good retro versus bad retro

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.