WPD#2: Sun Ra & the Impossible

The Banality of Soft Rock & What Most Music Really Is… Imperial Lather

With this Wild Pop thing, I feel like a little kid who’s wandered off into a shady corner without any of the grown-ups noticing, because I caught a glimpse of something out the corner of my eye and, when I got there, I started to tug at some loose ends that began to unravel. As those loose ends unravel, a fabrication I hadn’t realised was fabric disintegrates to reveal a seemingly limitless space it has forever been hiding from me. That space is murky; but I can no longer turn back simply because I now realise that the deceptive, duplicitous, dishonest character of that obscuring fabric, woven over the centuries that led to our perilous Now (the Welsh Nawr somehow contains the urgency and foreboding better) can no longer be woven back together, cannot be re-ravelled.

I’m talking about something that’s so impossible, it can’t possibly be true. But it’s the only way the world’s gonna survive, this impossible thing. My job is to change five billion people to something else. Totally impossible. But everything that’s possible’s been done by man, I have to deal with the impossible. And when I deal with the impossible and am successful, it makes me feel good because I know that I’m not bullshittin’.

[from John F. Szwed, Space Is The Place: The Lives & Times of Sun Ra (New York: Da Capo; 1998)]

This is just one version of a pronouncement Sun Ra made many times in different contexts, here cited in John F. Szwed’s still definitive biography. It’s so loaded; he talks of five billion people: did he say this particular version of his ‘impossible’ imperative much later than 1970, when the global population was ‘only’ around 3.6 billion? But still, he means the whole world, everyone. I like this particular version because of how he says ‘it’s the only way the world’s gonna survive, this impossible thing’ – we’re all doomed unless we’re prepared to, as a world solidarity, focus our attention on attempting the ‘impossible.’ Elsewhere, in an unsourced version I got from Goodreads, he speaks more plainly: ‘The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible.’ OK, but what is it we’re supposed to do that is impossible? Surely it’s something like to achieve a sufficient level of solidarity among the exploited and oppressed of the Earth such that a world order that isn’t predicated on the pursuit of personal, private wealth, comfort and security, becomes clearly attainable. The really hard thing, there, the ‘impossible’, is not only to achieve it but to have a practicable global plan wherein equal access to the Earth’s abundance is effectively implemented. Because, were such a solidarity to be achieved, overcoming, overwhelming the tiny minority of oligarch-exploiter-enslavers would be a piece of piss… woosh, one fell swoop. The key thing is that such a solidarity can only succeed, I think, through a sustainedly positive engagement with difference – on any level, but especially among human beings: individuals. I mean, notwithstanding the fact that solidarity forged from diversity is probably a natural human property artificially and perniciously undermined through wilful divisiveness. I write elsewhere much more about this, but the Right have long confused equality for equivalence (because they themselves unwittingly depend on that mechanism): they always thought equality meant everyone being a uniform same, where in fact the equivalence that they privileged as the logic of free trade has made our society a totalitarianism of consumerist individualism, where conservatism really does insist on extremely narrow conditions of ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ – and difference becomes problematic, to be suppressed, excluded or attacked.

OK, but - the whole point of Wild Pop is to home in on music’s place in all of this, and that’s where Sun Ra becomes really crucial, because as a theorist, sure, he did write some literary texts, but it’s in his music that he was most philosophically articulate and persuasive. If you read that opening citation, then listen to Sun Ra’s oeuvre for, say, a solid week (shit, a day) then you’d see where part of the cultural problem has always been manifest.

The True North of Wild Pop is total spontaneity - performance ever improvised wherein composition as such is the commitment to always improvise, and any form as such emerges from an acute facility with the discipline wherein idiomatic forms less disorientating to certain audiences can be effortlessly engaged and disengaged. Yeah, but to what end? Well, isn’t it obvious to suggest that a culture that persists in bashing out incredibly limited (thus limiting) structural formulae reinforces a general perception of human experience as pitifully blinkered and narrow and a society that expects to be told what to think and what to do?

