Post by Fuggle on Jan 12, 2008 17:03:08 GMT -5
The Power of 7
12/01/2008
As today's Telegraph DVD chronicles 1977, Mark Hudson asks why years ending in seven create such great pop
The DVD that comes free with today's Daily Telegraph chronicles the tumultuous events of 1977, a year that saw Baader-Meinhof kidnappings, National Front marches, and the emergence of Margaret Thatcher.
Tea at Number 10: Tony Blair
attempted to co-opt the energy of
Britpop
It was also one of pop music's true anni mirabiles. But that's how it seems to be with years ending in the number seven. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love (1967), and the 30th anniversary of hippiedom's brutal nemesis - punk rock in 1977. It was also 20 years since the birth of acid house in 1987, and 10 years since the confluence of Britpop and Britart created Cool Britannia in 1997.
Maybe there is something in the fact that every culture has accorded a particular potency to the number seven. Or perhaps it's just that a pattern has been set and it takes music a good decade to grind forward to a big new idea. Whatever the reason, pop's currents build to peaks of creativity in which each new mini-generation reaches its musical apotheosis in a year ending in seven.
1967
The forces that created the Summer of Love had been building for years: the anti-conformism of the beat generation, widespread availability of hallucinogenic drugs, disillusionment with materialism and the Vietnam war. Yet while purists might argue that the great psychedelic records (Revolver, Pet Sounds etc) were all released in the previous year, 1967 was the moment when it all came together - when it not only seemed that the world would change, but in many ways it actually did.
"All across the nation, there's a strange vibration, people in motion," sang Scott McKenzie in San Francisco - a corny cash-in which nonetheless crystallised the sense of a generation on the move.
Britain saw the rise of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd at the legendary UFO club, mass "happenings" such as the 24-Hour Technicolor Dream, and, of course, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper - not their best album, but imbued with a magic inseparable from the atmosphere of that year. Grotesque as the consequences of all that drug-taking may have been, the world threw off some imperceptible mental shackle in 1967, which - for better or worse - it has never quite managed to put back on.
1977
"No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones!" sang the Clash in their blistering manifesto 1977. Punk was the angry counterblast of the younger brothers and sisters of the hippie idealists, a raging celebration of the jagged, the monochrome and the brutally synthetic, in which all previous music was consigned to the dumper. But it didn't happen overnight. By the mid-1970s, hippiedom had degenerated into a drab, stoned consumerism dominated by super-rich dinosaur bands of the Floyd-Zeppelin kind.
While David Bowie and Roxy Music proposed a glamorous counter-aesthetic, it took a group of unemployed, musically illiterate London teenagers to shake things up. Formed in 1975, the Sex Pistols launched themselves on the world by swearing on teatime television, demonstrating the cosy insularity of Britain and opening the floodgates to a wave of bands who appeared out of nowhere, learning their instruments as they went - the Clash, the Damned, Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees and hundreds more.
Punk climaxed in an explosion of new music in 1977, America producing Talking Heads, Blondie, Television and the Ramones, Britain responding with mavericks such as Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and the great zeitgeist-rider Bowie. The "summer of hate", a conscious inversion of the hippie highpoint, saw punks and teddy boys battling it out in London's King's Road, while the Queen's Silver Jubilee provoked a scabrous riposte in the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen. Music would never be the same again.
1987
This was the year the generations divided, when pop became too large and multi-generational to accommodate just one mainstream, and when digitally generated dance rhythms seemed to open up a new musical future.
Born in the clubs of Ibiza, acid house united the bass pulse of Chicago techno with the euphoric glow of the "designer drug", ecstasy. Yet in the journey to these shores, acid house turned into something quintessentially British as tens of thousands gathered for one-off raves in abandoned warehouses and freezing fields off the M25 - losing themselves in a transcendent, loved-up anonymity that seemed the perfect antidote to the materialism and individualism of Thatcher's Britain.
While every previous movement centred on stars and icons, acid house was about the shared experience of the crowd. While the emphasis on freedom and togetherness created parallels with the hippie era that became explicit in 1988's second Summer of Love, there was no wider ideology.
"Largin' it" was an end in itself, and as rave culture moved indoors in response to government clampdowns, idealism gave way to blatant commercialism.
The 1960s babyboomer generation, meanwhile, found an outlet in "world music", a term invented at a meeting of record label heads in a London pub in June 1987. Twenty years on, the appeal of earthy, off-kilter rhythms and voices of yearning otherness seems as strong as ever.
1997
By the mid-1990s, guitars were back with a vengeance. If acid house's digital beats were about exclusivity - about youth withdrawing into its own subcultural bubble - Britpop restored the heart to the British pop scene, drawing the country into a great national knees-up in which many of the melodies felt comfortingly half-familiar from the '60s.
