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Manufacturing Music

In a global world of mass-manufactured products, it all comes down to authenticity. Today’s urban elite, unlike its rather more vulgar 1980s counterpart, isn’t content to see drinking Blue Nun wine and buying Fondue sets as a mark of sophistication. They want original Adidas Micropacer trainers bought for a kings ransom off EBay. They want mobile phones that have been designed by hip Tokyo design studios and produced in a limited edition of thee-figure numbers. They want balsamic vinegar produced by Italian families with a 500-year tradition that sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle. And they want music made by credibly hip acts like the White Stripes, who record on vintage analogue studio equipment that’s almost half a century old, lovingly restored to working order by electronics enthusiasts. What they don’t want is ‘manufactured bands’, music straight from the production line for an unthinking flock of consumers.

There’s something wrong with this blinkered approach to manufactured music. Though most fans don’t acknowledge it, the image of a band as authentic as The White Stripes is just as rigorously controlled as somebody as like the Backstreet Boys. All bands are, to an extent, manufactured. Teams of publicists, marketing analysts and music industry bigwigs spend huge amounts of time and money conveying the core image of bands like the White Stripes to the general public. Having an image as unshakably cool as that enjoyed by Meg and Jack doesn’t happen by accident. Just because it’s done in such a seamless, invisible manner it doesn’t mean its not happening.

It’s when cracks start appearing in the image that your product is conveying to the general public that you’ve got a problem. It’s this kind of crisis of credibility that’s affecting one of the hottest new bands of the moment, The Bravery.

With their New Romantic makeup and Morrissey-style quiffs they’ve brought an element of trashy glamour to the dirty world of garage rock and roll inhabited by groups like The Libertines. People have taken to calling them ‘The New Duran Duran’. They play guitars – and syththesizers! What combination could more excite a young urban hipster? Sounding like a cross between the Strokes and New Order, The Bravery have combined the cool of 80s synth-driven electro with angular, sing-along indie of the Franz Ferdinand variety. It all looks a bit like an identikit approach to forming a band, taking the hippest elements in the music scene at the moment and putting it all together. That’s probably because it is.

Music Industry insiders in New York have apparently dubbed the band ‘The Bribery’. Rumour has it that they band has been entirely manufactured by their record label, in an attempt to cash in on the success of similarly raucous rock and roll outfits like The Killers, who’ve met with unexpected commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Most embarrassing of all, their lead singer was previously the singer in a Ska band called, rather amusingly, Skabba the Hut, before a team of industry stylists gave him his current makeover. The Killers themselves have already entered the fray, branding the Bravery ‘opportunistic phonies’. They’re starting to look a bit like indie-rock equivalent of Take That.

The Bravery might emerge from it all with their credibility seriously dented, but how much does it all really matter? Their self-titled debut album is still worth a listen, looking set to become a great soundtrack for the summer. They still have more than a handful great songs, even if we might now suspect that they had more help in writing them than we previously thought.

Like last year’s big success story Franz Ferdinand, The Bravery make pop music. Pretending that it’s anything else is missing the point. It’s democratic, accessible and made for everybody, with the emphasis on sing-along melodies that your granny can hum and that seven year old girls can use as their ringtones. That’s what makes pop music so enjoyable. The fact that groups like Franz Ferdinand have the added advantage of being accepted as ‘cool’ is just an additional bonus.

In any case, the whole trend for Garage bands of sully young men with a New York swagger and a British sense of irony has become utterly predictably. The fact that a record label can put together a band to fit the prevailing template for Garage-rock cool is indicative of the fact that the scene has become conservative, trapped by its own accepted rules and conventions. The Bravery are the first signs of a scene that could be starting to stagnate. The search for the ‘Next Franz Ferdiand’ (or rather ‘The Next Bloc Party’ for those of you really paying attention. ‘Franz are soooo last year’) has become the all-consuming task for A&R men across the globe. And in their quest for this holy grail, it looks like they’ll be disappointed. The next big think always comes from a direction that’s least expected. Personally, I predict a Happy Hardcore revival. But until then, the Bravery look like they’ll make a good second best alternative.