David Stubbs (2) (1962–)
Auteur de Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany
Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent David Stubbs, voyez la page de désambigüisation.
A propos de l'auteur
David Stubbs is a freelance British music journalist and author. As well as music, he also covers sport, film, literature and TV.
Séries
Œuvres de David Stubbs
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1962-09-13
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- UK
- Lieu de naissance
- London, England, UK
Membres
Critiques
Any history of comedy with an introduction entitled ‘How political correctness saved British comedy’ is clearly coming out fighting. Before the advent of alternative comedy in the late 1970s, with its ‘non-racist, non-sexist’ agenda, a great deal of British comedy, including the gold as well as the dross, was casually littered with attitudes that are now unacceptable and should have been unacceptable then: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. For much of the 20th century British comedy was dominated by white men to such an extent that, as David Stubbs observes, it ‘was not so much about the human condition as the white, male condition’. Stubbs grew up in Britain during the 1960s and ‘70s, watched a huge amount of comedy on TV, contemporary stuff and old films, and fell in love with much of it. The tension between his continuing love of the comedy and contempt for the attitudes too often threaded through it drives much of this book and makes for fascinating reading. ‘Sometimes it’s just single moments’, he writes, ‘but they jar like a bone in an otherwise tasty fish supper’.
Stubbs is not an advocate of cancel culture. He believes that comedy from previous times can still speak to us in the present and make us laugh. He is dismayed by the fact that even the best of the old comedy shows and films are now rarely shown on mainstream television and many young people are growing up with a severely limited knowledge of comedy history. Nor is it a matter of imposing contemporary values on the comedy of a previous age. His concern, rather, is to analyse comedy to show what it reveals of the attitudes prevalent in the era(s) in which it was made.
He recognises that what seems hopelessly stereotypical now might have been refreshingly novel and even liberating in its day. Julian and Sandy were an exuberantly camp couple given to erupting noisily into the 1960s radio comedy Round the Horne, baffling their urbane host Kenneth Horne - a straight man in more senses than one - with their gay innuendo and liberal employment of Polari. The fact that they were played by gay actors, Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, lent their characterisations authenticity. In a Britain that was still busy putting gay men in prison, Julian and Sandy were bold, impossible to dislike and outrageously funny. They were the agents of the joke, rather than the butt of it, and remain among my all-time favourite comedy characters. Unfortunately, the template was then endlessly repeated to tiresome, increasingly unfunny and ultimately repressive effect, in the work of subsequent lesser comedians and scriptwriters in countless sitcoms and sketch shows throughout the 1970s.
Before the revolution of alternative comedy, and with honourable exceptions, British comedy was populated by such stock characters, as if culled from a mandatory comedy writing manual issued to all comedy writing hacks: gay men, husbands, wives, vicars, the elderly… the comedy writing manual had a stereotype for all of them. Racial stereotypes were commonplace and went largely unremarked. Once the stereotypes had been swept away the path was clear for the inventive and idiosyncratic characters of the sketch series The Fast Show, the credible gay hero of the sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, the feminist inflected comedy of French and Saunders and Jo Brand, and the well-observed comedy of the Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.
Particularly when discussing old-school comedy, Stubbs walks a tightrope between celebration and censure. Just occasionally he falls off it. He sounds uncharacteristically humourless and puritanical when berating a perfectly innocuous Morecambe and Wise sketch. Similarly, although he’s right about the reactionary politics of the Carry On films, he might have acknowledged that, in the context of a 1950s British film comedy culture in which sex seemed not to have been invented, their saucy seaside postcard humour might justifiably have been seen as a step forward.
Stubbs certainly does have his blind spots. Surprisingly, for a comedy buff who is also a music critic, he is not a fan of the comic song. Without wishing to sound chauvinistic, Britain has been rather good at funny songs: Noel Coward, Flanders and Swann, Jake Thackray, the Bonzo Dog Band, Victoria Wood. Stubbs, however, dismisses an entire and eclectic tradition in a few casual sentences.
For the most part, though, his analysis is perceptive, nuanced and scrupulously even-handed. There is much to admire and enjoy about this book. Stubbs draws attention to some brilliantly talented mid-twentieth century female comedians who work has been marginalised by history, including Joyce Grenfell and Eleanor Bron. He has the honesty to admit that he has never found the humour of Spike Milligan, that sacred cow of British comedy, remotely funny. He writes well about how TV comedy helped to bind the nation together in the 1970s (the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by an estimated audience of up to twenty eight million). He’s very good on the limitations, and even self-deceiving smugness, of television and radio political satire. And I cheered when he put the boot into the tired notion that comedy should be ‘edgy’ (in the 21st century ‘edgy’ comedy has largely degenerated into an excuse for comedians to punch down at the marginalised and persecuted).
