So listen, the 60s died brutally. We all know that. All that optimism and goodness, the fond things, just got absolutely suffocated and beaten down by too many years in the jungle, unforeseen technological advances and the inevitable rise of globalization. The Beatles broke up in 1970. Looking back, as someone born in the late eighties, I can’t imagine that anyone did not see that coming from a mile away. It seems like the Fabs were on the verge of calling it a day for the last three or four years that they were together; what with being the biggest band ever and all, obviously it couldn’t last forever.

Same goes for all of that stuff that gets tagged on to everyone’s memories of the 1960s and all of the things that those of us who never saw it associate with the period: it was always going to collapse into itself. The movements, all of them, didn’t work out as well as everyone had planned. Vietnam was still happening. The Cold War, in full force. Advertising and mass-media reached incredible new heights. All of those usual things. The Me-Decade.

And so we turn our focus of Postmodernism in Popular Music to the early 1970s. A lot happened in the early 1970s, music-wise that would be worth noting: Harvest, Songs of Love and Hate and Ege Bamyasi all happened and those were all great. R&B and Motown begat 70s soul beginning of course with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971 which would be perfected a year later with Al Green’s less political, but more overtly baby-making Let’s Stay Together. George Clinton and his Funkadelic produced Maggot Brain, thus unleashing vast hordes of funk imitators wielding science-fiction bass guitars. George Harrison surprised everyone by becoming the first Beatle to have a successful solo record with his mammoth triple-LP, All Things Must Pass.

To bring things back to Earth a little bit – though given what I’m about to say, bringing things back to Earth might be an inappropriate phrase – this section is about Glam Rock. That’s right, Glam Rock: androgyny, sci-fi, fuzz, rockabilly, strings and heaps of blow. What could be more appropriate a discussion point for discussing the advent of the excesses of the 1970s than men in women’s clothing singing songs about aliens? Of course, the majority of the Glam Rock that would be actually produced was more or less tripe, so I will obviously be focusing on the artier wing of the subgenre. Specifically, this section will primarily revolve around, for the sake of both brevity and quality, the early 1970s input of T. Rex, Roxy Music and David Bowie. To be even more specific, I will be mostly be discussing the albums Electric Warrior, For Your Pleasure, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane here to illustrate the direction that pop music took in the post-Beatles era with regards to music, culture and literature. Hang on to yourself.

The Hippy’s Lament

Marc Bolan formed Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1967 as a psychedelic folk group and would release several albums under this name and format – the group achieved decidedly middling levels of success. Meanwhile, the young David Bowie was treading in similar waters with his “Space Oddity”, that is, cutting his teeth as a minor player in the overcrowded late-60s folk scene; Brian Ferry was teaching ceramics, apparently. Thousands of bands trying to be both psychedelic and poppy as well as to more or less be the Beatles in a standing room only British rock scene; as with everything, something had to collapse.

By 1970, Bolan and his group, which typically consisted of a rotating cast of supporting players, began to incorporate electric instruments into their sound as well as elements of rockabilly, British blues and hard rock, which would eventually synthesize the glam aesthetic. Though Bolan and his cohorts, as well as countless other British musicians including the Rolling Stones had been incorporating makeup and androgynous theatrics into their stage show and persona for some time, this trend came to a boil by the first years of the decade. Bowie had already appeared on the cover of his Man Who Sold the World album wearing a dress and by 1971 would release Hunky Dory, a record which would again feature the apparently bisexual Bowie on the cover in an overtly feminine look.

Hunky Dory, though featuring a number of Bowie’s most well-known songs including “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, was only a mild indicator of the sexually-charged glitz and glamor that would appear in the music of David Bowie barely a year later. However, many elements of what was to come are very evident on the record: science-fiction imagery, the aforementioned blatant sexual overtones and almost comedic, grand, epic string arrangements and instrumentation all run rampant on the record.
This is likely the natural extension of the direction that the most influential pop music of the late 1960s was heading: the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground had all, by close of the decade launched into the practice of, as Brian Wilson would describe, using the studio as an instrument unto itself. Pop music was getting bigger, and not just in popularity; less concerned with writing simple, catchy confections, pop musicians developed an aesthetic of expanding their music in all directions sonically and thematically while at once remaining wholly accessible. Coupled with the advent of the sexual revolution and the death of the decade of ideals, in the case of hard rock groups such as Led Zeppelin, the music of the 1970s would be dirty, pessimistic and positively dripping with sex.

