falling out of digital love

Here's my paean to "Digital Love" and Discovery, part of a terrific NPR Music multi-authored tribute to Daft Punk - which touches on the proto-chillwave / yacht rock anticipating retromaniac moves on that album, and then the back-to-analogue gesture of Random Access Memories. (As discussed further in this interview with the duo I did for New York Times). 

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Here's a portion of a talk I did for the 2013 symposium Tomorrow Never Knows in Glasgow, that takes a deeper look at the themes and procedures of Random Access Memories. 

Probably the most high profile example of the uncanny temporality of the 21^st Century is one of 2013’s biggest pop music events. One of the few that could honestly be described as an Event in the old sense of the word. But if Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories comes to define  2013, it’ll be through rejecting 2013.

It’s an album that is full of references to time, transience, the notion of a lost future, and memory.  The song “Fragments of Time”, for instance, is about instant nostalgia, this sort of future anterior syndrome when we experience rapture or epiphany, then immediately project ahead to looking back at it. The title Random Access Memories itself is a pun on computer memory versus human memory.

Musically, the whole project was informed by a paradox specific to Daft Punk’s own dilemma as artists who had done sample-based dance music in the late Nineties and early 2000s, and taken that as far as they could. How to go forward? Daft Punk decided the only way was to go back.  Partly because the sounds they’d helped to pioneer in the Nineties as prominent figures in techno-house culture had become the norm. Daft Punk-like sounds make up so much of what you hear on Top 40 radio in America today.  The future-rush that those kind of electronic and digitally processed transmitted to listeners in the 90s and which felt like a preview of  the 21^st Century, that’s necessarily now gone. Becoming omnipresent and everyday has made these sounds banal and mundane – at best, not futurism but NOW-ism.

In reaction to digital overdrive and the burn-out it induces, Daft Punk decided to go analogue. Random Access Memories is a whole-sale reversion to the late 70s and early eighties: slick disco-funk in the vein of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, Chic, The Whispers and Earth Wind and Fire; Fleetwood Mac and Eagles style soft rock; late period progressive rock and New Wave at its most radio-friendly (The Cars, for instance).   The cut-off point for this time travel exercise is that point in the early-to-mid Eighties when Fairlight samplers, sequenced rhythms, and MIDI become the state of the art in recording studios.  All that, along with the kind of computer software that came later and that Daft Punk once used, is rejected, in favor of  high-calibre musicianship and live drumming from the session sticksman who worked for Michael Jackson.

Two of the hallmark impulses in modernism are the terror of repeating yourself, and terror of repeating something that another artist has already done. For Daft Punk those two impulses became at loggerheads: they didn’t want to repeat what they had done before (because in a context where their influence is legion, they would no longer stand out), so they were impelled to repeat and to remake styles of music that  were superseded over thirty years ago.

Geeta Dayal described Daft Punk’s approach as sampling taken to the next level: they reconstructed the sort of teams of skilled musicians and sound engineers that made the kind of music that Daft Punk in the 90s liked to sample  and rework into contemporary dancefloor anthems.  But I think they go even further than that: it’s as though they’re “sampling” the Zeitgeist of the late Seventies and early Eighties. They’re trying to reconstruct the episteme,  the larger cultural matrix that produced albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Tusk, or Off the Wall. Not just the analogue means of production, but  analogue sense of temporality. In particular, the Event, the mass synchronized experience of  “the whole world” tuning into some kind of cultural artifact: movies like Stars Wars and Saturday Night Fever,  records like Sgt Pepper’s  and Thriller.   Hence the much-discussed promotional campaign with its teasing hints and initial reliance on analogue-era techniques like billboards and television ads.  There’s a nostalgia here not just for the monoculture (“pop culture is the monoculture,” Thomas Bangalter insisted, when I interviewed Daft Punk)  but for monotemporality, for a shared experience of time.

This feeling of mass synchrony is inseparable, I believe,  from concepts like progress and the future. That is made clear on Random Access Memories with the two key tracks, “Giorgio By Moroder” and “Contact”.

 “Giorgio By Moroder” involves  a towering figure of 20^th Century popular music looking back on his own looking forward.  Producer of Donna Summer amongst many others, and pioneer of the electronic disco style known as Eurodisco, Moroder was interviewed at length by Daft Punk. Two small snippets appear on the track. The key segment concerns the making of “I Feel Love”, an international number one hit in 1977, and notable for being the first  all-electronic dance track.

