Over the last couple of weeks I’ve finally gotten around to doing a couple of 21st Century Things: I finally fiddled with the GarageBand program on the Mac Mini we bought about 8 months ago and I watched the movie 24 Hour Party People and marveled at both the director’s self-referential verité style and Steve Coogan‘s glib narration. The fact that I never paid much attention to the Madchester scene and rave culture did not hinder my postmodern faculties.
As the film moved from the early Factory bands, such as Joy Division and A Certain Ratio (ie, bands I owned albums by and liked) to the later bands I’d missed the boat on the first time around, such as Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, my interest in the film was challenged. The Tony Wilson character’s credibility was challenged too, and maybe it was no coincidence that he was being ravaged by Hacienda drug culture while extolling the virtues of the Happy Mondays frontman. But what do I know? That stuff was fantastically popular for a spell, especially in the UK, where the validity of popular musical tastes has been borne out by as many great and bad acts as our own nation’s hit parade.
I was curious to hear these bands again. It had been years since I heard a Happy Mondays song and watched those videos of vaguely ’60s-influenced guys in baggy, vaguely rap-inspired clothes dancing around like the “toaster” character in any ska band to some overly active snare and tambourine pattern. To my surprise, the first Happy Mondays video I checked out was fairly entertaining.
Then I checked out another video, one a bit darker but still fueled by a hyperactive, rest-free beat and repeating nuggets of rhythm guitar.
Something about the music started to sound familiar, and I don’t just mean the fact that I was realizing I had heard these tunes in passing when they were popular. I was hearing the sound easily offered to Mac users through GarageBand. My point here is not to question the quality or validity of the Madchester bands but to show how the development of those songs and the charming, homemade quality of the artists’ images were precurssors to what’s become an easily accessible path these days through GarageBand and YouTube-related video technology.
Here’s Stone Roses, a band that still gets tremendous amounts of acclaim yet always sounded no better or worse than a decent track The Jam might have done on their running-on-fumes, Pigbag-inspired album, The Gift.
OK, this is much more laid back than anything Paul Weller could have done – and the skipping drum beat and percussion track are free of the 4×4 lodged up Rick Buckler’s ass – but you do get the connection, right? Weller got it. His first solo album is inspired by this scene. Even I know that, no?
Before playing around with the program, I had assumed that the Apple designers who developed GarageBand started with the musical concepts established by rap and hip-hop sampling. I guess that was part of what they had in mind, but even moreso I hear the components that made up all this Madchester/rave stuff:
- Bite-sized, 4-square, funky drum and guitar loops to make up groovy songs
- Hyperactive beats that encourage users to never let up for space or unexpected fills, thereby satiating the impulses generated by our cultural ADHD
I’ve long felt that the eighth-note, trebly bass parts of Peter Hook are among the most significant influences on the development of today’s indie rock, but now I see how the second generation of Manchester musicians have further influenced our musical landscape. GarageBand affords the individual the ability to make recordings as bite-sized, direct, and fun as “canned” studio recordings crafted for AM airplay in the ’60s – bands like The Association, The Turtles, etc. There’s no need to pay a Hal Blaine or a Larry Knechtel. We owe a lot of the capabilities of Apple’s GarageBand technology to the Madchester scene.
Not being a musician, my knowledge of GarageBand is pure hearsay. But isn’t part of its appeal the ability to make professional-quality recordings in your home? Part of the appeal of something like early New Order for me is the sense of fumbling around. Power, Corruption and Lies has a sort of “hey what does this button do?” sound that I like a lot. It sounds to me GarageBand is designed so you can’t get that kind of amateurishness across.
I don’t know what others’ experiences have been, Oats, but that New Order sense of fun fumbling is EXACTLY what I’ve gotten out of it. I’m sure more adept users can figure out how to play free jazz on the program, but my 10-year-old son sat down with me one night and 20 minutes later he was composing his own pieces using nothing more than the prepackaged loops.
