Consumer's Guide to The Jam - Collective Inventions (1982)

A Jam concert is like any other concert, any other gathering of people. As a “public event," it offers a convenient excuse for having fun, for participating in what passes for entertainment in contemporary society. It also affords an admittedly arbitrary pretext for a critical discussion of connections, of links, of promotion and creation in modern culture. In a more than obvious association, a show and its audience bring to mind doors, openings: they open up everything. All the stage's a world.

Pop music and pop ceremonies are interesting precisely because tney are pop, are popular. The Jam generate interest - and literally demand attention - because tney are “England's top rock group.” Because of their not-so-limited public image, their role as pop spokesmen and pop politicians. In the face of such celebrity, immodesty is the reciprocal - and appropriate - response. All issues can be raised and are at issue, what pops out are the relationships that obtain between performers and their publics, between music and society - between pieces of paper such as this and tne people who read them.

In the summer of 1982, any notion of a “new wave," of a rebellious youth culture that would change the world as it changed the world's airwaves, appears as laughable, as a portentous sand pretentious claim worthy of depreciative laughter. Only the readers of Rolling Stone believe that the Clash are "revolutionaries"; only the fans of fanzines believe that their chic cliques make a noise that makes a difference. (For that matter, only a dedicated follower of fashion would bore you witn these words of dispraise.) As “Combat Rock” wends its way up the charts, it is worth considering the very promises and premises of combative music, of adversary culture itself. When the Sex Pistols sang of “No Future," they may have unwittingly provided the epitaph for all notions of sung protest even as they redefined the protest song. From Woodstock Nation to Mohawk Nation, the results have been rather meager: the final product of successive cultural rebelllons emerges as a vinyl product, a vinyl solution. It's a mod, mad world, and tha beat (the who, the jam, the clash, the floyd, the dead, the other) goes on. Rock stars shine out like beacons, Like neon billboards, in the fog of ordinary life and its anemic and anomic routines. The beat glows on, with an allure that is at once “false” and real. The promise and the lie both sell.

In the most recent Melody Maker poll, Paul Weller of the Jam was voted “most wonderful human being.” He also placed high in the “best dressed" category. However ludicrous such results may appear at face value (and faces are indeed valuable in the fabrication of pop personas), they pay tribute to the ambiguity of rock culture, which rides on currents of feeling and fashion, morality and music, presence and presentation, revolt and style. This inherent ambivalence is perfectly expressed in the Jam's music, which oscillates between modish imperatives (a call to arms against Thatcherism, the class system, racism and nuclear weapons, all "good" targets) and imperative modism (a call for a better cut of cloth and hair, for narrower ties). What sounds a wrong note in this mix is not so much Weller's particular perspective: he is enough of a fan of George Orwell (great guitar!) to know a leftist autnoritarian when he sees one, and it is unlikely that the Jam will fall into the trap of the hapless Clash and the guerilla chic posturings of “Sandinista!". What grates is greatness: the entire politics of rock heroism, the very idea that rock musicians and rock ethics are worthy of emulation and transmission.

Even at its most extrema and cultish fringes, the pop world is of this world. It mirrors dominant society; it reproduces relations of Literal and figurative domination. Amidst appeals to "the people" and songs from "the street," a hidden theme (play it backwards!) runs througn the rebel musis of the 80s which joins a group like the Jam to one like Journey. This dominant chord reveals pop musicians as musical directors, as those who give cues to others on goals, on attitudes, on roles. As in any other hierarchical system, experience is mediated, is lived through the person of the interpreter and performer. The role model shapes the code, models the uniform. However much the audience gives energy to those on stage, the audience is consigned - in the concert hall, the union hall, the study hall - to the other side of the footlights. Such an inequality is generally recognized and even criticized; what is surprising is that a desire for heroic performers, a need for a cul- tural pantheon, prevails.

