Climbing Out Of The Machine

“The lyrics kinda started to come, I think for both of us, being kinda underdogs in the business. My co-writer was a songplugger, just turned songwriter, and I'd had record deals and ups and downs in the music business. I think for both of us, we just came from a place of, you know, 'it's not a race'.- Jessi Alexander, co-writer of Joe McElderry’s 2009 X Factor single “The Climb”

There’s been a lot of noise in the UK press recently about a Facebook campaign to send platinum-selling agit-rock act Rage Against the Machine’s notorious 1992 single Killing in The Name to #1 in the UK charts for Christmas.

The song isn’t exactly John Lennon's Merry Christmas War Is Over, as anyone who’s heard it will already know. With a refrain that runs “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” it’s intended as a celebration of activist anger and political defiance, though some have also criticised it as a display of petulance or even an indirect incitement to violence.

What’s made this elderly piece of polemic newsworthy once more is its adoption as a weapon against the forces of music marketing, in the shape of Simon Cowell’s UK talent show The X Factor. Incensed at what they see as the show’s stranglehold on the annual Christmas #1 chart spot, the group has been urging its supporters to download the RATM song in “protest”.

Although its organisers claim the campaign was "supposed to be fun", it swiftly went viral as Cowell’s show approached its conclusion on British TV. And although it was conceived well before a real live X Factor winner emerged, the pro-RATM campaign is now in danger of scoring a major own-goal in the PR stakes.

For 2009’s X Factor winner is 18-year-old Joe McElderry – a personable working-class boy from a deprived region of north-east England. Raised by a single mum in a council flat, bullied by his peers because of his virginity and his interest in music, he turned to old-fashioned measures like education and hard work in order to pull himself out of poverty. In this he was not unlike RATM guitarist and activist-in-chief Tom Morello, a feisty mixed-race lad from Chicago similarly raised by a single mother and empowered by education after winning a place at Harvard.

Instead of identifying a kindred spirit and a parallel story, the now mega-successful Morello has added his support to the British campaign to block McElderry’s Christmas single from the #1 spot, giving interviews to the press and even adding fuel to the fire via his Twitter account. Instead of recognising that McElderry is a natural talent to be nurtured, encouraged and empowered, he's missed the chance to come to the aid of a fellow artist in favour of taking a swipe at the music marketing machine from which he too has benefited.

Perhaps those who are blindly supporting the pro-RATM Facebook campaign might also benefit from actually listening to the competition. It might not be to their own taste, but this Christmas single is no worthless seasonal novelty. Not only does McElderry have a rare vocal talent– his single The Climb, written by country artists Jessi Alexander and Jon Mabe, also has much in common lyrically with RATM’s stated sympathy for the struggling underdog.

None of the above is intended as a personal attack on Tom Morello, whom I have met and found to be a man of charm and apparent integrity. Neither is it a defence of entertainment mogul Simon Cowell – whose record company Syco is in any case part of Sony, to which RATM are also signed. Cowell has stressed that this campaign won’t hurt him. It does, however, have the potential to blight the career of a vulnerable teenage boy at its very outset. Not all X Factor winners go on to have the massive global success of a Leona Lewis. Some fail to ignite – and fall victim to the same industry pressures as any other act in the marketplace. First-ever winner Steve Brookstein was dropped just eight months into his contract; Leon Jackson faded away almost as quickly.

Songwriter Jessi Alexander has said that part of the message of her song is that when it comes to music, “it’s not a race”. It’s sad, therefore, to see it drawn into a showdown that has more in common with playground bullying than the right to artistic choice. It’s difficult to see exactly who will benefit if RATM do elbow Joe’s single out of the way. The members of Rage Against The Machine may get the chance to top up their pension funds; British students and NME-readers may get a momentary kick out of putting two fingers up at Simon Cowell.

But it would be ironic indeed if Joe McElderry became the actual victim of those who claim they want to empower people just like him.

Get Joe McElderry's debut single The Climb here (download or CD) or watch the official video on YouTube (sorry, embedding disabled)

Watch Joe McElderry performing Elton John's Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word live:

Imagine No Possessions...

Dusty, fusty, underfunded - tucked away inside civic architecture or ignored by schoolkids - the lending library's long been literature's ugly sister. And while the latest Dan Brown flies off the shelves in Waterstones, the scribblings of the less well-known are passed from hand to hand, dog-eared and date-stamped by mousy ladies in cardigans.

