fracking rock

hardcore for nerds, commenting on Ben Jeffery's article about Retromania

"If ‘retro’ is consciously taking elements of the past for (minimal) refashioning in the present, and the opposite is the mythical outpouring of original, transformational creativity, then I think there is also a middle path of artists that explore existing and established forms to see what more can be got out of them before they become exhausted: the ‘miners’. Miners do not have to go back into the past; they merely continue an existing seam. They only cover already-explored ground to get to where they’re going; what they find is not necessarily wholly new, but it is an addition to the existing stock. Most of all, however, there is a sense of an unbroken tradition that sidesteps the issue of ‘retro’: how can you be going backwards when you’re going forward on the same path, and deeper into the mountain of artistic possibilities? Some may find it claustrophobic, and break out into new tunnels or find a new entrance, but others are happy to keep going on in anticipation of a new lode (ok, I think the metaphor is done now)."

To which I commented: 

"genre-mining is a concept Joe Carducci came up with [in Rock and the Pop Narcotic], it's fine but of necessity it's incremental work

it doesn't have the Shock of the New-Seam

or better still completely new method of fossil-fuel extraction"

to which HfN replied:

"I can probably do without fracking-rock though."

Carducci's genre-miner idea crops up in this piece of mine from 1993 on the State of Underground Rock in America which teeters on the verge of forming the concept of post-rock