Category: Essays

A while ago I wrote a massive article on music, and the current state of it. As part of this article I interviewed a number of people about their tastes, and what they think is on the horizon. I think we’ve started to see the turning of the tide. 

The article was never published despite promises. The joy of having my own website is I can write what I want. Here it is:

 

 

In the last five years the volume on amplifiers seems to have been turned down. Overdrive has fallen out of favour and instead we are faced with a wave of electronica, of synth beds and computer-based production of music. This is not to say there are not incredible bands making incredible music out there, more that we appear to be at a low point for the rock guitarist.

 

These things come in waves. As part of the research into this article I spoke to a number of people about what they make of the current trends in music, their thoughts on what will happen this year and whether live music still prevails in a world where venues are closing left, right and centre and charging bands to perform. One of the key pieces of information I was given was these things come in cycles or in waves, which makes perfect sense, even on a grander scale than the music scene. We are experiencing a massive 80’s resurgence.

Yuppies are trotting about in their patent leather shoes with no socks, spunk in their quiffs, body warmers, outrageously big mobile phones and wraps of cocaine lining their pockets. Teenage girls are donning washed out denim cut-offs, making collages of androgynous boys they fancy and drinking garish alcoholic concoctions. Music is more image than substance. Teenage boys are pawning their Fenders for Korgs. The more you think about it, the more parallels there seem to be and the more depressing it all becomes. To quote Tame Impala, one of the few bands of the last couple of years still flying the flag, ‘it feels like we only go backwards’.

Is there really that much difference between Duran Duran crooning and swaying on a yacht in the video for Rio (boats and hoes) and A$AP Rocky bragging about his bank account figures? Is Rihanna glamorising sex any more than Madonna ever did?

 

A decade ago there was a resurgence of British guitar bands. It felt like a scene, and while it was quite short lived and was never really given a tabloid-friendly title beyond ‘new Brit-Pop’ it was an exciting time for British music. Radios and charts were full of clever lyrics, battling guitars and skinny white boy attitude. There are still bands of that wave riding along and they are to be applauded for it. Suck It And See was arguably Arctic Monkey’s best album to date while In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull saw The Cribs return to lo-fi form, yet there is no real collective nature to what is going on.

 

The worry when I took this article on was the fact I am invested in the last wave. I wanted to be a part of it. They were my formative years. I was in school, in college, at university and beyond when The Libertines, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and the like were pummelling pop with a righteous uppercut. I decided to open my inbox to others to see if I was taking the whole issue far too personally.
James claimed “Miles Kane is single-handedly keeping guitar going at the moment” saying he expected it all to “pick back up this year, whatever that means”. Whilst interviewing him he mentioned a number of different artists due to release new albums this year. Amongst those listed were Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Atoms For Peace and Kings Of Leon “but that’s just wishful thinking” he added of the latter. The thing I took from speaking to him is we are reliant on pre-existing and established bands to keep the whole operation on the road. There are not many up and coming guitar bands.

 

During the period of my research I was amazed by the amount of people who commented on the state of ‘manufactured’ music, especially the attempts by shows like X Factor to branch out with ‘winners’ like Matt Cardles and James Arthur who can hold a guitar. It’s hard however to maintain respect for anyone when you can see the price they were bought for.

The joy of listening to a band or musician is to hear the progression they make form the first album where they don’t get the full works in terms of production, when they are seen as a risk. The songs they produce for the first album are the hard work, them honing their craft and finding their way in the world. The ones who make it to a second or third album and indeed beyond are those who have a gift for songwriting. The stories you have to tell once you have ‘made it’ are seemingly not as exciting and involving as the freshman effort, and that is where many meet their maker. With manufactured artists everything is thrown at them, a team of songwriters, top producers, radio play, total exposure, and you don’t get to enjoy the journey of it all. Seeing them break down over the loss of a childhood pet who always believed in their talent is just not the same thing.

 

In terms of the way music is now being produced there were a mixture of opinions from people. Ariel, who works for New Jersey radio station The Core said it “doesn’t make any difference to her” how an album was recorded as long as it is bearable to listen to. “I don’t mind if it is in a fancy recording studio or in someone’s garage”.

Meanwhile Lottie said “the best records in my mind are often (but not always) those that are simply recorded, and are always those that are not overproduced… if a band aren’t honest with how they sound then it almost defeats the object”.

