“I call it the lost generation, because from 2000 to 2017, nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture. Like, how would you look back at 2000 to 2017 and remember anything? How would you see somebody wearing some gear and say, ‘Hey, that’s gotta be from 2014?’ There’s no music there, there’s no pop culture, there’s no fashion that defines the generation. I look at the Nineties like it’s the last truly great decade." - Vanilla Ice
That's like a vernacular version of the Gospel according to K-Punk and Simonretromania being ventriloquized through Vanilla Ice's mouth there!
Ice is quoted in this piece by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone about Nineties revivalism, the Nineties nostalgia circuit that Ice and others are doing very nice business on, and decade-consciousness.
Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray also quoted on the Nineties: “It was the last heyday of the music business. When you were a kid in your garage, you could pick up a guitar and dream of being part of that. I compare it to these young kids playing basketball, wanting to be in the NBA – then all of a sudden the NBA disappears, and the NFL disappears. Now people are still playing basketball, but it’s the local rec league; people are still playing football, but you gotta go find some guys and get some games together. The infrastructure of stardom is gone. So you look back on that – not just as a business, but romantically. ‘Boy, that was fun, going to Tower Records to see what’s new, watching MTV for a world premiere.'” Sheffield lays on McGrath this idea of Nineties as the last proper Decade with a sense of itself c.f. first two decades of the 21st Century being Zeigeist-ly amorphous:
“Right – what would you call it, the Noughties? The 2000s? No one knows what to call it. No one knows when it started or ended. It took a while for the stink of the Nineties to go away, because nothing replaced it. The industry imploded, so there weren’t new bands coming up. Name the last rock star. The top ten touring bands in Pollstar – it was still the Chili Peppers, it was still Soundgarden – God rest his soul, Chris Cornell – it was still the Dave Matthews Band. Nothing replaced the Nineties, even though the decade was over.”
This doesn't seem true to me, seems a bit of a self-serving fiction - there are plenty of definitively 21st Century pop stars, some of whom have taken on and taken over the old functions of rockstardom (excess, outrage, political statements, being taken seriously / taking themselves very seriously) .... indeed Rockism is alive and well in pop itself, ironically (and boringly)... rock anthems of the 21st Century is a shrinking category, true... guitars are rarely heard in the Top 40, for sure....
As for the no-feel-to-2000s/2010s ... I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if early-Noughties nostalgia kicks in. Won't be long now, if the 'stalgia is already settling in on the late Nineties, eve of Y2K moment.
YeahI wouldn't be surprised if a certain look (to clothes, hair) and feel 'n' finish to entertainment products will start to become apparent as we move into the future - something we couldn't put our finger on at the time, what with the welter of revivalism and pastiche
the clunkiness of an era becomes its charm
(although films and TV of the late Eighties and early Nineties often look really shit)
Watching Homecoming - an addictive new podcast-sourced show - I really enjoyed the Pakula / 1970s paranoid thriller vibe to the camera work: the aerial, hovering, Panopticon / surveillance-vibe shots, the decor and locations (sterile office interiors of huge looming scale, with that cold strip-lighting look - cf. newsrooms of All the President's Men), the new-built buildings and soul-less exurban perimeter zones.
There even seemed to be a deliberately Pakula-esque vibe to the music, with certain motifs redolent of the eerie-voice refrains in Klute.
Well it turns out that was even more the case than I thought.
Via Bruce Levenstein, this piece explains how director Sam Esmail deliberately repurposed underscores and motifs from 1970s thrillers (and some later films in a similar vein), despite the enormous cost of doing so.
After learning that, with the later episodes I've spotted a recycled swathe of ruminative, melancholy jazz used in The Conversation (that bit at the end when the Gene Hackman character is thoroughly defeated, hoist by his own surveillance-expert petard etc) and an imposing, stately fanfare (evocative of power and its untouchability) that I'm pretty certain is from All the Presidents's Men or The Parallax View.
But the rest have been more elusive, vaguely redolent of Carpenter or Michael Small but hard to pin to specific.
Ah, stop press - also via Bruce Levenstein - a piece at Indiewire that gives a detailed breakdown of what soundtrack motifs were recycled in Homecoming - turns out I'm right about The Conversation, Klute and All the President's Men. Lots of good-taste choices, including The Andromeda Strain OST by Gil Melle
Anybody seen this? Any cop? At Pop Matters, John A. Riley writes:
"Arcadia compiles footage from the British Film Institute's sprawling national archive to create an impressionistic collage film about rural Britain... "... Paul Wright's film is primed to be received in the context of two related phenomena: Hauntology and Folk Horror. Both represent new ways of thinking about our relationship to time and place, and of finding the sinister within the everyday, the former by emphasizing repressed pasts and failed futures, the latter by emphasizing sinister textures and themes lurking below the surface of Britain's rural communities. However, it may be equally if not more helpful to think of Arcadia as a sculpture done in paracinema: countless hours of public service announcements, promotional and instructional videos, and amateur-shot footage, are here given an unruly second lease of life.... "... a dizzying assemblage of bucolic, folkloric footage; maypole dancing and sundry village festivities that wouldn't look out of place in The Wicker Man, harvesting crops, hunting, bucolic landscapes. Occasionally footage from a well-known narrative film, such as an unmistakable glimpse of Helen Mirren from Herostratus, is thrown into the mix.... ".... The film doesn't present the archive footage chronologically, which means that a variety of formats, from badly damaged silent-era film to pristine 35mm, to home formats such as VHS and Super 8, all brush up against each other to dizzying, sometimes foreboding effect. The film works by associating, linking things in a montage chain that, in one example, goes from the pageantry of traditional village celebrations such as Morris dancing and 'Obby 'Oss festivals, to the '60s counterculture, exemplified by a patronizingly interviewed hippy who says he celebrates love "by doing psychedelic freakouts every now and again" to more recent times, through images of the kind of barnyard raves beloved by the '80s/'90s rave generation, as the soundtrack works itself up into a relentless pulse.... " Arcadia is a frequently fascinating, often unsettling look at traditions and places that can often feel like they are vanishing before our eyes."