Switch the concept across to music, however, and something strange happens. What's Spotify - the online music streaming service - if not an enormous music library? Like those fusty town libraries, it's legal, and free (or close to it). It's equitable. It offers a range of material, unaffected by current hype, marketing, sales or image. But unlike them - somehow it's become sexy.

It's altering our attitudes to music at basis. For years now, the music industry has been all about ownership. Rights, royalties, contracts, possessions. Now all that's changing. More and more artists are parting company from major labels and making their own arrangements for sharing their music - even, as Radiohead demonstrated, for a voluntary payment. Increasingly, at the click of a mouse button you can access pretty much anything, from any era. "My stepson...was telling me how he's currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s," said 80s pop star John Taylor in a recent speech given at UCLA, "...the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible."

With something like Spotify, you don't OWN a copy of the music you're hearing - you're streaming it in high quality over the Internet. But the chief point of that kind of ownership has already been steadily eroded by the growth in digital downloads. No longer do we buy weighty vinyl albums with gatefold sleeves, artwork and lyric sheets all designed to annotate and sell the idea of music as an artefact. For many people, even shelves of jewel-boxed CDs had already given way to a bulging computer hard drive. So what difference does it make - really - if that song coming out of your computer speakers is hosted on your own computer or a remote server somewhere else? Unless you're a hopeless hi-fi nut or one of the few unfortunates left who can't get broadband, the answer is very little.

And maybe there's another upside to the new lending-library approach to music. Buying, owning and collecting all the CDs by a particular artist used to be part of what made you a superfan. Collectors and completists felt they had invested in their idol's career, putting money in their pocket and contributing to their success. All that might have helped build a loyal fanbase - but sometimes also limited an artist's freedom to evolve. The power of money does strange things to art: angry fans whose artist has changed direction or explored other avenues of music-making, have sometimes behaved almost like company shareholders whose investment has failed. That has produced more pressure on artists to produce more of the tried-and-trusted, via a tightly-controlled brand or even through revivals of past successes. Change and experiment meant uncertainty and diminishing returns.

The effects of that pressure are still showing up via a rash of predictable comeback albums, reunion tours and legacy reissues. Now that a new generation of fans isn't being asked to make that continuing financial investment to its acts, could we be seeing the death of the whole idea of music as something we can own? As target markets age and sales of CDs plummet, there are already signs that the old breed of tribal superfan might weaken, terminally distracted by the allure of infinite choice. When the whole world's laid out to enjoy for free, why limit yourself to what you already know? And as we learn how to live without owning the music we love, perhaps that music's original currency - discovery, imagination, innovation and experimentation - will flower anew.

Let me tell you about winds

“There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives.” – Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.

Whirlwinds I can
Well withstand.
But these soft currents
Blunt any blade.
I cannot fight
To stay alive.
I must not tell
Of the holy waterline
The singing fires
Or your slow hands, working
To shake off sleep.
To live among these things
I must go weaponless,
Or turn the knife against myself.

© Clare O’Brien 2009

A new poem. Showed it to family: both teenage sons got it, husband was clueless. Not sure what that says. It's kind of about motherhood.

Reproduction

He cuts his teeth on your bones,
Milks your wet words dry.
His lips drip melted language.

His pelt grows through your skin.
His hairs squeeze sweat
From your tight winter pores.

You run all night behind him now,
Blood stings your labouring throat
with the sad salt stink of need.

You cannot stay here long.
His muscles will outrun you,
his heart split you in two.

© Clare O’Brien 2009

Review: "Scream" by Chris Cornell

Sometimes music isn’t only music. If you’re a synaesthete like me, sometimes it turns into a kind of psychedelic geometry – shapes, colours, movement, sensation. Chords are hot or cold, rough or smooth, notes gain shades of colour or depth of field, rhythms taste salty or sweet, silences burn. This is one of those albums.

When I first heard it, quite a while ago now - this Scream left me shaken. Coming at music from anywhere but hiphop, perhaps I expected Cornell’s collaboration with Timbaland to mean some kind of dilution. To have to go looking for what I wanted under an overlay of something else. Carry On had been a book of short stories, an exploration with an uncertain ending: I knew this would be something more cohesive, a power jolt, but I wasn’t ready for the sheer size of the shock. I was expecting something like Bowie’s Let’s Dance, a subtly subversive shot at the mainstream. What I got was closer to Earthling.

