Posted on by qscrisp

The Cure and Calligraphy

Sometimes I wish that I'd written something down. It was probably in 2002 that I saw a documentary on Japanese television about a contemporary calligrapher. I found it fascinating, and it has stayed with me, but I can't remember his name. I keep thinking there was a 'yo' in it, like 'Yoichi', but I'm probably way off. Anyway, one of the things he said in this documentary, to explain his style was something like, "Heta wa hontou no umai." I'm quoting from memory, so that might not be verbatim. Literally translated, this is, "Being crap is the true skilfull." This is the kind of pronouncement that some people like to snigger at, but I don't think it should be taken at face value as a disavowal of hard work or dedication in artistic endeavor.

Why was I reminded of this? Because I've just been watching some videos of old Cure songs, specfically, these:

Strictly speaking, Robert Smith can't sing, and he certainly can't dance, but… his expressiveness, whilst appearing 'crap', is actually quite controlled and articulate. Or, perhaps I should say, uninhibited and articulate. Compared to this, the great majority of pop music, old and new, is really robotic, cookie-cutter stuff. The singers might hit the right notes more often, or dance according to stricter choreography, but in inasmuch as they are less expressive, what they do is actually more primitive, more basic in its exactitude.

Just to choose an easy example, I have always execrated this kind of dancing.

In calligraphic terms, Justin Timberlake would be a mere stencil, that is, if one can imagine a stencil that is intrinsically repellent and sleazy and vile.

The Cure would be more like this:

I know which I prefer.

Pop music was meant to be 'crap' – in the sense that the best Japanese calligraphy is.

17 Replies to “The Cure and Calligraphy”

  1. “this video contains content from vivo which has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds”that’s the message we get. without even seeing the video i know what you’re talking about. i won’t try to paraphrase, but it’s the same with painting. in order for a painting to have a real ‘life’ an elan vital, or true essence, it has to kind of be born from crap. an elegant concept. perfection is that the result is somehow fresh, new and exciting.anyway, cool post. :cool:we got the timberlake… yep, stencil. 💡

  2. I see what you mean, but that’s a bit like comparing tap dancing with line dancing; they’re different genres. Justin Timberlake is making modern day disco — background muzak for nightclubs; it’s supposed to be soulless and utilitarian.

  3. Originally posted by I_ArtMan:”this video contains content from vivo which has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds”that’s the message we get. I can’t actually find other postings of those two videos on YouTube – I’ll just see if I can find something similar…Hmmm. I think the record compnay must be cracking down on copyright infringement, as there seem to be a number of videos with the sound removed. Here’s one that might work, though Robert Smith makes only a minimal appearance as a dancing shadow:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8CDERzun4kIf I find a better example, I’ll post it later.Originally posted by I_ArtMan: in order for a painting to have a real ‘life’ an elan vital, or true essence, it has to kind of be born from crap.I suppose it’s fertiliser. The opposite of fertility, sterility, also, interestingly, means lacking dirt. If I remember correctly, in his essay, ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Tanizaki says at some point that “elegance is filthy”.Originally posted by lesoldatperdu:I see what you mean, but that’s a bit like comparing tap dancing with line dancing; they’re different genres. Justin Timberlake is making modern day disco — background muzak for nightclubs; it’s supposed to be soulless and utilitarian.I suppose there are arguments for the soulless and utilitarian increasing diversity in the world, but not when they have the hegemony. It did strike me, watching these Cure videos after a gap of some years, that there’s not really much that compares to this kind of pop today. Even the ‘alternative’ stuff today tends to be relatively stencil-like.Can you think of a similar comparison within modern disco, of someone making more stencil-like music and someone else doing a more freestyle calligraphy thing? If it’s all stencil-like, then I think a comparison outside the genre with something that’s not is fair enough.

  5. Can you think of a similar comparison within modern disco, of someone making more stencil-like music and someone else doing a more freestyle calligraphy thing?Within electronic dance, I think DJ Hazard is a good example of an insipid and pedestrian musician; then there are people like Venetian Snares. Of course, any sort of dance music is inherently utilitarian, in the sense that, ultimately, people must be able to dance to it; and, because the charts are now dominated by dance music, I suppose it follows that the vast majority of mainstream music must be limited.Why are the charts dominated by dance music? It may simply be that dance’s main contender, rock, having been on life-support since the mid-sixties, has finally given up the ghost.

