From Cubist Castle 03.07.09: Why I Hate The Mainstream

Posted by Jon Kinsey on 03.07.2009

After a two week hiatus, From Cubist Castle returns and I answer everybody's favorite question - why am I a Negative Nelly when it comes to chart music?

Hi folks and welcome to another exciting edition of "From Cubist Castle". Some of you may have noticed that this column has been on enforced hiatus for the last couple of weeks but, never fear; I'm not, in fact, dead!

In the next two weeks, I'm going to answer the 2 most commonly asked questions whenever I enter into a conversation about music – why do you dislike mainstream music so much and, if you don't listen to the radio, how do you find new stuff? For this week's first part, I will be attempting to analyze the origins of my obsession with music and why I have such an aversion to the songs in the charts. Next week, I will be looking at three bands I've recently discovered who, in their own ways, illustrate how new music, more often than not, simply falls into my lap.

For as long as I can remember, I have found the typical chart music fare to be unsatisfying. I had never really been interested in music throughout my younger life. With the exception of the odd novelty song (the first single I ever bought was a cassette version of Benny Hill's "Ernie"), music didn't seem to push the same buttons in my head, growing up, as books and video games. While I could quite happily spend a day with Mario (that sounded so much more innocent when I was younger) or while away an evening with Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl, there never seemed to be any room in my head for music. This is, I suppose, entirely understandable as a youngster – the younger you are, traditionally the less contact with music you have – but even into my teens, nothing really grabbed me.

Let me put this into perspective. I was a teenager, in secondary school in Wales in the mid 90's. This was the middle of our music boom – the Principality's equivalent of the Manchester outpouring in the 80s. You couldn't move in the UK music scene without bumping into a Welsh band. In addition, Britpop had come into the ascension, and music in general was top of the teenage agenda. Some of my friends liked Blur. Some of them liked Oasis. An inordinate amount loved The Manic Street Preachers (Ritchie Edwards had just gone missing. A year or so prior he wrote The Holy Bible, one of the most over-rated albums of all time. Teenage angst has a lot to answer for). I, however, stayed almost stoically neutral. I was completely incapable of seeing what the fuss was about.

Until one summer evening in 1998. My Father was clearing out the attic and came across boxes and boxes of old vinyl albums. You see, my dad was a massive muso, back in the seventies. He had seen all of the greats - David Bowie, Rod Stewart, T-Rex and Gary Glitter back when it was still safe to admit it. He was never short of a story from the halcyon days of Glam and, while he insisted that he was describing bands and songs of quite palpable genius, I didn't believe him. After all, if I couldn't get excited about the stuff my friends were into, what change had my Dad, with his songs that were a quarter of a century old?

And then something magical happened. He dug out his copy of Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. I think it was his one throw of the dice; his final attempt to convince me that at one time, before he met my mum and was made to cut his hair and put his albums in the attic, he had been cool. He put the disc on the turntable and selected the track – "Running Gun Blues". He might as well have blown my head off. The cobwebs lifted, the trapdoor opened. Any other cliché you can think of, it probably would have been relevant for that night. I was instantly transfixed. This was nothing like the music my friends were listening to – either the dribblingly mundane ramblings of Blur and Oasis or the self-indulgent self-pity of the Manics. This was something else. It was raw and powerful. It had bite and attitude and it made me feel something that music, up until that point, could not do. It was from that one song, that one album, that everything I love about music has sprung. And one thing has always been constant - regardless of what I am listening to, it is worlds apart from the music habitually played on mainstream radio.

So I've never appreciated the mainstream. Even by the mid Nineties, the purpose and importance of the Sunday night singles chart had been stripped. There was a time in this country when people would tune in and hang on every word. These days, it is utterly meaningless. A song will clatter straight into the number 1 slot and then vanish without a trace. When I first became interested in music, I didn't hate the songs that were being played on the radio. True, I didn't understand why so many people became so unduly excited by them, but I could see that, in their own way, they were meritorious. No, my hatred for the mainstream chart and, by extrapolation, mainstream radio, has came a lot more recently. These days, to quote Gordon McIntyre, "the records on the radio are shite" and, as far as I can see, there are a couple of reasons for that.

