Cultural appropriation has killed modern music

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album – WITH THE ANDY WARHOL BANANA COVER! – floating up the stairs. I’d never moved so fast in my lazy little life.

‘It’s about drugs! And male prostitutes! And a thing called SADO-MASOCHISM!’ I squealed at my dad.

The dog looked sad.

‘I don’t care what it’s about,’ my dad shrugged with magnificent insouciance. ‘I just likes the tunes…’

Mute with frustration, I marched from the room and back upstairs, only for my father’s jolly Wurzel-type voice to follow me mercilessly: ‘Oi’m…waitin’ for me man!’

He was ahead of his time; in subsequent decades, the rise of the ‘Kidult’ saw men, especially, unwilling to put away childish things. Though Oasis and Blur might have squabbled, they had one thing in common – they were liked equally by teenage girls (‘Liam!’ ‘Damon!’) and middle-aged men (‘Noel!’ ‘Graham!’). But things have changed, according to the Guardian, where 36-years-young Daniel Dylan Wray wrote: ’A 2015 study of people’s listening habits on Spotify found that most people stop listening to new music at 33; a 2018 report by Deezer had it at 30… in my 20s, the idea that people’s appetite to consume new music regularly would be switched off like some kind of tap was ludicrous. However, now I’m 36, it’s difficult to argue with. Most people don’t stop discovering new books, films, podcasts or TV. Yet music seems to be something that more commonly slips away.’

I can tell Mr Wray why; it’s because modern music is (to almost borrow a Blur title) rubbish. And this isn’t a pensioner peeve – it’s a fact. Think about it. In the decade of my teens, the 1970s, I was lucky enough to experience the glory days of – deep breath – glam rock, Philly, Motown, disco and punk. The biggest male and female acts of the 1970s – if you combined sales, cred and sheer star quality – were probably David Bowie and Diana Ross. Now? Adele and Ed Sheeran.

Of course music goes through the doldrums, like anything else – but the crucial element of woke-scolding is what makes this slump different. For the first time, young people are having less sex and consuming less stimulants than their elders, instead spending long periods of time crouched over their keyboards, glumly interfering with themselves; woke and Covid between them have created Generation Killjoy. Punk, disco and glam would all be problematic in some way now – too white, not the ‘right’ kind of black, too light-hearted about gender-bending – but when I think about the pop music from past that the youth of today would approve of least, I think of ZE.

ZE Records was started up in New York City in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, Zilkha a 24-year-old entrepreneur (his father, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant to Britain, was Mothercare) and Esteban a 27-year-old French artist, mentored by the legendary John Cale, and the boyfriend of a young Anna Wintour. This combination of dirty cash tangling with both avant-garde and haute couture would add up to an awful lot of well-bred young Americans pretending to be French – and a lot of brilliant music, a fearless fusion of punk and disco. Their best acts were ‘Was (Not Was)’, Cristina Monet (the Zelda Fitzgerald of pop) and Suicide (with the most terrifying music ever recorded, Nick Hornby writing of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ that you would listen to it ‘only once’). You’d never heard anything like ZE – but you knew you’d been waiting all your life to listen to it.

’Mutant Disco’ was what they named their disparate stable; today, it would be slammed as cultural appropriation by the woke-scolds. ZE’s chief hit-maker was Kid Creole who with his wildly culturally inappropriate backing singers the Coconuts – generally dressed in grass skirts – became a regular on Top of the Pops in 1982, his run of luck ending with the prophetically-named ‘There’s Something Wrong In Paradise’. Born August Darnell, of Caribbean and Italian heritage, in the Bronx. ‘It was a great place to grow up’ he told the Quietus in 2011, ‘because it was full of every ethnic group known to mankind… I learnt at an early age that one ethnic group is not better than another… you won’t ever find any pure music in Kid Creole – I call it mongrel music. That’s what makes it exciting’. He was a former English teacher who in 1974, with his half-brother Stony Browder, formed Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, which combined swing, Latin and disco to great effect. He was also a producer of Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band, fronted by the best female voice of the era, Fonda Rae, an incandescently beautiful blonde black woman. Though ZE had flashier and more successful acts, for me it’s Rae (who never recorded for them but was briefly a Coconut) who sums up the era’s best, with songs like ‘Deputy Of Love’ and ‘I’m An Indian Too’ – her voice, effortless and egotistic, takes endless delight in itself, like a kitten on a keyboard or a baby finding its feet. These were the great colour-blind years of music – the sheer exhilarating freedom to choose life lived in any shade before the closing of the minds and the wagging of the fingers and the warnings to stay in your own lane. A time of curiosity and confidence, when rules were made to be broken and scolds were made to be shocked.

ZE closed in 1984 – it was only active for six years, which makes its reach all the more remarkable. Suicide’s icy genius now soundtracks a perfume ad; Cristina died of Covid. Many on the left now espouse ideas of cultural purity that would shock the Aryan Brotherhood. And if you Google ‘Ze’ you’ll find the likes of this on dictionary.com:

‘pronoun (occasionally used with a singular indefinite pronoun or singular noun antecedent in place of the definite masculine he or the definite feminine she): “My friend didn’t want to go to the party, but ze ended up having a great time!”’

Did ze, though? What was the music like? Did ze approve, or should ze have had a trigger warning before Fonda Rae started singing ‘Touch Me’? Was it so beautiful and bad that it made ze sad? Never mind – in five years’ time, pronouns will have gone the way of the antimacassar. But the magnificent music of the mutant disco will play on forever.