By making music which was sufficiently mellifluous to appeal to a mature audience, Boyz II Men outlasted the natural lifespan of the boy band. Not so Backstreet Boys or N Sync (alias *NSYNC), for both of whom five or six years was sufficient for camaraderie and stamina to fade. Britain’s Take That and Ireland’s Boyzone conformed exactly to the same limitations. In Take That, however, British pop was gifted with an act who continually outgrew the expectations of their handlers. They were initially moulded to appeal to a predominantly gay male audience. Unexpectedly, they attracted a huge following amongst young girls, and in former pub pianist Gary Barlow they boasted a genuinely impressive composer of soft soul ballads. Moreover, his bandmate Robbie Williams had the irrepressible stage presence of Tommy Steele, mixed with the laddish persona of Oasis. So crushed were Take That’s fans when Williams left the group in 1995 that suicide hotlines had to be set up in several countries. Having split soon after his departure, Take That not only reunited in 2006 to enormous acclaim, but rounded out their narrative arc when they were reunited with Williams in 2010.fn3
The only British pop acts of recent decades whose personal relationships have been studied with equal intensity by press and public alike bucked tradition by simple dint of being female: the Spice Girls, and their talent-show-based imitators, Girls Aloud. More than any previous pop stars, the Spice Girls were a media phenomenon first, a musical group second, and the compromises forced upon them by their barbed relationship with the press guaranteed that minor personal differences would be inflated into culture-shaking bust-ups. This would be the pop archetype of the future, a complex exchange of power and privilege which became increasingly unbalanced in an age when every passer-by on the street could contribute to the media via Twitter or Instagram.
Lost amidst the arguments between Ginger and Posh, or Scary and Ginger, and the rumours of their celebrity liaisons, was the Spice Girls’ effect on pre-teen girls. They exploded into the public gaze with ‘Wannabe’, a boisterous, defiantly female take on the hip-hop posse – sweetened with vocal harmonies to ensure universal consumption. Not only did the group offer five startlingly different looks and personalities for young female fans to mimic, but they arrived shouting ‘Girl power!’ This proved to be a slogan, rather than a coherent philosophy, but for pre-adolescent girls who were being groomed to consume and ultimately lust after clean-cut boy bands, this hint of gender solidarity and even independence was exhilarating. What the Spice Girls suggested was that it didn’t matter whether boys liked them or not: it was enough to be female, and in a gloriously rowdy gang.
The contrast with previous girl-groups was striking. The ‘classic’ girl group era of the late 1950s and early 1960s produced some of the most inventive and moving pop records of all time; but with few exceptions, the young women were anonymous, under strict male control, and unthreatening, rather than sexually rapacious. The exceptions were the Ronettes, sirens of sexuality, whose leader, Veronica Bennett, unwittingly sacrificed her independence in marrying their producer, Phil Spector. Another of Spector’s groups, the Crystals, exemplified his belief that it didn’t matter who sang on the records, as long as he created them. They would frequently hear ‘their’ new single on the radio, having not been invited to the recording session. This pattern was repeated in the 1980s, when a succession of American female groups – the Cover Girls, Pajama Party, Seduction – were assembled on the basis of appearance rather than raw talent: interchangeable sex objects first, vocalists only if strictly necessary, as session singers could compensate for their shortcomings on record.
The Spice Girls’ output was less cynical than that, even if it never approached the creativity of their late 1990s contemporaries, All Saints, whose magnificent early hits successfully updated the original girl group sound for a polyrhythmic, multi-ethnic age. For all their public spats and exposés, the Spice Girls were more like cartoon characters than fully rounded humans, which is what made their 1997 movie Spice World so entertaining – and so unreal.
