1/ You are one
of the few who dared to confront the coexistence of black and white music in
the vast ecosystem of musical time. It was not supposed to be easy? The subject
can lead a lot of false interpretations isn’t it ?
Oh, I wouldn’t
say I’m one of the few – not in the least. It’s one of the fundamental aspects
of the history of rock and pop. As important as the concept of youth culture
and teenage rebellion, or the influence of technology on music, from the
electric guitar to sampling, or the effect of drugs on music, or the role of
class. Lots of people have written about the relationship between black music
and white music. Going back to before rock, with writing on jazz and blues. But
yes it is a very complex subject, full of mistaken ideas and misunderstandings.
I have made a fair number of mistakes myself, which are collected in the book!
My argument I
suppose, or one of my arguments, is that is the white misunderstandings of
black music – the getting it wrong – that have led to mutations and creative
evolution. If white musicians had only replicated black music, it would have
led to a lot of “sonically correct” but redundant music that didn’t take its
inspirations or sources anywhere new. And just as bands like the Rolling Stones
or Talking Heads or The Police warped black musics like rhythm-and-blues and
discofunk and reggae, so too I think the misunderstandings by white critics of
black culture have also been “creative” in a sense. You try to get it right,
but you always end up with a distortion of one kind or another. But that is
more interesting and productive than successfully understanding something “on
its own terms”. That job is for academics to do. Rock writing in a sense is
about the creation of fictions and myths about music.
2/ In this
connection, I thought when I was reading Bring The Noise, that it would be even
more difficult now, with the expansion of "politically correct” in all
spheres of creation and society. What do you think?
Yes, well the
truth is that my original intention was to write a book called White On Black,
not a collection but a new book that drew on my older writings in various
ways. But the problem I confronted was
precisely the politically correct issue. There is so much critical literature
and academic work on questions of music and race, I felt I would be obliged to
read it all and as a result I would find myself, however much I resisted,
becoming more cautious and wary in my statements. A terrible inhibition would
creep in, for fear of accidentally saying something wrong or offensive. I knew that doing such a book would become a
chore, all the fun and life in the writing would be leeched out of it. Also I
would be committed to come up with some kind of definitive statement on music
and race, and I don’t know if such a position could be reached. So many of
these issues are ever-shifting and resist resolution. When it’s in a book you
have to go out there and defend your conclusions, and by the time the book
appears in print you might have already evolved your views! So I became
attracted to the idea of actually presenting my 25 years of journalism on the
subject, all the shifts in outlook I’ve gone through. Because the pieces were
written for immediate purposes, they had a vitality and energy about them. I
was not looking to make a definitive and
conclusive statement on the subject with these pieces, they were written
quickly and they were addressing the contingency of that particular moment – an
artist, an album, a live show, maybe a genre – and it was through that the issue
of music and race was refracted. But there is also a sense, with all the pieces
gathered together as one book, of some kind of evolution of thinking.
3/ The very good
idea in Bring The Noise, are the small "footnotes page" that you add
to the original articles. You make your own self-criticism in this book, you
return to your ideas in hindsight. Without them, Bring The Noise might be
(maybe) a self-sufficient book (or just "pretentious") in the bad
sense of the word ... don’t you think?
4/ When do you
have that idea? To add some footnotes to your older texts?
Yes I just
thought it would be both fun and essential to add these afterthoughts, where my
ideas have changed or become more sophisticated, and also add some contextualization,
because some of these pieces were very much interventions in arguments that
raged at that particular time, but have since completely faded from memory. I
don’t know if it makes the book less pretentious to have these commentaries,
some people might say that it was more pretentious or pompous to have them! But
they were great fun to write, I had to be quite compressed because you don’t
want to have a commentary that is almost as long as the original review. Some
of them get quite close to that.
The idea must
have occurred to me pretty early in the process. Looking at stuff that I liked a piece of
prose or because of the subject, but aware that it needed to be situated historically
in some way.
5/ It must have
been a crazy job to read it all. Not too boring?
I’m ashamed to
admit I was never once bored during the process. I was mostly just surprised at
how much I had actually written. Bring the Noise is a fraction of my total
output since November 1985, when I started writing professionally. Partly out
of enthusiasm and partly because it’s the only way I make my living yet musical
journalism is generally poorly paid, I have churned out millions of words. Selecting
for the book, I narrowed it down to the stuff that had some relationship to
music and race and the white/black theme, but even out of that stuff, there’s
way more writing I didn’t include in Bring the Noise than stuff I included.
