Stephen Sondheim

Last Friday the Guardian ran a piece in which current musical luminaries were asked to nominate "classic" albums they thought were overrated. Sgt. Pepper, Trout Mask Replica, The Strokes' first album, they all got it. Even Abba's Arrival. Shock horror - to discover that someone had thought that Abba were sufficiently elevated in the first place to need debunking. Dark Side of the Moon had its Zimmer kicked away as well. Odd, that. After rushing out to buy it when it came out in 19-ahem I quickly dismissed it as overblown tosh. So did most other people, and the record has been an object of ridicule ever since, so to find that someone has been carrying it round as a sacred cow to be slain and has let rip just at the point in my life when I was starting to think "Hmm, maybe I should re-evaluate those old Floyd albums" seems a little ironic.

Sorry, I'm rambling. There is a companion volume to the old favourite "Classic Albums that are Actually Shit" and it's "Acknowledged Geniuses who are Actually Rubbish". My personal copy includes Dickens, Mozart (I always sympathised with the Emperor in Amadeus - "too many notes") and Stevie Wonder. Radio 2 (just flicking round the dial, honest) this evening reminded me of another as they paid homage to the supremely overblown and fantastically dull Stephen Sondheim. I mean I'm not a fan of musicals in the first place but I can see that, say, Guys and Dolls makes for a jolly evening which will send you home with a tune to whistle. Sondheim, on the other hand, is nothing but soulless cleverness, with not a fucking tune in sight. Smug, eyebrow-waggling, look-at-me showing off. Yet for some reason as clear to me as the computation of the first picosecond of the Big Bang in 11-dimensional space, people don't just like Sondheim, they adore him. Worship, even. But why? WHY? "He's so witty". No he's not. He's clever. So are a lot of people. "He's so clever". See above. So what? "The music is so marvellous". It isn't. It's... clever (see above). Plenty of people are writing clever music these days, just go to the music department of any serious academic university and ask them to output their computer scores to an audio rendering device (hi-fi to you). If they're prepared to sully their work with being listened to. These are people clever enough to out-clever Bach, Hawking and Stephen Fry put together and certainly can blow Sondheim clean out of the water in the cleverness stakes, but have a listen to their stuff. It's shit. And I suggest that the average show-going Heimie would agree with me.

Deep breath. So what do the Heimies (as they are now known) see in their boy? Really? Really, have another listen. THERE ARE NO TUNES (ok, Send in the Clowns is a tune but the aficionados' favourites are always the most atonal numbers). I can only conclude that they admire, err... cleverness. And possibly they believe Sondheim's own hype: my own feelings about Mozart notwithstanding, can you believe the towering hubris of a man who knocks out a popular entertainment and calls it A Little Night Music? Clearly he rates himself a bit. Maybe his fans find him a less arduous way of bolstering their view of their own intellectualism than reading A Brief History of Time (though certainly more expensive - have you seen the price of tickets in the West End?)

Finally: if you want a counter to the notion that cleverness is a virtue in music, I say this - Mark King of Level 42. Je reste ma valise.

reacTable

I'm sure a lot of people saw Bjork on Jools Holland tonight, saw the weird and very cool-looking electronic instrument her keyboard/computer guy was using and went "Wow! What the fuck is that???!!!", quickly followed by "Want one, want one!" A few minutes googling revealed that it's called a reacTable, it's been around for a year or so, it was invented by a bunch of academics in Barcelona and there are a bunch of vids on youtube demonstrating it. Cool. Very. The kind of instrument Mr Spock would play. And all the comments are "Wow, want one!". Actually, that's going to be tough because there are apparently only two in the world and everyone's favourite Icelander has blagged the use of one of them for her tour.

But then the doubts started to creep in. Yes, it looks utterly stunning and there's no doubt it's a very organic alternative to knobs and switches but, but, doesn't it sound rather like, err... a twenty year old analogue synth? That you can pick up cheap on eBay? And then there's the little matter of how you, err... play a tune? Very old school, I know, the tune, but a popular concept to this day and showing no sign of being on the way out.

It's hyped as "multi-user" because you can get your mate to stand across from you and help you twiddle the little Lego blocks, but how many people are going to want that? Bjork's guy doesn't seem to. A piano is "multi-user" - we've all seen two people sit down at the same keyboard and play a duet but it's always a gimmick. It has, apparently, a "tangible user interface". A bit like a guitar, then. Or a keyboard. Or (you get the point).

And I still get these gripes about it. It's a good idea (as far as it goes) and it looks cool (this year at least, until people start to go "Oh yeah, another reacTable band, that's so 2007") but it's been implemented with the wrong technology. It's a string and ceiling wax creation of video cameras and projectors - too much to go wrong! Wait until a roadie trips over it and the projector goes out of register. And the Lego blocks (sorry, they're called "tangibles") - how long are they going to last on tour? "Sorry man, I stepped on your tangible." "Hey, let's make a bong out of Dave's tangible". It should, of course, be built using Jeff Han style technology (search Jeff Han on youtube). Maybe it will if they ever go into production. Which is doubtful if the attitude of the designers is anything to go by, which seems to be "What, you're a musician? You want to have one of these yourself? To own? I'm sorry, this is serious academic research. You may apply to borrow one for three days if you are a museum. Or an international rockstar who can provide us with the publicity to support our application for a research grant. Now fuck off."

Anyone remember Jean Michel Jarre?