A meme[1] tagging through Facebook during April 2018 invited nominees to post images of the covers of albums that had been significant in their lives. The accompanying instructions asked respondents not to comment on their choices, but to nominate a friend to join in with the postings, repeating the process for three to ten days according to taste.
I’d been nominated in an earlier version of this meme, but tend to ignore this kind of Facebook frippery. Coercing others to fill their social media feeds in this way is a high tech take on chain letters, which often promised that misfortune would befall those who failed to perpetuate the postal pointlessness. There was something more compelling than a threat of uncanny calamity about picking out a decade of favourite records, though, that recalled an earlier form of ‘social media’.
The bearing of albums
David Hepworth[2] describes a meeting of minds precipitated in part by a showing of LP sleeves:
On 17 October 1961 they were both waiting for a train at Dartford station […] Mick was carrying two albums under his arm. One was Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ At The Hops, the other was The Best Of Muddy Waters. […] Keith was lugging his hollow-bodied Epiphone guitar. The carrying of such items in a public place in the year 1961 was like a cry for help. They weren’t going anywhere in particular. They were probably carrying these items to show that they had them. The two struck up a conversation. It was inconceivable they wouldn’t.[3]
In an interview for a BBC Four documentary, When Albums Ruled the World,[4] the designer Aubrey Powell,[5] who co-founded Hipgnosis[6] — the company behind the artwork on many iconic LP covers by artists including Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Wings — comments on the social function of carrying records in the 1970s:
It actually summed up a lifestyle. You know, when people walked around town, you know, if you had some albums under your arm, it told people who you were. If you walked into somebody’s house and there were racks and racks and racks of album covers, you know… It’s a bit like going into somebody’s library, and you look to see what books they read to kind of ascertain what kind of person they are. Well, the same thing happened with the album cover.[7]
The bearing of albums as a way of proclaiming interests to the like-minded persisted throughout my schooldays in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was common at my comprehensive to accessorise with orange ‘IT’S AT Virgin’ bags containing prized cuts bought with saved pocket money or earnings from paper rounds and Saturday jobs. The more creative among us avoided adding flimsy carriers to hefty schoolbags by laboriously copying album sleeves onto the cover flaps of rucksacks using emulsion paint. This produced some impressive facsimiles of images from record collections, although the best I managed was scrawling ‘AC/DC’ on my white Adidas holdall in permanent marker.
Transcending pubescent passion
The conspicuous display of musical taste at school was largely redundant. Our preferences divided generically according to subcultural tribal groups — punks and teds, mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads, to paraphrase The Specials[8] — and we were well aware of the coteries to which our classmates conformed. This didn’t divide us into strictly segregated silos, but it did mean pouring scorn on the choices of friends who adhered to an alternative teenage subgroup. The development of adolescent identity is a process of investing in cultural capital (music, fashions, etc) that represents the lifestyles that most appeal to each emerging individual. Some products of popular culture are transitory and transient, while others represent a more profound expression of the attitudes and influences of those to whom they appeal. Malcolm McLaren[9] expresses this in a 1989 BBC radio documentary[10] as follows:
I don’t think either Bros or Wham! are any different from The Bay City Rollers, are any different from Herman and the Hermits, Fabian or Frankie Avalon, The Monkees… They are basically all innocuous, harmless, little fudge cakes that basically are easily gobbled and beautifully digested, and are appropriate to replace teddy bears in girls’ bedrooms. There’s no question that that softens the blow of everyday life, and they are great sexual awakenings, and they’re a call to arms to show your sexual prowess as a girl. But they’re not, at the end of the day, anything to live by. They come and they go very quickly. They’re part of the Kleenex tissue of the industry. But, if we look at Elvis Presley today, or we look at the Sex Pistols today, they are both bigger than they were when they were alive and kicking.[11]
McLaren is careful not to downplay the importance of the ‘fudge cakes’ of teenybopper culture in aiding adolescent girls (in particular) to negotiate their progress to sexual maturity, but is clear that they leave the objects of immature adoration behind when they are grown. (Some teenage idols mature with their fan base, maintaining this following into and throughout its adulthood. George Michael outgrew Wham! to remain popular throughout his post-teenybopper career, and members of Take That (particularly Robbie Williams) have transcended their boy band origins. The Beatles too were first presented as pop pinups with little expectation (even within the band) of their enduring for more than two or three years beyond their breakthrough, but they were driven to develop artistically, and so became the historic cultural figures they are now.) Music ‘to live by’, though, needs to connect past pubescent passion for pop idols.
Acts and alter egos
As Hepworth[12] outlines, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards invested in black US blues subculture to an extent that belied their white British roots:
When Mick and Keith first met Brian Jones, blonde-haired father of three and only twenty years old, and he announced that he was performing under the name Elmo Lewis, they didn’t laugh or point out that he really couldn’t be called Elmo Lewis because he came from Cheltenham. They just nodded as if they understood.[13]
Although this alias seems farcical, it is less so in the context of developing a musical act. As the word ‘act’ implies, performing often drives performers to assume personae that are not their own — if only to the extent of adopting a stage name. For evidence of this we need look no further than the musicians lauded and later covered by Jagger, Jones and Richards — Bo Diddley was born Elias Otha Bates,[14] Muddy Waters was McKinley Morganfield,[15] and Howlin’ Wolf was Chester Arthur Burnett.[16] Despite Jones’ initial pretensions, he performed in The Rolling Stones as Brian Jones, while Jagger favours an unusual but not unlikely shortening of his first name, and Richards became Richard at the behest of Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ original manager,[17] in an effort to draw improbable parallels with Cliff Richard (also a pseudonym).[18]
While it is to be expected that musicians’ identities are bound up with the subcultures of the music they play, music fans too (in McLaren’s words) ‘live by’ the stories, sounds and styles of their musical tastes.
Notes and references