While young women are marketed for a female audience, or a male leer, but rarely for both, some of their male equivalents were able to reach teens of both sexes. Both Green Day and Blink-182 achieved success at a similar age to the Spice Girls. They emerged from the punk scenes in Northern and Southern California respectively, inevitably carrying baggage from the Nirvana-inspired grunge movement. Barely older than their fan base, they offered guides to teenage etiquette with riffs borrowed from the Clash and Buzzcocks, before diverging musically – Green Day towards a more melodic power-punk sound, and the sociopolitical commentary of their 2004 album American Idiot, Blink-182 by edging away from schoolyard anguish towards an adult sensibility (their 2011 album Neighborhood revealed that life wouldn’t always be as simple as their early hits had promised). In Britain, the teenage band Busted retained Green Day’s punk motifs, but coupled them with sexist, frothy pop tunes – the authentic voice of the cocky 14-year-old boy.
It’s telling, however, that the most successful boy band of the last thirty years, One Direction, should strip away all this pubescent self-doubt and ambiguity, and return to the formula at its most simplistic. Their records typify modern pop: auto-tuned vocals, choruses so obvious that they almost come with subtitles for the audience (‘wave your arms in the air … now it’s time to get out your lighters’). But there has been a subtle shift in their emotional approach: having no doubt registered the worldwide appeal of James Blunt’s ballad ‘You’re Beautiful’, several of their songs turn the spotlight away from the stage and on to each of their yearning, lustful fans. ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ and ‘Little Things’ are aimed at young girls who will never feel so vulnerable again; who are unsure of the changes in their bodies, their emotions, their hormones, and their social role; and who are being told, by their dream lovers, that every one of them is, in her individual way, special enough to win the attention of Harry, Niall, Zayn, Louis and Liam, whichever fulfils her fantasy. Although it still places the girl in the role of supplicant rather than dominatrix, it is perhaps a healthier message to carry away from a pop infatuation than being reduced to a slut, whore or bitch.
Miles Davis is my definition16 of cool. I loved to see him in the small clubs playing his solo, turn his back on the crowd, put down his horn and walk off the stage, let the band keep playing, and then come back and play a few notes at the end. I did that at a couple of shows. The audience thought I was sick or something.
Bob Dylan, 1985
Playing 11,000-seater17 open-air theatres in Chicago with corporate sponsorship is not interesting. It’s not interesting for people sitting out in the back, anyway. And it’s not interesting for the band. No wonder people drink beer and eat popcorn all the way through concerts; how do you expect them to be involved from half a mile away?
Elvis Costello, 1989
At the end of a decade in which the staging of rock had developed from musical recitals into audio-visual extravaganzas capable of filling a vast sports arena, the sci-fi-inspired band Blue Oyster Cult took a momentous decision. In 1979 they announced that they would no longer be using lasers in their live shows, as they were in danger of reducing their music to a sideshow. With the honourable exception of Bob Dylan, much of whose incessant touring since 1988 has been dedicated to interrupting the sight-line of his fans, this represented probably the last occasion when a major rock act believed that less was more; sound more powerful than sound and vision.
In a dying gasp of counter-culture zeal, the rock media reacted with horror in 1984 when the Jacksons revealed that all tickets for their American reunion tour would be priced at $30. During a recession, the critics argued, the Jacksons were deliberately hiding themselves from their most loyal fans: the working-class aficionados who had worshipped Michael and his brothers since their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show fifteen years earlier, and shared the group’s pride in becoming the first black family to host a networked TV variety show.
A decade later, such concerns seemed naïve.
As the rock ticket breached the $100 barrier, then the £100 ceiling, and kept climbing, outrage was replaced by sullen acceptance. Customers who used a particular credit card or mobile phone were given priority booking; the best seats were crammed with corporate guests, as only corporations could afford to purchase ‘Gold Circle’ tickets; eventually, that humble South London R&B band from 1963, the Rolling Stones, dared to charge £375 for front-row seats to their 2012 London shows (or £950 if you also opted for the champagne reception – without the band – and three-course dinner). There was, it seemed, no price so high that some fan would not beg to pay it, no field so muddy or vast that people would not queue to fill it.
