Penned by Robyn Hitchcock recently as tribute to Syd Barrett on his 77th birthday, the text below is a remarkably eloquent and candid bit of writing - an exorcism of indebtedness. While I'm unlikely to get around to giving RH's urrrv another go, it gives me an angle on how it might be approached with more sympathy and generosity. Simply put, some artists are so towering and imposing that their impact on subsequent artists still in their formative stage is "all I want to be is exactly this". It's as though the nascent artistic self goes into shock; the anxiety-of-influence that usually fights back against the inspirational influx is paralysed. The sui generis ancestor becomes a genre: an individual personality and imagination transformed into a learnable craft, potentially the dedicated work of a lifetime. But although exact replication is possible (Shakin' Stevens as professional Elvis impersonator), in the better case scenario, originality seeps out almost despite the imitative intent: the secondary artist can't actually live the life of their role model, they necessarily have their own experience, desires, as well as interactions with other musicians, etc. History doesn't repeat.
Syd Barrett: The Vanishing
Thoughts on his 77th birthday…
If Bob Dylan is the most scrutinized musician of our times, Syd Barrett must be one of the most pursued. Almost as soon as he’d slipped off the radar, in the dismal wasteland of February 1972, the dogs were in pursuit.
I was one of those dogs. You only had to listen to “The Face of Death” on the first Soft Boys EP to see how completely I’d marinaded myself in Syd Barrett. The song was not, as some assumed, about Syd himself, but another local character who haunted the streets of Cambridge with an expression of terminal hopelessness on a face which looked like it was upside down. The poor guy lived alone in a room full of milk bottles and apparently injected himself with insulin for his diabetes. Rumours travel fast in those small, cold byways. He walked slowly, as if he’d been punched in the stomach, and he wore a leather jacket; I *think* his name was Arthur.
A few years previously, I even tried to call on Barrett himself, at his old family home on Hills Road. Thankfully he was out. But he was also no longer called Syd, it appeared. I stood on the doorstep pink with embarrassment, my stomach tight with dread - terrified of actually meeting this man who was rapidly becoming What I Wanted To Be - but the compulsion to see him was stronger than my anxieties. I rang the doorbell of the ample, suburban house and eventually a young student lodger answered. I explained my mission and she didn’t seem surprised:
“Oh, right - just a minute: Mrs B” she called up the stairs, “is Roger in?”
Who, I wondered, was Roger? I was about to explain that actually I was looking for Syd, when a calm lady with a faintly lizard-like aura and a print dress padded down the stairs towards me. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, either - pilgrims were already flocking to that door, I guessed. This dame with iron-grey hair, looking like an aunt of my own mother, this must be Mrs Barrett…
“Ah, no, you’ve missed him, I’m afraid - he’s in London now. Was there anything you wanted to see Roger about?”
“Oh, er, I - no, I mean.” I was flustered and breathing fast: pleased that I’d summoned the nerve to intrude on them (hardcore fan that I was) but somewhat relieved that the object of my quest was not actually there: “I - er - he’s in London?”
“Yes.”
“Is he… um… is he making a record?”
“We-ll”, said Mrs B, looking up at me with her head tipped slightly to one side, “I believe he’s by way of making a record, yes…”
Enough was more than enough, and I fled. It turned out that Syd’s real name was Roger, and had been all along.
The more I looked for news of Barrett, the less there was. Rumours had already made their way out of that house, of Syd (or Roger?) living in the cellar of his childhood home, playing Pink Floyd records at the wrong speed and laughing hysterically. But he’d also been seeing playing local jam sessions. He’d been seen eating chocolate cake. He’d been seen but he was gone.
As the 1970s wore on, it became more and more apparent that Syd Barrett really was no more. When he made his famous visit to his old band at Abbey Road studios just as they were finishing their tribute to him “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” nobody even recognized him for a while. Syd had been a lean, handsome and saturnine figure: Roger was fat, bald and had no eyebrows. Did he drop by that day just to make that point: that his old self was over?
He was no longer by way of making a record. Several attempts were made to lure him back into the recording studio, but when the tapes finally surfaced they turned out to be uninspired 12-bar noodlings: not even chaotic, just boring. Barrett clearly had no more songs in him. Nonetheless he continued to buy guitars until his royalties ran out. Part of him obviously wanted to believe he was still in the game, just as we, his fans, did.
