The ABC's Of Arrogance
This quote of Albert Einstein's has been making the rounds lately:
"Only two things that I know of are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the universe"-Albert Einstein
I think I've found something still larger - the ego of ABC head honcho Martin Fry.
What is ABC? It's a New Wave group from the 80s so ruthlessly commercial they made the guys in U2 look like Sandanistas. I've long wanted to compile an academically sound discography of the experimental/punk/new wave scene of the 70s and 80s, and even though Simon Reynolds and others are now (finally!) addressing this topic in the accepted manner within rock writing, I decided to look into what I could do and how it might be different. After all, the first short (four typewritten pages) list of bands I put together in this vein I did so in 1984.
ABC is near the start of the list, so I looked them up, hoping to get some basic information like when they started, where they were from, when they broke up and what label they were primarily with. Imagine the churning of my stomach as I read:
"ABC are one of those groups who come along once a decade to effect a paradigm shift in the way music is heard and made, one of those groups who move the music forward, alert us to the possibilities of strange combinations, employ radical ideas yet never confuse arrogance with ambition.
If tomorrow a bunch of white northern students decided to form a band inspired not by the integrated-to-the-point-of-invisibility Beatles-Kinks-Stones but instead by the collective irrationality and transcendent imaginations of Aphex Twin, N*E*R*D and The Beta Band, you'd still only be halfway towards understanding just how fundamental a break with tradition ABC effected in that period between punk and Madchester/grunge. Imagine a band from the alternative/indie sector whose idea of a dream version of pop music includes the metallic foreboding of Iggy Pop circa 'The Idiot' and the symphonic magnificence of Earth Wind & Fire circa 'I Am'; imagine the savagery of The Sex Pistols barely concealed beneath the surface of a Chic sophistication. ABC were (are) that band. They took that idea and they made it happen. Across the hit parades of several continents.
This is why ABC were praised to the skies in the eighties and it is why they are still loved to this day. It is not a question of nostalgia, it is a matter of contemporary urgency. ABC are no museum piece; they are an object lesson in how to avoid the obvious. They should be on the curriculum."
It goes on and on. You know, the only way such piffle could be posted and not laughed off the face of the earth is that music writers were lazy and didn't properly objectify the era; they simply concluded, like my friend Konrad Strauss (with whom I agree to disagree) that "the music of the 80s is merely an inferior version of the music that's being made now." This left enough of a gaping hole within the "curriculum" mentioned above through which to drive a train, and such outrageous claims as those expressed in the pro-ABC tract above becomes credible simply because they are unchallenged.
Don't get me wrong - ABC is a decent band, not to my taste, more to my wife's. But ABC certainly did not "effect a paradigm shift in the way music is heard and made." They were merely a successful commercial synth pop group that remain popular around their home base of Sheffield. Certainly if their work, and its kind, was the only thing around to represent the 80s then Konrad's thesis that it "is merely an inferior version of the music that's being made now" would hold water.
In honor of ABC's admission that it is one of the greatest pop bands in history, I will now present, in their complete form, the masterful lyrics of the song "Black Celebration" by ABC's related contempories Depeche Mode as an example of the supreme contribution such groups have made to contemporary music:
"We'll have a black celebration
A black celebration
Let's have a black celebration
A black celebration
Tonight."
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com
PS: Thanks for all of the kind letters congratulating me for the Hospital Records "revival" of sorts that has been going on lately. Hopefully it does not end here. I do have misgivings, from time to time, about that aspect of self-promotion, not just for me but the corporate "us" that constitutes the Hospital Records gang, which comes along with re-introducing our work to the world at large. But if I ever write crap like what ABC has put up on their website, you are all welcome to slap me.