The only boring
bit was the early pieces that were only on print, not in my computer or old
computer discs. Those I had to transcribe into the machine and that was a bit
tedious.
6/ You must have a goddam prescience to write
analyzes such as you wrote in 1985, for exemple for “Younger than yesterday” on
Talulah Gosh’s pop, The Pastels, K Records, etc.. How is this possible? Should
we not let pass a decade (minimum) to have enough perspective to analyze a
situation? You seems to be able to see it all, when you were in the middle of
it ... !
Well, it was
right there in front of me and certainly while there are benefits to looking at
things from hindsight, certain things become clearer, you also have the
advantage of being there, witnessing things unfold, and trying to work out what
it meant but doing in pretty energetic format of a piece for a weekly music
paper. Some of the ideas and even sentences in that piece came out of a couple
of years thinking about music prior to that– pieces that I’d done for the
fanzine Monitor – but yeah, it was sociological analysis done on the fly,
almost in real-time. I think the signs are there for people to read in any
genre or movement that’s happening right now, but obviously the long-term
significance or consequences, you don’t know what they’ll be. So these kind of
overviews or thinkpieces were also manifestos in a way, or acts of prophecy. My
stuff in those days fell somewhere between journalism, sociology/anthropology
(without any academic qualifications, I should add!), and the messianic mode of
rock writing, the “I have seen the future” mode. Of course most times the
future turns out completely different.
7/ In Bring The Noise you talk about the
condition of hip hop in 2009. What do you think of this condition today, with
the advent of ultra-smooth productions of RnB and those, tasteless and
repetitive, of the today rap?
Overall I still
kind of wish hip hop would just fade away and something totally new take its
place. But there have been some more interesting developments and artists
recently. 2007-2009 was kind of the nadir, I think. But recently there have
been interesting artists like Kendrick Lamarr, Odd Future/Tyler the Creator,
Lil B, Future.... I don’t like Drake really but I concede that he is a new
phenomenon in rap. And in 2009 I didn’t see Nicki Minaj coming either. There
has been the rise of styles like trap and ratchet which are the same old
gangsta modes of materialism and threats and boasts and sexism, but the sound
is quite excitingly cold and minimal and hard, as with songs like Tyga’s “Rack
City”, produced by DJ Mustard here in Los Angeles.
As for R&B,
the club-ification of R&B and pop rap – the Eurohouse sound that Rihanna
and Pitbull and Flo Rida have all adopted – that is a new development, but also
for Europeans it feels like a retread of the Nineties. Rihanna I find a rather depressing
phenomenon. I am pleased that in the Destiny’s Child piece in Bring the Noise, written in 2001, I already see the
signs of megalomania in Beyonce that have blossomed this year with the
Superbowl extravaganza and the biodoc Life Is But A Dream and the video for
“Bow Down”.
8/ Bring the
Noise also contains the famous (or infamous) article entitled “Post-rock”. In
France, the term was sometime taken as an insult by some conservative
journalists. I guess it was the same in your country? How do see this name now?
It was never
meant as an insult or necessarily a praise word, but a neutral description of a
space that had opened in rock in the early Nineties where bands that came out
of indie label culture and experimental postpunk music had started to wake up
to developments in hip hop and techno. They were listening to the loop-based,
sample-based music of Public Enemy and the electronic mindscapes of Aphex Twin
and assimilating those ideas into their music, as well as reactivating ideas
from dub reggae and from Krautrock. So it was a neutral description of this new
musical space, although at the same time I thought it was the right direction
for rock to go if it was to escape the
retro pitfall of replicating its own past (which it has largely done, ever
since!). And obviously I loved many of those early UK post-rockers, especially
Seefeel and Disco Inferno and Insides. But what post-rock evolved into, largely
through the influence of Tortoise and Slint, has not been so interesting to me.
It’s not really “post” anything, it’s too often today just a form of
instrumental rock music that tends to use rather hackneyed loud-quiet dynamics.
I guess
“post-rock” could be taken as an insult if you were very attached to the rock
that it was trying to be “post” in relation to! If you were happy with the concept of rock
staying static and becoming a tradition-bound form of music, then the
proposition of a new frontier for the music might very well be taken as a
reproach. Oasis responded that way when Radiohead did Kid A, which was very
much a post-rock move as far as I can see.
