Just what is it that you want to do?

We wanna be free

We wanna be free to do what we wanna do

And we wanna get loaded

And we wanna have a good time

That’s what we’re gonna do

(No way baby, let’s go!)

We’re gonna have a good time

We’re gonna have a party

(Sample from ‘The Wild Angels’ at the beginning of ‘Loaded’ by Primal Scream – 1990)

Being ‘free’ and having a ‘good time’ was what I wanted as a teenager. Yet I still wanted to ‘belong.’ Youth cults were such a big thing when I was growing up in London. I embraced it all. It seemed like a rebellion but was also a search for identity. I fancied myself as a Ted, when they were fighting the punks on the Kings Road. I was discovering the classic rock n roll of Presley and Buddy Holly. Then I became a fully fledged punk rocker along with my punk friends at school. I came late to it, when punk was morphing into New Wave and I followed bands like Adam and the Ants. Later I fancied myself as a Mod when I took a shine to scooters, discovering 60’s R&B and liking The Who. This coincided with a Ska revival and bands such as The Specials. The 80’s were a time of great creativity and excitement in music. Popular music was identifiable and yet boundaries were being pushed and new sounds were being created and new genres were emerging…the last big one being Hip Hop. Then came Primal Scream.

Last year I watched the TV highlights of the return of the Isle Of Wight festival after the pandemic – there were golden oldies galore, headliners from Duran Duran to Liam Gallagher to Tom Jones. Then there was Primal Scream. The highlights were followed by a music documentary looking back at the seminal album – Screamadelica. The uniqueness of this album included the use of sampling (taking bits of other songs, and movie lines, and having them on a loop.) It featured mixing all the pop music sounds known to man. The track ‘Loaded’ incessantly repeat the line, ‘I Don’t Wanna lose Your Love’…they might just have well done that! It was a mixing pot of all musical genres to a dance backing track, a beat popular at acid house parties and the rave and ecstasy scene of the late 80’s and early 1990’s. Does this mark the start of the steep decline of western civilization or just the end of pop music?

What we know is it certainly marked the dearth of anything new in the popular music scene…We had the usual revivals (Brit Pop) and the mixing of rock genres (Grunge) and the emergence of Boy Bands! We had experiments with electronics, with distorted vocals (Autotune), genuinely un-danceable dance music (…then there’s the history of dance from couple and group dancing to doing your own individual spaced out thing on the dance floor…but that’s a whole story in itself.) Then we had the X Factor! (One day, someone will write the book, ‘Simon Cowell and the Fall of Western Civilization’.)

It was as if popular music was dying a long slow agonising death, in similar fashion to the western culture around it. My brother often recounts a story of the chart show on BBC Radio 1 every Sunday evening. Everyone was tuned in with great expectation. He recalls the haunting sound of that intro to the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Many people on the estate would have their radios tuned in, and turned up all at once, and then that intro echoed eerily around the estate. It was something we all did together, listening to the chart show with great expectation as to who would be the new No. 1. It was a unifying event…pop music brought people together. It was the same with Top of the Pops…every Thursday evening we would gather around the TV to watch the latest bands. Again, it was something we did together and it struggled on until the mid-naughties, when it too died.

I am quite aware of the possibility that pop music didn’t die. Maybe my need for pop music died… I don’t need the same distractions that I did in years gone by…I don’t listen to music much these days and enjoy silence like never before.

So what’s up with pop music? If it is not dead then it has experienced a serious decline. Can popular music no longer articulate itself because it no longer knows who or what it is? Maybe music that is a mishmash of genres ends up being music without meaning. Maybe the death (or dearth) of pop music mirrors that of society in general, that we no longer have anything to bind us together. Maybe it mirrors today’s struggle for identity, that we all have to be different from our neighbour but feel uncomfortable with this (what’s my pronoun again?) Maybe we need to return to gathering around the hearth and singing together the songs our ancestors sang? Who knows, maybe in 200 years time that will include ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine!’ Did pop music give us false expectations and a distorted view of freedom? What will have happened to all those songs of the last fifty years in 2222? Let us hope that, by then, we ‘won’t get fooled again’…or will the new boss, be same as the old boss?!