Into a Flame

Pop after history

I had low expectations for Chris Smith’s recent documentary on Wham! (currently on Netflix) and this turned out to be a wise strategy as I was pleasantly surprised, but not too much. Its deeply conventional form is filigreed with the use of archival interviews with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, rather than talking heads, and a nice rustle of surface period texture thanks to skilled cutting of 80s archive footage and shots of the press scrapbooks Ridgeley’s mother kept. The story it tells, of suburban boys bound by friendship and, from inauspicious beginnings, climbing the ladder to international stardom, is as linear as it gets. What is remarkable about it is that was made at all, and I think it says something about the status of pop now. The format of retrospective pop documentary it follows was invented really by Julien Temple’s The Filth And The Fury (2000), a film preoccupied by the mythic depths, the capital-S Significance, of the Sex Pistols and its relationship with the alleged truth told by the band’s members. (As Mark Sinker pointed out at the time, this was really self-interested revisionism that blotted out the creative role of Malcolm Maclaren—solidifying the effect of the band’s myth itself.) What the film reinforces, that was already clear from the music itself, was that Wham! were above all and preeminently a group without myth. I feel obliged—and licenced by the general intellect of Substack to write badly in pursuit of this obligation—to say that I’m not denigrating them here. This radiant disenchantment was what made them what they were, it was the substance of their work as a cultural artefact irradiated by history, while making that history fade to an amnesiac halo.

The film is very insistent—this is the whole burden of its narrative—on George’s talent as a songwriter, which Wham!, in this telling, was really a vehicle for him to discover. (His voiceover contribution seems to come from the material used in his curious posthumous auto-hagiography Freedom Uncut.) The band were, like Japan and Duran Duran, a music-press laughing stock, whose initially thin funk gave way to lighter-than-air neo-Motown, neither of which would endear them to NME. But by the recording of Make It Big he was directing arrangements, had sole songwriting credit on most tracks, and apparently contributed more instrumental parts than the inner sleeve let on. The release of ‘Careless Whisper’ as a solo single before its inclusion on Make It Big suggests how much Wham! was already a one-man-band. ‘Last Christmas’, the one song that even sceptics can be browbeaten into declaring a classic, was recorded entirely solo. The climax of the film, much more so than their final concert at Wembley, is George’s Ivor Novello Award in 1985. It would be an overstatement to call this a revisionist account. Michael’s sporadic releases in the 1990s and 2000s worked hard to cement the image of him as a classicist songwriter in a particular British tradition—smooth, elaborate, considered, “emotional” in a manner that never jarred (less Stax than George Benson, Luther Vandross, Alexander O’Neal—a chart-friendly cousin to so-called “mellow soul”). He dedicated an entire single to the topic, one that substituted for an earlier Wham! release with the identical title ‘Freedom’:

Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy

What a kick just a buddy and me

We had every big-shot goodtime band on the run boy

We were living in a fantasy…

I think it’s time I stopped the show

There’s something deep inside of me

There’s someone I forgot to be

So Wham! was a fun anecdote, the story of how its teller got to where his real story begins. This trajectory jars with the film’s closing emphasis on the disposable, transitory value of the band, that mattered to their fans precisely because it gave body to impermanent youth, like the shodö mark that testifies to the passing gesture that made it: “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged, or anything other than that essential and pure representation of us as youths”. Yet George, in turn, is also insistent that that intelligence was present in the group from the start, in a self-awareness not very distant from punk: “people didn’t get it, we were constantly taking the piss out of ourselves”.

Moreover, this problem of narrative, of what pop is supposed to be and how it becomes what it is, was one that shadowed George’s solo career. As both emphasise, the closet was the greatest constraint on Michael towards the end of Wham!, but for all the increasing self-assurance of his solo releases up to Listen Without Prejudice, the songs don’t quite say what they think they’re saying. The declarations of freedom conjure up only a shadow narrative of a coming-out that didn’t happen until years later, under the duress of LAPD entrapment. As Joshua Clover has noted, the furrowed-brow manifesto of ‘Freedom! ‘90’, practicing concealment precisely in its central statements of truth-telling, is “shaken by an irreconcilable vector: the song’s unabashed pleasure in the very pop it claims to have exposed and outgrown”; the song is “machined to appeal as broadly as possible”, brimming with an “excess of hooks”. What is it that matters: mythic depth or pop flash, significance or insignificance?