Going back to Lyotard, “it is well known that during the 1960s, in all of the most highly developed societies, it [narrative knowledge] reached such explosive dimensions among those preparing to practice the professions – the students – that there was noticeable decrease in productivity at laboratories and universities unable to protect themselves from its contamination. Expecting this, with hope or fear, to lead to a revolution (as was then often the case) is out of the question: it will not change the order of things in postindustrial society overnight. But this doubt on the part of scientists must be taken into account as a major factor in evaluating the present and future status of scientific knowledge.” (Lyotard 128) Lyotard is of course suggesting that to have a knowledge of the issues at hand, particularly when faced with the realization of a harsh industrial framework, is not merely enough to achieve liberation, and this is why the movements of the 60s failed – all that existed was idealism.

Flying Saucer, Take Me Away

In 1971 Tyrannosaurus Rex, now going by the shortened moniker, T. Rex, unleashed Electric Warrior and Glam was official and unavoidable. The highest selling album in Britain for 1971 and with a deliciously appropriate front cover featuring Bolan with his guitar and a giant amplifier all outlined in gold on a black plane, Electric Warrior is a fabulously loud and brash hard rock stomp with a psychedelic twist and a groove so tight, one can scarcely get through track one without aimlessly pelvic thrusting in every possible direction.

By taking the aforementioned genres folk, country and blues and tossing them through the sexy-sci-fi filter, T. Rex with their Electric Warrior here crafted a grimy Postmodern masterwork that mixes and matches genres at will under a vast shield of thick irony. Make no mistake, this record is the very essence of camp - it is campy as hell - steeped in both tongue-in-cheek giddiness and almost tragic sincerity at once; it is a chaotic mess of contradictions and sidetracks. The most famous song from the record, the hopelessly rambunctious party anthem “Get It On”, brilliant as it is, is completely misleading to the multifaceted personality of the remainder of the record: Electric Warrior is the early 1970s embodied in all of its confusion, chaos, sincerity, and glitz, it is a seething ball of frustration and angst wrapped in a warm blanket of fuzzy, fabulous boogie.

When we get to Ziggy Stardust, these issues will take a profound one-eighty into clarity; however, Bowie’s album, Glam’s climactic moment, is an exercise in self-assuredness, where Electric Warrior is a hesitant dive into more or less uncharted territory. As Derrida says, “Prefaces, along with forwards, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preamble, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre-, the route that has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it.” (Derrida 150) With that in mind, Electric Warrior proves separate from the cannon of Glam and indeed Pop itself. Being a preamble, the first major example of a movement, it is almost a separate entity altogether as it is an experiment, both the summing of a number of elements and something which is yet to be perfected and which would be totally modified barely two years later.

Of course, it is known that Bolan intended the record to be his American breakthrough, an achievement which would allude him well past his 1977 death. T. Rex was a strictly British phenomenon, which is extremely interesting as it is a rather unusual take on our paralleling of High and Low forms as demonstrated in the earlier section: Bolan attained spectacular mainstream success in his native United Kingdom, however would be forever eluded by the holy grail of rock-stardom, America. Thus, he is both legend on the small-scale and utter failure on the large and his blatant pandering with Electric Warrior is proof of this. The record is a failed attempt to conquer the largest market of them all, that is, an effort designed to appeal to mainstream audiences but nevertheless denied likely due to its overt sexuality and camp value, things that American audiences would be unlikely to embrace easily.

Curiously, 1971 was also the year that Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album, which proved to be a spectacular, overwhelming success; a record that with its allusions to Tolkien and mysticism was not without its share of camp. What was the difference? What led to “Stairway to Heaven” becoming the most fantastically overplayed song of the decade, where the far superior “Cosmic Dancer” was relegated to a minor blip on the American radar? Both songs contain elements of rock, psychedelia and folk, as well as a lyrical focus on science-fiction/fantasy imagery. Likely it would have been the overt sexuality of the latter that would lead to its place in the forgotten bin of minorly successful singles as Bolan’s flamboyant dress, makeup and lyrical penchant for female perspective with hyper-masculine twist would have been deeply confusing for American audiences.

However, it is this exactly what makes the androgynous aspect of Glam so profoundly Pomo: this blending of polarities. David Bowie appearing on album covers in drag and Marc Bolan discussing dancing his way out of the womb represent the shifting view of what is masculine and what is feminine becoming blurred and united. As Irigaray notes, “To remember that we must go on living and creating worlds is our task. But it can be accomplished only through the combined efforts of the two halves of the world” the masculine and the feminine.” (Irigaray 228) the Glam-rocker’s devotion to merging of sexualities only suggests a manner in which music can be improved and it is a direction that follows popular music well into the present.

