At Marmalade Skies the SFA Index is not opening up for me for #32.

Anyone get this?

Im looking for the intelligent piece on GENRES. (I believe its halfway in and s done by Scott.)

Hey Wallace, I've got web archive files of all the issues. I hope it's alright that I've copied and pasted that section here. Let me know if you need anything else.


*** THE "PSYCH GENRE": SOME THOUGHTS, SOME OBSERVATIONS, by Paul Cross ***

GENRES:

(1) Every critic must recognise at least one or two constraints which he requires of genre material.

(2) A genre is a group of works with common defining characteristics and major formal, technical or thematic elements that write groups of works. Genres generate frissons of recognition. Genre work insists on and presupposes certain limitations in what's to be treated and how- not stylisations or conventions, which are open-ended, but genuinely constricting sets of expectations.
Convention, the manner of representing something, does not dictate what is to be represented nearly so narrowly as do restrictions of genre. Genre restrictions work from the outside in. Genre classifications have two major faults: Staleness and constriction. The first is accidental, but the second is essential.

(3) A musical genre is conspicuous for its signals that it is honouring the compact between musician and listener to respect the protocols embedded in the works which make up the canon. To work variations on them is clever, but to abandon them is to leave home.

(4) Psych in genre terms has never been defined with any precision. No fully satisfactory definition has yet been written. Words cannot be used to represent REALITY nor describe it. Psych suffers from a paradox of definition.

(5) The interest served by a musical genre is para-musical, e.g. with psych it is the need for the transcendental, the mystical, or merely the escapist. If what we term "psych" is a genre at all it is an impure genre. Its forms are not homogenous. The fruits may be psych, or more precisely, its fruits may have a 'psych flavour' - ranging from Ultra-Mild to Super Strength, but the roots are firmly planted in the non-psych: r&b, beat-pop, soul, blues, rock, musique concret, Stockhausen, the jazz innovations of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, et al.

(6) We can say with certainty that at an uncertain date in the mid-1960s, a richness of imagery and denseness of texture and invention never before known manifested itself within the vessel of popular music. Before that date [say, c.1965] much - if not all - of the work we are interested in could not or would not have been made.

MUSICIANS:

(7) It is not the rôle of the artist to force his work into critical straight jackets. Instead it is the duty of the critic to develop a competent and coherent language to describe the artwork.

(8) Some collectors/fans see psych music as a kind of homogenous, monolithic politico-musical movement. It was never that in the minds of most of its musicians, many of whom resented being thus categorised. Almost all the artists concerned disclaim any artistic unanimity.

(9) Except in a few cases (which we shall denote below as psychedelia "with a capital 'P'") it was more a shared state of mind (un-mind) than a formal artistic movement.

(10) If "psych" was a genre, it would automatically follow that a musician placed under that heading would feel solidarity with all other others lumped thus. But does Pete Brown feel kinship with Grapefruit? I doubt it. To see The Cream and World Of Oz, as hand-in-hand fighting on the same side is patently to hold an absurdist view, and to do the music an injustice.
There was no cohesion among these fiercely individual musicians, who had little in common beyond their contempt for straight society and a shared attitude to their recreation time, but for an all too brief period they made a common use of certain forms, motifs and musical/studio techniques.

(11) What all these musicians had in common was that they did very much their own thing. If there is a label under which they may be classified together, it is usually by accident, not by their own design. Together they form a constellation of phenomena rather than an air-tight genre.

(12) What the recordings all have in common is that they all contain elements stemming from the impact of drugs, spirtuality and technology on the creative climate of the mid-sixties. In a wider context these can be read as a manifestation and partial re-emergence of nineteenth century Romanticism.

TERMS & CONDITIONS APPLY:

(13) Faced with chaotic diversity some earlier critics were driven to invent an order of a kind, even at the expense of being dogmatic.

(14) Many fans and critics do not find the existing terms consistently helpful, but then they tend to worry more about the demarcation of genres than do writers and musicians.

(15) Terms are used more by proselytizers than by the artists concerned.

(16) It should be clear that the substitution of one set of arbitrary labels for another is not what it is all about.

(17) Proselytizers are interested in the implementation of canonical dogmatism.

(18) We are - for the time being - whether we like it or not, stuck with terms like "psych pop", "pop-syke , pop-sike", "freakbeat", and the like. To try to coin a new set of labels in order to avoid these terms would be as quixotic as pretending, as some people do, that these words are significant in and of themselves.

(19) As a propaganda weapon, the term 'popsike' had been useful precisely because it allows the blurring of boundaries, which in turn permits a great freedom from genre constraints and "rules".

