"A black hole in Time"

 

Perennial unease about retroculture.... here humorously expressed by NME cartoonist Ray Lowry before the word "retro" had achieved traction in parlance, in March 1982

Reminded me tangentially of this 

For a moment I wondered if  Lowry's "plundering images" had come from reading a famous piece, "The Age of Plunder", written by Jon Savage for The Face, but then realised that the essay came out in early '83, so almost a year after the cartoon appeared. 

However Ray Lowry is actually mentioned in the Savage piece, as the creator of The Clash's London Calling album cover - which is really an act of re-creation,  based as it is on  Elvis Presley's debut album cover. 

Savage does actually passingly deploy the word "retro" but I would still say the term is not THE term yet for this whole phenom, at this stage.  

By the end of the '80s, though, it is. 

There's a bunch of interesting things about the piece  in retro-spect, as it were. 

It's almost entirely about the visual side of pop - artwork, image - with little about the music (even though recycling and pastiche were almost as evident there as in the wrappings). 

 So it's a piece about plundergraphics rather than plundersonics.

Another interesting thing is that although Savage argues for a relationship between this culture of appropriation / recycling / revivalism / nostalgia and the Thatcher-Reagan era -  a link between cultural conservatism and the New Right ... rather quickly a kind of slippage occurs, one that's familiar to me from my own attempts to pinpoint the Rift of Retro, which kept on receding further and further back into the pop past.

So for instance when Savage brings up punk, he acknowledges that there was a strong strain of self-conscious referencing of the past -  borrowings and citations -  going on there - the Who and Monkees cover versions that the Pistols did, the image and name of  Generation X, a lot of the graphic recycling and allusion

In fact this is where the word "retro" appears in the piece - "punk always had a retro consciousness"

Well, more than that - as I explore in Retromania: the driving force behind punk in its prequel years 1970-75 was largely epigonic, its primary activities took the form of curation and custodianship. 

Before some real-deal hooligans got involved, "punk" was a movement of record collectors, embittered fanzine editors holding a torch for the lost styles of their youth, people who did reissues and historical compilations (Nuggets, Hard Up Heroes etc) and penned their elegiaic liner notes, and the sort of people who operate second-hand record stalls or run vintage clothing boutiques.

New York Dolls, Flamin' Groovies, Dr Feelgood - these progenitors of punk-to-be were anti-modernists all, defiantly out of the temporal groove of the first half of the 1970s.

The slippage in "The Age of Plunder" goes back to punk... but it could have gone further still - to glam  (Roxy as an essay about Pop So Far, the simultaneity of all past decades in the emerging archive... the rock and roll revival's overlap with glitter ) 

The fact that much of this retro-activity was taking place during Labour governments complicates this idea that there's a link between the New Right and postmodernism, although there was a certainly a lot of nostalgia and revivalism going on in the Eighties (Brideshead Revisited, young fogies, etc) 

Increasingly I tend to think that what happens within pop culture is only loosely linked to the economy or ideological currents in ascendancy, let alone who's in Number 10 or the White House and the policies they pursue.... 

Pop has its own internal economy, governed by a reactive  (il)logic....  swerves and veers and double-backs that operate more like the fashion economy, than a smooth and direct transfer of energies from substructure to superstructure. 

One proof of this is that all the socio-economic topics that punk abrasively introduced into rock in 1976-77   -  as the subject of songs, as imagery in record design, in the names of groups or artist alter-egos,  in terms of clothing etc  -  all of these problems and conflicts, this sense of malaise, were in existence in the first half of the 1970s.  Dead end jobs, urban decay, tower blocks, terrorism, etc etc.  The social fabric was frayed. Collapse and decline and decay were in the air.  If anything, it was worse earlier in the decade (the 3 day week, power cuts causing blackouts, industrial action bringing the country to a standstill).  

Yet these realities barely entered into the lexicon - lyrical or visual - of rock, prior to punk.

Examples of this kind of  "street credible" content are vanishingly rare in rock music before punk  - there's Third World War, the odd song like Hawkwind's "Urban Guerilla" - and these rare examples were  unsuccessful in the marketplace of popular desire.  They didn't catch on. They might have defined the times socio-politically but they didn't define the pop times.

A discourse of national crisis existed in the U.K. for years before punk seized it and reflected it back derisively, tauntingly ("Is this the M.P.L.A.? Or is this the U.D.A.? Or is this the I.R.A.? I thought it was the U.K.". 

So there must be other reasons - reasons internal to rock history, rock evolution - that caused punk to start writing songs about dole queues and inner city deprivation and the rest.   It wasn't a simple response to the social environment.

Put this another way - if Sham 69 had formed in 1972  - i.e. the same people but born a few years earlier - they would have been Slade.

Conversely, if Slade had formed in 1978 - same people but born a few years later - they would have been Sham 69. Or The Black Country Rejects. 

Slade's manager Chas Chandler (ex-Animals) actually described Slade as the first real  "wage packet" type group in years - i.e. the first proper working class band out of the U.K. since rock had gone arty and studenty.

("Wage packet" is such a period detail  - I should have explained this for younger readers in Shock and Awe - this is an era where young working class people don't have bank accounts, they all get paid in cash, in an envelope at the end of the week, and go home and give a portion of to their mum for bed and board and the rest is spending money).

But Slade didn't actually write about wage-packet stuff - boring jobs and the boss and the constraints on kids, the police etc.

They wrote about what the pop times dictated - fun, release, make some noise - and not the underlying social realities.

Their music was a mechanism for release from those social realities. 

The headline of this colour supplement piece on punk from 1977 not really substantiated by the article, except a bit on how Joe Strummer was on the dole for years and years (clearly a lifestyle choice) and that youth employment rates had increased a deal since 1967.

However the difference in overall unemployment between early 1971 and late '76 is a steady increase from 3.8% to 5.5% - hardly huge and rapid enough to create a time-defining sense of crisis, an economic determinant for a youth movement