Mark
J Prendergast's pioneering 'Isle of Noises' (Irish
publication as 'Irish rock', 1987; St Martin's
US, 1988) brought Irish rock, by anecdotes, interviews,
summaries of bands and albums and key songs, its
first extended presentation in print. Now, in
a book also titled with a variation on 'noise',
cultural and literary critic Gerry Smyth (Liverpool
John Moores U) brings his postmodern application
of Jacques Attali's 70s-era 'Noise: the political
economy of music' to dismantle the leftist, Adorno-founded,
snobbish dismissals of rock as a populist vulgarity
unbefitting the deluded proles beholden to their
cunning minders. Smyth takes music seriously but
not snootily. He's an academic who can discuss
music intelligently without falling into condescension
or hyperbole. He is a fan of much of what he writes
of, but he also knows when to keep his intellectual
distance. He presents the shift in Irish rock
and pop from an insular, uncertain, cultural expression
to another slick (if perhaps classier) product
for the global capitalist media market by the
90s. Ireland's boom allowed its cultural production
the status it needed to enter into the ranks of
Anglo-American cultural capital (and sometimes
beyond): successfully sold, eagerly consumed entertainment.
I
only caught a couple of typos; sadly such quality's
rarer to find in many scholarly studies today.
(Although it is debatable if as he states Horslips
began in 1972; the band played in some form as
early as 1970.) Smyth admirably can paraphrase
arcane French theory while analyzing the most
glossy pop tart or candyflossed ditty. He integrates
his critique with a defense of some oft-benighted
musical efforts. His apologia for the showbands'
significance; his understanding of Horslips as
the first home-grown, domestically-committed success;
his placement of punk and then U2 as harbingers
of the confidence that Irish youth by the mid-90s
began to exude; his thoughtful examination of
'Celtic' music's label and the Enya and Clannad's
ethereal emanations; Eurovision and its spawn
of the martial Riverdance-- these topics make
convincing points that foreground the emergence
of artists who knew how they could be marketed
to accentuate their Irish identity as necessary.
This appeal to the Irishness supposedly inherent
in a band's image or musician's sound, however,
could as easily been irrelevant, and part of Smyth's
study also examines why and how certain musicians,
especially those aiming for the top of the pop
charts, presented themselves without discernable
traits supposedly tied to Ireland. This calculated
strategy-- to be or not to be heard and seen as
if Irish-- itself deserves more sustained attention.
This book is so brief that such theoretical matters
lack the investigation that they deserve. However,
this book should inspire in-depth study by those
scholars and critics who will extend and narrow
Smyth's arguments to particular bands, styles,
and musical trends.
Smyth
"reads" a few songs closely, and in
Horslips' "Dearg Doom," the Undertones'
'Teenage Kicks', the fusion of Moving Hearts,
the defiance of the Pogues, or in 'N17' the contradictory
allegiances from Saw Doctors, Smyth shows how
such songs capture key moments of the Irish experience.
The emerging confidence of the island between
Britain and America begins to be heard as the
early 1970s bring about (as Horslips drummer and
'Hot Press' commentator Éamon Carr has
commented upon in Harper & Hodgett cited below)
a delayed countercultural movement in Dublin that
began to mix folk and rock, pop and experimentalism.
While the 90s began to promote this version of
a homegrown response to the Anglo-American media
hegemony, its roots can be found, Smyth reminds
us, as far back as at least the showbands, Seán
Ó Riada, and state-sponsored cultural bursaries
as a spin-off of the Lemass administration's emphasis
upon economic self-sufficiency. (For more context,
read Irish-born and a few Irish-by-adoption baby-boomers
on the largely classic rock influences that shaped
them in the collection 'My Generation', eds. Antony
Farrell, Vivienne Guinness, Julian Lloyd. Dublin:
Liliput Press, 1996. Track how many old hippies
acknowledge the LP 'Ó Riada Sa Gaeilty'
as a desert island disc that argued for the first
time that the traditional music need not be moribund,
risible, or barbed with CBS threats.)
It
is a credit to Smyth's ability to listen without
(much) prejudice that he gives a patient ear to
many efforts by musicians that au courant hip
critics would have disdained. He does not let
his own preferences overly interfere with his
quest to understand how Irish musicians-- at least
in their more inspired moments, rare as they may
be-- tried to balance acclaim with integrity.
Even those musicians I never have cared for (such
as Rory Gallagher, Saw Doctors, Enya, or most
of Van the man), by his patient exposition and
evident enthusiasm, proved in Smyth's rendering
able to account for themselves reasonably well
as representative forces for not only musical
expression but cultural significance. Neither
does Smyth ignore pin-ups, one-hit wonders, or
rather obscure groups who earned or did not deserve
their obscurity.