While Oasis, Blur, Pulp and their peers drew on everything from punk to rave, their defining influence was classic Swinging London pop at its most British - Beatles, Kinks, Small Faces and the Who.
With a parallel generation of artists - the YBAs - restoring the fortunes of the British art scene, a young new prime minister at Number 10 and a buoyant economy, 1997 saw a mood of national self-confidence and optimism that hadn't been seen in 40 years.
Indeed, Britpop's approach to pop history was essentially reverential. If pop rebellion had been based around the conceit that the older generation - and parents in particular - could not understand, the Britpop generation was the first whose parents had also been through the pop experience.
"I always felt my parents were right about everything," said Blur's Damon Albarn, whose father briefly managed the archetypal 1967 band Soft Machine.
Albarn did, however, opt out of the Blair government's attempted co-option of Britpop - steering clear of the cringemaking "Tea at Number 10", a meeting of pop and media faces which provided the defining publicity stunt of 1997's Cool Britannia moment.
2007
It was the best of times and the worst of times. In 2007, more people consumed more music and saw more bands than ever before. But the recording industry faced collapse, and with it the great narrative that powered pop from Heartbreak Hotel onwards. If you thought rock's catalysts were youth rebellion and social emancipation, it was in fact the sale of records, and of albums in particular, that financed music's artistic triumphs and the excessive lifestyles of its creators. As downloads threatened to make the "physical album" worthless, the music industry faced the bleak prospect of finding a new way of paying for its existence.
Radiohead and Prince gave albums away through the internet or newspapers - and paradoxically found themselves in profit. Where once bands toured to promote albums, CDs were now simply a way of advertising super-lucrative live performances.
And with the year's biggest-grossing live band, the Rolling Stones, in their sixties, the old rock and roll conceit about generational conflict finally bit the dust. In 2007, every manifestation of pop's past was simultaneously available, through the internet or through a live scene in which it was difficult to know which decade you were living in: gig of the year was Led Zeppelin while '80s stars such as Rick Astley and Bananarama revived their careers through retro roadshows. A new generation of teenage stars emerged, who recorded in their bedrooms and promoted themselves via MySpace and YouTube.
As pop adapted to a radically changed environment, there was the sense that some of the seriousness that settled on the music with Dylan, the Beatles and the idea of "the album" was finally lifting, that pop was just music for "the kids" to listen to in a way it hadn't been since the days of skiffle and Summer Holiday. Pop, it seemed, had come full circle.
12/01/2008
As today's Telegraph DVD chronicles 1977, Mark Hudson asks why years ending in seven create such great pop
The DVD that comes free with today's Daily Telegraph chronicles the tumultuous events of 1977, a year that saw Baader-Meinhof kidnappings, National Front marches, and the emergence of Margaret Thatcher.
Tea at Number 10: Tony Blair
attempted to co-opt the energy of
Britpop
It was also one of pop music's true anni mirabiles. But that's how it seems to be with years ending in the number seven. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love (1967), and the 30th anniversary of hippiedom's brutal nemesis - punk rock in 1977. It was also 20 years since the birth of acid house in 1987, and 10 years since the confluence of Britpop and Britart created Cool Britannia in 1997.
Maybe there is something in the fact that every culture has accorded a particular potency to the number seven. Or perhaps it's just that a pattern has been set and it takes music a good decade to grind forward to a big new idea. Whatever the reason, pop's currents build to peaks of creativity in which each new mini-generation reaches its musical apotheosis in a year ending in seven.
1967
The forces that created the Summer of Love had been building for years: the anti-conformism of the beat generation, widespread availability of hallucinogenic drugs, disillusionment with materialism and the Vietnam war. Yet while purists might argue that the great psychedelic records (Revolver, Pet Sounds etc) were all released in the previous year, 1967 was the moment when it all came together - when it not only seemed that the world would change, but in many ways it actually did.
"All across the nation, there's a strange vibration, people in motion," sang Scott McKenzie in San Francisco - a corny cash-in which nonetheless crystallised the sense of a generation on the move.
Britain saw the rise of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd at the legendary UFO club, mass "happenings" such as the 24-Hour Technicolor Dream, and, of course, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper - not their best album, but imbued with a magic inseparable from the atmosphere of that year. Grotesque as the consequences of all that drug-taking may have been, the world threw off some imperceptible mental shackle in 1967, which - for better or worse - it has never quite managed to put back on.
1977
"No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones!" sang the Clash in their blistering manifesto 1977. Punk was the angry counterblast of the younger brothers and sisters of the hippie idealists, a raging celebration of the jagged, the monochrome and the brutally synthetic, in which all previous music was consigned to the dumper. But it didn't happen overnight. By the mid-1970s, hippiedom had degenerated into a drab, stoned consumerism dominated by super-rich dinosaur bands of the Floyd-Zeppelin kind.