 

Ariel also said she had noticed there was a blurring of the lines between alternative stations and pop stations. While this can be seen as a positive as it gets a greater listenership and the opportunity to influence more young people to pick up instruments and try and make something meaningful, it also taints the music and the artists for those who sought it out and for who it was made special. While investigating the matter I received some flack for trying to drum up a redundant argument. I was told to seek out great music rather than accept what is offered to me. I try to do both, but it feels there is very little powerful music being created at the moment. I am open to being corrected, open to recommendations and a severe telling off.

Janelle said she was simply too lazy to “Dig through the horseshit” to find new music. She complained it had got “terribly bleepy-bloopy”.

 

Singer-songwriter Sam Sexton said some of the blame lies with the music venues themselves. “Good new bands find it hard to come through. 20 years ago live music clubs were ubiquitous, now they take a backseat and there is no good outlet unless you have the ability to market yourself”.

This brings out another interesting discussion. It seems bands need to be able to package and develop themselves over the Internet in order to reach the people, rather than building a fan base in the traditional way of gigging as often as they possibly can.

Florence & The Machine and Two Door Cinema Club were given radioplay following their BBC Introducing pages. Lily Allen was considered to be a MySpace star. Arctic Monkeys first EP was ripped and shared over the Internet to gain buzz. It seems increasingly if you want to get ahead as a band you have to put the hard work in yourself in terms of social networking. The problem is everything is trying to do this. In the same way all bands start out trying to emulate a hero’s sound, all bands try to emulate the success of YouTube or BandCamp sensations. In many way we are saturated with music. Before Internet downloads there were only the CDs you could afford to buy or burn copies of from friends. Before that there were only the tapes you could copy songs from the radio with or buy. Before that there were only vinyl.

I spoke to my own father on the subject, who brought me up on a steady diet of T-Rex, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. He plays in a 60’s and 70’s cover band. He said when he was a teenager he could only afford to buy one record a month and he would listen to it non stop and know every lyric and every guitar part through. That’s something we have lost.

In a world where you can carry 8,000 songs around in your pocket, and have access to Spotify, YouTube and however else you choose to listen to music there is a big wall for artists, and the money is spreading thinner each time.

Danielle commented “the likes of EMI, Sony BMG and so on need to start listening with their ears and not with their bank accounts”. This is all well and good in theory, but so is Communism.  In practice we are looking at a business, and the aim is obviously try and make as much money as possible.

 

I asked a lot of people if rock was dead. It is possibly the most cliché question I have asked anyone in two years but that is often the best way to get a response from people sometimes. I believe for the most part it is dormant. It is rare to hear a recognisable riff in music today. Those that spring to mind come from the likes of Band Of Skulls, St Vincent, Jack White and The Black Keys, bands who are known, are established and are keeping the flame burning.

There seems to be an essence of laziness to music today. It seems anyone can sit at a computer and throw something down, and I state that whilst spanking myself with a paddle for committing exactly that sin.

We should be more concerned about the callouses on our fingers than the squareness of our eyes.

 

A part of the problem is education. Music isn’t seen by the government as being important, despite David Cameron’s insistence that he loves The Smiths. A statement which moved Johnny Marr to ban him from listening to his music.

I gained a lot more from music between the ages of eleven to sixteen than I ever did from maths. It’s a wider problem as well. The worlds of art and drama are sidelined for what are considered to be the core subjects. I don’t know why any school child would need to learn German unless they wanted to translate the complete works of Rammstein but I’m not in government and therefore obviously aren’t as savvy to the world as they are, from their ivory towers, with their two homes and fraudulent claims and benefits. 

 

To return to the idea of cycles, in theory the next phase we repeat should therefore be the early nineties. Freelance writer Rob Thomas said “people will get fed up of bumf dink weeble weeble music and want more guitar based music… I think music has a cycle of about 25 to 30 years”. As far as I can see this will only be a good thing. Imagine if the ‘soft grunge’ fashions of the last year give rise to a resurgence of grunge music. The kids who tire of the current scene will dip back to Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Pixies and Nirvana. At the time it was a complete sub-culture and a complete fuck you to record companies and prancing about to backing tracks. It was gritty and it was real.

It won’t be anything new in the immediate sense of the word but as Ariel commented “new music must always be compared to already existing music in order to fit into a category or several. Any new music will inevitably be stuffed into a genre, keeping a genre ‘alive’ in a sense… it seems critics and listeners are much more likely to smash twenty genres together to create an artist, rather than creating a new genre’.