Feel both allured and also faintly fatigued by the prospect - like this really should be the absolute last word on terrain that is well ploughed by this point... - perhaps even whatever comes after the last word....
Riley also praises the score by Portishead's Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp's Will Gregory....
"The eclectic score, at times evoking Debussy, at other times sounding like '90s lounge music revival (not surprising given its composers), and at one point breaking out into an ominously-tinged '70s bovver rock stomp, is worthy of serious standalone consideration..."
Anything even slightly connected to the stench of Goldfrapp I'm a bit sceptical about....
I knew there were good reasons why I hated the movie, I just didn't know there were so many From a Bright Lights Film Journal essay by Richard A. Voeltz, titled “The Joke’s on History”: Retro-Reality, Twee, and Mediated Nostalgia in La La Land (2016):
"La La Land is more of a composite remake; even better, an archive, where Chazelle cleverly uses a combination of parody, homage, and nostalgia to continue, remake, and reimagine nostalgic themes or franchises established in earlier times that places it in the epistemological category of the nostalgic remake as defined by Lizardi that blocks engagement with the past or present.... “La La Land ultimately feels bloated by its references, by the mad rush to imitate all Chazelle’s inspirations,” writes Christos Tsiolkas. "The movie opens with the old CinemaScope logo in a similar way that Quentin Tarantino pays homage to the movies that he is imitating. The shooting of the film in CinemaScope is important because “the technique represented a groundbreaking new widescreen process that revolutionized filmmaking in the 1950s,” which explains why aesthetically the film manages to look like a classic movie-musical even when it’s just panning across a modern-day traffic jam at the beginning of the film.25 This is a film that draws on classic musicals and films that most people would only know from watching TCM religiously: Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Top Hat (1935), Shall We Dance (1937), The Band Wagon (1953), Broadway Melody (1936), An American in Paris (1951), An Affair to Remember (1957), West Side Story (1961), Bogie Nights (1997), Funny Face (1957), Moulin Rouge (2001), and Sweet Charity (1969) among many others. Sara Preciado has, in fact, compiled a YouTube video comparing scenes from La La Land with ones from these famous musicals.26 Rebel Without a Cause (1955) also plays a significant role in the film. Even Annie Hall (1977), Pulp Fiction (1994), and 8 ½ (1963) make the list. But none resonate as much as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and his lesser-known The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Demy’s Umbrellas provides not only inspiration for the plot, ending, along with the 1927 silent film 7th Heaven, and music of La La Land, but also for Chazelle’s use of vibrant colors of blue, red, green, and yellow in the cinematography."
Also
"Sebastian drives a 1982 Buick Riviera convertible and listens to music on a tape deck. He plays vinyl jazz records at home. And the needle-scraping ending of such records figures prominently as a metaphor for his relationship with Mia winding down as well. Early in the movie, a dinner conversation between Mia’s then boyfriend Greg, his brother, and his wife deals with the subject of “nowadays theatres … they’re so dirty – and they’re either too hot or too cold – always people talking.” When Mia and Sebastian meet at the vintage Rialto* theatre in Pasadena, later shown as closed (Chazelle loved the old red velvet seats), to see Rebel Without a Cause, the celluloid film during the scene of the drive up to the Griffith Park Observatory melts in the projector. This is a retro-intertextual reminder of when the film burns in the middle of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966)"
Yeah it's just pure pastiche puke from start to finish... meta upon meta... and these quotes are just a fraction of Voeltz's inventory of the ways in which La La sucks But the other thing, though - the real failing is on a much more basic level. It harks back to a golden age of song and dance movies, but the dancing is not very good and the songs aren't much cop either. If you're going to resurrect the lost golden age then you have to compete with Singin' in the Rain, High Society and West Side Story, on the toon and tap front...
* that Rialto Theatre is just up the road from us in South Pas.. was where a crucial scene from The Player was filmed (so that layers even more retro-referentialism)... was a ghost cinema for a long while... has recently been refurbished, but not to show pictures: on Sundays it hosts the "hipster church" Mosaic
"I’m not saying that I miss Winamp, the popular ’90s shareware program that is being rebooted like “Will & Grace” and “The Connors” (née “Roseanne”). But what its revival makes me realize are the manifold ways in which I have let the actual connection to the definite article of music fall by the wayside. Somewhere between paying $10 a month for access to everything that’s happening in music right now and buying physical LPs to fill up the space in my heart evacuated by digital culture, there is the memory of the halcyon days of downloading MP3s, pirating music, ripping CDs onto my computer, making CD-Rs for my car, making CD-RWs for my friends. It was a liminal ownership of music. I miss that, that last moment where it felt like I had some fleeting connection with digital music."
I don't miss CD-Rs - horrid things, especially when in paper sleeves.
But yeah, streaming - it's hard to establish any attachment to music in those conditions, or even to remember what you've listened to already, what you want to go back to, etc.
My compensation strategies include assembling monstrously large playlists on Spotify that in 19 out of 20 cases I never ever return to. That's a form of quasi-collection - setting yourself a listening task, a genre or a single artist's whole oeuvre gathered in one spot, that would be absurdly daunting (day after day of continuous listening) if it were not INSTANTLY unappetising the moment you've completed the 22 album long playlist - any originating impulse of curiosity or desire snuffed by the dismal drag-and-click process of pulling together its contents.
But I am actually still harvesting MP3s - valueless little clots of sound-data in themselves, but that still accrue some marginal trace of libidinal investment on account of the foraging effort expended, plus a faint after-image of libido-stirring obscurity (as with the MP3s I audio-strip off of YouTube and Vimeo - impossibly hard to find, or never ever released even in this age of releasing everything, like the soundtracks on obscure experimental films and animations, especially East European animations).
i guess the goggles and visors are meant to refer to VR helmets?
but getting also a pungent retro-fashion feel - reminding me of Andre Courreges's Moon Girl Collection of 1964 - "white and silver man-made fabrics cut in geometric shapes... PVC boots, cosmonaut-style helmets, and goggles"
These below are not exactly the Courreges collection - or Courreges type look - i am thinking of but have approximately similar vibe
did he really keep this up until 1970? have a feeling this video is mis-dated
Me and Retromania make a cameo appearance in the comic book Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 3, by Tom Kaczynski!
The blurb for Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 3, which is published by Uncivilized Books:
"Three stories that explore the past, the present, the future, nostalgia and it's origins, and political fall-out. 'Skyway' is a modernist neo-noir set in a mythical Minneapolis. 'Trump & Nostalgia,' a collaboration with award winning Danish cartoonist, Clara Jetsmark, explores the connections between nostalgia, immigrantion, and the politics of our moment. How will we remember the presidential menace? 'Use Your Nostalgia' explores the utopian possibilities of nostalgia."
Not so long ago, hauntology scholar Richard J. Lockley-Hobson - and doesn't that sound like the name a hauntology scholar ought to have? like one of those fictitious historians or independent researchers into the arcane and paranormal that Ghost Box quote on their releases! - not so long ago Richard produced a limited-edition run of adorable screen-printed tote-bags / cotton-shoppers in tribute to The Pogles, the magical 1960s children's stop-motion animation series created by Oliver Postgate and the late Peter Firmin (aka Smallfilms - as in The Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine etc etc). The bags quickly ran out, but another batch is coming soon, interested parties take note. Details to follow, for now here's Richard's account of how they came to be.
The story goes that the original series The Pogles was felt by the BBC to be too witchy and eldritch and unsettling for the tender eyes of under-fives, so was quickly pulled.
But it came back in slightly toned-down form as Pogle's Wood.
I remember loving the Pogles as a wee nipper but I've no idea whether I saw the original series or Pogle's Wood - I think the latter, though (the "wood" feels part of the memory)
How weird that these - my earliest televisual memories, pretty much (along with Andy Pandy and Bill & Ben and Weed) are up there, preserved, in the senselessly ever-expanding pubic archive that is YouTube.
Not that I have had time to rewatch them, for longer than a few minutes, of course.
Celebrating the Summer Solstice tomorrow, here's a new Moon Wiring Club mix!
Mr. Hodgson describes it as starting out as your "pretty standard hyper-soup of the usual 70s/80s audio synth nonsense with added vocal bitsy" that then veers into an unexpected "Industrial dance selection... everyone needs to have heard Soma Holiday at least once."
Mr. Hodgson also points out some related MWC action:
- a MWC interview that features in new "folk horror" bookHarvest Hymns. Volume II - Sweet Fruits
- MWC track contributed to "3rd Wave" hauntology compilation, Present At The Terminal, on the Modern Aviation label
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Mr. Hodgson mentions in passing a new 3rd Wave hauntology entity possibly worth checking out - Bloxham Tapes.
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A Year In the Country have a new themed album involving multiple contributors out next month, The Shildam Hall Tapes, which sounds excellently eerie on a first listen.
Release rationale:
“Reflections on an imaginary film.”
In the late 1960s a film crew began work on a well-funded feature film in a country mansion, having been granted permission by the young heir of the estate.
Amidst rumours of aristocratic decadence, psychedelic use and even possibly dabbling in the occult, the film production collapsed, although it is said that a rough cut of it and the accompanying soundtrack were completed but they are thought to have been filed away and lost amongst storage vaults.
Few of the cast or crew have spoken about events since and any reports from then seem to contradict one another and vary wildly in terms of what actually happened on the set.
A large number of those involved, including a number of industry figures who at the time were considered to have bright futures, simply seemed to disappear or step aside from the film industry following the film's collapse, their careers seemingly derailed or cast adrift by their experiences.
Little is known of the film's plot but several unedited sections of the film and its soundtrack have surfaced, found amongst old film stock sold as a job lot at auction - although how they came to be there is unknown.
The fragments of footage and audio that have appeared seem to show a film which was attempting to interweave and reflect the heady cultural mix of the times; of experiments and explorations in new ways of living, a burgeoning counter culture, a growing interest in and reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter culture and elements of the underworld.
The Shildam Hall Tapes takes those fragments as its starting point and imagines what the completed soundtrack may have sounded like; creating a soundtrack for a film that never was.
My memory is getting foggier as the years advance, but I think - I think - that I forgot to flag up this recent A Year in the Country release from just last month, Audio Albion
release rationale:
Audio Albion is a music and field recording map of Britain, which focuses on rural and edgeland areas.
Each track contains field recordings from locations throughout the land and is accompanied by notes on the recordings by the contributors.
The tracks record the sounds found and heard when wandering down pathways, over fields, through marshes, alongside rivers, down into caves and caverns, climbing hills, along coastlands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the signs of industry and infrastructure and its discarded debris.
Intertwined with the literal recording of locations, the album explores the history, myths and beliefs of the places, their atmospheres and undercurrents, personal and cultural connections - the layered stories that lie amongst, alongside and beneath the earth, plants and wildlife. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ News from the parish's twinned town in West Germany -Andrew Pekler announces a new project entitled Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas. It is "an interactive online map that charts the sounds and histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps but have since disappeared." Release rationale: "Phantom Islands are artifacts of the age of maritime discovery and colonial expansion. During centuries of ocean exploration these islands were sighted, charted, described and even landed on – but their existence was never ultimately verified. Poised between cartographic fact and maritime fiction, they haunted seafarers’ maps for hundreds of years, providing inspiration for legend, fantasy, and counterfactual histories. Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas interprets these imaginations in the form of a map of speculative sounds from 27 phantom islands around the world.
"Explore the map by clicking on the names of phantom islands to learn the histories of their discoveries and the dates of their cartographical existence. Zoom in on individual islands to hear their musical, biophonic and geophonic soundscapes. Or, engage Cruise mode to be taken on an audio tour of all the Phantom Islands – ideal for passive listening in a separate browser window or tab. (In this mode, all the sounds, played in sequence, amount to something like my new album.) Recommended browsers: Chrome (version 67+), Firefox (version 60+ ), Safari (version 11+). Not usable on mobile devices.
The big news in the parish is the publication this week of A Year in The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields by Stephen Prince of A Year In The Country the blog and the label. Sub-subtitled "Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology", it's an excellent compendium of Prince's musings and meditations on all things wyrdly bucolic, uncanny, and elegiac, spanning a spectral spectrum from Richard Mabey to Zardoz, Virginia Astley to Sapphire & Steel. With the possible exception of Mark F's Ghosts of My Life, it's the first tome fully dedicated to all things hauntological (as opposed to various volumes about "folk horror" or 70s kids teevee)
You can buy it here, and here - and if you must (although then again, it's effectively funding righteous scourge The Washington Post, so why not?) here (UK) and here (US) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ In other parish goings-on, I have already mentioned the delightful debut album for Ghost Box from Portugal's Beautify Junkyards - The Invisible World of...
Fairly imminently there will be another fine album by The Advisory Circle - Ways of Seeing, out late May.
Through his own imprintCafe Kaput, Circle chief Jon Brooks also recently put out this album Neil Grant of Lo-Five - whose album When It's Time To Let Gofor Patterned Air Recordings pleasured me last year - has set up a collective of Liverpool-based experimental electronic musicians under the rubric Emotion Wave. Here's Neil's project rationale . Emotional Wave has some musical output already under its collective belt and I believe there is a non-audio entity (printed matter) in the pipeline. And in a week or so Neil releases the Lo-Five miscellany Propagate - remixes, compilation tracks and one-off specials. Neil also alerts me to his having put out a little while back some "super lo fi house tracks" under the title My House Is Your House Volume One. Like Propagate, it's a tide-you-over / palate cleanser type release before the follow-up to When It's Time To Let Go. Love the graphic echo of Human League's "Being Boiled" single sleeve there. (Neil informs me that this was actually unintended - he just got the figures from a Letraset pack! A nice eerie echo nonetheless) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ A rather tardy mention of an intriguing my-back-pages project Meadow House by Daniel Wilson of RadionicsRadiorenown. It's really on the very edge of this parish, in so far as it's not particularly haunty, but the back story to Daniel's self-invented Dada-prankster practice of media-dropping - "theact of recording special homemade music and dropping it for random people tofind" - is pretty interesting. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The hypnagogia/memoradelia-tinged project Starbloodhas launched a series based around the concept of late-night TV sign-off themes.
Here's another of their tracks coming more from a dreampop / idyllitronic precinct than this particular parish but nice 'n' woozy nonetheless.
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Parish elders Boards of Canada were recently venerated here and here. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
1 1/ You note that on a personal level you find
something slightly shameful and lame about retro. Perhaps such a reaction
relates to your own obvious fascination and immersion in music. Do you believe
that retro invokes the same emotions in most listeners?
It comes from my own history as a listener – growing up
during the postpunk era, when music was constantly changing and innovation was
the generally held ideal, and then in the 90s being heavily involved in rave culture,
when music was constantly changing and innovation was the generally held ideal.
So those eras have created a benchmark for me of what I think pop
culture should be. And not just those periods alone, but things like hip hop in
the Eighties and much of the Nineties, things like Timbaland and the
future-R&B revolution from the late 90s, and even in the last decade things
like grime and elements within dubstep – they have maintained my belief
in innovation, futurism, a music scene that keeps moving and mutating.
That’s my big buzz. But equally when I listen to music
made before when I first got into it seriously circa 1978, the stuff I most
admire is Sixties psychedelia, Seventies Krautrock, dub reggae, the
arty end of glam like Roxy Music, electric jazz of the Miles Davis
kind... all about pushing the envelope, exploration, strange
hybrids.
At the same time I obviously enjoy quite a bit of
retro-oriented music that’s heavily inspired by the past and plays games with
history. But I tend to believe deep-down that these are lesser pleasures.
They’re not really taking us forward.
2/ Is there much conscious recognition of the
prevalence of retro, particularly among a younger generation for whom recycling
of material is considered standard practice?