9/ Which brings
us (obligatory step) to Retromania: Wouldn’t you do your own Retromania? Is Simon
Reynolds "best before"? ;)
That’s for
others to say. Writers always think they get better (so do musicians and
artists, generally). I know people who
say their favorite book of mine is Blissed Out, which is the collection of late
Eighties writing. Personally while I can
feel the passion and urgency in the early stuff, as actual writing I think it
gets better with each passing year. The
early stuff can be a bit clunky and strains a bit in terms of bringing in the
theory and the high culture references.
10/ How old are
you now Simon (if it’s not a secret) ? How age influe on the music perception
at your advice ?
It’s no secret,
it’s on Wikipedia! Most of my bios on my books reference me being born in 1963.
And since the first piece in Bring the Noise is from 1984, or perhaps 1985...
Well you can work it yourself.
Age changes your
perspective on everything, not just music. It would take a small book, or long
essay at least, to discuss all that, but let’s say that some of the urgency and
obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of
proportion about things. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots
of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and
the music took precedence. Nowadays my life is full – I’m a couple of decades
into a very happy marriage, I have two children, a 7 year old daughter and a 13
year old son who is becoming a teenager. I don’t have the huge space of spare time
or of unattached emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession.
When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you
got older, your identity is (hopefully) formed. You’re not looking to music to
explain yourself to yourself, or be a savior, or even the primary source of excitement and solace in
your existence. Music remains my major passion and interest but it competes
with other passions and interests much more than it did when I was 22 and
starting out as a music critic.
I also know a
lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things
become more contextualized and perhaps I have sense of how cycles repeat in
rock culture. By the age of 49 you’ve seen so many hype cycles kick off and
then exhaust themselves. You are also less easily impressed. But that’s good I
think.
11/ Are you
aware that some journalists (including me) are not fully agree with your
opinion about how pop culture sometime still to the old to create the new? I
mean, like you say in Retromania, it's always been like that. All decades
borrows to the oldest one…
Oh yes I’m very
aware about that. People have not hesitated to express that opinion, both in
print and to my face! But I think you perhaps misunderstand the argument of
Retromania -- it’s not that this kind of
revivalism and pastiche is a completely new, unique to the 21st Century
phenomenon, nor is it asserting that it is a completely barren field.
There are
examples of revivliasm in pop going back to the very end of the Sixties. What
is different is the degree and intensity of the recycling in the 2000s, and the
absence of a strong force of musical innovation to counter it. The only
contenders I can see are dubstep, which I underestimated in the book, and
perhaps the AutoTune phenomenon in pop, which has been used as a creative or at
least an extreme tool in terms of vocal manipulation. But overall it’s
undeniable that the last 13 years or so have been inundated with
retro-pastiche, revivalism, nostalgia marketing, reissues, archival culture,
vintage aesthetics – all to a degree never before seen, and converging in such
a way as to make for a depressingly muddled and undynamic spectrum of music
whether in the pop mainstream or in the various undergrounds. That there have
been some original interventions within this field of “recreativity’ is
undeniable, and something I acknowledge in the book, but it doesn’t compare to
the modernistic self-renewing drive of the Beatles/Kate Bush/Talking Heads
model of the rock artist, or the emergence of new genres (prog rock, postpunk,
techno, etc).
Talking of
inundation, to me the analogy is with climate change and global warming. The
phenomenon has been building for decades, it didn’t just come about overnight.
There have been voices warning about it for a long time. But there’s no doubt
that the situation with global warming is reaching a crisis point, you can see
it in the changes in the weather systems. Same with retro. People (including
myself!) have been complaining about it for years and years. But the situation
gets worse and there had never been a book-length exploration of the phenomenon
and the issues it raises.
12/ On Bring The
Noise we count a lot of reviews, articles, essays (we can’t count in fact,
ahaha), about this mass of information, I guess it must have been difficult
narrowing to made a choice. How do you made the final cut?
I got rid of the
pieces that I felt were overlapping with each other or repeating the same
points. Difficult, because you get attached to various pieces of writing. But
for example there was a super in-depth piece on Grime I did for the Wire on the
best grime tracks ever that we left out of Bring the NOise, because there had
already been several other pieces on Grime, Dizzee etc. The vivid description
of these tracks I love was painful to leave out of the book but the larger
points had already been made in the earlier pieces.
13/ What also captures
the reader's attention in Bring The Noise, it’s the incredible quality of the texts.
