(Un)Popular Avant-Gardes: Underground Popular Music and the Avant-Garde

(Un )Popular Avant- Gardes : Underground Popular Music and the Avant-Garde Stephen Graham I am going το talk about underground popular music, particularly in its role as an index of what I am describing as a popular avant garde. I will provide an introduction to the field of underground music, summarizing its history, its aesthetics, and its practitioners. The question guiding my paper concerns the proposed yoking together of the concept of the avant-garde with underground music. Namely, I ask in what meaningful way can we consider underground music to articu late, rehabilitate, even re-purpose, the notion of the avant-garde? The modern declension of the term 'avant-garde' invariably renders it as a degenerated and dehistoricized slogan, a logo, a hook which signifies in ten easy letters fuzzy impressions of experimentation, radicalism, and fractiousness. 'Avant-garde' as a descriptor has become iconic; little is known of its etymology or theoretical underpinning Perspectives of New Music beyond its loose denotation of, as I have said, comparative radicalism. An example: British newspaper The Guardian carried a review on April 15, 2010 of the rock musician Paul Weller's new album Wake Up The Nation in which the reviewer, head Guardian pop writer Alexis Petridis, employed the term twice.1 The implication carried enough weight for the sub-editor to use it once again in the standfirst. Each employment of the term is non-specific and not a little incongruous, Paul Weiler making music that falls comfortably within the mainstream. The dad-rock king's discontent with modern life should come as no surprise. But what is shocking—and thrilling—is that his avant garde phase continues apace, according to Alexis Petridis. Perhaps 2008's remarkable, turbulent, chaotic 22 Dreams was merely a temporary blip, a clearing of the avant-garde pipes before a return to what came before it, when his albums resembled the kind of TV dramas you get at 8pm on a Sunday—cosily unde manding, so predictable you could set your watch by them. You could find antecedents for Wake Up the Nation's spikier moments in the avant-garde end of the Jam's output.2 These examples are symptomatic of the theoretical fuzziness that has developed around the concept of the avant-garde. My contention is that despite this fuzziness, it is nevertheless possible to develop a meaningful contemporary theory of the avant-garde that draws on canonical theoretical texts, but that applies to non-canonical, decentred repertoires of music. In order to do this, I will build a brief portfolio of theories of the avant-garde, before moving on to a discussion of underground music that is framed by those theories. Theorizing the Avant-Garde It is possible to discern something of a dominant narrative in the litera ture on the avant-garde. In his famous 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg states that "in turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft." Also, "Content is dissolved into (Un)Popular Avant-Gardes form ... art for art's sake appears, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague."3 This making new of language and turning of form into content—and the associated intensification of art's autonomy from life, with which it now presents a discontinuity—can be perceived in embryonic form in the preoccupa tion with musical grammar in the late works of Beethoven, just as it can more extensively in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which as Greenberg suggests proposes "the reduction of experience to expression, for the sake of expression."4 Such a conception frequently underpins theories of the avant-garde. Even more basic to the field, however, is its desire to embody and express modernity, newness. Eric Hobsbawm describes the twentieth century avant-gardes as movements whose grounding principle was represented by the idea that "relations between art and society had changed fundamentally, that the old ways of looking at the world were inadequate and new ways must be found."5 A remarkable triangulation of those factors of innovation, autonomy, and the dissolution of content into form...