successor to Shock and Awe whose feed no longer seems to be working properly - original blog + archive remains here: http://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the blog of the Simon Reynolds book about glam and artpop of the 1970s and its aftershocks and reflections to this day
Minimal house was in such a rut by the early 2000s they tried to juice it up with some glammish boogie swing in the form of the "schaffel" fad pushed by Kompakt.
Born of Wolfgang Voigt's formative adoration of Marc Bolan - as evidenced much earlier in the 1996 Love Inc. track "Life's A Gas" (which samples you-guessed-it).
As it seems to languish behind a registrants-only wall at the Graun, here is the relevant portion of the piece:
... Southern Rock overlaps with that broad strip of Seventies blues-tinged
rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie
who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America
than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend
explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16
notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat.
But the best
way of conveying it is to just point at examples: "Get It On" by
T.Rex (Bolan's 1972 T.Rextasy-exploitation flick was titledBorn To Boogie), "Slow Ride" by
Foghat, "Whatever You Want" by those dependable boys in blue denim
Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on
"Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie").
"Boogie" originally
comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed
for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of
American popular and roots music. As
adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel. What's odd is that boogie today has a third,
completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an
early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further
from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.
The origins of this other boogie go
back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of
disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth
Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On
the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". The week before Delta
Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend,
Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by
outfits like Change and BB & Q Band. A few of the names were familiar to me from
the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches,
an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.
What defines this boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier:
110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent
on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping
four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the
creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get
more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous
examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me",
Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and
Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and
exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess
(of Black Ivory and Aleem).
Thing is, I don't recall anybody
calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about
"club tracks" or "discofunk". In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustive
etymological history of the genre, the word "boogie" crops
up asa vague reference in the
occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to
"get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag
retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only
by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti.It's really only in the last decade that the
term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.
Boogie is a prime example of the
creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and
compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence
in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc)....
An interesting short film about David Bowie's co-creation of the 1999 game Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
Which the album Hours was the soundtrack to, an attempt to give the game "a heart"
I confess this was new to me... my interest in his activities really flags from the late '80s onwards.
A couple of things that struck me watching the film
A/ Omikron's co-creator David Cage is described as a games auteur, someone respected more than enjoyed, written about more than played... "Edgy". Now, granted, I know next to nothing about games but it struck me that from what I could see there, in terms of look it is looks much like every other game... the way the camera moves... the fight scenes ... and as the mini-film concedes, it is an adventure game.
B/ the film makes great play about how ahead-of-his-time, advanced in his thinking, Bowie was when it came to all things digital... First pop star to have his own online music retail system, long before iTunes and Apple... many other internet-innovative things I've already forgotten since watching this short video... And you've probably already seen elsewhere the clip they use of the Dame (with terrible hair and awful shades) proselytizing about how the Internet is going to change all our preconceptions about media - "for better or worse" - and with it human consciousness... He sounds like a wide-eyed Silicon Valley tech-guru... jacked up on issues of Mondo 2000 and one too many smart drinks.
Thing is, all this modish, modem-ish stuff he did... none of it had any lasting impact, nobody remembers it... It's all just trendy piss down the latrine gutter of history.
If Bowie endures, if he'll be remembered in a hundred years, it'll be for those creaky, analogue things known as words-and-music... Oh, and a few images: the costumes, the albums covers, iconic photographer's shots, some of the videos or TV appearances...
It'll be for the human yearnings disguised artfully behind his various masks and costumes.
"New York Dolls go to Studio 54" is how I describe them in S+A
A parallel noticed at the time
And then of course the names - Sylvian / Sylvain, Jansen / Johansen - are the giveaway
Looking and listening to "Adolescent Sex" again, it's like the sound and the look of the song / promo is entirely sourced in the guitar break in "Amazona"
But the other thing about the image is that it is hair metal a decade too soon
I don't understand why "Adolescent Sex" didn't do a "Welcome To the Jungle" and instantly propel Japan to Guns N' Roses level
(Not that I would want to have foregone their growing-up so exquisitely)
In this publicity photo from 1977 theylook like they belong on the Sunset Strip in 1987
Actually what they look like is Def Leppard.
Or Hanoi Rocks.
Another 1977 image is totally hair metal - and again, like a premonition of Axl Rose, from the reddish blonde hair to the ice cream face and the hairless chest
Ooh, how funny - they identify him on the cover by his real name David Batt, not David Sylvian
How the single was pitched to the public
Two different crotches - same hand, though!
