In 2006, Bob Dylan had an album called Modern Times, which is very Bob Dylan of him, because he\u2019s 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\u2019d find people a-sitting round a campfire saying, \u201cThat there Bob Dylan is like a figure torn from the pages of history.\u201d
\nWhich all just goes to show that even old-fashioned people are obsessed with the notion of modernness. \u201cThis is the Modern World,\u201d 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 \u201cmodernists\u201d 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\u2019t create but they do curate. Other tribes \u2013 pop, soul, metal, rap \u2013 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 \u2013 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.
\nBut even mods were interested in being modern, which just goes to show how important being modern is. The Boomtown Rats sang She\u2019s 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\u2019t want any more.
\nPunk 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\u2019s fault \u2013 pop has always been the, ahem, daughter of invention \u2013 but another lot of it was David Bowie\u2019s fault.
\nBut when the 80s came and David Bowie recorded Modern Love, it was a strangely timed moment, because if there\u2019s 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 \u2013 the 80s \u2013 of David Bowie doing whatever other people were doing (he called this time \u201cthe Phil Collins years\u201d but it wasn\u2019t that bad).
\nThe 80s were a very modern decade all round. Peter Gabriel, who\u2019d spent five years playing a root vegetable in Genesis, shaved his head, wrote a song called Modern Love and invented Phil Collins\u2019 drums. There was a band called Modern Romance, whose debut single was very New Romantic and was called Modern Romance, but this direction didn\u2019t last, perhaps because it was too modern. There were Modern Eon, whose greatest achievement was to sound exactly how you\u2019d imagine a band called Modern Eon would sound.
\nPop 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 you may still be upset about Phil Collins being awful except for the drum one \u2013 but you should at least acknowledge that a lot of current popular music is very bizarre indeed.
\nStuttering 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\u2019s as though the true heirs of Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat are BTS and Charli XCX. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Quantick tweets @quantick. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2006, Bob Dylan had an album called Modern Times, which is very Bob Dylan of him, because he\u2019s 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, e\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9950,"featured_media":198502,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"issue":[13347],"class_list":["post-198501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","issue-december-2020"],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n