I have always been aware that when it comes to music from another country, there's always that slightly tacky, yet romantic prospect of the musical pilgrimage. I knew this, having pined for London each day between the ages of 5 and 20. The slightly-embellished story I've always told is this: upon my return to England, the first thing I did was take the southbound District Line service to Earl's Court tube station to visit Freddie Mercury's former home at Garden Lodge. Having initially taken a bus in the wrong direction, I had time to quietly contemplate what I would inscribe on Freddie's door. Yet as I stood before that ever-familiar dark green door with its loving messages scrawled and scratched over every square centimetre, I thought: "There's no way I could possibly articulate this..."

It's an alluring idea, to think that a place can be charged with significance and you might be able to sense that. I'll always recall the story I heard on a radio documentary about John Lennon's childhood home, Mendips. Now a museum, the caretaker described one particular young Japanese tourist who visited. Initially quiet, calm and polite, upon entering John's bedroom, she threw herself onto his bed and started wailing uncontrollably. Other visitors described how moved they were to be there, they described this feeling that took over them once they entered the house. In that way, the musical pilgrimage manages to align itself with the spiritual quality of a pilgrimage in the religious sense. Perhaps if I were more intuitive or had a greater sense of imagination, I could sense an importance, as opposed to simply being informed of one.

I love to consult the pilgrimages of Pete Frame's Rockin Around Britain, simply because the extreme level of research renders the spirituality of the musical pilgrimage void. I mean, I can't anticipate that anyone would venture out to the Permawrap cling film factory in High Wycombe simply because Howard Jones once worked in the stock control department. If anything, the fact that Frame has compiled such an enormously comprehensive resource indicates that culture is being created everywhere, in cities and villages, in halls and studios, even in squares and tube stations. It's a fact, but we're not always so inclined to react to any given locality in such a drastically emotional way.

Saying that, I'll rarely miss the opportunity to embark on one of these musical adventures. Not so long ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Milan when my brother suddenly said to me: "Wait a second. Aren't the Paninaro kids from Milan?" I rushed to the baby laptop and replayed the promotional clip of the Pet Shop Boys' Paninaro - it became apparent that we had accidentally stumbled upon a place filled with musical consequence. I read out slabs of text, describing the 1980s youth culture. They seemed so glamourous, what with their insatiable appetite for American culture, designer denim and sandwiches. "They congregated around the sandwich bars at Piazza San Babila..." It seemed clear there was no turning back now: we were on a mission to find us some Paninaro kids.

The first thing we did the next day was venture out to Piazza San Babila. There was no abundance of sandwich, indeed there was nothing to indicate that anything had ever happened there. We walked over to the subway, recognising its inclusion in the Pet Shop Boys' video. Rafts of bored business men and tourists congregated together tightly, forming a queue by the gates and spilling out into the square. As we settled down to a bottle of milk at a nearby supermarket café, I thought about the Paninaro kids, who they were and what they might have become. One of them might have been in that crowd waiting for the subway to open, but we never would have known it. Perhaps if there were a plaque or something, a token boy in appropriate vintage attire, we might have felt differently about our failed excursion.

I've found, with my recent love of Kino and Viktor Tsoi that I've developed this desire to venture off to Russia and test this whole theory about musical pilgrimages. I'd love to go to Arbat Street in Moscow and be confronted with that heavily graffitied wall in Tsoi's honour. I'd love to deal with that struggle again, that difficulty in trying to honour the beauty and the relevance of their music. I'd love to go to Club Kamchatka, the Kino museum café bar in St Petersburg that was once the boiler room of the apartment block where Tsoi worked and lived. I might not ever develop a real appreciation of what it was actually like to be in the depths of the Russian underground rock scene, what it might have been like to see a gig or source a bootleg cassette, but I appreciate that are people who attempt to create such opportunities to remember those moments we unfortunately missed the first time round.

The Tsoi Wall by Charlie Radosna

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Soviet Pop Podcast #58
Yury Mukhin - Humouresque
Display - Foreign Lady
Electroclub feat. Victor Saltykov - You Marry Him, Do Not Go
Kino - Your Number
Aquarium - Rock n Roll's Dead
Rodionov - Electronic Jockey (Horse Racing)
Rodionov - Baroque (Fencing)
Forum - On the Next Street
Arsenal - Festival
Aavikko - Machu Picchu

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In a Haze Between the Popular and Obscure...

It was a very old tweet written by Zach (@randomrecs) but it was a quip compelling enough for me to jot down and keep: Why is it that music writers only want to rehash the canonised legends or dig up the super obscure? After reading that, I felt a momentary jab of identification and it was a jab, because it was a bit painful for some untold reason. It's true, I ruminate about Queen as I seek out Форум, I dance to The Strokes as I think of Nemesy. I want to successfully articulate the consequence of those big bands that changed everything, while at the same time I long for that sense of ownership that derives from musical obscurity. So what becomes of those bands that fall between those two polarities? What are those bands that fall between those two polarities?

When it comes to music writing, I can only assume that it all comes down to a question of legacy and legitimacy. There is an unspoken expectation that we are all acquainted with Revolver and Pet Sounds, there is an assumption that we know what happened at Newport and Altamont. Documentaries, books and articles are constantly reinforcing the classic rock canon, establishing and re-establishing that familiar sense of retrospective consequence. It's nothing that I particularly resist or resent, in fact I give into it quite freely. If the University of Rochester's History of Rock Coursera course taught me nothing else, it reminded me of how comforting it is to have that shape, to have that firmly established understanding of cultural importance.

