FCS
2007-11-30 13:38:08 UTC
I forget quite which episode of 'Holby City' it was this last month
that I'm about to comment on briefly--except that it wasn't this
week's; and I forget which columnist in which paper has given me the
context in which effective parallels may be drawn--suffice it to say
it was one of those which once were the watchword of Quality
Journalism and was also this month, but not this last week.
The observation was made that the reason football, by which I mean
Association Football, or soccer, doesn't make a good fictional context
outside of the more child-friendly format of the strip-cartoon is
because the world of football is simultaneously widely-known about
(OK, I am an exception here) and also rather more incredible than the
fiction which seeks to emulate it.
I would also add that where other fictionalised formats such as the
police procedural, or the espionage thriller, or political blockbuster
novel and, to a lesser extent, the survival-cum-adventure-cum-treasure-
hunt narrative - depending on military/intelligence/Government-agency
overlap and technological immersion - lend themselves to
fictionalisation of the real-world because of the behind-closed-doors
nature of many of the activities portrayed, football just falls flat.
And, yes, I agreed, attempts to fictionalise it are often
unconvincing, bogus even, simply because of the amount of disclosure
the competing PR and journalistic cultures which these days live off
the huge gate monies handed over by loyal fans week in week out ensure
reaches the public in directly-mapped (if diluted) form by way of
celebrities' identities.
Match-fixing and other such corrupt syndicates aside, footballers,
football clubs, and those associated with them, rely on the PR machine
to maintain interest and, to some extent or other, disseminate values
related to sportsmanlike conduct and even manliness and womanliness.
This isn't really true to such an extent where popular music is
concerned.
There are however other reasons why fictionalisation of the music
business also falls similarly flat, and a lot of this is to do with
the information-at-any-costs approach to what big names are "doing".
Think about the number of guitar parts The Sex Pistols recorded for
each song on their master tapes.
Studio time is paid for, and projects are run discretely. In practical
terms this means that neither The Sex Pistols nor their engineers
spent 24/7/365.25 in the studio; as such, tapes could wander, then be
copied and subsequently returned, between two The Sex Pistols
sessions.
If you then have 12 tracks, on a 24-track master, full of guitar
nobody in receipt of the tapes would know which track/s would
eventually end up used in the final mixdown. And if bootlegs got out
prior to release then the released mix could always be different.
I'm sure people made money from facilitating precisely such inter-
label espionage, considered themselves brilliant, professional and
adept because of it; at the end of the day, the studio gets paid per
hour and so does the engineer--all out of the bands', usually as yet
unrecouped, advances (particularly for a first, or crucial second,
release). And I'm not going to cite obsessive fandoms as any primes
mobiles behind this, so much as the whole practice of hothousing bands
in stables to the extent they end up as research-swamped Pavlovian
drones who get grounded for not doing as their managers' tell them
(particularly where meeting other bands who're slightly further on the
way, whether backstage at gigs or in that all-precious studio time,
goes).
I mean, to what extent it was purely fuelled by 'NME' wanting to outdo
'Melody Maker' in the '70s and '80s I don't know. Nor, actually, do I
care. I know what square brackets are for and feel no impulsion to try
and find sub-lower-VIth applications for them as a quirking agent in
otherwise quite dull and blinkered prose, like the ASCII version of
hundreds and thousands or gelatine.
Anyway, the gist is that, tightly-controlled polysemy is where "pop"
has been at for years, whether it's the penny dreadful rock'n'roll of
such emotive classics as 'Tell Laura I love her', 'From a Jack to a
Queen' or 'Ring of Fire' or more up to date smashes such as 'Eben (E's
ARE Good) ezer Goode' and, similarly, pop's more surreal and abstract
side is larger than life to the extent that parody or mimicry outside
of the context of actual real pop is hard to draw parallels with in a
fictional context: 'Einstein-a-go-go'; 'Danger! High Voltage'; 'Girl!
I'm going to take you to a gay bar! gay bar, gay bar, gay bar, a gay
bar!' none of which would be particularly convincing if they had been
posited first in a fictional narrative, but all of which charted
respectably.
Those who are looking at the role of lyrics in their own fictional
prose - and there are precedents for it as chapter headings in
numerous narrative genres - may take some comfort from the fact that
even Douglas Adams struggled to come up with convincing fictional
lyrics (the 'Hot Potato' song from 'The Long, Dark, Teatime of the
Soul' for example) and he was something of a motif vulture, something
of a Midas where iconicity and complex exophorae were concerned.
