Blur and the Narcissism of the Entertainment Sector

Christopher Jackson

There is a moment in the Beatles’ catalogue of which I’m particularly fond. It comes on the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when Paul McCartney, ever the panting optimist, sings: “It’s getting better all the time.” Lennon improvises back: “It couldn’t get much worse.”

The essentially dual spirit of the Beatles is encapsulated in that – and, of course, it’s the want of instances like it which, one feels, diminishes their respective solo careers. It’s one of those moments which charts the ideal of ‘being in a band’ whereby two contrasting personalities lay aside competitiveness, and work together for the creation of something grander, more expansive, and stranger than their individual selves could muster.

A writer of manuals for office etiquette might call this ‘teamwork’. Musicians and listeners alike know it’s something far more magical: human difference overcome in the name of art.

I remembered this moment when, on a sunny morning in May, I placed Blur’s new single ‘The Narcissist’ onto iTunes, and in the joy of the moment, on a wide and deserted road, almost went above the stipulated 20mph speed limit, risking a £100 fine.

What does the new song sound like? For one thing, your summer suddenly has its soundtrack. What is it that makes a summer tune? When the intricate growth of spring gives way to the lazy months of July and August, we want our summer songs to mimic that: they should eschew detail and fiddly chord changes in favour of a languorous unfolding, leading with no particular hurry to anthemic choruses, simplicities learnable even in the heat. A summer anthem must speak to the most passive version of ourselves.

‘The Narcissist’ easily ticks all these boxes: the chord sequence turns out to be a straightforward exploration of the possibilities of E, C sharp and A, with various bouncings off the Asus11 and a cunning shift to the augmented chord of E in the chorus. An augmented chord, by the way, is a very good way of separating the amateur musician from the pro: an amateur will peer at its notation with a narrowing sceptical frown, myopically mortified at a difficulty. A true musician will instinctively see the progression, and intuit its justice, fingers manoeuvring knowledgeably.

The song possesses a pattern of ingenious simplicity. This is frontman Damon Albarn taking it easy, and telling us it’s okay to relax. Next up, the singer’s regal and essentially inexplicable cockney imitations enter, immediately recognisable to any Brit between the age of 40 and 50:

Looked in the mirror

So many people standing there

I walked towards them

Into the floodlights

The lyrical and the musical theme are perfectly intertwined. Not only this, but it’s the right thing for Blur to be singing about in this age of TikTok, Instagram live feeds, disposable memes, and Holly and Phil.

Let’s consider the narcissism of the music industry. It is sui generis. Theatre, which might otherwise have given the sector a run for its money, lacks the turbocharger of a huge audience; if narcissism is ever attained it happens in a comparative vacuum, with insufficient adoration to feed off. Meanwhile film, though also a contender with its ludicrous red carpet set pieces and softball promotional interviews, seems to have its saving grace in the dull slog of a working environment which ostentatiously lacks glamour.

The music industry by comparison is a cauldron of narcissism. Firstly, the musical skills required to make a ‘hit’ are relatively limited. You can get a long way in pop with an affinity for G, D, C and A minor. Most sentient adults can be taught to play ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ from scratch in an hour (though it goes without saying only Dylan could write it). Of course some – the members of Blur among them – become gifted musicians, but I don’t think any of them would say they were to begin with.

Pop music is a question of conveying an appealing mood. The offshoot of this is that, if successful, just as one is being lavished with money and sexual attention, one’s intellect is likely being overpraised. These things taken together make narcissism all but inevitable. And once arrived at as a condition, it appears irreversible: witness Pete Docherty’s adolescent ramblings, still ongoing now at the age of 44; Liam Gallagher’s tweets, the work of a 50 year old; and even Dylan’s plain weirdness, undertaken at the age of 82.

You can add to that the demographic certainty that pop stars are not made in middle age: my own experience tells me that the young are reasonably narcissistic even if they don’t have a hit with ‘There’s No Other Way’.

Incidentally, what would the music industry do if someone in, say, their mid-50s suddenly wrote a string of brilliant pop songs? This intellectual feat would not necessarily be difficult for anyone with musical training: its equivalent happens all the time in literature and art. But there is simply no precedent for sudden middle-aged achievement in this art form, meaning that there can be no economic migration from other sectors. When you turn on the radio you are almost certainly hearing the thoughts of the under-40’s, and usually the under-30’s – and if you’re not you’re probably hearing someone whose identity was frozen in place around then: we are hearing Narnias bereft of Aslans.