The
book does have slight shortcomings. Do not expect
a narrative as complete or as personal in its
style as "Isle of Noises." Smyth does
take the necessary story further fifteen years
past Prendergast, yet this is not an exhaustive
compendium or a definitive reference. It's ultimately
a 'Critical' as well as a 'Short History'. He
is a professor. It's oriented for an academically
inclined general reader, whereas Prendergast's
book was for fans. Both authors clearly possess
an inherent patience and eclectic embrace of a
vast array of musical efforts. Popular music for
Ireland seems in both books doomed to account
for folk, a bit of trad, jazz, blues, bubblegum,
teenybopper, rave, dance, chart fodder, and techno,
to name but a few varietals. Like Prendergast's
book, Smyth appends his own bibliography along
with a provocative discography. Many entries,
however, are not mentioned in the text. Pictures
contributed much to Prendergast's evocation of
the times; illustrations for Smyth's book would
have been effective. I assume their absence is
to lower production costs, as Cork UP has had
tumultuous times lately.
I
do wish Smyth had paid further attention to both
Ash & Therapy? within their Northern context
(or lack of, he might observe). As an aside, I
find it odds-defying that another Northern Irish
group had emerged in the 70s, more folky, called
'Therapy'! (no punctuation in the original...)
A major oversight also lies in too little attention
paid to the punk movement, on both sides of the
border in the later 70s and early 80s. Similarly,
Stiff Little Fingers has often been yoked with
their 'British' journalist-lyric writer Gordon
Ogilvie, but why not a look into how that band
cleverly managed to speak to both sides by its
ambivalent stance and its refusal to take sides
so as to appeal to both sides? Smyth correctly
cites this in 'Alternative Ulster' but the analysis
deserves in-depth attention. The evolution of
the 'Tones into That Petrol Emotion with its more
aggressive counter-Thatcher lyrics and graphics
and liner notes needed to be expanded similarly,
as did the emergence of Ruefrex, Derry and Belfast
punk, and the Good Vibrations label. I know that
'Tone Seán Ó Neill and Simon Tregarth
co-authored 'Makes You Want to Spit' on NI punk,
but Smyth needed to incorporate more of its expression
into his own study-- as it is he only lists in
the bibliography.
Likewise,
genre-challenging experimenters better or worse
like Pierce Turner, Iarla Ó Lionaird, or
Kíla needed more than a nod. Country &
Irish gets superficial asides; I ask how does
its appeal connect with the showbands' past audiences?
The sean-nós vocal heritage and its echoes
in modern Irish singers could have merited reflection
and exemplification. The tastes of those raised
in Ireland on either limited domestic hits or
British and American pop stars from the 50s and
60s: how did they change with the demographic
and musical shifts as Irish artists gained wider
success abroad? What influence has local radio
had? The remarkably vapid choices of most regional
radio stations in their musical programming seem
to me forever at odds with the wealth of innovation
by many Irish musicians. How can Smyth account
for this and the role of alternative media channels
over the past five decades? He does consider more
recent innovations such as digital recording at
home, the Net, filesharing, and DJ mixes, but
this area of individually-driven production and
distribution needed more historical situating
within earlier channels and home-grown distribution
efforts that countered, subverted, or aped the
largely London-dominated mass media.
The
quirky Cork rock scene of the 80s gets but a nod
beyond a bit on Microdisney. How that city succeeded
or failed in churning up an contrasting sound
to that of guitar-driven Dublin deserved more
detail, as the book suffers from a Dublin-centered
concentration. Understandably so, but all the
more reason for a closer examination of the regional
reactions to it in such places as Cork, Derry,
Belfast, and Galway. What happened in the market
towns? What was played at the parish dance? How
did bands in rural areas adapt, or fail to do
so? Did varieties of music persist in particular
districts-- were these popular as well as traditional
types? The political uses, particularly in the
North, of grassroots protest songs and cassettes
of rebel ballads and loyalist anthems might have
greatly enriched Smyth's study. However, the political
applications Smyth applies and the theorists he
chooses admittedly follow in post-modern more
than nationalist or sectarian directions.
