retrochat

I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. 

The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.

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I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology... 

I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year. 

Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality"  than Retromania. 

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Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it.... 

In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb: 

“The first quarter of the 21^st Century had a paradoxical feeling – so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that’s fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with.” 

Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews.

(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re.  the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).  

As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective -  "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to  gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones. 

Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself?  (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)

The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania". 

Would that we were! In both senses of the word -  the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.

Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave -  that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.  

There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.

Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things.  Inventive, if not quite innovative. 

The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative  music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up? 

I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis). 

But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?  

That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial. 

In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc). 

But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.

The secret shame of the epigone

Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song -  appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts. 

"I took an album from the ancient unit

And I walked on down the hall

"Jimi, I want to kill you"

He stood before me in a vision

With treasured secrets of the blues

A voice rang out from battered speakers

 "You are not fit to shine my shoes".

Jeff Lynne, virtually a Bloomian archetype of the "weak rocker", here on "Beatles Forever" fesses up to his unrecoupable artistic debts. But  then chickened out and didn't release the track.  

Key couplet: 

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Full lyric: 

Beatles forever

Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da

There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore

The beauty of the harmonies, the sound of the Fab Four

All their music will live on and on (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

They really taught the world to sing (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"

Beatles forever, "All You Need Is Love", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," wooh

Beatles forever, "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" (number nine)

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Makes you wonder how they did it (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

I wish I knew the secret, yeah yeah yeah (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and ever

Beatles forever, "Nowhere Man" and "Penny Lane", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"

Beatles forever, "Get Back" and "Yesterday"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

All the children sing

Beatles forever, "Please Please Me", "Eleanor Rigby"

Beatles forever, "I Am The Walrus" (yeah yeah yeah) goo-goo g'joob

Beatles forever, "She Loves You", ooh, "Day Tripper"

Beatles forever, "Eight Days A Week", "Magical Mystery Tour"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

Ah ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah ah-ah, ah-ah-all-ah

Ah, feel the beat, ah-ah-ah-ah, gotta move your feet ah-ah ah-ah

Rhythm and blues, ah-ah-ah-ah, pretty tune

Ah, rock and roll, ah-ah-ah-ah, eternity, ah-ah ah-ah

Started out, ah-ah ah-ah, as Merseybeat

Beatles forever

Beatles forever, yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever

What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  

This  BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. 

Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score. 

And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.

As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West). 

There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. 

The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the  mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.

I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.

There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness. 

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.

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Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"

Overstimulation

  

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, of humble origin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

Hyperstatic Charge

 Someone asked me what I meant by this term….

"Hyperstasis" is a concept I came up with after listening to a bunch of new electronic dance albums that had been hyped by music journalists, and having this mixed response: being quite impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the music, while ultimately being dissatisfied because nothing on the record ever really felt to me like it was "totally new" or "the future". (Which is the sensation I got all the time from electronic dance music in the Nineties, that the music was hurtling into the future and mutating wildly into all kinds of unprecedented forms). Often I concluded that the artists had managed to avoid being indebted to a single source by being diversely derivative.

Hyperstasis is a paradox, similar to the idea of "running on the spot", or the hamster who cycles endlessly and frenetically on his wheel. The "hyper" element is the way that the music, across the whole of an album but sometimes also within any given track, shuttles back and forth across a kind of grid-space of influences and sources. It is recombinant without ever quite innovating. It moves at a great speed and with great fluency within terra cognita, the sonic territory of the already known. But it never quite manages to push into the unknown and take the listener "out there".

Hyperstasis is a condition that afflicts individual artists and pieces of music. But it is also a condition that can trap an entire genre or field of music. It is not such a terrible state of affairs: good records still come out, often a lot of them. Hyperstasis is not a state of entropy and inertia so much as a febrile stage that follows a period of earlier creativity, which generated a lot of material to be reworked and recombined.  But the suspicion is that the frenzy of hyperstasis is what precedes a final collapse.

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Although I have no recollection of taking it from somewhere or even seeing it before I started using it circa 2009-10… it seemed like a word that would have to have been invented for some other purpose. I did look it up once and seem to recall it had some very specific meaning in physics or maybe finance. 

It feels to me to have some vague kinship with stagflation, but there isn’t a direct correlation or analogy - more that both words describe something oxymoronic, “shouldn’t be happening”, worst of both worlds syndrome.

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