  7. Originally posted by lesoldatperdu:Within electronic dance, I think DJ Hazard is a good example of an insipid and pedestrian musician; then there are people like Venetian Snares. Of course, any sort of dance music is inherently utilitarian, in the sense that, ultimately, people must be able to dance to it; and, because the charts are now dominated by dance music, I suppose it follows that the vast majority of mainstream music must be limited.Well, all of the examples you’ve given there, even Shoes, are at least better than anything Justin Timberlake has ever produced.I suppose I should explain my post a little further – it was basically a spontaneous post written without much in the way of premeditation – by saying that I am quite capable of enjoying music that has something of the streamlining of stencil about it. For instance, this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INwJj8-Ak-AAlthough, interestingly, the dancing happening here is not the robotic dancing of most modern pop videos. It’s as if the video is being used to make more explicit some of the ‘artiness’ that is more implicit in the music itself.My knowledge of the taxonomy of much of the music in the dance area is probably laughable, but I do know that both dance and hip-hop are related within the electronic genus. So, within that broad genus, there’s a fair amount of stuff that I like, though not much – it has to be said – that is especially dancey, but, some examples:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDWgtB_MD24http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W6cnYfVdKshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRX6mfTngxohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqoQCymn9PEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NfzLzHvhiwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OMTB8YwILYFrom my teenage discovery of music, I suppose I had a strong rock bias, with a smattering of synth-pop in the eighties mold. When it came to the mid-nineties, as I think I’ve said before, something happened, and, every single party I went to, instead of playing what seemed to me like a variety of music, with songs of different theme, tempo and atmosphere, suddenly the only music being played was dance music – house music as it was called at the time, with some trance here and there. I didn’t like this. It was the same monotonous beat throughout every single party, as far as I could see. The whole focus of the mainstream has switched from expressive song (however silly) to monotonous beat.Some good things have come out of this switch. There have been some interesting hybrids, and I think that my taste in music has expanded as a result, because eventually it was inevitable that the battering ram of the beat would break open my fortress defences and a few insurgents would get in before my defences were sealed again. So… in the sense that my taste and that of others has been expanded and there has been some miscegenation, it’s good.However, I feel the really bad thing that has resulted from this switch of emphasis is that songs are seen as passe. I like songs. I like a piece of music that has lyrics, melody and musical development from beginning to end. There are things that can happen with an actual song that can’t with a sonic collage spread over a machine-stomp.Even the actual songs that do exist these days all sound to me as if they have the same producer. I mean, this trend is naturally more pronounced at the popular end of the scale. But, for instance, Taylor Swift is supposed to be ‘country’, but she sounds exactly like… to use a slightly dated but still relevant example, Avril Lavigne, who sounds exactly like Miley Cyrus, who sounds exactly like, etc. They’re supposed to be different genres, but they have the same formula and production.So, I feel like there’s an intolerance of real freestyle expression.I think that Eno once said that art is the only place where you can crash the plane and walk away. But everyone is too scared to crash the plane even in art these days. But the great thing about pop music used to be that people were willing to do really ridiculous things within it. Robert Smith’s make-up doesn’t look ‘good’, for instance. He’s badly smeared lipstick in the general area of his mouth, and employed a drunk marmoset to do his eye make-up. But this is actually great! So… I suppose the death of rock’n’roll might be part of the problem, or something. I don’t know really. Music does seem in a bad way these days.Originally posted by JohnRenard:I would propose the so-called ‘New Wave’ revivalists The Faint as a good modern proponent of the calligraphy:http://www.youtube.com/user/thefaint?blend=2&ob=4#p/a/u/2/VOoHGEVFRfII actually first thought that this thread would be about The Cure’s art direction. I remember that the band’s logo as designed by Porl Thompson circa ‘The Head on the Door’ was written on a Polaroid, which created the dripping effect.I’ll check that out. Yes, I think the calligraphy analogy is appropriate in a number of ways – eg. the make-up thing I mention above.

  9. Originally posted by quentinscrisp:I didn’t like this. It was the same monotonous beat throughout every single party, as far as I could see. The whole focus of the mainstream has switched from expressive song (however silly) to monotonous beat.i’m on your side about this. but i suppose there were other parties offering a variety of music, but the mainstream… everywhere you go, the beat goes on. ummm and what happened to having a conversation that didn’t require shouting over the music?

  10. Cap writes:scott, the cure is new to you and you like them? I really envy you this state, because Disintegration is my favorite album ever but I’ve listened to it so much now. I wish I could erase it from my memory and start over.

  12. Anonymous writes:scott, the cure is new to you and you like them? I really envy you this state, because Disintegration is my favorite album ever but I’ve listened to it so much now. I wish I could erase it from my memory and start over.

  14. Ah, The Cure and I have a long history.Probably the most interesting part of that history was when in the early 90’s my friend Jennifer would call me up occasionally and say, “You’ve got to come over, I’ve been listening to The Cure for too long!”So I’d go over, sit on her bedroom floor and comfort her while she cried for a little while. To both of us this was both funny and sad. You see, the music moved her in a way that was profound to her, so essentially The Cure even through it’s pop sensibilities moved my friend to emotional highs and lows. Afterwards we’d go get pie.What I object to about modern pop is that they all try to be original, but use the exact same loops just slightly rearranged to attempt to show that they are original. At least back in the day pop bands were experiementing and coming up with their own sounds. Weirdly enough anymore the more interesting sounding pop seems to be coming out of Australia, with artists down under just doing whatever reguardless of the current trends in America and Britian.But reguardless of that, this is exactly why I listen to artists like The Black Angels, Exit Calm, Bonobo and Steven Wilson….pop is pretty much unbearable anymore and I want a more atmospheric sound to my music.

  15. Hello everyone.I still haven’t responded properly to some of these comments.I’m find that at the moment I can’t post new entries on this blog. There must be a bug of some kind. Is anyone else haveing problems?I’ll write more later…

  16. I’ve decided to revisit this, because I think I expressed my feelings badly last time. Essentially, my biggest gripe with art nowadays, other than the lack of talent, is the bloody self-consciousness of it all. Whenever anybody does anything kitsch or absurd, it’s almost always in a very laboured, affected, “ironic” manner. When I compare these Cure and Justin Timberlake videos, I can see a common thread of unbridled silliness. I mean, they are using different instruments, wearing different clothes, and moving in different ways, but the basic premise seems to be “let’s jump around and have fun”.I am not a fan of R&B, but I don’t think there is anything Machiavellian about it, broadly speaking. I don’t think there was anything Machiavellian about rock music, either, until Keith Richards started playing it. I basically consider Keith Richards, and most of the British Invasion, to be evil, harbingers of the spiritual decline of humanity. I think the mid-sixties were really the point where, for the most part, music stopped being about expressiveness (even the expression of baseness), and started being about impressiveness — that is, the calculated manipulation of the audience.

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