Image Bands and their Discontents

Actually, on second thought, one of the biggest instigators of my impression of "WAAAAAAYYYY more Image Bands in the UK than in the US" may be because for many years, the UK had a functioning weekly music press, which the US never really had. More space to parade and represent your Image, much quicker turnover of bands and music micro-scenes = more Image.

Key paragraph from that Voice review, my description of L'Arc's lead singer:

hyde has to be the single most androgynous frontman I've ever seen—he makes Antony Hegarty look like Henry Rollins. He wore a waist-length black blazer with shoulder pads over a black tank top, pants baggy enough to hold a spare microphone or two, and his hair was in blond cornrows, dangling loose for better whipping. His primary stage move (other than sticking his tongue out at the audience) is a version of Axl Rose's snake-hips dance, but with added twirls and what can only be described as flouncing. Oh, and five songs or so into the set, he donned a floppy, wide-brimmed hat Alicia Keys would envy, making him look like a '90s R&B diva having a rock moment.

more culturally influential on a global scale than their UK equivalents.

...Americans always over-stating the effect of their ~cultural influence~ on the rest of the world... pfffftttt

You're bigger. That's about it. Now go wave your flag somewhere else, unless you're going to do it like the New York Dolls. :-P

for many years, the UK had a functioning weekly music press, which the US never really had. More space to parade and represent your Image, much quicker turnover of bands and music micro-scenes = more Image

This is related to a crucial difference between how the US and UK music industries function, I think. The US music industry, at least where rock is concerned, has always played a long game, signing bands to multi-album deals with the intention of building a years-long career for them. The UK industry is, I think, much more singles- and quick-hit-oriented, not so much worried about five - or even two - years down the road. I doubt the majority of UK bands plan a two-year touring cycle when they release an album, but that's pretty much standard practice, at least where I work.

Yeah, this is the thing I'm trying to get at, when I talk about "Image Bands in the UK" and why it's so different from the States.

Because we are a country whose entire landmass and population could fit inside just *one* of your 50 states (OK maybe not Delaware or Rhode Island?) and yet for a significant period of the late 20th Century, we somehow supported 2, sometimes 3 weekly music papers, and a dozen monthlies. That's a lot of pages to fill.

And when I was trying to express why I did not think Kiss or Bon Jovi or "hair metal" compares, is that, during the "golden era" of that music press, it wasn't just one or two Image Bands or even one or two Movements. During the course of a decade it went, like: Glam, Bay City Rollers style teeny bop, Punk, Classic Long Grey Overcoat Post-Punk, Romo, Goth, Blue-Eyed Soul, Synth-Pop and on and on and on. I could draw you a recognisable cartoon of a musician or fan of any one of those "styles". And probably any British person who obsessively read the music press between 1980 and whenever Melody Maker folded, could do you a similar (probably expanded, because my memory is poor) list, and similar cartoons.

We have a *ton* of stylistic churn, because of our music press, because of our shorter cycle. To stand out in that churn, "Image" is one of the ways to get column space. I'm not saying this is better or worse than the US, it's just different. I was looking for *why* we were different, and there's probably a host of reasons why, including the ones I touched on above. But this stuff is definitely the *how*.

(And I've been thinking about the steady parade of US bands from Nirvana Pixies onwards, who came over to the UK to "break" first in the UK press, then sell themselves back to the US on the strength of that success. But I'm tired, and if anyone wants me I'l be in my bunk with my £3 Interpol CDs...)

i've been reading bits of the svenonius supernatural rock strategies book and one of the chapters makes the point that whereas actors and such can take off their makeup and personas at home, bands are expected to be the bands all the time, so in that sense maybe what it means to be an image band is to be more on the actor side of the equation. dee snider takes off the makeup at home but slash and buckethead wear those bucket hats all the time.

when i brought up hair metal and steven tyler, i wasn't trying to argue that the US is or isn't better than the UK at this. rather, i was trying to offer a counter-argument to this...

Think it's p obvious why White American culture doesn't do it. The horror of being scene as effeminate, the policing of masculinity.