I’m not sure how many of the comedians and shows featured in Different Times will be familiar to readers outside of Britain (some of them might not be familiar to anyone at all under the age of fifty). Some British comedians have enjoyed international success (Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Benny Hill, Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean) but many, including some of the best (Tony Hancock is just one great name from the past that springs to mind), have remained largely unknown beyond their own country. Stubbs concentrates on film and, particularly, TV comedy, bypassing stand-up almost entirely. He admits that, almost necessarily, his history is incomplete. It is, nonetheless, a comprehensive account of the main players and trends in 20th century British comedy, and the ways in which it reflected, and often failed to adequately reflect, the nation.
He makes some observations on the disappearance of a tradition of sheer silliness from British comedy. Silliness is what I personally miss most in contemporary comedy, which tends towards naturalism and truthfully observed characters. It once ran through all strands of British comedy from the comparatively left-field (The Goon Show, Monty Python, Vivian Stanshall, Ivor Cutler) to the mainstream variety comedians (Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd). There is, at least, the consolation of the sublimely silly Count Arthur Strong, whose wonderfully funny work combines the traditional and the post-modern (inexplicably, Stubbs mentions him only once in passing). Sadly, he seems like an increasingly atypical and even anachronistic figure.
Different Times ends on a positive note. Following an outbreak of cynicism and cruelty in comedy in the noughties, Stubbs argues that the keyword for the best of current British comedy is ‘kindness’. It is also more inclusive, diverse and multicultural than ever before. This won’t, in my view at least, automatically make it funnier. Truly great comedy will always be a rarity as most people simply lack the peculiar concatenation of qualities required to achieve it (a sort of intense intellectual rigour combined with an ability to take a sidelong look at everything). Most of the time we have to settle for being moderately amused. Still, a diverse and thoughtful comedy based on our shared humanity is something to be welcomed without reservation.
And the greatest living British comedian, according to Stubbs? Stewart Lee. No argument from me on that one, either.… (plus d'informations)
Stubbs is not an advocate of cancel culture. He believes that comedy from previous times can still speak to us in the present and make us laugh. He is dismayed by the fact that even the best of the old comedy shows and films are now rarely shown on mainstream television and many young people are growing up with a severely limited knowledge of comedy history. Nor is it a matter of imposing contemporary values on the comedy of a previous age. His concern, rather, is to analyse comedy to show what it reveals of the attitudes prevalent in the era(s) in which it was made.
He recognises that what seems hopelessly stereotypical now might have been refreshingly novel and even liberating in its day. Julian and Sandy were an exuberantly camp couple given to erupting noisily into the 1960s radio comedy Round the Horne, baffling their urbane host Kenneth Horne - a straight man in more senses than one - with their gay innuendo and liberal employment of Polari. The fact that they were played by gay actors, Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, lent their characterisations authenticity. In a Britain that was still busy putting gay men in prison, Julian and Sandy were bold, impossible to dislike and outrageously funny. They were the agents of the joke, rather than the butt of it, and remain among my all-time favourite comedy characters. Unfortunately, the template was then endlessly repeated to tiresome, increasingly unfunny and ultimately repressive effect, in the work of subsequent lesser comedians and scriptwriters in countless sitcoms and sketch shows throughout the 1970s.
Before the revolution of alternative comedy, and with honourable exceptions, British comedy was populated by such stock characters, as if culled from a mandatory comedy writing manual issued to all comedy writing hacks: gay men, husbands, wives, vicars, the elderly… the comedy writing manual had a stereotype for all of them. Racial stereotypes were commonplace and went largely unremarked. Once the stereotypes had been swept away the path was clear for the inventive and idiosyncratic characters of the sketch series The Fast Show, the credible gay hero of the sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, the feminist inflected comedy of French and Saunders and Jo Brand, and the well-observed comedy of the Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.
Particularly when discussing old-school comedy, Stubbs walks a tightrope between celebration and censure. Just occasionally he falls off it. He sounds uncharacteristically humourless and puritanical when berating a perfectly innocuous Morecambe and Wise sketch. Similarly, although he’s right about the reactionary politics of the Carry On films, he might have acknowledged that, in the context of a 1950s British film comedy culture in which sex seemed not to have been invented, their saucy seaside postcard humour might justifiably have been seen as a step forward.
