"it sounds modern"

Son, on hearing Art of Noise for first time, 35 years after the event: "It sounds modern"

I wonder why: something about the very limitations of early digital technology (incredibly restricted sample time - a second and a half - which necessitates a stab-oriented sound) making everything stark and angular? c.f. later vastly expanded digi-powers that allow for near-naturalistic levels of detail and fiddly nuance

he was also impressed with this Kraftwerk video (although possibly enjoying its retro qualities as with videogames of that era)

this video elicited no reactions...

Neu! versus Alt!

Met Michael Rother last week

Neu!'s children are legion, still





(that last one has a bit of Hawkwind in there, and "Transmission")


Entertaining tunes, but old Neu!s let's be honest

Is it unreasonable for me to not only prefer - but to be biased in favor of -  the neu when it was actually neu?



How come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?

The paradox of modernism innit - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time thanks to the 20th Century miracle of recording, recreates the original moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read). Is somehow eternally new, like fresh-picked fruit flash-frozen.*

Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year -  even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.

The context for meeting Rother was a Hamburg conference panel discussion in which we were both involved (along with Gudrun Gut, another German modernist albeit of a later vintage) and in which issues of lost futures etc were discussed. Mark Fisher's name came up.



* I also feel that the groups reactivating (if not quite reenacting) the breakthroughs made by other earliers, have evade all the hard work that went into actually breaking through into the new / Neu!. Their undoubted youthful energy masks an idleness - an Idles-ness, even

Chiming with the previous post about science-as-religion, cultural theorist Nick Katranis pops up in my in-box with  some "random thoughts stimulated" by one of the Retromania footnotes, specifically the bit about rock being neither modernist nor postmodernist but both at the same time...  Footnote bits in bold, NK in italics:

--And because of its lack of rigour, its intellectual laxness, rock artists can hold both sets of values simultaneously, without feeling any sense of contradiction.

....as well they should!  As a painter for 30 years I've always resented the Timeline. Post-Modernism's conceit is that it is not just post-Modern but post-historical is just that: nonsense. The same game is engaged.  Science (logical exegesis) forces intellectuals out of the business of "eternals", the domain of art.  Art schools are full of  self-loathing linguists, politically-inclined psychotherapists, but few artists.  "Craft" is considered an anachronism.  The hand-eye connection is an anachronism?  Something has to break here.  The body has been kicked out except as a concept.

How about "Post-Science"? Science (logic, space-time) is a religion, and it's not adequate. Industrialization, its product, is showing the first few signs of the end of its "empire" in those who now resist the obviation of technologies: the revival of emulsion-based film making, organic farming, etc.  "Retromania" is at least partly a resistance to a morbid acceleration: the cancer of endlessly updated tools.  Seriously: If all the technological tools we had now were all we would have for the next 100 years, would that be some disaster? Would civilization stagnate and rot? Accelerating "Progress" of the sort we've witnessed from the '50's to now has become cancerous, out-of-control metastacy displacing all else.

--Did my generational cohort pin all its hopes for changes on music, in a fatal displacement, a terrible evasion?  Music became indexed in an intense libidinal way with all those impulses and desires for progress, the Future, upheaval, revolution...

Well I think consumerism displaced that through co-option....but I don't think it died.  This smarter end of this generation of kids instinctively feel that. 

I truly feel that the "Sixties" (1962-1973, or something like that) was a dry-run. It was not "successful".  It was the first iteration of a wave, the next wave to come--I think inevitable--given the dire economic situation world-wide currently being dangerously delayed by banks (Etc.)  I believe that the Occupy movement was global information-infrastructure-building---which could be egaged in a flash, given the right spark (the intolerable action).  Most past revolutions have taken about 10 years to bloom from seed-days, but with info acceleration I'm sure that timeline is shortened.  My 20-something friends are wildly informed and self-deprogrammed (aware of propaganda forms), so much more than I in my 20's.

Eno said something in an interview (on a Crepuscule compilation you prob. have) about innovation being approx. 90% existing content, those elements which you do NOT want to discard as you move forward....could not Retromania be an instinctive stock-taking of that which we do not want to leave behind in this race to the future?  A kind of prudent fear?  Or rather, resentment? And not just by older folks?

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.

