Image Bands and their Discontents

Can anyone think of a band *without* an image? Because the only thing I can think of is artists where there is, literally, no image, like Gareth's weird anonymous techno records from the 80s where any information at all about the artist has been lost - except that has now become such an image in itself that people are now trying to ape it.

think of Oasis as an anti-image band, how badly Noel wants us to think of him as a builder manqué when really he belongs to Peter Noone and David Cassidy's progeny

OASIS ARE TOTALLY AN IMAGE BAND! OASIS ARE A UNION JACK GIBSON HOLLOWBODY SMASHING ON YOUR FACE FOREVER!!!!

was it haitch who talked about aussie resistance to this up there? AC/DC, Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo, "we are ordinary blokes who appreciate the simple blokey joys of playing musical instruments like some medieval minstrel. with beer."

I have an old issue of the NME from about '94 where they were taking the piss out of Noel's insistence that they didn't care about image and it was all about the music, versus how big an element their haircuts and shoes etc were in their success

...while wearing schoolboy uniforms? AC/DC automatically disqualified.

well quite but how hard Noel wants to be imageless, the dichotomy almost splits between the two brothers

BB i agree the velvets are right there at the proper ground zero of this - but like their other ideas I think it took a while to filter through more widely, hence glam as the point where it became more widespread.

plus maybe not having access to THE key 20th century art/media figure changes the nature of how the image gets manifested in the work of their later followers - iconic Bowie image from Ziggy era probably fellating Ronson's guitar on stage or the red spiky mullet, velvets' iconic image unquestionably the Warhol cover for the first record. (that starts sucking some of the velvets' power away in Warhol's direction, IMO.)

and YES it's ridiculous to be a 60 year-old schoolboy in a non-imagie band...what mental twists are going on in here tho? if you think of DC's blokeish W.C. presentation it's undermined all over the place by wee Jimmy Krankie and a dead singer whose sexuality has routinely been scrutinized for reasons unclear

If one of you has dated a model or television presenter, YOU ARE AN IMAGE BAND
If one of you has started your own fashion label, YOU ARE AN IMAGE BAND
If one of you has talked about how "it's all about the music, maaaan", you know, being "aaaalll about the music, maaaaaaaan" IS A FUCKING IMAGE

x-post

is the fundamental image dichotomy "we are just like you" vs "we are nothing like you" ?

massive xps

totally, yes, I see that on the VU, but Bowie/Roxy feel to me like ground zero because of their success maybe? Like here is where the image band takes over, runs the charts, etc. There are some other distinctions – the visual drive feels more internal, intrinsic or permanent for B/R (art students v roaming avant-garders?) – but they seem to define the field in Britain for a pop generation or two.

I don't think that acknowledging the debt to Warhol invalidates the Velvets' power in any way - in fact, being aware enough to know that they should work with Warhol, and when to leave, shows the Velvets to be way smarter than "throwing power away".

OK, I see the point now - Velvets were never on Top of the Pops; Bowie/Roxy etc were.

That whole dichotomy of "like you" / "not like you" involves an inherent *assumption* about who "you" is, though?

I feel a fuck of a lot more affinity with "genderqueer alien from planet bowie" than I will ever feel with "authentic, northern working class bloke" because of who I am.

And that old dichotomy, of Oasis = authentic working class blokes therefore "real" / Blur = soft southern art school ponces therefore "fake" - you know, I am soft, I am southern, I went to an art school during the brief time I managed tertiary education...

The association of "art school" with "Image Band" is pretty strong, from The Who on, like, I can't discuss Blur without bringing up Goldsmiths like I can't discuss Interpol without bringing up NYU (and anyone who tries to tell me "NYU is not an art school," come on, it's like Goldsmiths. The fact that you can major in French literature or whatever does not make it Not An Art School.) But this is what brings class into it - NYU was "art school for rich kids" where "art school" in the UK implies a mixing of classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDKF8KkD7rE

thinking about Oasis and image, I find it hard to draw the line between stuff that was self consciously affected, and stuff like their mancunian accents that were legit but became part of their image (and I guess there more general 'northerness' which was real but surely self conscious to some extent as well?)

their more general

when i say "like you" i'm thinking of the fanbase - the "like you" Image is about reassuring fans of your "normality", your connection to them, the same clothes, the same attitudes. and of course this likeness becomes another feedback loop, no doubt public school Oasis fans morphing into their idols to some extent as much as any other fan-relationship

as i said before, the huge irony of Oasis' "northern working class" shtick is that a generation before them ANYBODY playing in a pop group wd be identified as the ponciest of the poncey in northern working class terms

when i say "like you" i'm thinking of the fanbase - the "like you" Image is about reassuring fans of your "normality"

