18.10.24
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Through original essays and archival photos, We Call It Avant-Pop traces 22 years of the festival’s history and the sounds that have shaped it.

Over 288 pages, ten essays and dozens of photos, C2C‘s new book We Call It Avant Pop pays tribute to the history and visual identity of the Turin festival, honouring the artists, sounds and crowds who’ve shaped its 22-year evolution. Curated by festival founder Sergio Ricciardone and featuring the words of ten cultural critics, it also acts as a manifesto for C2C’s understanding of avant-pop – as a concept that has deeply influenced the festival’s identity, a community it brings together, and an outlook that has pushed pop music forward.

Together, these critics cover both personal experiences and a cultural movement, mapping out their own memories as well as the artists who’ve defined its sound – from Alberto Campo imagining Arthur Russell at Studio 54, to Carlo Antonelli asserting avant-pop’s power to trigger memory and transcend time.

Find out more at C2C’s website and read Jazz Monroe’s essay, ‘Avant-pop and the art of plunder’, below.

‘Avant-pop and the art of plunder’
by Jazz Monroe

Avant-pop began with pop, and pop began with plunder. From the start, pop plundered insurgent genres and made their innovations palatable – for teenagers first, and more broadly, for the market. Pop, of course, is a capitalist product. It mutates, innovates and iterates; it creates anticipation and desire. When pop doesn’t sell, it is no longer pop. Popularity is its principal quality.

Is pop, then, for everyone? Not exactly. The market favours those with security, assets and comforts, and pop has had to diversify to satisfy that market. One strand surges ahead, seeking new plunder – this pop is a little like avant-pop but is not quite there yet. The other strand of pop consolidates the novel elements, and uses them to reinvigorate familiar sounds without leaving the middle of the road. The goal of this second strand is to comfort the comfortable (and extract their disposable income). These two strands work together to keep pop healthy and marketable. What was once plundered from R&B or rock’n’roll or disco is now held within pop itself, no longer radical or dangerous. Over decades, genres come and go, and pop incorporates them into itself. Funk, house or grunge becomes pop, and then, when its pop iteration no longer sells, the genre morphs back to its original form, itself alone and not pop. Both of these strands exist to perpetuate pop, which is not avant-pop’s goal.

Conservative pop is white bread or oven cleaner or bin bags or light bulbs or Coca-Cola – a product you buy and buy again, anticipating little change to the formula. Plundered pop is less dependable but just as crucial to the enterprise. It is the introductory offers and brand new recipes that make it exciting to go to the supermarket.

"It should aspire to deliver not only the shock of the new but also, in just the same instant, a sudden shock of the old"

For pop music to truly surprise us, it has to see not only the totality of pop history, nor the crest of technical innovation, but both at once. It has to synthesise them into a sound that is puzzlingly, electrically current. It ought to see the trend but transcend it. It should aspire to deliver not only the shock of the new but also, in just the same instant, a sudden shock of the old. When pop achieves those aims, it may or may not be pop. It is probably avant-pop.

Like pop, avant-pop is an umbrella. Neither is a genre unto itself. Contrast avant-pop with the young genre of hyperpop. This Internet-bred style combines compositional nous with post-genre anarchy, reflecting the availability of seemingly all music, all at once. Nonetheless, hyperpop’s hyperactive, borderless anti-style is now a style in itself – the sound of how it feels to grow up in these information-overloaded times. Avant-pop, on the other hand, contains the possibility for multiple, successive iterations – contains hyperpop itself. Yesterday’s avant-pop is not today’s avant-pop. Its plunder is not what is hot right now, but what excites the collective psyche. Unlike pop, which draws the present out of the past, avant-pop sees the future in the past.

I teach a class in Experimental Pop at a California art school. One thing we look at is the question of who gets to call themselves “experimental”. Quality newspapers, art periodicals, and left-field music magazines alike are susceptible to a certain sort of pitch (borders being crossed, etc). Often these musicians were educated at institutions similar to the one where I instruct. Part of what they learn there is how to frame their practice. They become fluent in a language that’s essential when applying for grants and positions, but works just as well when making a case for what you do in the culture media.

But pop has always harbored its own internal experimental tradition, a vernacular and functionalist approach that doesn’t use the jargon and rationales of the art world. Instead it favors adolescent or street slang: dark, sick, twisted, fucked-up, fresh. Mark Stewart, late singer of the ironically-named The Pop Group understood this. Celebrating the electrofunk of LA label SOLAR, Stewart recalled how “they would slice up tape with a razor blade and do these amazing remixes. It was incredible, the most experimental thing I’ve ever heard. But because it’s Black and it was entertainment, it wasn’t considered avant-garde. But some kiddie playing a hosepipe going on about Dada was…”.

Separate from the Bowie/Björk line, then, you can trace a different avant-pop from Bo Diddley through King Tubby to the warped Auto-Tune madness of Migos and Future. The motivations are less lofty, more impure: they want to make money and blow minds. Every innovation is also a gimmick designed to grab ears and make bodies move. But just as much as the art school trained Raincoats, these street vanguard sounds have the power to make parents wonder why pop can’t just be pretty.

We Call It Avant-Pop is available for purchase via the C2C website and select stockists including Turin, Rome and Perugia.