As such, I just couldn't help thinking it said a lot about the recent
episode of 'Holby City', featuring a washed-up producer/engineer
debating whether or not a heart transplant would affect her ability to
work because of the amounts of cocaine she'd no longer be able to
ingest and, of course, her young doe-eyed charge (the next
excrutiatingly-simmering would-be musical genius to end up presenting
rather insipid children's programmes) that none of the considerable
team of writers, editers, acters, extras and general media wannabes
could dig out a half-decent competent, plausible song from the chests
in their attics and so, instead, we had a kind of cardboard cut-out
semi-paroled signifying referent to some hit-that-never-was,
hallmarked with mediocrity right through like a stick of promotional
coastal candy or the fossil remains in cut, dressed stone.
So, it would appear that songwriting is something of more of a skill
than scriptwriting is as, for them most part, I Grice in very co-
operatively with the Holby and Casualty casts--much of which is based
on having worked in the NHS at various points in time. Which if
nothing else really bucks me up.
I mean, c'mon BBC! Would it not have been both more valid and relevant
to recruit-in, for this one episode, a real semi-retired celebrity and
have them, albeit under a fictional name maybe, reciting the lyrics to
one of their own, real, back catalogue?
The music in the theatre scenes is real, For Feigenbaum's Sanity! And
yet the Elliot character was drooling, fawning and waxing over some
rather mediocre fictional song that had no charm, character,
resonance, or depth.
Just a thought. But if there isn't a half decent song to be
appropriated from amongst the whole of the writing, editing,
production and enacting crew's prior endeavours (even make-up's) that
could be used...then surely there enough musical figures who've crept
from cocaine use to dependent abuse and done the detox and rehab and
got on with their lives that the extra expenditure could be justified.
It's not like the Aussie soaps, where the music is novel and
previously unheard of here (but big as you like down under). In a
sector where the UK still is a world-acknowledged market leader,
fictionalised mediocrity just doesn't hack it.
If it really comes down to cost-cutting, then just conform to Fair
Dealing from a real-world hit is my thought on it. There's plenty of
flagging careers that would happily take Equity rates to get their
faces on shows with such a following.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
--
that I'm about to comment on briefly--except that it wasn't this
week's; and I forget which columnist in which paper has given me the
context in which effective parallels may be drawn--suffice it to say
it was one of those which once were the watchword of Quality
Journalism and was also this month, but not this last week.
The observation was made that the reason football, by which I mean
Association Football, or soccer, doesn't make a good fictional context
outside of the more child-friendly format of the strip-cartoon is
because the world of football is simultaneously widely-known about
(OK, I am an exception here) and also rather more incredible than the
fiction which seeks to emulate it.
I would also add that where other fictionalised formats such as the
police procedural, or the espionage thriller, or political blockbuster
novel and, to a lesser extent, the survival-cum-adventure-cum-treasure-
hunt narrative - depending on military/intelligence/Government-agency
overlap and technological immersion - lend themselves to
fictionalisation of the real-world because of the behind-closed-doors
nature of many of the activities portrayed, football just falls flat.
And, yes, I agreed, attempts to fictionalise it are often
unconvincing, bogus even, simply because of the amount of disclosure
the competing PR and journalistic cultures which these days live off
the huge gate monies handed over by loyal fans week in week out ensure
reaches the public in directly-mapped (if diluted) form by way of
celebrities' identities.
Match-fixing and other such corrupt syndicates aside, footballers,
football clubs, and those associated with them, rely on the PR machine
to maintain interest and, to some extent or other, disseminate values
related to sportsmanlike conduct and even manliness and womanliness.
This isn't really true to such an extent where popular music is
concerned.
There are however other reasons why fictionalisation of the music
business also falls similarly flat, and a lot of this is to do with
the information-at-any-costs approach to what big names are "doing".
Think about the number of guitar parts The Sex Pistols recorded for
each song on their master tapes.
Studio time is paid for, and projects are run discretely. In practical
terms this means that neither The Sex Pistols nor their engineers
spent 24/7/365.25 in the studio; as such, tapes could wander, then be
copied and subsequently returned, between two The Sex Pistols
sessions.
If you then have 12 tracks, on a 24-track master, full of guitar
nobody in receipt of the tapes would know which track/s would
eventually end up used in the final mixdown. And if bootlegs got out
prior to release then the released mix could always be different.
