Reformation! (Arbeit Mit Uns)

What do Van Halen, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smashing Pumpkins, The House of Love, The Police, Gang Of Four and Slint have in common? (If you said they all suck apart from the Mary Chain, The House Of Love, Gang Of Four and Slint, have a banana.) The answer is, or course, that recently, all of the above bands have put aside their differences, ideological objections and last remaining shreds of integrity for the sake of the money and reformed. Mere years ago, the idea of the disparate personalities in these bands getting together again seemed utterly laughable – as we all know, pop music survives on a diet of daft overblown legends. The greatest hates, like the greatest loves, are meant to last forever, and no one ever expected to see the Reid brothers reunited after years of not speaking to each other, or Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers in the same room as each other after the former chucked the latter out of his band – literally, out the back of the tour bus. There is inevitably something anticlimactic to the modern ending to these stories – instead of living unhappily ever after or resulting in bloody murder, the main characters have settled into a marriage of convenience in order to make a living on the nostalgia circuit. Not the stuff legends are made of. Perhaps more heartbreakingly, Gang Of Four, one-time Marxists who not only critiqued capitalist consumer society on 1979’s awesome Entertainment! album but refused to censor their lyrics in order to appear on Top Of The Pops, now have no problem with reforming not to create more music but to play Entertainment! note for note to festival goers in exchange for filthy lucre whilst gig promoters and record company execs rub their hands with glee. “Sell out, maintain the interest” indeed. Even experimental rock titans Sonic Youth have joined in on the act, taking a break from producing new music to play the whole of Daydream Nation to packed auditoriums.
Why is the music industry so entrenched in nostalgia? From band reunions to the ever expanding reissues market, so much of the music we listen to day is part of the past, preserved in aspic. Bands make careers out of mining sounds from a particular era of popular music. Part of it must be that pop music, while being by nature entrenched in the here and now, increasingly in these iPod days serves also as an escapist fantasy away from the here and now, taking the listener somewhere familiar, warm and fuzzy. Also, as the internet makes more music from every era immediately available to the curious, more and more interesting and overlooked records from the past are exhumed to be rediscovered and reevaluated. The past has never been a more busy or exciting time.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that something’s gone wrong. Reforming used to be the ultimate sign of selling out – when the Sex Pistols reformed in 1996, Siouxsie and the Banshees split in protest. However, The Pixies’ recent reunion saw the band welcomed as returning heroes rather then has-beens milking the last few dollars from their back catalogue. Admittedly, the Pixies reformation gave a generation of fans a chance to see their favourite band live, making it a bit more then a bunch of middle-aged hipsters reliving their youth. But surely the point is that young people these days should be listening to something else. Popular music has become complacent, largely I think because of an overly reverent attitude to the past. Bands seem unafraid to mangle up or distort their influences into something original. Placing Daydream Nation and Surfa Rosa on pedestals is unhealthy on two accounts – firstly, you have generations of artists struggling in thrall to these records when they should be aiming to produce something so amazing that it utterly destroys both records, and secondly, by making records ‘canon’ you immediately detract from their revolutionary and iconoclastic nature: they simply become one in a list of ‘worthy’ records that people really ‘ought’ to have listened to, alongside Revolver and Highway 61, and hence part of what must be kicked against in order for pop music to stay alive, protean and relevant. This is a process which happens naturally and is indeed the healthy natural order of things, but it doesn’t stop it being disheartening to see Daydream Nation’s fire and brimstone tamed not 20 years after its release. More disheartening still is to see an adventurous group like Sonic Youth consign themselves to the Irrelevant Old Farts scrapheap years ahead of their time by actively taking part in the process. Sadly, however, we live in a world where the music business is big bucks, and with the amounts of money involved, it must be harder and harder to resist for the sake of integrity.
What can be done about this? It is tempting to call for a punk-style, year zero, scorched earth policy, but in the information age this is not really possible and, with the past admittedly still having much to offer, it is perhaps cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. There needs to be a change in attitude to the past – there is a wealth of musical ideas, but they should not be approached with such reverence – assuming that you can never better it means you never will. Nostalgia as a whole should be abolished – ‘Balti and Vimto and Spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back bores’. Once bands reach the stage where they have nothing new or relevant to say, they should retire with grace and dignity, and if you never got a chance to see them live, well, tough. Far better to remember them this way, minus the bald patches, paunches and session musicians. And if you really like Daydream Nation, go out there and make something even better.