The global exposure of Live Aid, which boosted Queen and U2 into the top rank of live performers, reinforced the idea that music needed to be staged on a vast scale. Increasingly, the purpose of the live concert was not to hear the music you loved, but to say you had been there, and to share the comradeship, in sheets of rain or blistering sunshine, of tens of thousands of your peers. The shows expanded to fill the stadia, with the fireworks and lasers of yesterday supplanted by lavish scenery and special effects worthy of Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg. These presentations were inordinately expensive to stage, which in turn inflated the ticket price; and the consumer, already committed to the best part of a week’s salary for admission, pledged their allegiance by buying an overpriced T-shirt or baseball cap. These were not just souvenirs, but a vital earnings stream for the stars, whose take from merchandise often exceeded their performance fees.
Amidst all this excess, popular music edged slowly back towards its roots in entertainment. Stars from the pre-MTV era could still attract consumers who expected nothing more from them than music and nostalgia – tantalising though it is to imagine the likes of Bob Dylan or CSNY breaking into a song-and-dance routine. MTV altered the expectations of its viewers: when they left the comforting glow of their TV sets and ventured into the real world, they wanted to be entertained as they were by television. So pop stars, such as Michael and Janet Jackson, Madonna, New Kids on the Block, Kylie Minogue and Paula Abdul, gave them shows which might have been designed by Busby Berkeley – flawless choreography, startling diversions of trompe l’œil, part circus, part carnival, pure showbiz. Cynical observers noted that some of these stars appeared to be able to cavort around the stage without missing a single note, while sounding altogether less proficient on the rare occasions they simply stood in front of a microphone and sang. It became obvious that many performers were choosing to mime to pre-recorded tapes – and equally obvious that fans didn’t care. What mattered was the spectacle, and its three stages of excitement: anticipation, awareness that you were actually in the presence of a superstar, and the memory of pleasure that may, at the time, have been dampened by the weather, poor visibility, or the unwelcome company of a drunken sociopath. There was no room for foreplay in a stadium: the audience needed climaxes, one after another, each louder and longer than the last.
As theatricality became pop’s dominant virtue, it is not surprising that the West End and Broadway musical theatre soared in popularity. A blood brother of the popular song until the 1950s, the stage musical was renounced by rock fans in the 1960s as a bastion of artifice and inauthenticity (especially when, as in the case of Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar, it was employing the tools and symbolism of rock). As late as 1978, there was assumed to be virtually no correlation between the audience for Evita and for rock concerts, even though performers such as Freddie Mercury and Meat Loaf were theatrical to their core. But Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s melodies for Evita and its successors crossed into the pop charts, and his productions began to entice pop stars such as David Essex to venture into the theatre.
The musical itself now began to divide, with the sophisticated songs and moral ambiguities of Stephen Sondheim representing a serious, neoclassical approach to the form, while Lloyd-Webber and his peers, reversing history almost a century by reviving the convention whereby the entire narrative of a musical would be ‘sung-through’, opted unashamedly for populism and (in keeping with the new pop aesthetic) spectacle.
So we had actors dressed in feline costumes (Cats) and on skates (Starlight Express); or embroiled in epic tales filled with sentimentality and romance amidst historical chaos (Les Misérables and Miss Saigon). Individual songs came to matter less than the catharsis of being thrilled and moved by the totality of a production. Borders between entertainment genres were demolished: where once Hollywood had devoted itself to immortalising the hits of Broadway, now the process could be reversed, with The Lion King and Billy Elliot (both scored by Elton John) travelling from film to the stage. Hairspray ricocheted back and forth between the two media to the point that nobody could quite remember where it had begun. Madonna removed herself briefly from her obsession with chronicling her sexual exploits to assume the role of Evita in the movie of the show (and betray the limitations of her acting when compared to the original West End star, Elaine Paige).
These projects still represented a lengthy flirtation between pop and the musical, as did such vaudeville ventures as singalong screenings of The Sound of Music, or stagings of the early 1970s rock musical The Rocky Horror Show, where the audience was encouraged to dress up as the well-loved characters. The relationship was consummated and sealed by two theatrical projects which enveloped sizeable portions of the British public’s collective pop memory: Mamma Mia!, a drama hinged around the Abba catalogue; and We Will Rock You, a sci-fi extravaganza which succeeded, where Dave Clark’s 1986 effort Time had failed, in transferring rock’s mythic power to the stage – thanks to the lavish emotional gestures and musical crescendos of Queen’s array of hit singles. By transferring the songs from their place in history to the timeless, context-free scenery of the West End theatre, these productions erased any sense of pop or rock as vehicles for social change. In the end, as John Lennon had sung several decades earlier in a moment of cynical self-doubt, ‘it’s all showbiz’. The natural order of the entertainment business had been restored – perhaps never again to be overturned?
