The good old days

by JACK OATMON

You know, when Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971, people thought it was such depraved bull cocky that all the nay-saying critics, ensuing press controversy and even death threats led Kubrick to halt distribution of the film in Britain, a general ban that persisted till the millennium, a year after his death. And the film’s soundtrack creator, the legendary transsexual composer Wendy Carlos, was one of the main reasons people stopped saying electronic devices were incapable of producing actual music when she blew everybody’s fucking heads off with Switched-On Bach in 1969. I wasn’t alive back then to hear the moaning about those two pariahs and their wacky ideas concerning conceptual film and robot music. But those details nevertheless coursed through my head recently as I surveyed the comments in a debate on the CBC’s Web site about the article entitled “Designed to Shock: The 10 Most Controversial Music Videos of All Time.”

The article was a reaction to the recent video for Justice’s nerve-wracking gem, “Stress,” which features the whimsically violent adventures of a uniform-clad gang of youths, set to the sounds of grating synths and squealing violins. I figured the clear references to A Clockwork Orange combined with the classical instrumentation would alert any viewer that the video was at least in part a tribute to Burgess, Carlos and Kubrick’s ultra-violent vision of our era, and its current incarnations—suburban street gangs and kooky electronic music. Instead, there were droves of people taking the bait and getting up in arms about how the video was violent garbage and that this new music was terrible, like most new music.

Which brings me to a funny theme I’ve noticed amongst my ilk recently—that new music, and even art in general, is somehow inherently worse than that of the past. That stuff sucks “these days.” Hey, Justice is no Wendy Carlos, that’s for sure, and no one’s denying that there is a lot of derivative art happening right now. Hell, releases like the Presets’ new single “This Boy’s in Love” highlight the extent to which many bands are becoming a poor man’s Depeche Mode or Human League. Or take the Juan MacLean’s latest jam “Happy House,” which is on fire on the blogs but is essentially what it claims to be—a carefree Chicago house track like hundreds of others. And there’s nothing more derivative than the shit-hot Hercules and Love Affair, whose roots are firmly planted in the synth-disco of yore.

But acts like these also highlight the extent to which composition and thoughtful context can override a saturated sonic market, as new production techniques and previously unthinkable crossbreeding discombobulate people’s expectations of music. In my hubris, I’d almost go so far as to say that my ho-humming pals who groan “these days” are probably the same people who would have classified early punk bands as cheap, trashy Chuck Berry knockoffs and early hip hop as nothing but stolen funk samples and curse words. The same people that would have called Wendy Carlos and Stanley Kubrick crocks.

No, my friends, other than the increased visibility of bedroom projects thanks to the Internet, I couldn’t rightly conclude that music and art are getting worse as we get older. That’s ridiculous. We’re just getting better at bitching.

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