This dilemma is one attendant on the post-Filth… rock doc format, where “social context” is airlifted in through standardised footage of dole queues, protests, uncollected rubbish etc etc, before the narrative continues on unaffected. But it’s also the dilemma of poptimism in its cultural victory over the last 15 years or so. Kelefa Sanneh’s complaint against rockism nearly 2 decades ago centred around the unremarked elevation of certain attributes—authenticity, depth, self-possession, friction, mythic resonance, meaning and having “something to say”—that all happened to be associated with white male subjectivity to the centre of musical valuation, to the detriment of, say, superficiality, surface, artifice, abjection, technology, dispersal, performance, professionalism, the enjoyment that the average listener (a personage as hypothetical, postulated from desired conclusions, in poptimism as “Mondeo Man” was in psephology) craved more than meaning. Poptimism meant looking at an actually existing landscape of commercial music that was “a fractured, hyper-vivid fantasy of teen-pop stars and R&B pillow-talkers and arena-filling country singers and, above all, rappers… a fluid musical world where it's
impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures” for what it was, rather than lamenting its failings in the light of ROCK as a transcendental ideal—a teenybopper version of amor fati. It was also, as an unremarked consequence, a call for an end to the hermeneutics of suspicion—already fairly standard in postmodernist theory, newly realised in a world where Soulseek and iPods made so much of the past instantly and abundantly available. The figure of the subaltern was key: while social minorities had created the key constituents for the music of social majorities that was pop and rock, they had been devalued—“erased” as the terminology now goes—in the schema of what mattered in music. If rockism, in Sanneh’s view, disdained contemporary pop for its association with femininity, gay culture and blackness—a fact it never admitted, concealed in an aesthetic theory that claimed to peer through surfaces to the deeper meaning of corporate inauthenticity—then poptimism as a revaluation of values would reassert what the pop subjects chased from the magic circle of seriousness—teen girls, sexual dissidents, “non-Europeans” in Hamid Dabashi’s phrase—really wanted. As Frank Kogan memorably put it, “What’s wrong with pretty girls dancing, and with pretty boy singers giving a voice to the emotions of that dance, and a couple of genius Swedish songwriters and musicians giving them beautiful melodies to sing and strong beats for the screaming sexual girls and their beautiful dance?”

In practice, as poptimism has become a form of cultural common sense, with hardly even a spectre of rockism to define itself against, that isn’t how it’s worked out. You’re much more likely now to find people championing pop music because it’s good for you. Pop music rather represents the general interest of the subaltern. From the wine track of Pitchfork, whose register is caught perfectly in a favourite tweet of mine, to the beer track of thousands of pseudonymous stan posters insisting that Taylor Swift/Beyonce/Dua Lipa/etc “has done so much for [insert gendered group of choice]”, the claim recurs that particular pop music has good political content despite its chaotic dollar-glazed surfaces. (This is in fact one of a whole complex of related claims, deployed in different formations by different speaker, but we’ll leave those aside for a moment.) Fun isn’t enough, even if the tunes are better than Nirvana. Poptimism has in effect reinvented the hermeneutics of suspicion that it once declared politically dead. Thus, it isn’t enough for George, on ‘Wake Me Up…’ or ‘Careless Whisper’, to be a better songwriter than, say, Morrissey at the level of pure enjoyment. Queer politics needs to assert itself through the girlie-mag presentation, self-consciousness through the Saturday Superstore goofiness. But by the creed of the poptimist desert fathers, this is just rockism in disguise. So which is it? Part of this is the fate of an ideology when its conditions of possibility—untramelled capital expansion, easy credit, a loose consensus around Third Way politics, a soft job market in the so-called cultural industries—fall away. But I’d suggest it’s also a problem internal to the history of pop itself, one that was particularly acute in the period of Wham!’s career—a tension that poptimism has conjured away without resolving.

