TWELFTH PARAGRAPH
Wed. April 21, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
Perhaps the most troubling/ fascinating opposition in Words and Music is that Morley poses between Simon Fuller’s version of Pop and the version of Pop he attributes to Kylie. The opposition just doesn’t convince. I enjoyed Morley’s characterization of Fuller as Agent Smith/ Burroughs’ Death Dwarf, obsessively metastatizing images of himself (and/or his own banal fantasies) across the body of the mediascape. But is Kylie really opposed to 19/ FullerPop? Or did, in fact, Kylie’s passage from soapactress to pop temptress, from theatre school to popstar, pave the way for Fuller’s hegemony? Didn’t Kylie begin to make the Perfoming Arts Popstar acceptable?
sure mark, but kylie’s become something more than fullerpop hasn’t she. she did pass thru it (alvbeit w/ saw) but she’s come out the other side as something a lot more fulsome. she’s like our reverse-madonna (reverse as in she just keeps getting better with age, then again she’s about 10 years younger than madge so this may not be so accurate). in any case, she’s totally come out on the other side, so i can get with morely’s idea here. there’s also a certain blankness about kylie too – how much do we really know about her? this is helpful because it means she can be whatever we want her to be. she’s ripe fore projection. made some fab records, too.
I don’t think the Madonna parallel works at all, even in reverse (Ray of Light was one of her best albums, if not the best, and that’s one of her latest). Kylie’s trajectory is uneven to say the least; I would say that the SAW records are in the main better than what’s she’s done recently (‘Can’t Get’ and ‘Slow’ are the ONLY highlights of her post-SAW period. There have been real atrocities: the smug Pomo of ‘Confide In Me’ [you know it’s all over for an artist when they start ‘deconstructing their own image’ in videos] and the unspeakable embarrassment of ‘Some Kind of Bliss.’)
The distinction between Fullerpop and ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ seems to be so wafer thin as to be negligilble; so she’s got Cathy Dennis writing songs for her instead of SAW, so what?
Sure,. you can project what you want onto Kylie, but that her makes her empty and unenticing to me….
I like the book a lot (it got me into Tangerine Dream)….. but I couldnt help feeling it was vast rickety structure, bulging and falling apart in palces, based on one man’s rather ill defined attraction towards a rather boring popstrell with one good song, who can mean anything because ultimately she means *nothing*.
Baal OTM and i guess Mark too and i do think Ray of Light a good LP but really the only thing the generalist of Madge needs is a CD of ‘Immaculate Colletion’ so, really, behave…
Ok I haven’t read the book, aside from bits of it standing furtively in the Waterstone’s where I used to work. What strikes me though is that in all the paens to this work I’ve read over the months, no one has mentioned Morley’s quite gargantuan ego… I was quite taken aback by it in fact…
oh god yes, it’s a well-known thing up there in mcr.
I was quite surprised not to see him laying claim to being my actual biological father… he’s responsible for just about everything else after all.
LOL!
brilliant mate.
yeah he gets about old Morley, that’s for sure.
I tried to charitably ignore the ego-tripping; I wasn’t sure if to take it seriously and it certainly was very tedious. That’s I think another way in which Words and Music was weak in comparison with the more corruscatingly self-exposing Nothing.
“The distinction between Fullerpop and ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ seems to be so wafer thin as to be negligilble; so she’s got Cathy Dennis writing songs for her instead of SAW, so what?”
No Idol star would perform a song like “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” though. To do so would be to negate the veneer of faux-humanism which the show’s entire concept is based on.
PS. Fever is a far better album than Ray Of Light.
I haven’t actually finished W&M yet, and I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons is simply not liking Kylie enough.
The Kylie thing always struck me (cynically I admit) as yet another manifestation of Morley’s boundless self-regard…
Watch as he spins the history of pop music around the bland five-foot-nothing figure of an Australian actress! Gasp as he juggles with artists you’ve never heard of, while knowingly endorsing the kind of people most mortals would expect him to hate!
Yawn.
Tim
No Idol star would perform a song like “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” though. To do so would be to negate the veneer of faux-humanism which the show’s entire concept is based on.
Think it may be different in the UK.
Girls ‘I’m already wasted’ Aloud certainly don’t have a veneer of faux-humanism; and even Liberty X have a kind of slick cyborg sheen. Sure, Gareth/Will/Mcmanus are pretty wholesome, but that’s not the full story.
Fever superior to Ray of Light?
No way….
TP, are you sure that’s a ‘personality’? 🙂
Not sure I buy CGYOOMH as the acme of cold cyborg pop; that’s why I found so much of Words and Music difficult to swallow. Wouldn’t want to go all the way with Phillip, but partly what was unsatisfying about W and M was the desperate predictability of its supposed inonoclasm. I mean everyone and his dog likes Can’t Get You Out of My Head; it just isn’t in any way an unexpected reversal to run a history of pop through it. I think W and M exemplifies everything that’s annoying about PM (just as Nothing exemplified everything that’s great about him).
What’s interesting about the examples of Girls Aloud and Liberty X (even overlooking the issues Tom raised) is that both were actually *runners-up* in their respective contests, and both were beaten by groups whose music *did* end up taking the faux-humanist line. This suggests to me that any measure of anti-humanism either group might take on is part of a strategy of product differentiation. Certainly neither groups want you to *remember* that they came from competition shows. In the same way, “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” wouldn’t work if it made you think of Charlene from Neighbours.
This is not to suggest that a more “typical” Idol winner would automatically be bad – Will Young is clearly a million times better than either Hear’say or that “All This Time” woman. But I don’t think that the binary Morley has constructed is as easily dissolved as you make it out to be Mark.
No, Girls Aloud WON Popstars — beating the faux-humanism of the atrocious One True Voice….
Another thing, it’s inaccurate to reduce Fullerpop to Pop Idol/ Popstars alone.
Thing is, Cathy Dennis also wrote ‘Sweet Dreams (My LA ex)’ for one of Fuller’s charges. Can’t for the life of me see why Fuller would turn down CGYOOMH for one of his artists.
Oops my mistake – for some reason I was under the impression that One True Voice won that round.
What would you say is Fullerpop outside of Popstars/Pop Idol? Stuff that he would say is good music? That seems pretty broad to me (see the bizarre case of John Stephens on American Idol 3 for example).
Fullerpop: Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham, S-Club, Rachel Stevens (to name but a few)…