Work on words, the links (sometimes awkward, but at least they exist) between
sociology and music, poetry also ... Were you aware when you wrote all these
articles, to be a real writer?
Well, thank you.
I’m trying to do something that works as prose that might be enjoyable or
potent as a reading experience even if you’ve no interest in the music in
question. And sometimes people have said to me, I really like your writing but
I don’t follow music at all these days.
I remember one guy who was a big fan of all the late Eighties writing
that I and my comrades were doing in the Melody Maker, enjoying it as
discourse. But he said the last record he’d really loved was Grace Jones’s
Nightclubbing album of 1981. He had no attraction to Husker Du or Pixies or My
Bloody Valentine or Public Enemy as something to listen to, but he really
enjoyed our arguments and claims for those groups.
I think what I
do is a continuation of the messy hybrid nature of rock writing, which at its
best has always combined different registers – journalistic reporting,
manifesto, the prose-poem, the personal /memoristic/ confessional register....
you would get the clash of aspects of
gossip or frivolity with great seriousness.
A lot of rock
writing in the music press in the UK back in the old days involved shoehorning
philosophical or political concerns into various standard formats – the album
review, the live gig review, the page-length column of singles reviews, the
interview, even into the letters page where you would take your turn to be the
official responder to letters of complaint or comment or (rarely) praise from
the readers.
If there is a
poetic dimension it comes from trying to convey something of the intensity and
power – even the violence – of music as it impacts your body and your senses.
It is difficult to do and often it can result in embarrassing writing.
14/ Your
interview with Chuck D of Public Enemy is a great time Bring The Noise. What do
you think of it now? Once again you ask challenging questions about confrontation
between black and white music, you speculate on the reasons why Public Enemy
say what they say about the way they say ... You speak of "strike"
after the publication of this paper, but it is also a great time for you right?
A revealing moment ...
I’m not sure
about the word “strike”, how it’s used or what I meant, or what you think I’m
mean by it. Probably it refers to just
being surprised, retrospectively, at how I anticipated in 1987 some of the
difficulties with the Public Enemy worldview that would get them into trouble
the next year – Griff’s anti-Semitic comments that led him to being kicked out
the group, and also some of the really odd racial theories that Public Enemy
seemed to at least entertain if not outright believe. Yes, I’m pretty pleased
with this piece. It was more of a dialogue than a confrontation. I respected
them as a musical force immensely, and as a political one, I respected to some
degree while having obvious concerns and doubts. At that point I wasn’t hugely
aware of Farrakhan’s ideology or the exact nature of the Nation of Islam
movement. I only had a vague sense about what it stood for. You have to
remember that in those days there was no way of finding out this information
easily. No internet. I had picked up bits and pieces of information here and
there, but at that point, there wasn’t much info out there if you lived outside
America. And this was also one of the very first Public Enemy features. So what
I learned from Chuck D about their philosophy was as big a surprise to me as it
was to the readers. I also lacked a context for understanding where they were
coming from: I wasn’t aware at that point that Nation of Islam ideas were part
of a larger tradition of black capitalism in America, that included more
conventional figures like Booker T. Washington. At any rate, Chuck D’s comments
were fantastic material to present in the way I did, a double-edged celebration
of Public Enemy as a musical force but a critique of them politically. Nowadays
I would probably write something more circumspect and less judgemental, because
living in America for two decades, I have a much better sense of racial politics
in this country. When I met Chuck D in
1987 I think it was only my third visit to the USA. I interviewed him again a
couple of years later and we had a possibly more fruitful dialogue in which his
ideas seemed a lot more reasonable to me, although it’s possible he had become
more cautious with talking to the rock press after all the controversy!
15/ About your
new book, Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews, the companion book
to Rip it & Start Again, do you think it will be publish in France soon ?
Well it’s not
new because it came out in 2008, but yes I would love it to come out in
France. There is more likelihood, though
that Energy Flash, the techno/rave book, would come out in a French edition.
16/ Rip it Up
and Start Again is focused on post-punk, the (real) rich era of the 1978-1984
years, how was born the idea of a companion book combining the raw interviews
that were used to achieve the first one?