Our bassist uses this to make up his songs because he has a rule to make a “song a day” this whole year. He sends us mp3s just about every other day spurring us on to write lyrics or other parts to his stuff on guitar which we eventually figure out in practice when we want to work on a new song. It’s the easiest thing in the world to record demos with, and the Mac has one of the most quality built in mics in an operating system (or so I’ve heard, from a friend who works at Apple and uses it to record his own stuff also) – and it is also quite clear and warm for being a built in mic. Even though it is quick and easy, I’d hesitate to use it in place of an actual recording done in a studio, those back loops are crazy and often sound more like something pumped out with a karaoke machine and someone singing over a track rather than an actual song.
Sally C wrote:
Exactly – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the Madchester scene taught us, is it?
GarageBand needs to add a loop of a hefty black woman belting out a single phrase that I could mix into my neo-Madchester trax.
When we wew living in Chicago in the 90’s – the main radio station WXRT went heavy into the manchestor sound. Too me its guitar-oriented disco. No real songs so to speak.
My son Seth has done a few songs with it. You can deinifitely do real recording with GarageBand but you need to do sequntially. You can either use a real mic with an 1/8th inch adatpter or spend a few $$$ and get a channel strip to go between the mic and the computer. The sound won’t be too different as compared to the equipment we use but you can’t record 4-6 mic’s at the same time with GarageBand.
Threadjack, but semi-related conceptually:
I don’t even like this song, but I do find this oddly cool
http://tinyurl.com/3dyulv
Someone called Bullshit a while ago on Abba here, so I’d like to do the same thing with New Order. I’ve been reading the arse-kissing superlatives ever since i was a kid, yet when i hear the music I just can’t understand why they’re so well respected.
Sure, I understand the appeal of stylish packaging and dead former singer in adding to a band’s mystique but surely that’s over-ridden by Everything Else. Does suicide really make a band untouchable in the cool stakes?
Their singer is both a horrible melodist, (he seems to be completely unaware there are other intervals beyond a second, and melody lines step up and down in tentative, directionless motion), and a absolutely shocking lyricist, in every way: one-syllable rhyming ability, murky use of metaphor / similie, and even the inability to carry one clear idea throug an entire song. Their songs often have random titles because there really is not point or meaning to the lyric.
As for Peter Hook, any bassist who plays the root of the chord in eighths for an entire bar, (even bouncing in disco octaves, as in Blue Monday) should turn in their bass and explore their natural role as a Keytar player.
So, someone explain them to me. Everyone else seems to hear Manchster Cool whilst all I’m hearing is Stacey Q / early Madonna.
“Every second counts
When I am with you
I think you are a pig
You should be in a zoo”
Beautiful, Homefront!!! It’s not so much that I agree with you (although I do to some extent), it’s the passion with which you’ve expressed yourself. I can only hope that someone equally passionate with an opposing point of view gives it back to you:)
The Great 48, that’s a pretty cool link you sent over. Someone should remake the entire Yellow Submarine film using this technology.
Too passionate, methinks – my post is full of spelling errors.
It’s not so much I hate them as I realise they’re Obviously Not For Me. It’s more that I just want to understand why they’re critically venerated to such a degree, when they seem to hit so many of the markers that ‘rock snobs’ usually loathe. Why the pass?
Pop music is always simultaneously expanding and contracting. One impulse is to add in more sounds, rhythms, structural variations, instrumental facility etc etc etc. But there’s another impulse is to get by with less. What happens if we make music without verses and choruses? How about we subtract the swing? Let’s leave out intelligible lyrics etc etc etc.
So simply listing the musical features that a particular artist lacks *in itself* is not a valid criticism. It’s a perfectly good explanation for why something is “not for you,” but one can certainly make viable music with very little.
Since punk, the anyone-can-do-it philosophy has led to a lot of music that lacks … any number of things. I like it. You don’t have to.
I guess I don’t understand why “Because they’re a lot of fun to dance to” is an insufficient answer.
