Further to this earlier post on Robyn Hitchcock and the wonderful tribute he wrote to Syd Barrett (albeit on an odd-numbered commemorative date, his 77th birthday).... perhaps there is a kind of honour - even an authenticity - in deciding that this is where you belong - your historical heartspot - and just setting up shop there in perpetuity.
More about 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Lefthere
Press release:
“1967 is the point when I and the world went through the change. It was all just blissful synchronicity as I grew nine inches in 15 months, just as Dylan was electrified and pop groups turned into rock bands. Arguably as much was lost as was gained, but at the same time, you had Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd and others producing music that couldn’t have even been described three years earlier. You had the Beatles wearing suits and ties producing inaudible shows with tiny amplifiers, in many ways playing to the old rules of showbiz, and then suddenly up came Dylan with his thousand-watt PA and Jimi Hendrix with his Marshall stacks, and the whole thing erupted” - Robyn Hitchcock
Even before I heard a note of the Cindy Lee album, the aroma I'd picked up was that it was like a flashback to the late 2000s - the peak of hipster vintage aesthetics and revenant pastiche.
"Hypnagogic pop, with hints of 60's girl bands. It makes me imagine that The Velvet Underground released their "White Album"
"13th Floor Elevators, King Khan and Ariel Pink vibes. Glad to see people still making vintage sounding throwback stuff in 2024.
Also some plain mystifying comments:
"Feel like Bataille would vibe with this one"
But yeah neo-chillwave, hypnagogic pt 2... and just hark at the set-up to the already famous 9.1 graded review in Pitchfork, by Andy Cush:
"This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more? .... Two hours, 32 songs, each one like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits."
That's like a flashback to the radio station signal drifting in and out of focus metaphor that nearly everyone who reviewed Ariel P's The Doldrums seemed to come upwith independently.
Listening to the double album finally... it seemed to sit sonically somewhere between Ariel (albeit without the no-fi hiss) and early '90s melancholy slowcore (Galaxie, Mazzy Star) with maybe some Giant Sand in there.... and, less sonically than vibe-spiritually, a hint perhaps of Chris Isaak, Lana Del Rey....
After two listens to the entire thing - four hours of my life, I gave it a good go - I still couldn't say I love it. The crinkly goldenhaze guitar sound is attractive.. but there's something muffled, indistinct, recessed, about it emotionally.
Often there seems to be an attempt to boogie, a sort of snake-hipped bluesy shuffle feel.... but it doesn't quite come off. It's no Royal Trux circa Cats and Dogs, let's put it like that.
This not-quite-integrated quality reminds me of certain things I've heard that involve AI.
And I'm not alone here - among all the YouTube commenters talking about being in tears, spellbound, AOTY, etc etc... one doughty doubter piped up:
"It sounds like someone had AI make a T. Rex, Velvet Underground, and Beach Boys mashup."
So I decided to get ChatGPT to write a review of Diamond Jubilee in the style of Simon Reynolds if he'd unreservedly loved the album:
In a startling deviation from her previous ventures, Cindy Lee’s latest opus, "Diamond Jubilee," emerges as a haunting and enigmatic exploration of the spectral hinterlands of pop. Shedding the skin of her previous guitar-driven persona, Lee navigates through a dreamscape of gossamer synths and ethereal melodies, beckoning the listener into an otherworldly realm of melancholic beauty.
"Diamond Jubilee" is an album that thrives on its contradictions. At once, it evokes a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era while simultaneously defying any easy categorization within the confines of time or genre. Lee's vocals, bathed in reverb and distortion, float delicately above the shimmering sonic tapestry, imbuing each track with an eerie, almost otherworldly quality.
Thematically, "Diamond Jubilee" is a meditation on loss and longing, its lyrics oscillating between moments of tender vulnerability and cryptic ambiguity. Tracks like "Bonsai Garden" and "Heavy Metal" drip with a sense of bittersweet longing, while "Plastic Raincoat" and "Stairway to the Plaza" offer glimpses into a world both familiar and alien.
Yet, for all its spectral beauty, "Diamond Jubilee" is not without its moments of dissonance and unease. Lee's penchant for juxtaposing saccharine melodies with dissonant harmonies creates a sense of tension that lingers beneath the surface, unsettling yet alluring in its ambiguity.
In the grand tradition of avant-pop auteurs, Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" is a testament to the power of music to transcend boundaries and defy expectations. With its ethereal soundscapes and enigmatic lyricism, it stands as a haunting testament to the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of life's inevitable trials and tribulations.
That's not a bad effort from the chatbot, compared with the previous occasion I tried this exercise.
Certainly there's some words in there - "spectral", "hinterlands", "ethereal" - that I might resort to if actually officially tasked with reviewing Diamond Jubilee.