The True North of Wild Pop, then, can only remain, for now, an implied absolute. Given the infinite complexity of where ‘we’ (as a civilization) have taken music and where music has taken ‘us’, the pragmatic agenda necessarily becomes one that seeks to collapse the distinction between what we’ve hitherto separated as ‘composition’ and ‘improvisation.’ But the central premise, a governing principle, perhaps, to the whole project is the accommodation and embrace of a global-crisis understanding that, as Sun Ra says in the citation at the top of this post, ‘everything that’s possible’s been done by man, [we] have to deal with the impossible.’ Wild Pop sees the historically European insistence on rigidly fixing music ahead of its performance, through fastidiously crafted composition, as an infantilizing manifestation of, or constricting confinement to, ‘what’s possible’; the ‘impossible’ lies in the suggestion that a totally spontaneous music could touch people with the same emotional and sensual intensity, empathetic connectivity and reflexive identification that composed music has traditionally, only limits are challenged to the point where a much more adventurous sense of what’s possible becomes a part of what’s normal.

The first post in this series attempted to make the case that music played an essential role in the European Imperial Project, not least in the wider normalization of its atrocities, and that it has never actually relinquished that role in its supposed aftermath. I’m not saying - and I cannot say - that people can’t have whatever music they want, that would be completely idiotic. Because what music is to anyone else is infinitely complex. I can’t say you can’t have music the way you’re used to it. But I do want to reveal the extent to which the hyper-organisation of musics that emerged from the establishments of European Imperialism, where imperialist influence persisted in the hyper-re-organisation of the world itself, is something that continues to undermine people’s capacity to really look at themselves, which is to say, ourselves as societies and cultures such that we might see thing more like how Sun Ra does.

By the by, it’s important to stress that, politically, I’m also not saying that Sun Ra’s ‘impossible’ calls for a strictly uniform collectivity where everyone needs to think and say the same thing. In fact, as C.L.R. James points out, the engine of a disciplined spontaneity is a virtuosic dialectics: constant movement incrementally critically accentuated.

The legacy of Rock and Pop is a song tradition with so many astoundingly great achievements of innumerable flavours and feels, countless aesthetic particularities and stylistic postures. It’s not for me to tell any emerging artist that their response to such a tradition cannot be to extend it by making what they feel could be a meaningful and even relevant contribution to it. No matter how great any particular piece of music of the European Classical and Euro-American vernacular traditions might be [mentally insert list here] I would make at least three critical observations:

One: Those ‘classics’ belong firmly at the heart of imperial societies, cultural realms facilitated by far-reaching imperial projects, they are inseparable from them and can be seen, moreover, to have made the normalisation of those projects much more viable. This goes equally for Euro-American Rock as it does the European Classical canon.

Two: Despite how great those ‘classics’ were (and are) both in terms of the excellence their creators attained and their capacity to connect with people on a massive, often global, scale, they’re historically inseparable from a socio-economic order that ultimately led us (humanity) to the brink of self-imploding catastrophe (everything that’s possible’s been done…). Our fate. I mean, while people always seem to talk of fate like it was a kind of prediction of the future, I’ve often felt that fate was an anglicisation of the French fait (or faite, in the feminine) – in so far as what is done can only ever have been what was always going to happen because it can only ever be the only thing that did. (In a way, perhaps our incapacity to free ourselves from a sense of time as a linear chronology, one thing following another like farmed livestock, produces the symptom that is our willing repression and self-containment). But that doesn’t mean to say it was impossible to arrive at a different outcome – a thing could always be avoided if enough people realised what they were doing and where it would lead unless they stopped doing it did it differently, or changed course (before it was fait). All of which to laboriously underline that what we thought of as music per se from the Eurological perspective – formal, fixed, rigidly adhering to sluggish structural formulae, devoid of forward momentum, quest-repressed – was central to a collective worldview and mode of operation that led us to where we are, perilously close to midnight on the Domesday Clock. Or not even as theatrical as that: how about simply a world where an apparent majority (going by electoral mandates, anyway) are absurdly easy to manipulate, to coerce, to lead through the deepest troughs of human depravity by the nose. And it will only ever be Britain and Europe we blame for taking us to the brink because it was them/us that took the whole world in the direction it was taken in (through the grand imperial projects of the Enlightenment).

I got distracted after writing ‘at least three critical observations’ and I can’t remember exactly what they were, or how I was seeing them as such when I wrote that.

