Time Travel
Introduction
‘I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travel. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback–of a helpless head- long motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation too, of an imminent smash’.
H.G.Wells: “The Time Machine”, 1895
September 2nd 1995: Labor Day weekend in Cleveland, and the population is out on the streets, celebrating a late summer holiday given an extra zip by the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame inauguration and concert: for a weekend, this normally closed city is open – amplified music blaring on every corner, a rock theme park. The music and media industries have gathered to worship at the shrine made in their image: I.M.Pei’s $92 million Museum – and CLE is basking in the unaccustomed attention. The weather is unseasonably warm: the sun zooms off Lake Erie in an speedy white glare.
The weekend’s celebrations represent a considerable coup for a city which, according to local author Thomas Kelly, has suffered a ‘forty year winter’ of ‘defeat and disaster. Plummeting population and rising unemployment. Disdain and ridicule.’ The Cleveland Plain Dealer spells it out on its op-ed page: the ‘opening will pump $36 million into the area’s economy. But the rock hall stands to be more than a one-hit wonder. It promises to keep bringing tourists and dollars into this region for decades.’ So far, so familiar: like Manchester, a city of similar size and industrial archeology, Cleveland is regenerating through culture and tourism.
Except that this time, Rock’n'roll – as many Americans insist on calling pop music – is at the heart of civic policy: the city is a major investor in the museum. To be queasy about this fact, as many are, seems to miss the point: people have museums about everything, so why not pop ? Bearing in mind there exist Halls of Fame for topics as diverse as Burlesque and Chewing Gum, having one for Rock’n'roll seems merely respectful of Cleveland’s own part in pop history: this is where local DJ Alan Freed first popularised the phrase rock’ n roll (1952), this is where Elvis Presley first broke above the Mason Dixon line (1954) – both events marked by packed out shows and rioting audiences.
The city’s gamble has worked, as the early afternoon crowds wait in line for entry. Inside, the building is airy and comfortable, with open space for five of six stories, leaving nooks and crannies for vitrines and TV monitors: standout displays include Stephen Shore’s 1966 photos of Andy Warhol’s Factory, a reconstruction of Sam Phillips’ famous Sun Studios, and the Alan Freed exhibit. Here you can see the most extraordinary image from pop’s dawn: Peter Hastings’s photograph of the March 1952 Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena, which shows an all black crowd in ceaseless movement, awestruck at finding its own power.
The meat of the collection is to be found in an enclosed, theatre sized area called ‘The Ahmet Ertegun Exhibit Hall’. The inside is broken down into a satisfying environment of vitrines which tell a chronological history of pop from the late 40′s to the present day, broken up with video/ interactive CD-Rom areas and mannequinned tableaux. Despite the inherent problem in displaying historical costumes – the Oxfam shop syndrome – the curators have done a good job of assembling enough totems to keep pop-cult pervs like myself happy: Jim Morrison’s report card, a Dougie Millings Beatle jacket, mangled strips from the Otis Redding death plane, a whole display of early Hip Hop ephemera.
I’m here to check on my own pottery shard: a few pieces of memorabilia – handwritten Sex Pistols’ lyrics, a Sid Vicious Action Man from “The Great Rock’n Roll Swindle”, the blanked out globe from Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” – which forms one corner of the Punk vitrine. Seeing this material behind glass is an unsettling experience: I understand it intellectually, but it feels odd to have the present that you once lived through so intensely become the past – even if, in my own case, I’ve willingly contributed to the process. After a couple of hours, all these years of pop history accumulate into dead time: ducking plates of canapes, I leave the curatorial reception to get some air on the lakefront balcony.
Here, all is activity. As befits an aviation town, Cleveland has an airport, Burke Lakeside on a prime piece of lakefront real estate, right next to the Museum. The field is buzzing: all eyes and voices are trained on the Flying Eagles, who are putting their prop-driven planes through a dizzying sequence of stalls and dives – a barnstorming show from any time since the twenties. Then, from out of nowhere, a science-fiction shape flashes across this American panorama: a Stealth Bomber, as dark as obsidian, so dark that it draws all the surrounding light into its alien geometry. Suddenly I feel like the characters in Philip K.Dick’s “Time Out of Joint”, when they discover that the reality they perceive as normal is in fact virtual, engineered for them by the military: ‘What’s wrong? What did I stumble on, in there? Where have I been that I don’t remember?’
There’s a world being constructed here, but I’m not sure that it’s mine. For all the research and the pizazz, the Museum cannot, by its very nature, reflect contemporary pop time, let alone UK pop time. There is no House, no Techno here: nor is there any contemporary Rap, while 90′s white boy rebel music is represented by a Seattle vitrine and a cheesy Stephen Sprouse tableau called ‘All The Young Dudes’. Bearing in mind that senior members of the Time/Warner hierarchy are key players in the museum, this could be construed as a public lack of confidence in their subsidary, Dr. Dre’s Interscope – currently the subject of intense press and judicial scrutiny about Gangsta Rap – and thus artists like Snoop Doggy Dog, 2Pac and Nine Inch Nails. Dre certainly thinks so: together with Snoop, he pulls out of his appearance in the inaugural concert at the last minute, because his culture is not recognised here.