Syd the musician was the flower that briefly blossomed on the cactus that was Roger, his host body. Minus Syd, that host body reverted to what he had been before, an art student. Roger returned to his mother’s house in Cambridge and spent the last 30 years or so of his life painting pictures. And then, apparently, burning them.
I, meanwhile, had done my best to re-activate my vanished hero in my own Cambridge art-rock combo, the Soft Boys. Of course, you can only be Art-Rock posthumously - à la Velvet Underground or Roxy Music: during our career nobody knew how to categorize The Soft Boys - us included - so we were effectively unmarketable, and the music business soon gave up on us. We didn’t exactly help them sell us. One of our few definite markers was that I sounded very like Syd Barrett. We even recorded “Vegetable Man”, one of his rare unreleased songs. This magnetized the Barrett ghouls - and I’d long been one of those.
I may well have identity issues. Who are any of us if we examine ourselves from close up enough? Take somebody who no longer wants to exist (Barrett), and then add somebody who would rather be someone else (me) and…you get the picture. All I know is that if I like a kind of music I try to echo it, as closely as I can. Whether I absorb my influences or simply continue to echo them isn’t really for me to say. I write and play the music that I want to hear. Sometimes I do feel like the creature in the John Carpenter movie The Thing: that I’m just an amalgam of everything I’ve absorbed. Someone described me once as the Peter Sellers of rock: I’ve had worse compliments…
"Roger Barrett, whoever he was, became a blank canvas onto which his admirers could project their fantasies. It became more about them, and less about him. He continued to live on a suburban backstreet, looking as nondescript as possible. His address had long ago been trumpeted on the Barrett grapevine, some of whom persisted in staking him out on his way to the shops or cycling around town. They were still looking for Syd, or traces of him. I’ve seen footage of what might or might not be Roger Barrett, in a string vest on a cloudy afternoon. I was based in Cambridge till the early 1980s and may have passed him a dozen times in the town centre - I would never have known.
"In the end, it’s the gap between who you are and who your admirers want you to be. You encourage them to think you’re something you’re not because - oh, boy: wouldn’t it be fabulous if you really were it? And in reality you’re just a lump of aging flesh shuffling along on a dreary avenue. One psychotic Beatles fan chose to rob the world of John Lennon because he felt that John was no longer whom that fan had imagined him to be. So it goes."
As an artist, I know that the best part of me is my art. I’m truly grateful for the music Syd left us, and I’m truly grateful that I never ran into Roger.
Interesting rhetorical maneuver here: a defense of a retro band you like even though you know retro is "wrong" - on the grounds that their sheer fanatical commitment to a long-dead past style takes it all to another level. There's a degree of fidelity-in-recreativity at work that amounts to a form of time travel. So here, in early '92, Steve Sutherland, then deputy editor of Melody Maker, writes about the Stairs and invokes the Tardis. (There's also echoes of earlier time-travel exponents, specifically The Flamin' Groovies, with talk of action being shaken and so forth).
Here in his ensuing album review, Sutherland goes for the "beyond retro" trope - they go through retro and out the other side
This sort of rhetorical move feel like stuff I've resorted to myself at various points over the years, when caught between my liking for something and its indefensibility according to my "official" ideology. Casting my mind back, I thought of a couple of earlier examples - in 1989 describing The Stone Roses as a "resurrection insurrection" (rhyming as word-magic ploy as please overlook my inconsistency ruse). And that same year, in this otherwise mostly dismissive review of a Sub Pop compilation from 1989, I use the "time travel" metaphor to single out Beat Happening as exceptional.
The full review here, notable for its lack of clairvoyance re. the Pacific North West sound aka grunge's quite soon to be proven ability to shake some action on the mass culture stage.
As well as "time travel", another rhetorical ploy is "timeless" versus "dated". If I'd ever been in a position to review The La's "There She Goes", I might have tried wheeling "timeless" out.
