"We need to expand the concept
of Retro Necro a little.... Retro Necro is very difficult to
escape from, because its whole premise is that the old is more young than the
young, more new than the new. That's why Retro Necro appeals to the young --
all these teens and twentysomethings having slash fantasies about dead people!
That's why it appeals to Lord Whimsy too, perhaps. There's simply more spunk
and vitality in decades long-gone.
"I have a theory about what computer geeks call "the epoch" -- the year 1970. I think in 1970 someone pulled a switch and culture went into reverse. The 60s was the last progressive decade, by the standards of all sorts of 20th century ideas of what progress meant. Political ideas like increasing equality, access to education and health care, scientific ideas like introducing new planes like Concorde or getting a man on the moon: all that went into reverse after 1970. Inequality started to rise again. Instead of going beyond the moon, astronauts contented themselves with Earth orbit. If a gay icon in the 60s was Joe Orton, in the 80s it was someone in Oxford bags pretending it was the 1920s again. An old 1950s film star became president in the US, a sort of 1940s governess took over in the UK. In the arts, Retro Necro was given the name postmodernism, which meant that we were no longer Modernist, and no longer believed in progress. Instead, we recycled things endlessly."
-- Momus, circa 2007.
"Retro necro", a fabulous coinage, must have been devised by Momus at roughly the same time I was using anechronesis a/k/a anecronosis in various hauntology writings - a much-more ungainly term (anachronism + necrosis) to describe the same syndrome: the sensation of living death and spiritual-libidinal entropy caused by exposure to retro-rock or anything form of undead zombie culture.
However both terms have an antecedent in Peter York's Art Necro, a term he used to describe revivalism in popular arts, design, fashion etc back in the Seventies.
Of course, we're all of us are trailing in the footsteps of Nietzche.
"I have a theory about what computer geeks call "the epoch" -- the year 1970. I think in 1970 someone pulled a switch and culture went into reverse. The 60s was the last progressive decade, by the standards of all sorts of 20th century ideas of what progress meant. Political ideas like increasing equality, access to education and health care, scientific ideas like introducing new planes like Concorde or getting a man on the moon: all that went into reverse after 1970. Inequality started to rise again. Instead of going beyond the moon, astronauts contented themselves with Earth orbit. If a gay icon in the 60s was Joe Orton, in the 80s it was someone in Oxford bags pretending it was the 1920s again. An old 1950s film star became president in the US, a sort of 1940s governess took over in the UK. In the arts, Retro Necro was given the name postmodernism, which meant that we were no longer Modernist, and no longer believed in progress. Instead, we recycled things endlessly."
-- Momus, circa 2007.
"Retro necro", a fabulous coinage, must have been devised by Momus at roughly the same time I was using anechronesis a/k/a anecronosis in various hauntology writings - a much-more ungainly term (anachronism + necrosis) to describe the same syndrome: the sensation of living death and spiritual-libidinal entropy caused by exposure to retro-rock or anything form of undead zombie culture.
However both terms have an antecedent in Peter York's Art Necro, a term he used to describe revivalism in popular arts, design, fashion etc back in the Seventies.
Of course, we're all of us are trailing in the footsteps of Nietzche.