I think a lot of them think not only that this is normality,
but that it has always been like this. People who disagree with the book have
said “oh bands have always recycled” . Or even “originality and
innovation” are myths. The point of Retromania is to defamiliarise the musical
present, to show that retro is not the norm historically, but it is an
accumulating cultural syndrome that has built up over the decades until the
current predicament. I’m sowing seeds of discontent and rekindling the hope
that it doesn’t have to be this way.
3/ Is retro not an inevitable consequence of
changes in the way music is listened to. Instead of music that belongs
primarily to a specific teenage generation and which is then jettisoned
it now remains endlessly available within popular culture?
There’s nothing wrong with listening to old music, or even
being influenced by it, but I think it is more productive to use the past as a
springboard to go somewhere new. Too much of the current music scene is either
adding to an established tradition without extending it in any significant way
(Adelle) or it is involved in pastiche and citation and referentiality (most
hipster music today).
4/ Is there a finite number of ways to
express the same emotions, create a functional building or write
a script. Even Shakespeare borrowed his plots after all. Is it possible
that there is very little innovative material left to discover?
Well it is true that a lot of experimental avant-garde music
– and art and literature and film – heads into a zone which is abstract and
anti-emotional. If you have expressive needs, stuff you wish to vent
emotionally, you might well be drawn to established modes of songwriting that
do that job very well. The equivalent of certain kinds of narrative structure
in novels or Hollywood movies. The challenge for pop was to keep
innovating in terms of sound, structure, delivery, lyrics, while still
expressing emotions that are human and possibly eternal. Perhaps the
range in which that can be done has been almost filled up.
5/ You suggest that the download culture has
depreciated the value of music. Is there any way back from this? Can it regain
its original significance for people when so little effort is required to get
it?
I think the problem with the downloading culture is that it
has decommodified music, which sounds very anti-capitalistic and “hooray, we’re
kicking the corporations in the groin”. But it hasn’t returned music to any
kind of “sacred” or communally ritual function that it might have had
before it was commodified as recordings that you bought and used at home
privately. It’s the worst of both worlds: value-less, virtually abject in
its sheer overabundance, something to treat very casually, like water from your
tap. When it was a commodity there was still the possibility of commodity
fetishism, of some kind of desire or mystical investment in the
record-as-object.
6/Is it possible the same fate will befall books?
Possibly, although the sheer length of books and time
required to read them agitates against the kind of senseless downloading and
hoarding that I write about confessionally in Retromania. With books you know
you’ll never get around to reading them, whereas with downloaded music there
seems more likelihood. But certainly with the rise of e-books and reading
tablets, there could be a mass traffic in illegally shared books, which would
be the ruination of publishing.
7/ Has music completely lost its rebellious and/or
political nature? Can you envisage a powerful movement like
punk or the protest songs of the sixties emerging in the modern world?
One thing that fascinated me with the student protests in
the UK in late 2010, and then the street riots in the summer of 2011, and also
with the Occupy movement, is you get journalists writing articles asking “where
are the protest songs? What is the musical soundtrack for this moment?”. Well
perhaps there isn’t going to be one. Maybe music and politics got decoupled at
some point. Certainly it’s hard to imagine what songs could add to the current
moment. Whereas during the Sixties or postpunk or the early days of hip hop,
message songs did seem to have a certain kind of weight and heft.
8/ Finally, having explored the issued in depth, do you fear
for the future of something that you obviously care for deeply. Are there
things coming down the tracks with the power to startle and maybe even shock us
or should we settle for comfortable, recycled entertainment?
I hear a lot of things every year that are really cool and
interesting, and quite a few that are genuinely new and startling. However they
tend to be singular occurrences – artists as opposed to genres, and sometimes
just particular tracks within a record or oevure – and these artists are also
nearly all very marginal in the scheme of things, they operate a long way from
the mainstream. There’s no shortage of talent out there, genius levels have not
gone down... the problem is the process by which these occurrences gather
momentum and become movements, pop cultural events, rifts in History. That used
to work during the Analogue era – what people call the monoculture – but the
nature of digital culture, which its fragmentation and overproduction, seems to
prevent things on the same level as punk or hip hop or rave from
occurring.
A 2013 interview with Andrzej Marzec for Time of Culture that lays out my thoughts on the topic as they had evolved in the years after the book's publication.
·How should we understand the very concept of “retromania”? In which way
retro strategy is different from the traditional use of archive? Every epoch
somehow relates and refers to the past epochs. What is so distinct, peculiar in
this “retromaniac” particular return to the past?
I’m not sure “retromania” is
a concept, really.It’s a word I used a
title for the book -and I settled on it
towards the end of the writing process, after having failed to come up with a
title I preferred! In the end I think it was the right title, though. I see
‘retromania’ not as a concept or a theory but as an open-ended evocative term
for a bunch of phenomena to do with retro, vintage, nostalgia, revivalism,
curatorial aesthetics, commemorative culture, collecting, reissuing, etc .
These phenomena are related and intermeshed but they also have their own
discrete trajectories and specific determinants, and they can each be traced
back in history a good way (in some cases several decades, if not longer). But
the convergence of these tendencies in the first decade of the 21st
Century adds up to a cultural landscape that seems to deserve a term like
“retromania”. It’s a good ambivalent word for the overall mood of the culture.
For a condition that could be seen as a malaise, but also as something
distinctive and defining of our time, with aspects that are exciting and
culturally productive.