Here, in another 1992 review - this time of the second album by The Black Crowes - Steve Sutherland wrestles with his own nostalgia and experienced-in-real-time knowledge of pre-punk rock. Around this time in MM he'd be reviewing reissues of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Free, Grateful Dead, records he'd have listened to when they originally came out or read about in ZigZag. (Unless memory fails me, he'd once been in a long-hair band called Merryweather, who played some festivals). Here with Black Crowes it's not so much "Retro with Attitude" as "Traditionalist with Pride" or "The Campaign for Real Rock 'n' Roll" - and the review is a kind of defiant apologia.
I must say I don't mind Black Crowes... the high-energy Humble Pie-ism of "Hard to Handle", the scowling Stones boogie of "Remedy"
In some ways, they are only a successful version of Royal Trux, with residual avant-isms bevelled off.
I also appreciated the way that Black Crowes took the piss out of Metallica's drummer, saying he couldn't swing for shit. Because it's true.
At exactly the same time Steve was exploring the music of his past through the reissues column at MM - which was, now I remember, titled Retro-Active - I was exploring much the same zone but from a different angle: their new-to-me unfamiliarity. The hard 'n ' heavy early '70s tantalized as a forbidden and cordoned-off region, an era that as as good postpunker I'd been indoctrinated against, told I didn't even need to bother checking out. There's was a liberation - even a revelation - in listening to music that could swing for shit.
The staff took the piss out of me for a good month or two, bylining every piece I did as SIMON 'BORN TO BOOGIE' REYNOLDS.
This season of taking an interest in bygone boogie, raunch, and Southern Rock is recalled in this blogpost, which pins part of it on the influence of reading Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic and Chuck Eddy's Stairway To Hell. The other factors were grunge and the sheer cheapness of the original vinyl for heavy rock of the early '70s.
"So many bands today like to pretend that punk never died; I can't see how this stance is somehow less regressive than bands who pretend punk never happened."
Of course, the ideologically consistent response (especially given that I was at this very moment a convert to rave) would have been that both punk revivalism and pre-punk revivalism ought to be equally anathematized. The week after the ZZ Skynyrd review, I wrote this:
Here the argument is that Hardcore Techno is the Rock of the Future - the real Resurrection Insurrection.
[adapted from a talk delivered at the conference Aesthetics of Steampunk at the Universita di Bologna in June 2022]
My subject today is steampunk as a
subgenre – or side-genre - of
alternative history. Which is itself a subgenre – or side-genre – of science
fiction. I'll be exploring how those three interconnected genres of speculative
fiction might have a relationship with hauntology – understood here as both the
philosophical idea originated by Derrida, but also hauntology as a somewhat nebulous genre of music. That hauntology is a current of
ideas about sound and memory that you can trace back to the end of the 20th
Century with groups like Boards of Canada and Broadcast but that really took shapeless shape in the first
decade of the 21st Century, when Mark Fisherand I together started using the term hauntology around 2005, to describe mostly British artists like Burial, The Caretaker, the Ghost Box label (The Focus Group, Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle, et al), Mordant Music, Moon
Wiring Club, along with a few Americans, such as William Basinski and Ariel
Pink's Haunted Graffiti.
Alternative history has other names: counterfactuals, uchronia (a term that merges utopia, which literally means no-place, and time, via chronos), allohistory, alternate history. But whatever the term you prefer, this is a mode of science fiction that imagines the different route that History could have taken, resulting in radically different realities to the one we inhabit.
Right away, you can see there's an affinity here between alternative history and hauntology. Hauntology, in both the philosophical and musical senses, is concerned with the spectral traces of “lost futures” that persist and linger on the cultural landscape: dreams of tomorrows that never came but haunt and taunt us with their betrayed promise. Alternative history is about the ghosts – the mirages – of other presents; distorted reflections of our world. It uses the same speculative fiction techniques as science fiction, but instead of projecting forwards, it projects sideways through time– to versions of the present where history took a different path, usually because of a specific turning point that in this fictional scenario turned the other way.
Alternative history fetishizes the notion of the Event, the turning point; it revels in the look and feel of worlds based around differently evolved technology; it takes delight in in ironies, reversals, and displacements. So often real life historical characters in our history reappear in incongruous places. In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, a contender for Greatest Alternative History novel ever, Carl Jung is a Swiss police chief who specializes in the study of criminals by the shape of their heads. In Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, a world where the Reformation was defeated and Roman Catholicism rules almost supreme, Harold Wilson - in our reality the Labour prime minister - is a pipe-smoking Pope.