Rock and Roll Suicide

In 1972, David Bowie unveiled Glam Rock’s defining moment, a dense concept album about the degeneration of hippy culture into vice and disillusionment titled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The narrative of the record follows the eponymous spaceman, an alien rock star come to earth preaching peace, love and hope for a planet which, according to Bowie, has only five years left in which to exist, only to be consumed by drugs, disease and fame. Again, where Electric Warrior is a vague stab at new territory, Ziggy Stardust is almost too confident for its own good; it is a ballsy, flashy and grand eruption from one of rock’s most important figures, an announcement of Bowie’s prowess not only as a fiercely skilled songwriter, but also as a highly idiosyncratic, intelligent and flamboyant artist.

Equally steeped in duality and contradiction, Ziggy Stardust is again flashy and brash, yet deeply pessimistic and dark. The narrative is indicative of the postmodern notions of disillusionment, chaos and paranoia in contemporary culture with Ziggy’s inevitable fall from grace triggered by a harsh society that in its excesses was simply not able to sustain itself and handle the message. Through greed and corruption caused by the sheer availability and convenience of vice and production, the naïve Ziggy Stardust is as doomed as those he is trying to save. Ziggy falls into the demands of constant satisfaction, desire and property that have in turn led to the profound excess of the postindustrialist Western culture and in this way, the narrative of Ziggy Stardust parallels the narrative of the culture of the times. The hopefulness, the peace and love simply could not sustain themselves in the face of gluttonous capitalism.

This is of course reflected in the ways that the Glam Rockers presented themselves on stage and the elements of their music, lyrical content aside. David Bowie, during this period based his stage persona around the Ziggy Stardust character with flaming red hair, glittery and outrageous makeup and flashing, sequined catsuits. Bowie at the time was the epitome of 1970s excess with not only his dress but also his offstage behavior, which included a prolific cocaine addiction rumored to be on par with that of Sly Stone who himself was liable to tout about a violin-case packed with powder. Then again, which rock stars of the 1970s weren’t cocaine addicts? However, no one did it so flamboyantly as Bowie who would come to parallel the character that he created; his stage performance would often feature Bowie performing mock-fellatio upon guitarist Mick Ronson as he played along with numerous other displays of fierce fuck-you sexuality and outrageous theatrics.

Furthermore the actual music that was being played was clearly indicative of the moniker ‘Glam.’ Dramatic string arrangements contrasted with sparse acoustic ballads along with blaring horns, epic guitar solos and Bowie’s strutting, theatrical delivery made Ziggy Stardust a swaggering, cocksure opus of postmodern culture. Drowning the sorrows of failure in drugs and sex, the sheer excess of everything surrounding David Bowie’s music and persona circa 1972 is a stark reflection of the uncertainty and chaos that would come define the Postmodern era. Ziggy Stardust is merely an instrument through which Bowie conveys the song of the times: everything is not as we were led to believe, thus we will drown out our disillusionment with drugs and meaningless sex, which, of course, will only make things worse.

The increased access to knowledge has strengthened this disillusionment wholly for as knowledge is increased, so too must occur what Lyotard defines postmodernism as at its very base: “an incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 123) We learn more about the world in which we live and as such, we learn to question the foundations that we were told that society is built upon. Postmodernism rejects the Grand Narrative of culture just as Ziggy Stardust does through his own messages of hope, however, like the hippy movement, he too was unable to stop the forces that he was rebelling against and thus met his downfall.

Fallout '73

Bowie immediately followed Ziggy Stardust a year later with another record under the Ziggy Stardust banner titled Aladdin Sane, a denser, darker album that Bowie would refer to as “Ziggy goes to America.” The record toes a very pessimistic line, being the very aftermath of Ziggy’s fall from grace, and as such can be seen as Bowie’s ultimate lashing-out against the chains that bind him. The sexual, artistic and cultural boundaries that keep things static: “David Bowie is a male,” “David Bowie is a pop singer”, “David Bowie is a British Citizen,” etc. – are entirely indicative of this Grand Narrative which is there to be challenged.

With Aladdin Sane, Bowie, though he would continue to be an innovator well beyond the close of the 1970s, gave his last gasp as a member of the hippy movement. Ziggy Stardust was dying, his message crushed and now he was pissed off and it shows in the smoldering ten tracks including a scathing cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, a bouncing pop number turned warped and adrenalized meltdown by the thrashing and flailing Ziggy Stardust. Not surprisingly, the last album Bowie would record with the band the Spiders From Mars would follow later in the same year and would consist entirely of covers, thus representing Ziggy Stardust’s death by assimilation in the square mass of drones. Bowie for his part would round out the decade with an album based around George Orwell’s 1984, a harsh British appropriation of American (Black) Soul music and a trio of albums recorded with Brian Eno in Berlin that would be integral to the rise of electronic music.

