RFBX: In-Depth Specials – What Became Of The Likely Lads? Consuming, Governing and Marketing Music in 2010
I am writing this in the shadow of one of The Libertines’ more convincing comeback soirees. Their shows at Reading and Leeds cemented the fact that, even if the band didn’t have a future, it was still damn fine at having a past, and also that the almost exclusively under-30s crowd retained a large space in their heart for one of the artists that got music moving again after the malaise of early-2000s pop - the Albion-infused giddiness of the likes of ‘Time for Heroes’, ‘Boys in the Band’ and ‘Music When the Lights Go Out’ still provoked the same emotional cocktail in the breasts of all present as they had done several years back. However, what was also confirmed was that only by taking time out from the project had the star of the band not waned - this was nostalgic karaoke rather than bombastic re-introduction. Since The Libertines, Pete and Carl have both been involved in a multitude of musical ventures which have all brought gradually diminishing returns - collectively, none of their last seven singles have come anywhere near the top 40, a run that stretches back to 2007, and the desire to wheel out all of the old aches and pains that destroyed them has more than a hint of ‘Remember us? Remember how good we were?’ about it.
At least the Libs had the chance to build up enough of a following a few years back so that they could just waltz into a Main Stage slot at the drop of a hat. A glance down the line-up for the festival and, there in the programme beside your new favourite band, you find yourself stopping at the names of groups that were your old new favourite band, but who you’ve now forgotten how any of their songs go. New Young Pony Club, for instance, were nestled in the middle NME Stage bill, and I should imagine their performance drew a significantly smaller crowd than that of the Surfer Blood show that preceded it. Elsewhere, their former NME tour buddies The Sunshine Underground found themselves, out of sight and out of mind, on one of the smallest stages on site and just above another of those NME tour veterans that seemed not so long ago to be destined for great things - Blood Red Shoes.
Those three groups all emerged at the tail-end of a heady period that lasted for roughly four years between the first Franz Ferdinand record and Foals’ Antidotes, when ‘indie’ was very much the order of the day. For me, this coincided with the formative years of my adolescence, and I wholeheartedly threw myself into the culture - I bought the NME every week, tuned into Jon Kennedy on XFM every evening, and spent all my pocket money at Banquet, my local record store. Every other Saturday I’d travel up to central London (at that glorious time when, as I was under 16, I could get a travelcard for just £2) and wander around Soho, rooting around the vintage stores and Topman and hoping that one day I could call the dirty cobbled streets my home, before heading off to any gig took my fancy that week - We Are Scientists at Brixton Academy, the Cribs at the Astoria, Jack Penate at ULU, I didn’t care as long as I could jump and sing and feel part of something. I was, in short, the typical Suburban teen, full of dreams and frustration.
the libertines
Equally, the music that was being produced was both optimistic and pensive, catchy and intelligent, and every band seemed to be fronted by your non-existent cool older brother who had read Flaubert and bought you your first pair of skinny jeans for Christmas. Groups like Maximo Park, Good Shoes and the Long Blondes (in their case cool older sister) managed to strike a perfect balance between moderate chart success and indie credibility, their riffs jerky enough to make you feel a self-aggrandising sense of your own otherness while still having the energy and melody the keep you entertained. Equally, the emergence of MySpace meant you could wear your heart on your sleeve on your profile while sanding down all the rough edges of your real-world persona, and the sheer abundance of music that bands made available on their players and the fact that you could converse with them so easily through the site meant that the fans could feel truly close to the artists. It was, as Orlando Weeks of The Maccabees cooed on their debut, ‘local boys going nationwide’.
However, the Internet was both a blessing and a curse for up-and-coming bands. In what many people would have you believe were ‘The Good Old Days’, people would throw themselves with such passion into a certain music because of both a desire to be connected and a shortage of cash. Before the advent of social networking and mobile phones, you’d largely have to form your ties closer to home, which as a music fan meant picking a scene and clinging to it for dear life. Because there wasn’t such a thing as Napster or The Pirate Bay, you’d only be able to afford exposing yourself to one particularly genre too, meaning you became even more firmly grounded in your convictions. And, as iPods were at this point still but a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, you’d have to make time to sit down and listen to a record or the radio, and subsequently did it with a fuller conviction. All this also gave bands more time to work with a group of followers who they knew would continue to be devoted to them, and thus you hear stories of some of the biggest bands in the history of pop music taking what seems now like an unfathomably long time to break through - Fleetwood Mac, for example, were 11 albums in by the time they recorded Rumours, and it took Pulp fully 16 years before they were noticed by the mainstream.
Since computers became the dominant media platform of the world, the music industry has been thrown into complete turmoil. Now, instead of scrimping and saving for that new Rancid LP or the first pressing of Sandinista!, it is possible to access millions of tracks in no time at all and at no cost bar the broadband contract. From there, it is perfectly simple to download anything from Amadou & Mariam to Gang Gang Dance to the complete Johnny Cash in a matter of minutes, again at no cost. This ease of access has arguably tempered the passion of many fans who choose to spread their taste widely rather than wholeheartedly dig their heels in for, say, wobblecore. Sites like The Hype Machine may have opened listeners up to a whole kaleidoscope of sounds and genres, but at the same time it has changed the very nature of what it means to be ‘in to music’.
maximo park
The broad church that is contemporary music in the 21st century means that it is unlikely that there will be an overarching theme that music since the creation of this magazine to now will be remembered for, simply because listeners are now more fickle and trends come and go with lightning speed (remember last year when female singer-songwriters were going to save us all? Me neither). As successful as the aforementioned indie trend was at putting guitar bands in the public eye, it will most likely only be fondly remembered by white middle-class kids who were under 20 at the time and sufficiently interested in pop music that they made the effort to cultivate their interest.
