Image Bands and their Discontents

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)

the sort of sub-tom waits Serious Spooky Man shteez of nick cave/massive attack is one of my least fav things.

I always get the sense that the ramones would look and sound exactly the same if they were a pee wee baseball team except for that one ramone who became an investment banker

WOW. This piece is like the apotheosis of ~Image Band~

And as I was reading it, I my head was tilting further and further to the side, going "wow, this shit is more fucked up than my heights-of-mania thoughtworms" to the point where I actually started believing it was a parody.

Then I saw the byline at the bottom, and I think I actually woke up my upstairs neighbours with my fit of hysterical laughter. Oh, ILX, what have you done to me.

http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/carlos-d-leaves-interpol-three-

Misogyny in My Friends Told Me About You is an effusion of imagination that results from the catatonic rupture occurring in the psyche of the famed -ego from the onset of celebrity. It is a component of the epic complex of suspicion and paranoia that constitutes the empirical tableau exhibited across the photographic slideshow of then film’s display case. The failure to establish a reliable temporal axis of linearity and the excursiveness of the event horizon of the film’s narrative are necessarily symptomatic narrative structures emanating from this epic complex, of which misogyny is but one component.

Morbs.... is that *you*?

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.

dunno much about no pretty fings, but the ramones and birthday party strike me as textbook image bands, the former almost the platonic ideal

Pretty Things invented the Concept Album. Therefore, *canonical* Image Band.

Also, if your members have been used as background decoration in any kind of indie or arthouse film, you are almost certainly an Image Band (covers both Ramones and Birthday Party tbh, as well as every person who has ever been in an Alan Cox film (looking at you, The Clash and Courtney Love))

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.

― the drummer is a monster (Scik Mouthy), Friday, February 14, 2014 5:34 AM (2 days ago)

yeah, no, bands as brands is the perfect way to phrase the idea. as you suggest, it's especially apt as frame for dissonance between an audience's perceptions and expectations. boringly obv example = dylan going electric and fucking up the program for many of his folk fans. they'd bought into an existing image and felt betrayed by the rebranding. thinking about nicki minaj in the present moment. i want to invest in nicki the rapper, but get thrown by nicki the popstar.

yes, for Birthday Party, i think Cave has always thought v hard about his image, plus

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/76280302/The%2BBirthday%2BParty%2B%2B%2BTracy%2BPew.jpg

circling back round to pick at Roxy - what's the distinction between Roxy dress-up and Prog dress-up? I don't know if they can be pulled apart (because I know little about Prog) - Roxy/Bowie cut the image freer from meaning?

The horror of being scene as effeminate

Nice work btw

Perhaps Roxy dress-up (in relation to prog) coded itself more strongly as self-consciously artificial rather than fantasist, and worked more explicitly in relation to the celebration of fashion-as-artifice in their album art?

I watched a prog on iPlayer just now called something like "danny baker rocks the 70s" (not to be confused with another, longer prog on there called something like "danny baker and the rockin 70s", which is apparently sth different) and it was basically THIS THREAD, the show: extraordinary clips of Vivian stanshall, the who, eno (doing 7 deadly Finns!), Kate bush, the damned, nick lowe, Gabriel's genesis, the specials, all of whom were doing amazing things with how they were presenting themselves (in v v different ways) and all introduced by this bespectacled, quintessential Unassuming Bloke in an awful print shirt. A welcome transmission on a hungover Sunday