Saturday, July 20, 2024

"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 1976.




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

Monday, July 8, 2024

circling back

Here I am chatting with Andrew Keen for his show Keen On - about Futuromania, future-music, AI, and the intersection of science-fiction technology and retro culture - what you might term  (well, what I did term - a trial run for a coinage) necro-futurism.

I had a great chat with Andrew about a dozen years ago when Retromania came out - that time I went round to his HQ in San Francisco, sitting in a TV-style studio - so it was cool to bookend with this conversation, albeit this time done remotely. 

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Brutal and British

 













Spied in a trendy bookstore in Broadway Market, Hackney, a few weeks ago


Strange to think that this particular retro-fetish is still puttering on -  15 years after Militant Modernism, almost a quarter century since Boring Postcards

One almost wants to start a counter-current and whisper that "actually, living in one of these buildings wasn't a picnic" - certainly once the initial honeymoon bloom wore off... (Speaking as someone who spent about 9 months in a low-rise block on Brixton Hill back in '87-88.)


















Release rationale for Brutal Britain: Build Your Own Brutalist Great Britain


High-rise tower blocks, prefab panel housing estates, streets in the sky, new towns; some of the concrete constructions that once shaped the cityscapes of post-war Britain have stood the test of time, while others are long gone.

Brutal Britain by Zupagrafika celebrates the brutalist architecture of the British Isles, inviting readers to explore the modern past of Great Britain and rebuild some of its most intriguing post-war edifices, from the iconic slabs of Sheffield`s Park Hill and London's Trellick Tower, to the demolished Birmingham Central Library.

Opening with a foreword by architectural historian Barnabas Calder, the book includes short chapters with full-page colour illustrations and informative texts on each building, along with 9 press-out paper models featuring all kinds of details originally present on the facades. All models are die-cut and pre-folded with simple assembly instructions attached: all you need is glue. 

Arlington House. Margate  
Birmingham Central Library. Birmingham
Cables Wynd House (Aka Banana Flats). Edinburgh 
Cotton Gardens Estate. London
Hutchesontown C. Glasgow 
No. 1 Croydon. Croydon
Park Hill. Sheffield 
The Toast Rack. Manchester
Trellick Tower. London


"Build your miniature postwar paradise from the models in this book. Very sadly, shortsighted building managements and weak heritage protection for postwar architecture mean there is a real chance that, if you use decent glue, your models could survive longer than some of the original buildings did.”
– Dr Barnabas Calder

Release rationale for London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946-1981 (Fuel, March 2024)

The most comprehensive photographic document of council housing schemes in the capital, with incredible images from every London borough and the City, featuring 275 estates built between 1946 and 1981. 

London Estates documents these important buildings in all their diversity, championing the neglected alongside the distinguished, celebrating their vital contribution to the social and architectural fabric of the capital.

Featuring designs from a broad range of architects including Denys Lasdun (Keeling House, Trevelyan House); Chamberlin, Powell & Bon (Golden Lane Estate), ErnÅ‘ Goldfinger (Balfron Tower, Trellick Tower); Basil Spence (Stock Orchard Estate, Tustin Estate), and Kate Macintosh (Dawson’s Heights).








London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946-1981 reviewed by Municipal Dreams



"You'll be left in ruins for your wrongdoings.... Brutal and British!"