No – despite what you might have read here and there, Scream actually isn’t an easy listen. Sleek enough to slide under the radar to target the casual listener, its darker content may escape those looking for non-stop sunshine or a critical mass of heavy riffage. And in the sadly unimaginative world of rawk, expectations are easily confounded. Take away the genre signifiers – heavy guitars, live drums – and many won’t recognise what lies beneath.

Which is a shame, because although it might be wearing party clothes, Scream is a dense, complex and sometimes harrowing piece of work: imagine Superunknown remade with different tools, its band dynamic replaced with a dialogue between a great singer/songwriter and a great sonic imagineer. Together, Cornell and Timbaland have drawn on developments within the eclectic European scene to create a new musical hybrid which invokes the underground dance clubs of Paris, Oslo or Lake Garda as much as the arenas of the global rock circuit.

Timbaland’s sonic kaleidoscope challenges and supports Cornell’s peerless voice by turns; sometimes brutally sparse, sometimes surging and splashing around the layered vocals and sputtering beats like boiling sugar. Emotions rear up unexpectedly, fear stalks the back of a phrase or lurks inside a harmony, the sun comes out on a cadence or a scream unzips the sky and makes it rain. It’s a cavalcade of shapes and colours, a kind of electronic zoo in which all kinds of creatures spawn and frolic.

Songs ebb and flow into each other like scenes along a river. Centrepiece "Take Me Alive" – with backing vocals by Justin Timberlake - is "Kashmir" meets Bollywood, its dark imagery both sinuous and sinister. Title track and US single Scream ends with the clanking trudge of a retreating army before an electronic hornpipe drops us into the murky hell of "Enemy". The neo-disco stylings somehow turn an already dark song into something truly terrifying – a danse macabre, a relentless ballet of stylised self-hatred. It’s the album’s most disturbing moment.

Cornell’s lyrics have evolved over time from impressionism into expressionism, learning to wear their black heart on their sleeve. Instead of spinning oblique metaphors which keep the listener at a polite distance, he now pulls you directly into his nightmare: “no price/nothing I pay will make it all right/nothing I see
will make it lose sight/nothing I take will make me sleep at night”.

Elsewhere his elegant trademark wordplay reasserts itself, with dystopian lines like “the perfect present is no longer the future”. There are Chandleresque excursions into storytelling – we meet the guilty adventurer of “Other Side Of Town”, the hapless victim of a dancehall temptress in “Part Of Me”, the hellcat-on-wheels of “Watch Out”. Perhaps none of them are Cornell, or perhaps all of them are. Like the music which surrounds them, these lyrics are prismatic, reflecting differently depending on where you stand.

Maybe Scream will revive the lost art of the concept album, though it doesn’t so much tell a story as follow an emotional arc, a hallucinogenic journey through heaven and hell. This is a huge, 3D production, a cinematic creation from its crazy opening fanfare to the sound of film running off projector spools which brings it to closure.

Or...almost to its closure. The jokey bit of off-the-cuff studio verité which ushers in final track "Watch Out" isn’t the only snatch of the blues we hear: after a long silence, hidden track "Two Drink Minimum" rounds off the set with a slice of survival, distant cousin of Audioslave’s "The Last Remaining Light". Cornell says he recorded it as the sun came up at 6 am after a long night in the studio: Scream leaves you with the same sense of having made it through the night to morning. Excellent and fair.

That's Entertainment - or is it Art?

It’s a difficult question. Where does entertainment bleed into art? Can art itself be a form of entertainment? Or does the very word “entertain” imply something trivial, a way to fill up time, while art has the altogether nobler job of moving and unsettling us? If we’re talking about the Huxley-esque division between that which disturbs and that which merely sedates, what’s soma and what isn’t?

Human beings love to put things into categories. It makes our lives tidy and easy to track – but however much we struggle to contain life’s chaos, it has a nasty habit of breaking free and running riot. Living things grow and change, people especially - and so do the things they make, like art. Genre labels in libraries, music stores and broadcast media only tell us so much about the weirdly mutable stuff in which they deal.