The thing is, the great repertoires and their canons are there, now – we have them - and their legacy doesn’t have to be – indeed, really ought not to be – an endless re-microwaving of their leftovers, reheating the substance they were made from. I should be clear that, while I make reference to the (imperial) European Classical Tradition, it’s above all to observe its structural and harmonic contiguity with the Euro-American Pop-Vernacular (especially Rock - and even then, I would partially bracket off the ECT’s evolution through Modernism which was its own attempt to break out of the trap it’d been set, nonetheless its own unwittingly blinkered parallel to the musics of spontaneity emerging from the African Diaspora). The legacy of all of these musics, however – the hundreds of thousands of records - provide an inexhaustible resource for sampling (in the broadest sense, not just the digital technological one) and repurposing ad infinitum – the vitality that made them in the first place can live on through free fermentation where reheating simply deadens and deadens and deadens to a universally mind-numbing flatitude, a plain of moribund equivalence. It’s the domain of Rock, above all, that I see as, on the one had having done more to produce the socio-cultural ‘fabric’ I talked about unravelling earlier, and, on the other a sabotage of human agency, perpetually, ad nauseam, contracting anyone’s sense of their own or their fellows’ potential to an impossibly constrained incapacity. The (insane) paradox is how Rock crafted gestures of spontaneity in order to satisfy the innate need for movement and purpose we all possess as part of our human being – vitality ensnared, the spontaneous agency, the spark of the divine in all of us, tortured into singles and LPs that become the fabric of our subjugation.

I use some very recent examples to illustrate this, as good as randomly selected since my listening to them was simply because they were new albums by artists that the press would be treating as ‘important’ at least in the week of their release, but also by choosing something from the right now emphasises just how stagnant and sterile mainstream recorded music culture can become (or has become without ‘us’ really noticing). Both are examples most the people I tend to gig with wouldn’t bother with at all, but I’ve let it become a part of my job as a lecturer in ‘contemporary and popular music’ to try and listen to as much music, including anything current (especially if it’s making waves) as I can.

My first example is the second album by the Radiohead spin-off project, The Smile, simply because that was a new release I was listening to when starting to write this. I was never a fan of Radiohead, they arrived when I had already been teaching music for a few years; I could see what it meant to that adolescent generation that was my core demographic for teaching (this was secondary school, not uni), realising then that had I been their age I’d’ve probably been into it. They’ve remained a band that the ever-so-slightly less mainstream students gravitate towards in search of something a little less obvious, but many get stuck there, content that they’ve travelled far enough to satisfy their curiosity. And therein lies the rub: Radiohead themselves were a group who made a bland marketing stunt of blurring the edges just a little, allowing in a tiny bleed from the genuinely adventurous, the authentically daring, but resolutely restricting their trip to a mere dipping of toes. No risk, no flare, British centrist liberalism at its ‘best’ – as in, a best that can never be good enough. (Mind you, five years of partly living in Oxford helps get the measure, too). I found listening to the album, Wall Of Eyes (hey, that does sound weird! A wall of eyes, dude…) pretty tedious, but like so much else (by them or anyone) the music was a montage of reassembled and reheated pieces of Rock music like we’ve all heard elsewhere over the past 50-odd years. That’s ‘fine’, of course, it’s ‘perfectly legit,’ on its own terms, because there’s an audience for it, and one of the universally cited reasons for doing this shit is to ‘bring pleasure and happiness to people’s lives.’ Yeah, well I could offer a shit ton of examples of ‘what’s not to like’ born out of more obviously unlimited damage.

Wall Of Eyes (again, like any similar product) is defined by limits and limitations. What I found kind of difficult to imagine while listening was three guys just a bit younger than me being so motivated to put in the evident time, care and effort they clearly have. I’d’ve lost interest in making this record 10 minutes (tops) into the first hour of studio time I’d not be able to afford anyway. According to Wikipedia, ‘The Smile are an English rock band…’ OK, thanks for confirming: like so many English bands, they’re a rock, rigidly and irreducibly lumpen and inflexible, unfluid. So far, so contiguous with Radiohead. But hang on, isn’t the drummer the guy out of Sons of Kemet? He comes from a contemporary strain of ‘Jazz’, i.e. a medium defined by improvisation and fluidity, characteristics especially evident in his solo work (e.g. 2022’s Voices of Bishara). Nothing much to say about that; except that to listen to Bishara before or after Wall Of Eyes reinforces the relative dullness of the latter. Again, fucks sake, it’s fine (like it’s even my privilege to say so) but to me, it reminds me how the over-promotion of work that is presented as so ‘complete’ strengthens a suppression of agency by constantly (persistently-constantly) hammering in the notion that ‘this is as good as music can be because it’s actually the best which is why it’s so professional’. Fuck the Beatles – well, people’s elevation of them - for that. And yes, The Smile definitely sat in some Beatle shit on the way in to work.