At one stroke, the event is skewed from the present into the past: if nothing else, the Gangsta Rappers occupy a position in 1995 America not unlike that of the Sex Pistols in 1977 – public enemies number one, national scapegoats. We know that history will be taken care of, and so it is, with incendiary cameos from Al Green, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin, Lou Reed and local outcast made good Chrissie Hynde, but what the event was really about was shown by last-minute add-ons the Gin Blossoms. In place of Gangsta Rap’s complex brutalities, we got syrupy covers of the Beatles and the Byrds cloaking music industry real-politik: within a month of the show, Time Warner will announce that they are selling their stake in Dre’s label Interscope, as the direct result of lobbying by right-wing politicians and women’s groups.
As an official babyboomer – today is my 42nd birthday – I tap my toe to “Feel A Whole Lot Better”, then become uneasy. This flowers into resentment as archive clips of the Beatles and Stones intersperse the Radio Shack i-d’s on the video monitors: that’s right, just another ad. As Greil Marcus writes in “The Dustbin of History”: The worry is that our sense of history, as it takes shape in everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating; that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the past is a mystification powerfully resistant to any critical investigations that might reveal this assumption to be a fraud, or a jail’. Watching Sheryl Crow commit GBH on the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”, I realise which time I’m in: an eternity of 1969.
There are many pop 1969s, of course. There is the 1969 of Jamaican music, crashing into the UK charts as reggae for the first time; the 1969 of psychedelic funk: Sly and the Family Stone, the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine”; the 1969 of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Lothar and the Hand People’s “Space Hymn”; the 1969 of Terry Riley’s “Rainbow in Curved Air”; the 1969 of the Velvet Underground’s third album and the Stooges’ first – a blank negation seven years ahead of its time. Indeed, when Iggy Pop segues out of “Back Door Man” into “I Wanna Be Your Dog” at Cleveland Stadium, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I lose control, for the first and only time this long night.
No, the 1969 on offer here is the year of Woodstock, that moment when pop became rock, when the goal of feminine frenzy was replaced by musicianly machismo, when authenticity usurped artifice as a cultural ideal. Within the stadium, this festival ideal of hedonistic community has become a nostalgic ritual. In this, the appearance of Bob Dylan is the final straw: he has that aureole of hair, those twisted mod clothes. I should be thrilled at viewing this icon for the first time. But the framing of the event is such that as he grinds through “Just Like A Woman”, it’s like he’s in some scratchy archive film. For all his skills, he cannot step out out of the Woodstock that never ends. This is not my world, and there is no place for me here: as I struggle through the crowd to the exit, I suddenly feel very far away from home.
‘Ahead the dim blur of an alien land
Time to give ourselves to strange gods’ hands’Pere Ubu: “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”, 1975
September 3 1995: there is another Cleveland, of course: that’s why I wanted to come to this city. As often, the reason goes back to the late seventies: during that time, Pere Ubu released a sequence of singles and albums that defined a new aesthetic – an urbanism which accepted, indeed celebrated industrial entropy. Working in near total isolation, the group had time to develop: to produce something uniquely theirs and lasting. Their music reflected their lives: these were not tourists, gaping at the dowtown war zone, but urban pioneers, prepared to settle and struggle for desperate, deserted inner city areas: in doing so, they presaged the downtown regeneration of the past ten years.
Cleveland is an American crucible: like Manchester, a futuristic metropolis which has contained extremes of poverty and industrial degreedation. After its incorporation in 1836, it boomed exponentially: up to a population of 900,000 a century later. For many decades, it was the manufacturing heart of America: a steel town with a strong sideline in military technology. Sprawled out along the southern rim of Lake Erie, it was given a coherent civic identity by the redevelopment for the Great Lakes Expo in 1936: dominated by the white stone Terminal Tower, downtown retains a distinctive, modernist look. It has wealthy suburbs, like Shaker Heights, and one of the country’s great baseball teams, the Indians – currently on their way to the league championship, for the first time since 1954. It is also a prime music media city, regarded by the industry as the gateway into America’s heartland – a direct connection to pop history made manifest in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.
There is a shadow side, which you can feel in your bones. Cleveland is highly segregated, depressed, with little tolerance of outsiders. It still lacks a civic identity appropriate to a city of its size. It has a dark, dark past of organised crime, extreme poverty, and one of the worst sequence of serial killings ever: the unsolved Torso Murders of the late thirties – centred around the city’s prime industrial district, the Flats. In his book, “Torso”, Steven Nickel describes this area as ‘an awesome sight’: ‘flames rose into the black sky, casting a hellish, eerie aura over the entire valley. The pungent stench of gas fumes, burning oil, diesel engines, and smelting ore was overpowering.’ In 1976, this became international news when the Cuyahoga river, which passes through the heart of the city, caught fire from industrial effluents.
The West Flats are now a post-industrial theme park – full of bars, restaurants, galleries – but in the late seventies, as factory on factory closed, they were poised between hell and nothingness: in these ‘empty places and blank spaces’ Pere Ubu forged their vision. Their sleeves mapped this landscape of hyper-industrial decline. Their third 45, “Street Waves”, was written about a specific urban location – the Western view of downtown Cleveland along the grid of Prospect Avenue – and dared to suggest that the city could be beautiful, if you only had the eyes to see. Yet this surf euphoria was peppered with synthesiser blasts like you’d never heard before: as otherworldly as the pulp sci-fi movies the group got their titles from, as chilly as the December wind coming off Lake Erie, penetrating the huddled homeless.
By the end of 1977, Pere Ubu were the future. Finely poised between utopia and nightmare, their aesthetic had a considerable, if occluded impact. From their immediate congruence with UK synthesiser/ industrial groups like the Normal and Throbbing Gristle, there is a direct link between Ubu and the first Techno records, made in the mid 80′s by black Detroiters like Juan Atkins, Richard Davies, and Derrick May. When they played the UK for the first time, at Manchester’s Rafters in May 1978, they were carefully studied by a young Joy Division, who converted Ubu’s musical spaces – the instrumental drop-out, the ‘singing’ bass that carries the melody – into their own urbanism: a gothick that reflected their own environment and emotional make-up.
I was there, watching it happen. In the spring of 1978, Pere Ubu were both conceptually and emotionally liberating. Adding a synthesiser to more traditional rock instrumentation, they made explicit the possible connections between the thrash of Punk and the slower, cooler textures of the new synth musik – as pioneered by David Bowie, Brian Eno and Giorgio Moroder. In their own emotions, they’d moved through rage: shocked by the self-willed death of founder member Peter Laughner in September 1977, refusing to play their founding song, “Final Solution”, in case it was misinterpreted, they moved from ‘frustrated anger to disciplined, pragmatic optimism’. This was a valuable lesson in the comedown of English Punk, when negation had become nihilism in its less rigorous forms – cynicism and self-destruction – and solutions of any type were thin on the ground.
I’d consigned Pere Ubu to the past, but here in Cleveland, it all comes flooding back: how pop music has helped me orient in the world. I realise that to quit the Rock’n'roll Hall of Fame time and enter my own, I need to make the link between the Cleveland I envisioned in 1978 and the place where I am today. Through serendipity, I find a guide – in an antiquarian bookshop four blocks away from the hotel: Jim Jones was there at Rafters and, meeting him seventeen years later, the seventeen years between our meetings disappear. We drive around the Sunday city, Jim patiently pointing out some CLE highspots: the Tremont church, St Theodosiou, immortalised in “The Deer Hunter”; Lakewood, the home of Muzak; the Cuyahoga River and Kingsbury Run; Pirate’s Cove, a tiny bar in the heart of the Flats where Ubu had a year long residency; the Terminal Tower, completed in 1930 and still one of the most distinctive skyscrapers in the world. In these spaces, I can begin to make sense of my own story: I find myself recovering the incredible enthusiam I still had in 1978.
Just before I leave for Pittsburgh, Jim Jones hands me a tape of archival Ubu material: like everyone else, they’re releasing a boxed set, “Terminal Drive”. I’ve never driven through America before, and night is falling: as sometimes happens, the tape both reflects and programs the trip. I’m nervous about the journey, and the first few tracks, a collection of twenty year old Allen Ravenstine synthesiser pieces as ambient as anything released this year, locate the conurbations of Northern Ohio slap bang in the delicious nightmare of “Eraserhead”. As they slip behind me, I’m overcome with a feeling of dread so strong that my stomach starts to knot. But I can’t stop, or even change the tape. This simple drive is becoming something much bigger – something that involves my whole being. Why this should be so is not within my control.
The next three songs form an astonishing sequence. First off is a version of “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” recorded early in 1975 by the group that became Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs. Remember that 1975 was a year of great isolation: there was no punk rock, no youth TV, no contemporary cultural communites unless you were fortunate enough to participate in Northern Soul and Gay Disco. Playing to near total indifference, Rocket From The Tombs fought among themselves and confronted their audiences with sights and sounds they’d never heard before. Out of these warring elements, they somehow fashioned a song that, now I’m hearing for it for the first time, makes more sense of Pop’s fifty years than anything I’ve just seen or heard at the Cleveland Stadium.
’30 Seconds Over Tokyo” takes its title from ?; it is based on a historical fact – the January 1945? ‘Doolittle Raids’, where US bombers set out from aircraft carriers with just enough fuel to drop their bombs on Tokyo. The crew were then forced to bail out or crash land. The song is constructed as a narrative, taking you through every stage of this one way ride: from take off and flight to the final approach – ‘The sun a hot circle on a canopy/ The 25 a racing blot on a bright green sea’. The music is psychedelic in the mid-60′s sense: images in sound. The journey occurs during medium paced verses, shimmering with trebly guitars, which lurch sickeningly into the refrain – dreamtime before sacrifice.
The song is split in two by an accelerating, Stooges-like guitar thrash which lasts a good couple of minutes. The force of gravity locks you into the experience: ‘no turning back on a suicide ride’. The final verse begins slowly: ‘No this dream won’t ever ever end & time seems like it’ll never begin’. At the refrain, the group goes into its final dive, and David Thomas’ badly amplified voice, as crackly as any RT, accelerates with it. Like Slim Pickens at the end of “Dr. Strangelove’, he is bearing down so hard on each of his last 30 seconds that they stretch into eternity: as the tape cuts dead, this human machine – like the moment in a nightmare just before waking – is frozen forever on the point of impact, between death and the full intensity of life.
‘He streaked across the sky like a comet and crashed’.
Brion Gysin: ‘First Cut-Ups”, 1959
‘My week beats your year.’
Lou Reed: liner notes, “Metal Machine Music”, 1975
Like Iggy and the Stooges’ “Raw Power”, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” now reveals itself as a fully-fledged ritual of male adolescence. There is the terror that you feel when you’ve embarked on a journey into the unknown, leaving the safety of the familiar, without a map, with only a vision of how life could be to guide you. There is the anger and frustration that you feel when the world is not marching to your time: you have the incredible, seemingly invulnerable energy of youth, yet you have to live in institutions created and policed by the middle-aged and old. There is also the impulse to speed, with all that implies: neurologically, you are faster than almost everyone else – you have to be in order to make the world listen. This raw intensity is both attractive and highly disturbing to adults: a devastating combination which accounts for the contradictory messages pumped at teens – commercial exploitation and real-life restriction.
