ARE HITS LEGIT?

ARE HITS LEGIT?

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Cynthia Rose

by

This has been a fascinating—if dislocating—four weeks. Hie myself off to America for two weeks of MTV and a long day hearing other critics (American and British) publicly debate U.S.-U.K. relations in pop, rock and reality; then a further weekplus in the deep South, stunned by 24-hour religious TV but fascinated by what I learned from local music fans of all races.

Bobby Ann Mason’s brilliant Shiloh short stories are, I found, not jiving about the effects of pop culture on the American heartland. Phil Donahue, the Today show and 24-hour “music television” have brought folks from the Plasmatics to Bobby Womack right into everyone’s living room. And, just as Tom Verlaine claimed to me before I left London, the owners of said TVs and the people who read People aren’t about to be told what they should THINK about Prince or Cyndi Lauper.

Talking with black elementary school students and their jailers (sorry—teachers) for instance, told me a lot more about the Meaning Of Michael Jackson than even the most carefully weighed speculations of the critics I’d talked to and read thus far. Watching kids engaged on a papier-mache project break into a brawl over possession of a blurry newsprint photo of Jackson was a sobering experience...Particularly when it was further explained that cut-out pictures from color magazines get sold in school halls for dimes and quarters. Why Michael in particular, I asked and found: he’s black, man, he’s got style, he’s got magic and—a widespread apprehension among the kids with whom I spoke—he stands for strict morals.

In a poor area of a racially tense Biblebelt city such things seemed a commonsense recipe for success. But parents voiced their disgust that James Brown had recently been forced to cancel a planned concert*due to a lack of ticket sales. Their teens, they complained, regarded JB as a virtual has-been in black culture; one Mom said that her 15-year-old had “even called him an Uncle Tom.”

Back in Britain in time for The Midsummer’s Night Tube—a rare long edition of our “best” pop show, The Tube—l grasped that here mainstream TV was striving to ape MTV. But it stumbled and bumbled along; reggae (an excellent segment) ghettoized as usual and everything else botched or interrupted by vintage Charlie Chaplin clips and less-than-funny skits of political caricature. Still, we managed to get in a madcap encounter with Lee “Scratch” Perry, satellite scoopettes from Boy George in Japan, and—mostly in place of videos—bits and pieces of viable concert film.

But I could feel the wane of intense integration of sound with the experience it is supposed to describe. No one was cruising blastprcLondon with ghetto the ooi0L6re yeYe no table jukeboxes and of rent !°n j° Put*s came from some kind haH u ,ra ije^ a9ency. The life that music ror»l=» ePedLm,e *° °n every street was p ced with the sight of each-man-and-hisWalkman-for themselves down the tube.

Control over culture, it hit me again, is much more obviously exerted in the U.K.

I don’t mean just that 50 records sold in the right place will put you into the national charts (or that 50 pounds properly placed is apparently all you need to crack the “independent” charts). I mean what I tried to explain during the “U.S.-U.K.” debates: this is a small and deeply incestuous isle just now if you’re talking media. Every job in communications is hedged about with the exchange of favors among friends—and most folks “in the know” know exactly why what is happening takes place.

It’s hardly a suprise, for example, to find Frankie Goes To Hollywood hitting No. 1 with “Two Tribes”—a suss, if rather deplorable, merchandising of Americaphobic apocalypse-porn as disco. Frankie’s cake iced in my absence by the 1 a.m. telecast of the song’s “banned” video...an item I dutifully trekked down to Island Records to view, since you won’t see it on MTV. Why won’t U.S. telly touch it? Well, it illustrates the sloganeering dancefloor drivel with a hamfisted boxing match between actors made up as Reagan and Chernenko and most of their time is spent (in true Benny Hill fashion) grabbing each other by the balls. The “long” version of the vid is preceded by a doctored newsfilm of Nixon—much the same thing Red Saunders was doing on rADical Wallpaper’s 45 release back in 1980. And Frankie’s arty commie-PR shots are reminiscent too: they look like part of the 1982 exhibit of fake-Stalinist state portraits held in Manhattan in ’82 by emigre Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.

