Yesterday's Harvest

TimH Gabriele picks up on a recent FACT magazine story on the excessive number of  returns by legends in 2013, which he describes as "a litany of comebacks and reunions, the past regurgitating itself, a perverse ouroboros wherein death is staged, sometimes only for a few years, only to facilitate the cycle of rebirth". 

He argues that this is not revivalism but "the zombie vanity project... a ouroboros that doesn't engender recreation, just reaffirmation", i.e. "brands" who rematerialize in a swirl of hype. "The reaction to the music itself"--The Next Day, m b v, Random Access Memories, Tomorrow's Harvest-- "is almost secondary. Simply returning in and of itself reestablishes the brand, and thus pushes the act into the contemporary.... The result is a 2013 in which a flood of old names have become the zeitgiest."

 Gabriele finds something "almost heartening" in this trend, evidence of "a  collective nostalgia" for the Album as Event. Certainly Daft Punk have explicitly restaged the mass psychology or mass fan-libido structure of anticipation/delay/witholding/mystery as a renegade act of time travel, a return to the Analogue System. 

I would also argue that these acts -- Bowie and My Bloody Valentine, but to an extent also Daft Punk and Boards of Canada, whose rise to eminence predates the broadband era - are Analogue System creations, whose high stature in the popular imagination stems from the ability of the old Analogue System (i.e. major labels, centralised music media, etc) to build  legends (even semi-popular legends or cult legends in the case of My Bloody Valentine,  in which particular case it also worth remembering that the music of m b v wouldn't even exist without the extraordinary largesse of Island Records for the better part of an entire decade, their belief in investing in music's outer edge).  

In other words, these comebacks are the reactivation of latent or dormant or stored monocultural energy.... the recapitalization of assets accrued and built up in the past  through a system that has now almost wholly crumbled away and whose replacement, the Digital System is not, I suspect, creating phenomena with equivalent mythic profile or durability....  or future reactivate-ability.  

Our God Is Speed's thoughts on this and related subjects can be found in a post titled All Tomorrow's Yesterdays

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 Gabriele also notes gloomily that "there hasn't been a whole lot that has popped up from the margins to demand attention like Death Grips did last year" and that "as I scan the blogs and the zines... it still seems like music at the current moment is being swept up in investment into (diminishing) returns rather than the shock of the new."

With which I would pretty much concur. Unless you're placing under your magnifying glass  fluctuations  in the history of IDM, or prepared to argue that vaporwave is anything more than hypnagogic 3.0, or can somehow convince yourself that a House Resurgence is any kind of future..... I think you'd have to conclude it's been a year of small beer, so far at any rate.

Old Music Night and Day

In the book I discuss the "whole album" fad, as popularised by ATP and its Don't Look Back series, then copied by everybody under the sun. Wondering aloud who first invented this live entertainment format, I conclude that as far as anybody can tell, it was Cheap Trick, who promoted the late 90s reissues of their albums with a series of gigs in various US cities where they performed a reissued album all the way through in its original track sequence (in the case of Live At Budokan, with the singer exactly replicating the deliberately stilted stage banter addressed to the Japanese audience, which had become much-loved by Cheap Trick fans in the US).

However it's come to my notice that somebody else may have got there first -- the Man of the Moment himself, Mr David Bowie. 

For his 1978 tour, Bowie prepared a set full of all the "New Music Night and Day" that he'd  developed in Berlin, i.e. songs from  Low and 'Heroes' . But  according to the Golden Years fan site, he "made the whole show more palatable by including a major slice of the Ziggy Stardust album". (He didn't quite go as far as resurrect a character he'd killed off, though, because he doesn't appear to have to have dressed the part, just played the fan-favourite tunes).

So the tour ended up a mixture of New Music Night and Day and Old Music Night and Day.

In a 1980 NME interview with Bowie, journalist Angus MacKinnon expressed his fan's disappointment with this auto-archive-raiding move, admitting that he had reacted to it harshly at the time as a nostalgic pander to the star's fan base, a cop out vis-a-vis the Berlin-exile-era Enovations. "I did feel a vague sense of betrayal... I just felt you were very consciously trying to recover your old audience again - a move that seemed to cancel out the validity of the newer material....  a bit of a cheap trick."

Bowie replies:  "I think it was rather to do with two ideas that I felt strongly. One was that I actually wanted to play [the] 'Ziggy' album from top to bottom, from bottom to top, one to nine, because I suddenly found it again an enjoyable piece of music to listen to, having not done it for quite a few years on stage. So there was pure personal enjoyment value in there. On the other hand, I'm only too willing to admit to the number of people who come to see me to hear a lot of those old songs and without any hesitation I'm quite willing to play them. I will also play the things I'm doing currently. But I have absolutely no qualms about playing older things of mine that people like."

So that's the side of Bowie that's showbiz, a trouper, give the punters what they want, "bums on seats", etc, rather than the art-rock frontiersman and edge-chaser dragging his audience with him into the future. 

But  "Ziggy' from top to bottom, from bottom to top, one to nine" --if he literally did play Ziggy Stardust in sequence on that tour, he invented the Whole Album phenomenon -- almost two decades in advance of  Cheap Trick. ("A bit of a cheap trick" in a different sense to how Angus Mackinnon meant it).

McCain Oven Chips - a Year To Remember

a spoof commercial from a few years back meant to look like it was made in 1979 and looking ahead to the future (i.e. now)

made by Duncan Jones, whose first name was originally Zowie

whose Dad briefly worked in advertising (as a paste-up artist / entry-level illustrator) and whose own father was a publicist

a real commercial from 1979, advertising the just launched McCain Oven Chips

Dad playing an ad man

Planet Earth is blue

In 1979, one thing i can tell  you that we took for granted would be part of life in the 21st Century -- human beings on the Moon

Still I hear India is planning a mission to Mars (unmanned, albeit) in the next decade