This impulse to speed is at the heart of postwar pop music. In the words of famed producer Guy Stevens, ‘all rock’n roll speeds up’: you can hear this within the tempi of punk staples like Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line”, the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”, Patti Smith’s “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together”, the Clash’s “Brand New Cadillac”, the Saints’ “This Perfect Day”. You can also hear it in the way that pop genres have evolved ever faster: Mod into the Ramones and Punk; Chicago House into Acid and Hardcore; Rare Groove and Breakbeat into the serious time damage that is Jungle. The cycles come and go, from motion to entropy, but the impulse to up the ante, to go faster than anyone else, is inherent in the twinning of technology and the adolescent psyche that occurs in Western consumerism.
Pop is directly linked to the Second World War: both as a psychic purge and an economic continuation – sharing the technologically driven, mass production, fast turnover nature of the forties’ economy. Traces of war are constant in pop, whether it be the battering noise favoured by rock groups or the actual use of records as mental torture by the Red Brigade or the US in Grenada: a recent example being the success of Robson and Jerome, actors from a popular TV series called “Soldier Soldier”, whose cover of “Unchained Melody” went to number 1 during the June 1995 VJ Day anniversary celebrations. It can be argued that multi-national pop culture has proved a much more effective method of strategic colonisation than military conflict.
‘Speed is violence”, Paul Virilio notes in “Pure War”, but that violence can, indeed must turn inwards to be controlled and resolved in the teenage psyche. In this way, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” runs through the whole Punk code: from your starting off point, through the demons you must face (boredom, hostility, self-doubt) to eventual death, whether it be physical death, the death of possibility, or the death of your former self. These codes continue to be played out in white male rock music, where speed is all: yet the suicides of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis and Peter Laughner all locate the mid to late twenties as the age when men must begin to leave adolescence, to change pace. The alternative is the founding teen myth of James Dean: live fast, die young, become immortal.
‘There’s a mickie in the tasting of disaster
In time – in time you get faster’Sly Stone: “In Time”, 1973
Trying to break the Ubu spell, I slot in a tape of old Punk rock to stop myself from tuning out: this turns out not to be such a great idea. Back in London, I did what I thought was a funny segue of two accelerating American 45′s: “Car Crash” by the Avengers and “Accident’ by the Electric Eels – another Cleveland group operating in that no man’s land between glam and punk. Back in 1974 and 1975, the Eels wore rat-traps in their clothes; picked fights with audiences, club owners and each other; went to blue collar bars and danced as lovers, provoking more fights; played free jazz rock of unbearable sonic intensity; blasted out tunes like “No Nonsense”, an extraordinary list of negatives. With a warring line-up which included Jim Jones, the Electric Eels never recorded properly: remaining a dim memory until, like so much other digital information, they were exhumed on CD in the early 90′s.
Somehow, these horrible boys produced a masterpiece of black humour that exhibits the powerful imperative behind teen acceleration: loss of control leading to self-destruction. Taking this momentum as a given, the Eels position themselves within the wreck, defining for all time the voyeurism inherent in popular culture – where death is the ultimate sales point: ‘Hope no one sees me in this accident/ Hope noone sees me in this accident/ With my feet down through the floorboards/ And my head up through the busted glass/ With my face smashed against the dash/ There’s no attraction like a fatal crash’. Behind this vocal – finely poised between fury and absurdity – the group churn out a relentless Stooges’ riff, phased like crashing gears, which ends in a cacophony of scrapyard metal.
I have to say that this freaks me out. Here I am, driving in the middle of America, playing this mad music, fighting hard to stay on a travelator where everything – the rigorous speed limit, the size of the car, the size of the road – is subtly but definitely alien. I can’t relax for a moment, because I don’t trust my perceptions: but I’m compelled to pursue this experience to its conclusion. I switch tapes again, back to the Ubu compilation: and it does not relent. Next up are two versions of “Heart of Darkness” – their first song, written about a turn on the I-9O Shoreway travelling westwards into downtown Cleveland, a turn so vicious that its local name is ‘dead man’s curve’ – taking it at 40kph, I have to struggle not to come off the road.
The first run-through is from the group’s earliest practice session: in place of the squabbling Rocket From the Tombs, you can hear the purposeful chatter of musicians coming together to forge something greater than their individual egos. As the song begins, you can hear this realisation in the music: a synthesiser pulse which resolves itself into a rhythm that can carry the lyrics – a tale of extreme, psychotic isolation. As David Thomas murmurs: ‘Maybe I’m nothing but a shadow on the wall/ Maybe love’s a tune where you dance at night/ And maybe sanctuary is an electric light’. Yet as the song unfolds, you can hear isolation transcended through group solidarity: a living examplar of the way that pop works as a teen life-guide. For isolation is only romantic if transcended: otherwise it is unheard and desperate.
“Heart of Darkness” is dominated by the first appearance of Pere Ubu’s musical trademark: an unusually prominent, ‘singing’ bass which carries the melody. This is the function usually undertaken by the guitar, which is used here purely for rhythm and texture, blending in with modulating pulses of synthesiser noise. In this early version, there are no drums; the treatment is circular, ambient, five years ahead of its time. There is no escape from this waking dream, and I’m right within it, living the lyric. My stomach does the loop-de-loop. I pull off at a rest area to eat, but it’s all there right in front of me: ‘Image Object and Illusion: go down to the corner where none of the faces fit a human form, where nothing I see there isn’t deformed., where in a secret lab works Dr.Moreau.’ It’s as though this America is an experiment that has gone horribly wrong.
