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Popular
music is now middle-aged and has been mainstream for a long time, but
there is still a sense, as Nick Hornby observes in 31 Songs, that it
wasn’t supposed to last this long. These two books both use a list
structure to try to make sense of our persistent attachment to the format.
Both are personal choices of pop music favourites; there is little attempt
at objectivity, and not a sniff of jazz or classical. The content of
those lists, though, is hugely different. They have only one song in
common, which, you are unlikely to guess, is ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’
by the Avalanches (though the paperback edition of 31 Songs also includes
discussion of 14 albums, revealing their shared passion for Nick Cave).
Hornby, although he has 469 fewer entries, seems to include more obscurities.
Even John Peel admitted he did not know eleven of Hornby’s 31.
This does not particularly matter, because his subject matter is overwhelmingly
autobiographical. He uses each song as a means to discuss Life, and
his life, and the (admittedly large) place that music occupies in it.
This generally works well. At his best, he is very persuasive. He makes
you appreciate apparently throwaway pop like Nelly Furtado’s “I’m
Like A Bird” for the light, joyous song it really is. In endorsing
The Beatles’ “Rain”, he relates how in Victorian London
people used to burn phosphorus at séances in the hope of seeing
ghosts, then equates this with our modern obsession with rare B-sides
and unreleased material; in listening to them, he argues, we are trying
to hear the likes of The Beatles as they sounded in the brief moment
before they became overly familiar, before their songs had all the “pulp”
sucked from them.
However, Hornby has set out his stall thus: “I wanted mostly to
write about what it was in these songs that made me love them, not what
I brought to the songs.” But it is not long before the personal
memoir starts to overwhelm the musical analysis, indicating that he
missed his intended mark.
It also suggests Hornby is rather self-conscious, concerned that he
should not write the kind of book we would expect of the author of Hi-Fidelity
and Fever Pitch. One half of him wants to shrug off the cultural stereotype
the other half has created. For in a way, through his very success,
Hornby has come to represent something he is ambivalent about. In noting
that something is being lost from our literary and music culture because
all retail chain stores carry the same stock, he adds: “Yes, before
any smart-arse points it out, I too am sick of seeing my books everywhere
I go shopping.”
In fact he is good on the effects of cultural ubiquity. A fan of Zero
7 and Röyksopp, he decries their omnipresence as background music
on TV and in shops, turning them into clichés. “This may
partly explain the teenage fondness for the profanities and antisocial
attitudes of hip-hop,” he suggests. Little danger of contemporary
youth stumbling upon them in The Body Shop—which would be very,
well, uncool.
Which brings us to Garry Mulholland. This Is Uncool, being list-based
music discussion by a thirty-something Londoner, complete with highest
chart positions and lovingly-reproduced dog-eared record sleeves, comes
from a world straight off the pages of Hi-Fidelity.
It is conceived as a British equivalent of Dave Marsh’s The Heart
of Rock and Soul (1989), which catalogued the singles judged to have
had most impact on America. Mulholland’s is a wonderfully enthusiastic
and fairly eclectic (though rarely obscure) collection. He provides
insight into the context and musical content of most selections, and
is particularly good at tracing the rise of black music in its various
guises to the position of dominance it now holds over our singles chart,
in the form of hip-hop and R&B. Mulholland is a self-confessed standard-bearer
for rave, rap, the Specials and the Smiths, not to mention the Pet Shop
Boys, who unaccountably earn the most entries, eight. And he is broad-minded
enough to overcome his misgivings about Britpop and include five entries
by both Oasis and Blur.
Beyond the specifics, two themes run throughout. The first is implicit
in the title: he argues that the simultaneously sprouting punk and disco
movements were not, as commonly assumed, natural opposites. He locates
“the serrated edge hidden inside the elegant threads” of Chic’s
“Le Freak”, and credits Stiff Records artists like Ian Dury
and the Blockheads for crossing the two movements. Their convergence
shaped future music trends: from post-punk to the New Romantics (Duran
Duran described themselves as a cross between the Sex Pistols and Chic),
through to the Happy Mondays and the Prodigy. Ultimately the dance music
scene of the 1990s drew on both influences. After all, he observes,
“Disco didn’t die. It just called itself house instead and
rock fans were too thick to notice.”
His second theme is to put his choices in their wider context: like
Hornby, he presents us with plenty of autobiography, but he also explains
a track’s musical and political significance. This is no doubt
why he has plumped for a book of singles, for through radio (and video)
play, they have a mass impact.
When Hornby appeared on Desert Island Discs recently, he chose eight
completely different selections from the 31 here. Indeed, he is the
kind of committed music enthusiast whose favourite songs probably change
all the time (in an appendix he itemizes the strongest recent songs,
which obviously came too late for consideration; the list has completely
changed between editions). Ultimately personal lists such as these are
not intended to be definitive. They are there, as Mulholland puts it,
“to provoke a barney”, and both these books will appeal to
anyone with a keen interest in the popular music of the past four decades
who enjoys that kind of challenge.
Order
31 Songs from Amazon.co.uk
Order
This Is Uncool from Amazon.co.uk
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