Is Damon Albarn a narcissist? Some of the signs have always been bad. Even his defenders must concede the knowing inauthenticity of his East End vocals. There was the Damien Hirst-directed video to ‘Country House’ in 1995, Albarn in a bubble bath surrounded by Page Three models. One never recalls without baffled solemnity his initial willingness to submit to the extraordinary dullness of the Blur v Oasis spat, an esoteric competition he only soured on when it seemed to be going against him. And always in these narratives there is the bland submission to drugs and alcohol, the back and forth of addiction and rehab, leading to other yawns: fallouts with bandmates and rivals; dewy-eyed ‘hurt’ at the tenor of press coverage; all leading to a generalised and moneyed whingeing, and its inevitable offshoot, rubbish music.

Blur went through this phase with 13 – though note that even their low point contained ‘Tender’, perhaps their masterpiece. Despite all this, Blur has given the impression it knows what it’s doing, that it’s able to conduct the rituals of hedonism with a degree of ironic distance. Alex James, the band’s likeably louche bassist, is on record as saying: “Food is one of life’s really great pleasures. My 20th birthday party was all about booze, my 30th birthday was about drugs, and now I realise that my 40s are about food. It’s something you appreciate more and more as you get older.” This is a pleasing progression. By the way, where James says ‘food’ he predominantly means ‘cheese’.

Blur are reminiscent again of the Beatles in that their ‘third’ member also turns out to be a highly interesting person in his own right, just as George Harrison was. For some reason it is pleasing to me to know when listening to Blur that a major cheese-farmer is playing bass, and that the band’s drums player Dave Rowntree is also a minor Labour politician and former Kingsley Napley solicitor. Blur have jobs – they have experience.

Happily, that initial – and let’s face it, narcissistic – immersion in fame had its second act, consisting of a surprisingly mature resolution of the routine jeopardy of the pop star ‘predicament’. Albarn found salvation in the Hell of fame by discovering within himself an astonishing work ethic; he always seems to have five projects on the go, and all are ambitious. This might be why, in 2023, he feels able to tackle the question of narcissism and the entertainment industry: he’s traversed it.

For the record, I don’t know how sane Albarn is. For all I know, he may possess all the usual madnesses of pop stars: the unwillingness to begin any sentence without the word ‘I’; the childish need to have a pool of secretaries, bouncers and admin staff to conduct the basics of daily administration; a powerful lack of interest in philanthropy of any kind, especially if any outlay doesn’t get in the press with their own name attached to it.

But I think his work is sane: in his solo career, his Gorillaz albums, his musicals, and now in ‘The Narcissist’, he seems always to be using music to arrange the world, and make sense of it. In doing that for himself, he does it also for us. His artistry, and the endeavour required to produce it, breaks the typical cycle of narcissism.

As ‘The Narcissist’ enters its second verse, we are reminded how happy he is when he’s in Blur. It’s an ‘It’s Getting Better’ moment:

I heard no echo (no echo)
There was distortion everywhere (everywhere)
I found my ego (my ego)
I felt rebuttal standing there

The parentheses are sung by his old friend, Graham Coxon – and of course perfectly fit the theme of the song. At time of writing, it’s not clear whether Albarn sings ‘rubato’ or ‘rebuttal’ in that last line of this second quatrain. I think I prefer ‘rebuttal’, but with all due respect to Albarn, I don’t think he is quite sufficient a poet for it to matter, the way it might matter with Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan.

That’s because Albarn is very good at displaying generalised intelligence: the listener will likely feel at this point that he is simply using a word which we don’t normally hear in pop songs, bestowing a sense of non-specific sophistication. We don’t actually mind which word he’s using so long as it’s an interesting one. It has been said that some writers (Stoppard, Wilde) have the kind of intelligence which flatters the audience, and makes you feel more intelligent than you actually are. Others (Nabokov, Joyce) possess the intelligence which bludgeons you a bit, lets you know that you’re their inferior. There is another category, the highest of all – in Tolstoy, for instance – where you stop minding about the question of intelligence altogether and just take in a work of art as a chunk of life.

Anyway, Albarn is in the first category: we can partake of his intelligence without feeling overwhelmed. As tertiary gifts go, it’s a fine one to have. But the most important aspect of the stanza is in the call and response. Really when we talk of Blur as distinct from any other Damon Albarn project, we’re discussing the relationship between him and Coxon, singer and guitarist – songwriter and interpreter.

In the annals of Britpop, there were probably two ‘great’ guitar players: Jonny Greenwood in Radiohead, and Coxon. In neither instance are we discussing guitarists in the ilk of Slash from Guns N’ Roses – the purveyor of the note-riddled mountaintop solo. We are instead discussing something far more embedded.

