Pop music
Is there anyone listening?
Marcus Berkmann It's not just the audience that has given up on mainstream pop music — it's the musicians too. When the charts are domi- nated by rancid dance music, as they are in Europe, or by rap and heavy metal, as they are in the US, when there's no longer room in the hearts of youth for a well-crafted tune, what can a poor popster do? And indeed, listening to the latest batch of new albums, you get the sense of a whole gener- ation of musicians who don't really know what listeners want any more.
If you're Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, for instance, and are responsible for two of the best pure pop albums of the past decade (1983's High Land, Hard Rain and 1987's Love), you probably have two options. You can turn your baseball cap backwards, make terrible, bleep-filled tech- no records and pray for absolution. Or you can carry on writing tunes and hope to God Tor heaven's sake, Maureen, not everybody wants to see photographs of the grandchildren.' that someone out there is actually listening.
Bravely, Frame has stuck with the tunes. Dreamland (WEA) is so recognisably his work that on first hearing it sounds like an ingenious parody of it. His is an entirely distinctive melodic gift, and unlike many songwriters he has the voice and the instru- mental nous to do his songs full credit.
And yet this album has an oddly tenta- tive quality, a sense that its commercial failure is all but pre-ordained. Indeed, Frame's record company initially planned to release it last summer, but instead sent Frame back to the studio to record a cou- ple of surefire hit singles. The only prob- lem is that, for someone like Frame, there's no such thing any more as a surefire hit sin- gle. I can't help feeling that Dreamland, for all its undoubted merits, is doomed to be unbought and unheard.
You have to wonder, too, who will buy the new Donald Fagen album, Kamakiiiad (WEA). Well, I've bought it, but, as was explained last month, I am an unrecon- structed Steely Dan fan, and have been waiting for this record for 11 years. All the sad, unreconstructed Steely Dan fans I know went out and bought it on the first day, and then spent the next week under heavy sedation trying to cope with the terri- ble disappointment. Few records have received such ecstatic reviews and so bla- tantly failed to deserve them. For, after a career of producing ever more oblique and jazzy albums, Fagen has finally embraced simplicity, and it doesn't suit him.
The prime influence on Kamakiriad appears to be classic soul, mixed with a few jazz-funk workouts of a casualness he'd never have tolerated in the past. The result is the loosest record he has ever made. The production sheen of Gary Katz has gone. The tight arrangements, the perfectionism, the brilliant, sparkling rightness of it all — they're simply not there. Even his voice appears to have deteriorated. Of course I'm still playing it non-stop — it is the man's first record for 11 years — but not without a certain pain. Who will buy it? All the unreconstructed Steely Dan fans have it already, and it's hard to see who else will like it. A hit single is inconceivable. Once again, the market seems simply to have vanished.
Even the album that is rapidly turning into my favourite of the year is not exactly breaking all sales records. Bryan Ferry's Taxi (Virgin) is instantly recognisable as a return to form, but it's only after repeated listenings that its true qualities really emerge. It's slinky, it's cool and apart from one bizarre lapse — an entirely unneces- sary version of 'Amazing Grace' — it con- firms Ferry as a musician of supreme taste and judgment. And yet it has barely sold anything. Here is a beautiful record, a small masterpiece of restrained melan- choly, and no one wants to listen to it. If Bryan Ferry appears on his next album cover wearing a baseball cap backwards, we'll only have ourselves to blame.
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