04.2004: Franz Ferdinand, Academy, Liverpool
19.02.2004: Keane, Joseph's Well, Leeds
31.03.2004: Snow Patrol, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
02.02.2004: Joss Stone, Academy, Birmingham
17.05.2004: The Streets, Apollo, Manchester
12.01.2004: Ty, Jazz Cafe, London
05.12.2003: Amy Winehouse, Bush Hall, London
19.01.2004: The Zutons, Islington Academy, London
11.06.2004: Jamelia, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton
Useful links
Mercury Music Prize - official site
More on the 2003 Mercury Prize
More on the 2002 Mercury Prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1300413,00.html