We saw the
possibility of demand being there for a supplementary book because Rip It Up
was so successful in the UK. For that kind of serious music book, it was
something of a phenomenon, so it seemed likely that some people would want
more. I had also heard that Jon Savage was doing an England’s Dreaming book for
Faber based on his copious interview transcripts. So I suggested to my editor
at Faber that we could do the same thing for Rip it Up. I assumed Jon’s book
was just about to come out and mine would follow two years later, but as it
happened, he took longer to pull his one together and in the event they put
mine out a few months earlier than the England’s Dreaming Tapes.
17/ Since 1984,
you have contributed to a lot of magazine, What is the period that you
preferred ?
My happiest
period as a writer was probably the late Eighties at Melody Maker because I was
part of a team of people who were all operating at full energy and at their
height of their abilities, and were crusading for all this great music, trying
to present our time as a golden age. And it was a great lifestyle, working for
the weekly music press – going to gigs constantly, hanging out with other
writers, getting drunk, drinking coffee in the centre of London and discoursing
endlessly. Going on my first trips to the USA and to parts of Europe I’d not
been to before. But mostly it was about the collective energy that we had
there, a real corps d’esprit (is that the correct term?). Also, anything that
feels like it’s happening for the first time, whether it’s an obsession or a
love affair, is always going to be more electric.
But, probably as
exciting in terms of the writing, even though I was operating more solo than as
part of a team, was all the 1991-1998 phase of writing about rave, hardcore,
jungle, gabba, techno, Aphex, etc etc – the pieces that went into Energy Flash.
Apart from hip hop, most of the stuff we were writing about at Melody Maker in
the late Eighties was rock that did have some kind of relationship to the past,
mostly to the Sixties and early Seventies. But in the Nineties with rave and
electronic music, it felt like the future was coming into shape before your
ears. Rave felt like a real movement, a
cultural emergence. A new thing. So it was very exciting to pay witness to that
in print and attempt to explain its unfolding significance in real-time.
18/ And which
mag ?
Well, Melody
Maker obviously, was the most fun. But I’ve also always enjoyed contributing to
The Wire – that’s probably the longest continuous contributorship I’ve had now,
over 20 years. I’ve done some really enjoyable work for Artforum and Frieze. In
recent years I did some fun columns for the Guardian online. But really almost
all the places I write for, I enjoy doing because whether it’s a unconstrained
environment like the Wire or whether it’s more formatted, as with a mainstream
newspaper, the challenge is getting your ideas across to that particular
readership. Finding the mode of address.
I do also love
the completely freeform nature of blogging. The early days of doing Blissblog
when I was conversing and arguing with a whole bunch of kindred blogs, that was
as close as I’ve got to the vibe of being on Melody Maker, when I was arguing
with the other writers and also with writers on other music papers like NME.
19/ In Chronic
City, writer Jonathan Lethem wrote that there is nothing worse than being a
"rock critic". What do you think about it ? With all these works for
years, you can prove that this is not necessarily true. That writing, serious
and solid writing, can be married with the exercise of criticism. No?
He says that ? I know
Jonathan, I always thought he believed rock criticism to be quite a high
calling, something he would quite like to have done, and has done, in fact,
extremely well (with that Talking Heads ‘Fear of Music’ book, for
instance). But maybe he meant the
lifestyle is not a good one, that it leads to psychological distortions,
through the obsessiveness. He may have a point. It’s quite an isolated life,
these days, because no one brings their copy into magazines anymore, so there’s
no hanging out with the other writers. And that’s caused magazines not to have
any kind of « vibe ». But no,
I would have to say that overall I consider myself very lucky to have been able
to make a living this way. The books, the journalism, some talks and lectures
-- basically thinking publicly about
music is how I’ve made my livelihood. There
are downsides to being your own boss – to an extent being freelance means
having many, many bosses – but being able to manage your own time and work from
home is a wonderful thing. I just wish I was more disciplined and didn’t spend
so much time procrastinating and wasting time. I have about six more books in
me I think, but I need to get on with it.
20/ What is the
greater pleasure in the activity of writing on popular culture and music ?
There’s many
pleasures. The struggle to produce something that’s good and then finally, as
time is running out, it all comes together – that is pretty satisfying. Right
up to the last minute, you think it’s a disaster, and then it all comes together
right at the end.
But mainly it’s being confronted by some new
musical experience that you can’t quite account for or fully figure out why it
excites you or moves, how it works on you --
and then managing to come up with some answers that make a least
provisional sense for you and hopefully for others. Encountering an overpowering force of newness
or originality in music and being forced to come up with new thoughts – that to
me is a kind of bliss.
