Royal Academy Reviews May

Taking up residency as Clash’s in house music boffin is Alex Hills, a composer and lecturer in the Department of Academic Studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music.

Unaware of each song’s authors, Alex blindly merits the compositional qualities of the songs given to him by Clash, judging the best of the bunch by its perfunctory arrangement…

This month, Clash has told the story of Easter cryptically through five quasi-religious tunes.
Let’s see what Alex makes of them, and if he can guess the connecting theme...

1. Depeche Mode - ‘Personal Jesus’

This has a kind of steely, synthetic unrelenting-ness which makes me quite uncomfortable. It sticks so doggedly to one beat and chordprogression for most of quite a long song in a way that I maybe wouldn’t mind if they were either more complex or rougher - I loved ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, which takes that kind of thing much further.The lyrics appeal for a kind of personal, emotional, salvation - “your own personal Jesus” is interesting in relation to the absolutely sanitary and empty quality the sound of this has for me. Sort of a case of needing something to replace nothingness?

2. The Byrds - ‘Jesus Is Just Alright’

Oh my, I think this is Christian country. What are you people doing to me today? I really don’t know what to talk about other than that. It is quite hard for me to say much about this that is free of my views on the kind of God, guns and trucks America that actually listens to this music.

3. Bob Dylan - ‘Like A Rolling Stone’

This is Dylan, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Much more like it. There are lots of things to talk about here, most of which have already been said about Dylan - how the roughness of his voice focuses your attention on the lyrics, which are both much more complex and much more clearly delivered than in almost any other music I can think of, classical or pop. I especially like how the melodic climaxes are paced; he goes through long troughs where he is barely singing at all, really preparing the arrival at the (relatively) more tuneful moments. It is a very long and very repetitive song, too, but the pacing really makes that work well. As well as through the voice, this is achieved texturally - for instance, the nearly ever-present organ suddenly disappears at about five minutes in, and the guitar briefly starts doing something a little more complex. Not big changes, which would defeat the point, but subtle ones to keep the ear fresh. As I always bang on about, this one has earned its length.

4. The Jackson Sisters - ‘I Believe In Miracles’

More religion, this time in the funksoul mode. Disco, platforms, big afros and happy miracles all at once. Hmmmmm. I think this must be the Easter issue - we’ve had Jesus, Christianity, the Rolling Stone (subtle, and that song is well before Dylan’s own unfortunate God moment), and now a Miracle… Is the last one going to be about resurrection? This song sadly seems less than miraculous to me. It is certainly slick and well-drilled, with every wah-wah pedal and horn stab cliché beautifully in place, but it doesn’t actually take this anywhere at all. Anyone who reads this regularly must know by now that the thing in music that bores me the most is when it conforms to the clichés of its genre in an unreflective way. I can live with music that doesn’t break out from its style, but it has to engage with it more adventurously. In this musical ballpark, Sly And The Family Stone are an example of doing this sort of thing with a creativity I find pretty much absent here.

5. The Stone Roses - ‘I Am The Resurrection'

OK, this does end with ‘I Am The Resurrection’; could I be feeling any more smug right now? This is really pretty interesting, and caught me by surprise more than once. Rough edged but very musically competent British indie, from the late ’80s or early ’90s I guess, but I don’t know the song. The beginning is the kind of music that wears its influences very well; it reminds me of both Velvet Underground and The Beatles, but is in no way a copy of either of them, let alone the dread ‘generic’… It is really well directed towards the climax and the final chorus seems like a real arrival. Following on from such a strong moment, the sprawling instrumental that takes up the entire second half of the song is really risky. The radical swerves in style it takes, moving through every type of guitar playing imaginable, and another gigantic false ending about five and half minutes in, push the whole thing further to the edge of falling apart, but it picks itself up and keeps the new ideas coming. The last two minutes are a much more convincing resurrection than anything that went on at Calvary.

THE VERDICT

Obviously, these songs aren’t all actually religious, and indeed the last one is possibly, and thankfully, sacrilegious, but the theme is an interesting one. As I suspect may be obvious, I’m not much of a one for God myself, but there’s no doubt that, especially up until the nineteenth century, religious inspiration was the key to much, if not most, great music. The first four hundred years of what we now think of as classical music happened almost entirely in the church, and the unchanging cosmology of the church is reflected in exquisitely beautiful, but to modern ears very static music, by composers from Machaut to Palestrina. If we view these five songs as a mini-version of the Easter (passion) narrative, the greatest version of that is Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, unquestionably one of the most profound pieces of music ever written. However, around the 1840s things began to change (the same ideas that would lead to Nietzsche’s “God is dead”), and great art on the whole began to question the relevance of religion. Perhaps no coincidence, then, that the worst song here - the second - is the truly Christian one and the best - the last - is on the edge of blasphemy.

The winner?
THE STONE ROSES
‘I Am The Resurrection’

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Alex would like to stress the views and ideas in this article are his own, and don't reflect those of the Royal Academy of Music.