“Mania” is suggestive of something out of
control, an addiction or obsession, something on the edge of madness. It
suggests both craziness and a craze (in the sense of fashion or fad).But mania also contains the idea of
excitement and enthusiasm. And that fits because there are aspects of retro
culture that are enjoyable and compelling. Certainly retro’s charms are
something that I’m far from immune to.The book is written from the standpoint of someone who is as prey to
retromaniacal tendencies as anyone.It’s
a self-critique as much as critique of anybody else.
Incidentally I discovered
recently in my files a pieceI wrote in
1990 that was about reissues and retrospection in rock – it was published by
the Guardian newspaper under a different title, but the title I gave it was
“Retromania”. So these interrelated phenomena that I call “retromania”, they
have been building for a while. And in fact they’ve been a concern of mine
almost from the start of my writing (I was doing fanzines from 1984 and writing
for Melody Maker from 1986).But I think
they have built to a new intensity since the rise of broadband internet circa
2000, which enabled forms of sharing, collecting, documentation and archiving
that are like nothing we could have dreamed of before.That has definitely added greatly to the
manic aspect of retromania – the ease of access to the pop cultural past, the
instant-ness and the total recall that’s possible.
But – as you say-- not only
have all previous eras of human civilization had particular modes of relating
to the past, it’s also true that the anxiety about an excess of history and
historical consciousness is not a new thing either. Look at Nietzche’s On the
Use and Abuse of History For Life. Reading that, I was surprised to encounter
so many pre-echoes of my own doubts and disquiets. That was written in 1873!
2.Vocalist of the band "The Blouse" in one of her
songs sings: "I was in the future yesterday, but now I'm in the past and
it keeps taking me back." When we look at contemporary culture, it seems
that any way of thinking about the future is already behind us. We rework and
use the futuristic vision of the past years (60’-80’), but without any hope for
their fulfillment, we don’t want to create our particular versions of future.
Is there really no future in front of us now and the only future we can imagine
is the one that has failed us and never really happened? Does the future remain
in past as a kind of relic?
It does feel like we have
somehow gone past the future, and now confront the coming decades
without any set of mental images about what life will be like.Whereas for most of the 20th
Century, there were all these pictures and notions of what tomorrow’s world
would look, as drastically different from the present.Buildings would get bigger, planes would get
faster, robots would do all the shit jobs. Or think of the electric charge that numerals like "1999" and "2001" seemed to possess. We don't have any such year-dates that shimmer before us with a sense of possibility, strangeness, or even as a benchmark.
This is the shift that
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have been talking about – the fading away of
the capital ‘F’Future and the onset of
atemporality, as they call it.A generation
that lives in the digital now.
What was once called the
future, and seen as a scenario of promise, or at least of dramatic and
spectacular difference from the present (dystopia), now seems like it might
look more or less the same as the present. Or may even be significantly
worse.On the one hand, technological
advances of certain kinds seem to be proceeding at a good pace (particularly
medical and communications/information tech/personal computing), but in other
areas like architecture, high speed travel, outer space exploration, there
seems to be a standstill.All those
mid-20th Century visions of tomorrow’s world seem corny, yet also
induce a pained wistfulness, because they never transpired. Science fiction
itself has gone out of fashion, and it has been displaced in terms of youth
taste and popular taste by a resurgence of fantasy. Tolkien, not Asimov or
Arthur C. Clarke.
3.It seems that there is something strange with the
category of newness, we still desire novelty, but I think we cannot or do not
want to create it anymore. Do you think that this concept (newness) is still
useful and diagnoses properly phenomena and transformations of contemporary
culture? Can you give some examples of completely new developments and trends
in contemporary music?
As with “the future” or
“futuristic”, the idea of the new lingers, I think, but in a kind of painful
way, it’s not completely buried and forgotten but nor does it work like it used
to.
Some of what “newness”
provided is still provided through the latest increments in digital technology
– new games, new apps, new internet stuff.My son, who is 13, is buzzed up on this and is chasing wanting the
latest thing in terms of games, computers, social media, netstuff. But I don’t
know if the category of the new or of “progress’ in the cultural-artistic-political
senses means anything to him: the idea that things get better. And I know that
the science fiction concept that ruled my teenage years – outer space, the very
idea of the 21st Century—mean nothing to him.
I can’t think of many really
new things in music. Some of the bass sounds in dubstep – the wobble, brostep,
Skrillex end of it – seem pretty extreme, if not completely new then a
development along on an axis of intensification from things being done in the
Nineties. And similarly the use of AutoTune and “vocal science” effect, while
building on Nineties techniques, seems to be a growth area – it seems to be a
way that musicians indicate contemporaneity and “this is now”. You get that
across the board from mainstream pop and rap to underground and experimental
music – an interest in vocal weirdness, the denatured and posthuman voice.
4.Every new beginning is described by the means of the past
at first, with a usage of concepts from the perspective of a bygone era. Just
to mention that when first TV sets appeared, they were calling them radios with
pictures. Do you think that process of describing contemporary culture from the
perspective of the past is somehow similar tointerpreting TV set via radio? Putting it simply: is the present time
secondary and imitative, or is it the beginning of something new, but we cannot
even find the right category to describe this reality?
Well, TV is kind of like
radio with pictures, isn’t it? Most of the things TV did and have continued to
do – dramas, soap opera serials, news programmes, documentaries, music – are
all things radio did, just restricted to the audio dimension.The unique idiomatic things that TV could do
– experimental TV and video in the Seventies, or Eno’s idea of ambient TV that
would be more like a picture on your living room wall that something you’d
watch – these either remained an obscure, minority art-world function, or never
took off at all.