For me, part of New Order’s charm is that their lyrics are so god-awful. I don’t like everything they do, but when they get it right — a seriously great song like “Temptation,” for example — they get it really right.
New Order aside, I’m still curious to learn whether other GarageBand users have noted the influence of the Madchester scene on the development of this software.
Mod, I see what you’re saying, but i think you may be overdetermining the relationship just a bit, by characterizing it as causal and being a bit anachronistic. I think the similarities between Manchester and Garageband are more likely coincidental.
in the case of manchester, we have a speed acid and ex scene in a locale with strong punk, britpop, and neo-psyche roots. So a danceable psyche is natural.
by the time Garageband was released, hyperactive drum loops, psychedellic-ish guitar sounds, and grooviness in general were commonplace, and Manchester never had an exclusive copyright on them, anyway. And Garageband has much more to offer than this. One can take their loops in a much more diverse set of directions than you suggest.
However, you’re right to point out that this is what their users normally come up with. But is that due to Manchester? Probably not as much as you suggest. Nowadays, we have kids who don’t draw the same lines between genres that you or I might. Remember the RTH poll on dancing a few weeks ago? We don’t like to dance. We like the Beatles. These kids like to dance, and they like the Beatles. And they like rap. And they have Macs. So they wind up making trippy, danceable, beatle influenced pop songs….but not because Steve Jobs and his team thought the Happy Mondays should be the most influential band ever or something.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming day when this chick’s picture is no longer on the first page.
Sammy wrote:
It’s funny you say that, Sammy. I’ve been conflicted about seeing her each time I log on. If we didn’t have so many women reading and we weren’t such gentleman I’d detail my conflicted emotions.
she IS drug crazed, however, isn’t she?
I don’t believe that arguement for a second, because once you start making excuses and allowances int he name of ‘art’, the beauty of the form itself is lost.
Why base songs around a rhythm? Why use traditional instruments? Why have any structure or form at all? Why even make any sound? What really constitutes music? You end up wasting your life listening to self-congratulatory theoretical wanks like 4.33 by John Cage, or horrendous noise experiments like ‘The Beachles’.
Life’s too short to listen to Sonic Youth base their vocal melodies on their guitar riffs.
That’s normally not good enough for rock critics, which is why their love of New Order confuses me. The bands who are deemed Allowably Cool by the status quo seem largely random at times.
Homefront, although I agree with some of your initial objections, I think there are many ways to skin a cat. We’re talking about the creation of music, not just rock ‘n roll or pop music. As much as a dogmatic guy as I can be, I couldn’t make the argument that verses and choruses are in any way preordained to the art of music.
As for any critical acclaim given to New Order today, I think a lot of it has to do with them having survived a huge loss and withstanding the popular belief that they’d go nowhere without Curtis. When they first became New Order, they were considered a “pussy” version of the “real thing” by a lot of music fans.
I’m not really sure that criticizing bad lyrics/singing and simplistic bass playing is that strong of an argument (lots of bands good and bad have these flaws).
For me, New Order could write catchy, propulsive songs. They’re one of the few bands that could combine electronics and guitar without coming across as hoaky or stunted.
If they were a critics’ choice kind of band, it was because of their success in genre-crossing: playing club music that still sounded good while listening at home.
Homefront queries:
These are all excellent, not to mention productive, questions.
Yes I do, and you can too!
I wasn’t making excuses; I was just not footnoting my examples. Is James Brown’s music bad because he threw out verse/chorus structure? Are I Am The Walrus and I Zimbra worthless because they jettisoned intelligible lyrics? Does punk rock suck because it doesn’t swing?
The great 48’s American Bandstand approach to music criticism, though at the opposite end of the spectrum from what I’ve been getting at, is equally valid as far as I’m concerned.
As is the point that one cannot always explain why critics like some artists and not others.
Depends on the rock critic, I suppose. Speaking for myself, songs that make me dance always get good reviews, even if I don’t specifically mention in the review that track three had me doing the funky chicken across the kitchen linoleum when I was supposed to be keeping an eye on the mirepoix.