When I tried to enlist the pseudo-ghost of Mark Fisher, however, the review came out rather similar:
Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" unfurls like a spectral transmission from a parallel dimension, where the ghosts of pop's past converge with an eerie futurism. Departing from her previous sonic incarnations, Lee ventures into uncharted territory, crafting an album that defies easy categorization and demands attentive engagement.
"Diamond Jubilee" operates on the fringes of consciousness, its ethereal melodies and distorted vocals conjuring a sense of dislocation and unease. Tracks like "Plastic Raincoat" and "Bonsai Garden" shimmer with an otherworldly beauty, while Lee's haunting vocals float amidst a haze of reverb and distortion, evoking a sense of longing and detachment.
Thematically, "Diamond Jubilee" is a meditation on the uncanny, its lyrics oscillating between moments of poignant introspection and surreal abstraction. Lee's cryptic verses invite interpretation, hinting at a narrative that remains tantalizingly out of reach.
Yet, for all its enigmatic allure, "Diamond Jubilee" is not without its moments of dissonance and discord. Lee's penchant for juxtaposing saccharine melodies with jarring harmonies creates a sense of tension that lingers beneath the surface, unsettling yet strangely captivating in its unpredictability.
In the tradition of cultural provocateurs, Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" challenges listeners to confront the liminal spaces between past and present, reality and illusion. It is an album that rewards repeated listens, its haunting melodies and cryptic lyricism revealing new depths with each subsequent spin. In an era defined by uncertainty and upheaval, "Diamond Jubilee" stands as a testament to the transformative power of music to disrupt the status quo and beckon us into the unknown.
The Fisher factor here must be "liminal" and "uncanny"
Clearly it's got a ways to go before it can truly impersonate a writer.
But how about a more mundane assignment? Like: What are the parallels and affinities between Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee and the Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's The Doldrums?
Both Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" and Ariel Pink's "The Doldrums" inhabit a similar sonic and thematic landscape, forging a connection through their exploration of lo-fi aesthetics, dreamlike atmospheres, and unconventional song structures. Here are some parallels and affinities between the two albums:
Lo-fi Production: Both albums embrace lo-fi production techniques, utilizing tape distortion, reverb, and other effects to create a hazy, nostalgic atmosphere. This lo-fi aesthetic lends a sense of intimacy and authenticity to the music, inviting listeners into a world that feels raw and unfiltered.
Dreamlike Atmosphere: Both albums evoke a dreamlike atmosphere, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" envelops listeners in ethereal melodies and haunting vocals, while Ariel Pink's "The Doldrums" transports them to a surreal realm populated by quirky characters and psychedelic imagery. This dreamlike quality imbues both albums with a sense of escapism and introspection.
Eclectic Influences: Both Cindy Lee and Ariel Pink draw from a wide range of musical influences, resulting in albums that defy easy categorization. "Diamond Jubilee" incorporates elements of shoegaze, dream pop, and experimental music, while "The Doldrums" blends lo-fi indie rock with elements of psychedelia, glam rock, and pop. This eclecticism adds depth and complexity to their respective sounds, keeping listeners on their toes with unexpected twists and turns.
Cryptic Lyricism: Both albums feature cryptic lyricism that invites interpretation and speculation. Cindy Lee's lyrics on "Diamond Jubilee" oscillate between moments of tender vulnerability and surreal abstraction, while Ariel Pink's lyrics on "The Doldrums" are filled with enigmatic imagery and wordplay. This ambiguity allows listeners to project their own meanings onto the songs, deepening their emotional resonance and staying power.
Cult Followings: Both Cindy Lee and Ariel Pink have garnered cult followings for their idiosyncratic approaches to music-making. Their willingness to embrace unconventional sounds and defy industry norms has earned them devoted fanbases who appreciate their boundary-pushing creativity and uncompromising vision.
Overall, Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" and Ariel Pink's "The Doldrums" share a kinship in their exploration of lo-fi aesthetics, dreamlike atmospheres, and eclectic influences. While each album possesses its own unique charm and character, they both stand as testaments to the transformative power of music to transport listeners to otherworldly realms and challenge their perceptions of reality.
Another pass at the same idea: Does Cindy Lee's album Diamond Jubilee represent a renaissance of hypnagogic pop ideas?
Cindy Lee's album "Diamond Jubilee" certainly resonates with elements of the hypnagogic pop aesthetic, a genre characterized by its dreamy, nostalgic atmosphere and its exploration of memory and imagination. While it may not necessarily represent a revival of hypnagogic pop ideas in the strictest sense, it does align closely with many of the themes and sonic qualities associated with the genre.