Speaking for myself, as an artist, it has always been about next, not what’s done. I never made a conscious decision about this, it just seemed obvious: yes, make albums, recordings, pieces of ‘finished’ work, a concession to commodification, even, but that’s exactly what they are – finished, done and dusted, and the creative-productive process itself is always one of moving forward… the art is the artist. But when I really think about it, I also know that a lot of stuff like this (in this instance, The Smile) is a wilful under-achieving: for most musicians this is incredibly easy to make, but they deliberately resist challenging themselves because the money is good, and the money is good because the vast majority of their audience have been conditioned to expect so much less out of life.

Another recent listen, and even newer release, I’m going to pick on (as much in the playground sense as any other) is Tangk by Idles, one of several bands that get pigeon-holed (I’m guessing with no complaint from the band themselves, given the blatancy of their stylistic source-plundering – again, fine) as ‘Post-Punk’, who’ve captured recent/contemporary adolescent/student audiences’ attention, seducing them with the same (albeit somewhat fainter) whiffs of subversion, non-conformism and culture-countering aesthetic turns that took us in (more convincingly, it has to be said) in the early 1980s. Now, I should point out that when I listen to anything new I so desperately want, hope, to find myself immersed in a genuinely enjoyable listening experience; I’m up for being seduced by whatever I’m meant to be, I want to believe in a new record’s capacity to draw me in and make me want to listen to it several, even many, times. Like zillions of people I’ve spent decades of my life listening to albums that were aimed at this market of constraints, so obviously now (to me at least) instrumental in constraining (construmental?) and limiting our sense of what’s humanly possible.

The only reason I ever bothered listening to Idles was because some of the more interesting of my students over the last few years have been into them. I quite enjoyed Brutalism at the time, but by and large it felt like a hollowed-out shell of the models they were employing, early 1980s bands you’d have mostly only heard on John Peel.

When I listen to Idles I’m reminded of the fact that, actually, the only difference between composition and improvisation is the point at which an executive-creative decision is made: any record that gets made is inevitably (fait, haha) subject to a decision being made that, OK, that’ll do (or more often, perhaps, than one might imagine, that’ll have to do); in the case of rigorous improvisation (disciplined spontaneity) that decision comes instantaneously as part of the performative act itself – it has already been decided, come what may… anything more ponderous than that (an in the case of mainstream Rock album production, we’re talking fucking ponderously professionalist) is already a cringing from immediate relevance. The reason Idles remind me of this more readily than other bands is that so often I’m amazed that, given all the gusto and posturing (posing) they bring to the table, they have actually closed the book on any number of lyrics and studio takes with something along the spectrum of ‘Yeah! That’s great’ to ‘OK, that’ll do.’

Songs of perpetual centrism. All fine, apparently. But what’s at the heart of this is an understanding between artist/promoter and audience that people go to concerts to hear music they already know, the necessary ‘scarcity’ of the commodity being the original performer’s actual presence in the room and that they are really doing it, replaying those songs that people already know and love. Steve Harley died this week. I always liked Cockney Rebel - a much more interesting band than just their hits; in fact the distinctiveness of ‘Make Me Smile’ (which I loved when it was released) comes out of an operational interestingness that typically gets overlooked to the detriment of both artist and audience; you could almost illustrate this like some GSCE science experiment: the precipitated residue we’re left with is the entertainment mogul laughing all the way to the bank, forever… About six months ago I randomly sought out recent live performances of that song by Steve Harley. They were so bland and anonymous, lacking in the quirky character not only of the song’s original feel but the in-studio spontaneity of how he sang it for the final take they went with. There was very little to value or place it ahead of any band singing any song at all, anywhere, except that it just happened to biologically and anatomically be Steve Harley.  It's actually kind of bizarre, but it’s such a ubiquitous scenario it feels pointless and absurd to point it out, because it’s pretty much what everyone accepts, and expects, live music to be. But why? Hasn’t this always been a model devised as part of a marketing strategy? Yes, the artists have to be able to make a living plying their trade, but the fact that this model has remained so long unchallenged means that just about any artist setting out to do just that cannot really envisage another option, save for the more marginal zones where people do have the freedom to play previously unheard material (by definition, this will always be what purely spontaneous, unplanned performances will comprise).

