Delusions of Domesticity: Pere Ubu and the debate between pop and avant-garde
OK, the term ‘pop music’ might well be a broad and all-encompassing term these days, and simply by being popular, you’re therefore fitting under the flimsy boundaries of what pop music can be, right? Well, no, not exactly. Avant-garde music is about as far from pop as things can possibly get and is usually made with the intention of expressing true creative freedom that isn’t restrained by an attempt to create something that has mass appeal. By this metric, avant-garde music is the absolute antithesis of what pop is and caters only to a very small audience that is willing or perhaps brave enough to indulge in its abstractions.
Pere Ubu are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a pop group. Nobody can wave any amount of money in front of my face to get me to agree otherwise. In fact, the Cleveland, Ohio, group are about as far removed from pop as you can get. Pere Ubu are non-pop, and I will not be wavering from this point of view.
Even if you’re willing to apply the idea of there being an infinite number of universes where things are different to what we know in our own version of the cosmos, you’d have to go a long way to find the one where the extra-terrestrials are dancing in clubs to ‘Final Solution’, and considering that’s one of their more ordinary efforts, goodness knows what the aliens make of their fourth album, The Art of Walking.
Luckily for me, there aren’t many people who will disagree with the outlined notion that Pere Ubu are not a pop act. That is, except for Pere Ubu themselves. In a 1981 interview with Melody Maker, the band made the rather extravagant claim that ‘Lost in Art’, taken from The Art of Walking, is “a true pop song”. Whether or not drummer Scott Krauss was joking when he stated this untruth, guitarist Mayo Thompson decided to double down when asked why he thought it was a pop song.
“It runs to the tradition of popular entertainment,” claimed Thompson, muddying the waters of fact and fiction even more with this declaration. Choosing to expand on what he meant with this ludicrous statement, he continued by arguing that “what passes for spontaneity and what passes for rawness is quite often very highly edited and very highly refined. When you do something, you try and rationalise why the hell you’re doing it – unless you’re just sort of involved in the celebration of your own possibilities.”
It’s not surprising to see the band respond with something so oblique, considering frontman David Thomas was once asked if they had improved over time and chose to run off on an analogy about a polystyrene cup. Ever the philosophers and surrealists, they seemed unwavering in their position that they were a pop group at their core.
Thompson would round off the question by declaring: “Rock, with us, is only a springboard into our future lives, obviously, in terms of the way we conduct the business. We hope to go on from there, like everybody else – grow old and die gracefully.” That’s all well and good, but I stand by my word that they’re lying through their teeth when they say they wrote a pure pop song with ‘Lost In Art’.