Or maybe it's the same crotch, different trousers?
Supposedly they had an ad - or maybe it was A stage projected image - around this time, of David Sylvian, bare-chested but with female breasts.
Sometimes I'm not sure if I came across that in my researches or just dreamed it!
Hmmm, maybe it's something I heard when I interviewed Simon Napier-Bell, who managed them.
Re. the discorock feel of the tune, they were actually signed to Ariola-Hansa, a disco label
Oh! you pretty thing!
Sylvian, of course, very embarrassed by this debut album and whole first look-sound
This era doesn't have quite enough killer tunes though - nothing that would inspire you to dream up a whole counterfactual universe where Japan invented pretty-metal, make-up metal, glam metal, peroxide and blow-dry metal, a decade ahead of the game, like "Adolescent Sex" does
Such poseurs
(I know it's not an official video, but a fan creation using this)
Addendum: below a couple of ancient Blissblog posts about David Sylvian and Japan, in response to this K-punk celebration of the groop circa Tin Drum, titled "The Barthes of Parties"! "Adolescent Sex" pops up towards the end...
The escape artist.
Mark’s mini-essay on Japan is so immaculate and exquisite, it seems almost churlish to say that, actually, I find “Ghosts” rather a moving song. I’m not alone either--there’s the missus (possibly America’s #1 Japan fan-- a lonely breed), and there's Goldie (he sampled it on Rufige Cru’s neglected classic “Ghosts of My Life”, a masterpiece of svelte darkcore), and Tricky ("Aftermath" has a sample from "Ghosts", right, or a lyric-quote?), and maybe even Dizzee Rascal (judging by the the Sylvian-Sakomoto vibe on ‘Sittin’ here’ and “Do It”, the two melancholy songs that bookend Boy In Da Corner).
Carrying on previous trains of thought, I suppose my question is: would it actually diminish the song to believe it had some source or emotional referent in David Sylvian’s real life? To take it as both haunting and haunted. He’s very stylized as singers go but it seems like “beautiful sadness” is something that runs through a lot of his work (along with the quest for serenity) and you could see him as having less to do with a mannequin like Steve Strange and more with Scott Walker, or Nick Drake, or even Frank Sinatra (melancholy given poise, pain contained through elegance). Or Ian Curtis--“Ghosts” in some ways seems like a sister song to “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
Whenever I see someone who has pulled off a really drastic form of self-reinvention, gone all the way with artifice and masquerade--be it Strange, Numan, Leigh Bowery, Marilyn Manson--I always wonder: what are they running away from? It takes so much energy to do that and to maintain it. (I can barely muster the strength to look halfway presentable to the world).
With Sylvian, perhaps the word “Catford” is explanation enough. No slight to that town but if it’s like 95 percent of the UK or anywhere else for that matter, then you can imagine why the sparkle-starved, culture-famished David would want to dedicate his life to exquisiteness, alien glamour, forbidden colours, to turn himself into a perfect surface, to get away and never go back. But there’s something more, I suspect: thinking of him performing "Ghosts" on TOTP, the excessive poise and stillness, the statuesque quality of his vocals (a frieze of emotion, almost), the perfectly made-up blank white expressionless facade, to me it all screams internal struggle, damage in the depths. Real ghosts in his real life.
“Lines of flight” always carry with them traces of what’s left behind. Can we even conceive of escape or reinvention of the self without registering what's being escaped from, or acknowledging the raw, base matter that is remoulded into a human art object?
I think you could work up another reading of Sylvian, not opposed but supplementary to Mark’s.
It might cue off Penman’s riff about class and Bryan Ferry’s voice, how its alien-ness was produced by the struggle of a Geordie trying to sound debonair --and how that slightly grotesque quality disappeared when he perfected the po(i)se and shed the last traces of Tyneside. (Joy says one of her Japan fan acquaintances had managed to find a very early radio interview with Sylvian where he's talking with a thick Catford accent--again the struggle, the effort that goes into changing one's voice).
It might then proceed to examine Bowie/Roxy and the glam end of artrock, its motor fantasy of stepping outside the lowly world of production into a sovereign realm of pure unfettered expression and sensuous indulgence, an imaginary and fictitious notion of aristocracy (more Huysmans than real lords who have to do humdrum things like manage their estates, juggle their investments, do a bit of arms dealing). It might pause to consider briefly the disillusionment of actually achieving the supermonied aristo life--Ferry, condemned to mooch jaded forever through art openings, fashion shows, all tomorrow’s parties (that old tis better to journey than arrive line).
