"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

magazine as time machine

" To Truly Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine" -  Brian Dillon in the New York Times writing about the way that reading old magazines (his examples are a 1984 issue of The Face and a 1965 issue of Vogue) immerses you in history in a way that dissolves the inherited and calcified ideas of what a decade or epoch was actually like. It's a battle between "edits" - the original selective version of the then-present as captured in that issue of the magazine, versus the edited-down version of the era that comes down to us through a gradual winnowing into hardened cliches and stereotypes, stage after stage of nostalgic retrospection and generalization. 

"What surprises me now in the pages of The Face: There are just the tiniest hints of the British miners’ strike and the swelling unemployment that are convulsing the country politically. And not a single mention yet of AIDS; in a Wrangler ad, a model’s speech bubble announces, oblivious: “I’m Positive.” In these magazine pages, it both is and is not the 1984 of my memory."

Dillon describes the way that everything about a vintage magazine - not just the obviously notable, signs-of-the-time identifying articles, but the adverts, graphics, listings, etc - is like a plunge into the (almost) raw material of an epoch. 

"When research takes me offline to libraries and archives, or (better) into the depths of a dusty eBay find, I can’t stop at the magazine or journal pages I was looking for; I want to read everything, from masthead to classifieds. Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire."

This is where my head has been at for a while now - at a certain point, I got far more excited by and interesting in gathering up ancient print music magazines than old records. Here's something I wrote in an essay for The Wire around the time Retromania was first published:

"Shopping for secondhand vinyl: I can’t be alone in too often chancing on an intriguing record and then being halted just shy of purchase by the thought: “Hmmm, I can probably find this on the Internet for free... save myself $15... do I really need another record cluttering up the house?” Digiculture has here damaged a multifaceted set of pleasures: the thrill of the hunt, the risk of taking a punt, the tactile delight of ownership.

"Curiously, revealingly, my crate-digging lust is shifting to another analogue-era object of desire: the vintage music magazine. Now and then on a blog you’ll come across a download link to a zipped file of scanned pages from an obscure fanzine or periodical, but for the most part these yellowing bundles of ink and paper have yet to undergo the fate of dematerialisation/dissemination that’s befallen almost the entirety of recorded music. Part of the sudden allure of old magazines is, I’m sure, that they retain a scarcity value that records have forfeited (at least in terms of pure sonic information: the physical records obviously retain potent fetish appeal in terms of packaging, the period flavour of the design and the label, etc).

"But there is also a more elevated aspect to the attraction. Packed with uncommon knowledge, these vintage magazines provide the kind of information that’s hard to find on the internet owing to the particular way its archiving system is structured. Online, you can uncover a vast amount about an artist in terms of diachronic trajectory (discography, biographical arc). Much harder to reconstruct is the synchronic context: what was going on at the precise moment in time of a record’s release, whether in terms of the genre in which the group operated, the general state of music culture, or the political and social backdrop. A musty, yellowing 1970s copy of NME or Melody Maker, Creem or Let It Rock, is a precious capsule of circumstantial evidence: reviews and features about contemporaneous groups, but also record company adverts and the graphic design and typography, which ooze period vibe. You can’t fully understand the impact of glam rock without a sense of how drab and style-less regular rock groups looked then, of how visually depleted the whole media environment was. Likewise, the stark angular minimalism of post-punk groups and record covers derived its salient edge from juxtaposition with scruffy Old Wave and Stiff-style pub rock. 

A time-slice of history, stubbornly analogue, the vintage music magazine in some sense resists the decontextualising vortex that is netculture, that endless end of history that never stops churning. "

Actually, nowadays you can find a lot of whole issues of vintage magazines in pdf or online form - there's a list of repositories in the side bar of my own vintage music writing blog Pantheon.

Dillon again: 

"Carry on reading, however, past famous names and images that seem most of their time, and you find the past does not look or sound as you imagined or recalled.... Of course, you might come away from such pages smirking at the fashions, assumptions and ambitions of the past — or with a nostalgic ache for its objects, textures or habits of speech. But also a sense that the past is never the past of present cliché, any more than our present is purely itself, entirely made of the self-celebrating now."