Interview Javier Mattio of La Voz del Interior of Córdoba
1) The visual
exhibitionism of glam rock reminds of social networks and Instagram (inevitably
joke: instaglam). Indeed, you point out in Shock and awe how Carlyle wrote long
ago about the current “cult of one self”. Do you see any connection between
both worlds? Does the context (as the end of countercultural ideals did in the
70’s) has anything to do with the tendency?
“Instaglam”, love it!
I think Carlyle was referring to the ancient religion of
self-worship. That only goes to show
that things that we think of as very contemporary ills actually go back across the centuries – and will continue
far into the future. Social media and the internet and phones have just
provided a new arena in which these ancient human drives - the Seven Deadly Sins – can enact
themselves and create dramas.
When I watched the film The Social Network, about Facebook,
I suddenly thought that, in essence, if you took away all the technological
trappings, this story could be set in Ancient Rome – it’s about ego,
competition, the quest for worldly glory and power, about money and sexual
conquest. The basic motivations driving
the narrative are the same - then as
now.
I just rewatched the classic BBC TV series of the 1970s, I
Claudius, which is set during the early days of imperial Rome. Back then only
the emperors and the Roman aristocracy were sufficiently free from material
want to develop syndromes like narcissistic personality disorder and egomania
that led to them wanting to be made into gods in the afterlife, while
dedicating their terrestrial life to perversions and indulgences. Most of the population then had to toil for
the greater part of the day and then collapse exhausted at the end of it. It
was a constant struggle just to survive. It was only the aristocracy who were
able to afford to be decadent. But nowadays a much higher proportion of the
population is freed from material wants and basically able to devote a huge
amount of energy to self-glorification and pursuing personal desires and
obsessions. So I think “decadence”
becomes much more of a mass phenomenon in the late 20th Century and
early 21st Century.
Bowie would be at the cutting edge of that evolution, or
devolution. In 1972 he is mainstreaming bohemian and decadent ideas – a
self-obsession, a self-remaking, an individualism that paradoxically isn’t
wedded to a sense of a permanent fixed character. He is presenting decadence as
an aspirational goal, talking in press conferences of how he and Lou Reed are
signs and symptoms of the decline of Western Civilisation.
But this idea that the present is especially corrupt and in
decline is in itself a kind of narcissism of the era rather than the
individual. What a whole age believes
about itself. Last week I read Nathaniel
West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, which is about Hollywood in the 1930s,
and I was stunned by how vividly contemporary all its themes and even its
atmosphere was. It describes a world in which people pour all their emptiness
into worshipping stars, or trying to become stars themselves. It ends apocalyptically
with the crowd outside a movie premiere turning into a crazed mob riot. There
is very little about the current era that West and his contemporaries would not
have understood. Someone like Trump would have seemed a totally logical
development: showbiz meets fascism.
2) In your books
classic rock appears as the “other” in the sense of hegemonic, macho, tough and
repetitive. Are you writing –with Energy Flash, Rip it up, Shock and awe- a big
History of rock opposed to classic rock? A kind of critic “Comédie Humaine” of
alternative music?
I’m actually a huge fan of rock music in the classic sense –
Rolling Stones, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, etc. I really see a
commonality of drive and energy between hard rock and a lot of the electronic
music that I like – it’s music to rock out, to go wild and crazy, it’s “a
program for mass liberation”. A band
like the Stooges didn’t set out to be the godfathers of alternative music or
the prophets of punk – they wanted to be the biggest rock band of the era, I’m
sure, and had to settle for being simply the best. Iggy
wanted to be the new Jim Morrison or Jagger.
He was but not enough people were ready for it.
Postpunk is different because it has more a self-reflexive
and critical relationship with rock as an institution and rock as new set of
conventions and conformities. So you get the critique of “rockism” emerging out
of UK postpunk culture. But Joy Division are a rock band, and you can see the
connections back to the Stooges and to the Doors.