Stubbs certainly does have his blind spots. Surprisingly, for a comedy buff who is also a music critic, he is not a fan of the comic song. Without wishing to sound chauvinistic, Britain has been rather good at funny songs: Noel Coward, Flanders and Swann, Jake Thackray, the Bonzo Dog Band, Victoria Wood. Stubbs, however, dismisses an entire and eclectic tradition in a few casual sentences.
For the most part, though, his analysis is perceptive, nuanced and scrupulously even-handed. There is much to admire and enjoy about this book. Stubbs draws attention to some brilliantly talented mid-twentieth century female comedians who work has been marginalised by history, including Joyce Grenfell and Eleanor Bron. He has the honesty to admit that he has never found the humour of Spike Milligan, that sacred cow of British comedy, remotely funny. He writes well about how TV comedy helped to bind the nation together in the 1970s (the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by an estimated audience of up to twenty eight million). He’s very good on the limitations, and even self-deceiving smugness, of television and radio political satire. And I cheered when he put the boot into the tired notion that comedy should be ‘edgy’ (in the 21st century ‘edgy’ comedy has largely degenerated into an excuse for comedians to punch down at the marginalised and persecuted).
I’m not sure how many of the comedians and shows featured in Different Times will be familiar to readers outside of Britain (some of them might not be familiar to anyone at all under the age of fifty). Some British comedians have enjoyed international success (Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Benny Hill, Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean) but many, including some of the best (Tony Hancock is just one great name from the past that springs to mind), have remained largely unknown beyond their own country. Stubbs concentrates on film and, particularly, TV comedy, bypassing stand-up almost entirely. He admits that, almost necessarily, his history is incomplete. It is, nonetheless, a comprehensive account of the main players and trends in 20th century British comedy, and the ways in which it reflected, and often failed to adequately reflect, the nation.
He makes some observations on the disappearance of a tradition of sheer silliness from British comedy. Silliness is what I personally miss most in contemporary comedy, which tends towards naturalism and truthfully observed characters. It once ran through all strands of British comedy from the comparatively left-field (The Goon Show, Monty Python, Vivian Stanshall, Ivor Cutler) to the mainstream variety comedians (Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd). There is, at least, the consolation of the sublimely silly Count Arthur Strong, whose wonderfully funny work combines the traditional and the post-modern (inexplicably, Stubbs mentions him only once in passing). Sadly, he seems like an increasingly atypical and even anachronistic figure.
Different Times ends on a positive note. Following an outbreak of cynicism and cruelty in comedy in the noughties, Stubbs argues that the keyword for the best of current British comedy is ‘kindness’. It is also more inclusive, diverse and multicultural than ever before. This won’t, in my view at least, automatically make it funnier. Truly great comedy will always be a rarity as most people simply lack the peculiar concatenation of qualities required to achieve it (a sort of intense intellectual rigour combined with an ability to take a sidelong look at everything). Most of the time we have to settle for being moderately amused. Still, a diverse and thoughtful comedy based on our shared humanity is something to be welcomed without reservation.
And the greatest living British comedian, according to Stubbs? Stewart Lee. No argument from me on that one, either.… (plus d'informations)
A superb examination of the West German music scene that not only places krautrock within the context of West German society, but also places each individual band within its own local context. To any fan of krautrock with the slightest curiosity about the history and context of the genre and its players, this is essential reading.
David Stubbs—the author of this book—wrote "Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany", an excellent recant of how "kosmische" music came about. In that book, he kept a narrow view of how things came to be, and founded much of his analysis on interviews with musicians.
This time, he has written a book that is both sprawling and, at times, probably verges into the fictional, at least where he digresses on actual words from musicians and theories on why they did things.
Having said that, this book does contain much information that is probably of importance both to persons like the perennially name-dropping Moby, and to persons who want to receive a skimpy version of electronic music history. The forté and pain of this book both lie in the fact that it skips over a lot of theory quickly. It's also sensationalistic, which is almost always a bad thing to myself, and to the facts.
The best about Stubbs's writing is undoubtedly his style:
The book goes from Schaeffer, Rossolo, Stockhausen, and Ligeti, all to Aphex Twin, Actress, and...it's a hyperkinetic mash-up; at times, it felt stressed and forced, other times it felt as though Stubbs's language and style really did the music and the artists a huge service. However, if you want a pop-ish view of the history of electronic music, I can't think of a better place to start than this book.… (plus d'informations)
This time, he has written a book that is both sprawling and, at times, probably verges into the fictional, at least where he digresses on actual words from musicians and theories on why they did things.
Having said that, this book does contain much information that is probably of importance both to persons like the perennially name-dropping Moby, and to persons who want to receive a skimpy version of electronic music history. The forté and pain of this book both lie in the fact that it skips over a lot of theory quickly. It's also sensationalistic, which is almost always a bad thing to myself, and to the facts.
