R&B Divas

There's not much literature about rock 'n' roll, or rather not much good literature about rock music. There's even less about rap, soul etc. though there's plenty of fictionalised stories (Dreamgirls.) Been thinking that if I was to write a music story for the contemporary age it would have to be about the R&B divas. There seem an endless number of them, and for a long time, some of the best music came from them. Yet, something's happened to our divas. They seem to have lost a bit of their self-confidence. A brief history of the R&B diva should probably begin with Janet Jackson and "Control." The title said it all; after 2 manufactured records, Janet stepped out from the family shadow, hired (rather than was hired by) top notch producers Jam & Lewis, and came up with an album that was as brim full of attitude as it was of tunes. Over the next few years Jackson's self-aware confidence gave us further mega albums such as "Rhythm Nation 1814" and "Janet". As "new jack swing" "r&b" and "urban" became THE key musical styles of the 90s, the female soul singer changed from being a big voice on whom a producer could hang their style, to being the key part of the whole enterprise. Think of Mary J. Blige's genre defining "What's the 411?" or Missy Elliot's "Miss E  - So Addictive." Sure there was a formula; a big voice, a backstory that included some personal tragedy, a brilliant production team (or teams); but whether solo act or girl group (TLC, Destiny's Child), much of the best music of the 90s and early 21st century was female fronted r&b. Yet listening to Beyonce's last album "I am...Sasha Fierce" or Alicia Key's new album, there seems to have been a change. These are no longer Kelis or TLC style pieces of affirmative action against a mans, mans world, but album length love breakdowns. The contemporary diva is strong, but in a different way. She's not gone out and started again; she's overcoming her depression. I think Keys' "Empire State of Mind Pt.2" is a brilliant piece of music, but coming at the end of an album of big, mid-paced soulsearching soul its got me craving for "Caught out there" "No Scrubs" or "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" It is the Pink's, the Kate Perry's, the Nelly Furtado's who are having all the fun, with their rock stylings loosened with a bit of r&b slinkiness, whilst our R&B divas seem to be caught in a (highly commercial) trap: between the reality TV big ballads on the one hand and the antediluvian "hos and bitches" stance of contemporary hip hop on the other. Missy Elliot, Kelis, Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopez and Mary J. Blige may have gone for the occasional collaboration, and worked with top producers, but you always felt they had the upperhand. Obligatory Jay-Z or Kanye collaborations aren't the issue; more that in the past it would have been the diva who was the main draw, and the rapper was having to work hard to keep up. Maybe it was the mega-success of Christina Aguilera's "Stripped" album and its ultimate self-love/self-hate ballad "Beautiful", or maybe it's just the contemporary world. But I for one am wanting my divas to be less "I can feel your halo", and more "I hate you so much right now."

Event Literature

A new novel as an "event"? It seems rare. Yet, you get the sense that this is where the "celebrity" of Martin Amis comes into it's own. "The Pregnant Widow", his 11th novel (the count seems to exclude the novella "Night Train"), is being hailed as a return to form. I've my copy already, and though I'm not sure I'll devour it immediately, the first 50 pages or so have been a joy to read. It's like when Lou Reed recorded "New York", it's like "thank God, at last he's recorded a Lou Reed album again". At last Martin Amis has written a Martin Amis novel again. He'll be reading from it as his latest public lecture at the University on Monday, though I'm not sure whether I'll make it down. Amis has always made the case for comedy, for satire - and it's Amis the satirist I think we might find has made a welcome return in this book, Amis the entertainer. More on this when I've er...read the actual book.

I enjoyed Wednesday's The Other Room and picked up ZimZalla's "object 2" - a 3 writer collection, one of whom, Holly Pester was one of the readers on Wednesday. Diminutive, young, southern-accented, she gave a compelling performance of work that it was then a surprise to find could also exist on the page. Much avant garde works is concerned with the disconnections and disfunctions of communication, and Pester's approach is to deconstruct a topic into words and syllables and sounds and then perform the work, with these deconstructions as a powerfully shocking rhythm or subtext. So in a piece that is apocalyptic in tone, she takes on the bangs and hisses of a shortwave radio after the catastrophe, and in a piece about an eye test she turns the optician's chart into the verbal throb of the poem. Excellent stuff. Steven Waling and Rob Holloway performed either side of Holly, with very different styles, Waling's work becoming increasingly observational and anecdotal, whilst retaining a roaming sensibility, whilst Holloway's is very much that particularly avant orthodoxy of accumulation - words, images - with little being conceded to the overtly personal. On another cold snowy Manchester night, we stayed put until last orders, but my eyes were going as I slumped down on the bus.