But although there is humor, there is also estrangement, a making-strange, at work in alternative history. The effect on the reader of alternative history and the best steampunk writing is similar to how listeners experience hauntological music. There are other aesthetic traits in common: a love of clunky hardware, quaint and cumbersome technology that is heavy and takes up a lot of space, but is somehow still futuristic, just like analogue modular synths. There’s also similar blends of moods: whimsy, horror, the macabre, the grotesque, the eerie, all jumbled up together.
The title for this talk - Sideways in Time – comes from a lyric from Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine”, Hawkwind are the British Underground kings of space rock of the 1970s, and they're a rock band overtly influenced by science fiction. They collaborated in fact with the science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, who will appear later as an ancestor of steampunk. The lyric mentions how the silver spacecraft “flies sideways through time”, but I have always heard it as “slides” - sometimes “glides” - and I'm sticking with that poetic-feeling mishearing.
Here's a funny thing: when I picked that as my title I was
completelyunaware that one of the foundations
of the alternative history genre in
s.f. is Murray Leinster’s short story “Sidewise In Time”, published
in 1934. Sidewise is an alternative way of saying sideways – it’s slightly
archaic. Leinster’s story belongs to a particular kind of alternative history
involving the idea of parallel universes: the "sidewise" is when someone slips across into a different universe where causality went differently.
Then, in another surprise, I further learnt that the Sidewise Award is
the name of a prize given to the best alternate history writing. The award
started in 1995 – reflecting a boom in
alternative history, fueled in large part by steampunk and its
propagation as an aesthetic into many different areas of popular culture and
art.
Before I wanted to become a music
critic, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. This is around the age of 14,
15. In particular I was very interested in alternate history. Among my
boxes of childhood notebooks are detailed scenarios I wrote for worlds in which
history had taken a different path. There’s one about a world where Germany
won the First World War – not the far more common Second World War scenario,
Hitler and the Axis Powers winning – but the Great War. It was incredibly
detailed and went right up to the present, which would been about 1978. I went on to study History at university, and
I suppose I have become – without really intending to – a historian of popular
culture. So I have a feel for history as strong as any feeling I have for
futurity or for future music. Through the genre of alternative history, readers
like me have access to the same
sensations – disorientation, estrangement, sense of wonder and fear – that
science fiction creates, as do certain kinds of avant-garde or extreme
music. Alternative history remakes the present into something otherworldly –
literally it’s an other world, a different version of this Earth.
Separate from science fiction, there
is a form of alternative history that is a kind of parlourgame for actual historians. They write
historical essays on different scenarios – like, what if Napoleon had won at
Waterloo, or escaped from Elba. Many historians look down on this as an
unserious activity. But I do remember one of my tutors at university bringing
up a counterfactual possibility – we were studying the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and he said, what do you think of the idea that it would have better if the
Empire had stayed together and gradually evolved into a confederation of Balkan
states. A sort of Eastern European Community.
For the most part, though, alternative history is a field that has been largely left to fiction writers. The more interesting
examples of the form are those that use the same methodology as the near-future
science fiction story. Not science fiction of the sort that's set millions of years into the future,
and that involves interstellar empires and alien races. Rather, this near-future
science fiction involves using the historical method speculatively; it projects forward into plausible scenarios
based on current trends and chains of causality.
Alternative history uses the
same techniques but its start point is located further back in the past – it
locates a turning point, a fork in the path of time where instead of going
right (towards the historical reality we live in) it goes left. Bend sinister. The
turning point is often a battle, a military victory that is reversed. Or an
assassination or the unscheduled early death of a key figure, or the survival of a
key figure who died early in our reality. It could be the premature invention
of a technology, as with the definitive steampunk novel, William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, where Babbage succeeds in making a
functioning computer more than a century ahead of schedule.