In contrast, the second version is all propulsion: a manic live cut from spring 1978, by which time Ubu were no longer isolates, but internationally recognised. That cosmic bass line is still there, but locked into a sinuous drum beat. In place of the demo’s dreamlike cycle, there is a more traditional rock arrangement, including a short guitar solo, which speeds up into the final repetition – ‘Looking in to, looking into the heart of darkness’. When this song was first released in 1976, as the flip to “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”, it featured an accelerating fade so intense that you were, again, left locked between destruction and transcendence, but there is no car crash here: the group slow down and end all in time, to a smattering of applause. The world does not blow up, and the musicians have passed the test: freed to pursue a future.
‘Producing an unprecedented amount of movement, the innovation of the motor provided in one stroke what time only grants a bit at a time (Morand). It will see to it that earth’s inhabitants get used to visiting the planet not as beings subject to physical laws, but as rebels, marginals, escapees’.
Paul Virilio: The Art of the Motor, 1993
Back on the travelator, I pass emerald cities and exit signs with fantastic names: Ashtabula, Camembert, Mars. I’d like to live there: imagine saying ‘I’m from Mars’. These are momentary diversions in my heightened state of anxiety: the feeling grows and grows in the pit of my stomach and the only way I can make sense of it is to play these three songs over and over on the tape. About 45 minutes outside Pittsburgh, I can take no more, and leave the highway in the middle of some wooded hills: perhaps I can sit quietly in the country and calm down. The feeling grows worse: there is no open space here, nothing that is not fenced and patrolled. I pull off the side of the road and lay on my back, trying to control my leaping stomach: all I can hear is the pulses of a thousand cicadas, boring holes through my skull. I’ve done it. I’m as far away from home as I could imagine: I could disappear and noone would ever know.
Self-preservation takes over. I find a soothing ambient tape in the trunk and glide into downtown Pittsburgh at 1.30am. Tomorrow I must undergo a different form of tme travel, in the time capsules at the Andy Warhol Museum. As I pull into the hotel, I feel as though I have passed through a warp: my experience of America always has the effect of distilling recent experience, presenting it to me in a concentrated form, allowing me to understand it and, with luck, move forward. These couple of days have been an extreme manifestation of this. From the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame to this journey, it’s as though time itself has telescoped: I’ve lived years in a few hours. It’s all too much, and, in order for everyday life to continue, I have to push it aside.
A season later, I can begin to put the pieces together. Seeing the data collected in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame has forced me to think about pop history and my place within it. Why is it that the most pop thing I saw that weekend was the airshow ? Why did the Stealth Bomber rip a hole in my consciousness ? Why did I choose to pass my adolescence in a culture of shrieking men and women ? How come I still love that stuff but have resisted its self-destructive pull ? How come Pere Ubu’s twenty year old songs sound so good, so right today ? Like the planes pirouetting by Lake Erie that September afternoon, I’ve sought to break the bounds of the body in speed – if in time rather than motion: I’ve paid for it physically, but in the meantime there has been some kind of resolution.
The last three years have been full of real live death. First, my father died of cancer, after a year long illness, in March 1993. Arriving back from the US two days before the inevitable end, I precipitate into a kind of breakdown: a psychological death, the effects of which will always be with me. A year later, Derek Jarman dies of AIDS, the first close friend I’ve lost to the disease: two days after his funeral, I catch a glimpse of him in the crowd at the National Portrait Gallery. I can’t believe it: when I focus, he has gone, and the floor is whipped from underneath me. I remember the wonderful line from his punk film, “Jubilee”: ‘Now is the time of departure. The last streamer that ties us to what is known parts. We drift into a sea of storms’. All I can do is hang on, and let the vortex pass through me.
Eighteen months later, death has been followed by a partial rebirth. For the first time in my life, I’ve had to take on serious responsibilities: managing money, planning for the future, being head of the family. Up until now, I’ve only been responsible for myself, and have lived blithely in the instantaneousness of pop. Then it hits me: what I’ve gone through on the interstate between Cleveland and Pittsburgh is nothing less than an enactment of the passage from adolescence to adulthood – a final recognition of the fundamental changes that have been occurring over the last four years. You can smirk at my retardation but some people never manage it: the lack of rituals – for both men and women – to mark this passage is one of the most serious defects in our society.
It’s also not as simple as that: at any given time, we are many ages at once – sometimes a child, sometimes an adult, sometimes a teen. I relish this mixture, and agree with Edmund White when he says: ‘The volatility and intensity of adolescence are qualities we should aspire to preserve: I have no contempt for that time in life when our friendships are most passionate and our passions incorrigible and none of our sentiments yet compromised by greed or cowardice or disappointment.’ Yet changes have to be recognised: I am and am not the same as the person who went to see the Sex Pistols and had his life changed. The pieces collected here form a partial autobiography, a diary of this eighteen year journey: from the moment when I fully entered adolescence to the time when I confronted adulthood, somewhere in an alien land.
‘I hang around 1995 for a week or so, and I realize that the texture of life is different from what it was in 1975. It’s a subjective thing, and I try to put my finger on it. Nobody hitchhikes anymore. Nobody has hobbies. People use their phones, and phone-related devices like faxes and E-mail, all the time. Nobody seems to “have time” anymore. People don’t have “lives” anymore.’
