anti-theatricality and rock (part 2)

Nik Cohn, from Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, on early English "rock and roller" Tommy Steele (and his manager John Kennedy)

Not that it interferes with the SUPREME GREATNESS of Awop (rereading it at the moment, must be the fourth go-round) but Cohn constantly flip-flops around this opposition "rock and roll" versus "showbiz". Or at least it's a kind of wobbly, reversible ideologeme throughout the book...    After all, it's clear that nearly all the early rockers were showmen with routines and shticks and stage stunts...  they were acts as much as they were raw realness,  rehearsed as much as "wild". Elvis was a fan of Dean Martin (and as the journey of "Hound Dog" indicates, in practice it's hard to separate the blues and Vegas-style variety).  And then there's P.J. Proby - just about Cohn's favorite performer, a talismanic figure - who's the most outrageous ham ever.   

Barney Hoskyns on The Fall and Mark E. Smith, sideswiping punk as just another form of showbiz, instantly recuperated by the Spectacle  

 

Andy Gill on The Birthday Party

The idea that there is no theatre in the Birthday Party seems misplaced.

Perhaps it is the theatre of cruelty - Artaud-rock versus art-rock

But "Nick the Stripper" is a self-lacerating satire of the exhibitionism involved in getting onstage, as far as I can work it out.

And later Cave would be quite interested in the idea of the Performer, the Showman - e.g. "The Singer"

Hadn't realised his Bad Seeds / Kicking Against the Pricks phase love of "entertainment music, what some would call corn" went all the way back to the first group

Ray Lowry interviewing Chris Dean of The Redskins, August 1983

Kim Gordon, in Artforum, 1983

In the spring of 1981 the rock group Public Image Ltd. (PiL) played at the Ritz in New York. That club’s movie-scale video screen, which functioned as a barrier and was used to create or motivate the crowd’s reaction, was the center of the performance. PiL’s three members were projected on the screen, both as shadows (they were lit from behind for the video cameras) and as a video picture. A giant image of John Lydon’s face, laughing, appeared, larger than the Wizard of Oz. He began singing, and then the live image was changed to a pre-recorded tape of a demented commercial rock video. Furious at the ghostlike, ritualistic silhouettes of the group behind the screen—instead of, as usual, directly in front of them—the crowd constantly interrupted the music. They barraged the screen with bottles, finally tearing it down. The group hadn’t intended to cause a riot; in their words, they were trying something new. They did not want to mechanistically continue in the learned role of rock entertainers. As PiL’s Keith Levene remarked in an interview in ZigZag magazine in August 1981, “You’re more honest putting on a video or sending a video round to do 30 dates, rather than sending a band around to do it . . .You’re standing up there and saying ‘after you’ve bought my album for so many pounds and heard how great we are you can now stand in front of us and see how great we are . . .’” 

People pay to see others believe in themselves. Many people don’t know whether they can experience the erotic or whether it exists only in commercials: but on stage, in the midst of rock ‘n’ roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment. As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy. Performers appear to be submitting to the audience, but in the process they gain control of the audience’s emotions. They begin to dominate the situation through the awe inspired by their total submission to it. Someone who works hard at his or her job is not going to become a “hero,” but may make just enough money to be able to afford to be liberated temporarily through entertainment. A performer, however, as the hero, will be paid for being sexually uncontrolled, but will still be at the mercy of the clubs and of the way the media shapes identity. How long can someone continue to exert intensity before it becomes mannered and dishonest?

Scott Miller of Game Theory / Loud Family / Music: What Happened? 

"As you know, I kid the 1980s. I wonder can it possibly be fair to condemn an entire decade as a horrifying decline in every kind of musical competency, but nostalgia for the Eighties baffles me. Eighties nostalgia has lowered my opinion of nostalgia. So you're right, I was unconsciously targeting that kind of decline with "What Happened?" But pop music is great in that a true decline fosters a true pop response, like R.E.M. Eighties music suffered from a coliseum spectacle mentality, and R.E.M. reached around that with a sort of small-combo, home-spun literary connection approach."

Michael Stipe

"Awhile back I found myself repeating a lot of things on stage — a lot of the vocal parts, and the same motions. That made me feel insincere about what I was doing." He pauses as people talking loudly pass the car. "So I stopped using a set list; I don't start many songs so I really don't have to know what's coming up. It is always a surprise to me; and we always change the set around. I have to keep things interesting: I despise the idea of Keith Richard playing 'Street Fighting Man' 15 years after he's written it. It's horrid; the idea of that is like being in hell."

Anti-theatricality and rock part 1