It's a steal

 

One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality"

So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in Whatever You Think Think the Opposite, a sort of motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an echo itself of that famous McLuhan book with all the pix, The Medium is the Massage).

Ha, ha - the twist at the end where he reveals that he nicked these pearls himself, from Jim Jarmusch.

 Clever-ish. 

But as is pointed out in my Recreativity piece, the key bit of the Godard quote that Jarmusch and now Paul Arden brandish is  "it's where you take them to". 

That, right there, is the aperture, the window, through which creep back the very properties of originality / genius / innovation that the recreativity mavens are trying so hard to exorcise and eliminate. 

Seeing this inadvertently self-deconstructing steal reminded of how uninspiring I found David Shields's  Reality Hunger - the book almost entirely composed of meant-to-be-inspiring quotes from others. 

(For conceptual integrity, Shields really really wanted them to be unidentified, but the publisher forced him to run attributions at the end of the book. So in pique he added some text urging the reader to cut out and throw away the attribution pages!). 

Like, did Shields intend to write a proper book and then just gave up and decided to present his research, in this barely organised fashion?

One of that select company of books I started and just gave up on well before the end. Usually I am  a dogged, tenacious, teeth-gritted, gotta-get-to-the-finish-line reader.

(My favorite feat of overcome-by-apathy is getting to within 20 pages of the end of On the Road and then just pulling over and giving up)

Talking of books...

There is a super-expanded remix of my Slate article on recreativity which is about 18 thousand words long and was published as a stand-alone mini-book to accompany... the French version of Retromania? Or was it the German? I cannot remember!  It's the marshalling of all my thoughts on innovation / originality / nature of creativity. 

It's also proof that the best time to write a book would be a couple of years after the book comes out, if you get me (i.e. it gets sharpened immeasurably by all the arguments you have with people)

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Another bit from the Arden book, and here he's got the McLaren-Westwood story badly wrong, both in particulars and in his sense of what it meant... 

Nostalgia of Mud was started in the early '80s. 

(The "beginnings of the 1970s" boutique was Let It Rock and it was at the far end of the King's Road, not just off Oxford Street). 

And those Nostalgia of Mud-era clothes were neither unwearable or unbuyable. They were very much for sale. And became  fashionable very quickly. Instantly in fact, so hot was Westwood by this point.

But the same thing happened with the oh-so-shocking punk era get-up -  the shop, by then renamed Sex and then Seditionaries (or was it the other way round - I can't remember) and its owners got covered rather rapidly in the glossy fashion mags.

At absolute most, the punk look was a couple of years ahead of its time, not thirty. 

What's also odd about this page is a/ the fact that he is talking about originality as a virtue and a value (whereas the Jarmusch steal-it thing is saying the opposite)

And b/ this wholly un-punk illustration on the facing page

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. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.

(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 hoax of the new

"Pablo Casals said that 'the desire for innovation leads to greater aberrations in art than would acceptance of what's already there' and I think he's definitely got a point"

- Tom Verlaine, quote appearing under the sub-heading "THE HOAX OF THE NEW", in this Kristine McKenna interview from November 1981, in the New York Rocker. 

Odd sentiment to cosign there from Verlaine, who with Television is a supreme example of the way in which the new can manifest through the older form (gtr/bs/drms; psychedelic rock) over-writing it from within 

a paradox Barney Hoskyns captured when he hailed Television as - 

"the original post-rock rockists" 

that was said in a 1982 piece celebrating-defending Echo & The Bunnymen (very influenced by Television) from the charge of being a trad guitar rock group, an accusation mounted by some at the height of new pop

in the interview, Pete De Freitas makes a good point, on the subject of synth-pop, and how the superficial new can actually cloak the persistence of the old: 


"It's also that the stuff that's supposed to be experimental has just been blanding out more than anything else. It's not experimenting at all, it's just using synthesizers to play pretty ordinary songs a lot of the time."

where it started to go wrong for the Bunnymen - when they made their guitars sound like sitars, and therefore directly evoke the Sixties

whereas this

The Audacity of Hype

Lot of chatter, pro and anti and pro, about Savages

(and some more anti)

Including this review "Against Music's Reductive Obsession With the New"

Of course, what Tom Hawking really means is, "Against (Some) Music Critics's Reductive Obsession With the New"

Because, for those critics (whoever they are!), the problem is precisely that Music isn't Obsessed with the New... that in fact Music, most of it anyway, is overly comfortable with being not-new....  

(that could have been the Retromania subtitle, actually - Against Music's Unproductive Obsession With the Not-New)

Savages, eh?

Good name

Like the band's manifesto, as daubed on the cover, and incanted at the start of this video

(Although, ironically, far from instilling "silence" they have managed to add greatly to the din of discourse. They are the proverbial hot new band making a lot of noise)

and the wo-manifesto falters with the bit about "an angry young tune" -- it's like, after the build-up,  THAT's what you're brandishing? A tune?

 
Now, part of me thinks:

look - Malaria

sound -  Red Lorry Yellow Lorry

it's WAY too early for a  Post Punk Revival Revival


Another part of me thinks:

well maybe it's like Elastica or PJ Harvey, the form fairly familiar, the content new and fresh, the energy and urgency undeniable

(and the parallel there would be the trans-gender shift: Justine F's Hugh Cornwell impersonation, or Polly Jean insisting all her role model were male - Nick Cave, Beefheart, etc)


The pro and the anti reminds me of the  debate-flurry earlier this year re. Peace and that NME rave review by Eve Barlow:

The narrow-minded reckon their experience of history can’t be surpassed; that there’s no point in drawing inspiration from the past because it was better IN THEIR DAY. They murder people’s vibes because they’re buzzkillers. They criticise young people for being unoriginal and lazy because 58 years after Bill Haley And His Comets’ ‘Rock Around The Clock’ charted, idealistic, rebellious teens haven’t evolved beyond simple pleasures like first crushes, guitar strums, pop hooks and leopard print. This disappoints buzzkillers immensely.