The first is record company cynicism. This is a theme that I have covered relatively extensively in my time here and I don't intend to batter people around the head with it once again. Sufficed to say that I find mainstream music, especially chart music, to be a largely soulless enterprise, put together for the express purpose of making money. Big labels care little for legitimacy. They do not work on those terms. Legacy is a liquid thing and, as long as the company is making money, largely irrelevant in the eyes of Big Music (I use this phrase in the same way as some will refer to Big Oil or Big Tobacco, and mean the same implication to be attached to it). Big Music cares only for the bank balance. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with the undiscerning man on the street, putrescence sells. If your major objective in life is to make money and you are given the choice between releasing a novelty song performed by a man in a suit roughly analogous to a foam rubber blancmange or uncovering the next Nick Drake, who will sell four copies and a pasty but be seen as an icon for generations to come, then Mr Blobby wins, I'm afraid. Big Music insults our intelligence on such a regular basis that it is impossible for me to take them seriously.

The cynicism shown by the labels directly feeds my other major bugbear – the lack of artistic integrity. Making money should not be a good enough reason to make music. Almost every day of my life, I have to justify my interest, something that one or two have labeled, possibly correctly, an obsession. I know that the right song, heard in the right place and at the right time, can change the course of your life. I mean those words absolutely literally – as I mentioned earlier, this very thing has happened to me. A well-crafted song can be as enlightening as Mill or Voltaire, as literally rich as Dostoyevsky and as able to shift perception as Huxley or More. These sorts of songs are as much art as any other medium; they speak to you at a visceral level, a level that, oftentimes, leaves you incapable of explanation. Language is inadequate to describe a great song, in the same way as it lacks the ability to accurately assess a masterpiece of sculpture. It exists on a creative plain above and away from what most of us could ever conceive.

Whenever I try to explain that point to a "casual" music fan, I am greeted with incredulity at best and derision at worst. It is forever pointed out to me that it is duplicitous to compare a song to high art, that the comparison does not sit. The reason that the vast majority are able to make this point is because, in terms of the music that they listen to, they are absolutely right. Because mainstream music is largely a soulless pit of commercial drivel, the natural assumption, if you have never been exposed to anything else, it that all music must be, to a greater or lesser extent, the same. Most people listen only to whatever their radio station decides to pump down their throat. It is easy to see how such people can conclude that all music is rubbish when all they ever hear is sanitized guff.

The life of a jobbing songwriter can be a lonely and unrewarding one, and I take no truck with the people who scrape together a living writing gibberish that will eventually vanish onto a Britney Spears B-side. In some senses, conveyor belt songwriting has a noble tradition and was crucial in the Fifties and early Sixties as a means of galvanizing artists to begin writing their own songs. Had it not been for the oppressive regime of Tin Pan Alley, the likes of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Kinks would not have risen against it and written their own material. I needn't dignify the ramifications of that eventuality with an explanation.

There are, however, people who become exceptionally rich off the back of cynical commercialism. Putting the label execs to one side – we all know how much money they cream from the young and the gullible – there are professional songwriters who have bought their Bentley's writing mindless ditties for the masses. For instance, the chaps who wrote the Spice Girl's debut single "Wannabe" are millionaires from the royalties. Yet the song is the musical equivalent of slurry. It is a festering pustule that will forever scar the face of British music. At the risk of falling once again into cliché, there is the old chestnut about a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters accidentally turning out Shakespeare. The "Wannabe" example proves that a thousand monkeys aren't always necessary. In some cases, two are more than enough.

Now, you may be taken to thinking from the previous few paragraphs that I am one of those crazy elitists who believes that the only way to create genuinely affecting music is to slave away for no reward and die in poverty with a tiny fanbase and no money. This position couldn't be further from the truth. Part of next week's article will be dedicated to lancing the myth of "selling out" and explain why it is actually in everyone's best interests for brilliant artists to succeed financially. The point I am making, when I castigate the record labels and songwriters for profiting from sub-standard work, is that they are not promoting brilliant artists. They are publicizing people with little discernable talent, picked for their looks, unable to sing without Auto Tune and utterly incapable of writing. They are putting deliberately shoddy songs into the market knowing that people, who have been conditioned by years of mediocrity, will jump out and buy it. This, in turn, leads popular perception to denigrate music as a whole. If people see a billion dollar industry profiting, while the product they are shilling becomes progressively worse, it destroys any good will for those who are truly exceptional.

I suppose, what I'm trying to say, is that the music mainstream doesn't do it for me on two levels. Not only do the songs not appeal to me, maybe because they are too lightweight, or too dancy, or just plain bad, but I hate the idea of the stereotypical cackling executive, who knows that his output is awful, yet sits back and watches the money roll in. I truly believe that, with possibly a few exceptions, the decision makers in the big labels have no clue what good music is. They simply know what sells. While they rule the roost, there will always be space on the books for Bob The Builder, The Tellytubbies or whatever Pop Idol puppet happens to be flavor of the month and, for as long as that is the case, "popular" music will always be the art world's Leprous Aunt.