Meanwhile in 1973, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and their Roxy Music would take Glam into arty new territory with their album, For Your Pleasure, which may well be considered the subgenre’s swan song. In a way, this record represents the streamlining of Glam as Roxy Music reduce it to its essentials, taking away the flamboyant arrangements and flourishes and replacing them with a much more foreboding and ominous set of synthesizers and saxophone trills. Less of an overt pastiche than Electric Warrior and less conceptual than Ziggy Stardust, For Your Pleasure is more of an embracing than a rebellion, a fluid merging of ideas and styles, a welcoming of new sounds and territories. It is equally an expression of disillusionment, however unlike the kicking and screaming of David Bowie, it is a slow-burning formal rather than lyrical protest. Led by Eno’s innovative soundsculpting, Roxy Music carved out dense new forms of rock and roll. Disjointed song structures, unusual instrumental arrangements and bold new sound ventures led to a colder and more mechanical interpretation of Glam that manages to never skimp on the things that really matter.

For Your Pleasure grabbed pop and took it into modernity – no longer would pop music be warm, fuzzy and organic; pop in the post-Eno era is harsh, digital and economical. The eight tracks presented on this album bounce, hop and soar with the best pop songs of the era, however, there is an unusual feel to the set: it retains many of Glam’s essential traits including the overt sexuality, traditional pop sensibility and madcap pastiche wrapped in a hard rock sheen that had previously characterized it, however it feels desolate and sleek. This very polished vision is extremely appropriate in relation to the arc of Postmodernism in popular music and as well to that of Glam Rock as For Your Pleasure is, like Aladdin Sane (both albums were released within less than a month of each other), Glam post-Ziggy, the aftermath of the realization of the great death of the hippy and the subsequent acceptance of said death. Where Electric Warrior had wisps of that dream lingering about and saw Glam rise as a response to the death of the 1960s, and by extension exposed T. Rex as an unlikely heir to the Beatles on the pop throne, it would eventually give way to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, the peak of the movement and the signal for its eventual downfall and finally to the Pop Apocalypse of For Your Pleasure, the moment when robots took glam from the aliens.

Oddly, this extremely brief reign and subsequent downfall of Glam Rock lasted only three years before it imploded onto itself, however, it remains extremely important to the scope of pop history as it is the direct descendent of the Brit-Pop of the Beatles, a direct response to the breakup of that institution as well as the death of the decade that spawned them. It is the direction that pop took immediately following the disillusioning of its inventors, a harsh, aesthetically-driven blast into modernity that sometimes appears as a dream and sometimes as a nightmare. This was the moment where the 1970s came into bloom, when the culture reared its head and rolled all over itself – nothing was as it seemed, though this prospect need not be as terrifying as it might seem, in fact, the possibilities for growth would prove to be endless.

Comments

• June 18, 2009, Patrick Grant writes: Referring to "For Your Pleasure" as "the moment when the robots took glam from the aliens" is exceptional. Your description of "Electric Warrior" as preamble or preface to glam rock is pretty spot on. I wouldn't (ever!) say that Cosmic Dancer is better than Stairway, though. Despite the fact that it's absolutely everywhere (most hilariously in the subtitle of The Crow TV series), Stairway is actually a masterpiece. It's one of the better examples of rock n' roll poetry being married to somewhat virtuosic musicianship in a blown-wide-open song structure. And on top of that, it's fucking catchy! While this is somewhat of a synopsis of glam article, it might be interesting to do a consideration of the death of glam through the lens of Lust for Life and the Idiot by Iggy Pop...which, in light of the Ziggy mythology seem to come across as an attempt to make real some kind of redemption for the idea, if not for the character. But then, if you've ever listened to the Idiot, it's pretty crushing. I'm not so sure where I'm going with this. It can also be argued that newer groups like Of Montreal (who are just fabulous) are actually successfully reviving and revitalizing glam, imbuing the genre with new meaning for a digitized and fragmented 21st century. It only takes a few tracks of "Skeletal Lamping" to recognize the overt sexuality mixed with hyperliterate attention to identity construction on a bed of whiteboy electro avant-noise funk invading your eardrums and your loins. I'm totally digging the direction you're taking these pieces. Keep it up man.

As with most things Pop-related, the best place to start this madness is with – yeah – The Beatles. It is utterly impossible to escape the relentlessly extensive range of their mighty influence - and all the same, why would you want to? Opposed to the vast majority of the Pop Music sensations of today who shall remain nameless, I would consider it fairly safe to say that The Beatles were and, arguably, continue to be the world’s biggest band for a reason; their ongoing popularity is forever restoring my faith in the music industry and humanity in general.