Frankie is most certainly the hype of hypes (although “Two Tribes” is valid disco, it’s hardly anything more) but one does wonder what ZTT boss Paul Morley does these days with the other three-quarters of his valuable brain. Manipulation of Britain’s tendencies to a) incur a fit of the giggles at ANY mention of S-E-X and b) move immediately to one extreme or t’other whenever a political buzzword hits the air is not creativity—it’s simply an acquired skill. Frankie’s video, I should add, is the work of ex-lOcc team Godley and Creme, so maybe they should take the blame.

For truths about youth perception, I’d rather search out clues among the young. What about Nick Cave’s version of “In The Ghetto,” supposedly a hot independent single at the moment? “I can’t believe he put that out,” moaned one young pal of the man himself. “But what I really can’t believe is no one says how lousy he’s got since the Birthday Party. Face it, the guy wants to be Tom Waits. He’s into drugs, into looking wasted as this thing in itself. His band could be good, but they bloody aren’t yet, and you get these incredible raves every time he plays...the press thinks he’s the greatest human being on earth. It’s like what happened to Neubauten.”

What happened to Neubauten is, quite simply, that stardom seems to have almost disbanded them—leaving opportunists such as Test Department to grab up the PR they generated. Claiming to “comment upon the work ethic” (!), Test Dept, are certainly laboring over their own video. Not to mention their one-off engagement at Cannon Street station: a deed performed in order to provide material for the South of Watford TV special on “metal music” aired a mere week later. No coincidence, either, that all this fuss was timed to take place just moments prior to their premiere New Ybrk engagement. Caveat spectator, Yanks.

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A young friend over last evening asked me if people “back in the U.S.” found it weird that so much British music was so concerned with politics. Yeah, 1 said, 1 think a lot of middle America might; it’s hard to explain. “But what I think about most now IS the news,” he reiterated (this is a chap who currently roadies for Siouxsie’s Banshees). “How can you take pop music seriously now? It’s such a con. It won’t pay the rent, it won’t get you a job. Half of it can’t even cheer you up.”

What does cheer him up, 1 queried. Well— new groups such as the Flowerpot Men, a danceoriented nine-piece named after an old British children’s TV show (“Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men”). And the music on the telly, well that was often a laugh. Stuff like the old Roxy Music clip on Midsummer Night’s Tube.

That clip, which probably lasted all of 90 seconds during an abortive attempt to interview Bryan “Mumbles” Ferry, struck me pretty powerfully too. I’d never seen poxy Roxy at their absolute gal-lizardo height and BOY! did they look sleazy. Eno hunched over the keyboards in a leopardskin suit, locks flowing from his soon-tobe-balding pate; greased-up, made-up Ferry faking angst at the mike; Andy MacKay suited up like a Saxman from Outer Space—it was obviously brasher, sexier and more genuinely outrageous than anything David Bowie ever engineered. Somewhere in that clip lurked the secret of England’s obsession with style as a kind of replacement for physical and social mobility... Somewhere in there lay the secret of undying loyalty to Gary Glitter, Sweet, T. Rex—even Quentin Crisp. Malcolm McLaren, the world’s most well-publicized haberdasher, somehow got born in a blink of those blue-limned eyes.

Later I mentioned that same clip to a writer who told me he’d interviewed Ferry shortly after it was made. “It was weird, you know,” he laughed. “Because he didn’t have his hair greased back when we spoke and he wasn’t wearing anything flamboyant. But when 1 asked him about it, he seemed really worried. All through our interview, he kept coming back to that one point. ‘Do you think we should wear it all the time?’ ‘Were you really suprised when you saw us in street clothes?’ ‘What do you think of us now you’ve seen us without makeup?’ ”

What he thought, he told me, was that they led more or less directly to Boy George. Beamed over smiling from Tokyo at the outset of his “Kiss The Ocean” tour, BG himself was—as usual—full of his own take on said English proclivities: “LOOK at where this country came from., .guys in high heels wearing white wigs and face-powder! It’s not like homosexuals or weirdos are anything new, is it? England is just embarrassed by sex, period. That’s why ^e go in for all this gift-wrapping.” (As he spoke, George was attiring himself in a pure white wedding dress— with veil—for his Japanese debut.) “I mean,” he continued, “it’s a potentially interesting fact that I’m grateful when anyone wants to go out with me. And I suspect I share that with a lot of fans.”

Then George winked broadly. “But, my dears,” he said to the camera, “/got my trousseau by entirely legitimate means.” And Culture Clubbers or culture vultures-, I’d say let’s hear it for all the legit we can get.