The latest storm to blow up in the X-Factor teacup is over the winner’s single, Hallelujah. Originally written by Leonard Cohen, it was memorably covered by the late Jeff Buckley on his 1994 album Grace, a sublime piece of work which almost deserves its acknowledged status as art-rock’s Holy Grail. However, for some people music made by dead guys is Art while music made by hungry talent show contestants is “inevitably soulless”. Sadly, grace of any kind is in fairly short supply on Facebook pressure groups like this one, which overlook the fact that X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke’s gospel-inflected reading of the song actually has the kind of passion, soul and commitment which might well have made Jeff Buckley smile in recognition.



It wasn’t a matter of misplaced credit – Buckley had always said his recording followed John Cale’s arrangement of the song, and Burke’s very different performance was really nobody’s but her own. Meanwhile, songwriter Cohen, recently relieved of his liquid assets by an unscrupulous manager (see this story), is all too happy to see his work coin in a bit of Christmas cash. The boycott campaign protects nobody: it merely spotlights the kind of snobbish outrage which sometimes ensues when artists overstep category guidelines and the line between art and entertainment is blurred.

Which could mean a lot of adjustment is needed to both ears and preconceptions. In an era when big-name musicians from wildly different genres are busy pairing up like wallflowers at a tea-dance, categorising music is becoming more and more difficult. Where do you file Alison Krauss and Robert Plant? Chris Cornell and Timbaland? Alicia Keys and Jack White? James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma? The music created sometimes turns out more compound than mixture – a new substance which defies its origins, a huge risk which may please everybody or nobody. Crossover, once seen as a moneygrabbing dilution of artistic purity, is now becoming responsible for some of the bravest and most interesting music being made. Rather than typecasting creativity, it can be a source of growth and experimentation for musicians of every stamp. After all, travel broadens the mind. The more so, once audiences begin to disregard cultural signifiers and leave their narrowcasted comfort zones behind.

Which brings us back to the original question. If, as Jim Morrison once said, everything is broken up and dances.......what makes art? Where is it found? How can you recognise it? Does it differ from entertainment at all? Let’s have your thoughts....

Fanning the Flames
Slavery, “Misery” and Chris Cornell

When the musician Prince wrote the word “slave” on his face back in 1993, he made a powerfully iconic gesture. Not only was he pointing up his own frustration with his record company and the terms of their contract - he was also invoking his own country’s history at a time when a civilised society felt able to buy, sell and enslave a human being. Although liberators from Abraham Lincoln to William Wilberforce put an end to slavery across much of the world, elements of serfdom still held sway within the music business. Artists felt they were being bought and sold by corporate entities, prevented from owning the master tapes of their own work while being forced to dance to the tunes of their masters.

The pressures of digital piracy and easy music downloads have since forced the record companies onto the back foot. Although much remains that is restrictive, most artists - whatever their level of success within the industry - now make much of their living by touring. Music is increasingly seen as a kind of loss leader, a free inducement to tempt in those in the market for mobile phones, designer clothing or social networking. The focus for experiencing music has moved back to perhaps where it should have been all along - the live stage. And whether you’re a squillion-selling country or R&B singer, an arena rocker or a folkie slogging round the DIY circuit, that’s where you’ll be plying your real trade.

Sadly though, the idea of ownership of art has been harder to shift. Painters and sculptors have long had to accept the fact that the things they made could be bought and owned by others, and have had to adjust to the loss of original artefacts on which they have lavished care, passion and love. Those whose work was able to be copied and reproduced, like musicians, writers and photographers, have maybe had an easier time of it. When J.K. Rowling sold her Harry Potter books to Bloomsbury, the manuscripts stayed in her study along with the bound and published evidence of her success. And unlike yesterday’s composers who needed an omnipresent orchestra to charm their imagination off of the printed page and into reality, today’s musicians can rediscover their own fully-realised work at the touch of an iPod button.

But even today’s artists experience one last powerful barrier to artistic freedom - and from an unexpected source. Sometimes, the most powerful constraints can be placed not by a publisher, a gallery owner or a record company, but by those who buy into and consume the artist’s vision. The fans.

In his 1987 novel “Misery”, Stephen King writes about an author kidnapped and imprisoned by one of his readers. Obsessed with controlling his output to suit her own requirements, Nurse Annie Wilkes shackles him to a bed and cripples his body to stop him escaping. Then she treats and cares for him, force-feeding him painkillers and saving his life only as long as he dedicates it to her vision rather than his own.