But STILL, who is the fanbase? This is already assuming a fanbase with an idea of what "normal" comprises! And "normal" varies wildly.

sure. which wd bring us into the whole realm of "reading against", i think, which wd be very interesting. fans who get into an artist despite the artist's Image being strongly "not aimed at you or about you"

Oasis's fanbase included both authentic, northern working class blokes and middle class southern student types and they presumably processed to the "like you" / "not like you" thing in different ways?

i guess i started down this road because i'm wondering who Bowie/Roxy/Velvets were defining themselves against? and i thought about early Fleetwood Mac and their dress code being like "camouflaged amongst their audience" and why that might be the case

my initial inclination is to say, "all bands are image bands" (all artists are image artist, w/e), but i realize that such a response doesn't add much to the conversation. thing is, i think all people are "image people", that everyone's in drag all the time, in their clothes, persona, communication, etc. i pretty much have to start from there.

in the 80s, proto-indie punk & hc bands like the minutemen and husker du were often praised for their lack of image. they played and were photographed in worn, shabby, everyday casual & work wear, nothing fancy or otherwise attention-grabbing. this styling, as deliberate as any despite its dgaf trappings, was taken by fans as a badge of authenticity, a symbol of the artists' opposition and superiority to what was often labeled something like "prefabricated, soulless, commercial pop culture". the UK press seemed at leas as interested in the hair and dress of the first sub pop seattle bands as they were with the music. charles peterson's photos helped cement and sell a very specific image of the scene. a few years later, grunge style had become a risible fashion cliché: hideous thrift store sweaters, artfully ripped jeans, bedhead, mangy flannels & dr. martins.

maybe we classify bands as image bands based on our sense of how much emphasis they place on their image, the curatorial care taken. by that standard, i'd say that the white stripes and strokes were image bands in much the same way. the difference, i suppose, is as bb notes, the white stripes seemed to have constructed their image from within a rather personal field of interests & references, while the strokes were more engaged with the mainstream urban fashion of their day. doesn't incline me to think of the latter less in terms of their image. were duran duran more "imagey" than devo? no, just different. they both obviously invested a great deal of care and thought into curating their presentation. i get that dd were trying to look cool & sexy by then-current fashion standards, while devo were just being deliberately weird, but i nevertheless think of them both as image bands.

http://s.pixogs.com/image/R-376907-1235055164.jpeg

^ image band

like by the time Bowie is a big thing loads of his fans are dressing in ways he has inspired but when he came up with Ziggy Stardust i doubt it was because he wanted to reflect his fans back at themselves

(It's also weird to me that you guys are picking "Bowie/Roxy" as ground zero, when to me "Ground Zero" is so clearly the Velvet Underground

ground zero is waaaaay before the velvets. the beatles were very carefully crafted images/styles/etc, and, hell, they made what were basically art house movies about theselves to make sure everyone got it. elvis was an ever-changing series of carefully crafted images. go back another couple generations and you will land on the carter family, who were carefully dressed, and carefully posed in photographs, to project "hillbilly," which is something they were not. i'm sure someone better steeped in history could take it back centuries before that.

and i know you don't want to focus too much on innate beauty in this thread, but good looks have mattered to all kinds of artistic success since the beginning of time. singers, actors, painters, poets -- as a group, they tend to look better than the rest of us, regardless of their gender. looks are an absolute advantage to popular success in every genre of music, from classical to jazz to pop and beyond. studies have shown that even in the corporate world, better looking people, both male and female, tend to have more success. looks are a part of image, and they are unavoidable.

contenderizer makes many good points.

wow so many x-posts

sure. which wd bring us into the whole realm of "reading against", i think, which wd be very interesting. fans who get into an artist despite the artist's Image being strongly "not aimed at you or about you"

This kind of gets at the nub of Image Bands and what drives their popularity. Because when it comes down to it, Duran Duran - the bulk of their fanbase were not male; were not from The Midlands, in fact not even British; were certainly not fashionable, we were actually totally uncool teenage bands.

And yet that "aimed at" was in terms of DD being portrayed as objects of desire for the female gaze, even while they wrote entire damn songs about The Male Gaze.

This is where it gets complicated by gender, because (straight) men looking at men, it's considered to be "you can be like this" while with (straight women) and gay men looking at men, there's always that weird double identification/arousal of "do you want to *be* like this" (like you) versus "do you want to *fuck* this?" (totally unlike you). This is why I can't look at this without bringing gender into it. Because the perceived "you" in the "you" of Oasis's fanbase that they are supposed to be "like" has an inherent image of masculinity attached which is just not attainable to many fans.

we were actually totally uncool teenage bands GIRLS.

i do suspect that wholehearted, live-it-breathe-it dedication to a single TOWERINGLY COOL IMAGE that seems emblematic of the exact right place to be in the larger cultural moment might be the sole property of the young (or naïve). as you get older, your field of references widens and you, as a necessary consequence, fall out of step with culture as it is being invented and perceived as "NEW!" within freshly-minted minds.

so perhaps only young artists and fans can invest passionately enough in the fashionable image to really be "of the image", hence "image bands". just thinking aloud...

I can't even count the number of girls I personally know that started playing bass or forming bands or whatever, because of Duran Duran, so it's an understandable mistake.

But identifying with "the people onstage" is complex and takes many different forms.

yeah BB i have been coming from a distinctly homosocial position throughout this morning's thought process

many xps to bramwell - not throwing their power away, just that some would still probably shorthand the velvets as 'the Warhol band', just because he's such a huge figure. Roxy heads would know, say Anthony Price's role in their look but he doesn't dominate in the same way.

the Aussie thing NV mentioned many posts up - AC/DC absolutely not a part of it for reasons mentioned, plus Bon quite campy for a front man of that era here. (Robert Forster wrote well on how Angus is stuck with the school kid outfit for all time a few years back.) but the sound they codified got adopted by the following generation, so they influenced it. also comes from local mistrust of UK music press hype machine, earliest manifestation probably the Saints' experience when they went to england - "we were better, but weren't wearing the 'right' clothes."

http://www.dexys.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/coming_to_town.jpg.w300h367.jpg

probly my favourite Image Band

Contendo, this is something I wrote about Suit Bands while discussing Interpol last night, but moved on because mh hadn't even bothered to notice the phrase "suit bands". But the thing you wrote on grunge bands and anti-style as "authenticity" just reminded me of it, and I had it still open in another tab, so:

Suit Bands: OK, in the mid 90s, Grunge was huge and inescapable, and just flattened the musical landscape, in New York City as everywhere else. There was a "Grunge Boutique" at Macy's, selling pre-ripped jeans for hundreds of dollars, and you could not go to a show without seeing just a sea of flannel.

It originally started with the mod boys, who wore suits because they rode scooters and listened to Blur. But it spread outside the mod/60s garage/Minds Eye scene, as a reaction against Grunge. If you want to stand out at a gig at Brownie's where everyone is wearing flannel and ripped jeans, you turn up wearing a three-button suit, even if it's a shitty second hand suit from Dompsey's Warehouse, you get attention. It was deliberately turning away from all that Pacific Northwest stuff, and turning your eye instead to British groups and European fashion and caring about style. I remember one of my bands playing this ridiculous art school party around NYU, and turning up, and it was like something out of "Sophisticated Boom Boom" - the girls were wearing formals, the boys were wearing ties, and it was like an anti-grunge costume party. It was about suits, and drinking cocktails at places that were called "Lounges" instead of Bars.

I have no idea if these were the same people, who hung around the same places, who eventually coalesced into a "scene" or if it was just a general cultural shift. But "suit bands" in the late 90s, were totally a thing

I do have to say, that in my personal experience, playing a lot of shitty shows at the Pyramid Club in the early 90s, while there were drag revues going on downstairs, really shaped a lot of both my attitudes around "dressing up to go onstage as a performance" as well as shaping my awareness that *all* image was an image, including "going onstage in the clothes we wear in the street" (but what if you dressed like a suit band On The Street*, as it were?) as well as the idea that all gender was a performance, even "default gender".

*This is the last I'm going to say about my brother or Interpol, or anything, but I found the interview I posted on the other thread so funny, because in the early 90s, when my brother was "majoring in neo-Fascism at Columbia", he used to put on a suit and tie every day in class as a gesture of "solidarity with the Leisure Class", and then he'd come downtown and stick out like a sore thumb at one of my gigs, even though I was also wearing a suit and tie. (He would tut at this and tell me "you know what they say about girls who wear ties?" and when he told me they were all lesbians, hmmmm, yes, do you think I'm trying to tell people anything? *goes and snogs my band's singer's girlfriend just to show who has the real pulling power in the band*)

Anyway, sorry, total derail. No more.

lol i used to do gigs in a jacket and tie because i'd been at work at the Inland Rev during the day

but also because i hated indie grebos tbf

many xps to bramwell - not throwing their power away, just that some would still probably shorthand the velvets as 'the Warhol band', just because he's such a huge figure. Roxy heads would know, say Anthony Price's role in their look but he doesn't dominate in the same way

N, please!