"Hypnagogic pop" as a term was coined by music critic David Keenan to describe a style of music that blurs the boundaries between reality and dream, often drawing heavily from pop culture artifacts of the past. Artists associated with this movement, such as Ariel Pink (as previously mentioned) and James Ferraro, incorporate lo-fi production techniques, retro synths, and warped samples to create a surreal sonic landscape that feels both familiar and uncanny.
In a similar vein, Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" embraces a dreamlike aesthetic, with its ethereal melodies, distorted vocals, and lo-fi production evoking a sense of nostalgia and introspection. The album's exploration of themes like loss, longing, and dislocation also align with the hypnagogic pop ethos, inviting listeners to immerse themselves in a world that feels simultaneously timeless and ephemeral.
While "Diamond Jubilee" may not adhere strictly to the conventions of hypnagogic pop, it certainly shares a spiritual affinity with the genre, tapping into its dreamy, surreal qualities to create an immersive listening experience that transports listeners to the liminal spaces between waking and dreaming. In this sense, Cindy Lee's album can be seen as a continuation of the hypnagogic pop tradition, offering a contemporary reimagining of its themes and aesthetics for a new generation of listeners.
"The nineties were better than the eighties, and one key reason was that there was less originality. Originality is unmusical. The urge to do music is an admiring emulation of music one loves; the urge toward originality happens under threat that the music that sounds good to you somehow isn't good enough."
Scott Miller, Music: What Happened?
A clever thought - inspired by a song by Smashing Pumpkins of all things ("Cherub Rock")
Elsewhere, he picks up the theme:
"As you know, I kid the 1980s. I wonder can it possibly be fair to condemn an entire decade as a horrifying decline in every kind of musical competency, but nostalgia for the Eighties baffles me. Eighties nostalgia has lowered my opinion of nostalgia. So you're right, I was unconsciously targeting that kind of decline with "What Happened?" But pop music is great in that a true decline fosters a true pop response, like R.E.M. Eighties music suffered from a coliseum spectacle mentality, and R.E.M. reached around that with a sort of small-combo, home-spun literary connection approach."
Music: What Happened? - well, it's a view of music very different from mine... we do converge on early R.E.M., but it's a rare occurrence in Scott Miller's year-by-year inventory + commentary on the best best songs between 1960 and the end of the 2000s. (He carried on commenting on the year's output online, until his tragic too-early death in 2013). Even when his approbation lands on a band I love, he often picks a song by them I don't rate or actively dislike.
But it's a wonderful book to read for that very reason - full of unexpected insights and precision description of a song's moving parts, informed by his being a musician (Game Theory, The Loud Family) and operator in a scene (loosely, college rock) that had its own distinct metric of evaluation (craft, structure, daintiness to a degree.... cleverness as a pure value... melody above all, but understood in a particular sense, that sense defined by the inside-out - in my view - position that the tunes of Grant Hart were better than the tunes of Bob Mould).
So yes the '80s canon is dBs, Let's Active, XTC, the bleedin' Smithereens... and by the '90s (The Posies, Jellyfish, They Might Be Giants) it's getting even further from both my own aberrant pantheon and the mass idea of what pop is.... by the 2000s, it's beyond marginal.
But Music: What Happened? - despite the implied, "it all went to shit" in that title - reads neither as contrarian nor embittered, but as simply the eloquent expression of another way of listening, another kind of loving.
Here's a review by Michaelangelo Matos that goes into Miller's methodology in the book (each year's harvest relates to a CD comp of his favorite tunes released that year).
A playlist of damn near every song that makes up Miller's personal pantheon
And one that goes from 1980 to when he left off in the early 2010s - what you might call A College Rock Canon
There's a bit in it riffing off the Smashing Pumpkins / originality comments:
Scott Miller: I don’t want to create the false impression that the more derivative a piece of music is, the more I like it. But liking something because it’s new is never a musical response. Music carries a lot of potential for emotional impact that is not musical impact. As a simple example, a moving set of lyrics may have more or less the same impact if you just read them. Five minutes of sound might have dramatic impact, and five minutes of compositionally vapid music in a film score might work great to telegraph a set of emotions and surprises to go with the scene. But a purely musical response always needs an existing music context. You can’t play Andean flute music to Rush fans and expect the value to be apparent in isolation, or vice versa. There’s a world of context needed by the ear to support a musical reaction. I like originality in music, but that is a non-musical reaction.
Matthew Perpetua: How often do you think originality actually occurs? I tend to think that it usually comes down to the personality of the artist more than the formal aspects of things, which are usually lost on non-musicians. I found it interesting that you chose the Smashing Pumpkins as the vehicle for this thought because while that band didn’t really invent anything, I would think that to some extent there is originality there simply because Billy Corgan is such a one-of-a-kind figure. If nothing, he has this distinct voice and persona.