Essentially, in keeping with the point raised in my introduction, it is the shameless blending of High and Low forms so indiscriminately that gives Pomo its unique flavor by this measure. The Beatles are the ideal progenitors of Postmodernism within popular music as, particularly in their later work, the intermingling of avant-garde forms and pastiche with the rock and roll of the masses adheres to a fairly standard Postmodern model. The fabs are often cited as being the first popular musicians to embrace experimental aesthetics, thereby transforming Pop from a commercial youth culture phenomena into a legitimate art form and elevating the Pop record to something to be listened to rather than simply bought and consumed.

As Paul Gleed in his essay, The Beatles and Questions of Mass and High Culture explains, “the Beatles can be viewed as instrumental in challenging and dissolving such traditional and restrictive categories as ‘high art’ and ‘mass culture’. Indeed, even with the best of intentions, struggling to place the Beatles somewhere neatly between the hand-clappers [low] and the jewelry-rattlers [high] has for years obscured the true extent of their art” (Gleed 162). It is in fact this perfect amalgamation that the Beatles somehow attained that makes their music and their mythology so fascinating; for rarely has any artist in any medium achieved such a fine balance. The enduring commercial and critical success of the Beatles is in no doubt indebted to the seamless blending of these cultural forms; if anything, the Beatles helped to demonstrate that the High and the Low are nothing but ideals that do not exist on any particular plane and instead are merely words attached to meaningless cultural models, or as Lyotard puts it, “they [language games] do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players” (Lyotard 129).

Framework for Postmodernism in the Popular Medium

Of course in the beginning of their career, the Beatles were simply young British men more or less re-appropriating the music of American musicians such as Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley; musicians who, in turn, had appropriated their own music from black American traditions. Although this melding of styles would be in effect as early as the late 1950s with globalization and the slow vanishing of cultural boundaries, in order to take full effect, both Pomo Pop and the Beatles would need an outlet for their growth and that vehicle would be the LP.

Prior to (arguably) 1965, very few artists released full-length albums at all, as the musical atmosphere was largely singles-oriented; furthermore, when LPs were issued, they were largely loose collections of songs rather than singular artistic statements. Outside of jazz, cohesiveness over the course of a full album was unheard of and without this medium, there would be no Postmodernism within Popular song, as this allowed for the expression of numerous ideas under the banner of a single entity and many of the aesthetic and formal conditions associated with Postmodernism would be extremely difficult to attain over the course of one three-minute Pop song.

When describing a Pop record as being Postmodern, it is an all-encompassing affair that includes not just the music itself in terms of both lyrical and formal content, but also the entire aesthetic approach of the piece counting as well its cover art in conjunction with the contents of the packaging.
Which brings us back to 1965 and the release of the relatively underrated Rubber Soul. While not a drastic change from their previous work, the album is often thought to be the first Pop Album in that each of its songs represents a part of a whole rather than a loose collection as the Beatles veer away from their skiffle-Pop, Ed Sullivan image and turn now to more folk and country influences and sewing the seeds for their future masterpieces. Rubber Soul is important because it represents the first shift within the Beatles on their path to reaching this perfect straddling of High and Low that would culminate in 1968 with the release their self-titled tenth album that is colloquially referred to as The White Album.

1966’s Revolver continued the trends brought to the surface with Rubber Soul, finding the Beatles delving further into sound and genre experimentation; “Love You To” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” in particular seeing John Lennon and George Harrison testing new ground in sonic textures and instrumentation, while Paul McCartney would lean towards the Vaudeville and Tinpan Alley sounds such as in “Here, There and Everywhere”. Revolver indeed stands as a landmark work, less for its critical value but for its sheer cohesiveness, perfecting the album format that Rubber Soul envisioned. Where Rubber Soul presented an album largely based around the same style of music shown in a unified manner, Revolver introduced the idea of pastiche into the Beatles repertoire, while at once remaining thematically and tonally integrated. This pattern culminates in the final track, the aforementioned “Tomorrow Never Knows” a song that integrates the Beatles popular rock sound with flashes of traditional Indian music, ambient and avant-garde noise-manipulation technique and, notoriously, sections read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The song is also, according to Russell Reising, the point at which all of the apparently disjointed themes and thought-fragments come together.

“In its [“Tomorrow Never Knows”] willful transcendence of death, ‘it is not dying, it is not dying’ also links up fully with Revolver’s earlier songs. Throughout the album, the Beatles maintain a running dialog with thoughts of death and life, of morbidity and exuberance, rejecting or transcending them at every step of the way” (Reising 114). This cements the status of Revolver being a unified statement unto itself, the first of its kind; a full-length effort that is both unique in its parts, however amalgamated under a banner.

This would of course be followed by the greatly romanticized Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the total reinvention of the Beatles as artists within the popular medium. I will speak only sparingly upon Sgt Pepper’s as many of the points I would make, I have already stated with regards to the previous two records, however, it is worth noting that this is the point in the Beatles’ career in which they were recognized officially by critics as being legitimate artistic innovators.

