Why did the music press give Hugh Laurie an easy ride over his debut as a bluesman? And is there a meeting of pot and kettle in the reviews of Simon Reynolds's Retromania?
We need to start this month with a grave dereliction of journalistic duty. What do the numbers 9-8-6-7-9 mean to you? They don't add up to a song by City Boy. Nor ? at least, not explicitly ? is their sum the number of the beast. They are the numerical representation, published in this very newspaper (and remember marks are allocated out of 10, not 100) of UK broadsheet rock and jazz critics' verdicts on Hugh Laurie's recent live performances, and are every bit as disturbing as anything in the Book of Revelation.
Talking to Pat Gilbert in Mojo a couple of months back ? an early warning shot in a publicity blitzkrieg of mounting and ultimately horrific intensity ? the star of Jeeves & Wooster and House imagined Britain's critical elite dipping their quills in venom in anticipation of his forthcoming celebration of the unique capacity of the sufferings of black Americans to alleviate the midlife crisis of the white British millionaire. Sorry, I mean his album of New Orleans blues standards. "We hadn't even made it," but "people were already giving it one star, the fuckers."
Yet so successful was Laurie's campaign of pre-emptive self-deprecation that when the time came to step up and tell the inconvenient truth ? not that Hugh Laurie is an old Etonian, or a TV comedian, but that he has a voice like a Canada goose ? no one (at least, no one I've come across) was prepared to do it. Come on, people! If this kind of mass abdication of aesthetic responsibility continues, we'll end up with Tony Blair as Middle East peace envoy and Miranda Hart winning three British Comedy awards.
It was hard to tell the exact moment at which the previously inoffensive Laurie somehow became as apologetically omnipresent a cultural force as his former partner in dinner-jacketed Oxbridge revue comedy, Stephen Fry. It could have been in the course of the ITV documentary in which Hugh asserted ? blithely dismissing centuries of musicological scholarship ? that "there are only two kinds of music ? good and bad". (Louis Armstrong could just about get away with saying this kind of thing, but it's harder to take from one of the stars of Peter's Friends.) Or maybe in his very own Culture Show special, when he told Alan Yentob: "It's just nakedly me and a band ? communing." (Note to Mr Yentob: when an actor says they have "found their true self" doing something, it is generally best to treat this assertion with a degree of scepticism. Actors don't generally have true selves ? that is why they are actors.)
For me, the moment when Laurie's false modesty began to take on a truly totalitarian aspect ? and didn't George Orwell once promise us a future of Hugh Laurie's version of St James' Infirmary playing in a human face for ever? ? came in the album's TV advertising campaign. At the corner of the screen, an artfully torn-off scrap of notepad appears bearing the spontaneously handwritten legend: "I love this music as authentically as I know how." He's not even playing it as authentically as he knows how. He's just loving it that way.
The disturbing notion that it might even be possible to love something inauthentically is one of several scary-looking nettles that Simon Reynolds's new book Retromania attempts to grasp. Rather than being discouraged by the (for him) unusually mixed response this publication has attracted, the author should take comfort from having fulfilled the critic's highest function, which is to provoke thought.
The major point of consensus that seems to be emerging from its wildly divergent reviews is that Retromania is at once Reynolds's least characteristic and most personal book. This is in itself an intriguing conjunction. Given the emotional incontinence that so often prevails among the bloggerati ? that broad church of which he is, if not the actual pope, then at least some kind of cardinal ? there is something very endearing about how uncomfortable Reynolds seems to be writing in the first person. And his almost Cronenbergian self-depiction as a culture-consuming invertebrate, writhing under the microscope of infinite digital possibility ? "It's the present I inhabit that really feels stretched thin, a here and now pierced by portals to innumerable potential elsewheres and elsewhens" ? certainly appears to have struck an ominous chord with his own generational cohort, many of whom seem to be addressing issues of their own in the course of their reviews of his book.
To be accused of creating "the sound of a pop critic's midlife crisis" by the Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick is a badge of honour in itself. And Dave Haslam's puzzling contention that Retromania is "too music-based" reads especially strangely coming from someone who progressed from writing acclaimed socio-cultural studies of Manchester's dance heritage to considerably less successful celebrations of the crazy world of Seventies TV.
Ben Thompson adopts a kindlier stance in the Independent on Sunday, suggesting a less instinctively hostile rereading of Jaron Lanier's visionary tract You Are Not a Gadget might help Reynolds locate the technological roots of his midlife malaise. It's true Retromania is harsh on Lanier ? the virtual Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom Reynolds calls "curmudgeonly" and "disillusioned" (arguably the clearest case of pot and kettle encountering each other since Mr McCormick, two paragraphs back). But even the superficially solicitous Thompson probably hasn't realised the extent to which his approach to Retromania has been conditioned by bitterness over how much more attention Reynolds's early Melody Maker writings on My Bloody Valentine got than the piece he wrote for the NME in 1988. Or something.
It certainly is a tangled web out there, and while we're ending on a note of befuddling continuity, Q's 300th issue will do nothing to change the minds of those who feel this is a magazine for people who don't really like music, written by journalists who work harder when employed by other publications. It's the constant recourse to patronising phonetic speech that bugs me ? as if there were something inherently miraculous about the idea of anyone making it into the public eye without the benefit of Home Counties RP. It's not even Bez or Wiley we're talking about here, but Adele ("Aw, fackin 'ell") and Skream out of Magnetic Man ("Beautiful, innit") ? neither of whom could really be classed among pop's honorary costermongers. As a birthday gift, perhaps Q might consider giving itself the gift of the English language as she is writ.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/17/maggoty-lamb-hugh-laurie-simon-reynolds
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