3) Where do you stand
regarding the ethic aspect of glam? Is there a glam journalism? What’s your
idea of narcissistic and show off journalism? Are true and objectivity
imperative?
I think the book makes it fairly clear I’m ambivalent about
glam - loving the music and the sexual politics and the games with image and
the rock-mythical exploits of these legendary figures, but troubled by the fact
that so few of the glam stars seem to be admirable human beings and wondering
about whether there are limits to the idea of continually pretending to be
somebody you’re not. They seem like lost
people in lots of ways.
Psychologically, the quest for fame and some kind of fantasy
glamour lifestyle almost always leads to spiritual damage. Bowie’s bi-polar
pursuit of fame and then his retreat from it - which he does over and over again, shows how
addictive being in the public eye can be, and yet also how intolerable it is to
stay in that limelight space. I find it very ironic that all through his period
of fame Bowie was a professed Buddhist – I don’t know how he reconciled the
self-abnegation of Eastern spirituality with the ego-magnification of being a
stage performer and a superstar.
They have definitely been rock critics who have been like
rock stars. They develop a persona, an alter-ego that they got lost in. Writing
can be a performance. Certain rock critics have been taken very seriously, they
have had fans, and people who wanted to be like them. It’s a small scale
version of rock stardom. There’s a few that have been like that in person as
well as in print – Nick Kent actually looked like a rock star, like he could
have been in The Only Ones, standing in for Pete Perrett. And in fact he
actually fronted a band of his own at one point, The Subterraneans. As have quite a few other rock critics. Then
you get the rock stars who actually did some rock writing in their early days –
Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Bob Geldof, Morrissey. It’s a different way of achieving public
profile and showing off – not strutting onstage but making striking critical
stances and grand claims.
Most “name” music journalists though tend to be less
impressive in person than they are in print. But on the page they can conjure a
sort of super-self, someone who seems charismatic or like an authority figure.
Someone once said after a public appearance I did, that I didn’t seem
like “Simon Reynolds” – which is to say I was more unassuming and mild and
low-key in manner. That reminded me of the famous story about a woman who slept
with the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, and when asked how he was, she said
"he was fine, but he wasn’t Mick Jagger.”
4) As you expose in
Shock and awe, glam goes way beyond music and reaches aesthetics movements as
surrealism or decadentism. Does glam light a broader conflict between
aestheticism and moralism in History? Who or what would be the current glitter
icon?
That’s a big question, but yes, what recurs over and over is
the fissure between aesthetics and ethics. You see it with someone like Bryan
Ferry blithely saying admiring things about the Nazis’s sense of style – their
great uniforms and architecture. That’s Ferry the terminal aesthete able to
look at the form and not the content; the exterior surface of design rather
than the intent and the consequences. What is cool and impressive and stunning
in terms of rock music or rock theatrics does not translate into the real world
and how people should treat each other. You see this most strikingly with rap
today - the energies and stances that make
for the most compelling entertainment of our time involve personal
characteristics (boasting, bullying, threatening, etc) that you would avoid
completely in real life, and sentiments that you would find deplorable and
ugly. You wouldn’t want to be around
these people; you wouldn’t want to be these people.
For examples of current glam or glitter icon, just look to someone
utterly consumed with self-obsession and into playing endless games with their
public image. You’re spoiled for choice! Could be Kanye West, could be Drake,
could be Taylor Swift, could be Gaga or Beyonce.
5) Glam rock showed
how artifice is more authentic than content or “political consciousness”, but
at the same time you observe that Marc Bolan wouldn’t had been who he was
without the X-Factor. Does that means that artifice is just a tangential truth?
I don’t think I ever argue that artifice is more authentic
than content or political consciousness. It’s more the case that someone
pretending to be something they aren’t
- a working class boy pretending to be an aristocrat, as with Bryan
Ferry, or Bowie trying to be decadent or like some strange alien monster – is
actually telling the truth about themselves: their innermost dreams and
desires. So I talk about Bolan’s glam as
a “true lie”.