Pomo Pop Emerges: The White Album Pastiche

It is, as mentioned, 1968’s White Album that remains the Beatles’ masterwork; a sprawling, fragmented epic – thirty tracks, not one the same, recorded infamously during a period of almost overwhelming internal conflict within the group. The White Album is not only the Beatles' most oft-debated work, far and away their most controversial and polarizing, but also marks the first truly Postmodern Pop Record.
Often considered little more than a chaotic hodgepodge that spits in the face of the virtues of continuity that even I, just mere paragraphs ago championed; even producer George Martin has stated publicly and frequently that he had pushed to narrow the album down to a single LP. The unholy mess of the inflated double-album is where much of The White Album’s genius lies, however, as it is very much like the work of a group of solo artists rather than a single band-unit. The Beatles, very much at the apex of their contempt for each other, it is well-known, wrote the majority of the songs individually and in many cases played all of the instruments on their own tracks, rather than involving the other members at all in the process. As a result, the album incorporates a vast range of musical styles and influence that crash into each other violently as the Beatles hurtle irreverently through country, folk, hard-rock, baroque-pop, British blues, dub, Tinpan Alley and avant-garde noise, among others in an aggressively messy collage of soundscapes.
Of course, the device of pastiche with regards to the integration and blending of historical and aesthetic artifacts within one piece of production, and by extension the dissolution of cultural and formal barriers, is integral to the postmodern position. The never-ending charge of technological progress and the vast rise of communications would inevitably give way to fervent interdisciplinarianism through an increasingly large scope of influence and cultural bombardment.

As Jameson puts it:
“what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed …in any case, the conception of ‘genealogy’ largely lays to rest traditional worries about so-called linear history, theories of ‘stages’ and teleological historiography …One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity.” (Jameson 191)

This blending and homogenizing of timeframes, cultural values and the like, being entirely a result of increasing access to information is exactly what is manifested here where in a record where Harrison’s Orwellian harpsichord-pop track “Piggies” is allowed to be followed immediately by McCartney’s interpretation of American Country, compete with ragtime piano, “Rocky Racoon”. Unusual pairings and juxtapositions of unlikely musical influences are tantamount to the White Album experience; witness the jarring one-eighty of Lennon’s agonizing, howling blues number “Yer Blues”, to McCartney’s softly plucked folk piece “Mother Nature’s Son”.

The White Album is forever careening brutally from song to song and it is in this abruptness where it comes together (so to speak). Its beauty lies in its chaos; it never at any point knows what kind of album it wants to be: sometimes it’s a hard rock romp as evidenced on the disc 2 tangent of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey”, “Sexy Sadie” and “Helter Skelter”, and sometimes it’s a quirky post-psychedelic calm as in disc 1’s “I’m So Tired”/“Blackbird”/“Piggies”/”Rocky Racoon”. At all times, however, it is a blissful portrait of the impeding death of the decade and the group that defined it – its direction is uncertain and its scope is global.

Pomo Pop Emerges Cont’d: Expanding in All Directions

Among other things, including the expansive, fractured pastiche form of the record, The White Album further represents the artistic development of all four Beatles as each was allowed to explore uncharted sonic territory, including Ringo Starr who received his first songwriting credit on the album for his kitschy-country stomp “Don’t Pass Me By”. Harrison, although still confined to just two tracks per disc makes each of his four songs count, including the aforementioned “Piggies”, a song that makes heavy use of irony in its playful instrumentation coupled with sinister, Animal Farm-inspired lyrics; and “Savoy Truffle”, a fabulously giddy pop track about eating too much candy and featuring one of the album’s numerous moments of self-reflexivity. “Savoy Truffle” is notable in this, as when Harrison sings “we all know Obla-di-bla-da”, not only is he referencing a song featured earlier in the same record, he is also mispronouncing that refrain while at once making mention to the Beatles enormous social stature – a very cheeky nod to the diluting nature of mass culture, perhaps the most recurring theme of the album, a reaction against the mass-produced music machine that made the Beatles the biggest band in the world.

“The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of the decision makers,” Lyotard suggests, “Even now it is not composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators and the heads of major professional, labor, political and religious organizations.” (Lyotard 132) This of course brings back the debate of High Art v. Mass Culture; the Beatles being the world’s most popular musical institution are inevitably handled by the powers that be at the major labels and are thus expected to churn out the hits, which is of course in conflict with their incessant artistic growth. When Harrison mentions the success of the group within the song, is he reflecting upon the nature of these constraints, particularly with regards to the inevitable backlash by those merely wishing to be fed the old songs?

