8 Wednesday January 26 2022 | the timesarts
beating Oasis’s Roll With It to the No 1
spot. But it was a pyrrhic victory, as
Oasis went on to become the biggest
band of the decade and Albarn
discovered that for the next six
months he couldn’t walk down the
street without someone shouting an
Oasis tune at him from the window of
a van. Truly a case of being careful
what you wish for.
In an age when the old-fashioned
rock-star feud has given way to
musicians forever pretending to
be nice to each other for fear of
a Twitter pile-on, at least
Albarn is keeping things
interesting, because there was
a time when this kind of spat
was always happening. “If
Morrissey says not to eat meat, then
I’m going to eat meat. That’s how
much I hate Morrissey,” Robert Smith
said in the late 1980s. Perhaps the hate
came from Bigmouth himself calling
the lead singer of the Cure “a fat clown
in make-up, weeping over a guitar”.
Then there was Keith Richards’scomment about Elton John
rerecording Candle in the Wind after
Princess Diana’s death in 1997, which
essentially ran along the same artistic
integrity v commercial entertainment
line that Albarn used against Swift.
“Songs for dead blondes,” Richards
quipped. “I’d find it difficult to ride on
the back of something like that myself,
but Reg [Dwight, John’s birth name] is
showbiz.” Living up to the title of his
song The Bitch Is Back, Elton
responded: “It would be awful to be
like Keith Richards. He’s pathetic, poor
thing. It’s like a monkey with arthritis,
trying to go on stage and look young.”
As to the accusation of being nothing
more than an entertainer, he added,
“Please, if the Rolling Stones aren’t
showbusiness, then what is? You know,
with their inflatable naked women.”
Ultimately all of this is harmless fun,
leading to nothing more than a few
bruised egos, some overanalysis about
class and sexism in the music
industry, and a stack of publicity for
all involved.
With Albarn and Swift, you do not
imagine the feud will go much
further. They might even end
up playing on a stage together,
as Albarn did with his one-
time rival Noel Gallagher in- It hardly approaches the
rather more tragic tale of
Tupac Shakur and Biggie
Smalls, rappers and
former friends from the
west and east coasts of
America respectively, whose
rivalry ended with Shakur being
gunned down on September 7, 1996,
and Biggie being shot and killed six
months later. Neither murder has been
solved. As Christopher “Biggie”
Wallace said, after the death of
Shakur: “We two individual people.
We waged a coastal beef... One man
against one man made a whole west
coast hate a whole east coast.”
Unless the Albarn-Swift beef ends
up making a whole pop world hate a
whole rock world, it doesn’t really
compare.
I
t is a spat tailor-made, pun
unintentional, for the era of
identity politics. Damon Albarn,
a middle-aged man whose career
with Blur, Gorillaz and as a solo
artist has made him the classic
credible British indie-rock
stalwart, tells the Los Angeles
Times that Taylor Swift, the very
essence of a thoroughly American
modern pop woman, “doesn’t write her
own songs”. On being corrected by the
journalist Mikael Wood that Swift
does in fact pen her material, albeit
some of it with co-writers, Albarn
responded: “That doesn’t count. I
know what co-writing is. Co-writing is
very different to writing.”
Given that Swift went to the
extremes of rerecording her old
albums in their entirety as a way of
getting back at the music executive
Scooter Braun after he bought the
masters of the originals, we could have
guessed she wouldn’t stay quiet on the
subject. “Your hot take is completely
false and SO damaging,” she wrote on
Twitter. Once Swift’s army of fans and
collaborators blew up at Albarn he
was, unsurprisingly, quick to apologise,
no doubt realising how it looked for a
53-year-old bloke to have a pop at an
extremely popular and media-savvy
32-year-old woman — but not in a
genuine way. “I had a conversation
about songwriting and sadly it was
reduced to clickbait.” That’s right,
blame the journalist!
The Albarn-Swift spat really goes to
the heart of two very different ways of
working: the rock way and the pop
way. When you are in a band, even if
you are as dominating a figure as
Albarn, you do co-write, even if you
think it is all down to you. The
guitarist has to interpret your music
and put his or her own print on it, the
bass player has to ensure the whole
thing works on the bottom end, even
the drummer might have something to
say about making sure the song keeps
in time — not to mention on dynamic
and groove — and each personality in
the room has an effect on the
outcome. It’s the reason why the
leaders of so many great rock bands
falter when, thinking that they do the
lion’s share anyway, they strike out on
their own. Look to the collected works
of the Rolling Stones and Mick
Jagger’s solo material for proof.
Albarn is right about pop
songwriting in a sense. It is not
unusual for big stars such as Rihanna
or Beyoncé to get a songwriting credit
on material they may not have written
a word or a note of, because without
their interpretation it has no chance of
being a hit.
But Swift is the wrong choice of
target. She comes from Nashville’s
country tradition of co-writing,
where a singer’s personal story
or theme is generally used as
the spark of a song before a
collaborator is brought in. In
2012 Swift had the lyrics and the
melody to All Too Well, a ballad
about the memory of a
relationship, before the songwriter
Liz Rose came on board to sharpen up
the structure. It has since become one
of Swift’s most beloved songs.
None of this is new for Albarn, of
course, given that he found national
fame during the great Blur v Oasis
Britpop war of 1995. Back then, Blur
seemed like a bunch of swotty
students posing as mockney geezers
while Oasis came across as the real,
northern, working-class deal, with
Blur’s Country House eventuallyMorrissey, below, and
Robert Smith. Far
right: Elton John
and Keith RichardsA i a w M IWhen two tribes
go to war:
Damon v Taylor
The musical tussle between Damon Albarn and
Taylor Swift is actually a cultural bust-up between
the worlds of rock and pop, says Will Hodgkinson
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAw
cThe spat goes to
the heart of two
very different
ways of working
If he says not
to eat meat,
then I’m going
to eat meat.
That’s how
much I hate
Morrissey
Robert Smith
JIM DYSON/MANNY CARABEL/GETTY IMAGES