retro and proud of it

 The Retro Critique refuted, by a Melody Maker reader, November 2 1996

Well, it's a point of view, and on its own terms, watertight. 

And as for us elitist-miserabilist-obscurists... I feel seen. 

Although I had stopped writing for MM by this point, it feels like this piece from several months earlier might have contributed to the Britpop-lover's backlash - in it I start to describe Tribal Gathering as a kind of anti-Britpop convergence, then correct myself: actually the Tribal Gathered are blissfully unconcerned with Oasis-at-Knebworth etc, and it's actually Britpop that is the anti-formation - anti faceless techno bollocks etc etc

Also letters like this might have goaded Joe Handy to the rescue of his fellow ladrock-lovers

good retro versus bad retro

Last year, on Twitter a designer who identifies himself only as Stuff by Mark put up a bunch of imaginary movie posters that took New Wave songs and imagined each of them as a film from the New Wave of British cinema aka 1960s kitchen-sink realism. 

I  thought these were clever and attractive. 

This kind of thing strikes me as "good retro" . It's work that's fun to look at but it's based in an affinity between the two things being mashed together: British realist cinema of the late '50s / early '60s, the New Wave / 2-Tone school of late 70s / early '80s groups,  Films and songs about ordinary people and ordinary life, equal parts wry and gritty. Social comment, social observation, class-consciousness, deglamorized documentary-like pictures of real life. A tone of undisguised bitterness. These were new things in pop in the late '70s, as they'd been in British film in the early '60s.

The affinity is even clearer in the case of the Squeeze song, which takes its title  - and lyrical ambience - from the Sixties film. 

Stuff by Mark puts out a steady stream of, er, stuff, all based on bygone graphic styles. Prints of the work are for sale from the website.

But just like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, so there's good retro and bad retro. 

And this recent offering strikes me as the bad kind.

It takes the track list of  the one and only album by The La's and imagines each song as a movie poster in the style of the legendary Saul Bass, famous for his title sequences for films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Preminger  and Billy Wilder, among many others.

 

Why "bad retro"?

Unlike with the New Wave songs as New Wave film posters, there's no aesthetic affinity between the La's and Saul Bass.

'

The La's were an edge-of-Madchester / proto-Britpop outfit, immortal for "There She Goes", itself totally retro - or perhaps "time travel" is the operative word, the true hopeless desire at work here. (Famous story of Lee Mavers rejecting a vintage studio console because it didn't have "proper Sixties dust" on it). 

But the region of the recent past that the La's were obsessed with reenacting was completely separate from the world that Saul Bass operated in - the Hollywood mainstream. You think Saul Bass and you're instantly in the era of Mancini and Martinis and mid-century modern (the kind of look and feel that suffuses the decor and costumes of Mad Men, say).  

Whereas The La's reference points are Beatles and Merseybeat and perhaps a bit of Crosby Stills and Nash (the Graham Nash bit). The look and feel of this 1960s is a world away from Saul Bass's world.  Rock, then, saw Hollywood as showbiz, as phony, as nothing to do with youth culture (or hopelessly clumsy and out of touch when it tried to deal with it). 

The La's own album artwork is faintly Swinging Sixties / mod / Carnaby Street, or just ugly.

The other big difference is that The La's are throwbacks, while Saul Bass was absolutely modern in his moment. Ridiculously with-it and au courant.

More to the point, whether it was the credits sequences or his film posters or his logos for corporations, Bass did things that had never been done before.  He innovated with typography, with cut-out animation, with methods of production. The very idea that a title sequence could be a miniature work of art in its own right was a new thing.

So it's an arbitrary marriage of contraries, done according to the additive logic of the mash-up:  "Here's two things I like - Bass's designs, Mavers's tunes and voice - so let's combine them". 

AI means the world is going to be choked with this kind of thing. Already is being choked by it.

Like low-density lipoprotein, it clogs up the arteries of the culture.  

addendum to previous post on patternwork

here's the very thing I had made a mental note re. -- Phil's post from April last year on patternwork at the Nineties blog Up Close and Personal

which starts with this bloody big Spengler quote


"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.

So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures." 

- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

and goes into a panoramic riff-sweep across 20th Century culture before homing in to blast into smithereens both Britpop and Britart - the former described as "a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well" and the latter as "a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge".