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Pop vs art (victor not yet decided)
More angst. Is this what blogging is for? I suppose so.
So anyway, the Pet Shop Boys once released a best-of compilation called PopArt. The songs were divided into two categories on two separate CDs, called Pop and Art. The division never made a lot of sense to me. West End Girls, their first number one single and still one of their best remembered songs, was on the Art CD, but their medley of Where The Streets Have No Name and I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, a knowing prod at the self-importance of 1980s rock bands, was on the Pop CD.
How does that work? Where The Streets Have No Name wasn’t as big a hit as West End Girls, therefore it’s surely less pop. It was also more artful - to truly get the point of the song, you have to understand pop music, the way the single juxtaposes what is generally thought of as a serious rock song (by U2) with what is generally thought of as a throwaway easy listening song (by Andy Williams) and demonstrates that they can happily exist side-by-side as a single pop statement. It was a deliberate, subversive smashing of barriers, and arguably quite influential. It was certainly art.
Then again, perhaps the whole tracklisting exercise was a clever joke at the expense of daft music critics. Maybe they ordered the tracks at random in five minutes, sniggering as they did it. The Pet Shop Boys, after all, have always argued that pop IS art, and taken the creation of it very seriously (although always with a sense of humour). Every song they have recorded is simultaneously art and pop, which is one of the reasons I like them so much. I aspire, in my own humble way, to do the same.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently. Something has been bothering me, and I haven’t quite got to the root of it yet. It is this.
1. I am a fierce, constant, absolutely unironic defender of the cultural legitimacy of the term ‘pop’, and frequently find myself defending the likes of Girls Aloud or Beyonce Knowles against idiot rockist snobs who think the music they listen to is somehow intrinsically superior, somehow not ‘pop’ at all because it dresses slightly more untidily and is written about in Mojo or the NME. I have written at length about this in a previous blog, so won’t return to the subject here. Suffice to say, it was a tough battle as a teenage fan of A-ha. It’s a lot easier in a time when Franz Ferdinand can make an album with Xenomania - the team behind Girls Aloud - without risking ridicule.
2. However, I seem to have a troublesome relationship with art, or certain kinds of art. I often find myself in contemporary art galleries, looking at some inexplicable pile of objects on the floor and seething with something resembling rage because what I see seems pretentious and deliberately obscure. Because, I suppose, I don’t GET it, I don’t see why it is being held up by obviously intelligent people as something to be admired and taken seriously as an artistic statement. I have this nagging feeling that I’m being conned somehow. I went to the National Review of Live Art for the first time last week, to write about it for the Scotsman, and spent more of my time there than I feel comfortable admitting feeling faintly cross and irritable. There seemed to be an awful lot of people talking obscure academic gobbledygook into their own navels. Much live art, on this evidence, consists of people doing not very much, incredibly slowly, in a very serious way. Admittedly, some of it I really loved and was very moved by - the stuff that challenged you as an audience member to interact with it, or had a sense of humour and fun and spectacle, or a really unusual idea - but I kept thinking: why can’t MORE of it be like this? Why so much of the doing nothing really slowly?
Of course, it could easily be that some of the stuff at the NRLA just wasn’t very good, the way some of the stuff at T in the Park or any pop festival just isn’t very good. But my objections feel different. I am not simply indifferent, the way I am to a useless band. I am actually annoyed and offended. But why? What is my problem with certain contemporary/live artists? I think it may be because I have it in my head that they are self-important in the same way some rock groups are, that they act as if what they are doing has more worth because of the context in which they are doing it. Why are certain films labelled ‘art films’, for example, when they are often just incredibly boring, badly made home movies that no one would take remotely seriously if they were shown in a cinema? At the National Review of Live Art I went to see a dance performance which was so slow, repetitive and tedious that I had to leave before the end, irritated beyond belief. Was its boringness the point? Was that the ‘art’ of it? Doesn’t art have a responsibility to entertain, to hold your attention? For a while I started to think I was a philistine for being so bored, but then I thought - no, I have been going to theatre, dance and live art performances of various kinds for MY WHOLE ADULT LIFE and this one is just FUCKING DULL.
But here’s my problem. I worry that I am not tolerant enough of artistic indulgence, of people’s right to be obscure, or difficult. I fear that my lifelong pop obsession has made me shallow, dismissive and suspicious. Why should I feel that certain artists at the National Review of Live Art are setting out to con me, or trying to make themselves look clever? Why do I find it hard to accept that they are simply following their instincts, in an uncynical, sincere and committed way? I worry that I really am a philistine, and that I am in denial about this. I worry that I am not clever or cultured enough, and am in denial about this too, preferring to blame other people whenever I don’t understand art. I worry that I still haven’t managed to get beyond track three of Tilt by Scott Walker, despite having had a copy of it for years, because it bores me so much, even though it is widely hailed as a modern avant garde classic. I worry that I think Douglas Gordon is a charlatan, a shallow one trick pony, and yet I seem to be in a minority, given that he is one of this country’s most successful and respected contemporary artists. I tell myself that Hamish reads The Wire so I don’t have to. It took me THREE years even to get round to watch the copy of Wings of Desire that I had in my house, which isn’t really that hard a film to watch (although it’s quite long and not a lot happens). Instead, to my slight shame, on at least one or two occasions I watched Star Wars again instead. I worry that Swimmer One would make much better music if I wasn’t so hung up about all this. Then I worry that if we make decent music at all it is precisely, partly, because I DO get hung about all this.
I am going to the Instal experimental music festival at the Arches in Glasgow this weekend, and looking forward to it. If I can get through a whole evening without rolling my eyes and tutting, perhaps there is hope for me yet.
Or maybe I am completely right, and all the live art, experimental music etc that I have seen which made me roll my eyes in despair was actually SHIT.
My investigations into this subject are ongoing.
Andrew