But also thinking about this, I was drawing the connections between Blur -> Goldsmiths and Interpol -> NYU and thinking "now I just know that Bowie, also went to art school, didn't he...?" but being unable to name the school. So I guess, yeah, Bowie/Roxy seemed more self-driven, and not linked to a specific artist or school or movement.

did typical Punk or Metal costumery originate with artists rather than audience,

there were so many paths. richard hell's ripped t-shirts were the doing of a guy who was kind of simutaneously artist and fan. whereas by the time ripped t-shirs and safety pins and graffiti fashion got to the sex pistols and their contemporaries, aspiring couture designers (who would eventually become actual couture designers) were deliberately influencing the mix. as for metal, I've always loved the story that rob halford's influential leather get-up was basically a way for a closeted gay man to project his true identity in broad daylight.

was thinking about Rob Halford when i wrote that and it seems so obviously at least a part truth to me

I've never thought of Duran Duran as an image band in terms of their look (the Rio videos are a different matter) - they had a style, certainly but I always thought they just dressed in the fashions of the time rather than having an image in the way that, say, Adam and the Ants did (I wasn't 'around' at the time though so I might have got this completely wrong).

massive xps again

yes - Dexys are fascinating to me in this context because they are such a deliberate, self-conscious and dramatic image band, but collapse much of what's sketched above - not art school, strong appeal to a kind of bloke that one expects to be repelled from the image-band proper, constantly and explicitly hammering towards the sort of 'truth' that isn't an easy fit here.

Suit Bands: OK, in the mid 90s, Grunge was huge and inescapable, and just flattened the musical landscape, in New York City as everywhere else. There was a "Grunge Boutique" at Macy's, selling pre-ripped jeans for hundreds of dollars, and you could not go to a show without seeing just a sea of flannel.

It originally started with the mod boys, who wore suits because they rode scooters and listened to Blur. But it spread outside the mod/60s garage/Minds Eye scene, as a reaction against Grunge. If you want to stand out at a gig at Brownie's where everyone is wearing flannel and ripped jeans, you turn up wearing a three-button suit, even if it's a shitty second hand suit from Dompsey's Warehouse, you get attention. It was deliberately turning away from all that Pacific Northwest stuff, and turning your eye instead to British groups and European fashion and caring about style.

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), last nigh

i suppose this sort of thing is always push-pulling back and forth. new wave stylishness replaces freedom rock sideburns, is overturned by slacker chic, which falls to the cocktail revival, and so on. "suit bands" come in and go periodically.

there is something suspect about treating "ordinary" dress as a badge of authenticity. this approach seems to devalue created/creative identity, to consider heteronormativity (especially supposedly "styleless" masculinity within that) as more real and respectable than other forms of self-presentation.

huge x-posts bcz I've been to the shops, but BOOM!

lol i used to do gigs in a jacket and tie because i'd been at work at the Inland Rev during the day

― the undersea world of jacques kernow (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 12:03 PM

This got me thinking about how much of early Joy Division's "shirt and tie" image was down to their dayjobs. Which got me thinking about Kim Deal and her "turn up and play gigs wearing her secretary's skirts" which got me to: BOOM!

The ultimate Non-Image band, in my mind: Pixies.

Because the Pixies never ever registered as anything other than "generic slacker dude college bro jeans and t-shirt and flannels band" and their Non-Image Image seemed almost deliberately in counterpoint to the weirdness of their music and extremity of their lyrics. But that is the *thing* - Pixies were Gay Dude, Racially Ambiguous Dude, Female Dude and Drummer Dude - and yet somehow, even though all of those ways of Being Other would be The Issue, in any other band, their deliberate coding as "Utterly Generic Dude" was this brilliant way of casting their Other status(es) into negative space.

Which made me start thinking about Husker Du again - Husker Dudes, more like - and wondering how much of that beflannelled, down to earth "we don't have an image" was about coding as Straight Acting (Butch) Gay Dudes in the hyper-masculine hardcore scene out of which they grew. Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

And it's weird that these two seminal (LOL) bands of the whole grunge aesthetic came from this place which got overwhelmed by a sea of cis-het ex-metal dudes in flannel. (OK, I'm willing to contest Kurt as "cis-het" but the whole Grunge Explosion and Grunge Boutiques in Macys? Come on.)

as for metal, I've always loved the story that rob halford's influential leather get-up was basically a way for a closeted gay man to project his true identity in broad daylight

Yeah, good point, this should be on the Image Band 101 syllabus course, here, definitely.