Equally, there is the argument that when musicians strive
really strenuously to be ordinary and
“from the streets”, this supposed realism quickly become a new form of theatre.
You see this most clearly with Bruce Springsteen, but also with a lot of punk
groups: it’s just a new code of
“real-ness” that is being enacted, gestures and poses that are just as
contrived and mannered and stylized.
6) How does music
criticism remain in the era of graphic journalism decay? Are blogs and e-magazines
the next step in critic writing? How does legitimation work in the 21st
century?
That’s three very big questions I can’t really hope to
answer here. Blogs, sadly, seem to have been and gone. They still exist but
their golden age was 2001-2005.
Interesting music commentary is fragmented across Facebook posts and
tweets and message boards and so forth.
The magazines still exist but it’s unclear who is paying attention. So
there is the absence of a central stage as there was in the days of Creem or Village Voice or Melody Maker
or NME (when it was something
important). And for a music critic to get up and make a performance, they do
need to feel like they are stepping onto
a stage and they know that there is an audience there. Your rhetoric rises to
the occasion. Increasingly to write now feels like you are talking into the
void.
7) Glitter seems
superficial, but with artists like Bowie the movement reached a deep meaning.
As you write in Shock and awe, he adopted Buddhism as a perspective of reality,
in the Borges or Burroughs sense that everything is a lie and truth and identity
are an invention. Shock… starts with a zen quotation. Is that truth the secret
center of the book?
I was struck by that quotation by D.T. Suzuki because of how
clearly it spelled out the way that -
despite all the evidence of our senses, and what science and history
tells us about the size of the universe and the length of time – none of us can silence for long the clamorous
demand that rises from deep within each of our souls that insists that “I am
the centre of the universe! And I deserve MORE!” In reality, we each of us are next to nothing
in importance. That can be reassuring: at the cosmic scale, the difference
between Shakespeare and myself shrinks to infinitesimal degree. We are almost equally insignificant, me and
William! Glam - like all attempts to
achieve fame or immortal prestige, which include sports and politics and
literature - is a system of heroics, means by which individuals assert their
importance in the scheme of things. Which means believing in an illusion. Through
reading Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death I came to see all cultural endeavor in this light, as self-heroics or an attempt
to attach oneself to what he calls an “immortality project” – self-sacrifice on
behalf of patriotism or a religious or political faith of some kind.
It’s very striking to me that even as he was dying, Bowie
spent an enormous amount of his remaining energy on his last aesthetic
statements. Think of all the work and ideas and effort that went into
Blackstar, into the videos for songs on that album, into the Lazarus theatre
project, into the box set Nothing Has Changed. You know you’re heading for extinction
but you’re determined to make your exit as elegant and immaculately executed as
possible. That shows some last-ditch, right-to-the-end faith in the power of
Art to ensure one’s immortality!
8) How did you
receive the Earthling-era Bowie, when he experimented with drum n’ bass? Did
you have a new idea of him when you wrote the book? What’s the main Bowie
legacy?
I liked Earthling, or rather the single “Little Wonder” at
the time, and found it both charming that he would try to keep up with the
cutting-edge of modern music (he would have been 50 at the time) and also thought
it was rather well done. He’d managed to get the drum and bass sound and in
interviews he seemed have done his research, referring to quite obscure,
hardcore jungle labels like Kemet and Congo Natty.
I can’t really discuss here my take on Bowie – I wrote about
a third of a book, 200-plus pages on this subject! But to keep it simple: he
was addicted to fame and tried to kick it several times but never did; and he
used the public sphere - the world of
media, publicity, rumor, gossip, rock critical discourse, image etc – as a
stage, on which he dramatized himself through a series of roles. I was struck
by how Los Angeles, and then Berlin, figured for him as dramatic backdrops for
the transformations and identity games he was playing. To the point where you
wondered if he really encountered the cities, or whether it was always mediated
through his own needs as well as through those cities’s own images and myths
and the received history of what they were in certain eras. Certainly there
were other LA’s, other Berlins, that he could have found.