The best about Stubbs's writing is undoubtedly his style:
Practically the moment it beams down, ‘I Feel Love’ feels like first contact: the slow opening of the spacecraft door, the blinding shaft of green light. This is … what is this? Brian Eno hears it and rushes straight into David Bowie’s studio, claiming to be holding the future in his hands. Sparks hear it and promptly decide to ditch their band, hit up Moroder and function as an electronic duo. And that’s just the start.
What’s also striking, and similarly depressing, is that pop hasn’t been this non-queer since the days of Rosemary Clooney, the early 1950s. Gay culture had always been one of the great underground drivers of rock and pop, from Little Richard right through to Hi-NRG, often necessarily coded in a world that was institutionally homophobic. And yet today, when gay rights, while by no means universally accepted, are more established in the Western world than ever before, queer pop has disappeared. The charts in 2017 are primarily an idyll of young, photogenic, heterosexual love, preferably experienced in a seaside environment.
A few weeks after I interviewed them, I was at a record-company bash. Though I had spent an hour in their company, when Bangalter flagged me down to say ‘Hi’ there was a mortifying second or so before I remembered who he and his partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, were. Daft Punk, however, had a grasp on the immediate future. ‘Today, it’s possible to make a record in your bedroom at a cheap price,’ said Bangalter. ‘Our album, Homework, is cheaper than nearly any rock album. No studio expenses, producers, engineers. We’re not saying there is a right way or wrong way to go about things, but this is certainly a way. When we started to make music, we were just trying to form the teenage band everyone wants to be in.’
For Futurists like Luigi Russolo, as well as visionary composers such as Busoni, Varèse and, later, Stockhausen, new electronic modes of music-making weren’t novelties, conveniences, cost-cutting devices or objects of tinkering fascination for gadget nerds who were less than human in their make-up. They were the means whereby music would exceed the bounds of mere scripted notation, explore infinite possibilities in tandem with a world whose technological leaps and bounds seemed limitless. In their wildest dreams, they truly believed that electronic music could soundtrack, or even by some occult means be the source of, an expansion of mankind’s capabilities.
Stockhausen’s mind was a brilliant one, operating with the strength of multiple lasers. He could speak – in detail and with a conviction lesser brains found hard to counter – of ancient Japanese ritual and musical custom, of horticulture, of Eastern mystical thought, of the all-embracing importance of spirals (an idea introduced to him by the English writer Jill Purce, with whom he liaised in the early 1970s), allude easily to philosophers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as well as explain, to those with the ability to take it in, the workings of serial music, notions such as periodicity and harmonic perspective. He could out-converse most people across a range of topics, without even resorting to his first language.
‘You know people are going to laugh?’ the host warned Cage gravely – though that, of course, was the entire purpose of this TV exercise. Cage refused to play the stuffed avant-garde shirt. ‘I consider laughter preferable to tears,’ he said, to more laughter. The host referred to Cage as someone who dealt in ‘experimental sound’, only to be firmly corrected by Cage. ‘Experimental music,’ he said. He explained simply that since music was the production of sounds, and sounds were what he produced, then the result was music. It was that simple. He would demonstrate this to the audience with his presentation of ‘Water Walk’, so called because it featured the running of water and himself walking through the piece, event by event.
Even seventeen years later, Alan Vega couldn’t hide his bitterness at the success Soft Cell enjoyed. ‘Suicide finally get to go to Britain, in 1978. And sure enough, a year or so later, you’ve got this big techno-pop explosion. Soft Cell, who admit to being influenced by Suicide – one guy on vocals, one guy on keyboards. And what happens? Soft Cell go on to sell millions of records, Suicide sell squat. Soft Cell come to America, they’re huge, we come back, nada. To this day.’
The book goes from Schaeffer, Rossolo, Stockhausen, and Ligeti, all to Aphex Twin, Actress, and...it's a hyperkinetic mash-up; at times, it felt stressed and forced, other times it felt as though Stubbs's language and style really did the music and the artists a huge service. However, if you want a pop-ish view of the history of electronic music, I can't think of a better place to start than this book.… (plus d'informations)
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 17
- Aussi par
- 4
- Membres
- 322
- Popularité
- #73,505
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 9
- ISBN
- 42
- Langues
- 4
The first three sentences of the previous review are a very fair sum-up of what I read before giving up in frustration not very far in. I'm sure there are juicy tid-bits which quote directly from musicians in this book. However. in what I read they seemed buried within a highly-flavoured sauce of opinionated writing that at times jumped to conclusions. As ever, others may feel differently.… (plus d'informations)