I'm sure people made money from facilitating precisely such inter-
label espionage, considered themselves brilliant, professional and
adept because of it; at the end of the day, the studio gets paid per
hour and so does the engineer--all out of the bands', usually as yet
unrecouped, advances (particularly for a first, or crucial second,
release). And I'm not going to cite obsessive fandoms as any primes
mobiles behind this, so much as the whole practice of hothousing bands
in stables to the extent they end up as research-swamped Pavlovian
drones who get grounded for not doing as their managers' tell them
(particularly where meeting other bands who're slightly further on the
way, whether backstage at gigs or in that all-precious studio time,
goes).
I mean, to what extent it was purely fuelled by 'NME' wanting to outdo
'Melody Maker' in the '70s and '80s I don't know. Nor, actually, do I
care. I know what square brackets are for and feel no impulsion to try
and find sub-lower-VIth applications for them as a quirking agent in
otherwise quite dull and blinkered prose, like the ASCII version of
hundreds and thousands or gelatine.
Anyway, the gist is that, tightly-controlled polysemy is where "pop"
has been at for years, whether it's the penny dreadful rock'n'roll of
such emotive classics as 'Tell Laura I love her', 'From a Jack to a
Queen' or 'Ring of Fire' or more up to date smashes such as 'Eben (E's
ARE Good) ezer Goode' and, similarly, pop's more surreal and abstract
side is larger than life to the extent that parody or mimicry outside
of the context of actual real pop is hard to draw parallels with in a
fictional context: 'Einstein-a-go-go'; 'Danger! High Voltage'; 'Girl!
I'm going to take you to a gay bar! gay bar, gay bar, gay bar, a gay
bar!' none of which would be particularly convincing if they had been
posited first in a fictional narrative, but all of which charted
respectably.
Those who are looking at the role of lyrics in their own fictional
prose - and there are precedents for it as chapter headings in
numerous narrative genres - may take some comfort from the fact that
even Douglas Adams struggled to come up with convincing fictional
lyrics (the 'Hot Potato' song from 'The Long, Dark, Teatime of the
Soul' for example) and he was something of a motif vulture, something
of a Midas where iconicity and complex exophorae were concerned.
As such, I just couldn't help thinking it said a lot about the recent
episode of 'Holby City', featuring a washed-up producer/engineer
debating whether or not a heart transplant would affect her ability to
work because of the amounts of cocaine she'd no longer be able to
ingest and, of course, her young doe-eyed charge (the next
excrutiatingly-simmering would-be musical genius to end up presenting
rather insipid children's programmes) that none of the considerable
team of writers, editers, acters, extras and general media wannabes
could dig out a half-decent competent, plausible song from the chests
in their attics and so, instead, we had a kind of cardboard cut-out
semi-paroled signifying referent to some hit-that-never-was,
hallmarked with mediocrity right through like a stick of promotional
coastal candy or the fossil remains in cut, dressed stone.
So, it would appear that songwriting is something of more of a skill
than scriptwriting is as, for them most part, I Grice in very co-
operatively with the Holby and Casualty casts--much of which is based
on having worked in the NHS at various points in time. Which if
nothing else really bucks me up.
I mean, c'mon BBC! Would it not have been both more valid and relevant
to recruit-in, for this one episode, a real semi-retired celebrity and
have them, albeit under a fictional name maybe, reciting the lyrics to
one of their own, real, back catalogue?
The music in the theatre scenes is real, For Feigenbaum's Sanity! And
yet the Elliot character was drooling, fawning and waxing over some
rather mediocre fictional song that had no charm, character,
resonance, or depth.
Just a thought. But if there isn't a half decent song to be
appropriated from amongst the whole of the writing, editing,
production and enacting crew's prior endeavours (even make-up's) that
could be used...then surely there enough musical figures who've crept
from cocaine use to dependent abuse and done the detox and rehab and
got on with their lives that the extra expenditure could be justified.
It's not like the Aussie soaps, where the music is novel and
previously unheard of here (but big as you like down under). In a
sector where the UK still is a world-acknowledged market leader,
fictionalised mediocrity just doesn't hack it.
If it really comes down to cost-cutting, then just conform to Fair
Dealing from a real-world hit is my thought on it. There's plenty of
flagging careers that would happily take Equity rates to get their
faces on shows with such a following.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
--