The problem with from a whisper to a scream, the latest TV celebration of the "success story" of Irish rock, is the conceit visible in the title itself, suggesting an uncomplicated journey from little or nothing to something of substance. The narrative appears determined to deny that there has been a return journey to mediocrity. A more appropriate title would be from a whisper to a croak (with a muted scream sometime around 1987).
Anyway, there is something deeply sad about middle-aged men slagging off showbands with such vehemence as to suggest that they are saying something new. As with the broader historical arena, the field of Irish popular culture is bedevilled by revisionism, in this case asserting that Irish rock 'n' roll was an immaculate conception, utterly unrelated to the dodgy showband spawn. For people like Bono and Bob Geldof to suggest that their creative journeys owe nothing to showbands is like John Bruton condemning the IRA without acknowledging his own party's roots in the same mire of violence.
A few facts need stating.
One, whatever his prominence for other reasons, Bob Geldof ranks well below Brendan Bowyer in the pantheon of Irish popular culture. Two, what is being celebrated in from a whisper to a scream is not contemporary Irish rock 'n' roll, but the glories of the 1970s and 1980s. Three, not one Irish artist of note has emerged in the past 10 years. Four, the present boyband craze is indistinguishable from showband culture except in that (a) many showbands contained musicians; (b) we at least had the decency to keep showbands to ourselves; and (c) neither Boyzone nor Westlife would have drawn 100 people to the Midnight Club in Ballaghaderreen on St Stephen's Night in 1975.
The best you could say is that we have cunningly revisited history to exploit more cleverly that which at the time we decried.
One of my chastening memories of being a rock 'n' roller in the 1980s is of how we used to indulge ourselves in luxuries like criticising Rory Gallagher. Of course, we knew that Rory was godlike, but we had this sense that he could - and would - be improved upon. We used to wonder about the seemingly functional nature of his lyrics, or the narrowness of the idiom he had chosen. Now, we are rightly filled with shame for such churlishness. Had we known how things would turn out, we would have been prostrate before him. Human nature is disposed to the delusion that, every day in every way, things are getting better and better; but sometimes things get better before getting worse.
WHAT Irish rock aspired to, it now appears, was not fine-tuning, but harder neck. The things we vainly dreamed about back then happen now, in the land of the Celtic Tiger, effortlessly and on a daily basis, to people who would have been thought unfit to carry Rory's Vox amplifier. I remember, nearly 30 years ago, a month of collective pent-up excitement among the hardcore rockers of Castlerea as we observed Thin Lizzy's progress in the British charts with Whiskey in the Jar. I think it got to number five, an outcome which filled us with as much joy as currently consumes the nation after, say, a scoreless draw against Holland.
Now, with Rory and Philo returned to the dust whence they came, we awake to a new millennium and the intelligence that Westlife has occupied the coveted Christmas number one slot in Britain with a record comprising cover versions of two unspeakable songs. And yet, without irony, we repeat the easy sneers about Big Tom.
The standard analysis seeks to characterise the most striking difference between the Ireland of today and the country of the past, as a shift from monochrome to colour, from the grey shadows cast by McQuaid and de Valera to the kaleidoscopic vistas of Westlife and Boyzone. But beneath this perception is a deeper truth: that whereas Ireland is certainly different, it is nothing like as attractive or as interesting as we hoped it would become.
It must be hard for anyone under 30 to believe that, before 1979, there were two hours of pop on national radio per week. It is even harder to imagine, in the present era of pandering to every whim of the "youth market", that nobody in authority thought anything needed to be done about this. Those of us who emerged into the light of post-1960s Ireland, with one ear to Fab 208, the other to John Peel and Whispering Bob, could not have imagined the multiplechoice pop culture of today. In those dark, monochrome days, those who yearned for stimulation might have regarded a premonition of the party animal that is the Celtic Tiger as the tantalisingly false promise of a prize beyond price.
But quality depends on a degree of deprivation. The scarcity of the past made the possibility of plenty so intoxicatingly improbable that we made the most of what we had. Now we have home-grown pop stars cooing and crooning as once we had missionaries spouting platitudes in foreign lands, and it is nothing like as gratifying a prospect as we imagined. Most of the music lacks intelligence, irony or passion, while the obsession with the alleged personalities and private lifestyles of pop celebrities is all-consuming.
IT IS fashionable now to denounce the alleged nostalgic self-indulgence of suggesting things were better in the past. All the economic indicators, we are reminded, say otherwise. But the privations of the past at least held the promise of something better, its mediocrity the redemption of ignorance and deprivation. There was, in other words, an excuse for Larry Cunningham and the Country Blueboys. But how do we explain Ronan Keating to our accusing grandchildren? The whisper contained the faint echo of the scream, but the croak appears permanent and probably terminal.
The explanation for present-day mediocrity is elusive but uncomplicated: for all the constant prating about "change", the people running the Celtic Tiger are precisely the same people who would have been running Ireland had it not changed at all. The middle-aged managers of RTE, TV3, radio stations, newspapers and political institutions would have been just as happy taking directions from McQuaid and de Valera as phone calls from Louis Walsh and Paul McGuinness. Where once they might have held power by throttling public creativity, they do it now by swamping us in superficiality.
By comparison with the past, our pop culture is now less an embarrassment of riches than an embarrassment of embarrassments.
jwaters@irish-times.ie