Strictly Come X Factor: the Potency of the Cheap and the Difficulty of Moaning about Decline

In this season of relative calm on the reality TV show front – both X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing have escorted the viewing public safely through to Christmas but not beyond – perhaps the time is opportune to take a breather and ask: have these shows become an indispensable part of our lives? If so, is this a good thing? And even: is it fair to say that they constitute evidence of a cultural decline, as their numerous critics would suggest?

There is an overwhelming temptation to reply to these questions with no, no and yes respectively.

Before writing this article, I probably would have done so. But that is the joy of writing. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E.M Forster once wondered aloud. Let’s begin.

Enter Damon Albarn

Damon Albarn spoke for many last November when he described X Factor as a ‘malignant tumour’ on our music industry. This was not a new melody for the Gorillaz songwriter to be found singing. In another interview with the BBC in 2007 he had even gone so far as to suggest, with number-plucking radicalism, that 99% of our media needs to be dismantled immediately:

“At some point in the very near future we are going to have to change our value system so dramatically, and what we deem as important and what we throw away….There’s just so many things I would alter. I think for a start you have to get rid of things like The X Factor immediately.”

I confess that I find it impossible not to read such a statement without submitting to a minor thrill of revolutionary sentiment.

Let’s agree that to certain music lovers, Albarn manifestly has an argument, not necessarily less strong because it is derived from passion (as we shall see later, this argument can never satisfactorily be won intellectually). Anybody now under the age of 30 can still remember with almost absurd nostalgia a time when ‘songwriting mattered’ and when the No. 1 pop single of the week had the option (often reneged upon) to be a relevant statement about the condition of the soul rather than a slice of ephemeral marketing.

Of course, to say that songwriting doesn’t matter anymore would probably be an equivalent of the dinosaur’s imagined exaggeration: “There will be no civilization after ours.” We still have new songs after all, so they must matter to somebody somewhere. What we do not have to anything like the degree that we had even ten years ago is the exaltation of the singer-songwriter, the Dylanesque sage speaking across a guitar to discover for us a depth within ourselves:

My love she speaks like silence

Without ideals or violence

She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful

But she’s true like ice, like fire.

In spite of Professor Ricks’ constant megaphoned insistence, lyrics like this of Dylan’s are not great poetry. Next to Yeats or Eliot it looks muddy and – as how could it not, not being a poem? – ill-metred. Even so, they are wonderful words to find in a popular song, full of strange passion and above all, a dedication to send that passion truthfully into the auditory imagination of listeners.

Accepting this and surveying the musical scene today, many will want to ask: Where did it all go wrong? A watershed moment seemed at the time (and seems in retrospect) to be the arrival of the Spice Girls and their hit single ‘Wannabe’ which spent 7 weeks at No.1 in 1996. Seeming to pile into our lives by sheer virtue of numbers, they teased us all with the chanted ultimatum:

If you wannabe my lover

You’ve got to get with my friends

Make it last forever

Friendship never ends

I can just about imagine a contrarian literary critic saying that he prefers this lyric to the Dylan, that it is a crystallized and moving plea to the would-be lover that he respect the deep friendships she has already acquired in this vale of tears before any sexual cooperation can be expected from her. As we shall see later, such a viewpoint is not possible to disprove. But the reasons for the Dylan lyric being superior – its dense clever exploration of the nuances of fidelity, its rhetorical flourishes (‘like ice, like fire’) and its subtle juxtapositions (‘speaks like silence’) – seem to me so numerous that it is galling to concede this. Here there is compression of language and meaning; in the other there is little compression, and an obvious meaning.

Nor can we say that this trend away from the Dylanesque toward Spice Girls-dom has been arrested in the years since that tempestuous catchy summer of 1996. Nowadays, it would seem that we are still being asked to celebrate a performer like X Factor victor Matt Cardle on grounds of his being able to hold a guitar and plausibly strum it. Cardle possesses a skill, of course – perhaps a good deal more skill than all the Spice Girls put together – and perhaps he may yet do better than his rendition of Come Together in week 7 of The X Factor which was performed in a desperate jiving growl when an exploration of its psychedlic strangeness would have been more interesting to this viewer.

But even the most dedicated Cardle apologist must concede that his gifts are not of the same imaginative ilk as Dylan’s or Albarn’s. Few would seriously dispute that a smaller talent is being venerated whilst a complex and vital one is being jettisoned, or worse, forgotten.

Surely, runs the argument, what we are witnessing is the most monstrous decline. Decline: that passion of the curmudgeon, the old grouch’s friend and the naysayer’s poodle.

Enter Melvyn Bragg

On this basso profondo note of misery, the argument rests for many, and shall forever remain. You can’t seriously pluck the complainer free from his complaining and it is usually very unwise to try. If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that a bull-mastiff is not less docile than the X-Factor hater.

I myself was comfortably in the Albarn camp, my position agreeably unchallenged and seemingly unchallengeable. I will not say that Melyvn Bragg’s interview with Elizabeth Day in The Observer on 9 Januray of this year constituted a moment of Road to Damascus revelation; Cardle’s music shall very rarely adorn my ears. But it did demonstrate to me the importance of something I had almost been forgetting: namely, the difficulty of moaning about decline.

