Q: When can a new,
exciting, dangerous art movement be said to have truly lost its edge?
A: When a group of
middle-aged, middle class people holding umbrellas are dragging their
children around Bristol on a guided walk of it by a wildly
enthusiastic, fiftyish (sorry if you are reading this and younger
than that, I assume a lifetime of the lifestyle has taken its toll)
chap in a sensible lightweight waterproof jacket.
That's
me on the far left, don't let my feigned cynicism put you off, it's a
really interesting walk
This was my
realisation last weekend as my wife and I trudged the pavements of
Stokes Croft on a tour of
Bristol street art. Street Art, Graffiti, or whatever you want to
refer to it as, has been defanged; it is now as dangerous as the
pre-raphaelites, pointillism, cubism and pop-art. We were on the walk
to see if it would be appropriate for my wife's private school GCSE
class to go on, that's how edgy the spray can brigade are now (they
have their own specialist paint marketed at them by big corporations
and everything). I think a few of the other participants were a
little miffed that we only saw two Banksys, and that the very
enthused guide was far more excited by newer work, and Graffiti's
inherently transient nature. I liked him, I learned stuff, although I
agreed with the guy who had sprayed 'Fuck Banksy' on the side of a
wheelie bin in silver paint. Banksy is to Graffiti what Mumford and
Sons are to folk music (I accept that that might be a bit strong,
nobody deserves to be compared to Mumford and Sons plc).
This
is not in silver paint, or on the side of a wheelie bin. I didn't
take any photos.
Art, by its very
nature, is an ever changing, ever evolving thing, and so it is only
natural that big, colourful, barely readable letters on the side of
trains would become accepted and boring. Of course, Graff/Rave
culture is all well over thirty years old now, and by rights should
be as dead as the hep cats and Daddios of the beat generation were
when it sprang up. But it's not, perplexingly. Millenials (I think
that's what we've decided to call them yeah?) appear to just be
running a continuation of the culture that we generation Xers handed
down to them. Spray your name on a wall, eat a disco biscuit and chew
your face off to some seriously dirty beats, just like 1989
(except they spell it dutty now).
Not
so very different, apart from the hair, obviously
A young chap in
Bristol city centre on Saturday was singing DJ Luck and MC Neat's
1999 garage classic 'With a Little Bit of Luck' to me as he handed
out flyers to a dance weekender. It is possible that he recognised it
as something an old git like me might recognise, but it is still akin
to me handing out flyers to a free party in 1992 (when
we were still allowed to meet up in fields and dance to repetitive
beats) while singing 'I Wanna Dance Wit' Choo' by Disco Tex and
the Sex-O-Lettes. Which, I must confess, I may well have actually
done, but I am special.
It worries me
though, my Grandparent's generation had Jazz, modernism, berets,
trench-coats and sneaky reefers. They went on to ask their kids what
that god awful noise was and why on earth those blokes had such long
hair. My parent's generation got Rock and Roll (which in my very
broad definition includes Psychedelia, Heavy Metal and Punk) Pop art,
loon pants, winklepickers and LSD. They wanted to know why the music
we listened to had no discernible tune, and invented the
rap-with-a-silent-C joke for everyone to enjoy. My generation got
huge, phat (with an emphatic PH) electronic bleeps and beats,
Hip-hop, Graffiti, massive trainers, flowerpot hats and Ecstasy. We
are still young enough to believe we like current music (luckily for
us it is not radically different yet).
This is not my mate Tom, looks a bit like him though
The next generation
seem to be content to drink over-priced coffee and grow over-long
beards while listening to the same tired old trance anthems and
munching on the same horse tranquilisers that the hippies were
messing around with in the 70s. In their defence, we are doing the
same thing, generation X is nothing if not greedy, we hung on to the
coat tails of rock and roll, we can latch on to the hipsters flannel
shirts if we want to. Of course, the big difference is how well it is
all classified into sub-genres nowadays, it can't even be narrowed
down to one type of glitch
hop for fuck's sake (it's possible that critics just need to do
something to justify their existence, so why not new genre names. I'm
still a big fan of Post-Womble-Deathcore-Hoedown).
It
might be because they have the new frontier that we never did, the
world wide web, interconnectedness with everyone all the time, a
platform to broadcast your every thought and whim upon, and consume
all the culture that ever was.
There's a lot of it
out there already, maybe now it's all so accessible there's no need
to invent anymore. Or
possibly the next
mass change has
already happened and I am just too old to realise that it is not just
vandalism/noise.
Broadly speaking I
can drop modern, popular musical movements into 3 stages (I'm a
musician, my wife's the artist, if I keep up the art talk I'm going
to get found out as a bluffer pretty quickly) the Jazz age, the Rock
age and the Electronic age. The first half of the 20th
century was dominated by big bands, crooners and swinging good times,
and then Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black turn up and turn
everything upside down (Rock Around The Clock is Big band Swing, I don't care what anybody else says, it is NOT Rock and Roll). After that it's all guitars and rock (be it
'n' roll, -abilly, prog or punk) until Giorgio Moroder buries
everything in synths, Run DMC sample all the beats and old men with
guitars and trumpets harrumph and say it isn't music and anyone can
do it (it is and they really can't). Of course there is a seam of pop
music running through the whole thing from Irving Berlin to Justin
Bieber whose only concern is creating earworms to get your
foot-tapping and your granny humming along.
Small confession, I think Love Yourself is a fucking top tune, and I am not sorry
Of course people get
upset that their idols get old and continue to play, shaking their
heads at grey-haired, arthritic rock and rollers still strutting
about the stage, not remembering that the old swingers, jazzers and
bluesmen played and sang until they dropped (some of them have not
dropped yet, nobody is telling Tony Bennett he should stop now). I
remember Phil Cool
doing a routine about the Stones still playing in the 80s – I can't
get no... Sanatogen - he thought they should have stopped then...
These people are
more upset at the very visible evidence that they are no longer
young, virile or relevant, rock is dead, get over it. I'm sure
sometime back in the late 16th century some ludicrously
hatted Italian noble lamented the fact that Giovanni the Madrigal guy
was still trying to to fit into his minstrel's tights at his age.
I was told these guys were past it when I saw them 25 years ago
After the walk, my
wife and I laughed at the idea of the old people's homes of the
future having an afternoon rave rather than a tea dance, or a sing
song. But Ebeneezer Goode is the new Knees Up Mother Brown, make way
for the next thing. The original rockers probably never expected to
be grey haired and supervised either, but eventually the day room
will be filled with black lights and glow sticks and the disco
biscuits will be rich teas (predunked so as not to hurt your teeth).
Anybody got any Veras? Lovely