Douglas Coupland: Walk on the Wired Side, Artforum, Dec 1995
This is also a book about music as a way of telling the time. From birth to death, we are bounded by physical time – the revolutions of earth, sun and moon impact on the daily and yearly rotations of light and dark, winter and summer, and on the body itself: in waking, sleep, eating, and the prime meter of human time, the monthly female cycle. Ever since the invention of the mechanical clock in England and France during the 14th century, however, measurement of time has become ever more exact, infinitesimal, merciless: from years to months to days to hours to minutes to seconds to nanoseconds. There is no excuse for not knowing what time it is at any instant: each moment is accounted for. This is what we agree to live by in order to function in society, indeed to have a society: the routine world of timetables, appointments, and working hours.
This is what Joachim-Ernst Berendt, in his book on music and the landscape of consciousness, “Nada Brahma”, calls ‘measured’, or ‘objective’ time: ‘considered to be steadfast and precise, the same time and obligatory for all people.’ This public time is contrasted with what Berendt summarises as ‘lived’ or ‘subjective’ time, which ‘is the personal time of each single individual, passing by much too fast during moments of bliss and much too slowly in the hour of suffering.’ We talk of having a good or a bad time; of having good or poor timing; of having no time or time on our hands. It hardly needs adding that there are many occasions when this private time fails to connect with public time: think of how some days go so fast while others go slow; how many times you’ve missed an appointment, a train, a deadline.
Turning to Greek mythology, Berendt posits this opposition in terms of their two gods of time: ‘Chronos, the archfather, was the god of absolute, “eternal” time. For Kairos, however, the youngest son of Zeus, time meant the favourable moment, the “right time”.’ For him, ‘rationalistic Western civilisation has suppressed its Kairos. Its time is taken with clocks and watches, with chronometers. Its time is comes from archfather Chronos. It is male, patriarchal, rational, and functional. In the more archaic cultures, as in the African continent, even today the time of Kairos is more important than clock time, which is “primal time” only for male-dominated thinking.’ Indeed, ‘clocks have to do with a lack of freedom’.
Just as, in Western society, pop music marks the appearance of the private in the public sphere – the extraordinary frequency of the word ‘love’ in hit songs is only the most obvious index of this – then music itself is ideally adapted to swim between these two times. With its reliance on rhythm and metre, music is the attempt of humanity to make its own time. As Jacques Attali writes in “Noise: the political economy of music”, ‘Science, message, and time – music is all of that simultaneously. It is, by its very presence, a mode of communication between man and his environment, a mode of social expression, and duration itself. It is therapeutic, purifying, enveloping, liberating: it is rooted in a comprehensive knowledge about the body, in a pursuit of exorcism through noise and dance. But it is also part time to be produced, heard and exchanged.’
As an integral part of our economy, postwar pop music has abstracted performance into records, endlessly repeatable and accessible commodities: writing in 1890, soon after he invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison imagined that one of its uses might be as ‘clocks that should announce, in articulate speech, the time for going home, the time for meals etc.’ This is pop as locked into the measured time over which we have no control: the countdown of the Top 40; the use of music in adverts, the accelerated BPM (beats per minute) played in boutiques to stimulate consumption, the concept of “Music While You Work” industrialised by Muzak. In this, it’s no accident that the emergence of the modern music industry was marked by the grids of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”.
Like time, music is a perception, a way of seeing the world: it embodies the conflict of measured with lived time, between which it also mediates. Ever since “Rock Around The Clock”, pop’s relationship with time has been intimate and complex: not only in the hundreds of records about time, but the way in which we measure its history. If “Rock Around The Clock” and Prince’s extraordinary state-of-the- nation address, “Sign of the Times”, cements pop in measured time, then songs like the Easybeats’ “Friday On My Mind”, the Clash’s “48 Hours”, and Chic’s epic “Good Times” celebrate the desire to break its bounds, while Jimmy Jones’ wonderful “Good Timin”, with its ticka-ticka-ticka refrain, is nothing less than the subversion of Chronos by Kairos.
On the other hand, we agree to measure pop in years, chart positions and cultural movements. You can say that “Rock Around the Clock” is Rock’n Roll, that it went to number one for nine weeks and caused riots when filmed, that “Good Times” is Disco, that, as part of Grandmaster Flash’s epic cut-up, “The Wheels of Steel”, it has had an incredible influence on Rap and dance music thereafter: thus validated, they are placed into the canon – a matrix of agreed, public recollection. In this way, pop music is a valuable tool for social historians, an instant access to the collective memory bank: as evidence by popular programmes like “The Rock’n Roll Years”. Here, news footage provides the images, but the real kick is provided by the songs used as soundtrack: here, rather than in headlines, is where you can map what has happened to you.
Pop is both deeply connected with our society – existing within and fuelling measured time: turning private desire into commodity – and a way out of its hammerlock consciousness. Play “Good Times” again: right from the phased fanfare, it remains as much in the present as it was in the moment it was recorded. Nile Rodgers’ bassline has the vibrancy of lived time: an uptempo pulse that, locking in to your heartbeat, compels you to dance and, in that physical movement, to lose time. Another irresistable stomper, James Brown’s “There Was A Time” locks into a hypnotic groove that acts as the bridge between black music past and future: between the church and the sequencer. Here he is taking the audience through a lesson on the primacy of personal time: ‘I-I-I-I!’ (‘I-I-I-!!”) ‘I-I-I-I!’ (‘I-I-I-!!”) ‘I-I-I-I!’ (‘I-I-I-!!”) ‘I’ve got that feeling !’
