The Smiths | The Grain

BEETHOVEN, THE SMITHS AND SHIFTING THE ART GOALPOSTS

Girlfriend in a Coma

As regular readers of ‘The Grain’ (and I’m reliably informed there are literally several) will be aware, we have quite a penchant for popular music. We also tend to write about this music in very serious, some would say pretentious, terms. Why? Personally, I believe it comes from a desire, an idealistic crusade, to keep chipping away at the invisible wall that separates “high art” from “low art”. There has been a mountain of work ranging from academic to popular press[1] that tackles this most thorny of issues – and there have been almost as many conclusions as to exactly where the line is drawn, on what grounds it is constructed and even if such a divide is still prevalent (or even relevant) in modern musical discourse. For my part, I think the divide between the ‘valuable’ and the ‘valueless’ is still very much a part of our musical landscape. However, the traditional battle lines of ‘classical’ versus ‘popular’ have shifted somewhat. In an often-desperate attempt to justify itself, popular music has split itself in two and in so doing has moved the high/ low art dichotomy into the centre of itself. Thus now the language used to describe popular music is imbued with words like ‘authentic’, ‘raw’, ‘relevant’, ‘experimental’ and their opposites ‘commercial’, ‘pop’ and ‘throw-away’. The semantics of such language point to he fact that there now exists ‘high popular art’ and ‘low popular art’. The goalposts – to use that well-worn management-speak phrase – have well and truly shifted.

So, how did this transplantation of a very old argument happen?[2] Well, part of the cause is a fundamental shift in the paradigm of what constitutes ‘value’ in music. This shift in value stemmed primarily from how popular music was viewed in relation to classical music. The divide between the two was always seen as this; classical music is somehow transcendent of time and society – it is universal, autonomous and therefore its value innate. Popular music, by contrast, was seen as ephemeral and commercial. It was so closely bound up in its place and time – so dependant on its social context that its value (if indeed it had any) was extra-musical (i.e. it lay outside the ‘notes on the page’). Rather than tackling this glib assumption, those with a vested interest in the status of popular music embraced this dubious virtue of extra-musical significance. Thus, musicians, journalists and popular music scholars began discussing these social aspects of music and performance more and more frequently. As a result, two things can be seen as emerging from this. Firstly, the actual musicological (i.e. the study of discussion of the music) in popular music became less and less significant. If you look at any discussion of popular music from the 1960’s onwards, the sociological – how the song/artist reflects and impacts on society will be the dominating element discussed more often than not. I’m not for a second saying this is a bad thing, by the way and I’m certainly not saying that sociological factors are not important in music – but more of this later. The second thing that happened from popular music’s embrace of social ‘value’ was that it realised it needed an “other”. If popular music was to jump the fence over to the valuable side, then it needed to have something on the other side to define its parameters by (and have a good old sneer at). There was no ‘other’ to rally against, so popular music was carved in two; the ‘serious’, ‘rock’, the ‘authentic’ on one side and the ‘commercial’, ‘pop’, the ‘meaningless’ on the other.

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(500) DAYS OF SUMMER

(500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer is the directorial debut of Marc Webb, previously most notable for his music videos which have including offerings for acts as diverse as Green Day, Miley Cyrus, My Chemical Romance, and the Backstreet Boys and will also be directing Pink Panther 2 (oh dear god!). Although that may seem like a worrying introduction (a little too reminiscent of McG who delivered us the tripe of Charlie’s Angels on the back of a similar CV) don’t be too concerned, because this is a more than capable debut.

The film itself aims to be an offbeat romantic comedy that subverts the genre, making it not just watchable, but actually enjoyable, and includes some of the staples of the recent ‘indie’ comedy (think Juno, Little Miss Sunshine) – not least a soundtrack that includes Regina Spektor, The Smiths, Pixies, Arab Strap, The Temper Trap, Feist, Spoon et al. The story, a semi-autobiographical script from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, is of our protagonist Tom Hansen (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt or as I will refer to him, that kid from Third Rock from the Sun), who reflects on his relationship with what may be his first love, Summer Finn (indie darling Zooey Deschanel), and the 500 days for which they knew each other. One day Tom meets the new girl in the office and after some awkward exchanges decides she’s the one; what follows is a recount of the relationship we are all supposed to have had, the one that could have been, maybe should have been, but for some reason, it just didn‘t work. In terms of universal appeal, this concept certainly holds the key elements necessary.

The films centre piece is its non-chronological narrative, with the picture of their relationships built up through scenes that are introduced by a calendar telling you which of the 500 days it is, therefore you see the various highs juxtaposed with lows, and introductions placed in contrast to deeper understanding, and this is essentially what makes the film work. Each day feels framed as a chapter, able to stand by itself and add to aesthetic of the film, shunning the act system. In addition to its non-chronological format, it offers a mixed medium to frame the story, including narration (though this felt slightly jarring and at times misjudged), sections of animation, a song and dance number superbly executed (providing one of the films biggest laughs) and what verges on the protagonist talking directly to the camera, though the film is unwilling to fully commit in this area.

There is of course more to the film than the standard boy meets girl scenario; it aims to explore relationships (and our rose-tinted memories of them) immediately announcing that this is not a love story, but despite this, many of the norms of the genre are still incorporated (see Tom’s pals offering ‘comedy’ relief as is the norm in all teen/coming of age/rom-com films) . Tom is a hopeless romantic, a believer in destiny and fate, the one who over analyses and thinks about every nuance, while in contrast Summer is the sceptic, the one who believes no happiness can come from a long-term relationship, and laughs at the fancy of destiny. She is looking for something casual, he is head over heels. So in the films centre there is a fairly unsubtle gender shift, the inverse ideology of the Hollywood standard (and hardly post-feminist view) that the female protagonist must believe in true love, she is the one who over over analyses. It is a move that the director and writer maintain was not intentional despite being directly referred to in the film when Tom and Summer, in an early drunken meeting in a Karaoke Bar, are establishing these contrasting views of love when Toms friend Mackenzie (Geoffrey Arend) declares ‘I get it you’re a dude’ to Summer, or the moment (in the trailor below) when Summer states she is Sid and Tom is Nancy.

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