In 2006, Bob Dylan had an album called Modern Times, which is very Bob Dylan of him, because he’s not very modern at all, is he? With his old-fashioned hat, and his old-fashioned bow-tie, and his old-fashioned everything, really, Bob has been harking back to days gone by ever since actual days gone by. In fact, Dylan is one of those people who, every time you look at them, is still far away in the past. If you were able to construct a time machine like in Back To The Future 3 and set it to BOB DYLAN 1887, you’d find people a-sitting round a campfire saying, “That there Bob Dylan is like a figure torn from the pages of history.”
Which all just goes to show that even old-fashioned people are obsessed with the notion of modernness. “This is the Modern World,” sang The Jam, which was a bit ironic as they were dressed as mods at the time, who if you recall used to call themselves “modernists” but since 1962 have devoted themselves to being about as modern as, well, scooters. Mods are, by the way, the weirdest pop tribe because, unlike every other pop tribe, they don’t create but they do curate. Other tribes – pop, soul, metal, rap – are enormous, decades-spanning founts of creativity, spawning artiste after artiste with fresh new ideas. Mods just buy scarves. There have been two good mod bands – The Jam, who were really a rock band with scarves, and the Small Faces (The Who are a rock band who pretended to be mods to get scarves), which is dismal going for 60 years of mod, really.
But even mods were interested in being modern, which just goes to show how important being modern is. The Boomtown Rats sang She’s So Modern, a song about Paula Yates, who was a lot more modern than The Boomtown Rats, who pretended to be punk but were really the Irish Bruce Springsteen, or the bits of the Irish Bruce Springsteen that Thin Lizzy didn’t want any more.
Punk rock was supposed to be modern, of course, overthrowing the past like the past was a hairy statue in an RAF greatcoat, but it was still guitars and songs. It was, however, a lot more modern than new wave, which was basically people in their late twenties wearing 60s suits and ties with too many keyboards. But the modern world, which The Jam could only dream of, persisted in happening. A lot of this was technology’s fault – pop has always been the, ahem, daughter of invention – but another lot of it was David Bowie’s fault.
But when the 80s came and David Bowie recorded Modern Love, it was a strangely timed moment, because if there’s one thing Bowie had been since 1969, it was modern. From writing an acoustic one-hit-wonder song about space alienation to fucking with the fabric of time in Berlin, Bowie was so modern he was from the future. Yet, by the time he wrote Modern Love, he was all about the present, and Modern Love introduced a decade – the 80s – of David Bowie doing whatever other people were doing (he called this time “the Phil Collins years” but it wasn’t that bad).
The 80s were a very modern decade all round. Peter Gabriel, who’d spent five years playing a root vegetable in Genesis, shaved his head, wrote a song called Modern Love and invented Phil Collins’ drums. There was a band called Modern Romance, whose debut single was very New Romantic and was called Modern Romance, but this direction didn’t last, perhaps because it was too modern. There were Modern Eon, whose greatest achievement was to sound exactly how you’d imagine a band called Modern Eon would sound.
Pop music was, by definition, modern. People wanted new sounds and new styles (but not so much the magazine New Sounds, New Styles) and, as new technology evolved even more, there was MTV pop, then house, and then all kinds of music, some of it exciting and modern (sampling gave the world the chance to recombine old sounds to make new ones) and some of it boring and old (Britpop, which was basically Merseybeat on cocaine). Now we live in an age where half the chart is full of ballad-singing property developers and the other half is teen pop. And the weird thing about that is that pop is completely mental nowadays. I don’t mean all those dull men in knitwear singing about their dull lives in knitwear. I mean the tinny stuff that comes out of the radio. You may not like it – you may still be upset about Phil Collins being awful except for the drum one – but you should at least acknowledge that a lot of current popular music is very bizarre indeed.
Stuttering beats, sliced-up vocals, apparently random changes of tempo, loud bursts of weird random noise: sometimes hearing daytime Radio 1 is like listening to John Peel late at night [in 1981 – Ed]. It’s as though the true heirs of Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat are BTS and Charli XCX.
David Quantick tweets @quantick.