 

I’m reminded of a quote in Chbosky’s Perks. It was said no band could ever be as big as The Beatles because they gave the whole thing a context. Anybody following from that point is just emulating and that’s how sub-categories begin. Arguably Helter Skelter was the start of metal.

There is always the hope something will come through and completely change music. As Kate said ‘rock never dies, it just goes underground it’s off the coke and ready for a comeback’. I read recent dub-step was the music of our generation, but if that’s the case I think I’ll sit this one out.

 

I can’t predict the future. If I could I wouldn’t have included quite so many maybes in this article. What I will say is the floor is wide open for a new scene or culture or sub-genre of rock bands to come forth. It has been long enough. You may be reading this article with a guitar cradled in your lap. You may be planning on meeting up in a practice room or a garage with some friends, but there is no reason you couldn’t take what you are doing and blow an awful lot of turgid driftwood and shit clean out of the water.

Last night I went out for drinks with another guy. For some reason the very prospect of such a venture made me more awkward than my usual state of ‘tensed up and ready to drop dead’.

The reason for this is no fault of my own. Society makes it difficult. This dude (A) and I got chatting at a Christmas party and realised we had loads of stuff in common. We talked about music and university experiences and books. The next time we saw each other, much more sober, it was as if the whole thing had never happened.
I consulted my brother who can often be the Tom Cruise to my Dustin Hoffman.
“Just ask him out man, it’s not gay. You get on. Why are you being weird about it?” – Cracking advice there bro. The problem being I hadn’t asked anyone out in over two years.

Eventually I plucked up the courage and asked A out for a beer. I can expressly remember telling him there was nothing gay about it as though this might convince him my intentions were honourable.
It worked. We went out, had some beers, talked about a multitude of things and those first date nerves are out of the way and everything is fine.

So don’t let anyone tell you there is something wrong with a bit of man on man time (for want of a better phrase).

Last night I got into a discussion on gay marriage. It’s incredible we still exist in a world where there is a discussion to be had on the subject. While I appreciate I am coming at this from the view of a straight mid-twenties male I am ready to be silenced by anyone who feels they have more of a right to air their views on the subject. I would classify this as any gay man or woman who wishes to get married.

People talk an awful lot about the sanctity of marriage. I don’t see how who people choose to marry being against the sanctity of marriage, if anything it is purely sanctimonious. The sanctity of the church has been questioned in recent years. I don’t think given the advances in culture (questionably) and science (definitely) we can consider anything to be made of the bible as a verbatim piece. As Captain Barbossa would say, “think of it more as a guideline”.

I don’t understand how we can put aside animal sacrifice (Lev 1:9), selling our children into slavery (Exodus 21:7) and murdering anyone who works on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2) but somehow two people of the same sex aren’t allowed to be married in a church.

I think it should be entirely down to personal choice. I would like to one day get married. I don’t necessarily want to do that in any kind of religious building because of the backwards and vindictive state of religion in the world today.
The fact there are couples who are denied the option in the first place does not make sense to me.
It seems fine for people of the cloth to finally come clean on their sexuality (that almost reads like a pun, sorry) but two people can’t get married in a church because “marriage should be between a man and a woman”? What has that got to do with anything.
I thought sex should be between consenting adults but that hasn’t been the way of the church for centuries.

Pretty redundant statement right and yet I continue to see it and the like (no pun intended) popping up on my Facebook News Feed.
While I have done everything within my power to limit the number of absolute fucking tools and trolls that block up my News Feed this appears to have befallen some of my nearest and dearest.
Of course I agree cancer is bad. That’s not what this is about.
Instead it seems to be some kind of badge of honour, a “you don’t know man, you weren’t there” update that cries out for attention. The original postee is probably sat getting a hard on at how popular their status has become and yet it is not actually doing anything of worth.
To do something worthwhile, click here.
How about instead of just liking a status you donated something to Cancer Research.
How about instead of buying your lunch in Pret tomorrow you made lunch at home and donated whatever you would have spent to charity. We are so quick to like the status and yet so slow to act.
The bigger ask is instead of liking a status, why don’t we rally the government to make further education more available. It shouldn’t be some elitist club like an Eton shower room. What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of somebody who can’t afford education?

As if you haven’t had enough of me going on about writing and about how I’ve finished already I’m now going to try and delve into exactly what the experience has done for me, what I have learned along the way and how I’m going to take that forward in my writing and my life.