Pop uses time to express social criticism: you need only think of Sly Stone exquisitely cocking a snook at the world in the lyric of “In Time” – Kairos as Stagger Lee. The Beatles’ “Any Time At All” both recognises their new-found ability to make the world bend to their perception – this is their time – while seeking an escape out of their clock bound existence as pop stars. In punk classics like “The Last Time” and “No Time”, the Rolling Stones and the Saints may well be directing their comments, as adolescent men are prone to do, at individual women, but the message is in the insolent drones of the music: a direct challenge to the established order, whether it be the nursery demons of the music industry, or authority figures like parents, teachers or politicians. We’re faster than you: we come from a different time; our time will prevail.
Provoke and you get a response: it might not be the response you expected. There is a persistent undercurrent in this book: the conflict that occurs when the pop time zone – in public terms, the present and the future – clashes with that of establishment institutions, by definition locked in the past. These conflicts are played out in public scandals – from the Sex Pistols to the Beastie Boys and Boy George; show trials – like the interlinked “Modern Primitives” and Operation Spanner cases – which briefly made illegal the body-piercing and S&M that had been a pop staple for over a decade; and, in extreme cases, private tragedy – the suicides of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain epitomise the dangers of private time being forced to go public. Mainstream attitudes to pop are always ambiguous: desirous of its attractions, hostile to its perceptions.
As a commodity, pop embodies one of Frederick Jameson’s definitions of the postmodern condition, which he calls ‘schizophrenia’: ‘the schizophrenic will clearly have a far more intense experience of any given present of the world than we do, since our own present is always part of some larger set of projects which force us selectively to focus our perceptions.’ This mindset can be directly locked into the status quo: think of current group names like Menswear, Boutique, Delicatessen – a frank description of pop as shopping mall. Yet as music, pop allows us to enter a different time, where past, present and future are indistinguishable, part of the same continuum. This could be the Byrds’ “Fifth Dimension”: as they sang in 1966, ‘I will keep falling as long as I live, without ending; and I will remember the place that is now, that has ended before the beginning’.
This apparent paradox is enacted in current arguments about nostalgia; retro; sampling and digital technology; the release of time capsules like the Beatles’ “Anthology” – a fascinating experiment that has thrown up a wide variety of public reactions, from exaltation through cynicism to sheer psychotic hostility. Much of the problem has to do with the way that pop is still perceived as a modernist medium: locked into a public definition of the present, where its reliance on the past – whether it be Oasis cheekily sourcing Gary Glitter on “Hello” or the Bucketheads including an actual snatch of a fifteen year old recording, Chicago’s “Street Player”, in the structure of “The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)” – is seen as a lack of emotional authenticity, a loss of cultural power.
‘It seems to me like I’ve been here before
The sounds I heard and the sights I saw
Was it real or in my dreams ?
I need to know what it all means’The Yardbirds: “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” 1966
Pop has changed time: one of the reasons that the Beatles invite such extreme reactions is that they are the embodiments of a collective, linear cultural motion. The sixties were a time of great economic, social, sexual and spiritual gains: a healing of wartime wounds, the final overthrow -in private time, at least – of Victorian values. It is also the case that many of the liberations initiated during that period – consumerism, sex outside marriage, the social use of drugs – have since shown their darker side, but the measure of the pop sixties lies in the unsolved social problems which it identified: ecological damage, obsolete puritan guilt, the lack of any spirituality in materialism. This is the lifetime journey the Beatles made in three years: from “Money” to the quotations from the Tibetan Book of the Dead contained in “Tomorrow Never Knows”.
On its release in August 1966, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was an explicit assault on contemporary perception, using a battery of technological effects to simulate the eternity in a nano-second offerred by the LSD experience. The recording is like nothing else that the Beatles ever did: built on a sequence of loops, whether Ringo’s drum thud – MacDonald – it exists in its own, suspended time. The continued power of the song also lies in the fact that it marks the moment when pop began to move out of linear into serial time, when directional was replaced by circular motion, indeed, when the explicitly materialist was replaced by the spiritual – with the consequent fundamentalist backlash, triggered that summer by John Lennon’s quote, ‘we’re more popular than Jesus now”.
1966 was the year that pop time went out of joint. The loop was fully introduced into record production, whether in “Tomorrow Never Knows” or John Cale’s LaMonte Young-inspired feedback instrumental, which encodes form in title: “Loop”. This time shift was also reflected in the hallucinogenic concentration of lyrics with the words mind, circle, dream; in the change of pop design away from Pop Art to a series of Revivals – Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts; in the move away from mod to antique clothing – Victorian uniforms, Edwardian mustaches, depression era Granny glasses; in the speed chaos of records like the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow”, or the Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” – modernism accelerating to the point of catastrophe.
As Jacques Attali writes: ‘Repetition is a fundamental change in the relation of man to history, because it makes the stockpiling of time possible.’ Since the decline of pure modernism in 1966, pop has slowly passed through what is usually called its postmodern phase – marked by overlapping revivals, looped time, the increased interconnection between music and the other media industries: advertising, newspaper and book publishing, film and TV. The music industry has expanded exponentially, to the point where you can hear music accompanying every human activity, where you can walk into any megastore and find an incredible array of material stockpiled from the last hundred years: the result of a ten year stockpiling of CDs. The effects of this are maddening (if you can’t afford it), bewildering (information overload can result in nausea) yet liberating.
Our relation to history has changed. Heard for the first time now, a record from 1973 (the Cosmic Jokers’ “Galactic Supermarket”), 1948 (Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy”), or 1960 (Maxine Brown’s “All In The Mind”) can make as much sense of the present as any produced this year. Each of these time scales has equal value, indeed exist on the same plane as each other. It’s true to say that an archive release is locked in its own time: it will come with a set of expectations, a fund of shared, public knowledge. Yet it can also communicate directly with private time: although I know that, say, “Nature Boy” was recorded five years before I was born, that it was written by Eden Ahbez (an itinerant mystic who sported hippie length hair in 1948), what I zero in on is the melody and the lyric – ‘the only thing in the world/ Is to love and be loved in return’.