...which i don't think is true at all. the founding fathers of american rock and roll -- little richard, elvis,, all those guys -- were very effeminate. or, more to the point, they were SEEN as effeminate. and white american culture completely embraced them. and this was in the '50s. you might also have noticed that all those macho, beer-swigging, denim-clad southern rockers like lynyrd skynyrd -- maybe the epitome of white american masculine music culture -- all had long, completely feminine hair.

i admit i had never actually heard the phrase "image band" before this thread, but if there is such a thing, lynyrd skynyrd are just as much of an image band as duran duran are. different image, though, obviously.

another way to look at the question, which may well have something to do with the UK weekly music press as well as the general UK tabloid culture, may be to ask not why the UK has more image bands but rather why the UK press spends so much more time talking about it. and even then, i think any answer would be quite complicated. because it may also be that the UK press and the US press tend to talk about different aspects of image, and they tend to talk about it in different ways.

The US has plenty of "image bands" but maybe they get overshadowed by, you know, the actual music. Whereas the UK seems to be great at churning out bands that are pure image.

I love when a guy starts reciting arguments that you and other people have made, yourself, and discussed up thread, as if he is trying to score points against you. And by "love" I mean "roll my eyes and move on".

(Maybe it wasn't actually this thread, but I can't even remember what thread it was at this point, I'm tired and there's no milk to have tea. But the whole "Long Hair = Feminine" thing is one of the quickest things to get me to roll my eyes and move on.)

But, y'know, talking of haircuts. I was thinking this over this morning, and thinking about other aspects of "Image Band" and whether that means having a strong, defined image that does not change, but then thinking that many of the bands I think of as "Image Bands" are actually bands that have had fairly lengthy careers, but, if you look at a photo of them, you can tell *exactly* what album they're promoting, or at least, what era.

I probably wouldn't call Radiohead an "Image Band" (though yes, they are obviously a band that cares hugely about image and presentation) per se, but Thom Yorke is very definitely part of the Image Band trope because of this. (They would be an "Image Band" if all of the band behaved like Thom, but the rest of them dress like History Professors and p much always have. Then again, "Oxford History Professor" is also an image?) But if you look at a photo of Radiohead, you can tell instantly, are they promoting Pablo Honey or The Bends or OKC or HTTT or TKOL based solely on Thom's clothes and haircut.

And all of the bands that I think of as "my" Image Bands (Duran Duran, Blur, I'm starting to be able to do this with Interpol now) you can do that, you can instantly tell not just "This is Blur" but you can tell which album they're promoting based on haircuts, even while presenting a strong image of *Blur*-ness.

I'm not sure you can do that with Kiss (not counting "Unmasked") or Aerosmith? Maybe a ~real fan~ could? Which doesn't make them Not Image Bands, just, a different kind of image band than the kind I tend to go for.

I love when a guy starts reciting arguments that you and other people have made, yourself, and discussed up thread, as if he is trying to score points against you. And by "love" I mean "roll my eyes and move on".

and i love when someone assumes that because he or she has already discussed something, sometime before, on some thread or other, that the argument is now closed.

i don't think long hair equals feminine anymore than short hair equals whatever short hair equals, but i do think there have been many eras, and many corners, of the US (and no doubt some other countries) , where hair lengths have been PERCEIVED as such. "the policing of masculinity," as you yourself put it. and if a longhaired male walked into a bar in one of those corners in one of those eras (for example, large swaths of the american south in the not-too-distant past), assumptions were very likely being made about him. that's all i was saying.

i am NOT asking you or anyone to re-argue something you've argued extensively elsewhere. i am just letting you know where i'm coming from.

i could look at any photo of bruce springsteen, based solely on clothes and haircut, and tell you exactly what album he was promoting (at least through the first 20 years of his career, when he truly mattered from a pop standpoint).

Aw, BOOM! Perfect example, like, *textbook* example, of an American image band! Bruce Springsteen! Thank you for that.