(20) Fans of genre material concentrate on unimportant details, and to such a degree that the details are what really matter (some actually believe that the psych lies in the phasing!). The details were elevated, and the notion of "classic psych" was created. Not in the spirit of inclusion but in the vanity of exclusion. This is psych as musical apartheid

(21) Genre terms tell us a great deal about the inflexibility of marketing and critical categories.

(22) Manipulation is inevitable. It takes many forms and its use has many objectives, and is driven by differing factors and differing 'needs'. Three examples of manipulator will suffice:
(i) The cynical dealer. He will use a buzz word to get stock moving. The term is useful only in so far as it signifies only that certain materials were/are considered together as a distinct and collective body by "listeners".
(ii) The blinkered (conservative) collector. It is he who, despite its imperfections, adheres strictly to an earlier model.
(iii) the liberal music lover. He has the ability to detect psych in all manner of strange places.
(i) is prone to misuse the term to his advantage. Anything however remotely related may be so labelled if it means making bucks. (ii) seeks only to narrow the range and focus to close the parameters. His is the triumph of style over content: the music fan made collector, the collector made obsessive, the obsessive made fetishist. (iii) values as inherent (often intangible) psychedelicity over simplistic hack theorizing and genre clichés.
(i) thinks (ii) is too fussy a customer, whilst he's happy to exploit (iii)'s laissez-faire attitude. (ii) thinks he's the true guardian of the flame. (iii) whilst his heart is in the right place. He sees the wood but now ignores the trees. (i), (ii) and (iii) all think that they are right. This leads us all into a confused moral chiaroscuro.

(23) Genre delineations are maintained by economic forces. These 'mainstream' forces have a public to serve and moreover, money to make. It is in their interests to remain perfervid.

P$YCH: MONEY TALK$:

(24) "Call it psychedelic and it will sell fast Some merchant say 'psychedelic' is developing into
a magic sales word" ~ Wall Street Journal, 1967.

(25) The parasites have gained control over their hosts. Capitalism has vitiated the genre.
It is in the ve$ted intere$t of record dealer$, compiler$, reissuer$, bootlegger$, and professional hack$ to market certain products as "psych". Keep it lurid, keep it $tatic, and above all make and keep it $imple and easily recognisable. The Kapitalists have little or no need in promoting or advertising sui generis material.
This is psych as a marketing category rather than as musical label. A field fenced in by commercial demands and market forces. This is "P$ych".

(26) The medium of psychedelia as a marketing, packaging, collecting and economic phenomenon has hitherto had a dominant influence, indeed virtually a determining influence, on the canon (the size and shape, the traditional parameters) of psych as musical genre.

(27) The freaks should re-claim the music.

CAPITALISATION:

(28) Perhaps we ought to make an attempt at capitalisation?

(29) Psych material can take two forms:
(i) "Psych with a capital 'P'" is music which is made to be psychedelic, to fit a psych mould, to fulfil a psych brief. e.g. Psychedelia, psych-pop, etc.
(ii) "Psych with a small 'p'" is music wherein the psych has been made to fit the music, a psych gloss added to the music. e.g. pop-sike/pop-syke, toy town pop, etc.

(30) In hierarchical terms (i.e. in the language of The Man, not in the language of The Freak), capital 'P' psych is superior to small 'p' psych. Capital 'P' psych is the real deal.
This is to totally miss the point about the sheer artifice of pop culture; and moreover, the artifice with which psychedelia manifests itself within pop culture. In our society earnestness is a purely relative phenomenon.

(31) Regarding "psych with a capital 'P'": its moment was brief, its disintegration swift and almost total, but its echoes still reverberate everywhere.

(32) Except within "psych with a capital 'P'", there was a divergence of aims and intentions which made the artists aesthetically incompatible except perhaps retrospectively by some "collectors" who clearly mistake superficial contemporary surface/stylistic similarities for close kinship.

(33) We ought not to say: "This work is psych", but rather the more apposite "this work is of psych", or "this work has a psych element". The psychedelicity is present in the contents not in the vessel. The vessel - beat-pop, prog rock, whatever - is in vitro, external to the psych. Where we denote the psych quality in the music we should remember that only "psych with a capital 'P'" was really psych first and foremost.

UN-GENRE:

(34) "The machinery of communications and publicity is now so efficient that we go through styles in the arts as quickly as we go through socks; so quickly, indeed, that there seem no longer any real styles at all. Instead there are fashions, idiosyncrasies, group mannerisms and obsessions. But these are different from genuine style". The Critic - A. Alvarez (1969)

(35) In the sense of a School of Music with strict rules of form, prose, content or ideology, psychedelia did not and still does not exist.