It’s possible to write something worthwhile in three weeks.
Despite what Capote may have believed about Kerouac’s style of writing, it does seem to get the job done. Who’s to say that it has to take years to get a story together? The fact is that the story I wrote for NaNoWriMo is something that I hadn’t written a word of before November 1st, as it well should be but I spent a lot of time thinking about it before then. I first had the idea over a year ago and I’ve been flipping it over in my mind since then. At times it felt as if the words weren’t something I was thinking of, it had been turned over and churned up so many times in my head that it almost became automatic. Reading it back there are some really strong points to it, and some really good scenes and with a little bit of a redraft I would be happy to send it out into the world. It’s a strong story.

I can write other than as myself
I have a habit of writing from the point of view of ‘attractive, twenty-something male with narcissistic tendencies’. With Visions Of Violet I decided to try something completely different and completely out of my comfort zone and write as a woman. I’ve always been very aware of the way men write female characters. For me in particular they always seem to just feed into the male characters, almost to act as ‘a bit of skirt’ in the story. Yes, I write like a sexist 70’s boss. First reports indicate that I have managed it, that I have created a realistic female character.

I can set myself targets and achieve them
I’ve never been one for deadlines, I often leave things to the last minute under the assumption that I work better under pressure but I was very careful with NaNoWriMo. I spent as much time as I could writing. I took my laptop to work each day. I wrote on the train to London. I wrote on the train back. I wrote through lunch. I spent weekends locked away working, and it has paid off. I’m free to move onto the next project.

The first one wasn’t a fluke
It took me nine months to write my first novel Situation One. It took me a further three months to redraft it. Although Visions is half the length, I still wrote it in three weeks and plan on doing a quick redraft now before leaving it to settle before picking it up again in a month’s time.
I was worried that because Situation One was pretty exclusively based on things that had happened to me that I wouldn’t be able to finish something that ended entirely in fiction. The truth is that I have pulled from things I know for this book, as I hope most writers do. I once asked Graham Linehan (via Twitter) if he had any advice for new writers and he said “show, don’t tell” and I try to stick to that with my writing. It’s an excellent piece of advice.

I Google myself far too often. That’s something I’m not too ashamed to admit, which is probably a problem. It has been described as narcissism but it goes beyond that. It’s almost obsessive. That’s why I was so disgusted when I discovered that someone almost had the same name as me, and was sneaking into my Googlability.

I’m very fortunate in that I am the only person in the world with my name. This is down to one thing, my surname is made up. I guess arguably all of our names are made up but mine is very recently so, on the grand scale of things. Go back a hundred years and you’ll struggle to find a Schiernecker. It’s sort of disheartening to know that your family tree is untraceable further back than three generations, it makes you wonder what went before and what the hell we were hiding from to have to change it, and drop our history. On the upside it does mean that when I use a search engine I will only find me. That was until recently. One day when I was procrastinating from writing I decided to see how I was faring on the scale of Search Engine Optimisation. Imagine my dismay when this message shot up before me:

No, Google, that is definitely not what I meant. I decided to do a little bit of investigating. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet in the last ten years and I’ve left a pretty deep set of footprints, Paul Schoenecker must have done some series work to outdo me. It turned out he had. He’s got a degree in Chemical Engineering and he works at a Wildlife Park studying natural resources and he’s studying accounting in Minnesota and he works at Choice Auto Rental, and he is trained in Muay Thai boxing, and he’s involved with the Academy of the Holy Angels. I figured that he must be some kind of demi-God but refused to settle back and let him ruin my Google life with his incredible skills so I set to work putting my full name everywhere I possibly could. I set up a YouTube channel, I put my name on my blog, and my Tumblr, and my Twitter accounts. I created a Just Giving page and spammed my full name on there. I just tried to spread my love like a fever, and eventually it worked. When I searched for me, it was me I got and I was happy, for a while.

I realised that hero of men Paul Schoenecker might not have even been aware of the struggle I was facing. It was either that or he would be sat on the other side of the Atlantic drastically trying to outdo me. I hoped it was the latter. I needed a nemesis. I decided to make contact. This is how I chose to do that:

………To date I have had no response.

In my attempt to find this message which I sent a month ago I typed my nemesis’s name into Facebook and seven accounts came up. Seven! Why had I not realised it before. He wasn’t some kind of freaky new Jesus, he was seven men, and I had managed to outdo them all. It made me feel Hulk strong and I headed off to fight other battles that nobody else would notice.