In the interview, Bragg was asked about X Factor. Here is his response:

X Factor is a perfect form. It has been here since the Greeks, really, people love it and they’re right to love it. It’s got everything. The idea of “anybody” being able to walk off the street and become a star is one of the deep rags-to-riches stories in literature. It’s one of the great stories. The idea that people have a certain talent, that it is untutored, [that they] can come and just deliver is thrilling for people because they know someone like that down the street.

Aside from the possibility that there is a slight whiff here of the intellectual cheekily admitting to a liking he might not be expected to have so as to confound expectations, it would be churlish not to admit that there is some truth in this. But in order to concede the point one would have to agree that X Factor is not so much about music as it is about story-telling. For many, this is the charlatanry of the whole enterprise: it purports to be about music but is created by a man with no musical understanding or musicianship (Simon Cowell) who permits himself to masquerade throughout as a man with the musical discrimination of Leonard Bernstein.

But Bragg is right to draw our attention to the question of human nature. ‘Strange how potent cheap music is,’ a character remarks in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, and I have sometimes wondered whether that is not what we have been engaged in these last years: coming to terms with the potency of the cheap (or not coming to terms with the potency of the cheap, depending on your point of view). I sense a syllogism coming on:

X Factor is cheap art

Many humans like X Factor

Humans often like cheap art.

If there is any truth in this, it is also worth pointing out that human nature at this evolved point in human history is likely to be more static than we sometimes suppose in a fast-moving world. In War and Peace, Tolstoy warned that the moment you here a man begin a sentence moaningly with ‘These days…’ you must prepare to hear nonsense.

One doesn’t have to imagine the sort of thing Tolstoy means. The voice is shrill and familiar and all around us: “These days nobody knows what’s music and what isn’t”; “These days, all anybody cares about is fame and money”. “These days nobody has the patience, the concentration, the knowledge….”

Yes, but isn’t there a limit to the extent that people should be expected to deny their own natures and appetites? Alan Bennett once wrote in relation to Franz Kafka: “When we are on our best behaviour we are not necessarily at our best.” Well, why should we be on our best behaviour all the time? There is, in fact, nothing to say that we should.

Enter Socrates, pursued by John Carey

At the bottom of all this lies – lurks – the S word. Not Socrates. Snobbery.

For the so-called high arts are not perhaps so high as snobs would like them to be. Sophocles and Euripides competed for prizes in Athens in an atmosphere very different from that of the Bodleian Library – and one much more like a television studio than some scholars would admit. Shakespeare always made sure there was a song or a suitable innuendo, or an outpouring of comic expletives for the groundlings, a part of the audience he seems to have looked upon with uncondescending affection. Mozart was not the crude nuisance as portrayed in Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, but he was never bereft of a crowd-pleasing melody either.

We idealise and sanitise the arts to the absurd point where we might be upset to learn that Beckett played football, or that Seamus Heaney reads thrillers. Since Flaubert, artists have become priests of a flawed religion. Thousands of years ago, Socrates already knew that there was no way of proving a work of art to be good. Whilst today, Professor John Carey’s book What Good Are the Arts? provides a donnish survey of this problem which essentially amounts to an act of self-abdication of the don’s right to say he knows more about music, art or literature than anybody else.

This will seem to be good news to some people since it is democratizing. To those who had been going around considering themselves superior to others if, for example, they knew a lot about a particular poet, Carey’s book will feel like a 300 page ticking off.

It may well be that the word democracy has been vastly overused in the last few centuries. Indeed it might be possible to argue that the only two times in history when democracy has really functioned was in Socrates’ Athens and today in the Internet age: the former thanks to the manageable smallness of their society, the latter thanks to Mr. Berners-Lee et al and their astonishing technological breakthrough. The democratic signs today are abundant, but more obvious in terms of the anguish of the old order than the celebrations of new arrivals. Here is Machiavelli in The Prince:

“There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.”

Writers, artists, politicians, everybody is in shock about what the Internet has done to level the playing-field not so much financially as intellectually and in terms of the capacity to be heard. But perhaps, following Machiavelli, many are still lukewarm about their new rights and opportunities: the Internet seems, even after 10 years of widespread use, to be all too incredible.

Furthermore, sometimes this democratic right can seem trivial: it might consist of a bizarre scream in the ‘Post your comments beneath’ section under a column in The Times but it is still a scream that nobody twenty years ago had vocal chords to make, nor could it then have been heard by the writer of the column. If the right acquired can seem negligible, the life of the old order which is being lost never does. John Updike went to his grave politely wondering aloud about the death of the book; Philip Roth still does the same. The figure of the Grand Old Man of Letters is in its last generation: V.S Naipaul and Gore Vidal being about the only remaining. The plucky whiskey-sodden print journalist in the Christopher Hitchens mould may also be about to pass. And we shall never again have a remote leader of the ilk of Churchill since not even Prime Ministers now are insulated by their fragile busyness from the general noise.