Scott Miller: That’s a very good observation. On the artist side, there are gestures intended to be taken as originality, and on the listener side, there are experiences of novelty, and they might not match up at all! One of the most tried and true formulas is for musicians to strive mightily to do something as well as their heroes, but while failing miserably at that, arriving at something close enough for a certain size audience to relate to, but with a whole new aspect of appealing sound that simply came from who they are.
At The Ringer, a whole feature about Pitchfork's Most Notorious Review.
The year was 2006, the album was Jet's second effort Shine On, the writer was.... well, that's the mystery that Ringer's Nate Rogers sets out to solve.
And the review? The review was wordless, consisting only of a brief video of a chimp peeing in its own mouth.
Scott Plagenhoef, an editor at Pfork, recalls:
We were talking about the central problem as we saw it with the record, how the Return to Rock trend that started with the Strokes, White Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and really rock in general—had curdled into a set of lazy signifiers and poses. When the point or driver of what you’re doing is reclamation it’s inherently limiting and resistant to new ideas. It’s a creative cul-de-sac. Progression—whether it was in hip-hop, pop, guitar music, electronic music—was important to us at the time. Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, became so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing.
This what things were likein the 2000s. A state of affairs that might lead someone to write a book called Retromania.
Mind you, a magazine doing an in-depth historical investigation into a single record review could be taken as an example of retro culture.
Or if not retro exactly, then a kind of chronically historical culture.
Only way to make it more archive-feverish would be if it had been an oral historyof the Shine On review.
As it is this piece - including a sidebar on Other Famous Pitchfork "Stunt" Reviews - is nearly six thousand words long.
Never listened to Shine On, or indeed any Jet album, but I confess I've always liked "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" - always turned it up when it came on the radio. It's an immaculate recreation, boosted with modern production.
They get down pat the surly, rocket-in-my-jeans-front-pocket mannish-boy swagger of, I dunno, the Pretty Things.
Perhaps justifying one's weakness for such a record would require resorting to the "time travel" metaphor, the futurist critic's self-respect-saving rhetorical maneuver.
Going back to the mid-to-late 2000s, when the retro-talk really started in earnest....
Momus amusingly castigated this sort of thing at that time - reactivatingPeter York's concept of Art Necro and talking about Retro Necro.
One post in particular at his blog Click Opera I remember vividly, although possibly imprecisely:
Momus is at an airport and what is clearly a rock band arrive at the same gate. The Groop come swaggering in, elegantly wasted, in the appropriate dress for a rock band sonically oriented towards the pre-punk Seventies. Suddenly Momus feels like he's looking at employees at one of those "living history" museums, whose job it is to wear Medieval garb and do traditional crafts all day long - , working in the blacksmithy, churn butter, that kind of thing .
I suppose it's possible the band at the airport might actually have been Jet.
Not that there wouldn't have been many other contenders to trigger this epiphany - Kasabian. Probably most groups that appeared on the cover of NME during the 2000s.
Yes, it was a chronic culture of revival and reenactment... which now feels stabilized, just part of how things are and will always be...
But at the time it seemed inundating and alarming... the escalation of preexisting trends and their synchronized convergence, combined with new digital archiving platforms = Crisis.
Particularly disorienting and dispiriting for post-punk veterans such as me and Momus and Mark.
Interesting post by Robin James at It's Her Factory about how we've moved into "Pop's Franchise Era".
Noting the Bob Dylan biopic and the horrific thought that each individual Beatle is getting their own biopic, she argues that what already unfolded in Hollywood - franchization, cinematic universes, stars replaced by characters - is taking hold in pop music. Not just with Legacy Artists, but with relatively young, musically active stars who are prematurely Legacy-izing.
Hence Taylor Swift's Eras tour: only 34, she's already consolidating the exploitation of her archive in the way that Bowie did with his Sound + Vision tour of 1990 and the Rolling Stones have done since the late '80s.
Robin writes:
"... When Swift repackaged all her individual albums into a catalog of “eras” for a tour of that same name, she created a universe; each album set the vibe for world-building sets, costumes, and the like. The same is true of Beyonce’s various acts: there’s the house music act, the country act, and purportedly a forthcoming rock act....
"Taylor and Beyonce are franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They are not stars, per se, but tested and proven brand IP that the industry leverages into blockbuster content like the Eras and Renaissance tours and concert films. And they franchise not just in the music industry, but across media – that’s what the Taylor and Beyonce beats at Gannett are, new locations of existing franchises. I will be the last person to be surprised if and when they build a Taylor Swift theme park....