Reputedly inspired by the murder of John Lennon by crazed fan Mark Chapman, it’s probably the ultimate nightmare for any artist - and a powerful metaphor for all those who become the victims of their own success. Actors who become typecast in a role or musicians who are not permitted to overstep genre expectations are primary examples of this kind of mindset as it operates in the marketplace. Although they may not be moved to direct action of the type King imagines, fans do become invested in the product they are buying, identifying with its familiar associations and demanding that it does not change. Just as confectioners get angry letters if they change the packaging of a chocolate bar or a breakfast snack, music fans rebel if a favourite artist experiments by wrapping his art up in something new.

Bob Dylan was famously called a “Judas” when he went electric in 1965; his work was developing but many felt betrayed. Arguably, some were invested more in the idea of an acoustic troubadour in the Woody Guthrie mould than they were in the man and his continuing musical vision. Alt-rock darlings Radiohead were reviled in some quarters for dropping the guitars and resorting to electroblippery on 2000’s “Kid A”. Even celebrated changelings like David Bowie suffer from reinvention anxiety. Despite having moved through modernism, hippie folk, heavy metal, glam, retro, art-rock and soul over a decade and a half, his multi-platinum “Let’s Dance” encountered more prejudice from fans than ever before. Conceived as a deliberate mainstream breakthrough, this 1983 collaboration with Nile Rodgers of Chic outraged those who had seen him as an alternative, if changeable messiah.

That situation may be about to repeat itself with grunge icon Chris Cornell’s new alliance with urban music’s own King Midas, Timbaland. Cornell spent much of the 1990s making edgy art-rock with his band Soundgarden, picking up a cultish audience who bought into his dark and often depressive emotional landscape. When their hero later kicked the booze and the pills and re-emerged as a family man with a couple of cute kids and new line in sensuous love songs, many older fans experienced abandonment issues. Sounding reminiscent of Stephen King’s anti-heroine, they wrote blogs and forum posts urging him back into the emotional shackles from which he had escaped.

For many of them, his Bowie-like aspirations towards mainstream success with forthcoming album “Scream” are the very last straw. The grunge voodoo dolly they bought back in ’94 has changed and developed, as real living things will, and the changes have robbed some fans of their original emotional investment. And that’s where the flames kick in. For the last few weeks, music forums have been full of the kind of seething rage and recrimination Bowie was lucky enough to escape in those far-off, pre-internet days. Fans furious at the Timbaland collaboration have demanded statements, explanations, even apologies: many have insisted, without irony, that Cornell has become an industry puppet whilst volunteering to hold the strings themselves.

Plainly, an “alternative” artist owes it to his fans not to explore too many alternatives. One fan even declared that Cornell would be better off dead than left alive to dishonour his own myth. Or, perhaps, merely crippled and shackled by the pre-existent expectations of his audience? Maybe Stephen King’s gothic fantasy wasn’t quite so paranoid after all. Or perhaps the concept of slavery has as much currency in 21st century art as it ever did in 19th century commerce.

In the end, those writers, musicians or thinkers who seek to explore and experiment will stand or fall by the extent of their own courage. Some may be cowed, dropping wearily back into the shackles of Nurse Wilkes and her real-life counterparts, grateful for her deadly care. Others will persist, knowing that keeping their nerve and their will intact is the way through and the way forward. No-one now thinks of Bob Dylan as merely an acoustic troubadour. Radiohead’s reviled “Kid A” is now an integral part of their oeuvre.Hopefully, Cornell's new album will follow the same healthy trajectory.

Such eruptions will continue as long as people feel. Because the need for slaves, or enemies, or scapegoats is in the end driven by our own fears, jealousies and longings. We forbid artists to change because we are jealous of their freedom: we have to go to work every day and allow someone to tell us what to do, so we resentfully try to bind those who write our books and make our music with the very same ties. What we forget is that it was their very freedom that drew us to them in the first place; their liberty to express whatever they wanted, whoever they were, whatever they felt. Their ability to move, redeem or simply or communicate with complete strangers, anyway, anyhow, anywhere they choose. The ultimate irony is that in enslaving them to our own selfish needs, we deny our own most basic link with the art they make.