(Do you know how tempting it was to tell teenage metal dudes affecting the styles of their heroes "um, you do know you're wearing a cock ring there, right?" Oh, precarious masculinity, thy name is str8 boy youth.)

And no, I think that history has written the image of the 80s so completely that Duran read as "following fashion" when they were the ones that set the style?

Not so much talking about the original romo, but that kind of "Nagel prints come to life" white trousers and pastels thing - they predated Miami Vice with that look, though that look has come to read "80s" through Miami Vice. That's my memory of it, and I was around them.

yes - Dexys are fascinating to me in this context because they are such a deliberate, self-conscious and dramatic image band, but collapse much of what's sketched above - not art school, strong appeal to a kind of bloke that one expects to be repelled from the image-band proper, constantly and explicitly hammering towards the sort of 'truth' that isn't an easy fit here.

And then you end up onstage at Reading wearing a negligee and suspenders? My eyes may never recover.

Husker Du's workmanlike clothes stop seeming to be about being "authentic" but about another kind of *passing*.

interesting idea, but hard to say. mould's dress sense hasn't changed much over the years.

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/26640591/Bob+Mould+Mould2009.jpg

Another thing I'm trying hard not to think about because: Carlos D is the whole overlap between the Goth/Industrial scene and the Fetish scene?

And then you end up onstage at Reading wearing a negligee and suspenders? My eyes may never recover.

(After I typed this, I realised that with its jokey sentiment, it might seem hypocritical, or even gender-queering-phobic, but I just wanted to say that my discomfort was not with a man dressed in lingerie. It was with Kevin Rowland dressed in lingerie, and very specifically, Kevin Rowland simulating rimming with two women dressed as sex workers at 2pm in a field in Reading. Stuff plays differently in different settings, and that was something that just really came off as tacky and gross, rather than intriguing or provocative or interesting or naughty.)

interesting idea, but hard to say. mould's dress sense hasn't changed much over the years.

Why would Mould's dress sense change? What would that have to do with it?

Thanks for the Springsteen link! Talking on this thread seems to have turned into writing a 180000 word LOLnovel about image bands and non-image-bands and their discontents so I'm hungrily sucking all of this up as "research".

I guess I know what that P4k link on Clark was *trying* to say, using her former bands' costumes as "look at the leap from session player wearing other people's costumes to fully informed auteur" but it just fed into my irritation with the way that men are usually described doing stuff and women are usually described wearing clothes and I've tried to spend the entire thread flipping that around, noting both that "men wear clothes too" and also, "wearing clothes" is not just a portable meme but means something, depending on what the clothes are.

Tim De Laughter's alumni have turned up in all sorts of other bands I rate, and I never saw anyone describe what Benjamin Curtis or Phil Karnats were doing as "wearing robes" as opposed to "playing drums/guitar/etc" so it does irk a bit. There are times when discussing an artist's aesthetics feels interesting and worthy, and times when it feels like a lazy shortcut. I don't know what the difference is, though, because Clark talking about her stage set and her album cover choices and her choreography in the Village Voice interview over on the other thread was actually extremely interesting and provided a view into her working methods that really went beyond "wearing clothes".

Mumble, grumble, typical Branwell complaints, I know.

OH MY GOD THIS HAS BEEN STARING ME IN THE FUCKING FACE HOW COULD I NOT HAVE SEEN THIS

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.

...

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.

And then in this comic book I'm reading about postmodernism, in the section on feminism, I find this:

Male theories of sexuality - Freud's or Lacan's - literally cannot think of a woman except as negatively imaginary, incomplete, an empty signifier (the vacant womb).

Empty holsters. The empty signifier. FFS, the latin word "vagina" literally means scabbard - in the modern sense of weaponry, a holster is a literal linguistic vagina. THIS BAND ARE WALKING AROUND WITH LITERAL AND SIGNIFIED VAGINAS HANGING ALL OVER THEM.

I think I just broke mine own head. *dies*

I'm not sure what the appropriate thread for this is important cultural artefact is, but I'm just going to leave this here:

https://24.media.tumblr.com/0345403877347715f85e36d741933a2d/tumblr_n4p8ebQoD71txg5hvo1_400.jpg