"With their “portfolio careers” spanning various industries like apparel, beauty, instruments, and food... , pop stars treat their own brands as a franchise.... Pop artists are less like stars and more like characters whose vibes grace everything from athleisure to sweet potato pies.
"The problem, of course, is that this concentrates all the wealth in the hands of the richest artists and corporations...
"In August 2023 Billboard published a piece asking “Why Aren’t More Pop Stars Being Born?”
Xenogothic exhumes a panel discussion from 2014 involving Mark Fisher, Lee Gamble, Kode9 aka Steve Goodman, Alex Williams, Lisa Blanning - and bearing the title The Death of Rave - and does a public service by getting the debate transcribed.
Go here for his reasons for digging this up and reflections of how it relates to current glumness, state of clubbing and club music, as well as the transcription itself
Here's one choice exchange:
Alex Williams: As regards hedonism... What was interesting about things like the early days of rave music, is that it’s fun, but it’s serious fun. It’s seriously fun. But also it has some… There’s a kind of a sense that sort of eliminating yourself collectively through drugs and music is an intense and meaningful experience. … Kids still go out. They still have a good time and people still take lots of drugs and become highly intoxicated.... The lack of the idea that this could be a good time that is also more than a good time, in a certain sense. An intense experience that could be transformational, in some way. Maybe not political. I think in many ways, all of this stuff stands in for politics. The politics we’re not allowed to have.... Within the impulse that you see in rave is a lot of things coming from the failed revolutions which were happening in 1968, which couldn’t happen. They failed. So that impulse, then, sort of reverberates throughout culture, and pops up every now and then. And rave was one of these things.
... To a lot of eyes today [it] seems naïve. We think it’s naïve that you could treat a rave as if it was really serious, as if.... this sort of being together with people and having this collective experience could be transformational. We view it a bit distastefully, as if it’s sort of jejune, or sort of hippy-ish. It’s something to be kind of viewed with contempt.
Mark Fisher: The key affective figuration of our time is depressed hedonism. Depressive hedonism. Like the way Drake sings, “We had a party, we have a party, we had a party”. [Laughter] It’s like the saddest sound you’ve ever heard.... The best kind of critiques of capitalism coming out of, like, Drake and Kanye West… Even if you’re super rich, you’re totally fucking miserable.... Just the absolute abject misery of on-tap hedonism...
It's funny how an image like this can give you a right hauntological frisson....
But at the time, it would have just been part of the dreary everydayness of the era (that dingy orange).... graphic with-it-ness reaching the mainstream and becoming mundane.... unremarkable, unnoticed...
But there are design scholars and archivists and imagery collectors who love the Sainsbury packaging, see it as an outpost of popular modernism
Last year, on Twitter a designer who identifies himself only as Stuff by Mark put up a bunch of imaginary movie posters that took New Wave songs and imaginedeach of them as a film from the New Wave of British cinema aka 1960s kitchen-sink realism.
I thought these were clever and attractive.
This kind of thing strikes me as "good retro" . It's work that's fun to look at but it's based in an affinity between the two things being mashed together: British realist cinema of the late '50s / early '60s, the New Wave / 2-Tone school of late 70s / early '80s groups, Films and songs about ordinary people and ordinary life, equal parts wry and gritty. Social comment, social observation, class-consciousness, deglamorized documentary-like pictures of real life. A tone of undisguised bitterness. These were new things in pop in the late '70s, as they'd been in British film in the early '60s.
The affinity is even clearer in the case of the Squeeze song, which takes its title - and lyrical ambience - from the Sixties film.
Stuff by Mark puts out a steady stream of, er, stuff, all based on bygone graphic styles. Prints of the work are for sale from the website.
But just like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, so there's good retro and bad retro.
And this recent offering strikes me as the bad kind.
It takes the track list of the one and only album by The La's and imagines each song as a movie poster in the style of the legendary Saul Bass, famous for his title sequences for films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Preminger and Billy Wilder, among many others.
Why "bad retro"?
Unlike with the New Wave songs as New Wave film posters, there's no aesthetic affinity between the La's and Saul Bass.
'
The La's were an edge-of-Madchester / proto-Britpop outfit, immortal for "There She Goes", itself totally retro - or perhaps "time travel" is the operative word, the true hopeless desire at work here. (Famous story of Lee Mavers rejecting a vintage studio console because it didn't have "proper Sixties dust" on it).
But the region of the recent past that the La's were obsessed with reenacting was completely separate from the world that Saul Bass operated in - the Hollywood mainstream. You think Saul Bass and you're instantly in the era of Mancini and Martinis and mid-century modern (the kind of look and feel that suffuses the decor and costumes of Mad Men, say).
