The Honorable Epigone (Are You Inexperienced)

 

Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active -  reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.

But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...

In a recent Guardian interview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says: 

“Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically....

"I didn’t invent this field of music, but I’ve perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I’m the opposite. I’m sweeping up after them. It’s like, ‘Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.’”

That's admirably clear-eyed, isn't it?

About his Eighties success in America: 

"It’s funny when people think of me as an 80s artist because I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that’s a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I’ve avoided both success and failure. It’s fantastic. And it’s always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I’m Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I’ve signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice.”

I can feel myself relenting... actually considering listening to the solo albums....  perhaps even "Brenda's Iron Sledge" will get its second chance!

I will say, Hitchcock did record, with The Soft Boys, at least one stone classic. And it doesn't actually sound that 1967, it feels very much of whatever the year it was it came out. 

Talking about wanting to destroy someone... over at Pantheon I discuss the mystery of a missing Soft Boys song, "The Lonesome Death of Ian Penman". 

Going back to this idea of being an epigone, the honesty and even honour of accepting that you are a secondary artist, tilling terrain opened up by pioneers....  

An intriguing thing that emerged in another recent Hitchcock interview, with Mojo, is that although he is an overtly psychedelic artist,  he was relatively inexperienced with psychedelics:

“I hardly took any acid at all. I don’t think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one.”

That adds another dimension to the idea of being a "secondary artist". You skip a stage in the process... 

Instead of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" - the mission statement and modus operandi of Spacemen 3 - you absorb it via the sonic encoding of hallucinatory experience in select Sixties recordings.  The music is the drug. 

In a piece on Rock and Self-Destruction in the new issue of Vice, I wonder the extent to which this was widely the case with the Still In A Dream groups...  

A phrase I use in the book for the era is "a second psychedelia". But in quite a few cases, I imagine it was also a second-hand psychedelia. 

Some of the groups were doing acid.  For a few, harder drugs. Spacemen 3 energetically explored the whole pharmacopeia (Sonic Boom even experimented with chloroform!). But I'm guessing that a possibly surprising number were getting it indirect, vicariously, via the records and the records alone.   

Prompted by the way the music was going, I got into using Sixties lingo in my writing - mind-blowing, kiss the sky, blissed out, far out, tripped out  - for quite some time before I could answer Jimi's question in the affirmative... 

Fisher-talk (and a bit of Retro-Talk)

People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher. 

Only a slight exaggeration.

It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no. 

But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found it easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't. 

Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not want not, as me old mum says.... 

 1. Fisher seems to have a lot of impact on younger audiences, even among those outside academia. Why do you think his work resonates so much with a generation that were still quite young when he passed away?

I think it’s the way Mark used his personal experience - depression, dealing with bureaucracy in the workplace, etc - as a basis from which to write outwards, as it were, towards larger principles and a systemic and structural analysis. It is very relatable and accessible, it helps readers understand abstract ideas. He was also a stylish, yet crystal clear, writer - it is entertaining as well as illuminating. 

He writes about depressing things but the effect is not depressing - even just apprehending things clearly is energizing. And usually there is some kind of hopeful aspect.

The idea that your depression and anxiety is not the fault of personal insufficiency but caused by systemic tendencies is a liberating message. 

Another thing that makes it relatable to young people is the way Mark used music and popular culture (mainstream films like The Hunger Games) to make ideology and political structures legible.

Another factor is that Capitalist Realism is very short - it’s only about 80 pages long. You can read it in an afternoon.

2. Since Mark's passing, pop music has taken on new paths -- including new chaotic and fragmented genres like hyperpop, rage, etc. Do you think these new genres and cultural phenomenons still have echoes of "hauntology" and "retromania" that was discussed by both of you in the 2000s and 2010s, or do they mark a departure from these frameworks? 

Well, retromania and hauntology are not music genres - they are culture-wide formations, manifesting in quite disparate areas - music but also fashion, TV, film, visual art, literature, videogames etc. 

At the same time, neither retromania nor hauntology apply to the entirety of popular culture, or explain everything that is going on in the culture or society. They are tendencies or currents - structures of feeling that can seem dominant at certain points and then prominent but not dominant at other phases.

I would say peak retromania was from around 2005 to 2013 - I see Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories as the absolute zenith but in some way the swan song of retromania. 

But even during this very retromanic time (conditioned by the emergence of YouTube, then streaming, among many other things) there were things going on in music and the culture that are not retro or that are even anti- retro. A genre like footwork would be one example. ASMR videos is another new cultural form that has nothing retro about it.

Around 2011 there was also a trend for what I called digital maximalism - ultra-bright, crisp, slick, glossy sounds (very different from the sound aesthetic of hauntology which is foggy, soaked in reverb, faded-sounding). Artists like Rustie and Skrillex.  Hyperpop is an extension of that glossy, dry (no reverb) aesthetic but combined with a Baudrillardian simulation politique that parodies consumerism, glow-up glamour,  and influencer culture (InstaGlam, someone called it).

I would say the Auto-Tune trap of late 2010s - Future, Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott - is another formation that has nothing to do with retro. But unlike hyperpop, trap is minimalist and hypnotic. A new kind of woozy psychedelic ambient music with post-verbal vocals chirruping ecstatically. 

3. There's been a lot of discussion about how music criticism has "softened" over the last couple of years. Fisher could be a very rigorous and, sometimes, unforgiving music critic (I remember, as an example, a specific article he wrote for k-punk on Glastonbury). How do you think his writings fit into this new music criticism landscape?

One of Mark’s most potent concepts was nihilation - the idea that music culture is driven by dialectical energy and that critics - but also musicians (who are in a sense active critics) -  operate by opposing the things they don’t believe in or respect, and that their goal is to discredit their ideological foes. He didn’t believe that that everything was equally valid and everybody should get along nicely. He didn’t believe in that “each to their own” idea - he wasn’t into tolerance or acceptance. So yes he was “unforgiving” to things he thought were mediocre or a waste of time or actively pernicious. Like many of us who grew up on the UK music press, he had a bi-polar relationship with music - he thought some things were great, heroic, inspiring, and other things shit, lame, depressing. And he thought there were ups and downs in culture, not a steady state of quality. Exhilarating phases alternated with down periods - crashes that follow the manic collective high.

4. The way Fisher mixed cultural criticism, political analysis, and personal writings about his own mental health was distinctive. What do you think made him such an interesting and compelling writer? 

I think I already answered that in the first reply and then throughout.

But a few other thoughts.

Penetrating clarity of intellect combined with style and a certain savage humour. His stuff is entertaining to read, it doesn’t feel like hard work.

He had an ability to come up with snappy catchphrases - slogans, memes, aphoristic sentences. “The secret sadness of the 21st Century” is a good example and it sounds beautiful in English - all the ‘s’ sounds, the sibilants. 

He could write very well about the details and particularities of a work of art or an auteur’s oeuvre, but his superpower was to extend that to larger abstract principles. You sensed  that he was always taking things to a higher level, building towards a total understanding of culture / politics / existence. The scale of the ambition was thrilling. 

I'm a meme, or at least I'm riding shotgun in a Mark-meme.

I forgot to click on the full caption and so I don't know what exactly contemporary art "keeps" doing... 

RetroTalk 2 - Kieran with a counter-vision to "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" gloom

 

Listen and watch here