This is in interesting contrast to Lennon’s “Glass Onion,” a song that references no less than five external Beatles songs and is well known to be itself a reaction to the over-analyzing of their catalog for hidden meanings, i.e. the Paul is Dead conspiracy. By this measure, where do the Beatles fit in the High/Low debate? Via self-reflexive lyricism we have Harrison railing against the Low and Lennon against the High at once. Paradoxically, despite Lennon’s noted distaste for the over-analyzing of his work, The White Album marks what would unquestionably be Lennon’s most decidedly highbrow work with the Beatles, finding the man exploring dark and ambitious territory with each of his contributions.

Obviously, “Revolution 9” is the standout here, featuring violent tape loops, reverse sound effects and a number of other moves form the John Cage playbook, it is probably best known as the most-skipped-over of all Beatles songs. Being sandwiched between Lennon’s more straightforward acoustic number “Cry Baby Cry” and the Starr-led string-ballad “Good Night”, “Revolution 9” demonstrates not only the influence of the infamous Yoko Ono, but sees Lennon coming into his own as a fully-fledged avant-garde musician: he can bitch all he wants about people taking him too seriously, but one can hardly pretend to be a populist whilst spouting off noise like this, which of course only bolsters the fabulously healthy dose of irony The White Album provides.

Later Beatles and Conclusion

The final two Beatles albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be, saw the emergence of the neoclassicist Beatles, surrendering their violent, experimental urges for a sophisticated pop sound that would lead them to the end of their existence in great style. Abbey Road, notably, with its titanic second-side pushes the fragmentation found in The White Album to the very limit and succeeds unusually with eight songs clocking in under three minutes in succession. This tactic leads to one of the weirder swan songs in music history, Abbey Road being the last album that the Beatles recorded despite Let It Be being released afterward.

It is worth noting, that in 2004, hip-hop producer Danger Mouse miraculously, and very illegally, created a mash-up of The White Album, taking the instrumentation of tracks from that record and splicing them with the vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album. This monstrosity known as The Grey Album, is a masterpiece of Pomo ingenuity, taking the first classic Pomo Pop album and turning it into a hip-hop leviathan. Hip-Hop being almost always innately Postmodern by default, with its heavy use of sampling and relentlessly self-reflexive lyrics, when added to The White Album only adds to the chaotic, outrageous mystique of the Beatles tenth record. This intertextuality brings the album into the new realm of wherever it is that Postmodernism is heading. Later in this series, I will loosely define Pomo Pop as ending at around 2001 in its traditional sense, however, The Grey Album proves to be an interesting anomaly within this definition, or perhaps its something new altogether.

Comments

• June 1, 2009, Patrick Grant writes: First and foremost, this is an incredible essay. I think in order to fully understand the cultural impact of the Beatles artistically, it's important to recognize that their success was a product of mass media. I fully support your argument that "Savoy Truffle" is a self-relfexive nod towards "a reaction against the mass-produced music machine that made the Beatles the biggest band in the world," however one must consider whether or not they would have had the means if it weren't for their overwhelming success. The band was positively ubiquitous in North America even before their records were for sale here; they signed 99 merchandising contracts and stores were flooded with Beatlemania memorobilia before anyone had heard a note. The Beach Boys, arguably the most significant pop band of ther period other than the Beatles, weren't as heavily marketed and didn't have the same overwhelming success - which, among other things, led to Brian Wilson's breakdown and the fragmented (but brilliant) late period of the group. I'd like to present the argument that late period Beach Boys records like Smiley Smile and Surf's Up are actually stronger postmodern statements than the White Album because they are self-reflexive in reaction to the changing world around them (see the abominable "Student Demonstration Time" from Surf's Up, easily the worst song in their catalogue). The Beatles never struggled to stay relevent, they simply were relevant by virtue of their ubiquity; the masses were tricked by a band that had been normalized for consumption and then slowly "poisoned" with the avant-garde. The Beach Boys, on the other hand, unwittingly embodied postmodern angst in their attempts to reconcile their failure with the self-awareness that comes from being trapped in the fame machine. Sorry to vamp on that for so long. It just came to mind while reading the article. Great work, I love this zine.

“We want the death of rock and roll. This is the music of the minions. This sound is a terminal condition.”
-Constantines, from “Arizona” (2001)

Typically, or at least, from what I’ve gathered, the venerable Postmodern Stamp of Intensity, when it comes to music only seems to pertain to that most discerning of musics: the avant-garde. Primal Scream lunacy, screeching, clicking tape loops and minimalist mindbenders tend to more or less dominate the extremely ambiguous and relatively undefined realm of postmodern music. In both literature and philosophy, the postmodern umbrella is tremendously specific and outlined with almost fanatical attention to detail and clarity despite the vast confusion surrounding the term.