Whereas The La's reference points are Beatles and Merseybeat and perhaps a bit of Crosby Stills and Nash (the Graham Nash bit). The look and feel of this 1960s is a world away from Saul Bass's world. Rock, then, saw Hollywood as showbiz, as phony, as nothing to do with youth culture (or hopelessly clumsy and out of touch when it tried to deal with it).
The La's own album artwork is faintly Swinging Sixties / mod / Carnaby Street, or just ugly.
The other big difference is that The La's are throwbacks, while Saul Bass was absolutely modern in his moment. Ridiculously with-it and au courant.
More to the point, whether it was the credits sequences or his film posters or his logos for corporations, Bass did things that had never been done before. He innovated with typography, with cut-out animation, with methods of production. The very idea that a title sequence could be a miniature work of art in its own right was a new thing.
So it's an arbitrary marriage of contraries, done according to the additive logic of the mash-up: "Here's two things I like - Bass's designs, Mavers's tunes and voice - so let's combine them".
AI means the world is going to be choked with this kind of thing. Already is being choked by it.
Like low-density lipoprotein, it clogs up the arteries of the culture.
Not sure if I did post this on Retromania, as opposed to Hardly Baked... an oldie riffy-rambler from 2011
This summer we went to see two exhibitions in Los Angeles – one was in nearby Pasadena (Clayton Brothers: Inside Out) and the other was in downtown at the MOCA and called Art in the Streets, a mammoth retrospective of graffiti and street art going back to the very beginnings... Clayton Brothers do life-scale shacks and diorama-type things, lots of stuff based on old illustrative styles, newspaper fonts, etc – readymades either literally or in inspiration, but the overall agglomeration of it tinged towards the surreal-creepy-macabre-twisted... a sort of dayglo American-Gothic... At Art in the Streets, a lot of the more recent work involved very large pieces, real-size reproduction of actual real-world stuff – like a bodega, with cans of vegetables etc – or a shabby taxi hire office in a shady part of town, those band or advertising or prostitute type stickers stuck over every surface – one artist (Neckface, we used to see his graff in our old neighbourhood in the East village) did a thing that was literally street art -- the recreation of a dark, dank alley in a scary, grotty part of NYC, complete with a sleeping bum.
Anyway this got me thinking... about readymades and collage, the tradition that starts with Duchamp... with Schwitters with the merzbau and the merzhaus... then proceeds through Lichenstein, Warhol, Richard Hamilton.... Lari Pitman, whose work draws on decorative and kitschy-retro graphics and fonts... Jeff Koons.... and then into the post-graffiti/hip hop era with people the Alleged Art crew (heavily present at this exhibition)... some of whom were into stuff like the tags left by hobos on the side of railcars, or they were into tattoos...
The late Margaret Kilgannen of Alleged used a lot of commercial imagery... hand-painted shop front signage, imagery from advertisements in old magazines... in the Alleged crew doc Beautiful Losers she says something about how "all this stuff becomes interesting to me when it's no longer selling anything to me"-- in other words, once it's divorced from commerce in the immediate here-and-now, it becomes capable of being aestheticized, which is a great description of how vintage chic works
But what struck me about all this in connection with Art in the Streets and Clayton Brothers is that underpinning the whole century-long thing was One Idea – a REALLY BIG idea - which is treating the objects of manufactured modernity as if they were nature, as beautiful as a tree or landscape... (c.f. James Ferraro's description of Far Side Virtual as "the still life of now" - the audio and video landscape of our digitized, augmented-reality daily surroundings)
But also it’s a move of taking the non-art, the infra-art, and just moving it across a line... commerce becomes Culture, the mass produced aura-less product becomes the one-off, aura-full handcrafted object ready for the art market.
And as the Ferraro comparison suggests, it's the same move being made by the hauntologists and the hypnagogics (a lot of post-Ferraro music is Pop Art meets psychedelia), you take what is deemed beneath or outside Proper Serious Rock-as-Art, so that would be ancient cheese pop or mainstream AOR or library music (in the case of hauntology) or with Ferraro now it's ringtones and computer start-up jingles and so forth i.e. today's equivalent to library/Muzak... and then you say well actually if you tilt your head this way slightly , it’s sublime – or even (upping the ante) in some cases it’s just better and more weird than self-conscious Arty art-rock.
