my power pop addicition, no. 27 (99)

With Utopia’s Deface the Music, Todd Rundgren deconstructs the Beatles and creates a masterpiece of postmodern pastiche, one that celebrates the enduring power of pop as a cultural force even as it seems resigned to the exhaustion of its capacity for innovation. The album is one of the most fascinating of Rundgren’s long and prolific career, and it provides further proof that the man is one of the most compelling figures in popular music. …Any discussion of the roots of power pop has to start with the Beatles and their emphasis on tight, compressed, hooky songcraft. Some bands, like Badfinger and the Spongetones, then take the added step of explicitly trying to sound like the Beatles. But Rundgren’s studious devotion to Beatles-type song structures on Deface the Music moves things to a whole new level as he makes simulacra from actual chord progressions and instrumental passages lifted from songs like Fixing a Hole, I am the Walrus, Eight Days a Week, She Loves You, and Day Tripper, all in an effort to essentially make a new Beatles album. There are some who will critique this whole enterprise as a big derivative yawn. Who cares if Rundgren can expertly do the Beatles? But I think what makes Deface the Music so interesting is that Rundgren seems to understand implicitly that originality is no longer possible, if it ever was. The Beatles, after all, are essentially Buddy Holly + Liverpool. The Stones are Chuck Berry + Little Richard + Muddy Waters + London. The Byrds are the Beatles + Dylan. And so on and so forth. Pop records don’t get made in a vacuum but rather emerge out of an increasingly media saturated and commodified environment, where mechanical reproduction and market forces limit creativity to known quantities, and where the artistic process is reduced to the cobbling together of familiar ‘influences.’ Rundgren makes this explicit with a self-consciously mimetic album that validates what the pomo theorists refer to as the death of the author. The genius artist with whom great ideas originate becomes what he always was, a comforting if also reactionary fairy tale and form of wish fulfillment, and he’s now replaced by the artist as assimilator, a bricoleur who defaces the music with fragmented, infinitely referential collage. All this doesn’t speak too optimistically for the health and future of cultural production, but in Rundgren’s hands, I must say, the creative bankruptcy of postmodernity manages to sound fucking great…