From Howard Slater's mute music column http://www.metamute.org/node/12853
Tellingly Inarticulate (1)
When Mark E. Smith semi-sang ‘Let's get this thing together, let's get this thing together... and make it... bad' and when Sun Ra spoke of there being no mistakes, that ‘if someone's playing off key... the rest of us will do the same' we're not only in the terrain of an affinity dynamic that permits the impermissible and defies expectation whilst creating collective bonds, we are in the presence of what poet Nathaniel Mackey called ‘telling inarticulacy'. There have been many terms for this: dirty timbre, dirt music, freak playing, skiffle, punk, messthetics, noise etc. So when Mackay speaks of the way that some jazz playing conveys a sense of ‘apprehension and self-conscious duress by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite' we are in an area where music assumes an acutely political mantle. Militating against expected industry standards of production (the Fall's
Dragnet as well as the Slits'
Y album spring to mind) as well as against an alleged musical coherence that befits those automated by a common sense consciousness, this approach to non-virtuosity and ‘making it bad' is a direct affront to notions of specialisation and commodification that not only restrict our confidence to participate but dull our senses. The self-same creates a lull and a dulling of the senses that can be awoken by the sudden shocks of an off-note or a staggered, stuttering rhythm. There's something enchanting about Sun Ra's percussive tracks on
Atlantis that sound, to too trained ears, like a bunch of kids randomly banging stuff in a room. Or, the way King Oliver, a lot less smooth than Louis Armstrong, suddenly seems to have stuffed some broken glass down his trumpet. Such a reference to the beginnings of jazz is not without relevance as ‘telling inarticulacy' is there at the root of it all: sandpaper used on a snare drum before brushes were invented, the intrusion of the saxophone into the New Orleans combos as if it were an alien instrument. This inarticulacy not only seems to respond both to the ‘non tempered psyche' and to an emotional polyphony by means of its putting strict meaning into abeyance and addressing the affective, but it also seems to place us in the presence of a coming-to-articulation; something that could be prior to commodification. This latter, because it is a result of an ‘affinity dynamics' that legitimates it, carries a sense of meaning as being made in the collective moment. So, ‘telling inarticulacy' is a constant reminder that our creative powers need not be alienated by some debilitating version of virtuosity and, in that there is always a guaranteed audience for telling inarticulacy in the fellow musicians, that these creative powers have a constitutive force that's based in shared precarity...
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i think this makes it clear why the fall where inexplicably namedropped as an influence by so many shitty 00's indie bands. their very "inarticulacy" made themdrop completly off the radar for years, it must have seemed completly outdated, like the very thing that modern bands had surpassed with the technological and stylistic "innovations" that are mistaken for such because they are so widely spread over the present as to give it a character that can only really be noticed once it's gone. like how people growing up in the 90's fetished the type of now dated filmstock used in the 70's and 80's, how the signs of the present become the signifiers of the past. what is so false about the lo fi stuff of the 00's is that the worst of it (pens) simply tries to recreate the conditions of the past as a reaction against the uncertainties of the future, while the best stuff, like zola jesus, tries to create new palates out of the sound of datedness. if you listen to what the fall are doing now, in a way the stuff off country on the click and imperial wax solvent and whats surfaced from our future -your clutter sounds like they are only catching up with the alterna rock crunch sound of the 90's. i always thought what sounded "off" in the fall was the result of the intensly individual and facistic tendencies of m.e.s. it wasn't contrived, it was in a way completly natural because the fall were never feeding off their influences, (until their latter days), they always believed what ever they did was better than their influences because of the very fact that
they did it. and by they i mean m.e.s. of course. it was this kind of arrogance and narcissism that sheds light on m.e.s.'s mysticism and the appeal of the fall, because it is the appeal of an individualism that will always react to any attempts to collaborate with it and never truly reveal its foundations or stance because it's very stance is ruled by the law that whatever is happening is centred around it and is malleable enough to be shaped by it. this explains why m.e.s. says things like "i had horrible dreams before 9/11". we know he's probably making it up, but he is always right because his very individualism and refusal to see the world as a reflection of himself but rather reflect the world back onto his self creates a kind of isolated schizoid fiction. wherein manchester becomes a haunted kingdom with m.e.s. as the only lone siren who can truly see it. some posters here have said that they can't really understand the fall and they think it's because they are american. this is in a way quite accurate. when you see cut out characters from coronation street in the inner lp art of fall heads roll it means something that only the fall could make it mean. if any other band from manchester (where coronation street) is filmed did that it would just look stupid and cheesy. when people call the fall conservative or right wing they miss the point entirely. m.e.s. singing victoria and lording it in old victorian era costumes in the video isn't some sort of imperialist arrogance, it's not the same as an american band playing against the backdrop of the flag. in the fall's universe, reality is distorted in such a way that it looses its moralistic options, it becomes more like how we actually expieriance reality because there is only really our will and we don't know what's going to happen, but we'll go on into the unknown and decide what we did was correct because we did it. it's a kind of nihilism that comforts us. i am trying to explain why the fall seem to always mean something of the utmost importance despite having little effect on anything. it's like when you're drunk and getting home and eating chips and doing stupid shit seems so filled with importance and feel so much more consequential. reality opens up to meanings of indivdual interpretation that allows you to twist and project it into terrifying or wonderful meanings.