Image Bands and their Discontents

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

there's a fake-but-handy distinction that's tempting me between Theatrical image band (drawn to narrative, meaning) and Art image band (enjoying free play of image, autotelic fabulosity)

Given that distinction, I'd put Bowie on the theatrical side and Roxy on the art side. Bowie's still playing with characters, narratives, and stories. The worlds he creates feel a lot more solipsistic and illusory than Roxy's, which have a feeling of real-world community.

Hmmm. See that's coming a bit close to what NV and I were talking about on the other thread, with regard to Weighted Semiotics and Weightless Semiotics.

That the theatrical band are looking at the meaning and the narrative (and if they are dressed as Renaissance princes it is because they are doing a concept album about Machiavelli) which are weighted semiotics, and the "art" band are weightless semiotics, signifiers pointing at nothing, just for the sake of playing with image, pointing only at a reference to a reference, like Carlos D's empty gun holsters.

But the problem is, I don't see a hard and fast distinction between them. What do you do with bands who are both and neither? When everything is an image or a role, where do you say "this band are lounge lizards" or "this band are playing lounge lizards for a role, while simultaneously being lounge lizards"? Or bands that start with weightless semiotics, but then because that look now signifies *that* band and their oeuvre, it becomes weighted semiotics by association?

Semi-weighted semiotics?

The more I think about it, I don't know where the line between "doing characters and narratives in songs" and "autotelic free play of imagery" really can be drawn.

I don't even know that I *believe* in weightless semiotics at this point. Maybe it's a paradox or inherent contradiction (oh noes GEB's strange loops oh noes!)

I was complaining upthread about Carlos D and his empty gun holsters and how he said that his look was *referencing* Blixa from Neubauten, and getting frothingly angry because the imagery that Neubauten played with *meant* something, in the context of post-War Germany, while D was using empty signifiers. However, I could also argue that in the construction and then destruction of D's image, and the whole narrative that became attached to that, to go onstage now wearing that get-up would be "Signifying Carlos D" with its own complex raft of associations and meanings and god it's too tempting to call that meme the perfect viral here heehee. Weighted semiotics become weightless semiotics become weighted again, in this recursive loop of imagery.

Is it even possible to create an "original" (ha!) Image these days, or do all Images eventually collapse under the weight of too many signifiers? Would we even recognise a new original Image Band today if we saw one? Have Image Bands just been reduced to PSY-like memes in the absence of a UK weekly press for performers to peacock in, or has the endless 24 hour cycle of the internet ramped up Image Bands to the point of ubiquity?

yes, it's definitely a tricky distinction to draw - not least because as you say meaning accretes around the (puportedly) weightless, & it becomes its own new narrative (so in the most straightforward/ trad example Pistols/Maclaren/Westwood would = Art-image-disruption then signifiers harden rapidly into Punk - a reprise, of sorts of the fabulosity -> strict rules about shoe brand stuff from upthread?); I think you have to let intention in to make it make sense, tho i think the distinction between internal-to-the-work narrative & the external narrative is always prone to collapse (maybe the refusal to let it collapse is why I don't find dress-up-as-characters bands interesting?).

I think in some (if not all) cases it's about what audience you're aiming for, and perhaps counting on historical ignorance on that audience's part. Half the trick/fun of image is making fun of old people who take it too seriously. "Come on, man - don't get so worked up, it's just a jacket!" If you are angered by the weight of the signifiers, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not the intended audience.

One of the strange things about Now is that, living in a large city in the UK, I often find myself overhearing people with (say) feathers in their hair, or an arm full of prominent tattoos, talking about how they don't like pop music in general or some band in particular ... because it's 'too image-conscious', in more or less words.

Sure, that's a stock critique and we shouldn't be surprised to hear it made, but, you know, isn't it interesting to hear it from people who themselves 'dress up'. But who might not see themselves as dressing up. It feels like a situation that could only arise after a lot of pop-cultural deck-shuffling and re-shuffling.

There's a famous and probably apocryphal story about an NYPD officer entering a Frank Zappa concert sometime in the early 70s and some heckler shouting something along the lines of "Take off your uniform!" to which Zappa replied "Everyone in here is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself."

My mistake: a quick Google search reveals that it happened in London, and was actually recorded and preserved on the album Burnt Weeny Sandwich. So there you go.

it's 50/50 when i agree with Zappa but he was otm there

I think in some (if not all) cases it's about what audience you're aiming for, and perhaps counting on historical ignorance on that audience's part. Half the trick/fun of image is making fun of old people who take it too seriously. "Come on, man - don't get so worked up, it's just a jacket!" If you are angered by the weight of the signifiers, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not the intended audience.

Hmmmm.

Although this is certainly the case in many, many examples, and the *anger* is the sign (I am thinking here of the frothing hatred which the Old Men Of ILX are riled to, every time LiLo wears a Motorhead t-shirt or Lorde wears a Cramps t-shirt) I do also think that it is possible for signifiers to fail, or at least fail to reach even their *intended* audience.

