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| August 1st, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Permalink) Add Comments |
Early last Fall, I was watching the O.C. with one of my roommates, a fellow art history graduate student, when a commercial for Franz Ferdinand’s new album came on the air. She said to me, “Wow, Franz Ferdinand know their art history.”
While I will admit to watching the O.C., the appropriation of independent punk rock culture in the mainstream media irks me to no end. I started talking to my roommate about Franz Ferdinand’s appropriation of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s poster of Lily Brik as a symptom of the contemporary hijacking of punk rock by the culture industry. She rolled her eyes and said I was ranting.
Franz Ferdinand’s use of the Rodchenko poster, I said to her, has no political purpose. Rather, Franz Ferdinand is borrowing the revolutionary aura of the image and of Russian Constructivism in order to merely appear revolutionary. It would be ironic if it weren’t so common: the idea of Marxism here is turned into symbolic capital; the Rodchenko image enters a system of exchange in which it confers upon Franz Ferdinand not even revolutionary status but an abstract aura of rebellion. The Franz Ferdinand cover makes the band seem cool as — and I suppose I do find some humor in this — Marxist revolution is used to sell CD’s. Franz Ferdinand, in turn, are themselves used as symbolic capital by iPod, Urban Outfitters, and, indeed, the O.C. to exchange the secondhand revolutionary aura of Rodchenko (not to mention the third-hand Maoist revolutionary aura of Gang of Four) for a semblance of relevance to youth culture.
This is, of course, not to say that appropriation is politically suspect, a priori. For example, while I do have problems with the easy cultural references bands like Gang of Four make to Marxist and communist ideas (as well as their insufficiently critical appropriation of reggae/dub), there are worse things than wearing one’s heroes one’s sleeve like a badge — it is worse, to cite the most insistent example, to wear one’s heroes on one’s chest like a Che Guevara t-shirt. And besides, the most relevant new band I’ve found in the Rough Trade universe in some time, the Pipettes, is all about appropriation. But, after being introduced to the world through Rough Trade’s “Counter Culture” series, being hyped to death by the British press, and appropriating older styles of music, the similarities between the Pipettes and Franz Ferdinand end.
I saw the Dansettes in New York a month and a half ago and, while the band is unmistakably good at what they do, there was something missing from their faultless retro Brill Building pop songs: critical distance. The Dansettes, who boast three singers with voices as close to Candi Staton as white girls from Jersey can be, perform the girl-group role completely unironically, as if there was nothing at stake in this music in the first place, as if it was all just about having a good time. The Pipettes, on the other hand, take the piss — to invoke the rhetoric of the British press — out of Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads, and all of the other neo-post-punk bands from two years ago.
Let’s go back to Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in Uniform,” from their third album, Songs of the Free. The song, released not long after the Clash’s “This is the Radio Clash,” mixes the dub-influenced punk rock of Gang of Four’s earlier work with disco. Unlike the Clash, however, Gang of Four’s flirtation with disco and backing female vocals was wholly ironic. It is important to remember that, at around the same time, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and New Order were taking this disco-post-punk sound to the mainstream. In their parody, Gang of Four was claiming authenticity for themselves. The dub-influenced political punk rock of Gang of Four’s first two records, “I Love a Man in Uniform” implied, was real, authentic music in contradistinction to disco, the self-serious disco-punk of “This is the Radio Clash,” the disco-appropriations of the contemporary hip-hop (e.g. Grandmaster Flash, Cold Crush Brothers), and the Clash’s engagement with disco-sampling hip-hop on “The Magnificent Seven.” More damningly, “I Love a Man in Uniform,” in its parodic use of female backing vocals and its equation of disco with materialistic consumption, seems to lazily suggest that the female pop tradition is inauthentic and manufactured, which was noticeably out of step with Gang of Four’s late 70’s peers the Slits, the Delta 5, and especially X Ray Spex, whose critical take on the construction of femininity in the pop tradition nonetheless built from it instead of writing it off.