And then the art work for a lot of those hypnagogic cassettes is chopped-up magazine images (eyes, lips etc) like a more grotesque and cack-handed version of what the British Pop Artists did... like the popcult unconscious throwing up all over the page (and that's no diss, i love all that artwork)
the low > high context-shift
Nick Katranis calls this artistic move "looking at what is right in front of you"
for most people "right in front of you" nowadays means that what they can find on the internet, what’s trawl-able on YouTube etc etc
e.g. Oneohtrix scavenging for alchemy-susceptible materials on YouTube, the stuff that’s beneath consideration, infomercials or ancient clumsy computer graphics, or Chris deBurgh... or with Replica, the new LP, he's sampling from a DVD of 1980s and ‘90s daytime TV commercials
What I'm a-wonderin' is whether the BIG IDEA that i mentioned, whether that is so very very BIG -so fundamental and capacious in scope and potential - that it can just carry on and on and on... or is it a 20th Century idea that has just lingered a bit into the next century and hangs on while we all try to think of somewhere new to go?
Post-script: what do you know, Aaron Rose, the guy who co-curated Art in the Streets and was owner and director of Alleged Art (and also directed the Beautiful Losers doc) has co-written a book called Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century's Identity Crisis that looks to be a rather Retromaniac-al polemic ("why has the 21st century become an era of collage, in which creative works are made by combining elements from the former century?", "THE PAST MUST NO LONGER SERVE AS OUR MASTER") which sorta suggests that even as he was pulling together the exhibition he might have been having similar anxieties as i did looking at it
here's what he says in an interview with Oyster:
"Everything in this world is built on references. I don’t think that’s really such a problem, that’s part of the creative process. Although where the amount of original input is below 5%, that’s when I feel like there’s maybe a problem... I think the contemporary art world is horrible [as an offender]! And in music. Music, I think, is really bad. Music videos, especially — horrible — are like, basically just taking things frame for frame."
An interesting article with an interesting title - Techno: Inside the Museum of the Living Dead - from interesting new-ish blog (really a Substack) Infinite Speeds, the interesting work (go check the archive of previous essays) of Vincent Jenewin.
This essay juxtaposes the "musealization of techno" with the club-closure crisis.
I particularly enjoyed the bit about "the little "Drexciya-industrial-complex" that has popped up within the last few years". It is bizarre - yet also all too logical - how that tuff little unit has become the basis for a production line churning out PhDs and dissertations. Not that they haven't made some great records with a fascinating mythos wrapped around them.... But you don't see the same level of exegesis with the equally-rich-and-ripe text that is Marc Acardipane / PCP. Or [insert your own example].
But more to the point, there's plenty of fantastic electronic dance music that doesn't have any text around it as such - music that sonifies rather than signifies - tracks that simply execute the task it's been set . But for those reasons gives academia nothing to latch onto.
Musealization seems to capture everything eventually, perhaps it's futile to resist. or pointless to complain... And of course I'm in this business myself, rather often.
But in the conclusion to the original 1998 Energy Flash I suggest that the vitality of a genre or music movement is in inverse relation to the amount of history written about it, before wryly noting that my own tome might well be an early sign that the prime was passing - had literally become The Past now, past-ure ready for memory-mastication and digestion. For when things are most vital, things move too fast for retrospection: you're in it, living it. Under the bracket "history" could be included not just books but exhibitions, box sets, documentaries, podcasts, oral history features, and every other form of curation and annotation.
If techno-house etc is fundamentally a bliss-machine, then... well, this old favorite quote springs to mind:
"Criticism is always historical or prospective... the presentation of bliss is forbidden it: its preferred material is culture, which is everything in us except our present"
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.
This one too:
"Beauty will be amnesiac or it will not be at all."
~ Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Related themes and quandaries - ideas of futurity, lost futures, looking back to looking-forward - flicker through two new excellent bits of writing at Pitchfork...
A review by Philip Sherburne of the new Burial release "Dreamfear"/ “Boy Sent From Above”
Gabriel Szatan s Sunday Review flashback toJeff Mills's Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, the legendary 1996 deejay-mix-CD
The Burial release - it suddenly struck me that it is now
A/ almost 20 years since Burial's recording career started
B/ in reference to the darkcore-'93 flavour of "Dreamfear", we've probably now hadat least 20 years of aunterlogikal ardkore
(Well, the very first example dates to 1997 - Jega's "Card Hore" - but then there's a long gap, before you get Zomby's Where Were U in '92? in 2008... I don't think there are any examples between Jega and Zomby... Then again, there was The Caretaker's Death of Rave project)
Listening to "Dreamfear", I felt the same way I did aboutAntidawn, that it floats in this zone where it could either seem self-parodic or consummate + inimitable, depending on how you tilted your head. More of the same, only more so.
Here's how Sherburne negotiates similar feelings:
One of Burial’s chief fixations has long been nostalgia for a halcyon era of renegade freedom...
Or is it becoming a shtick? It can be hard to say. If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.
