REVIEW: Buzzcocks, Modern (Go Kart Records)
- Wilson Neate
During the week of the Queen's Silver Jubilee festivities in 1977, The Sex Pistols' anti-anthem "God Save The Queen" reached number one in the UK singles chart, although BMRB executives frantically juggled the numbers to keep it officially at number two (or so legend has it). That brilliantly ironic moment, when a celebration of monarchy and national identity collided head on with a scathing, nihilistic rejection of traditional Britishness, was perhaps punk's defining instant. Bearing in mind its contempt for the concept of musical longevity and given the built-in obsolescence and self-destruction (in favor of selling out) that were endemic to the spirit of punk, it might seem somewhat ironic, then, that the release of Modern should come as the Buzzcocks' own Silver Jubilee approaches.
But while selling out became part and parcel of the punk narrative--as the Pistols proved at every turn, and most recently with their "Filthy Lucre" reunion bash--since their formation in the mid-70s, the Buzzcocks have done an admirable job of keeping it real, producing new material sporadically over the last decade and never sinking to the level of novelty has-beens, just wheeling out the oldies and little else. (For more info/history check out their website: http://www.buzzcocks.com )
This is the Buzzcocks' sixth studio outing and the third album of the 90s, their career having been largely interrupted by that unfortunate decade, the 80s. On Modern, Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, the two surviving members from the original line up, are still turning out pretty much the same product as they did in the 70s: short, sharp-edged, anxious and angst ridden, irritable and irritated punk pop.
And there's nothing wrong with that, especially since they're still doing it better than any of the current crop of commercially successful imitators and derivatives, most of whom are probably young enough to be their children at this point. On hearing one of the standout tracks from Modern--"Thunder of Hearts"--my first thought was that they'd cribbed the song from Green Day, but then I remembered that the Buzzcocks had written most of Green Day's songs more than 20 years ago anyway.
During its finest moments, Modern reminds us that the Buzzcocks' significant contributions are often unfairly overshadowed by a tendency to look no further than the Sex Pistols or The Clash for a blueprint of British punk. The Pistols wrote the book on punk-as-situation / style / shock, while the Clash covered the political angle, but the Buzzcocks (along with Wire) took punk beyond the gesture and the pose and left perhaps the most substantial and enduring musical legacy.
While most first-generation punk railed against the boredom of 70s pop--as well as the anachronistic persistence of dinosaur and progressive rock--its reaction generally took one of the following forms: extra-musical sloganeering, direct and obvious lyrics, or a simple refusal to reproduce the conventional narrative and characteristics of the pop song. The Buzzcocks, however, have always taken a different approach. Rather than destroy the pop song they deconstructed it, playfully reinventing it as a catchy, self-conscious pastiche of itself. And this is precisely what Modern continues to do so well.
As always, Pete Shelley's work on this album takes as its starting point the historically distant, paradigmatic pop format of the banal 50s and 60s bubblegum boy-girl song. While the lyrical and musical framework of this foundational form is left nominally intact (the harmonies, the I/you romance narrative, the straightforward verse/chorus structure and the simple chord progressions) it is compressed into a shorter, faster package, supplemented and shot through with jagged, saw-like guitars, and scattered with irregular, staccato beats.
Still crucial too is Shelley's distinctive vocal style which continues to unsettle the traditional, formal symmetry of conventional pop. Modern is rife with examples of irregular combinations of short punchy stanzas and lengthy, weaving run-on lines--sometimes stretched out for a painful but compelling duration--that both carry and lead the songs.
Moreover, this combination of the brusque and the drawn out line--on top of the contrast of the staccato beats and the whining, UK-police-siren-circa-'76 guitar sound--emphasizes the twin-pronged emotional thrust of Shelley's lyrical content: that is, the expression of explosive angst and irritability coupled with lingering discomfort and frustration.
Also crucial to the Buzzcocks' reinvention of the pop song, and demonstrated perfectly again by Modern, is Shelley's ability to endlessly rewrite the classic adolescent pop narrative, albeit in gender-ambiguous terms and from an unrelentingly miserable and niggly perspective. We can only hope that Shelley's lyrical voice is not his own given that, after all these years, it's still distinctly unlucky and profoundly unhappy in love.
So, to plagiarize a question asked by Pete Shelley quite a few years ago, "what do I get" from Modern? Quite a lot actually. During its best moments--"Soul on a Rock", Rendezvous," "Runaround," "Choices," "Why Compromise" and "Under the Sun"-- this album is vintage Buzzcocks. And what more could you ask for?
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