Buzzkillers will use songs such as Brummie quartet Peace’s ‘Lovesick’ – about reckless abandon and skipping school – to lambast uncomplicated singers like Harry Koisser for cooing “I don’t wanna make no sense” over an updated version of the refrain from The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’. They’ll demand something more sophisticated – a unique way of saying “I love you”, perhaps. You can safely assume buzzkillers are no longer in love, detest romantic gestures and are cautious of hype bands with hippy names....

Those with one foot in the past may view Peace with scepticism, finding them over-familiar. Alright, the psych opener ‘Higher Than The Sun’ reminds us of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as guitars swirl through a Technicolor wash of dirge. Admittedly, the grunge ‘Follow Baby’ blasts off like My Vitriol or Mansun before hammering a Gallagher lyric of “We gon’ live for-evaaah”. Yes, ‘Wraith’ is laced with Herculean drumming and could’ve been by The Charlatans. Indeed, ‘Toxic’ is one-dimensional, employing riffs that fizz like sherbert Flying Saucers. Totally, you can sing Blur’s ‘There’s No Other Way’ over ‘Waste Of Paint’’s feral chorus. BUT ENOUGH WITH THE BUZZKILLING.

So long as teenagers exist, there’ll be eternal value in rock’n’roll this spectacular. It has no sell-by date...  Peace are intoxicated by their own youth, and all that matters is that they’re happening NOW.... Point is: music can reflect the past and still be valid. Some may see it as history repeating itself, for others it’ll be brand spanking new... As Britain suffers from youth unemployment and economic crisis, our greatest currency is the chime of a golden tune. Peace have delivered 10 of them. So what if they’re a bunch of pirates and not pioneers? This is their time.

Quite a few people of my generation found risible both the band and Barlow's review (a sort of defensive-aggressive paean). (It's interesting that so many of these 'let the young have their music' articles are couched as defences - Hawking's piece above is subtitled: A Defense of Savage. Whereas actually self-evidently new music never needs an apologia or a justification -- it is proclaimed, exalted, the trigger for a manifesto or a sermon).

Here's a great tirade from only the other day by Neil Kulkarni that picks up from a taking-the-Peace  Facebook discussion some of us were involved in April. He points out this this advance-apologetics tone of so many Peace reviews, preemptive defensive maneuvers against an imagined (and largely non-existent) army of curmudgeons.

The rhetorical stance taken by Barlow I actually thought was fine (in fact it reminded me of stuff David Stubbs wrote in his Melody Maker end-of-year 1988-Best-Year-For-Rock-Ever essay, the below-the-belt but brutally effective tactic of basically dismissing naysayers with "don't listen to them, these people are old")

What I thought was interesting was that Barlow seemed to be writing on behalf of an imaginary new-to-music teenage fan of  Peace et al (while her own, better-informed, twentysomething viewpoint is clearly cogniscant of the abject derivativeness of Peace)

Indeed in this parallel post from her tumblr (a fierce defence of the "guitar music" resurgence) she repeatedly references an imaginary 14 year old

Now as it happened, as all this "blew up", I was in the UK, spending time with  a non-imaginary 13 year old and her mother, a very dear and old friend, who I often stay with when I'm in London

Her daughter, who I've known since she was a baby and is almost exactly the same age as my son, is crazy about indie music


She is learning guitar and wants to be in band. 

(And, what is hard to get one's head around, but I suspect is both quite common and indicative of something -- she and her mum share similar music tastes -- both adore the Smiths -- and often go to shows and festivals together)


Of course this girl looooves Peace and a bunch of others from NME's current batch of young hypefuls

Confronted by such enthusiasm up-close, all of one's heard-it-before cynicism melts away

So when she played Parma Violets, Foxygen, Temple, I couldn't help trying to hear it from her viewpoint, trying to see what could be loveable about them...

Okay, Parma Violets do a good Echo & the Bunnymen (better than Mighty Lemon Drops anyway, who I made allowances for in '86, until I interviewed them) while other songs echo The Clash, J&MC, Britpop. (Many of these comparisons were actually made by the 13 year old herself, so it's not like she's unaware of the debts and derivations).  Foxygen are, what, Zombies-like or something? Temple: can't be arsed to identify the precise template but they are the most classicist and period-formalist of the bunch. I was struck by their incredibly fastidious recreation of Sixties psych, especially the drumming and the cymbal sound. .

When all is said and all is done, though, it is undeniable (contra Barlow's "this is their time") that these bands fail the test of their time.


One just wishes the ardour of young people (like the daughter of my friend), this excitement and joy of discovery -  always beautiful to witness and, up to a point, unarguable -- one just wishes that there were objects far more worthy of their passion.

In Slate today, a piece by me on  "recreativity" -  a critique of the emerging orthodoxy of "everything is a remix" / "originality is a myth" / "no such thing as genius", in terms of its relationship to digital culture and to dance music ideas that are frankly a bit stale at this point. 

(Reading some of the arguments being made these past few years from critics, academics, artists, etc you can't help wondering if these dudes heard a Girl Talk CD and had their minds blown.)

Or, old fashioned modernism versus what is now equally old fashioned postmodernism.