But newness isn’t the point. Using not just the same tropes but even many of the same samples he’s used before, Burial seems to be pursuing his long-running project of world-building and self-mythology to increasingly hermetic ends, burrowing deeper into a state of déjà vu—as though if by recreating the memory from every possible angle, he could preserve it forever.
And here's the relevant bit in Szatan's incredibly in-depth, gets-into-the-nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts-of-turntable-artistry review of Liquid Room, where he zooms out to this question of futurity:
"In a recent campaign for fashion house Jil Sander, Mills was asked to expound upon a theme, “mid-’90s optimism”—with the unspoken “that we’ve lost” echoing not far behind. There’s no glint of awe in our collective eye when DJing’s premier cosmologist collaborates with NASA. It’s just a thing that happens. The idea that technology could be inspiring or even fun anymore has dissipated. Accordingly, the notion that techno might be a pathway to revolution has lost resonance. So many arenas and aircraft hangars have passed in front of Mills’ eyes now that, by his own account, he sometimes zones out mid-performance and begins to dream, instead, of the stars. To some degree, he stands as an avatar for a future forestalled.
"Yet I’d encourage you to listen to the mix and consider the opposite: that this is the work of an individual who believed so unreservedly in the possibilities of what lay beyond that they gave up their best years attempting to tear open that wormhole. At the root, Mills told author Hari Kunzru in 1998, his spin on techno has always been “about making people feel they’re in a time ahead of this present time. Like if you’re hearing someone speak in a language you don’t understand, or you’re in surroundings you’ve never seen before.”
The final point Szatan makes resonates with me: that for all the talk of posthuman this and posthuman that, 'the machines are taking over" etc etc - that excitingly depersonalized discourse that many of us got caught up in the '90s - what makes the record exciting is that it's a human being grappling in hands-on real-time with (by today's standards) unwieldly mechanical technology and analogue slabs of sound-matter. The friction and the sparks come from this battle between the will-to-flow and the resistance of materiality. The disc captures a pre-digital moment, steampunk almost compared to what can be done today...
" Paula Cole Releases ’90s-Summoning New Single “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.”
The follow-up to the Massachusetts-born singer/songwriter’s American Quilt (2021) is called Lo and the album’s first single will make ’90s music enthusiasts turn their heads. Titled “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.” the song chronicles Cole’s introduction to those bands by her late friend and musical mentor Mark Hutchins. Hutchins, who died in 2016, produced all of Cole’s early demos and was the one who introduced the singer to a wide array of alternative bands, like XTC, A Tribe Called Quest and Daniel Lanois. "In a statement about the single Cole wrote: “Mark exploded my mind. I literally heard the Beatles first with Mark. Also The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., A Tribe Called Quest, The Pixies, and a lot of gorgeous early-90’s alternative music folks might not associate with me. We connected in our love for Peter Gabriel’s music. I was mourning, honoring, celebrating Mark when I wrote this. I wanted to acknowledge him and his lasting influence in my life. Mark should have had an enormous career. I’m so grateful. The song needed to be fun, like he was.”
This inevitably reminded me of The House of Love's "The Beatles and the Stones"
But also - more appositely - of The Replacements's own "Alex Chilton"
That, then, was A/ quite clever and B/ indicative
Indicating the Replacements's perverse drive to fail in the marketplace, just like Paul Westerberg's revered forebear, the ironically-named Big Star.
But Big Star was only ironically named in retrospect - they really wanted to be big and thought they could be. Listening to the Anglophile distillate of Beatles-Stones that is their perfect first album, the fact that they did fail, that radio didn't embrace them - it seems so mystifying, so wrong. The music is full of self-confidence and sense of destiny.
Later on Chilton did - of necessity, through self-destructive impulses - make a right cult of himself.
But he and the rest of Big Star wanted to be big.
Plus he'd already been a pop star, in The Box Tops, with the massive hit "The Letter".
"Alex Chilton" the song is also a significant contribution to the canon of meta-pop - "I'm in love / With that song", it captures that feeling of being ravished through the radio. (Or in this case, it being Big Star, not through the radio). The chorus enacts what it rejoices in - the seizing of the ear, the endlessly renewing miracle of pop. Yet releasing a song titled "Alex Chilton" as a single virtually guarantees it'll never be a hit (except in the hearts of college radio deejays and fanzine editors).
As for The House of Love, doing a song titled "The Beatles and the Stones" and then releasing it as a single, it just seemed like a form of self-humiliation - as if the only way they could ever be mentioned in the same breath as the B and the S was by this ruse of titling a song after them.
Talking of the Beatles, here's legendary-era-of-blogs ex-blogger Owen Hatherley surprising us with an excellent piece in The New Left Review about the AI-concocted half-lives of the Beatles
"The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’....
"What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier.....
"The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors.
".... Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute."