I struggle to understand why something like British Summer Time still exists, it seems unnecessary to me. That being said I was assuming that I would sleep through the changes and wake up feeling an hour better off this morning. That was exactly not what happened and here is what did.

I started drinking at around half past five, in the bath, watching Homeland. I then put my looking-ropier-by-the-second Hannibal Lecter costume on and sat about waiting for a reasonable time to go out and see other people. This was about half nine when I managed to drag my brother out of the house to give me a lift to the Brush. Once there I acted as a conduit for the brilliant people I know. You know when you overhear someone saying ‘Oh you will love me mate Jonesy, he’s fucking mental’, and you meet Jonesy and he can just down a pint really quickly and inappropriately feel up any girl in sight, well my friends are actually mental, and I mean they act so odd that in the Brush (a meeting place for the weird) people stop and stare when they dance by. That’s why I love them. Since re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reading On The Road I see myself as more of a Paradise type figure, I take in all these firework personalities and I light their fuses and then I stand back and it all blows up in my face and I laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed before. That’s what my friends are like.

I got to see my friend James who only just decided to return to the land of the living (from up north). We spent the evening in sporadic bouts of conversation before he would be distracted like a budgie and head off into the flashing darkness, with a stead like a pirate and hair like Robert Smith after a salon day. Then another of my friends (coincidentally dressed as a surgeon) spent the evening necking a stripper from Basildon who was dressed as a zombie nurse. Then my friend Ben (who I mentioned the other day) was a skeleton John McEnroe celebrating his cat sister’s birthday. That’s what I mean by mental. I also got to see my Gonzo friend Mike and his lovely girlfriend Jess. We talked (drunkenly) about how we just switch hanging out on and off, there’ll be nothing for months, barely any contact and then it’s a click and everyone is back together and it is all hugs and how are yous and we dance in a circle and love love love one another and it is just pure and brilliant.
Kate was also there (in the best costume I saw all night) with her friends and I love seeing all of them as well because they’re just in the league below when it comes to crazy and I like to watch that develop.

How I spent that extra hour gained was stood outside. There were fifty people crammed into the glass faced kebab shop opposite, there were girls with ripped tights and fake blooded necks lying in doorways waiting for friends or taxis, there was still that noise in the air that said, where can we go? I stood out in that for over an hour, trying to make sure everyone was safe and able to get out and home, and then picking James up from the sloped entrance to the cornershop and getting him to the taxi rank. I discovered that even in this day and age the clocks resetting still fucks up technology. Every ATM in the high street refused to dispense cash and confused rolling skeletons and mummys roamed up and down in the lights of the parade of cabs trying each one in the hope of that golden withdrawal that could carry them home. Eventually it was just James and I making promises we knew we would forget by the morning. I shoved him into the back of a cab and promised to speak to him soon. I then sat on a wall waiting for the clock to turn back.

I believe it was seven years ago today that I would have been filling my parent’s car with everything I had ever begged, borrowed or stolen and headed off to Buckinghamshire to begin my adventures as a fully flung student. It’s a time of my life I am still very hung up upon, a point proven by my obsession with writing about fictional versions of myself getting into all kinds of hi-jinx on campus. The reason it is so at the forefront of my mind today is that this morning I was at my girlfriend’s as her youngest sister repeated the steps I took seven years ago. Everything was boxed up, everything was thought over and considered, and then they packed it all into the back of the car and headed off to Roehampton.

It was an interesting and emotional thing to watch, especially given the fact that Sarah is a twin, and while she goes off to University Holly has deferred for a year to try a different avenue first, testing the water as it were. It is the first time they have really been apart in nineteen years and it is going to be a hard adjustment for both of them to make. I can remember the thoughts I had in my first weeks away, how I would fantasise about what my family were doing, and how they could possibly cope in my absence, but once that all moved aside I began to realise that although I was tied to them, and that link would never break there was room to become myself in a lot more ways. The freedom afforded to me by University was one of the greatest life lessons I have encountered and as such I look back on it with firm fond memories. It is a time when you are going through so much physically and mentally, internally and externally, and you really start to work out who and where you are, what you want to be doing, and you get an awful lot of lessons along the way.

I would like to say good luck to anyone making those journeys this weekend, or in the coming weeks and remind you that it’s different and it is new but it is one of the best decisions you ever made, and it is well worth the debt.