Here‘s a rather delightful thing posted by Simon Reynolds on one of his numerous blogs, Brian Eno listing a selection of his favourite music for Sounds magazine in February 1977… some amusing choices (his own “Discreet Music”), some you might expect (Bowie, Cornelius Cardew, Kraftwerk) and others you might not (“Tattoo” by The Who?)… but for me the interesting part of the post comes in the comments section where two commenters go into a discussion about how few concessions Eno makes in his list to popular taste, what popular taste even meant at that time, and the whole concept of “artsiness”, taking the latter to indicate a given artist’s conscious ambition and/or pretensions to artistic seriousness (as opposed to the question of how actually good or bad the end result is). This turns into an evaluation of various artists and their degree of artsiness, some of which are kind of marvellous:
Beatles – ended up artsy (for all the talk of their differing personalities, the only Beatle not arty and sensitive was the gregarious, down-to-earth Ringo)
Beach Boys – Brian grew artsy, but not the others (Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art)
Stooges – artsy (codifying punk is very artsy, especially in Iggy’s formulation of modern urban white blues, plus we have We Will Fall and LA Blues)
Black Sabbath – Very difficult to determine, I find. Inventing a genre is artsy, but it feels deeply wrong to call Ozzy artsy.
Sex Pistols – I can’t say right now, I need time to think. (Jones, Cook and Matlock were resolutely not artsy, but Lydon had a fierce artsy streak. Although, the artsiest figure associated with the Pistols was McLaren, so are they artsy because of his conception of the band as a living sculpture?)
Happy Mondays – a little bit artsy but not much (there’s the New Order connection, and being the only group with a fondly remembered dancer has surely got to be worth something)
Oasis – might actually challenge Status Quo as the least artsy band imaginable
Like I said, this is not an evaluation of these acts’ quality or otherwise, but damned if that comment about Oasis doesn’t feel like a mighty burn anyway. And I know there’s a theory that Mike Love is actually not the champion scumbag of popular music he’s generally considered to be, but I’ve never seen much to suggest that the sentence “Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art” is not the definition of harsh but fair.
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