SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E15
and in it, a mountainously pretty,
chuggy, Delfonics-on-holiday
track titled “Long Hot Summer”
that abandoned the Jam’s laddish
grimace for sun-fevered smiles
and shots of Weller luxuriating
topless on a gondola.
Later came other iterations of
this new little prince: The video
for “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” a deli-
ciously syrupy song with its own
scat section, stars a fez-clad
Weller pensively staring into a
hand mirror in a vacant English
manor; “Wanted (Or Waiter,
There’s Some Soup in My Flies)”
has him in pinstripes in a night-
club’s practice room. But it was
the Style Council’s biggest, breezi-
est, brassiest hit, “My Ever Chang-
ing Moods,” that crowned Weller
into what biographer Iain Munn
called a “fair-skinned Smokey
Robinson,” earned him his high-
est-selling single, and allowed the
1984 album it came from, “Café
Bleu,” to catapult him toward the
top of a twinkling constellation of
sophisti-pop superstars that
shared the bourgie grandeur of
his rebrand. From the Blue Nile’s
fedora-clad euphoria in “Hats,” to
Scritti Politti’s drop-top-friendly
“Cupid & Psyche 85,” to the span-
gly nightclub gauche of “Animal
Magic” by a band titled the Blow
Monkeys — cunningly, sophisti-
pop turned the crisis of money
into a fetish object.T
he beauty of a compilation
usually lies in the way it can
refashion a band’s narrative
by sequencing songs into some-
thing resembling a coherent
statement of purpose. Out of their
15-plus official and unofficial col-
lections, “Long Hot Summers” is
the Council’s tellingest for how it
makes clear sophisti-pop’s new-
money-in-drag act was more than
an indulgence that foiled fanta-
sies against the formlessness of
life for so many in the United
Kingdom. In 1984, the same year
“Café Bleu” was released, unem-
ployment had reached its apex at
11.8 percent. With chronic job-
lessness, an upswing in poverty
and a grand undoing of the social
welfare state, the Style Council —
backed by their historically punk-
grown politics — seemed unique-
ly suited to coat some agitation in
velvet.
Glorious, gaudy titles like
“Come to Milton Keynes” are
wisely included at the heart of the
compilation. It’s a dreamy, par-
adisal track — with requisite horn
sections and jazz drums — asking
for suicide in the face of the Con-
servative Party’s regime. Their
class-consciousness-raising an-
them “Walls Come Tumbling
Down” starts with, “You don’t
have to take this crap,” meeting
the equally unsubtle anima in the
swingtime standard “Dropping
Bombs on the Whitehouse” or the
complex snub to Thatcher’s boot-
strapping politics in “Life at a Top
Peoples Health Farm.”
Actively oppositional stances
wound their way across and into
sophisti-pop canon like sharp fili-gree. Bands like the Blow Mon-
keys would go on to write songs
that would literally detail raving
on Thatcher’s grave (the track is
called, incredibly, “(Celebrate)
The Day After You”), whereas
bands like Wet Wet Wet built into
their name a triplet celebration of
what the prime minister referred
to her “wimpish” opponents as:
“Wets.” Members of Hue & Cry —
of the Sly Stone-ish single, “La-
bour of Love” — went on-record in
an interview to note their hit was
really a polemic “about the love
affair that existed between parts
of the British working class and
Margaret Thatcher.” One could
probably do no better, though,
than the title of Heaven 17’s al-
bum, “Penthouse and Pavement”
— the twin battlegrounds govern-
ing British life and sophisti-pop’s
concerns.
Just as soon as it had started, in
1985, Weller, once again, felt the
windy whip of change. Egged on
by the coaxing hand of left-wing
activist and singer-songwriter,
Billy Bragg, the Style Council
joined the front of a cavalcade of
sophisti-pop comrades including
Heaven 17, Prefab Sprout and the
Blow Monkeys to form a collective
of musicians who called them-
selves the “Red Wedge.” They held
“a simple remit: to oust Margaret
Thatcher from office, and by de-
fault return the Labour Party to
power.”I
n its early ’90s descent —
marked by Labour’s loss of the
1987 general election, the Red
Wedge’s dissolution and the Style
Council disbanding shortly there-
after — sophisti-pop is ultimately
remembered as a world rife with
not-unpleasant cognitive disso-
nances. It loved and lavished new
money, yet found ways to make a
burlesque of it; it was a style that
sometimes yearned for freedom
from class trappings while often
remaining performatively glued
to them. Its real legacy, though —
its pathos and odd magic — is in
how it smoothed the mess of the
moment into radio-ready coher-
ence; how it aestheticized the
pomp of politics into song.