However I do get what you’re
talking about – there is a tendency for critics to appraise the new medium
using the terms and concepts and metrics of value that apply to a previous
medium. So cinema (even now, still -- in mainstream coverage at least) gets
assessed in the terms of literature or theatre – plot, acting,
characterization, dialogue – and not so much in terms of cinematography,
editing, effects (the areas that are proper and unique to the cinematic
medium). Everyone knows who the actors and directors are but only your hardcore
cineaste theorists know who did the cinematography, lighting, costumes,
editing, décor and props, grading, etc.
The same goes for rock
criticism, particularly in its early days, --critics focused on the lyrics or the social meaning, had very little to
say about groove or sound. That partly reflected their background as students
of humanities, usually English Literature or History or Political Science.But it also reflected a culture-lag syndrome
of the kind you’re talking about.
5.What do you think about hipster culture, what does it
mean for you and how does it influence the condition of contemporary culture?
Why does this category function rather as an insult and the object of derision,
in fact no one wants to admit that he/she is a hipster? Does the diving for
remnants in the dumpster of culture is so shameful or the very concept of a
hipster is identified with the lack of any taste and competence?
Hipster, as a phenomenon, is
closely bound up with retro, but it’s not identical with it. Retro and vintage
is one of the ways hipsters express themselves and accumulate their subcultural
capital. But it can also be done through cosmopolitan exoticism – through
knowledge of other cultures, usually non-Western and subaltern cultures. So I
talk about xenomaniaas a parallel phenomenon to retromania. Both retro and
xeno have existed for decades, but again the internet has intensified both
syndromes hugely.You have hipsters who
know about obscure music from the 1960s and 1970s (or increasingly going back
before World War 2 to pre-war gospel and blues). But you also have hipsters –
often the same hipsters – who are chasing strange new rhythms from the ghettoes
of South America or Africa, things they find out about on YouTube. And
sometimes you get retroxeno – which is the quest for super-obscure African
musiconly ever released on cassette in
the 1970s, or Ocora field recordings, or New Wave music from the former Soviet
Union...
The derision aimed at the hipster comes from an
intuition that the process of turning music into semiotic capital, an index of
coolness and superior skills at scavenging and hunting for things no one else
knows about – that this is voiding the music of its value. The hipster modus
operandi is decontextualising the music from the lifeworld where it actually
had meaning and social purpose, and turning it into décor for your lifestyle or
something that is “costuming the ego”.Even when it’s driven by a genuine hunger for “the real”, the
authentic... which is what it seems to be about in a lot of cases –it comes out, unavoidably, as inauthentic.
But there’s hardly any of us
who escape the taint of hipster... it’s more a sliding scale of tourism and
vicariousness.
I sometimes think of myself
as a hipster who isn’t good with clothes or hair...a failed or partial hipster. I can do the
music-taste part of hipsterism easily, not the other bits.But I’m the wrong age group, also. I have too
much mental and emotional baggage from a pre-hipster era.If hipsterism is the voiding of bohemia of
any actual dissident cultural value, then I still mostly belong emotionally to a world
before that happened.
6.Who is a contemporary artist: genius, a curator, a thief,
a plagiarist, a follower, or a consumer? You are interested in the concept of
recreativity, could you tell me something more about this idea? How attitude
towards originality, copying and imitating changes in our times? Are we able
nowadays to steal somebody’s ideas or we just simple recreate them?
Recreativity is a term I
came up with for a whole set of practices to do with remixing, reenactment,
mash ups, parody, and also for the theories that have sprung up to celebrate
these practices and to attack ideas of originality and innovation, along with
the notion of copyright and intellectual property.As with retro, there’s been a boom of these
practices and their attendant theorizations in the last decade, but they also
go back a long way – through appropriation art in the Seventies, back to Pop
Art in the Sixties, all the way to the readymade and collage in the early 20th
Century.Not forgetting postmodernism
which was in large part all about the rejection of the idea of originality and
origins. And just in the context of pop music, there have been debates about
sampling and “plunderphonics” and the remix going back to the early Eighties.
So in an ironic way, these very 21st Century things like Nicolas
Bourriaud’s theories about postproduction art and curatorial aesthetics, or
things like the early 2000s fad for mash ups, they are themselves remixes of
earlier ideasor they are extensions of
earlier practices of remixing and mashing-up.They exemplify and perpetuate the very syndromes they identify and
celebrate .
To me, the ideas seem
exhausted, they feel like the 1980s all over again...and they are used too often to justify work
that is purely a rearrangement of existing elements, with no X Factor of
newness. “The new is always old” has become a cliché and a defeatist
creed.I do not understand why people
seem to find it a liberating concept, or refreshing.It’s stale and old - and depressing!
To say that “all artists
steal” doesn’t help explain how some artists transform what they steal and
actually create the new. Which keeps on happening.
7.Young generations don’t miss the past usually (they don’t
have their own yet), so what is the reason for this overwhelming sense of
nostalgia among youth nowadays? Do you perceive it as a sign of contestation,
dissatisfaction with the present, disappointment with the future, refusal of
its co-creation, anti-capitalist opposition to the production? Or is it simply
an expression of laziness and unwillingness to take a risk? We can tell a lot
about the past, but this is one of the most secure area we can imagine, nothing
there is surprising or unexpected.
I don’t know if it’s
nostalgia as such.Probably there’s
different levels and different motivations .Some young people are fascinated by the past because the archives in
their teeming clutter provide a space for exploration, you can discover things
in the rubbish heap of history through which you’re sifting, and you can
repurpose them. So it’s a form of cultural archaeology that can involve genuine
interest in the past but also can be purely a present-minded, use-oriented
approach – what can I do now with this old synth, this vintage garment, these
bygone style of graphics or typography.