It might also look at the history of Orientalism and its relationship with dandyism. The Far East and its codes of etiquette, the extreme stylization of emotion in its art; grace and symmetry. (Didn’t Barthes write a whole book about Japan--the country, not the group!--called something like Empire of Signs, one of its ideas being Japanese culture as a realm of surfaces, where the depth model is abolished--he had this idea that the Japanese don’t think eyes are windows to the soul, they see them as attractive but flat planes).
There must be some connection between artrock’s ruling-class fantasies and ideas of China or Japan as extremely well ordered, disciplined, hierarchical societies. There’s a bit of totalitarianism chic going on--Mao, the Emperor, Mishima etc--that parallels Bowie’s “what this country needs is a really strong leader” flirting with fascism phase, or Iggy with his “visions of swastikas” and plans for world domination (and those are lyrics from “”China Girl” come to think of it). As reheated by the New Romantics: Spandau Ballet’s Journeys To Glory with its noble torso statuary on the cover and Robert Elms’s faintly fascistic sleevenote, the whole idea of a Club for Heroes.
Glam's tendency (through its shifting of emphasis toward the visual rather than sonic, spectacle rather than the swarm-logic of noise and crowds) towards the Classical as opposed to Romantic. Glam as anti-Dionysian. The Dionysian being essentially democratic, vulgar, levelling, abolishing rank; about creating crowds, turbulence, a rude commotion, a rowdy communion. Glam being about monumentalism, turning yourself into a statue, a stone idol.
bit more on Sylvian...
“Ghosts” is one of only two things by Sylvian I paid money for, so maybe Mark is right about it being exceptional in the Japan canon for its overt emotion; other stuff, like “Art of Parties”, sounds great but was a bit disengaged for me. But per Mark’s reading, maybe that’s what great about it, the slink of the surfaces.
The other thing was “Bamboo Music/Bamboo Houses” by Sylvian-Sakomoto: amazing drumming
The China/Japan totalitarian chic thing doesn’t run deep, sure… it’s appropriately shallow, flirtation with decontextualized signifiers in true glam style. Still I notice that there’s a song called ‘Communist China’ on the first album, while on the Teutonic tip there’s “Suburban Berlin” and “Nightporter” which I assume is inspired by the Dirk Bogarde as Nazi-in-hiding movie. They also have a tune called “.... Rhodesia” bizarrely enough---surely the only rock song about this white-power pariah of the world community state, although I daresay there's a roots reggae tune of the same title.
That bio Mark links doesn’t mention “class”’ as such (maybe press releases should come with sociological data). But I’d hazard a guess re Sylvian: he’s from that upper W/C, lower M/C indeterminate greyzone whence so much great UK pop stems.
The later stuff’s not as barren as Mark makes out (although I once dismissed Sylvian solo as “jet-set mysticism”, while Jonh Wilde’s description of his voice as sounding like hair lacquer struck me as uncomfortably apt). But the “Gone To Earth” instrumentals are lovely in a Durutti/Budd/John Abercrombie sort of way, while things like “Orpheus” and “Waiting For the Agony To Stop” have a certain Scott Walker-goes-ECM grandeur.
But I would swap his entire solo career for “Adolescent Sex” the title track of the first Japan album. It’s like disco-metal or something, its sashaying glitterball raunch and cokane dazzle suggesting a whole lost future or parallel pop universe. It’s like Guns N’Roses “Welcome To the Jungle” produced by Daft Punk circa “Digital Love” or something. This totally plasticized, artificial rock music that still rocks. (The only thing I’ve heard like it is some tracks made by Last Few Days, a second-tier industrial group who circa ’89 totally reinvented themselves as this glammed avant-raunch outfit and got a major label deal. Then they unwisely went house and that was that).
It’s interesting how Japan (and Foxx-era Ultravox too come to think of it) had so many of the same inputs and reference points as Siouxsie & the Banshees---Roxy, Velvets (Japan covered ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’), Dolls, Eno, Bowie, similar movies and books too I’ll bet, similar flirtations (that decadence/fascism/S&M/voyeurism) and shtick (ice queen, don’t touch me, regal remoteness, I am a machine, metal will rule in my master scheme).
And yet the Banshees were deemed "punk" and all through this period Japan and Ultravox were jeered at as glam johnny-come-latelys, throwbacks. If you reconfigured glam as the true 70s revolution/upheaval in 70s UK pop, and made punk into its aftershock, you might get some interesting results.
