Britain's Mercury Prize for music (complete with Simon Armitage appearance) was awarded last night to another seldom-heard band, Elbow, instead of going to Radiohead, and their innovative In Rainbows. It is good to see smaller, less-known bands celebrated by such awards - but surely In Rainbows was, quite simply, the most important record event of the 21st century (so far)? Not only did it alter the way music is made available to the world, but it presented the most upbeat, and even lyrical, songs that Thom Yorke and friends had ever recorded. It's a great, great album. Perhaps its reward will be in heaven.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
I agree that In Rainbows was one of the better music releases this past year. But I think the Mercury Prize was created with the ethos of promoting talented bands and musicians whose work deserves, but is yet to reach, a larger commercial audience. And with the release of Radiohead's substantial greatest hits on the back of In Rainbows, The Bends and OK Computer being the huge musical events they were (the best albums of the 90s, I'd say), and their regular slots as big festival headliners, one can hardly say the publicity of winning the Mercury would have really benefited them. Elbow, on the other hand, are a serious, off-beat and ambitious indie-rock band that, while not as noisy as many of their more successful contemporaries, are beginning to fuse their more thoughtful and innovative side with the belting, anthemic catchiness rock bands usually require to make it big.
I'd also say that I reckon the most important mainstream record of the 21st century so far would have to go to Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future rather than In Rainbows. I'm a fan of the latter as the review on my blog testifies to, but it isn't much of a musical leap from their previous, and in my opinion, much better, work. Klaxons' debut, meanwhile (winner of last year's Mercury) is an inventive, complex, allusion-riddled and often deceptively catchy album that brilliantly fuses 90s trance and dance genres with infectious, guitar-driven indie to impressive - if not always successful - effect. You should give it a listen if you haven't.
cheers,
B