Weller certainly endures — his
status as silver-foxed icon re-
mains strong across the Atlantic,
his stint as a councilman is end-
lessly torn apart by Jam purists
and is now of the not-unpolitical,
pastoral singer-songwriter ilk.
Stateside, however, sophisti-pop
proper lives mostly now within
banal retail atmospheres — de-
partment stores, groceries and
pharmacies — like a charming
Muzak meant to drain and tem-
per a mood to stasis. This is not to
say that the genre was lost in
translation, nor that it’s now only
good for the amniotic state neces-
sary to buy toothpaste or Q-tips,
but only that it’s a sick, savage
irony to see that it has been rele-
gated to do what pop, sophisticat-
ed or otherwise, has always done
best: stylishly manage to keep
things moving.
[email protected]BY MINA TAVAKOLIT
he protests and riots had
become quotidian. A
health crisis plagued the
nation. Class disparity
was chasmic, inflation had
reached a point of inanity and the
country seemed to hang its head
in shame.
Just as most happy eras are
alike in similar ways, periods of
darkness have more in common
than they’re usually given credit
for, and London in the early ’80s
seems a not-so-distant reality
from one we’re very familiar with.
Pop music, as it does today, was
operating in the usual manner —
songs built on platitudes and pro-
test dominated the radio — but, in
this dimension, a stranger, silkier
and somehow spikier faction had
quietly snaked its way to the top
of national consciousness. Out of
the fog and concrete came a style
of pop that blended love ballads,
fantasy and anti-establishment
attitude with all the smoothness
of a laxative chew.
The Style Council — an impish-
ly named band whose fifth official
career-spanning retrospective
collection, “Long Hot Summers:
The Story of the Style Council,”
was released i n September — held
court at the top of a pantheon of a
very English genre born and laid
to rest in the Thatcher era, now
retroactively called “sophisti-
pop.” Consciously or otherwise, it
was a form dedicated to the slip-
page between style and sub-
stance.
Its stars were gangly and un-
muscled, but they could pass as
debonair in the right suit, a good
coif and a close-up. They adored
soul music, high-hold mousse and
shared the energy of yupped-up
slicksters or corner office-con-
tenders, but were too naturally
pasty and left-leaning to be real
proto-Patrick Bateman-types. Pa-
tently nouveau-riche, white-col-
lared to the point of costume, and
obsessed with the unctuous
cream of a saxophone solo, this
was a breed of artists of a new
caliber, as conspicuous in their
consumption as they were teth-
ered to the contradictions of class.
They shared some of the resent-
ments and furies of punk, ska and
hip-hop — politicized genres by
nature — but in their cashmere
sweaters and emphatically new-
moneyed glamour, they broad-
cast mixed signals to a mass audi-
ence.
“Long Hot Summers,” and the
sophisti-pop mania that it chroni-
cles, can be read as a faithfulAnarchy in
the U.K. —
but make
i t stylish
BY SEBASTIAN SMEE“I
only go out,” wrote Lord
Byron, “to get me a fresh
appetite for being alone.”
I sometimes wonder if
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
wasn’t a little Byronic. When he
“went out,” he painted so well. His
stylized, anonymized crowd pic-
tures perfectly conjure the idea of
the hive mind: the buzz and whir
of collective intelligence. But
there remains in all his jaunty,
swaying scenes of communal life
a secretive, feline quality, as if he
were determined to retain a right
to solitude, to singularity.
In the foreground of “Fulton
and Nostrand,” which hangs in
the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a
cat. It casts a spiky, syncopated
shadow, like a chord cluster by
Thelonious Monk. The creature’s
neck appears connected to a taut
black line that my eyes initially
read as a leash, so that I almost
mistook it for a dog. But no: It’s
unmistakably a cat, and that line
resembling a leash is actually a
shadow cast by a walking stick.