The closest anything came to being a definitive, trans-Atlantic phenomenon was the ‘New Rock Revolution’ that was more or less begun by The Strokes’ Is This It. However, it is significant that when the Internet truly came into its own in the middle of the decade, the relevance of most of the initial proprietors waned - the more those who formed the bands became more knowledgeable about genres other than rock, the more rock became obsolete. Even before then, the concept of the ‘New Rock Revolution’ was flawed from the start - while bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes did a good job of combining big fame with big riffs, the fact that the term could be thrown at anyone from the Vines to Arcade Fire showed how it was more a desire to create an umbrella term for the wealth of indie bands suddenly breaking into the charts rather than an attempt to pinpoint an individual ideal within this supposed scene.
Musical fads after 2005 have generally had a short, niche shelf-life. Apart from Justice and perhaps Simian Mobile Disco, no-one from the Kitsuné/Modular really made an impression outside the clubs of Paris and that other brief period when New Rave was in, itself a flash-in-the-pan trend. The Brooklyn scene that was largely responsible for the defaming of the term ‘hipster’ was always going to be too wilfully difficult to tolerate mainstream attention, and the groups who gained notoriety (basically MGMT, Yeasayer and Animal Collective) were either anomalous in terms of what was being produced in the scene or not really in it to begin with - Animal Collective, having released their first album a month before the creation of Rockfeedback, are a rare example of a Noughties group who’ve been patient enough to wait their turn. Even grime, probably the punkest movement going a few years into the century, has since completely lost all sense of identity and priority, with early exponents such as Wiley, Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder ditching the uncompromising flow and jagged beats of their early releases to make a dash for mainstream success.
As an artist breaking through in 2010, you have to brace yourself for a fall as steep and swift as your rise. Get a buzz going on the blogosphere and you could find yourself with a full festival schedule without having found a label or put out a single: Forget to stay bang on trend and you’ll be begging for shows the following summer. I think I can speak for pretty much every self-pronounced ‘indie kid’ circa 2006 that we all felt a little tinge of sadness when recent albums by Pull Tiger Tail, Tokyo Police Club and The Rakes (among many others) were treated with something between antipathy and derision by virtually all of the music press. As for chart performance - what chart performance? It’s tragic, but that said we didn’t exactly go out in our droves and buy the records either.
the rakes
While all of the above has certainly not helped some artists, the astonishing lethargy with which the industry has reacted to Music 2.0 has only compounded the problem. Ever since In Rainbows, label bosses have been grappling with the problem of how they’re going to make money when the traditional album-tour-album format has become entirely obsolete, and thus far few solutions have been tabled. The best that has been produced thus far have either been cynical marketing ploys - labels quickly realised the mistake they made in taking music videos off of YouTube - or genuinely brilliant ideas that gradually morph into cynical marketing ploys. Spotify, originally a Mecca of free music, has become slowly bastardised by the restrictive invites policy and slow siphoning off the best content for paying users. This, more than anything, is proof that the record companies are both too traditionalist and too scared to think outside the box, and will at any opportunity revert back to the same system that has served them for over half a century with an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ mentality.
But it’s very much broken, and needs fixing. It is no co-incidence that some of the alternative bands who’ve spent the last few years at the top (and it is massively indicative that longevity now means releasing a second full-length that generates something close to the same amount of buzz as your first) both adapted to the change that was evident in the industry and took time and effort in cultivating their fans. Crystal Castles, whose sophomore release came out in May, were the buzz band for a good couple of years before they put out their debut. Similarly with Foals, whose string of early singles helped cement a fanbase that took Antidotes to number 3 in the charts and earned 2010 follow-up Total Life Forever a Mercury Prize nomination. It is certainly no co-incidence that both groups were picked to play on Skins - they had the subversive edge that hinted to young fans about how they represented an ideology beyond what was harboured by the stuffy, wounded industry machine.
Bands like The Libertines were lucky - they came from the last generation when you could still build a reputation solely around gigging and handing out demo tapes, which would lead to a record deal, which would lead to a tour, which would lead to an album, which would lead to a tour, which would lead to an album. The songs that were played at Reading and Leeds were some of the last that people rushed home with on the day of the album’s release rather than torrenting absent-mindedly a month before it went to press. It’s an enormous task that the industry faces - trying to protect revenue and the local record store while re-inventing the very nature of it’s being for a new generation of customers that are in real danger of being lost. There needs to be a seismic shift in the way popular music is viewed, governed and marketed, or there’s a distinct possibility that we could all fall out of love with it.
Yes, it’s time for heroes. But not the heroes we used to know.
Artists in this article: We Are Scientists, Good Shoes, Maximo Park, Surfer Blood, New Young Pony Club, Foals, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, The Libertines,