Because Springsteen has long irritated me on that level, that this is a guy who has spent decades carefully constructing and changing and working with Images, specifically of images of Working Class American Masculinity (whether that's messing with beards and biker chic or clean shaven with the American flag and Levis 501s) but it's like this elephant in the room, of everyone (well, especially British people who fetishise Springsteen) going on about how AUTHENTIC and how ANTITHESIS OF IMAGE BAND he is, when he is an ARCHETYPICAL IMAGE BAND, but somehow read as "not image" because white American male is so "default".

(Sorry, I hate Springsteen, but he is a pitch perfect example, and I'm super-glad you raised him.)

And I don't want to pick this scab, but it's not that the argument is *closed*, it's that this is a discussion I've been having for weeks now (across the 22 Listens thread, across the Men With Long Hair thread, across all 8 billion of the gender threads, which means it's actually more like 14 years now, but this specific argument has been going over this thread and 22 listens) and you pick one sentence out of a 2-week argument of going back and forth and considering one side and then the other and argue like *that* is my whole position, which needs to be debunked. American and European conceptions of masculinity are different. (And there are myriad conceptions of masculinity within "american" and "european" as well as between.) I do think that stereotypical American masculine views of European men as "sophisticated and metrosexual, therefore suspect" is still a valid point. (But English men have similar views about "European men" and French men probably have similar views about "decadent English men" so it's probably about being "other" within masculinity, rather than specifically US/UK, but the US can never really seem to get over its rugged frontier masculinity schtick.)

The whole dance of "long hair on men = rugged and masculine" swinging back and forth with "short hair on men = rugged and masculine" is a dance that has been going on way, way, waaaaaayyyyy longer than even "bands in suits" swinging back and forth with "bands in jeans and t-shirts" in terms of fashions in masculinity. Because most of us grew up in the 20th Century, we have absorbed 20th Century mores about "long hair on men" and what it means. "Policing of Masculinity" is the point; hair length is incidental. Lynyrd Skynyrd wearing their hair long were them coding as masculine as fuck because Civil War Generals of the Deep South wore their hair longer than The Beatles. It's an image.

springsteen is absolutely an image guy, who spends an awful lot of time thinking about this stuff. spend any time in asbury park, and you will hear stories, to take one silly example, of springsteen employees who were paid to wear his jeans to properly break them in for him. everything about how he presents himself is calculated. i'm a fan 'cause i like the music and i like the way he says what he has to say and i like his guitar playing and i think a lot of those looks were damn good looks. i tend to tune out all those people who go on about his authenticity and whatnot because -- if you want to know what i've been ranting about since the beginning of ILM time -- i don't believe authenticity exists in any music of any type by anybody.

(singular exception to the above: the lifers group, a hip-hop group consisting of guys serving life sentences at rahway, released a song called "let me out." that was an authentic moment.)

specifically of images of Working Class American Masculinity (whether that's messing with beards and biker chic or clean shaven with the American flag and Levis 501s)

it's perhaps not surprising that a lot of ILMers' fave springsteen album is the one where he tried something else. for tunnel of love, he switched to sport jackets and bolo ties, suggesting something more like American Man on a Date.

If it weren't for Nicky Wire, I'd be tempted to put late doors Manic Street Preachers down as the ultimate non-image band - not one of the albums when they're trying to recapture their, ahem, punk rock roots, but one of the Q magazine-friendly ones when the lyrics are just collections of bland signifiers and they're standing there looking like they've just been shopping in BHS. It's not even a kind of ostentatious everybloke look it's just plain half-arsedness.

Obviously the Manics up to a point are pretty much the ultimate image band.

The band that first sprung to mind as an 'anti-image band' was The Chameleons but that's purely because I once watched a YouTube clip of some live TV performance where the singer was wearing a really horrible jumper.

Going back to the hair metal thing, I think in defining 'image bands' I'd want to differentiate somehow between bands who adopted a standard hair metal look (though obviously there were those who defined it in the first place - I'm not sure who, it's not a genre I really know anything about) and those with a distinctive look that is unique to them. For example re: Soref's point about garage bands, from our point of view lots of bands do look like '1964' whereas The Who looked like The Who (albeit in a '1964' way). Obviously there's a huge grey area here, fans of a genre will notice differences in style that might not be apparent to non-fans, just as their would be with the music.

xp Well that Everything Must Go/This Is My Truth period was a deliberate anti-image to make a clean break with the Richey period. They explained it at the time and it wasn't half-arsed at all. It was a decision.

