"If songs were lines in a conversation," Nick Drake once sang, "the situation would be fine." Some are. The other day a track came up on shuffle-- "Superstar" by Lydia Murdock, from some 1980s disco compilation. Generic title, nobody act, but something about it nagged at me. That determined, taut bassline was familiar from somewhere. Really familiar. And then the lyrics-- "I'm Billie Jean and I'm mad as hell-- I'm a woman with a story to tell."
An answer record-- of course!
Hearing an old tune and running by surprise into a sample is a rare delight: bumping into an answer song is even rarer, since-- of course-- most of them are very keen indeed to advertise their relationship to their host track. Why else would anyone have bothered to hear Sporty Thievz' "No Pigeons" (a reply to "No Scrubs"), or Jody Miller's "Queen of the House" ("King of the Road") or Mz Bratt's "Wearing His Rolex" (three guesses)? The narrative of "Superstar" is of a woman wronged, denied credit and identity by the unnamed idol-- how can you say you don't know who I am? When, of course, the answer song itself is piggybacking on fame, the very thing "Billie Jean" is so tortured over.
I love answer records. I love how you can never quite tell how illicit they are-- whether Dizzee Rascal gave Shystie's outraged response to "I Luv U" his blessing or whether it took him by surprise. Sometimes the setup is just too neat-- Eamon's "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)", Frankee's "Fuck U Right Back"-- but there's still a pleasure in the artifice. I wish there were more of them: where was the angry, haughty girl in 1993 ready to tell Thom Yorke that yes, actually, he is a creep? Some acts seem bereft without replies. Beyoncé, that mistress of the in-song situation, needs a Greek chorus of R'n'B nobodies to step up and vainly say their piece. "A ring? Get real." "Babe, you will never replace me."
In their heyday answer records were half cash-in, half empowerment: typically an answer record is recorded from a woman's point of view, expanding and overturning a pop situation to give it perspective. Often a wry perspective: In "Queen of the House" the curtain is pulled back and we see the patience and domestic scenery that enables the road king's hobo life.
So answer records are positive parasitism-- a creative repurposing of a hit that can tell their own story or suggest a lens through which to view a more familiar one. They are the record as fan fiction-- another sector of creativity where, so the stereotype runs, female and minority perspectives can flourish.
I say stereotype because in many ways it's pointless for me to pronounce on fan fiction-- after all, I've never read any. To try and characterize fan production without immersing myself in it would be as silly as playing mix and match with dance sub-genres while never setting foot in a club. So it's lucky other people have done the legwork for me. Because fan activity seems to me a really useful lens to view not only answer records, but remixes, cover versions, samples, revivals, and retro stylings. As critics and listeners we tend to treat these things separately, but they're all transformations creative people put one another's work through-- work which was itself perhaps the result of earlier transformations.
You can go further. Not everyone who learns to write becomes a writer. But almost everyone who learns to play the electric guitar is doing so in some hope of playing in a band-- not for fame or profit maybe, just for companionship and kicks. To learn to make music-- rock or pop music especially-- is to enter a fandom, and not passively: when people pick up a guitar or load up FruityLoops they have someone else's music in mind, a template they want to follow or surpass, break from or elaborate on.
The fandom legworker I've latched onto is Henry Jenkins, who in his 1992 book Textual Poachers attempted a taxonomy of fan fiction in terms of the transformations it effects on its source material. As a fan I talked to about this pointed out, 17 years is a long chunk of internet time, and network effects have transformed fandom so that a 1992 depiction will inevitably feel simplistic.
But simplistic sounds like a good starting point: let's run with it. The types of fan fiction Jenkins identifies run as follows: recontextualizing; expanding the timeline, refocalizing on a different character; moral realignment; genre shifting; crossovers; character dislocation; personalization; emotional intensification; eroticization. Flourish Klink, whose blog on fandom pointed me to this list, adds an 11th-- experimentation: changing one or two elements to see how a story alters. All these categories of transformation can of course combine.
What on earth does any of this have to do with pop music? Well, "refocalizing on a different character" seems a good description of the answer records that led me here, so perhaps the others might be applicable too. Experimentation and recontextualizing-- a catchall category for gap-filling and adding information-- sound to me like remixing. Crossovers are mashups. Genre shifting speaks for itself. Expanding the timeline does too-- the urge for there to be more of a favored record has been a motor for intense innovation.
Other categories require more subtle analogies. Emotional intensification is a good description of the effect sought by certain cover artists, from Cat Power to Johnny Cash. Character dislocation involves pulling an element out of context, and might equate to sampling. Personalization is a fascinating category, involving writing oneself (or a thinly disguised analogue) into a story: for me it echoes both the patient stylistic imitation of a retro band and the delicacies of reality TV song choice and narrative arc creation. Which suggests an intriguing equivalence between "American Idol" and Vivian Girls.
That leaves eroticization and moral realignment. I thought of equating eroticization with making a song more dancefloor-friendly, but it seemed too tenuous. Maybe eroticization is a way of thinking about what happens within a band-- the hot fission that studio and touring closeness creates. Moral realignment, though, could easily mirror shock-value covers and the kind of records that create satisfying, unifying outrage at the thought of a "classic being desecrated."
We should also ask ourselves-- what's been left out in this schema? I particularly think there's a kind of negative, destructive transformation absent from Jenkins' list, which arises from the way that-- as I mentioned earlier-- making music is inescapably linked to fandom. With no way out of the playpen, no wonder some start wanting to smash up the toys.
If this whistle-stop remix of Jenkins' work seems frivolous, I plead guilty. But there's a serious point behind it, which is to think of records which reference other records as part of a huge continuum of fannish and social activity, rather than as discrete techniques like "sampling" or "cover versions" or "answer records." We write and listen and play music in a cultural environment in which there's intense excitement and anxiety around the idea of music as a social object, not just a commercial one. As Eric Harvey pointed out in his first Silent Party column, music has always been social. But in order to understand better the ways in which songs are becoming lines in listeners' conversations, we need different ways of thinking about how they've played that role for musicians too.