Another highlight of Incubate -- but not the least bit industrial - was Buzzcocks, who headlined the final night.

Several people mocked me - Mr Retromania, the caustic critic of reunion tours -- for visibly enjoying their greatest hits and not-quite-hits revue. But what can I say? A favourite band, I never did see them at the time, they're pretty fucking tight and energetic considering how haggard they look, and - strangely -- they still sound quite modern.

In fact one of their recent albums is called Modern, isn't it?

The gig was just great, but this here performance of "Harmony In My Head" was decidedly off, not cos of the rendition but on account of this bizarre interlude mid-song where Steve Diggle does a kind of...  rap. Not rap as in rapping, but this stagey, overwraught soapbox-declamatory routine in which he inveighs against... well, your guess is as good as mine. As "Harmony" ended, Pete Shelley could be heard muttering "what the hell was that?"

 
Diggle has also got into doing these disconcerting guitar-heroics, lots of axe-brandishing and pointing of his arm and finger into the crowd as if to say "didn't I blow your mind?" -- dramatics that are way out of proportion to the very basic powerchords being struck.

One of my favourite Buzzcocks tunes, performed a long time ago.

Singles Going Steady, as immaculate an artifact as anything pop's produced in the last 100 years?

Saint Etienne, Sassoon, and the Sixties
 
"Can you be wildly ahead of your time and hopelessly behind it, too?" asks David Colman in this New York Times Fashion & Style section piece  that's sort of about Saint Etienne but mainly about Sarah Cracknell's home in Oxfordshire, which is tricked out with a lot of Sixties artifacts and collectables. Prompting Colman to perorate: "in a world filled with practical, pedestrian stuff, why strive to live in the present? The past is not only prettier, it’s a lot less crowded."

Personally I'd have never have fingered Saint Et as that Sixties-fixated (it's just one of many moments in music they've been drawn to and have drawn from). Or even that retro-y (they've generally had their ears trained on what's going on now in pop just as much as they've rifled through the archives).

Cruel paradox: it's the very mod-ness and modernity and modernism of the Sixties that makes it so alluring, so tempting to pastiche. As Cracknell says: “It’s an era with such a great sense of design, with these crazy things like Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Mary Quant dresses. So stylized, so deliberate. The furniture, too. Or cars!"

That reminded me that when Vidal died recently, I kicked myself for not featuring him in Retromania's chapter on Fashion. He should have been in there right alongside Courreges, Cardin, and Rabanne. As the obituaries and tributes noted, Sassoon was one of the decade's greatest avant-gardists of pop culture and pop couture. The Corbusier of coiffure;  his handiwork and scissorwork as startling and angular and neophilia-inciting as the Philips Pavilion. Indeed his geometric five point cut, introduced in 1963 - the year I was born -- was inspired by Bauhaus. Originally he wanted to be an architect, not a hair stylist.

"Nowness presents!" how appropriate...  nowness becomes then-ness, present-ness becomes the past(iche)

these fabulous ruins (cont.)
 
"The role of pop culture is interesting here, because it’s both more and less modernist than the capital-intensive world of city-planning and architecture. Hippies, even the smartest of them, basically hated modernism and saw anything in concrete as an appalling monstrosity; but then they partly grew out of Mods, who were called ‘Modernists’ for a reason. Pop goes retro before architecture, in the late ’60s, but its anti-modernism was very different. Postmodernists like to drag Pop into their arguments, but it doesn’t wash for me; the difference between architects like Robert Stern or Leon Krier repudiating everything that happened after 1914 is a very different matter to, say, a producer in the ’80s sampling (and distorting, and making new) something made in the ’60s. Pop kept the momentum of modernism up until comparatively recently – something like Grime was obviously Modernist, an insurgent, futuristic force, and rave, pirate radio and so on strike me as implicated in everyday life and urban space in a modernist, if not always optimistic, way"
 -- Owen Hatherley, with some sharp thoughts about modernism versus postmodernism, both in his main beat (architecture) and in culture generally

oh and look Owen's got a new book out next month (incredible work-rate he maintains -- New Ruins was out not even 2 years ago!), viz:

A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (forthcoming on Verso)

An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the “progressive nonsense” of the Big Society and “the localism agenda,” the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot- and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.

[i didn't even notice there was a 2011 sequel to "Pow"]