I suppose that to a degree, screeching, clicking tape loops and the like do to an extent express the culture of postmodernism with their disjointed, fragmented structures that very much evoke the sort of outrageousness that is often associated with the catch-all variation of the term that is often stamped upon Pomo. However, I tend to feel that the sometimes alienating, sometimes unlistenable and always highbrow sort of experimentation that the purely avant-garde brings to the table is insufficient to express the condition of the culture that Postmodernism is supposed to imply.

As the venerable Miss Banana herself points out, Postmodernism is often an amalgamation of High and Low art and culture; and almost as a rule,  avant-garde music tends to be High. Thusly, who better to report upon the plugged-in franticness of society rather than a bunch of mad scientist experimentalists, however working through the medium of our very own Popular Music? Who could be more ideal to raise the Postmodern banner, than those who have appropriated the music of the masses in the name of experimentation, taking it back for the paranoid and the disillusioned? A wild incarnation of the popular form is far more likely to reflect upon the culture in a more appropriate and direct way that would express the condition of Postmodernism and Postmodernity than any stray sounds of John Cage ever could. After all, and as Derek B. Scott notes, “The opposition [of] art vs. entertainment is an assumption of mass culture theory and may be regarded as an ethical rather than an aesthetic opposition.” (Scott 123)

The purveyors of what I will henceforth be referring to as “Postmodern Pop” spat in the face of popular song in both form and content; creating a branch of music that was rooted in both popular and experimental traditions at once. Some, if not most of the albums and artists I will be discussing here have achieved a great deal of commercial success, a fact that only adds to the mystique and the unusual nature of the Postmodern within music. How, for example, could an album that samples avant-garde noisemakers like Paul Lansky and has more in common with German Psychedelia than Bubblegum possibly reach number one in the United States without even releasing any singles?

In many cases, Pomo Pop has arisen out of an established popular artist’s dissatisfaction with the music industry, stardom and/or acclaim or just an expanding musical palette. In all cases, the artists I will be associating with the Postmodern have a great deal of common traits between themselves and literary or philosophical Pomo including the use of self-reflexivity, pastiche, fragmentation and depictions either tonally, lyrically or stylistically of paranoia and hyper-reality, among other characteristics.

Some common pop music strategies for reflecting the Postmodern condition may include things like heavy use of sampling - particularly if the samples are taken from a genre not associated with the artist using the sample –  as well as other genre-bending methods, lyrical pop culture references and non-traditional song structuring. Keep in mind, however, that as with everything else in art: just because it’s weird, doesn’t mean it’s Postmodern. Tom Waits is pretty weird and kind of off-putting to a lot of people; but, and I say this as a huge Waits fan, Tom Waits usually tends sings fairly traditional songs in his weird and off-putting Tom Waits kind of way. Though he has performed in a number of musical styles, rarely does he blend them together at once and his mode of songwriting, both lyrically and structurally is firmly rooted in the music of the early twentieth century. Postmodernism is all about the new and Tom Waits is an old-school cat, oddball or not.

American music theorist John Kramer laid out sixteen traits of Postmodern music in his book Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, traits which would typically apply to straight experimental music, however, can easily be transferred to Postmodern Pop and that read as follows:

1. Is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension

2. Is, on some level and in some way, ironic

3. Does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present

4. Challenges barriers between 'high' and 'low' styles

5. Shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity

6. Questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values

7. Avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)

8. Considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts

9. Includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures

10. Considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music

11. Embraces contradictions

12. Distrusts binary oppositions

13. Includes fragmentations and discontinuities

14. Encompasses pluralism and eclecticism

15. Presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities

16. Locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

These characteristics in many ways express the values of what Postmodern Pop should evoke; however, as this series progresses and for the sake of specificity, I will be listing my own guidelines for Pomo Pop that should in the end give a fairly clear definition. It is useful to keep Kramer’s set in mind, as I will be drawing somewhat heavily from it.

Over the coming months I will trace the roots of the influence of the Postmodern within popular music from the mid-1960s to the present, paying close attention to the albums and artists that truly and effectively report upon the culture. Taking stock of numerous subgenres and trends from Krautrock to Post-Punk to Trip-Hop, I aim to bring the various modes of Popular Music into a critical light. Pop, rock, hip-hop, electronic and the like should not be thought of as the music of the masses, but rather the most effective musical tool we have to reflect upon the conditions of society. This is not intended to be a glorification of the major-label/indie-label system, rather it is an attempt to legitimize popular forms of song in the academic respect.

In Next Month's Issue: The roots and influences of Pomo Pop, 1965-77.