Not long before starting collaborative
work on The Difference Engine, Gibson explored ideas of a different kind of
retrofuturism in his famous story “The Gernsback Continuum”. The title nods to Hugo Gernsback, who
in 1926 founded the s.f. magazine Amazing
Stories. One character in Gibson’s
story talks about 'semiotic ghosts' - culturally
persistent after-images of yesterday's visions of tomorrow generated by
the collective unconscious - but to the
central character this feels like a hallucinatory affliction, like bleed-throughs
from a parallel present, a world where
the dreams of 1930s science fiction and the World Fairs of that time came true –
as Gibson writes, a "kind of alternate America...A 1980 that never
happened, an architecture of broken dreams”, 'American Streamlined Moderne'.
For Gibson, his story was a critique of the cult of technology, the belief that
progress is an inevitable byproduct of technological advances.
Bruce Sterling, the coauthor of The
Difference Engine, around about this time started the Dead Media Project, for the cataloguing of examples of outmoded technology. This was the crystallization of a new sensibility of
retrofuturism, and one that is very close to hauntology. There's an exquisitely heightened sensitivity to the pathos and
weirdness of machinery that was very recently cutting edge but is now antique. Although obsolete, these machines seem to contain a trapped promise of futurity, a foreclosed path into the future that could have been. Again, emotionally and aesthetically, this is close to hauntology and to related genres like vaporwave.
The Difference Engine codified steampunk
as a distinct subgenre of alternate history, as well as a kind of sideways
offshoot of cyberpunk. But intriguingly, steam power crops up in a number of alternative
history novels that preexisted the notion of steampunk. Alongside the Victorian / Edwardian aesthetic, you also find such staples of the genre as the airship, the
lighter than air balloon that carries freight or passengers. The dirigible, to
use an old fashioned word, which means a balloon that can be steered and propelled
by a motor, rather than just carried by the wind.
Dirigible airships feature in Michael
Moorcock's The Warlord of the Air – the first of his trilogy A Nomad of
the Time Streams, alongside The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar. Where as an adolescent I planned
to write about a world where Germany won the First World War, here the First
World War never happened at all – Edwardian manners and style prevail and the
European empires still rule the world.
Dirigibles also appear in Ward Moore’s
Bring the Jubilee (1955), which involves a world where the Confederate South won the Civil
War. Another technological side-effect in Moore's brilliant imagining is that the combustion engine is never
invented. Instead there is a vehicle called a minibile – a small, trackless
locomotive powered by steam, similar to what in our world was called the
traction engine. In Bring the Jubilee, the minibile is something
only the wealthy can afford, partly because of its size and also because it
requires a trained driver to operate.
Pavane by Keith Roberts, written as
separate short stories and then combined as a novel in 1966, describes a world where Elizabeth the First
was assassinated, the Spanish Armada successfully conquered England , and as a
result the Reformation is crushed and Roman Catholicism is triumphant. In the
20th Century of Pavane, science is tightly controlled by the Church,
electricity forbidden, so there's no internal combustion engine here either. Instead, personal cars
are powered by wind sails and for heavier transportation there is steam power: heavy goods are carried by ‘road trains,’ steam locomotives that don’t run on
tracks but pull behind them wagons loaded with goods. The first story in the book
involves a haulier making the dangerous journey through the wilderness of the Southern England province of Dorset. He's in danger of attack from routiers,
gangs of bandits on horses. So it's a bit like the Wild West in America around
1890, but transposed into a late 20th Century largely rural England that is still
Medieval, in which barons live in castles (Corfe Castle is still inhabited) and the
Inquisition is busily torturing witches and the possessed.
A similar scenario – a Catholic
England where science is suppressed – is the backdrop to Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976). William
Gibson wrote the introduction to a new edition of the book published in the
early 21st Century, and offered this high praise:
“I must recommend it as containing the single finest steampunk set piece I know of: a seven-hour luxury train journey between London and Rome, via Sopwith’s magnificent Channel Bridge.”
Steam – and alternative technology – don’t play a large role in Amis book. But one thing he does do, in a homage to Philip K. Dick’s classic counterfactual The Man In the High Castle, is to feature a book within the book. Teenage boys in this altered world surreptitiously read a scandalous fiction in clandestine circulation because it imagines something equivalent to our world – where the Reformation happened and science flourished.