Archival releases also enrich the fund of public knowledge: in broadening our sense of what happened, they make it clear that history is not predetermined, but a series of accidents – things could have gone a different way. Even in the measured past, time is not static. Most of all, they create a climate where new cut-ups, new juxtapositions are possible: if, as Virilio states in “Pure War’, ‘our consciousness is an effect of montage’, then Rap, Jungle and Techno have turned perception into form. Here, time tripping is not a self-conscious stylistic gambit but a climate: an accepted fact of life to the producers of music, another way of constructing a narrative. Modern pop exists within at least two or three separate speeds, held in balance by a conjurer’s graceful sleight of hand.
In 1964, the Beatles excited comment when they were discovered doing at least three things at once: reading, listening to music, chatting, watching TV with the sound off. From this came many of their songs – like “Good Morning Good Morning”, which came from a half heard advert on TV. This is now a routine, mediated experience: today’s musicians and teens have entered a more complex perception of time and space, one which may to outsiders appear like the maze of a computer game, with its constantly shifting perspectives. Indeed, they routinely pass Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 test of a first rate intelligence: ‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’. This may be regarded as a perceptual leap that has occurred over the last sixty years.
‘There is no topology more beautiful than Moebius’ to designate the continuity of the close and the distant, of interior and exterior, of object and subject in the same spiral, where the screen of our computers and the mental screen of our own brain become intertwined with each other as well. According to the same model, information and communication always feedback on themselves in a kind of incestuous convolution: because they operate in indefinite continuity in a superficial indistinction between subject and object, interior and exterior, question and answer, event and image – a contiguity that can only be solved in a loop, simulating the mathematical figure for infinity’.
Jean Baudrillard: “Xerox and Infinity”, 1987
Pop is not just a commodity: it has another, bio-acoustic function. Entering our heads, surrounding our brains, impacting on our bodies, music is a complete sensory experience. According to Marshall McLuhan, ‘we are enveloped by sound’: through it, we can change worlds, from the public to the private, from measured into lived time. In “Ocean of Sound”, David Toop develops this through metaphor: ‘On our watery planet, we return to the sea for a diagnosis of our current condition. Submersion into deep and romantic pools represents an intensely romantic desire for dispersion into nature, the unconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is made.’ (Like Oasis sing: ‘All I want to do is live by the sea’ – now there’s a lyric I’ve identified with and acted upon.)
Indeed, its form encodes a harmony between the public and the private, the past and the present, between individual and environment: whether it’s Techno in all its myriad forms (Ambient, Goan Trance), which pits expansion noises, suggesting space and transcendence, over machine rhythms and rapid fire film soundbites, or Jungle, which overlays hyper-speed breakbeat percussion (ie drum loops from 70′s records like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” accelerated to the status of computer game sound-track) on top of slow, rolling reggae basslines. Felt in every part of your body, the music offers a strong solution to today’s conundrum – how to resolve all these different times: the fact that you can find an equilibrium between different speeds, the fact that you can live in several time zones at once without being torn apart.
This blurring of the classic distinctions between past, present and future returns us to the nature of the loop itself (somewhere in the world, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is still playing). A loop can be closed – referring to nothing but its own circularity, like MTV – but it can also be the loop of infinity. (As disembodied as someone from a different time, John Lennon chants his mantra: ‘Play the game existence to the end/ Of the beginning’). Time has blurred into the everlasting present that has always been the hallmark of the teenage experience. This is at once the optimum measure of capitalist time and its transcendence: on the one hand, an index of postmodern psychosis, on the other a direct connection to the eternity to be found in the spiritual wisdom of both East and West. With everything rushing at us, we can nevertheless tap into that eternity for an infinitesimal moment and, connecting with Kairos, seize the favourable moment, the ‘right time’.
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‘”We will travel not only in space but in time as well”. A Russian scientist said that. I have just returned form a thousand year r time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw to tell you how such time trips are made. It is a precision operation. It is difficult. It is dangerous as the early days of aviation. It is the new w fronteer and only the adventurous need apply. It belongs to anyone who has the courage and the know how to travel. It belongs to you.’
William Burroughs: “Time”, 1965
This collection contains the first article I ever wrote for a nationally distributed magazine, which I stayed up all night to write, and cuts off on the deadline for publication, this February. For much of this period, I’ve been fortunate enough to feel connected to something outside myself, a collective energy from which I drew strength: whether it be working for “Sounds” in 1977, “The Face” in 1982, the New Statesman or the Observer in 1986. Between 1977 (Punk) and 1988 (the end of Style) I felt completely in sync with the weekly and monthly deadlines of national journalism: it was a period time of great excitement, intense rivalries, and, I now realise, unreckoned privilege. Since then, I’ve sought my own time: without the security of a regular deadline, I’ve had to learn to work at my own Speed.
These articles probably represent about a quarter of my total output during the last eighteen years: they are presented as published, except for the correction of minor typos and, in the very first section, some small cuts to compensate for the almost total lack of sub-editing at “Sounds”. (It wasn’t until I worked for “New Society” that I ever worked from a proof). On a few other occasions, where the cuts on publication have been hurried and brutal, I have substituted a few lines from the article as handed in. Nothing more has been added or revised.