The stick’s handle is hooked
around the forearm of a woman
who grips her daughters’ shoul-
ders as, under a cop’s eye, they
negotiate the gorgeous anarchy at
the intersection of Fulton and
Nostrand streets, in the Bedford-
Stuyvesant neighborhood of
Brooklyn. It’s the 1950s.
Lawrence’s scenes of everyday
life tend to be modestly scaled
(this one is 24 by 30 inches, quite
large for him) but they’re dense
with life. His vision was kaleido-
scopic, attentive to peculiarities
and always a little opaque. In-
stead of being transparent and
airy, like a view through a freshly
washed window, they’re airless,
angular, slightly resistant.
The medium is part of it. Law-
rence painted in tempera, a fast-
drying, egg-based medium thatbinds colored pigments and has
none of oil paint’s translucency.
But the bigger part is Lawrence’s
sense of pictorial rhythm — his
own, wholly original adaptation
of Picasso’s and Braque’s cubism.
Life itself — being alive — has a
rhythm. It derives from all itsgathered moments of resistance
and flow. The dynamic is fueled in
part by the tension between inner
life and company (Byron’s “being
alone” and “going out”). Law-
rence painted this rhythm.
Standing in front of “Fulton
and Nostrand,” you first take inthe pattern of forms, colors and
shapes, and you see that it’s mod-
ern. It emerged, that is, from a
period in art history when flat-
ness, colors and shapes took pre-
cedence over narrative and illu-
sionism.
But Lawrence yields only somuch to the prevailing taste for
abstraction. He loved people. He
loved street life. He loved narra-
tive, psychology and secrets. All
of which he squeezed into this
picture.
There’s a lot going on. Notice
the stripes — little bursts of opti-
cal intensity scattered across the
left half of the picture. Appreciate
the jazzy interplay between blue
shapes and red. The windows in
the building have jiggled free. The
picture itself is divided (but not in
the middle) by a red streetlamp.
And the scale is out of whack.
That’s the abstract part of it.
Now notice the strange feeling
between the couple on the left.
The woman with red hair has her
hand through the man’s arm. Her
body is tilted oddly, and she
seems to cast a questioning
glance his way. He looks tense; his
hand holds a cigarette. What
bombshell has he just dropped,
feigning casualness?
But Lawrence resists our curi-
osity: He distracts us with store
signs for a pawnshop, a florist, a
place to hire or purchase tuxedos.
Through a window, a man can be
seen helping a customer into a
jacket. In the foreground another
man in a tan suit carries a brightly
colored bird cage, replete with
green bird.
A lot of postwar art that was
self-consciously modern became
more and more reductive, distill-
ing experience and sensation into
crystalline visions that became
emptier even as they became big-
ger.
Lawrence said no. It doesn’t
have to be like that. Life is com-
plex. His small, hard, busy and
astonishingly artful paintings re-
flect that complexity, even as they
capture the dance of life: the
rhythm of yielding and obstruc-
tion, block and flow, shouting and
silence, cats and company.
[email protected]GREAT WORKS, IN FOCUSThere’s a rhythm to be captured in the scene at a corner in Brooklyn
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART; MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM H. MARLATT FUND; THE JACOB AND GWENDOLYN KNIGHT LAWRENCE FOUNDATION; ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETYJacob Lawrence
(b. 1917)Fulton and
Nostrand, 1958On view at the Cleveland
Museum of Artdocument of the incoherence and
instability of capital in an inco-
herent and unstable state — a
testament to how meaningfully
money can soothe and confound,
or free and bind. It might reason-
ably be seen as a flourishy blip,
campy ephemera or an uncom-
monly excellent case in pop’s
mimicry of the mood of an excep-
tionally twisty epoch. What was
uncontestable — especially dur-
ing a moment when most things
felt like a tough swallow — was
that it was a movement that
seemed to go down remarkably
easily.
***
In the huddled land of what
Prime Minister Margaret Thatch-
er tellingly termed the “haves”
and “have-nots,” Britain in the
early ’80s was experiencing tec-
tonic convulsions of economic
disorder. New-wavers, two-tone
artists and bohemians — as they
were wont to do — made much of
their disgust toward the state.
Whether the dorky, nasal war-
blings of Elvis Costello, the neces-
sarily politicized skankings of the
Beat and the Specials, or the eter-
nally fabulous sulk of one Steven
Patrick Morrissey, the world of
English alternative wrought its
own thematic canon out of ag-
gressively rejecting Thatcher.