Amis goes one better than Dick, though – he imagines a completely different genre. Because ‘science’ is a bad word in this world, the genre is called Time Romance. Romance, here meaning ‘novel’ as in the Italian romanzo or the French roman. And there is also a subgenre of Time Romance that is equivalent to alternative history – it’s called Counterfeit World. So in other words, a fake reality, a false history.
The closest to the steampunk aesthetic that I’ve found in an alternate history novel that predates The Difference Engine is Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hooray!, which was published in 1972. Here the scenario is a world where the British Empire still
rules all of North America. The technology is not exactly steampunk: there are
no airships, but instead heavier than air airplanes are fueled by the burning of
pulverized coal - by coal dust. And
although we see a formidable steam train that can travel at 200 miles per hour
it turns out that the steam is heated by a small nuclear reactor in the
locomotive engine! What really makes the novel steampunk is the overall
aesthetic of the world – the look, the manners, the social structure. Harrison
wrote that when conceiving it, he realized his “parallel world... would be very
much like a Victorian society with certain material changes. This would have to
be, in some ways, a Victorian novel. [But] since, I had decided it would be a
light book, I did not dare even touch on the real condition of the Victorian
working class, child prostitution and all the various ills of society at that
period. I had to ignore them. So, true to the nature of the book but not true
to my own beliefs, it did turn into a Tory vision of glory for
which I do apologise to my socialist friends.”
Harrison's remark captures—and prophesies - a
large element of the appeal of steampunk as a genre: the old
fashioned atmosphere and décor and trappings, but also the old fashioned formal properties (characterization, dialogue,
plots, etc that all follow the adventure-hero model of pulp fiction genres or
19th Century popular story-telling – Rudyard Kipling, R. Rider Haggard). That kind of nostalgia or hankering for a supposedly more romantic and dashing time is fused with the thrills and wonder of science fiction, particularly
the kind of hard science fiction that fixates on technology. Instead of a straightforward linear advance
in technology, it’s a step sideways and then step forwards again, down a
different branch of development.
Fans and critics talk of a division
between historical steampunk versus fantasy-world steampunk. In the latter, there
is less emphasis on the historical method and the kind of ironies and reversals
that the altered world generates, and more on the décor of this transformed
world and the kind of adventures it allows for. This division between historical
and fantasy is similar to the difference
between science fiction and science fantasy. In science fantasy - or as it
sometimes called, space opera - it’s essentially a magical world: there are
monsters and dragons, supernatural powers, divination and prophesy, often a
priestly caste of wizards or magi. Think
Dune. And usually there is some kind of quasi-Medieval symbolics to do with
blood, honor, destiny, dynasties, clans, oaths and pledging of fealty. All the
Lord of Rings, Game of Thrones type stuff. This kind of fantasy tends to run on
emotional energies uncomfortably close to authoritarianism. It is fueled by royalist
or outright fascist energies – the desire for a hero strongman, or the desire
to be a hero yourself. Often there is a barely disguised nostalgia for a caste
society, where everybody knows their place in astratified and hierarchical society. There is steampunk that is based on
similar sorts of desires and fantasies, and rather than involving historical
thinking and feeling, it’s more about an escape from History, or at least an
escape from our current historical moment.The result is Jules Verne but without the timeliness and relevance that
Verne had in his own time.
Nicholas Lezard, the British critic,
noted that many of the historians who are interested in alternative history
-Niall Ferguson, Norman Stone, Winston
Churchill - are right wing. There are a lot of counterfactual histories about a
world in which the British Empire never waned. And there are an uncomfortably large
number where Hitler won World War 2, or the South prevailed in what is in this altered reality now officially known as the War of Northern Aggression. (A delicious spoof on this appetite for Confederate counterfactualism is Sword of Trust, the recent movie, which involves a conspiracy theory underworld of Civil War truthers, who believe that the Northern aggressors really were defeated and there's been a massive cover-up).
Generally, there tends to be a fixation
on Great Men – the idea that a single act by a figure such as Napoleon or Robert E. Lee can change
the course of history.
A particularly vivid example of a nostalgic
alternative history is the novel Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is set in a
world in which the Mongol and Tartars conquered the territory that Russia
comprise. As a result the Russian people ultimately settled in North America.