Two
complementary books from 2005 (they seem to have
appeared too late for Smyth's acknowledgement)
widen a key section in Smyth's account of the
60s and earlier 70s. Britta Sweers musicological-sociological
study of the British heyday of 'Electric Folk'
(Oxford UP) treats the scene from which-- if one
or half a step removed-- kindred spirits Paul
Brady, Sweeneys Men, Planxty, the Bothy Band,
and the Woods Band emerged. Belfast journalists
Colin Harper & Trevor Hodgett's 2005 'Irish
Rock, Trad & Blues' (Cherry Red; also reviewed
by me for The Blanket) in rock mag
style compile their interviews and reviews and
reminiscences of this same era, more or less.
This late 60s, somewhat postponed, Dublin-Belfast
counter-cultural ferment, when progressive mingled
with protest tunes, psych with acid, and folk
with rock, needs still more investigation in its
Irish manifestation. Dr Strangely Strange, Skid
Row and Brush Sheils are nearly invisible; Eire
Apparent-- whose one album was shakily produced
by Jimi Hendrix-- is invisible.
Likewise,
Virgin Prunes and the alternative-to-U2 Dublin
movement of the late 70s, as well as the place
of the Radiators within as Ireland's fast-maturing
answer to and challenge to punk, gain notice but
lack the detailed treatment that they deserve.
(Neil McCormick, whose 2006 book co-authored with
U2 is a bestseller, earlier wrote an engaging
and surprisingly thoughtful memoir of this Northside
Dublin milieu as he grew up with the band in school,
provocatively titled 'Killing Bono'. The Christian
evangelical mix with a proto-goth ethos that Lypton
Villagers practiced also merits more sustained
study. Speaking of which, not mentioned is the
metal-Irish-folk hybrid Cruachan. Their ethos
could have garnered for Smyth a heap of rich ore
to grind in his critical mill!)
Basically,
a longer book, for once, would have been better.
To
his credit, when the Corrs or Thin Lizzy's 'Whiskey
in the Jar' or B*witched-- not to mention Van
Morrison with and after Them-- raise familiar
touchstones, Smyth also pauses and treats these
breakthrough artists with the same attention that
he devotes to lesser known musicians or groups
more fawned over by many erudite rock critics.
As an aside, speaking of hits, I would have liked
to know, if only to satisfy my momentary curiousity,
why Chris de Burgh (to blame for that wretched
'Lady in Red' ballad!) was only a psuedo-Irish
artist. Even Gilbert O'Sullivan gains his glance.
This book-- far more than Smyth's previous, more
theoretical, Pluto Press, post-modern analyses
of literature and culture-- reads easily. He's
able to show why cult faves and chart toppers
both left an Irish legacy, some for being identified
with the island, some for not.
By
the turn of the century, it seems less so that
Irish artists desire to be identified with the
island's benign or patronising musical stereotypes.
Whether the Corrs, JJ72, Samantha Mumba, or Boyzone-Westlife-Take
That boybands, Smyth shows cleverly how they all
chose to downgrade or simply elide over any sense
of themselves as the Other as they achieved wider
chart success. The few pages given to Louis Walsh's
Svengali-like spell over boybands itself again
shows how a topic SMyth raises could lead to follow-up
exploration by cultural critics, especially those
enamoured of queer theory and gender issues. Similarly,
Smyth's take on Sinéad O'Connor's soul-baring
move away from her early contradictions of fragility
and brutality into a more complex relationship
with her Irish allegiance presents a challenging
idea that future scholars will continue to refine.
U2
is the guiding angel-daemon behind any Irish rock
music post-1980. Suffice it to say that Smyth
shows well why 'Achtung Baby' succeeds. He argues
that the band took an enormous risk here, and
stayed with the zeitgeist even as it expressed
it, yet its music hearkened back to its roots
even as it expanded into the dance-rave scene
then popular. He tracks how after all the Fly-Zoo
hubbub again the band regrouped from a weak album
a decade later. The band's own talent at managing
to speak to its own audience while advancing their
listeners and the band itself into further self-exploration,
artistic courage, and musical challenge is expressed
well by Smyth. Again, credit the author with being
able to convince at least this tepid listener
to U2 that the band does indeed represent the
past three decades of Irish identities in its
music, its image, and its idealism. 'Beautiful
Day' was well-timed as the rarest of feats, a
band able to move with the times for the third
time. Smyth, with this concluding episode, to
date the zenith of Irish pop success, reminds
us that the band, for all its slyness, embraces
many facets of an artistic shape-shifting. U2's
success helped them, as the first truly international
Irish superstars, to achieve the fruition of today's
complex blur of Irishness. Four teens and a sharp-eyed
manager, they have been able to express all the
changes of the past thirty years within the vision
that they began with when Ireland slumped in the
late 70s and appeared as if it would never recover.
Smyth's small study reminds us how crucial popular
music has been in encouraging today's Ireland.
