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 imagined each 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.
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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.
11 comments:
Serendipity: almost as soon as I read your post, the following article appeared in my inbox: https://daily.jstor.org/up-the-junction-a-place-a-fiction-a-film-a-condition/
Interesting to see the artwork for the paperback of Up the Junction: much more 'trash' fiction than New Wave film.
AI will create more of the 'bad retro' like you say, and combined with many people's lack of a sense of cultural history now, will get very hard to correct.
On a similar tack, Twitter has been reporting on multiple errors on the English National Opera's website: https://twitter.com/PatrickAllies/status/1768227982273884670
https://twitter.com/YehudaShapiro/status/1767954061788094916
If the staff at the ENO don't know Benjamin Britten is dead, then we're in trouble.
I know a bloke who was spent most of his young years in a borstal and then spent most of his adult life as a petty thief. One of the jobs he had was to chauffeur an illegal abortionist around London, and one of the things he said is that she always, always, always visited the "posh houses" and never working class ones. And yet in all the major cultural depictions of illegal abortions, like Up The Junction, Alfie and Vera Drake, it's always depicted as a problem of the working class.
I remember Martin Amis describing in his philandering youth how it was easy bed middle class and upper class girls, whereas he described working class girls as being "like fortresses". So this whole genre is just the upper/middle classes projecting onto the working class in order to get the social liberalisation that is good for themselves.
(the above comment was me, btw)
Also, the Lee Mavers "sixties studio dust" line reminds me of when Ian Astbury asked for the creaking of a hinge on the studio door to be recorded because it "sounded like a dolphin".
I'd say the cultural heart has arrested, arteries long since clogged...
Bit of a tangent, there, Anonymous / Phil!
Yeah, I was really replying to this:
https://daily.jstor.org/up-the-junction-a-place-a-fiction-a-film-a-condition/
Which I read about two days prior to your post.
I must disconnect from the internet for a few days.
Another bit of a tangent here, but a friend of mine from architecture school got a job with Saul Bass after graduation, and I recall meeting my friend at the office one night, and what a wonderland of ideas/history that was (this was late-80's.) The man himself was toiling away in the middle of it all, at a big drafting board. Well past his "golden era" (and well past clocking-out time!) but still in the trenches.
Yes he carried on doing title sequences for movies well into the '90s, right? For people like Scorsese and Coppola.
At that point he was doing a fair amount of corporate re-branding. My friend was kept busy generating graphics/architectural design for BP gas stations, Denny’s restaurants, etc.
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