We are in unprecedented territory in every regard except in respect of a) human nature and b) the impregnability of the argument that no man can prove his taste to be philosophically better than another’s. He can only say that he feels that to be so.

What we have today is the spectacle of these two static facts having been hypertrophied by what the evolutionary biologist E.O Wilson would call ‘cultural evolution’ – which is to say for our present purposes, cable television and the Internet. As a result, it will sometimes seem that more has changed at the fundamental level of the human heart than actually has.

Enter Glenn Gould

One man who certainly wouldn’t have minded the X Factor age at all was the late pianist and musical philosopher Glenn Gould.

As Geoffrey Payzant’s first-rate book Glenn Gould: Music and Mind illustrates in beautiful detail, Gould, a child prodigy concert pianist from Toronto, gave up the concert hall at the prime of his career. He did so on account of having forged a New Philosophy of music relevant to our discussion.

Gould’s philosophy sometimes seems to me an intellectual abstraction extrapolated from a shy person’s natural responses to the ordeal of submitting to the inherent stresses of giving a piano recital in front of several thousand people: Gould disliked the ‘bloodlust’ of the concert hall; he felt that people tended to attend his concerts in the hope of his making a mistake. He saw no particular difference between the mentality at a concert and the mentality at a gladiatoral contest in Ancient Rome. This was a characteristically perceptive observation. More extraordinary was his response to having made it. In the event, when Gould gave up his concert hall career, it was in favour of a recording career: the first classical musician to pursue this.

Always alive to the possibilities of technology, he was a famously fastidious artist in the recording studio, sometimes spending upwards of 30 hours splicing a single track. Yet with Gould, nothing was ever arbitrary; he always had a philosophy with which to accompany what he was doing. Put briefly, Gould believed that by technology everybody benefited. The pianist could leave the concert hall and its limitations; the composer could distribute more widely; and the audience could listen in the flexible privacy of their own homes.

This last point was the most democratising one. Gould believed that a New Listener would emerge, one who was as much an artist as the artist himself. For Gould, listening was a creative act. We all indulge in this: when we turn down our speakers or adjust the volume of one over the other we are, Gould says, listening artistically. What Gould had noticed was democracy in the turning of a volume dial.

What we have now is democracy at the touch of a laptop key or the touch of a TV remote. But it is a democracy that strains against the old Cowellesque hegemonies: the record company, and the television studio. Last year’s hit single by Rage Against the Machine which beat the X Factor winner’s single to No.1 constituted a victory for the new if only because it was more effective as protest than as song; Cardle’s going to No.1 showed how temporary victory can be. And so we are back to Machiavelli: ‘the difficulty of initiating a new order of things’.

Exeunt all

Where does all this leave the questions with which we began?

‘Have shows like the X Factor become an indispensable part of our lives?’ A plausible answer to this can be found in Bragg’s remarks. We are addicted to the rags-to-riches story and this shall probably remain the case while we still have rags and riches and any mobility between the two. So, if one thinks of X-Factor as a piece of annual reality ex tempore storytelling, the answer might well be ‘yes’.

“If so, is this a good thing?” I would respond here with a mixture of Carey and Gould. In the first place, it isn’t philosophically a bad thing. Second of all, the New Listener ought not passively moan about a state of affairs like the X Factor but instead turn the volume down if he so choses. To do so is an artistic act.

Thirdly, “Is it fair to say that shows like the X Factor illustrate a decline in our civilization?” My answer to this would be no – or yes, only if we collectively and individually suffer a failure of will and imagination.

Gould’s writings can tell us something about the appeal of the X-Factor. We are asked, or permitted, to listen creatively, to sit in on judgement. To somebody who can’t play a musical instrument, it constitutes a creative act. The music is, in my opinion, ephemeral, but this is not the same as saying the format in other hands might not have some potential to realize Gould’s dreams about a deeply engaged new listener.

We must beware snobbery if it closes our minds to a potential as yet unused. Albarn’s passion for music is a good thing, even if it is expressed in terms of disparaging music not his own. Having said that, Albarn should be careful of his aim. It is worth remembering that a devotee of classical music would certainly yearn for a more trained voice than Albarn’s which is by operatic standards ill-trained. Likewise, within the domain of classical music, a rigorous Schoenberg fan would denigrate the Mozart lover. And perhaps for a Stockhausen or Boulez admirer even Schoenberg is not sufficiently serious. Such attitudes are struck along a bogus scale which runs courtesy of caricature from unseriousness to gravity; and even if X Factor is justifiably for many somewhere near the bottom of the ladder, perhaps a sense of superiority in music at all is where the problem starts.

Socrates knew this. John Carey knows this. What Glenn Gould gave us was another vision. He wrote that the important thing is for each listener to forge his own personal heaven consisting of his most cherished artistic encounters. Only with this could the listener expect to find himself satisfactorily armed against the vicissitudes and sadnesses of life. X Factor does not do this for me, I admit, but I can no more justifiably attack it for existing than I can attack human nature.

As for my own personal heaven? I’m very fond of the piano-playing of Glenn Gould.



About the Author

Christopher Jackson is a poet and journalist. He lives in London.

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