Mark quotes Penman on the later Ferry stranded in an “autumn swirl of shriveled or dying signs (that once were lustrous: 'dance' - 'drug' - 'love'), making solemn play of an immensely empty escape in the facades of an eternal tone - windswept, misty, limpidly sensual, banal.”
The comeback Roxy is something I’d probably have mostly disregarded at the time, except in an idle radio enjoyment way--not sure I’d even heard the original Roxy then, so had no disappointment or betrayal to bring to the table. But I always really liked the glint-swirl synths of “Same Old Scene” and in retrospect this wanly elegant later Roxy/Ferry--“More Than This”, “Avalon” --has a certain narcotic allure. Weirdly, it’s like Ferry’s arrived at his own wispy aristocratic version of ambient music.
Mark Fisher would say that glam is intrinsically aristocratic.
But it's supposed to be a Tom Ripley type interloper - someone from the lower echelons of society who sneaks his way in. Borrows the clothes and apes the manners of the nobs. Artfully, cunningly, through unstinting attention to detail, becomes "one of them".
As if to the manor born - but actually an upstart of lowly birth. A parvenu.
Glam as aesthetic class war. Usurpation in the realm of symbols and representation.
Although the wealth and fame thereby won can enable a literal form of infiltration.
Bryan Ferry as pit-worker's son who first imitates - and then penetrates - impregnates... the actual upper classes. Marries into blue blood... breeds some Eton-bound hunting 'n' fishing brats... hangs out with Dukes and discusses vintage wines.
Or - fictionally - the narrative arc of that silly film Saltburn.
What would Mark say, then, about an actual blue-blood doing glam?
Hark at this for a pedigree!
Daphne Guinness - socialite / fashion model / fashion writer / curator / film maker / actress turned pop singer.
Scion of the Guinness dynasty and the Mitford line.
Her grandmother was Diana Mitford, who divorced Guinness and married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Daphne grew up moving between country houses owned by her family in England and Ireland and a villa in Spain. Salvador Dali was a family friend. Later lived in New York (where her sister worked as a PA to Andy Warhol).
Muse to fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfield. Friend to Isabella Blow
Has her own Comme des Garcons scent, named Daphne
Encouraged by David Bowie to purse music. As a result...
Produced by Tony Visconti
Claimed to known nothing about her step-grandfather's politics when Mosley's death announced.
And yet here is a song named after hierarchy-obsessed Emperor-admirer Mishima!
"Named after the renowned Japanese poet Yukio Mishima, who Daphne was introduced to by a Japanese nanny she had when she was between the ages of three and five. Her name was Etsuko, she recalls, and when I was three and Mishima died, my father found me on the back staircase trying to commit seppuku. I said to him, 'I think I'm Mishima.’ The track also features traditional Japanese instrument, the shamisen. I bought it when I was in Japan with my friend Nori. He took me to this man who was about 85 and still making shamisens and they couldn't believe that I wanted it."
Introduced by her nanny!
New single
A bit "Warm Leatherette", a bit Deborah Evans-Strickland from Flying Lizards, a bit Marianne Faithfull
"I might look like an icicle, but underneath I'm a volcano"
This triptych is - sonically - a bit sub-White Noise / Julie Driscoll / Broadcast
I've heard.... more wieldy voices, let's say.
Discography includes Optimist in Black (2016), Daphne & the Golden Chord (2018) and Revelations (2020), the contents described variously as "drama-pop with a gothic tinge", "glam-rock-ish," and "aristocratic glam fuelled by wit, character and a clear and abiding love of rock'n'roll".
"I'm a rather private person - and armor to me is many sorts of masks... Japanese Noh theatre... make-up... you become a different persona"
It's a bit Glam 101.
"I like haute couture because it's the last vestige of something that's been an integral part of Western Civilization from very early on"
Last-vestige-ism = a bit of a political giveaway.
Relates perhaps to my idea of fame as a secular version of royalty / royalism.
At the top I wondered what would Mark Fisher think of a member of the actual ruling class becoming "glam".
To me, it would seem to be... not much of a journey, more a case arriving back where you started, or confirming what you already are.
So the opposite of the pop idea of self-reinvention.
Concentration of wealth addendum:
"In 1987, she married Spyros Niarchos, the second son of Stavros Niarchos... Her $39 million settlement, obtained at the time of her 1999 divorce, was added to her Guinness inheritance."
More recently partnered with philosopher and public intellectual Bernard Henri-Lévy, whose own inherited fortune had grown by 2004 to be in the vicinity of 150 million Euros - probably more now unless he's a complete bumbler.
What does it say in the Bible?
'For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.
