Gideon Coe
|
Don’t you just love the BBC? Don’t you hate it? Can’t get enough, can you? And it makes you sick. Auntie, The Beeb, The British Broadcasting Corporation, The Be Bee Sea – doesn’t it make you uneasy, queasy, bored, awed, curious and furious as you watch it, listen to it, read it, browse it, download it, phone it, text it, tweet it, stalk it, pray to it, or have it beamed directly into your subconscious via its spiffy new iObey app? It’s Jonathon Ross with his obscene phone calls, obscene salary and haircut that refuses to admit it’s not young any more. It’s the uncannily human-like aliens who front Breakfast TV with smiles that give your soul cancer. It’s Jeremy Clarkson’s three-in-a-bed feltch-romp with Gary Lineker and Tim Wonnacott. Probably. Off-the-peg satire, science-free science documentaries, soft news, dance marathons, stand-up comedians performing for charity… it’s a 24/7 multi-cultural, multi-media shit-storm of cynically playful, vacuously informative, celebrity-infested, relentlessly “on-message” tat, signed for the deaf and available to the dead via its Ouija-board service – PRESS YOUR RED BUTTON NOW! But above all else, looming over the killing fields like Michael Barrymore perched above the bloodied corpse of his career, stands the Beeb’s unerring gift for making the worst possible programmes – except for all the ones made by its competitors.
Which brings us, frankly, to BBC 6 Music. Radio 1’s a chav; Radio 2 dresses young but uses Tena Lady; and the less said about commercial radio the better (“Come on down to Dawson’s Utensils for all your cutlery needs, just off the B52 next to the Triple Bypass…”). But 6 Music smirks at us coyly from beneath its Ker-Plunk haircut and says, “I’m not like those other guys – I’m cool. With me, it’s all about the music, babe.”
Except that it’s not. Listen to it. All about the music? It’s all about the CHAT. Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat and more chat. Celebrity chat, Glastonbury chat, news chat, Glastonbury chat, food chat, Glastonbury chat, TV chat, Glastonbury chat, sport chat, Glastonbury chat, relationship chat, Glastonbury chat, weather chat, and “I bought some cutlery this morning – if you have a funny utensil-related story of your own, text the show and let me know. But next up I’ll be discussing the line up for this year’s Glastonbury Festival…” WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT FUCKING GLASTONBURY I REALLY DON’T FUCKING CARE JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP PLEASE PLEASE I’M BEGGING YOU WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET PLEASE.
Ahem. Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yes: the music. Because, in amongst their shameless, year-long advert for the Glastonbury Rally (I swear the Beeb’s TV coverage is produced by Leni Riefenstahl under a pseudonym), they do get round to playing quite a few songs. Classic pop, punk, New Wave, post-punk, indie, with the odd guest-appearance by hiphop and electronica’s more digestible corners. From The Beatles to Squeeze to Florence and the Machine (“Machine”, by the way, refers to her publicity machine, which takes up fifteen whole floors of Euston Tower). Bless them, it’s exactly the sort of station I wished I had back when I was eighteen. And now it’s here. And I hate it. No, hang on, I love it. No, I really do hate it. Okay, okay: I love it, but it makes me feel kinda… sick. Sick and, sometimes, white-lipped with anger.
It’s not just the white-middle-aged-middle-classness of it all (which, obviously, being white, middle-aged and middle class, I frown upon), the endless wallowing in nostalgia for the good old days when we wished we were dead, or the insidiously corrosive musical relativism that suggests it’s fine to like The Smiths AND Alien Sex Fiend (look, sorry, but you can’t support both sides in the Kulturkampf). No. Over and above all that hangs the nagging thought that BBC 6 Music actually stifles the creation of exciting new music by making everyone too aware of all the great stuff that’s already been produced.
Allow me to explain. Old good music used to be hidden. It was a counter-culture and the mainstream reacted with horror at the very thought of it. The radio didn’t play it; it wasn’t used as a bed for trendy ads, football highlights or documentaries; you couldn’t download it at the flick of a switch; you couldn’t even buy it in record shops, unless your idea of “good music” started with Dark Side of the Moon and ended with Rumours. Basically, unless you had a cool older mate with too much pocket money and a vinyl fetish you were stuffed.
