I don’t think there is any such thing as pure pop. What matters is what feeds you. Like the way listening to Meet the Beatles thrills a spiritual/physical nerve ending, like breathing pure oxygen.
Which is odd and sad, given the fact that the London music scene that sealed us up in this bell jar actually spawned the last flailing lunge at making popular music mean something. The Sex Pistols and the punk bands that followed them over the top were the last to speak rock ‘n’ roll’s great “‘No!’ in thunder,” to make protest music. And they did it with a beautiful instinct for the legacy of energy they inherited; you could hear it rolling in their huge chords. They were perfect avatars of the vision that John Sinclair had written down ten years earlier, in prison in Michigan, as his way of explaining what the MC5 were all about (indeed, what the 60s were all about): the idea that rock ‘n’ roll tapped into a unique form of human energy that could be used to empower the people, or rather each individual person—an energy external to the rigged options of mass modern culture, and so one that could be used to fuel the growth of a more spiritually energized alternative.
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This the Pistols did. At least musically. At least in America. In England the self-lacerating nihilism that was the dark face of the Sex Pistols’ moral outrage could not be put back in its box once set loose. Just as with an angry child, the power to say “no” became intoxicating, then maddening, until it took on a diabolic life of its own. It always felt like the Pistols were making an overhasty surrender to the death of all possibilities. Remember “no future, no future, no future for you”? You never knew whether they were outraged by or half in love with the thought. And Sid Vicious acted it out.
English pop hasn’t totally wasted the landscape. There are still bands and musicians who’re crafting songs that we can use for bread, weapons, or fire—mostly in America, because we have been separated by an ocean from the nihilist sump into which English music sank. But in Britain too. Because the Sex Pistols, the whole punk thing, did empower people, a new world of musicians. Only a relative minority got caught in the whipcrack at the end of it that snapped them off into the void.
At first the song sounds like it comes out of the same ocean that Van Morrison found himself rolling on when he created Astral Weeks, when some personal agony forced a break in the world that opened vision to him. The massed acoustic chords bob and ripple, the maddening sinuous strings crest and slacken. Then Mike Scott goes through a roll call of the wounded, calling to them: “You been scarring your conscience, raking through your memory. . . . You say you been suffering from . . . a few . . . too . . . many . . . plans that have gone wrong!”
But that’s not the important thing about the Replacements, and it’s not why people get so worked up about them. What excites people, whether they can articulate it or not, is just the sense that there’s something human going on in their music. That it reaffirms rock ‘n’ roll without either the faintest stink of nostalgia (that admission of defeat and anachronicity that oozes out of most of the respected rockers of our day) or of selling out to soulless synthetics. The Replacements sound like struggle, like personalities cramped and convulsed with the effort of finding out why they feel empty.
And then there’s the presence of an Other, a relationship implied in the incessant questions, and in the care that weights them. “Tell me what’s wrong?” “Are you satisfied?” posed by that torn-up voice.