This diverse city life

The new year has turned hectic, perhaps the lost week because of snow has compacted everyone's activity. Anyway, tonight I'm at Social Media Cafe Manchester, debating the yet-to-be-released iPad amongst other things. All last weeks hype about the device is settling down into a period that seems more sceptical than expectant, as, perhaps unusually for Apple, the penny drops that the market for this device might not be the Apple-obsessives but their mums and dads. With the exception of the iPod, Apple's always missed the mass market by a long way. One of the key reasons for buying the iPad remains the least sexy, to be the best eReader on the market. Bigger and better than the Kindle and Sony eReader, and not as niche as either of them, it could get a decent market share just from that market alone. (At least in the UK, where the Kindle was notoriously slow to appear.) The devil, as always with Apple, is in the detail. The web's full of stories of e-book pricing, with publishers falling over themselves to say that the physical cost of a book is actually hardly anything, hence no price differential with the e-book version. Really? Then maybe an enterprising publisher should bundle the 2 together then. Pay an extra 1p and get the physical version as well. Anything that increases the e-book market has to be good thing, I think, as without a viable market the chances for innovative electronic books being developed will be somewhat small.

Small publishing is alive and well of course, (or as well and alive as it ever is), and this week's The Other Room at the Old Abbey Inn on Wednesday promises to be a treat. I'm on a panel at the other end of town the week beforehand, so I'm hoping that finishes in time for me to make it.

I've a piece published in Arts Professional magazine this week, for any arts professionals reading this who subscribe to it. Its a piece co-authored with Hannah Rudman about the ethnographic evaluation that we undertook on the AmbITion project I managed last year for the arts council.

Just a reminder that the music I've recently put online is available to listen to or to download for free. Both my recent LP "You Want to Know Something?" and previous E.P. "Popular Songs" are now available on the site, and I'll add some other older music over the coming weeks.

***
One other thing before the new Martin Amis book comes out and dominates all rational thought for the rest of the month: a fascinating article on American literary magazines I found via Arts and Letters Daily. 

I've always felt that our lack of literary magazine culture to match America has been a disadvantage, but it seems that this particular American jewel is disappearing under a mixture of university cutbacks, mediocre magazines, and the retirement of editors - never mind the continuing perplexity of a culture of "creative writers" who don't, apparently, read themselves. Though the literary magazine is problematic even here in the UK. I like the idea of the magazine more than the magazines themselves. They tend to too narrow a definition (whether defined by editor or readers tastes I'm not sure), or drift too far from the literary (reportage, memoir et al.) Few concern themselves with both poetry and fiction, for like the farmers and the cowmen in Oklahoma, the novelists and the poets can't be friends. Newer, younger magazines haven't quite shed their desire to be edgy (where edgy seems to mean stories derived from a pantheon that runs all the way from Bukowski to Irvine Welsh), whilst odder ones are so often tastefully unread. So I like literary magazines, but can't seem to find one that I particularly like at the moment. My general rule would be that the smaller and more scruffily produced they are, the better they might turn out to be. There's something about the neater magazine that seems to mitigate against the messiness of the best literature. Just a thought. 

Two Different Takes on the 60s/70s

Whether its the coincidence of the publishing schedule, or what happens when enfant terribles hit their sixties, there are two alternate takes on the late 60s/early 70s in today's Observer. Patti Smith's new book, "Just Kids," is a prose memoir of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe on her arrival in New York in the late 60s. If the extract from the Observer is anything to go by, it will be a must read. Almost uniquely literate amongst rock musicians - after all, she began as a poet, and in many ways created her own hybrid - it's perhaps no surprise to be riveted by the story. Smith was extremely lucky in her muses, with Mapplethorpe, Fred "Sonic" Smith, Tom Verlaine and others she connected with some of the great spirits of the seventies; it nurtured her art, but she also nurtured theirs; but as any cursory reading of her biography knows, meeting Mapplethorpe on coming to New York, was crucial. I've always felt his photography and her music are two different stems from a similar bud - grown from that fervent artistic hotbed of lower East-side New York in the late sixties and early seventies, watered at the Chelsea Hotel, St. Marks' Poetry Project and Max's Kansas City amongst other places.

Though we have no extract, Martin Amis's new novel "The Pregnant Widow" also looks at that "golden generation", but from the other side of the Atlantic. In a positive review in the Observer, Tim Allen makes the point that by returning to his own autobiography, the post-Oxford demi-monde of early 70s artistic London, Amis's supreme comic voice has perhaps found a way to thrive now he's also in his sixties. I'm looking forward to it, though perhaps not as much as the Patti Smith memoir.

Phoneys

I got a twitter from Sarah Crown today, literary editor at the Guardian, that she'd received copies of the new editions of Salinger's work, with new covers approved by him. He died on Wednesday aged 91, and though I'm sure his legacy was on his mind at some point during his last days, it seems inconceivable that a writer who had refused any kind of "new" version of his books during the last 40 years, suddenly showed a keen interest in cover design.