What, after all, are we supposed to do with the fissures in Michael’s early career, ones that he spent the rest of his life trying to resolve in favour of his image as a Serious Artist? The “social commentary” of ‘Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do)’ and ‘Young Guns (Go For It)’ disappears almost immediately, replaced by the more musically compelling fantasia of ‘Club Tropicana’, a single and video whose flimsy unreality appeared neither to (politically) endorse nor critique the image of the new-money petty-bourgeois good life it adopted. Between Fantastic, whose cover dallied with DAFs rent-boy grit and whose reedy, personable funk had some relation to the sober soul-boy aesthetic the NME had run to in the eclipse of post-punk’s innovations, and Make It Big, where the duo look like carbon copies of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in Miami Vice, George’s look to the camera a homely, smoothed-out version of the New Romantic image that Phil Oakey, David Sylvian and sundry Blitz Kids had made a glimpse of a world where the unemployed can live on fame (a “tiger’s leap” from Bowie’s image where “the workers have struck for fame”), a possible form of life has disappeared: the world has frozen into product. Michael, who had been a YCL member as a teen, would be a vocal Labour supporter throughout the 1980s and insisted on playing benefit gigs for striking miners while appearing in the press as a consummate Thatcherite subject—the immigrant kid making good on just talent and initiative, torn from any communal context, buoyed only on the market fluctuations of dreams. The pair would go on to play Live Aid, the event that declared an end to the efficacy of governments and popular movements to provide for and protect the oppressed—that said on the world stage that buccaneer entrepreneurship was now the basis of an entire global political ontology. There is obviously a diachronic account here, of the transition from an unstable world where punk had remade pop’s very conditions of possibility—who could make it, what they’d wear, what they could say—to one where “it’s like punk never happened” (to use Dave Rimmer’s phrase). And yet the music itself is giddy with synchronic intensity. Its founding gesture is exit from the everyday temporality of the dole queue and “death by matrimony”, to the replayable order, the intense and licenced leisure of the 3-minute pop single, and in doing so denies that anything will happen. The horizon of contradiction, the dialectical flux of antagonistic elements, isn’t Hegelian resolution and supersession but the promise of an eternity where “membership’s a smiling face/Rub shoulders with the stars”. In the right conditions, this coupling of opposites in pop—Michael’s early career is perhaps just the most dramatic example—appears as a dialectical image, that, as Benjamin writes, “polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out”. But what pop concentrates into itself as a dream, imbued with all the illusionism of commodity culture—the wish-image of the early 1980s—is the vanishing of the dialectic itself.

There is thus a deep tragedy at work in this contradictory gestus, in which the illusionistic promise that any suburban lower-middle class schoolboy can become a star is premised on the actual destruction of working-class power, a process whose twin emblems were Live Aid and the defeat of the miners. The new aesthetic possibilities of play, lightness, glamour, non-meaning, individual charisma, facility and so on were entwined with the capitalist realist standardisation Mark Fisher described looming ahead:

The quiet desperation of a world that is totally dominated by work, especially for those who don’t have it; where the domestic labour of ‘lonely housewives’ never ends, where shiftless men bred for work in factories that have closed down forever sit morosely on hire-purchase sofas they can no longer afford, in endless grey afternoons that promise only more of the same, forever. It is made just about liveable by the anti-depressants and the alcohol: scores of clone towns descending into a stone cold dead downer haze, softened up for wave after wave of neoliberal shock doctrine ‘reforms’, as mass culture degenerates into comfort food lowest common denominator entertainment.

The band’s role in breaking open the Chinese pop market is the most tense and peculiar of the film’s episodes in this regard. Only a few bits of footage from the Chinese tour documentary made their way in, mostly of standard goofing. (A proper reissue of the documentary, including an official release of Lindsay Anderson’s director’s cut, would be a good use of any distributor’s money and efforts.) In voiceover, George talks about his misgivings about staying in Wham! at that time, but how he couldn’t resist being the experience of being an international star. An uncomfortable American interview ends with him conceding that the Chinese state, on its way to “market socialism”, gave the band this historic opportunity because of their “wholesome image”. Pop, in other words, takes a hand in the liquidation of the revolutionary project that Lyotard lined up with other meaning-producing “grand narratives” of the 20th century—a familiar enough story, amenable to a certain form of rockism—but in the name of the very freedom the peasants of Hunan had taken up arms for decades before. Queerness, the burden of the “new social movements” that would soon enough be discursively opposed to a dying Marxism, emerges as silence even as its conditions of possibility as a coherent and valorised politics crystallise. A bright spark, into a flame—one that, as Benjamin writes, “becomes legible” from our perspective, even as pop dramatises its extinction.