The Abba Confusion - Part 1

I fucking love ABBA. But this isn't about really about ABBA. It's as much about me as anything else. It's about being obsessed with pop music, going to art college for two years, and coming out wanting nothing more than to do pop music. Write it, play it, breathe it, shit it. It's about realising that my brain thinks in I IV V. So it's 50% self indulgence and 50% a look at authenticity in art, but filtered through the only art I know. I spent a lot of time at college writing about stuff that I thought was important, like latent catholicism, but most of the time I just wanted to be Kevin Rowland.

But that said, it's not hard to bring this round to God. When you're delving into the intangible otherness that makes art what it is, those spineshiver brain-exploding moments, it's easy to put it down to J.H.C – Oliver Sacks describes it as feeling like you '[have] God's phone number'. But art can, if you describe it in the broadest sense, make your eyes, ears, the hairs on the back of your neck and your dick stand to attention – not something that the Gods of either testament are likely to endorse. But there's something of the holy even in a penny dreadful, and music is unrivaled in art for sharp, visceral emotional effect. Pop is like cheap romance, and all the better for it, and when pop gets ideas above its station it tends to lose something of its essential naivety. But sometimes it's magic – inarguably authentic and easier to understand than Mozart.

So from a theological bent, you have Brian Wilson's hymnal 'teenage symphonies to God', and there's something of it in the Carpenters too. But by including religion in our study, it's easy to assume that there are certain absolute artistic values defined by a god, which are out of the realms of mortal thinking.. which is a bit of a cop-out. What we're looking for is something equally elusive and indefinable, and it's far more interesting to think that something like that can exist purely in the physical world. To quote Sacks again - “The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.” Scritti Politti's post-structuralist soul-pop, for example, is rooted firmly in intellectual boundaries, and Abba. Oh, god, Abba. Abba are the most authentic band I can think of. Abba play crystalline pop music, they sing about the most heartbreaking things but they sing it with a smile to a disco beat. It's almost completely transparent, the pain is just below the surface, and all the things which are considered staples of 'authentic' music – distorted or acoustic guitars, puritan intimacy, minor keys – are safety blankets. They wrap the anguish in easy-to-recognise signifiers that are there to distract and deceive. Wrong? Probably.

But I'm trying to think about all of this logically. I'm trying to forget all of the mysticism and drama of rock and roll, so this is where my thinking has got me to. However, I'll defend the worthiness of the kitsch and the throwaway like a bear, to the point where I find myself reacting against anything that presents itself as overly authentic. Case in point: dressing up as a giant heart whilst in a head-to-toe-in-black kind of post-rock band. So part of this desire to search for the intangible 'authentic-ness', and my fierce rejection of the rock and roll cliche, probably comes from a frustration with my own work. An inability to create anything beautiful? or at least allow myself to? I'm going to New York City on November 7th – it's going to be an interesting experience, for sure. But what I'm most looking forward to is failing. Failing in the most interesting ways possible. Me and Will are giving ourselves four weeks to form a band, play a gig, make a record, get interviewed, get on tv etc. Impossible demands, practically. I know that there's as much chance as finding this elusive authenticity gene as proving the existence of a god, but what we can do is take a logical, almost scientific approach to the creation process. Horrible metaphor: New York is our petri dish, Antifolk is our culture and these demands are our catalysts. It's the DIY dream taken to extremes and turned on its head – the young band rehearsing wherever they can, promoting their own gigs, recording their own music. It's a piss-take as much as anything else, applying such strict rules and planning to a process steeped in passion. But it serves a purpose and it's not a passionless piss-take, in fact passion is crucial – to fail, to look at the failure, to want to discover as a result of the failing.

So failure is expected, but I'm not making any real guesses about what might happen. Maybe achieving some sort of critical or commercial success would be fun, but it's certainly not what we're setting out to do. The demands we've set ourselves are very much geared towards that, but in no way am I equating authenticity with success here. One of the great confusions of the indie aesthetic is the strive for success, but not too much success. We'll play with the idea of selling out, just as we'll play with the idea of the natural formation of a band, the songwriting process, rivalry, band identity, the city of dreams.

It's important to stress the 'we' – this is very much a collaboration. Will is getting to New York a week after me, but he's as essential to this project as our plane tickets. On the one hand, he complements my ideas perfectly by giving them focus, and on the other he disagrees with me completely on certain issues. This friction is absolutely essential to get an interesting dialogue going – we're both already quite set in our ways of thinking and we're both quite stubborn, but I'm sure this will become more and more apparent as we go on.

This is it for this post though, hopefully I've rambled coherently enough. See you in New York!

Oliver

An Introduction