We need more than this!

Rip It Up, Issue 15, 1 September 1978, Page 18

We need more than this!

Peter Thomson

“Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert," or so wrote T.V. producer and music critic Tony Palmer when considering theSgf. Pepper album in 1968. For many years Palmer has lamented that popular music is deemed culturally inferior, “not worthy of proper analysis”, and consequently has been earnestly seeking to rectify the situation by providing “a higher standard of appreciation.” His major attempt at cultural edification to date is the T.V. series All You Need Is Love currently screening on T.V.I. He has also written a book as companion to the series. Now while all this is a highly laudable activity, Palmer does suffer, as the opening quotation demonstrates, from a lack of balance. The trailer to the series boasted having shot almost a million feet of film and acquiring as much again in archival material, 300 interviews, and specially commissioned essays. Yet with all this available, Palmer has failed to achieve fresh insights into his subjects and has often plainly misused his resources. The episode on Rhythm & Blues provides a typical and (considering that this is a Rock paper), pertinent example. On the

credit side we saw performances by Wilson Pickett, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the Meters, rare film of Buddy Holly and an equally rare interview with Phil Spector. For this we are grateful. However, other material was, as elsewhere in the series, either spoiled or wasted in the pursuit of slick, filmic effects. Much time and good film was wasted through editorial imbalance. We spent four minutes while a white gospeller peddled religious knick-knacks and then gave us a tour of her mobile home but had barely V/2 minutes devoted to the whole of Tamla Motown. Editorial imbalance was also responsible for several glaring omissions. Any program on R. & B. should include such seminal figures as Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles and Fats Domino. Yet only Bo Diddley appeared. Furthermore, we had to suffer Pat Boone’s milk-sop rendition of Richard's “Tutti Frutti”'only seconds after being told that R. & B. caught on because people were “fed up with bland faceless music.” Irony upon insult. Such important omissions are symptomatic of what is perhaps the series' (and

book’s) central flaw: that Palmer seems to lack a clear conception of what he means by “popular”. He recognises that popular music is a totally capitalistic enterprise yet, at the same time, despises obviously manufactured pop (eg. Osmonds) and admires those artists who "express themselves” without selling out to commercialism. Palmer, it seems, is an elitist on the side of the underdog, a white liberal purging his guilt over the manipulated black. If the series (and book) does contain a thematic argument it lies only in the recurring motif of commercialism, manipulation and exploitation: whites exploiting blacks (minstrels, ragtime, blues etc.), whites exploiting whites (the music business), blacks exploiting blacks for whites (Motown etc.) So don’t expect any critical enlightenment on popular music from All You Need Is Love. All you get is the chronological, production-line treatment. But stay tuned anyway. There’s always some good film clip . . . and wait till the final episode when Palmer presents Mike Oldfield as the future of pop!