Speaking from personal experience, I’d have to say that I can’t have played more than about twenty gigs, ever, of written-repeated songs – I never really liked it that much; I remember the feeling of relief at having done an OK job of getting through a setlist less than the feeling that too many aspects let a show down, or I/we weren’t very good. But above all, having done hundreds of totally spontaneous performances where barely anything was discussed or pre-discussed, a key factor I can clearly observe now is that when you do a planned-composed set, what the venue is like, what the people who turn up bring to that space, whatever has been happening in anyone’s lives, can only minimally affect what you play and how you play it, in fact negligibly compared to how much any such conditions can influence a totally spontaneous performance. Sure, if you’ve already managed to accumulate a fanbase through releasing recorded material and/or ‘paying your dues’ flogging the same material through regular board-treading tantamount to knocking persistently at the ‘door’ (if not banging your heads against it), then the necessary chemical reaction required to establish the received protocol of ‘band-plays-the-songs-we-know’, then those factors become less important, except what then happens is that the artist/s paint themselves into a corner, surrendering themselves to a game it can rarely be possible to free themselves from without losing valuable collateral.

What I’m trying to draw out here is some kind of phenomenological revelation of how silly and existentially pointless this long-encrusted mode of practice is – not as an end in itself but in order to move ahead from there to make a more obvious case for exploring modes of professional performance that have shaken off the nonsense of a trade which ultimately leaves the audience the loser because a) what felt special for them is just what the band dole our night after night to whatever nameless audience they’re next booked to play for, and, b) their sense that no potential means of agency could possibly exist (and be reachable) beyond the severely limited ones they think they have (and are prepared to settle for) in their daily working lives.

Songs songs songs – I go to these sites to check out what’s new. So many albums disappoint because it’s just more songs songs songs songs songs songs… with riffs, chord sequences, pristine arrangements, mildly interesting drum sounds and drum beats, occasionally a surprising and gratifying chord change, or a phrase in the lyrics whose unexpected turn nudges you oh so slightly off the straight and narrow… or a vocal sound that’s relatively distinctive (but not too – it makes sure to apologise for itself at the latest by the end of the chorus). I want songs to surprise me, to remind me that there’s life in songs, and sometimes at least the sense of that does manage to happen, but soon I realise that that is down to the relativity of a successful song’s, or album’s, very-slight reaching beyond what’s otherwise uniformly a closed-circuit operation, willingly-knowingly setting out to observe diminutively strict limits that resolutely affirm a stultifying status quo. (Growing up I hated Status Quo, but I’ve come to really like them for what seems retrospectively like a deliberate satire on exactly this condition – the undisguised giveaway was in the name, but like The Police, Dollar, or Queen, no one seemed to notice).

Could Wild Pop be the collective hand that tugs at the frayed edges, unleashing a music that through its material essence disavows ruling paradigms of exploitative oppression?

At various stages in this piece I keep counterbalancing my critique of reactionary music with a neutralising ‘it’s fine’ because I don’t want to be seen to be advocating a right way or better way over a wrong one or a supposedly crap one. But I want to tie this post up by kind of reneging on those little reflexes by remind myself and the reader of the Sun Ra quote I started with, and what he seems to always have been saying whenever he made these pronouncements.

But it’s the only way the world’s gonna survive, this impossible thing. My job is to change five billion people to something else.

My understanding of his rhetoric is that shit has got dreadfully, perhaps fatally, real (he couldn’t have known how much more serious it would keep getting. Except, no, he probably could. His impossible-possible dichotomy feels like a directional thing, a question of trajectories: we’ve been going this way, but we really need to go that way else we’re fucked. So how seriously do you address it? Reform and tokenistic gestures of concession to a desperate scenario have never even begun to meet the challenges they were meant to respond to. Yet no absolutist revolution (in a literal sense) can ever succeed due to the embeddedness of cultural paradigms which hold a rotten order together. We can only erode, undermine and disavow in nuanced interpenetrative ways. So this mission becomes one which looks for opportunities to foreground real spontaneity (CLR James’s disciplined spontaneity), to reveal it where it has been subjugated and to gradually collapse the bogus distinction between ‘composition’ and ‘improvisation’ by exposing the extent to which the logic of such a distinction trains collective consciousnesses to other and divide. Which is why the next post will revisit George Lewis’s use of exnomination.

[both images are my own screenshot stills from Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (Robert Mugge, 1980). As with any time Sun Ra started talking on camera or in front of a mic, he comes out with endlessly quotable remarks; we recently screened this again at the university, and it was choc full of pronouncements I could’ve included here. Maybe I’ll work them into later posts. But I’ll just throw in two from right at the end of the film here:

I know I myself would never want to be God, or even like God, because God got all these human beings on this planet, and I most certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for them, or even have the disgrace that I've made them.

I think some people on this planet are going to wake up to realize that it's the unknown that they need to know, in order to survive.

[Sun Ra, in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (Robert Mugge, 1980)]