(36) Some psychedelic musical manifestations are, from certain angles, completely invisible. This is due to the uncertainty and disagreement over the label itself, among its old adherents as well as those whose opinions have been over-coloured by the tastes and/or prejudices of certain more recent compilers.

(37) The demarcation of certain forms of musical expression as "psych" automatically implies "non-psych". As "new wave" implies "old wave". Whilst it is relatively easy to reach agreement and consensus on the clearest cut examples of non-psychedelia, it is the peripheral, penumbral, grey areas where consensus slips away and confusion seems to triumph.

(38) Perhaps it is better to speak of:
(i) "genre psych" - created with a psych aim.
(ii) "non-genre psych" - created in the spirit of, but not necessarily intending to be, psychedelic. "Classic" material fits easily into the first category; difficult material and all so-called pop-syke/-sike into the second.

(39) It should be borne in mind that our contemporary perceptions of "genre psych" - in particular so-called "classic" material - have been moulded by such factors as punk and new-wave/post-punk tastes: the nascent psych-collecting scene developed at a time when noise, viscerality, energy and muscle were de rigueur. The 'Chocolate Soup' series tells us a great deal more about late-70s musical tastes and attitudes than it does about psychedelia per see. This is a dubious inheritance. Equally the categorisation of certain material as "difficult"/"non-generic is also borne of twisted perceptions: as "the scene" focused on the tough end of the musical spectrum, the gentler sounds (ironically, in many ways the true locus of UK hippiedom) were discarded as lightweight, not relevent and "not psych".

(40) The purpose of musical psychedelia if indeed it can be said to have one, is to release the listener from the preoccupations of the straight idioms. Conventionality (tradition) is to be avoided. What matters in art is what is individual; what matters in genre composition is to avoid deviating in any important way from the prescribed rules.

(41) This is not so much about a 'type' of music as one with an invented label.

(42) It is the effusion which makes it intelligible as psych.

(43) Matters of DRUGS are an irrelevance. What matters is the *idea* of drug inspiration. A perception/suggestion of drug influence, rather than any actual direct chemical ingestion.

(44) What is most noticeable about the nature of psych is that it is something about which it seems everyone has an opinion, be it catholic, orthodox, fundamentalist, reformed, methodist or non-denominational.

PSYCH Vs SYKE ?:

(45) In hindsight we can see that some "psych records" were genuine attempts, however, awkward, to get at revolutionary implications of the subject matter; while others, especially "pop sike" ones, were excursions into mannerism, surface novelties with perfectly conventional interiors.

(46) The mimetic or "realistic" cleaves to known reality.

(47) Sike = mimetic (e.g. 'Tracy Took A Trip', 'Colonel Brown, 'Shy Boy')
Psych = fabulation (e.g. 'Interstellar Overdrive', '2000 Light years From Home', 'Bracelets Of
Fingers')

(48) "True psychedelia" developed a new aesthetic, with a preference for inner landscapes, new modes of beauty and expression. It manifested itself in an assault on language, on perception, on society, necessitated by a radical reinterpretation of reality. In sike, however, rationality has not been totally abandoned for the sake of imagistic resonance. Sike with its mimetic (art to life) prescriptions, was explicitly deferential to the outside world. But with psych, by the discarding of traditional fixities of narrative (place, causation, character development) and linearity-chronology from the song story, the onus for interpretation is passed to us. To YOU and ME.

(49) Pop music (in its most commercial sense) is the result of a treaty drawn between creativity (art) and finance.

(50) The inclusion of "non-genre psych" (that's psych music with the smallest 'p') can still be regarded by some as a radical ideological decision.

(51) The Un-Genre is the elevation of personal whim and intuition above convention.

(52) A 'type' of music, once perceived and labelled as a 'style' is quickly identified as a formula.

(53) Let's re-make an obvious but needful point: that psych, in musical terms, is indefinable and not homogenous, and indeed from one perspective contains many genres within it, whilst from another it is an element within many genres. Psychedelia was the first manifestation of post-modernism in popular music, and as such it manifests itself in a diversity of forms and displays a total absence of a single dominant, defining aesthetic.

(54) Where the cautious see barriers we should see only hurdles. What an outsider perceives as the limitations of genre the fan feels as the security of city walls. Some less parochial enthusiasts would be happy to open the gates to visitors. Others want to keep the gates closed, they prize the esoteric delights of belonging to a clique, and relish the exchange of conspirational whispers while the outsider stands baffled. Commercial genres exist by exclusion, these have specific functions (primarily economic), and satisfy particular tastes.

(55) At its best SFA kindles controversy, challenges assumptions and stretches the limits of acceptance. All these are necessary if interest is to survive and if any new conclusions are ever to be drawn from this music.