But then for other young people maybe there is actual longing and
yearning directed to these golden ages of music they’ve read about, the
attraction is to music that seemed to be connected to history and to social
energies in a way that few music today is. So that would be a self-defeating
form of nostalgia, because by channeling energy towards music from the past
they are by definition disconnecting themselves from history and from current
social energies.
Of course music from the
past often has intrinsic qualities and value, in the same way that Shakespeare
or Citizen Kane or whatever does.I
don’t have a problem with people listening to classic old music at all, in fact I think
they should. It’s when they try to recreate it or to base an entire revivalist
lifestyle around that... that’s when it gets problematic.
8.Why we cannot forget about what is left? In your book you
seem to claim that we are doomed to the past because of the improvement of
archive technology – collecting data and access to information have never been
so easy. If nostalgia is something authentic indeed or is it only facade or
decoration and only the modern way of expression, rather form than essence?
It is interesting, and
something that I don’t really explore in the book, how the idea of the
generation gap has faded – the rejectionist impulse of youth doesn’t seem to
apply anymore, in the sense of rejecting their parents’s music. Or in the early
hyper-accelerated days of rock, it was rejecting your older brother and
sister’s music. Glam fans seized on glam because they wanted their own thing,
and the hippie / underground music of just a few years earlier belonged to
their older brothers and sisters. Same with punk and New Wave: it created a
dividing line in history. It would be many years before I listened to Led
Zeppelin or Pink Floyd... when I got into music in 1978, you just took it as
read that the Old Wave of rock was utterly irrelevant, discredited, and
actually devoid of any musical value.
12.Would you agree with the statement that titling this book
Retromania you are also as the author filled with nostalgia? You quite
frequently repeat that modern world is no longer the same as before. For
example, today bands refer rather to the entire list of their inspiration
("playing as Joy Division") instead of manifest their differences and
emphasize originality, no one is waiting for a new album as much as it happened
before and so on. Your longing for the past seems to be rather nostalgia for
the past type of albums production (not overproduction), their distribution
(not YouTube) and consumption of music (not iPod or shuffle mode). You write
about music, albums and bands as if they have lost their aura, uniqueness,
inaccessibility and mystery.
I don’t know about that.
Personally, I have all kinds of nostalgia for various periods of my life, and
periods of culture. But I strongly resist this idea that when you talk about a
decline, or a change even, in how culture works, or the nature of music – that
this can be simply dismissed as nostalgia.To point out that things are different in a certain respect, doesn’t
necessarily mean that you want to go back.
An example: after punk and
New Wave, it is simply undeniable that British rock bands, on average, were
less groove-oriented and capable of “feel” than they were in the Sixties and
pre-punk early Seventies. This is because of a number of factors:punk discredited the idea of virtuosity and
paying your dues, so that by the time they were getting make records, New Wave
bands were less seasoned and tight as performing units; New Wave music had
moved away from its grounding in blues and in American musical sources
generally.Now you can say that “feel”
and “groove” are old fashioned values, if you want, or you can say that
postpunk and New Wave made up for that diminishment through other aspects of
the music being radical or exciting or fresh. But just taking that metric of
value, it’s undeniable that the drumming in your average British band
deteriorates from 1977 onwards and it has continued to deteriorate. (Partly I
would say because anyone with a flair for rhythm has been more like to get into
electronic dance music and apply to it drum machines, sample-loops, digital
audio workstation programming etc). To say that this has happened isn’t
nostalgic, it’s pointing to a real and measurable decline along one metric or
axis of judgement.
So in terms of what I’m
writing about in Retromania, I think the book can be seen as in part a neutral
description of changes caused by the transition from an Analogue System to a
Digital System.Parts of the book – the
stuff to do with YouTube and with filesharing and MP3s in particular – are a
kind of phenomenology of digital life, an anatomy of its sensations and
affects. The Analogue System made possible certain kinds of affect and
convergence of energy;these occur much
less frequently or much more weakly in the Digital era, if at all.
But since my expectations of
music was shaped by experiencing those affects and living through such
convergences of energy: postpunk, rave, etc) you could justifiably view
Retromania as a requiem for the Analogue System.There is an element of mourning the passage
of an entire world and the kind of subjectivity shaped by it. The Analogue-era
sense of culture-time as linearity and forward propulsion has been displaced by
atemporality and a recursive, archival logic.So the interest is what new convergences and affects are emerging out of
this altered sense of time and space?How will music function in the new order? So far it’s very unclear--mostly we are still living inside the wreckage of the Analogue
System.Will pop music have the
privileged status it had or has it become just one zone or componenent with the
entertainment landscape? The sense is that the old power and function that
music had has decisively gone but we don’t know yet what powers and functions
it will have.
13.I know that you are planning a new book. What comes after
retro and what will be the subject of your research this time? Will it be
another come back of the past and you will continue threads started in
Retromania or you will focus on completely new territory?
I had so many ideas after Retromania came out, through doing so many
interviews and public appearances, but also just thinking further on the
subject, responding both publicly and mentally - in my own head - to critiques of the book, etc, that I could easily
write another book on the subject. There’s lots of things I should have said,
and I can see ways of making the argument clearer and more far reaching - and inarguable! But I
think it’s time to move on to a new subject.The next book is partly historical and partly about the present: its
main subject is glam rock, but I’m going to be connecting that to contemporary
pop culture and looking at things like stardom - fame as a cultural pathology.