* * *
fn1 The Doors prompted Morrison’s contemporary, David Crosby, to write a bitter song, in which he declared: ‘I’ve seen the movie, and it wasn’t like that.’
fn2 The madness didn’t end there: in subsequent decades, virtually every pop and rock anthem ever written would be subjected to an utterly uniform Hi-NRG makeover for the dance floor, from such cultural barbarians as Jackie ‘O’ and Micky Modelle – who has even extended his reach to Irish and Scottish folk tunes.
fn3 Williams and Barlow, whose dramatically different personalities had seemed impossible to contain within a single unit, sealed the union with a duet single, ‘Shame’. Its video delivered the symbolic emotion that a Lennon/McCartney reunion might have mustered, atop a homoerotic storyline which the two men carried off with sublime aplomb.
1, 2
IN OCTOBER 1958, four years before it released the first Beatles single, the Parlophone record company of London proudly introduced its latest signing: Sparkie Williams. He was the winner of a BBC TV talent competition, designed to discover the most loquacious talking budgerigar in Britain. Carefully groomed by his owner, Mrs Mattie Williams, Sparkie won the judges’ hearts with his rhymes and raps, as he literally sang his own praises.
The talent show has been a staple of light entertainment since the birth of vaudeville and music hall. Almost every major star of the twentieth century tested themselves in public against their peers, including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Ella Fitzgerald was merely the first icon to graduate from Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Battle of the Band contests across America were a common apprenticeship for rock ’n’ rollers in the 1950s and 60s (the Turtles satirising the genre on a 1968 album). The long-running ITV series Opportunity Knocks launched the careers of entertainers such as Mary Hopkin, Middle of the Road and the ill-fated child star Lena Zavaroni. The battle-rapping t
radition offered the likes of Big Daddy Kane and Eminem the chance to spit out their rhymes, catcalls and cheers from the audience their reward. Many of the biggest acts of the past two decades also emerged from talent contests – Usher, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Aaliyah, Christina Aguilera, Alanis Morissette, Justin Timberlake, Kelly Rowland, Destiny’s Child and LeAnn Rimes, being among the many losing contestants on the US TV show Star Search who enjoyed substantially more success than the ostensible winners.
Their quest, and that of millions like them, encouraged the extension of the stage school and drama academy into institutes for the performing arts – or Fame schools, named after a 1980 Hollywood movie and a 1982 American television series. Each was located in an educational establishment where young people exhibiting a demographically satisfying array of genders, preferences and racial backgrounds gathered to pursue their dreams. (Pursuing one’s dreams has been the lifeblood of popular music ever since, expressed in the bombast of AOR power ballads and the self-help clichés of singer-songwriter ditties.) Nearly thirty years after the film, the same ambition inspired Fox television’s remarkably successful teen drama series, Glee. Set in the glee club (or, for British readers, choir) of a fictional Ohio high school, Glee has enabled around a dozen young actor/singers to perform, week after week, a vast repertoire of popular songs – all but a handful established hits, or staples of the musical stage. More than 200 of these – yes, 200 – entered the US Hot 100 chart between 2009 and 2013, eclipsing the achievements of every other act in musical history. The Glee cast recordings bring together AOR, soul, alternative rock, oldies, stage show-stoppers – some for individual voices, others delivered in choral harmony that suggests the Swingle Singers tackling the score of the rock musical Hair. Meanwhile, performing-arts schools have overcome the misgivings of those who felt that they were likely to train imitators rather than original talents: one such establishment alone, the BRIT School in Croydon, has already spawned the likes of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, the Kooks, Imogen Heap and Rizzle Kicks.
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