Remade, Remodeled Roxy Music

By Jeff Miers

Events of recent weeks have convinced me of a bipolar tendency in this culture, a to-ing and fro-ing between decadence on one hand and puritanism on the other.

We push mercilessly ahead toward some imagined future, with commodified sexuality being the carrot dangling just out of reach. We then recoil in self-righteous horror when we finally manage to take a bite of the carrot.

Which might explain to us Britney Spears and Eliot L. Spitzer as pop culture phenomenons. Both represent the American dream and its nightmarish doppelganger, equally — though Spitzer appears to own a more imposing fleet of sinister black SUVs than does our much- maligned, gone-to-seed American teen-queen.

Brit and Eliot are, after all, the logical outcome of our cultural schizophrenia.

Modernism and its scruffy little brother, postmodernism, hinted throughout the last century that we might ultimately celebrate the mannequin as a vessel of sexuality. Hence, Britney.

The pull of nostalgia against modernism’s momentum created a longing for the moral certitude of the 1950s, or at least urged us to keep our (collective and individual) kinkiness under wraps or in the closet. Voila, Spitzer.

Considering all of this while making my way through a pair of delectable new pop artifacts concerning the big daddy of postmodern art-rock bands, Roxy Music, forced me to make some rather interesting connective leaps of my own. For Roxy Music clearly celebrates nostalgia and futurism simultaneously. The difference? The principals were smart enough to discern between art and artifice.

Pondering Roxy Music today, we’re forced to look backward, but when the band emerged in the early 1970s, it already looked like a cross between some sort of throwback to the roaring ’20s and what co- founder Brian Eno describes as an "intergalactic parliament." Watching the just-released twin-DVD set "Roxy Music: The Thrill of It All" (Virgin), Eno, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Co. still suggest the past, present and future in equal measure, both visually and sonically. The band and its art haven’t so much aged well as created a microcosm within which age isn’t really a consideration.

Michael Bracewell’s scholarly tome/memoir "Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music" (Da Capo) does an exhaustively researched job of explaining to us why this might be the case. Bracewell offers a dissertation, not on the dry facts that led to the formation of this massively successful and influential ensemble, but rather, on the particular intellectual and artistic milieu which enabled and encouraged it.

Eno once scrawled the hilarious epithet "I was a teenage art school" across one of his journals, according to Bracewell, and indeed, he, Ferry and Mackay were exactly that. In fact, it was the collision and collusion of movements in what we’d come to know as American pop-art, with the doings of artists and art pedagogues Richard Hamilton and Roy Ascott, that would ultimately birth Roxy Music. And with Roxy Music came, for nearly the first time, the belief that rock could have as much to do with Marcel Duchamp and behaviorism as it could Chuck Berry and teenage sexual longing.

Hamilton taught at Newcastle College of Art, Ascott at Ipswich. The former had as a pupil future Roxy leader Ferry; the latter, co- founder and confounder Eno. Both Ferry and Eno were, ostensibly, painters. But under the tutelage of Hamilton, Ascott and a host of like-minded artists, colleagues and friends, both saw a way forward in a rock music that would apply the fairly radical concepts they’d been exposed to at university, to a multidimensional new pop-art. There was something simultaneously trashy and profound, disposable and artistically sound, leeringly sexual and capital-r Romantic, chilly and emotive, forward-looking and well-mired in a longing for the past, or at least certain elements of that past.

What’s any of this got to do with Spitzer and Spears? Nothing, one could argue. But just as easily, we can see the milieu that produced Roxy Music being not wholly unlike the pea soup-thick melange of possibilities in our current . . . well, mess.

The idea back then was to grab the bits from the past and present one liked, and forge something new and desirable out of them. That should be the idea now, too, I believe. Self-awareness at this stage of the game might not be a bad thing for both the pop artist and the pop consumer. After all, you only get what you ask for.

Bridging the gap between decadence and puritanism is a noble and necessary endeavor. And pop music is uniquely situated to achieve this remodeling.

Just ask Roxy Music.

e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com

Originally published by NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC.

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