And the result of this cultural suppression was almost entirely positive. Sickened by what they saw on Top of the Pops, each generation was forced to reinvent pop for itself, blissfully undaunted by what had gone before. The emphasis was on revolution and originality, not on “living up to” the great bands of the past. And if your original sound turned out to be not so original after all, it didn’t matter because hardly anyone was in a position to spot that you were just reinventing the wheel – how else do you think The Jesus and Mary Chain got away with it for so long?
Things started to change in the mid-80s when sufficient numbers of ex-hippies reached positions of authority to influence the culture. Suddenly The South Bank Show was doing hour-long documentaries on The Velvet Underground and Jim “Nick-Nick” Davidson was using Brain Salad Surgery as his intro music on The Generation Game. As if on cue, the CD arrived, making it cost-effective for record shops to stock large numbers of old albums – especially as everyone over 30 was frantically rebuying their entire record collections in this seductively shiny new format. The assimilation of the counter-culture was well underway, hastened subsequently by the rise of the Punk War veterans and the MP3. Finally, after years in the wilderness, “our” music was popular, accepted, and ubiquitous. It was terrible. Yesterday’s rebellions had been accepted and lionised, but only insofar as they gave the mainstream the illusion of coolness. And, of course, helped to sell things. So Ceremony gets used to flog vodka, Johnny Rotten greases his palms with butter and now we have a Tory Prime Minister who claims his favourite album is “The Queen is Dead”. Just pause for a moment to reflect on that.
Painful as this was for aging punks, the effect on the upcoming generations was, if anything, even worse. Far from being ignorant of pop’s history, they were now drowning in the bloody stuff. Want to be rebellious? Too late – The Sex Pistols got there first. Want to be gloomy? You’ll never do it better than Joy Division, even if you hang yourself. Debauched? Two words: Keith Richards. And so-fucking-on. In fact, it was a double-whammy: on the one hand the kids were made painfully aware that no matter what they tried they’d been beaten to the punch and, on the other hand, it was clear that the end result of all this pouting and posing was just to provide background music for “Flog It!”
Caught between rock and a hard place, the kids took the only way out: they embraced the futility of it all. Unable to be innovative, they made a virtue out of stagnation. Where bands had once had “influences” now they just sounded like other bands. And “sounding like other bands” was magically transformed from a failing into an objective. Oasis were the trail-blazers in this respect. Noel Gallagher spent most of the 90s saying how much he was “influenced” by The Beatles. But he didn’t mean he was inspired by their attitude or spirit (which was how, for example, Bowie and the Pistols influenced Joy Division); he just meant he was ripping-off a few of their musical ideas. And where Noel led, countless others followed, until Indie music had become one giant tribute act, a sort of Civil War Recreation Society where no-one cared which side they were on, so long as there was lots of shouting and everyone got smashed afterwards. It frequently happens to me these days that I hear an unfamiliar song and have absolutely no idea whether it’s brand new or twenty years old. If you think that’s a sign of progress then… well, you’ve got the society you deserve. Unfortunately, I’ve got it as well.
And this is the blighted cultural landscape that BBC 6 Music so diligently services and promotes. They didn’t create it and, to be sure, it would still exist without them, but there’s no getting away from the fact that 6 Music is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. As I type this, Gideon Coe is playing “For What Is Chatteris?” by Half Man Half Biscuit. Before that, it was “Left of Centre” by Suzanne Vega. Any moment now he’s bound to play something by Hot Chip or Friendly Fire. It’s the sound of social quiescence, the soothing bed burbling away beneath the glittering misery of our lives. And it’s not called a “bed” for nothing, is it?
So shut the bloody station down. Not because it would bring a smile to Rupert Murdoch’s cadaverous chops, but just to give the rest of us one less excuse to wallow in the past. It wouldn’t solve anything, but at least it would be a gesture: a voice no longer crying in the wilderness. Except that, if we shut down 6 Music, what the hell would I listen to all day?
|
- RSS Feed 
Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”