Perhaps we just like to hear the same stories over and over again. Perhaps we are shaping this history in an attempt to legitimise pop music in a way that it can stand alongside classical music. If I were really cynical, I would think the whole process of purposefully establishing musical histories reeks of insecurity: either it's the insecurity of the authority (desperately urging you that this is an artist of historical and cultural importance) or else it is the insecurity of the audience (unsure and unknowing, unclear of why they have to care for this artist exactly). But then I remember what I do on here. I just share and talk about the artists and the songs I love. I talk about the histories of various genres of music and some of those genres are obscure, so obscure that their histories haven't been properly documented yet. It's hard to describe why I love that, but the idea of uncelebrated pop fascinates me endlessly.

Why do I wish to rehash canonised legends? Because they're important to me. Why do I wish to dig up the super obscure? Because they're important to me too. Saying that, I admit that I am suspicious of the popular or that which I ought to embrace, according to some important cultural stakeholder. Perhaps those are the bands that fall between those two polarities, those contemporary groups who are not completely assured of a long-term legacy. I say that because I've witnessed that shame that comes from liking those once-popular-now-embarrassing bands. Only recently I was told of a friend-of-a-friend's deathly embarrassment, after her music press boss ridiculed her for still liking the band, Editors. It all seemed horribly ironic, since that same musical publication once campaigned heavily for that band's popularity. The incident makes me feel irked and yet, it effectively demonstrated why I'm so reluctant to take up their musical recommendations. Quite simply, I feel awkward connecting with the musically fickle.

 

Viktor Tsoi in Moscow, 1986.

  Ideally, personal taste should be autonomous, it should remain unaffected by popular taste. There are instances where this actually happens, where you manage to develop a strong bond with the music itself, completely free of any knowledge, recommendation or hype. But whether you like it or not, every single band exists on this scale between popularity and obscurity. There will always be a historical and cultural context: Did people like their music? Did people buy their music? Is that music hard to get now? Yet what seems frustrating about it is that no matter how much we write, no matter how often we go over that historical and cultural context, there's no way of properly calibrating that scale. What might seem ridiculously obscure to one person might be more than familiar to another... and yet, oddly enough, that doesn't seem to be the point of all this.

It's about appearances. It's about establishing a sense of authority. It's about reinforcing this impression of discernment and good taste. Returning to those far-flung polarities of the very popular and the very obscure is an easy way to do that. I'm looking forward to the day when I'm more inclined to take the trickier route, to embark upon lengthy, unapologetic essays about artists who are neither popular or obscure. I wish to celebrate artists like Milli Vanilli, in a way that doesn't undermine my taste or my identity. I want to do it in a way that isn't ironic or defensive. That's a difficult thing to do, a near impossible thing to do in fact: to encourage a reader to cast aside their historical understanding of a group, to ask them to faithfully suspend their cultural pre-judgement and just listen to the music. That's something I'd really like to do.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Mixed Bag Podcast #56
Internet Forever - Cover the Walls (Dreamtrak Diamond Sound)
Pompeya - Untitled
Santigold - Disparate Youth
Entrepreneurs - Fuck Tactics (feat. FOE & Ghostpoet)
Clean Bandit - A & E
Marcella Wright - Origins
Chromatics - Back from the Grave
Daniela Poggi - Break-Up (Hysteric Edit)
Veroniqué - Jungle Man
Kino - The Last Hero

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I must be cautious when I approach politics in pop. I have the tendency to dismiss the concept outright, as if the expression of a musician's social consciousness is disquieting. It's a generalisation that tends to undermine the legitimacy of songs that may well contain great depth and insight. There are some genuinely great political songs, of course: U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Cranberries' Zombie and The Style Council's Money Go Round. Despite everything, I still admire the power and potency of these songs and I know that their appeal is directly attributable to their political quality.

It's difficult to identify this weird sense of unease that comes with political pop. Perhaps it has something to do with the assumption that an entertainer has some specialist insight into social reform. Maybe it has something to do with the honest concerns of the the rich, touring pop musician. More to the point, I am wary of the extraordinary capacity of these songs to influence change. It's like the Depeche Mode song, New Dress: You can't change the world but you can change the facts, and when you change the facts, you change points of view. If you change points of view, you may change a vote and when you change a vote, you may change the world.


I knew that creating a Soviet Pop podcast would invariably lead to this notion of politics in pop. However, its presence wasn't as irksome as you'd expect. It was fascinating to explore how pop music was perceived as this evil thing by the Soviet authorities, its existence was deemed to be emblematic of the "decadent West". The lyrics, presentation and subtext of every song of every group was subject to the ideological scrutiny of the Ministry of Culture, the KGB and the state-run record company, Melodiya. It's extraordinary to retrospectively consider the existence of punk bands, creating in dissent, trading tapes in secret, living in Soviet underground. I'm not quite sure how, but it somehow made politics seem so inexplicably alluring...

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Soviet Pop Podcast #46
Форум - Что сравнится с юностью
София Ротару - Ночь
Магик Студио - Волшебное Диско
Маленький принц - Снежный человек
Летний сад - Постой
Звёзды - Солнце горит
Форум - Компьютер
Кино - Звезда

Forum - What Compares With Youth?
Sofia Rotaru - The Night
Magick Studio - Magic Disco
The Little Prince - Snow Man
Summer Garden - Hold on
Stars - The sun is burning
Forum - Computer
Kino - Star

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