(NB. It seems like the new covers were already in the works, and you can see them here.)

Most writers have anonymity in life, and only in death find fame. The irony about Salinger's self-imposed exile is that when he was alive he managed to keep out of the public eye, but in death he is "public property." Up to a point, of course. Copyright law should keep him safe until 2080, so if anything does come out in the next few years, its his heirs' decision, I guess. Literary estates tend to jealously protect their writers' reputation.


Salinger wrote one novel, the massive selling "catcher in the rye", but his literary legacy is as equally served by the short stories he wrote about the Glass faimily. That novel was written in the voice of its protagonist Holden Caulfield and influenced many generations of teenagers. (And only one psychotic, Mark Chapman, to kill.) The stories...their fragmented half-history, say something similar, but also something else.

Its hard to conceive that such a slim selection followed by those years of utter silence, could be a literary legacy. But the proof is in the books. The work stands up, regardless.

So, J. D. Salinger, you left us finally. I'm sad to see you go. Rest in peace, for I doubt you'll retain your silence in this world.

A Sad Day for Bananafish

death robbed him of his anonymity

in that


he did the opposite of what most of us find

that life is loud


and after that is silence


but in silence


he found perfection

I think the silence spoke louder


against an age he foresaw

did not particularly like

did not see why he should be part of


the barrier all writers build

between

their written and real selves

collapsed



read Hapworth 16, 1924

and tell me any difference, there is none,

walls collapsed


*


and in death do not expect revelations

respect the beauty of his choices

he remains one of the remarkable ones

though his skin was thin, his talent was strong

Whose Literature is it anyway?

I imagine them sat in a room. It's probably a scene from a Carol Churchill play, a banquet perhaps, with dinner guests who could not possibly meet and talk at the same time. There's a few youngsters there. A Samuel Beckett, a James Joyce perhaps, firebrands. There's a bearded Lawrence, a chicken leg in his hand like a wand or a weapon. Fitzgerald, I like to think, is by the drinks cabinet. If Zelda is with him then they're deep in conversation, but chances are, if there are ladies present, Hemingway has already taken them into the hallway for a particularly intimate conversation. Proust, of course, has cried off, illness. Pound has gathered some poets around him, with only Eliot really involved in the group discussion, whilst Yeats might have joined Fitzgerald for a dram, and Lorca's probably checking what Hemingway's up to - it will be more fun out there. If Pirandello is conducting a drama out on the lawn, its probably to an audience of painters and musician. They are, of course, at Diaghilev's house and Eric Satie is playing the piano throughout. Lurking by the coalshed, an old man looks on, Knut Hamsun wishing that he'd had such a crowd to hang with in his day. Late in the evening they'll play literary games, perhaps that one "books you haven't read, but should have." But nobody's ashamed not to have read the classical greats; after all they are all keen on finding different models. Even Gertrude Stein, arriving late, bringing her austere presence to the party, who has read just about everything, is uninterested in what the past holds. She writes in her diary at the end of the evening something (I paraphrase) along the lines of "literature is ours, now." 

As cinderella amongst the funded arts, (lack of expensive buildings you see!), it is important that the Arts Council and other funders continue to include literature as a priority, but I'm not so sure about a consultation on a strategy for literature.  It's pretty clear that those writers and others mentioned in the above paragraphs had a strategy for literature; it didn't, I'm pretty sure, involved Galsworthy or "childrens literature" or literature-in-performance or diverse communities, or reading-in-schools or anything similar was part of the remit. I guess the Arts for social change is too embedded in our policy to change now; and I'm certainly not advocating a wholesale destruction of the few schemes that do exist for encouraging readers and enabling writers. Yet, literature itself cannot just be seen as the promotion of anything-in-a-book. A reminder that literature remains a potential powder-keg, rather than a warm comfortable bath, comes out of Martin Amis's latest rip, of J.M. Coetzee "having no talent". Here is one of very best writers talking about another of our very best, and saying "I read one and I thought, he's got no talent. But the denial of the pleasure principle has got a lot of followers." It's like when Proust and Joyce met at a party wearily agreed that they both knew who the other was, but that they'd not read the other. I'm kind of pleased that Amis hasn't read Coetzee - I don't think he'd learn anything useful from him; the other way round? Who knows...but it's timely reminder of the lie that literature is all one happy family. You can like a person's writing, but hate the person; and there's been many writers I've liked personally, whilst not being overwhelmed by the writing. Thankfully there are writers where you like both. If there is going to be a consultation on literature it should burn up all the well-meaning preconceptions that are listed in the consultation document and come back to the work.