Pop music has always had explicitly messianic and millenarian overtones and overlords. The metal gurus of rock usually have a mission: to save the world, to save the music, to save their T-bills, or more radically, to save humanity from its saviors. This sense of mission is not always derived from the performer; it can be conferred by the audience, by the fans who create - and in a definite sense they do create - their dream. Critics like to talk about how artists feed off, work off their audiences. In turn, these audiences eat the manna dispensed by pop idols. And what a succession of demigods has stalked the pop stage: Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Towns[h]end, Springsteen, Costello . . . Even the consummate cynic, Jonn Lydon, appears as less pariah than prophet, one who had the good sense to preserve his immortal status by doing a disappearing act. Sometimes, nothing succeeds like self-effacement. Ultimately, everyone and everything has its place in the sun of the pop universe. Every incident - from the suicide of Joy Division's Ian Curtis to Joe Strummer’s going AWOL - is fed like grist to the myth mill.

Below the unending and almost exclusively male chain of pop christs sit the great unwashed hordes, the fans wno take their inspiration from, find meaning in, the offerings of the philosopher-kings of rock. Fortunately, even the most diehard fan has his or her moments of lese majesty and engages in periodic bouts of idol bashing. These levelling impulses are themselves often the basis of a new creed, however, and iconoclasm is often reduced to a mere style, an “antiauthoritarian" pose. Some form of anarchist identification is almost de rigueur in today's punk/pop soene. The more “avant-garde” throw in a few quotes from the Situationist International to spice up their record jackets. But while black and red may be the favorite colors of the new wave, they are usually there for the sake of design rather than designation. Even the most "anarchist" punk has his or her uniform, his or her exclusive and exclusionary movement or gang to identify with.

What is surprising is not that the politics and perspectives of a pop musician are as shallow as the next person's; what is surprising is that anyone should expect them to be better, to be as illuminating as they are illustrious. There appears to be an unspoken need among the devotees of pop and antipop for anthems, for inspirational soundtracks, for emblematic noises and messages of enlightenment. It is this addiction to the smack of stardom (whether elitist or populist) that is the hardest to break. Rock music, any music, is only one aspect of general process of creation, production and representation in modern society. Its monopoly on public attention, as well as its commercial appeal, isn't difficult to “suss out," as Paul Weller would say. Why it should remain the almost excluslve focus for either “creation” or subversion is another matter.

Nothing today is more revealing of the pretense of rock culture than the reaction of British youth to the Falkland lslands/Isles Malvinas war. The same kids who voted for pacifist and Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) supporter Paul Weller in the music polls are supporting Maggle Thatcher (best missile launcher, best heavy metal artist, most wonderful iron lady) in the Britisn opinion polis. Weller has at least denounced their “nationalistic fervor"; hopefully, he will also discard his pop fantasies about the young and the restless, about youth being the hope of the world. Last year it was the Battle of Brixton; this year it's the Battle of Britain against the uncouth "argies.“ Meanwhile, the sinking sons of Argentina and the United Kingdom die in the South Atlantic for God, Queen (or Junta) and Country. This is the modern world! While Paul Weller (in “Trans-Global Express") enjoins that "you men in uniform will have to learn the lesson too / not to turn against your own kind / whenever governments tell you to," the men in uniform in the armies of the world appear to have turned a deaf ear. The machineries of state and business pay little heed to the “lessons" delivered by the juke boxes of tne music industry.

The dream of communication and expression which is at the core of most attempts at creativity - be they rock concerts, street happeniags, wall posters - persists. It isn't that "rock 'n' roll will never die": it isn't that the art school dance goes on forever. It's simply that people will always want better sounds, better imagery, better lives. Why say thls at a Jam concert? Why not sneeze?

Memorial Dayy 1982

Something Else
written & produced by:

collective inventions
p.o. box 24411
san jose, california 95154

also available from collective inventions:

Order: Poland 1982 (wall poster and text)
Defense Mechanisms (pamphlet, 1980)
Unnatural Acts (wall poster and text, 1979)
and other assorted novelties and notions.