(I am sorry to keep going on about Interpol, but I am kind of OCD obsessed with this band and their imagery at the moment.) But I don't think it's overly flattering myself to think that I probably *was* within Interpol's target audience in the early 00s. If I'm too old to "get it", it's only slightly too old, as 3 of that band were at high school during the same years as me. I guess what I've been curious about the whole time, is the *failure* of Interpol's image to move me, despite their image being so completely blatantly marketed towards "me" (and indeed hit a large portion of ILM in 2002) that I might as well have been walking around with a giant target on my back. Granted, that was probably way more about *hype* (which is different from "Image" and would probably require its own thread, and has indeed had many threads) than the cut of their suits or fetish gear writing cheques that their guitar tone couldn't cash.

When girls with blue hair and boys with full sleeve tattoos make comments about pop bands being "too much about image" of course they don't *mean* "too much" but "the wrong kind" or "image that appeals to the wrong people". Zappa's uniform comment being a rare example of Zappa being OTM.

(This is definitely a thing that I *do* - being as allergic to "music biz hype" as a character in a William Gibson novel, and being impossible to even begin to *digest* a band while the hype is still going on. Then, once the hype has completely disappeared, and years after the band has stopped being even unfashionably naff, I become *obsessed* with the band, and with viewing the hype like a historical document and trying to piece together how it all happened, how it worked, why people went so nuts for this. Like an archeological dig of the recent past.)

((I can actually remember the first time I did this, I was still a teenager, so this was about 86/87 or so. I went through the periodicals index of the local public library, and looked up every newspaper or magazine reference for "punk" or "sex pistols" or "the clash" or related people and topics in every year between 1976 and 1979, then went upstairs and sat in the stacks, tracing the history of the music and the people through old reviews in yellowing copies of Rolling Stone or Creem or even Time Magazine or whatever. That was my favourite thing in the world, when I was a teenager, trying to figure out music scenes and explosions that had happened just out of reach of my personal memory. And it's kind of a shock to think that in 1986, reading reviews from 1977 seemed almost impossibly ancient, such a long time previous it was almost unimaginable. While, in 2014, digging up Interpol relics from 2002 with the same glee, Interpol feels like it happened *yesterday*, when it was further ago in time than the Sex Pistols were from my 16 year old self.))

(((I don't know if this is because I am LOL old, or if music - or at least rock music - has completely stagnated. I would have to ask someone who is 16 right now, if an Interpol record feels like an ur-artefact from the dawn of time, before they were even born.)))

((((But then again, I wasn't shocked, in 1986, about how these 10 year old punk records sounded so ancient and decrepit, I was shocked that they *didn't*. When it was A Flock Of Seagulls records that sounded just embarrassingly old, y'know, older than your parents' hippie albums.))))

(((((Points to the fact, that time is eternal)))))

I think the Zappa incident was about army uniform not police.

Wonder if The Fall had a recognised image prior to the Brix era makeover.

jumpers

((I can actually remember the first time I did this, I was still a teenager, so this was about 86/87 or so. I went through the periodicals index of the local public library, and looked up every newspaper or magazine reference for "punk" or "sex pistols" or "the clash" or related people and topics in every year between 1976 and 1979, then went upstairs and sat in the stacks, tracing the history of the music and the people through old reviews in yellowing copies of Rolling Stone or Creem or even Time Magazine or whatever. That was my favourite thing in the world, when I was a teenager, trying to figure out music scenes and explosions that had happened just out of reach of my personal memory. And it's kind of a shock to think that in 1986, reading reviews from 1977 seemed almost impossibly ancient, such a long time previous it was almost unimaginable. While, in 2014, digging up Interpol relics from 2002 with the same glee, Interpol feels like it happened *yesterday*, when it was further ago in time than the Sex Pistols were from my 16 year old self.))

I did this, circa 1994/95, with CDROMS of all the broadsheet newspapers, in our school library, looking up stuff about The Stone Roses and such like from only 5-7 years previous, and that felt like a lifetime. Absolutely. And the Interpol debut feels two minutes ago.

Wow, that is so funny, and reminds me awkwardly of the age difference between us, because I can remember living through the Stone Roses and Madchester while it was happening (though obviously in another country, therefore "living through" the eyes of the press, a few weeks late because that was how long it took the NME and MM to be shipped to NY). And it's always earlier than I think, because I can remember it being a summer that I was in London on my way to a family visit. And my Dad and I spending our Heathrow stopover wandering around Soho looking at record shops and seeing kids queued up outside the Marquee or somewhere to see (oh I don't know, not one of the big bands, but, like, The High or someone) and I was still in my Glam-Goth clobber, and looking at these kids in 18" flares and thinking "OMG, I am 6 months behind, this is the ~future~!!!" and I came back from that visit having swapped bondage bracelets for lovebeads and paisley shirts and my friends were like WAHT and I was all "you'll see" and put on a Happy Mondays record haha.