I don't think Wire's lyrics are ever close to being bland signifiers btw but that's for a different thread.

i won't be able to think about this properly today because I have to work hard but i am getting tangled up in passing in the dialectic of innovation and correctness in image-bands and their followers - are there distinctions between kinds of image bands that generate a 'be marvellous, be spectacular' culture, and those that generate principles that that are more 'your trousers must have n inch bottoms and break exactly here; your shoes should be brand y', or does one degenerate or harden into the other? I feel like there are distinctions between dress-up and aestheticism drifting around in this somewhere. Anyway, work!

Oh, Woof, don't work; talk to us instead. Some really great posts itt at the moment!

But need lunch right now.

"'Authenticity' is a Construct" is one of those basic level ideas that has been printed on cards and handed out to new ILM-ers since 2000. Or, rather.. *should* be. But hey.

still caused outrage on the post-fahey thread a while back vis-a-vis porches, checked shirts & mountain men

Yeah, I mean, ppl who have a hissy-fit when you suggest that, y'know... those flannel shirts, those deliberately square-tailored, plaid, in bold masculine colours, modelled in the LL Bean catalogue by rugged dudes with beards flannel shirts just, like grow on trees or something. But whatevs.

i won't be able to think about this properly today because I have to work hard but i am getting tangled up in passing in the dialectic of innovation and correctness in image-bands and their followers - are there distinctions between kinds of image bands that generate a 'be marvellous, be spectacular' culture, and those that generate principles that that are more 'your trousers must have n inch bottoms and break exactly here; your shoes should be brand y', or does one degenerate or harden into the other? I feel like there are distinctions between dress-up and aestheticism drifting around in this somewhere. Anyway, work!

― woof, Friday, February 14, 2014 11:08 AM

I've been thinking about this, and I think this is much more about "First Gen" versus "Second Gen" in terms of a music scene.

The originals will just be doing their wild, wacky thing, being marvellous and spectacular. But when you get a group of people being marvellous and spectacular together, group think and hive mind takes over. And people who are just dressing up together to go to the same parties/clubs together end up attracting a secondary group of people around them who think that instead of being marvellous and spectacular, the trick to acceptance in that scene which has coalesced around those originators is to wear their trouser cuffs at exactly n inches and their shoes must be y brand.

This is the role of the British music press in hyper-accelerated scenes: that once it's been put down on paper as "this is the X scene" suddenly you get kids across the country who have never been to X club, suddenly dressing that way, from having seen pictures of it, rather than being in on the scene. (But this is also the place where the most interesting mutations take place, to drive it forward to the *next* micro-scene.)

Music scene politics just fascinates me, it always has. Whether it was seeing it in the local scene, or reading about it in the NME.

I was at a conference last week all about marketing in HE, and one of the last plenaries started with someone playing "Anarchy in the UK". They asked us if we knew why we were playing it (their reason was that UK HE is basically anarchy at the moment because of govt policy) and I was the only person to pipe up and say "because Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren are oustanding marketers", and explain that everything I knew about branding and image and loyalty and emotional investment I new from being into music and following bands.

This thread is totally about bands as brands - some of which (Kiss) remain pretty much the same, and some of which (Thom) subtly change and evolve over time.

Really interesting and good stuff.

xp
yes, that sounds v right & reminds me of the recent ian penman piece on mod from the LRB, a great essay & i think relevant here.

I was the only person to pipe up and say "because Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren are oustanding marketers", and explain that everything I knew about branding and image and loyalty and emotional investment I new from being into music and following bands.

Heee heeee heeeeeee this just reminds me of last year, when Tumblr partnered with Yahoo and started talking about how great this would be for ~promoting brands~ and my dashboard got filled with reblogs of A Certain ILX0r basically throwing a hissy and saying that he didn't join Tumblr to follow "~brands~" followed by a good thick wad of take-down notes going "actually, my dashboard is filled with Brands - Brand Radiohead or Brand Doctor Who or Brand One Direction or whatever, in fact I did very much join Tumblr to follow brands, but we call them hashtags now" and said ILX0r stropping out going "TAKE THAT BACK TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW JOAN DIDION IS NOT A BRAND!!! ALPINE STOATS ARE NOT A BRAND!!!1111eleven" and sorry, dude, but, I got news for you... #brand

I mean, to be serious and non-meow for a moment, I'm sure there is a difference between an Image and a Brand, but I'm not sure where it is.