Coxon is seemingly able to do almost anything with a guitar: he can make it scythe unobtrusively through a landscape of disco (‘Girls and Boys’); imitate the sound of a fly bumping again and again into the frustrating transparency of a windowpane (‘Beetlebum’); or give it a loose twangy mid-American verandah ranginess, which seems to let a song walk on a sort of leash (‘Tender’). He can make a guitar riot (‘Parklife’); mourn (‘Badhead’); headbang (‘Song 2’); and yearn (‘Under the Westway’). His limitlessness is entire – in Blur. But that’s his limitation; he needs Albarn to realise his own greatness.

But more notable than all this is what Coxon chooses not to do. Every Coxon contribution to Blur is generous not just to the listener, but to his bandmates: humility is implied in all he does. This is especially in evidence in ‘The Narcissist’. The chorus passes off agreeably (‘I’ll shine a light in your eyes/you’ll probably shine it back on me’), and then the interlude reverts to four straightforward notes by Coxon which I am sure I could teach my six-year-old to play. But a lesser guitarist would have sought to play forty. Such a solo would have been more complicated to play. There’s no doubt that Coxon can play it, or anything you put in front of him: but such a performance would have been obtrusive and spoiled all our summers.

Ever since Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Symphony was booed and mocked by the classical music fraternity at its premiere, there has been the question of how good at music you have to be to be a pop musician. It is a complicated question: on the one hand, there is no evidence yet of McCartney being able to play Scriabin on the piano. Equally, none of his tormentors has yet had the wherewithal to write ‘Penny Lane’. My allegiance is probably – just – with McCartney, as I’d always rather have the thing itself than the interpretation of the thing. But I also know I don’t need to take a side if I don’t want to. And I don’t.

Yet the question seems to matter if we’re considering whether the 21st century finds us in some kind of musical decline – and perhaps therefore in some broader societal decay. One thought experiment is to imagine your way into Beethoven listening to Coxon’s guitar-playing. It’s possible to go round the houses on this. Sometimes I imagine Beethoven sternly wanting to educate Coxon on classical progressions; at others I imagine him going quiet, knowing the game is up, then meekly asking Coxon if he might borrow his guitar.

A good summer song should be like a good summer’s day: it shouldn’t go anywhere. ‘The Narcissist’ makes good on this. I’m not sure if lyrically it says much more than: “I’ve been a narcissist in the past but now I’ll not be.” If we were strict about it, it’s probably a minor song, but something in its beguiling expansiveness makes me want not to be strict about it. Besides, it’s minor status only really makes sense if you take it out of context as a record and as a release.

So what does Blur mean now in 2023? Initially, Blur could be pegged as an act nostalgic for the music of the 1960s – this was because Albarn looked to Ray Davies as a way of navigating the shallowness of the 1990s. In relistening to songs like ‘Lola’, ‘Days’ and ‘Autumn Almanac’, Albarn found a useful crutch because the country hadn’t really changed all that much since the Jenkins reforms of the 1960s. But the band was always more than that. For instance, Albarn also leaned on Martin Amis’ comic novels. Just as Amis gave us John Self, Keith Talent – and later, his most hilarious name of all, Clint Smoker – Albarn created Tracy Jacks, Dan Abnormal, the Charmless Man, the rural escapee who lives in the country house ‘reading Balzac, and knocking back Prozac’ and a myriad others. Even when he was caught up in the satire moment, Albarn took care to have a range of satirical influences.

But he was always omnivorous: amid all the satires in Parklife, there was nothing satirical about ‘To The End’, or ‘This is a Low’. It’s immensely to Albarn’s credit that he knew satire wasn’t enough. He had to go on seeking, until he became a kind of search. Through the digressions of Gorillaz, The Good, the Bad and the Queen, Mali Music, and his musicals (themselves astonishingly diverse in influence and intent), he has amassed a body of work which you would only underestimate if your main image is of the blonde boy singing ‘Parklife’ in front of an ice cream van. Unfortunately, that accounts for almost all of us.

But I don’t think Albarn minds this. In fact, we can now see that his fame gave him useful cover for his essential seriousness – not to mention an ongoing audience. As a result, he has smuggled into the mainstream so much that’s interesting that he has come to merit extended study while belonging to an industry that all balanced people try to ignore.

It amounts to a remarkably generous corpus, of which Blur will always be the cornerstone, as ‘The Narcissist’ reminds us. It’s a marvellous thing that Albarn has again made time to return to his old friends, in one fell swoop continuing a conversation which we all love to hear, and eschewing the cliché of the spat that turns into an everlasting split. Each Blur record now has the wisdom of the renewal of old friendship attached to it.

From Amy Winehouse to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and all the others, musical careers often seem to end in tragedy – and the tragedy is always the tragedy of narcissism. Blur have gone a different route: this isn’t tragedy but a sort of romance, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale when the statue of Hermione starts moving, and suddenly all the altered world is singing again.