Tame Impala and the Death of the Echo

Perth's premier bleary-eyed bong-rockers Tame Impala have returned, sluggishly, bearing a new record. Lonerism expands on the (already pretty, ahem... 'expanded') template of their debut effort, 2010's Innerspeaker. Lonerism applies a new level of focus to their obvious affection for late-period Beatle-isms, Can, the Soft Machine and Spiritualized into one long, paisley-patterned carpet-ride back to 1969. The lead single, below, kind of crystallises what I mean:

All of which got me thinking about Jarvis Cocker's comments in the Guardian the other day about the continuing deification of the Beatles (down to the supposed 'significance' of the  Post-Its Lennon left out for his milkman), the long-term effect on youth culture of  how great the Sixties allegedly were.

This in turn led to a big ol' mind-wander around the commodification of 'cool' by big corporations, which manifests in things like the O2 Arena's clear association, through the 'historic' pictures of fans going nuts in the foyer, with yesteryear. Apparently, then, these sepia-tinged visual cues are supposed to make us draw a line of association between waiting for a hotdog before Coldplay start and the mass hysteria generated by Elvis' first TV appearance in 1957.

But why would we want to do that? What is so good about the past? If we are, as Cocker supposes, 'children of the echo' - a beautiful way of putting it, I thought - what keeps us coming back to that time, and why won't we leave the Beatles and their later period - say, Tomorrow Never Knows to The End - alone?

What was so fucking great about it the first time around? More importantly, have an entire generation wasted their time trying to get back to something that only exists in its clearest form inside Liam Gallagher's head? Just as a for-instance, and in the interests of full disclosure, here's the full head-spinning remastered version of Tomorrow Never Knows - which might be my favourite song by my (often) favourite band. More on this later, no doubt...

 

Are we saying that the obvious achievements of the Fab Four  are still the apex of freewheeling experimental pop genius? Why is that? Surely we're supposed to have done better than this by now? Maybe it's because, while plumbers are supposed to get better at their jobs the longer they do them,  their jobs don't require them to take the accepted, Western ideal of what a sink should be, and with no prior training, fuse it expertly with the ancient Sanskrit ideal of a sink, as communicated by a chanting pensioner on a hillside in Rishikesh.

All I know is, music now is an order of magnitude shitter than it clearly, abundantly was between 1950 and 1980. Being a child of the late Seventies, my generation is still massively chuffed with itself because it invented music that made it easier to jig about to while hopelessly off your knackers on E. In jazz, my grandfather's generation, on the other hand, came up with something as mysterious, challenging, varied and diverse as an entirely new language during a massive and universally terrible war. Not to be outdone, my dad's lot had a go and came up with  rock'n'roll. Fucking hell. In other words, faced with the discovery of calculus and the breaking of the sound barrier, we presented history with a lager-soaked whoopee cushion. Well done, all.

To illustrate my point, check out Miles Davis in bombed-out Paris, sounding, I'm sure you'll admit, as cool as a man made of fuckoff. Not bad for a little bloke on bin-loads of heroin and sixty a day:

 Alright - Miles is a cheap shot - everybody knows he invented about 329 different forms of jazz in his own right - it's hardly fair to compare him to anybody else of this century. Except for the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Hendrix (who he reportedly revered) and all of the other cultural touchstones we still hold above our own modern equivalents like holy artefacts.

Fast forward to the Sixties, then, and at this point, ignore all of the established godheads. I'm trying to work out whether modern music really is bollocks, here, so let's take an example of what I consider to be a 'middling' group of the time, and see how they compare in terms of musical ability, composition, body of work and influence with what we currently have. To do this I've chosen a band who, while they've rightfully taken their place among the great and the good, aren't exactly standard-bearers. I give you The Band:

I'm a big fan of The Band - great players, and I always loved their commitment to melody and the musical understanding within that band. No world-changers, though, were they? That said, are they in all important respects, better muscians than the current mainstream can offer? Is it just me, or is music getting thicker, more derivative, more obvious, and less based on four friends' shared vision and willingness to learn to play - or at least to create surprising, innovative songs - than it used to be?

I'm aware that Zeppelin recycled old blues riffs, making them louder, not about slavery and approximately a billion times more fun, and David Bowie was a genuine one-off. That said, I think punk has to be the next major port-of-call on this badly-constructed ramble through the musical ages. Punk was clearly designed to upset the established way of doing things - and quite rightly, because life with Status Quo at number one and no heating three days a week sounds monstrously shit on all levels.

Punk clearly fucked with some established ideas about what was cool, and what just would not stand. Maybe the Fates that govern such things were all in favour of a shift towards more direct, snotty, Windsor-baiting music, too - after all, how else do you explain the cellist from ELO's  freakish demise at the hands of a runaway hay-bale? Eh?

Again, there are standard-bearers from this era, and we all know who they are. I won't bore you with the Pistols, or X-Ray Spex, or the Clash - you know about those. Let's once agian take a random sample of 'the middle' of 1977, and see if it stands up to Coldplay, Kasabian and the Maccabees in terms of playing, passion, songwriting, production and influence, shall we? What about, er, this lot?:

Despite containing lamentable televison piano twat Jools Holland, Squeeze were brilliant. Check the words out: that line in the first verse about the 'little kicks inside her' is pure genius. They also win a shitload of points in my book because they sounded exactly like Television would have done if they'd come from Crawley. And the song's structure is really inventive, too - it basically comes to a dead stop after the intro for no good reason, and kicks 4/4 into touch, which is always nice for a bit of variety.


I guess what I'm getting at is - even the average bands of the last four decades would have kicked the arses clean off the Maccabees, and the latter are playing massive sheds nationwide the week after next. Somehow, this doesn't seem right. I'd say that for the exception of Radiohead, there are no acts around at the moment that will be venerated. Can you honestly see Kasabian and the rest standing the test of time in the way that Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, the Beatles et al did? I can't, and that's weird to me.

Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of current acts, but none of them have the permanence of their forbears. We've made disposability part of the deal; built-in obsolescence, almost. The concept of the album as a long-playing body of work is near to collapse - what will sustain the reputations of new acts into the future? A bunch of half-remembered singles? I don't think so. It's a weird future in prospect.