Well marketing theory would say that 'image' is part of 'brand', but exactly how you delineate that is gonna vary.

Get the font slightly wrong on the CD spine of your b-sides competition = alienate your die-hard fans (who notice shit like this, consciously or not), make them feel like it's a bootleg or inauthentic product, and see it bomb.

Faintly off-topic, sorry!

It's just funny how so many of us think about this. And not at all accidental, given ILX was founded by someone who went on to work... in branding/marketing due to a fascination brought about by a love of pop.

(I was working at a marketing agency when ILX was founded, seems like it's kind of an ILX thing. At least it was in the early days.)

Yeah I was wondering where things like album/single artwork fitted into this - I definitely see it as part of a band's brand, not sure about image (maybe it depends whether or not the cover features a picture of the artist?).

"Putting your picture on the album cover" = pretty good sign that You Are An Image Band.

But then again, some of the strongest image bands I can think of never put themselves on their album covers. It's another not-thing of thingness.

But "having a strong image" often translates into expressing that aesthetic in visual ways that aren't photos - the Nagel painting on the cover of Rio says just as much about who Duran are and what they aspire to as any of the other albums with photos of them on the front. It's still part of "Image Band".

Obviously it's been discussed a lot, but have we ever had a specific "bands as brands" thread? Can't find one. I'd love to broaden the discussion beyond just image, but am loathe to do it on this thread (for sake of future revives as much as anything else).

xpost - Stone Roses using John Squire's paintings. Absolute apotheosis of that.

Yeah that's a good way of putting it (xpost). I used to be really into the Chemical Brothers and I definitely associated their music with the look of their covers (at least up to the second album) rather than what they looked like as people. I remember them saying they made a point of choosing images that didn't look like typical techno/dance covers.

Stone Roses basically turned themselves into a giant John Squire painting for a set of promo photos, so it's all linked together.

I dunno; I feel like "bands as brands" is getting a bit beyond the remit of this thread, because that all starts to go a bit "OMG, artist X wore a t-shirt of a totally inappropriate artist Y!" after a while. I kinda feel like... "what band X chooses to put on their t-shirt" is within the remit of this thread, but "what it means when a fan wears a t-shirt of band X" is kinda not? If that makes sense?

i am impressed we've gone this long w/out mentioning carles

xpost - Yeah I agree with that. I think what I'm interested in is the way bands brand themselves (which is often about image, and thus totally about what they put on their t-shirts, album sleeves, etc), and how cognitive dissonance can result when fans buy-in to something only to have it contravened by things they view as being off-brand.

Brand is a clumsy term given to misuse but it seems to make the most sense here.

Like, a lot of people use it when they mean 'company' or 'corporation', when actually brand is the interface of how something (company, corporation, band, football club, whatever) presents itself and how its audience perceives it.

What's a carles?

Oh, do you mean Hipster Runoff? Because I'm all.. argh, is this some obscure French cultural theorist I've never heard of?

haha, yes, he did have a good eye & an ability to make his own writing palatable & catchy that obscure French cultural theorists lack ime

thinking of image bands or their opposite I'd wonder where the Ramones, early Pretty Things r the Birthday Party would lie on there.
I think all 3 might be viewed as anti-image by some but also think that at least some members in all 3 worked consciously on the way they looked.
I haven't read the thread through so don't know if there has been any comment on the look the Ramones consciously developed prior to them getting mass exposure. That mismatched uniform has been covered in a couple of articles I've read. Possibly even going as far as intentionally ripping jeans knees to ape what I think was originally a rent boy look which is what the song 53rd and 3rd is about from what I've read.

("Roland Carles was a butcher, he had 16 knives..." brane what are you even doing)