(56) As the 'unified front' the name suggests, musical psychedelia never existed. It was less a movement than pure musical extremism; loose concentrations of individuals around certain aesthetic nodes - e.g. psych: derived from pop; folk: coloured by psych; blues: riddled with psych. It very quickly shifted back from its vigorous stage - into the mainstream, by which stage the mainstream had also been invigorated by it and had in some ways, advanced to meet it.

(57) Behind the infatuation with fantasy/surrealism/mysticism and the re-enactment of the hallucinogenic effect in terms of lyrical/musical technique, lies a dissatisfaction with ordinariness.

(58) Style vs. content. Substance vs. surface.
These are the terms on which the battles of psych "definition" are fought. The combination of themes, ideas, and the complexity of relationships at every level ought to over-ride specious notions about the over-importance of trappings or the manner of expression. But too often incorrectly, it's the smooth tissue covering that's taken, a la MacLuhan, without salt, as meaning.

(59) Psychedelia in its less obvious forms works through juxtaposition and should succeed through resonance rather than explicit statement. All too often the surface receives all the attention. It is also true that at surface level most experiments are made. Trappings can define a work as can ideas/notions which may be subliminal and therefore easy to miss. The psychedelicity is in the reaction to the work. This reaction is reliant for its generation on the senses of the listener and on his being *able* to decode the signals, to read the language. With 50's rockabilly these codes are easy to decipher. But with psychedelia as a whole (as opposed to "classic psych" or "psychedelic pop" in particular, which are relatively simple) this is not always so obvious. The data may be encrypted, hidden beneath opaque surfaces, in a guitar line, a self-conscious dreamy lyric, a breathiness, a timbral aura, it may be like a spectre dissolving in sunlight. Often with the more 'occult' material the matter of its 'psych-ness' is handled with a most masonic subtlety, maybe with a nod, a wink, and a knowing smile. Blink and it's gone.

(60) With the "psych classics" there has been a tendency towards picking the icing off the cake and so missing out much of value to our understanding.

(61) Always revere aposiopesis.

WHEAT AND CHAFF:

(62) What is very widely known or aesthetically striking or attractive is not always and necessarily as important for the purposes of studying the totality of music influenced by psychedelia as the aesthetically unimpressive, ambiguous, uninspiring or little-known works. The scholar of psychedelia should collate all available and relevant materials. Let any censorious "filtering-out" be done, if at all, as a matter of personal taste, at home by the casual listener. Personal likes/dislikes have no part to play in these matters.
Attempts (by Record Collector, 117 (zine), Jon Savage, Vernon Joynson, et al.) at creating an artificial psych canon have all been glorious failures. SFA, let it be said, is thoroughly anti-canonical. So-called mainstream "collectors' guides" are, discographically speaking, of pretty limited value, often frustrating, and most suited to the needs of the general, novice listener rather than the specialist. Although it is perhaps on the perceptions of the novice that their warping effect is most disastrous. After all, there is no such thing as a purely objective reference work. The mere act of selecting material suggests a value judgment. Discographers should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN YOU:

(63) Psychedelia provides an armamentarium of tools for coping with synaesthetic derangement.

(64) Leave the labels and ideological epithets to the mandarins. Instead concentrate your mind on the feel and form of the music.

(65) Hippies should re-claim the music. Psychedelia is a synthetic modern archetype, a structure around which musicians blow stylistic, formal, or allusive riffs. Psychedelia may be the subject of the recording or psychedelia may be a precious thread woven into a plainer, denser fabric, not easily visible to the naked eye but nevertheless an integral element of it; a hidden treasure half buried amongst the weeds, spotted with moss, the bracken shadowing its beauty from the eyes of the profane.
It is you who ought to discern any patterns with your mind's eye/mind's ear, to discover the seams of quartz, the caches of gemstones, wherever they may be found; not to be the obedient puppet of dogma and sales pitch.

(66) Rather than breaking up traditional genre classification, we ought to attempt to bring them to their highest expression by applying the full weight of subjectivity, innovation and sophistication to a set of rigid principals and out-moded conventions. Psych as it stands in genre terms defines those who earlier erected the fences not the music.

(67) A move towards interpreting the widest possible diversity of content and form will always be the hardest to grasp for the traditionalists. Iindivisibly wedded as they are to prescriptive definitions, and to style, they seem only able to be to 'read' the material on one basic level. Luckily most of us are not wedded thus and this interpretative move is happening now and is led by those outside the ferment of international finance. Rather than blind adherence to some imagined ideology (actually little more a sales label) or obsolete received notions of style and form, there is a move, mature and subjective, towards private visions and personal response.

(Many thanks to Amanda Cohen)