So the Tsarist world of country homes and servants in which Nabokov grew up is
magically relocated to where he ended up living in exile. In this world, electricity is banned but things are powered mysteriously using a water-based
technology.
"Steampunk Manifesto" by Professor
Calamityaccused most steampunk of being at best nostalgic escapism, at worst
outright reactionary:
“Unfortunately most so-called
“steampunk” is simply dressed up reactionary nostalgia. The stifling tea-rooms
of Victorian imperialists and faded maps of colonial hubris. It is a
sepia-toned yesteryear more appropriate for Disney and Grandparents than a
vibrant and viable philosophy or culture”
The anonymous author of this tirade
calls for a more politically acute version of steampunk alert to conflict and class struggle – “We stand with the traitors of the past as we hatch impossible
treasons against our present.”
Professor Calamity says that the
‘punk’ element is missing – steampunk in truth is far more often steamprog.
Which brings to me to the subject of
counterfactuals in music.
There are numerous bands who identify
as ‘steampunk’, dress the part, and do fairly conventional rock music that
carries steampunk themes or storylines – like Abney Park, an American group
steeped in English imagery. This is is an
extension of the fantasy and cos-play aspects of Goth or metal (Abney Park used to be a Goth
band, in fact).
Far more interesting are groups trying to
imagine sonic forms that could have existed in alternate musical histories.
Add N To (X) were a band of the ‘90s and
early 2000S who used analogue hardware synths at a time when digital technology
was dominant. Their music could be seen as imagining an alternate rock world
where the synth displaced the guitar as the primary instrument and so the future
direction of electronic pop is not hypnotic and trance-like (the Moroder path) but rocking and
bombastic (ELP, Magma etc).
Broadcast imagined a world where all
pop descends from a few 1960 psychedelic groups that used synthesisers and had
ethereal pure-toned female singers:White Noise and United States of America in particular. A genre I call "synthedelia" - indeed in the piece linked I even do a bit of counterfactual speculation about whether this lost moment of Moog-love in American rock music could have blossomed rather than withering.
With Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti,
it’s more the case that individual songs involve strange combinations of the pop
past: he described “The People I’m Not” as “a demo from Rocket From the Tombs, but
playing a Fleetwood Mac song – there’s some Tango In the Night, ‘tell me
sweet little lies’ vibe in there” – in other words, a song and a style that is from
a decade-or-more after the Cleveland proto-punk group Rocket from the Tombs ceased
to exist. (Pink more recently, and regrettably, has opted for a kind of political counterfactualism, seemingly believing that the 2020 Election was stolen and Trump is the rightful President).
The leading hauntology label in the UK is Ghostbox and its artists often resemble renegade
archivists looking to uncover alternate pasts secreted inside the official
narrative. Take The Focus Group’s albumWe
Are Pan’s People –here Julian House conducts a kind ofalternate-historical research, looking for
hidden possibilities in glam rock, light entertainment and British movie-score
jazz. “Albion Festival Report” is an attempt, said House, to imagine “what
ifrock and roll didn't happen, jazz continued
on a strange trajectory. “
Going further back we have John Foxx
of Ultravox- originally a glam band who
then became postpunk and synthpop pioneers, but nowadays Foxx is considered an
ally of hauntology and has recorded for Ghost Box. He told me about the
formulation and conceptualization of Ultravox in the early ‘70s. “I tried to
re-imagine what British/European popular music might have sounded like if
America had never happened –If we hadn’t been overcome by a tidal wave from
such a powerful and energetic culture. We’d decided that we weren’t going down
Route 66. It was to be Route Nationale 1 and the M6.” So it’s a vision of pop
without rock’n’roll. A similar vision of
a pop that formed in Europe in a direct line from Dadaism and Futurism is what
led to the Art of Noise, the 1980s sampling pioneers.
Fans for years have been creating
unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's Smile, Hendrix’s First Rays of
the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's Get Back, the Who’s Lifehouse – using bootlegs,
demos, out-takes, and so forth. Today
there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice – Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums.
Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry
Peppers, don’t stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers – they write incredibly detailed and extensive histories of worlds where the Beatles didn’t split up, or
where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine’s Kevin
Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don’t leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett
stayed in Pink Floyd. A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.
But here I don’t see anything
utopian or subversive in the practice, or even hauntological. Actually it’s more like an extension of fan
obsessiveness and almost a kind of greed
– the desire to reconsume the band, find endless new ways of enjoying them, through reconfiguring the existing catalogue, or imaginatively extending their careers. So in that sense it’s a pure, slightly insane form of
retromania! It's also related to the insanity potential within fandom - a revolt against the finitude of a band's lifetime, the limits of what-is-and-was. In some parallel universe, the band flourishes, is copiously productive, never broke up or ran out of creative juice.
So now, winding up, let me return to where I started, this connection between steampunk along with its host genres
alternative history and science fiction, and hauntology.
With alternative history, there’s
still that sense of world-turned-upside-down disorientation that science
fiction supplies, but it’s not set in the future or on some distant alien
planet: it’s our world seen in a distorting mirror, made unrecognizable and even
grotesque.
Fredric Jameson is renowned as a great
theorist of postmodernism. But he has also written extensively about science
fiction in his book Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions. He is a real sci-fi nerd in fact, with deep knowledge of even its pulpiest thoroughfares. But in that
book, Jameson doesn’t discuss alternative history much, even though in his Marxist
writing he’s constantly going on about dialectical materialism and historical
thinking. In another book, though, when talking about Derrida
and the concept of hauntology, Fredric Jameson defines “spectrality” as that
which “makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through
which the massiveness of the object world--indeed of matter itself--now
shimmers like a mirage.”
I think that effect is what the best alternative
history does: it makes our world seem ghostly, makes the present waver and
reality seem unreal, insubstantial.
Another thing it does is activate a sense of history as changeable - in both the sense of being volatile, but also subject to human agency and will. Alternative history, including steampunk, can at its best counteract that waning of historicity that Jameson identifies as a symptomatic hallmark of postmodernity, that fatalistic feeling that the world is as it only can be ; the era of revolutions or even progress is over. It subtly resists the “The End of History” argument of Francis Fukuyama: no more ideologies, liberal democracy and globalized capitalism triumphant for ever more.
You come away from reading a book like
The Difference Engine or Pavane with a sense that things could have gone
differently, and that therefore things could go differently in the future. Nothing is ordained, nothing is predestined.
Alternative History tends to fixate on
turning points – in Moore's marvelous Bring the Jubilee it's onedecision by a soldier in a field during the Battle of
Gettysburg that then determines the course of the battle, and thus the outcome
of the American Civil War.
In that sense, Alternative History is anti-deterministic
– it believes in the Event. In human free will – in human agency but also human
error - in the role of accident and
contingency.
The word ‘alternative’ makes me think
of Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Alternative History, at its most provocative and unsettling, is saying "yes, there is an alternative, because in the past, there could have been alternatives –
things could have gone better, or worse, or just radically different".
One recent addition to that category of politically provocative alternative history was published by Repeater Books, the radical publisher Mark
Fisher co-founded – Eminent Domain, by Carl Neville . This novel imagines a
world where Soviet Communism triumphed but also managed to reform itself and
liberalize itself. In this world The People’s Republic of Britain is a
particularly free and experimental nation on the fringe of the Soviet sphere. *
Eminent Domain is that rare thing – an
alternative history that is utopian or near-utopian.
Usually, the turning point has turned
to the worst – Nazis rule the world, or there’s a Confederate
States of America.
But in Eminent Domain, things have
come out better – the novel imagines all kind of liberating and innovative developments
in the organization of work and leisure, human potential optimization through the
use of drugs and new kinds of technology.
Reading Neville’s book makes you
conscious of the radical potentials dormant in our present, the different way
things could be.
After finishing the book, there is a
curious unsettling sensation that this present in which we currently languish is
the imposter reality – that this world is the Counterfeit World.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* (Eminent Domain is loosely related to Neville's very-near-future s.f.Resolution Way, in which one thread involves a hauntology-flavored subplot about a mythological lost recording by a mystery-shrouded musician. So these two related modes of historical thinking in speculative fiction are here entangled with ghost story aspects).