“I Like a Boy in Uniform,” the a-side to the Pipettes’ debut single (2005) resumes the pop deconstructionism of X Ray Spex, et alia, but with an insistent fidelity to aspects of that pop tradition. In its obvious reference to “I Love a Man in Uniform,” the Pipettes counter the girl-pop as materialistic consumption position of Gang of Four. More relevant, however, is the Pipettes’ take on the neo-post-punk of our time. Franz Ferdinand’s retreading of Gang of Four and Josef K may have been obvious to the initiated, but, to most of the O.C. viewers who discovered Franz Ferdinand in that iPod commercial, this music was completely new and, at the same time, a logical extension of the previous years’ fads, the retro electro of Fischerspooner and the disco-punk of “House of Jealous Lovers.” But this decade’s yearly succession of retro movements — various “old” schools (e.g. ‘88, ‘93) of hip-hop (Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples; 2000), garage rock (the Strokes, the White Stripes; 2001), electro (Fischerspooner, Peaches; 2002), disco-punk (the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem; 2003), and post-punk (2004) — led to last year’s year of the cheerleader. To be sure, the retro-ization of girl-group pop has its own tradition, from at least as early as the Go-Go’s, Josie Cotton, and Toni Basil in the 80’s and continuing through to the Aislers Set and Saturday Looks Good to Me, among many others, in this decade. Last year, we saw countless artists do the Toni Basil “Hey Mickey” retro cheerleader thing, from the ubiquitous Gwen Stefani, to the ultra-trendy Go! Team, to Architecture in Helsinki’s relatively overlooked but stunning “Wishbone.” “I Like a Boy in Uniform” rode this fad to the Pipettes’ current cult status to the point where their debut album, released earlier this week, was among the year’s most anticipated.
But the retro pop of “I Like a Boy in Uniform” is not just retro. At the same time as it takes on Gang of Four, it takes on all of Gang of Four’s imitators, from the humorless reverence of Radio 4 to the nod-and-wink pastiche of LCD Soundsystem to the enforced cultural amnesia of Franz Ferdinand. At a time when post-punk was not only being rehashed by young upstart bands, but by entire youth culture industry pushes, the Pipettes’ repetition of “I Love a Man in Uniform” — Gang of Four being the central band of the revival — compares itself to Franz Ferdinand’s repetition of Gang of Four tout court. This comparison calls out the new boy-punk nonsense as the commercial fad that it is. What could be more manufactured and inauthentic than a girl-group pop song? How about the post-punk fad?
For me, the appeal of the Pipettes is conceptual. They are a pretty good retro girl-group outfit, but Saturday Looks Good to Me writes more formally interesting songs and the Aislers Set sounds more authentic. The Pipettes’ appropriation of girl-group pop seems to me a critical move in the tradition of late 80’s and 90’s indiepop bands, particularly Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, who take aim at the idea of rock and roll as the serious and authentic counterpoint to frivolous, manufactured feminized pop music. (I have written about Television Personalities’ reaction to the same phenomenon.) Where Talulah Gosh’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Thank God” and Heavenly’s “Cool Guitar Boy” ask the question, “What makes the Rolling Stones serious music?”, the Pipettes ask the same question of Gang of Four. To be sure, “I Like a Boy in Uniform” is more serious than Franz Ferdinand and makes it plain for all to see.
Many miss the point of indiepop or anorak pop or twee or whatever they’re calling it these days. For Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, the point is not to make cute music. The cuteness of their music, conventionally feminine, calls into question the seriousness and authenticity of all the cool guitar boys. But it is fair to say that a lot of indiepop bands after the heyday of Sarah Records misunderstood the movement and made cute music for cuteness’ sake. In the same way, I fear that we will end up missing the point of the Pipettes. Being that retro schools of girl-pop are currently in vogue, it would be a shame for “I Love a Boy in Uniform” to get lost in the shuffle of the trend and for the legacy of their critical retro girl-group assault on the neo-post-punk trend to be remembered as just another stylistic fad in our decade’s endless succession of decontextualized retro styles.
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