Books and Arts

Grade: B+ “Cheltenham Symphonies”, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab. Now listen to John McCabe’s Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe’s orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colors on the surface of a bubble. Not that there’s anything fragile about McCabe’s musical engineering.

Just two weeks ago I was ready to cancel my subscription to Apple Music. I’d stumbled across its “Composer Essentials” – a list of 100 composers so significant that they merit their own curated playlists. It includes Bonds, Boyle, Caccini, Dawson, Dett, Perry, Poldowski, Sohy, Strohl and Walker. If those names don’t ring a bell, how about the composers who are missing? Albéniz, C.P.E. Bach, Bellini, Berg, Bizet, Borodin, Chabrier, Kodály, Martinu, Messiaen, Mussorgsky, Nielsen, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Walton, Weber and Webern. See what I mean? The “Essentials” list is stuffed with DEI hires. Which – an analogy to Cambridge University comes to mind – does no favors to the black and female composers who deservedly feature in it, such as Joplin and Beach.

AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the subliterate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, résumé, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators. Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc., there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify.

Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 100th birthday this year. My new biography of her begins with this story: she’s walking with a friend down Park Avenue dressed in a raincoat and sunglasses and without make-up. As the crowds stream past her, nobody gives her a second glance. Then she turns to her friend and asks, “Do you want to see me be her?” Without changing her hair or dress, the transformation begins and, after making some kind of inner psychological adjustment, she morphs from an ordinary woman into Marilyn Monroe, superstar. As her friend, the actress Susan Strasberg, recalled: “There she was – not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ resplendent, ready for her public. Now heads turned. People crowded around her.

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.