(Punk, to nobody’s surprise, bris-
tled especially hatefully with
songs bearing titles like “How
Does it Feel (To Be the Mother of a
Thousand Dead).”)
A band called the Jam — a
rascally, jangly, skinny-tied, mod-
rock troupe — had, until its disso-
lution in 1982, become one of the
clearest articulators of British
anxieties. Their tracks were filled
with scowly denunciations of nu-
clear militarism and small-town
dissatisfaction. They toured with
the Clash, cashed-out with 18 con-
secutive Top 40 singles in the
United Kingdom (with four of
them reaching No. 1) and gave theworld “That’s Entertainment,” a
song that — in its curt, roguish
narrative of a crumbling working
class, allegedly written in 10 min-
utes in a post-pub stupor — would
become one of Rolling Stone’s
“500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
At their commercial climax,
principal songwriter and aquiline
blond Paul Weller decided he had
had enough of the din. “The rock
sound just bores me,’’ he practi-
cally sighed in a 1984 New York
Times interview. “I just don’t
think it means anything anymore... all those clanging guitars. I
just got sick of it.” Within a year,
Weller, along with Jam keyboard-
ist Mick T albot, transfigured into
the Style Council and plunged
into a specific, satin-smooth,
melt-in-your-mouth, cocktail-
party-ready polish that would
butter Britain’s charts for a
h alf-decade.
A
uthor Martin Amis — one of
the loudest British voices
chronicling apocalyptic
angst and moral laxities in the
1980 s — has something of a sub-
text on sophisti-pop in his 1984
novel “Money.” The work is a
piece of fiction about the epony-
mous subject from a hedonistic
dirtbag’s gaze on Thatcher’s U.K.
and Ronald Reagan’s America,
and in the main character’s world
of hyper-capitalist masculinity,
men abided by “the Thatcherite
creed of ‘loadsamoney’ ” to its
fullest. “You just cannot beat the
money conspiracy,” he wrote.
“You can only join it.”
An Englishman named Bryan
Ferry seemed to carry this idea
like a credo. First seen as the lead
of the athletic art-pop stalwarts,
Roxy Music, he shed the avant-
garde cardio of his albums from
the ’70s to emerge in the early ’80s
as something more like a lounge
singer permanently employed on
a luxury cruise. Gone was his
earlier art-school peacockery, andin its stead came a mood more
suited for white tuxedos, silk
pocket squares, fat roses and vid-
eos that had him taking sullen
rides in limousines.
British media had fun calling
him “Byron Ferrari” for his new
high-class trappings and tenden-
cy toward louche cabaret, but
money was beautiful, and, by ex-
tension, so was he. Ferry had
remodeled himself into a yawn-
ing, Gatsbyesque Lothario, and in
Roxy Music’s final album, 1982’s
“Avalon,” sophisti-pop’s aesthetic
lodestar.
In full, exquisite exhaustion,
“Avalon” examines the debris of
relationships, as told from the
point of view of a suave loner, all
backed by plush and luscious
oceans of saxophone swoon. From
the crème de menthe wooziness
of “More Than This” to the heart-
and-velvet-jacket-flinging
“Avalon,” the sheer gigantism of
Ferry’s newly groomed glamour
made him a moony figurehead of
a style that felt distinguished,
lusty and romantic to the point of
near-satire. Rob Sheffield of Spin
magazine would later call the al-
bum “the all-time greatest make-
out inferno,” which was less a
sideways dig than it was a fact:
Few things were as seductive as
how money felt.
Entranced, Weller swan-dove
headlong into the heart of Ferry’s
unwritten sophisti-pop syllabus
with airs that were tonier, goofier
and made for extraordinarily eas-
ier listening than anything the
Jam would’ve deigned to do. By
using R&B, soul, doo-wop and
jazz as ideological and structural
starting points, embracing his
hot-nougat voice, and bridging
the distance between the Stax
catalogue and Wham!, Weller
made the Style Council a lush
Amazon of uniquely sumptuous
schmaltz. Within six months of
his band’s formation, out came
“Introducing the Style Council,”OWEN SWEENEY/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Singer and songwriter Bryan Ferry, above in Philadelphia in 2019, and his British band Roxy
Music epitomized sophisti-pop’s aesthetic in the 1980s.