Legacy? How can I
answer that in an interview question! One of many legacies is a plague of
artists who think they can – and think they should
– keep changing images and styles. But
what was interesting when Bowie did it (and then only in the 1970s – the
Eighties and Nineties, his constant changing is largely fruitless and
desperate) doesn’t mean it’ll work for lesser talents.
9) Latino music is
everywhere now, from avant-garde Arca or Nicholas Jaar to commercial reggaeton
and Despacito hit. How do you see that phenomenon, is it a late effect of world
music or something different? What’s the role of rock now that guitar music is
a minority’s liking?
I don’t really have a take on the spread of Latin American
music, beyond the obvious comment that we’re all connected by the internet and
the global village is a reality. You see the same thing with vogues for African
styles of dance music like gqom or Afro-beats.
Rock is a minority taste now. I can’t think of a classic
guitar-format band that is significant from the last 15 years. There are
popular ones like Muse, and they are ones who survive and play big shows from
the earlier eras, whether it’s Metallica or U2.
Even Radiohead really seem like a Nineties band . I suppose Vampire Weekend are technically a
guitar format band but the whole feel of their music is non-rock and their
records are increasingly technologically facilitated.
“Rock” as a concept -
in the sense of “rock star” as unbridled excess and wild freedom – seems now to
be the property of rap – hence Future calling himself “Future Hendrix”, or Rae
Smemmurd saying they are “Black Beatles”.
10) The idea that we
have in the newspaper is to make photos of you in a traditional alternative
record shop in Cordoba. I’d like to know what do you think about the massive
shutdown of record shops, how that changes music sharing and socialization. Is
there any sense in being nostalgic? What happens when music becomes air-digital
and “spotifiable”?
There are still quite a lot of record shops in Los Angeles
and other hip cities like New York and London. However they are more like hip
boutiques than the old record stores I used to frequent, which were often dirty
and shabby and cluttered with crap that you had to search through. Record
stores now are thoroughly “curated” and they look clean and chic. And the records
they stock are usually incredibly overpriced, whether it’s new vinyl or old
second-hand records. It’s hard to find bargains anymore.
You can also find vinyl in unlikely places – like the
megastore Whole Foods, where there’s a vinyl section right next to the handmade
soap and Fair Trade organic coffee. It feels like vinyl has become another
bourgeois luxury good. I always wonder
who are these people who are spending $30 on a single album? Or much more for
the deluxe box sets.
I have a huge number of records and still occasionally pick
up things when I find something that is cheap and unusual. But practically
speaking I listen to music digitally – as files I’ve been sent, or have
“acquired”, or I’ll go on YouTube, or I’ll use Spotify. More often than not, even if I own the record
or the CD, I will be in a hurry and won’t want to go to the bother of looking
for it, so I will go straight to YouTube - or I might even download it. Digital is convenient and takes up less space
and the logic of that tends to be all conquering. Which is why new vinyl
releases nearly all come with download codes, because they know that in
everyday life people will play the digital version. So the vinyl just sits
there, as a sort of mute witness to a purchasing decision.
The implications of a dematerialized, non-tangible
relationship with music commodities are quite huge – again I wrote a whole book
that deals with some of these issues, Retromania, so I can’t really give a
precis of those arguments. But I think it further reduces the sense of the act
of listening as an occasion – digital flow is much more easy to interrupt, to
pause, to rewind. I find that listening to an album or even a single song, I
might do it a broken way, having to start again, or go back to a bit I missed –
because I am distracted by an email or might find myself having to check what’s
going on politically and my concentration is divided. So there are big
downsides to listening to music through a device – a computer, a pad, a phone –
that is connecting to everything else in the world at the same time: friends
and family, news media, social media, etc etc. The sacred flow of the listening
experience becomes less and less special: it is at once more and more “under
your control” yet equally it’s a victim of outside media disruption. You listen
distractedly while writing emails or comments on Facebook, reading tweets or
stories about Trump – or even while searching for and downloading more music
that you never get around to listening to. Or while replying to interview questions!