While David Bowie and Roxy Music proposed a glamorous counter-aesthetic, it took a group of unemployed, musically illiterate London teenagers to shake things up. Formed in 1975, the Sex Pistols launched themselves on the world by swearing on teatime television, demonstrating the cosy insularity of Britain and opening the floodgates to a wave of bands who appeared out of nowhere, learning their instruments as they went - the Clash, the Damned, Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees and hundreds more.
Punk climaxed in an explosion of new music in 1977, America producing Talking Heads, Blondie, Television and the Ramones, Britain responding with mavericks such as Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and the great zeitgeist-rider Bowie. The "summer of hate", a conscious inversion of the hippie highpoint, saw punks and teddy boys battling it out in London's King's Road, while the Queen's Silver Jubilee provoked a scabrous riposte in the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen. Music would never be the same again.
1987
This was the year the generations divided, when pop became too large and multi-generational to accommodate just one mainstream, and when digitally generated dance rhythms seemed to open up a new musical future.
Born in the clubs of Ibiza, acid house united the bass pulse of Chicago techno with the euphoric glow of the "designer drug", ecstasy. Yet in the journey to these shores, acid house turned into something quintessentially British as tens of thousands gathered for one-off raves in abandoned warehouses and freezing fields off the M25 - losing themselves in a transcendent, loved-up anonymity that seemed the perfect antidote to the materialism and individualism of Thatcher's Britain.
While every previous movement centred on stars and icons, acid house was about the shared experience of the crowd. While the emphasis on freedom and togetherness created parallels with the hippie era that became explicit in 1988's second Summer of Love, there was no wider ideology.
"Largin' it" was an end in itself, and as rave culture moved indoors in response to government clampdowns, idealism gave way to blatant commercialism.
The 1960s babyboomer generation, meanwhile, found an outlet in "world music", a term invented at a meeting of record label heads in a London pub in June 1987. Twenty years on, the appeal of earthy, off-kilter rhythms and voices of yearning otherness seems as strong as ever.
1997
By the mid-1990s, guitars were back with a vengeance. If acid house's digital beats were about exclusivity - about youth withdrawing into its own subcultural bubble - Britpop restored the heart to the British pop scene, drawing the country into a great national knees-up in which many of the melodies felt comfortingly half-familiar from the '60s.
While Oasis, Blur, Pulp and their peers drew on everything from punk to rave, their defining influence was classic Swinging London pop at its most British - Beatles, Kinks, Small Faces and the Who.
With a parallel generation of artists - the YBAs - restoring the fortunes of the British art scene, a young new prime minister at Number 10 and a buoyant economy, 1997 saw a mood of national self-confidence and optimism that hadn't been seen in 40 years.
Indeed, Britpop's approach to pop history was essentially reverential. If pop rebellion had been based around the conceit that the older generation - and parents in particular - could not understand, the Britpop generation was the first whose parents had also been through the pop experience.
"I always felt my parents were right about everything," said Blur's Damon Albarn, whose father briefly managed the archetypal 1967 band Soft Machine.
Albarn did, however, opt out of the Blair government's attempted co-option of Britpop - steering clear of the cringemaking "Tea at Number 10", a meeting of pop and media faces which provided the defining publicity stunt of 1997's Cool Britannia moment.
2007
It was the best of times and the worst of times. In 2007, more people consumed more music and saw more bands than ever before. But the recording industry faced collapse, and with it the great narrative that powered pop from Heartbreak Hotel onwards. If you thought rock's catalysts were youth rebellion and social emancipation, it was in fact the sale of records, and of albums in particular, that financed music's artistic triumphs and the excessive lifestyles of its creators. As downloads threatened to make the "physical album" worthless, the music industry faced the bleak prospect of finding a new way of paying for its existence.
Radiohead and Prince gave albums away through the internet or newspapers - and paradoxically found themselves in profit. Where once bands toured to promote albums, CDs were now simply a way of advertising super-lucrative live performances.
And with the year's biggest-grossing live band, the Rolling Stones, in their sixties, the old rock and roll conceit about generational conflict finally bit the dust. In 2007, every manifestation of pop's past was simultaneously available, through the internet or through a live scene in which it was difficult to know which decade you were living in: gig of the year was Led Zeppelin while '80s stars such as Rick Astley and Bananarama revived their careers through retro roadshows. A new generation of teenage stars emerged, who recorded in their bedrooms and promoted themselves via MySpace and YouTube.
As pop adapted to a radically changed environment, there was the sense that some of the seriousness that settled on the music with Dylan, the Beatles and the idea of "the album" was finally lifting, that pop was just music for "the kids" to listen to in a way it hadn't been since the days of skiffle and Summer Holiday. Pop, it seemed, had come full circle.