Moroder speaks of the Donna Summer album on which “I Feel Love” appeared, I Remember Yesterday, a sort of disco concept album about time and memory:

 “I wanted to do an album with the sounds of the 50s, the sound of the 60s, of the 70s –  and then have a sound of the future - – and I thought, ‘wait a second, I know the synthesizer -   why don’t I use a synthesizer, which is the sound of the future?’... –I knew that could be a sound of the future, but I didn’t realise how much the impact would be.”

And the rest, as they say, was  history. The history of future pop. Eighties synthpop and Hi-NRG and house, Nineties techno and trance, these and so many other things can be sourced back to this breakthrough, “I Feel Love”.

It’s totally charming that Daft Punk pay tribute to their ancestor-hero with “Giorgio By Moroder”, which may well invent a new genre, autobiographical disco. Interestingly, however, Daft Punk and Moroder  don’t collaborate musically. Instead they use his voice,  the one thing he’s not particularly famous for. And the melancholy implication of the collaboration is that neither Daft Punk nor Moroder felt  capable of making any kind of future music together or separately. What Daft Punk do instead is to make an accurate reproduction of  the synth and drum machine driven Eurodisco sound.

Fredric Jameson  described the modernist art work as a monument to the future . With “Giorgio By Moroder,”  we have a monument to a past future.  Nobody is going to rush out of the front door, like Brian Eno did with David Bowie, and tell their friends, “I have heard the future of pop”.  Rather, listening to “Giorgio By Moroder”, you  might say, wistfully, “Do you remember when music sounded like the future?”.

“Contact” is the finale to Random Access Memories, and it aspires to be a grand one. It starts with a sampled voice from a NASA transmission,  the Apollo 17 mission, from December 1972. It’s Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to stand on the Moon’s surface.  He’s talking about “a bright object, it’s obviously rotating because it’s flashing, it’s way out in the distance”. After describing it in some detail, Cernan says “there’s something out there”.

Right there, you have encapsulated all the romance of the space race, the final frontier. There’s that mystical inkling of something being out there that is our destiny as a species to find and make contact with. We must boldly go, it’s our nature, our calling.

What Cernan actually said when he actually climbed the ladder back into the lunar module and bid adieu to the Moon was this: “as I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.”

“Contact” itself is a thrilling track, the least dated sounding (it could almost be a Chemical Brothers tune from the rocktronica golden age of 1997).  A wooshing rush of sound is sustained, modulated, and intensified for quite a long stretch of time. But then it sputters out anticlimactically, like the Space  Race did. 

[now this melancholy for the lost dream of Space is itself dated, with new images and sonic impressions of Mars, a burst of activity from multiple nations flexing their strength with probes to other planets in our solar systems etc etc)

i stream you stream we all stream

Here's a piece I did for last weekend's Guardian Guide looking back at the last decade's popular culture - music and TV -  focused on how streaming is eroding the idea of a mainstream, as we all follow on our own increasingly individualized streams that thread through the flood of content. The result is not so much the disintegration of the Monoculture as the de-synchronization of the Monotemporality: a swarm of micro-publics all tied to their own timeline.

My original headline was "Scattered and Shattered".

A scatter of further thought-shards from myself...

Lured down the path of least resistance (oh so convenient) I use Spotify (along with YouTube and Bandcamp etc) as the primary way of listening to things, unless I've been sent them as files, and even then sometimes it's just easier to stream. (A lifetime's worth of records and CDs lie inert in their vastness: I've even downloaded things I already own rather than be obliged to move my butt from this chair).

But I find streaming in general and Spotify in particular unsatisfying in a way that’s hard to explain...  The nearest I can get is that it feels like the music isn’t really going in.  Or that it passes right through me, like water (which is one reason why the utility analogy - piped music - feels so apt). That’s possibly down to the fact that I’m nearly always doing something else on the computer while listening, so that the concentration-pie is divided.  Streaming tends to turn music - even the most lively or attention-grabbing - into background listening.

But the lack of a public dimension is also part of the disconnection feeling. Radio feels realer somehow - more social, less atomised. A record that is getting increasing radio-play feels like an unfolding event within popular desire. And when you grow to like that record you feel like are converging with unknown others in social space.

Radio also liberates the listeners from the burden of having to choose (okay, it's true you'll often flick to a different station in the hopes of hearing a tune you like better - but that's as close to a toss of the coin as it is a purposeful act of navigation within the sound library).  For sure, there are algorithms at work in streaming that attempt to tune into your sonic libido and do the selecting for you. I find that the archival surfeit provokes in me a neurotic drive to master the flux, by building enormous playlists of genres or clustered artists, that once assembled would take a day or two to listen through. These playlists are almost always then immediately forgotten and never returned to, although catching sight of them from the corner of my eye as I assemble another never-to-be-played playlist I experience a shuddery twitch of self-disgust.

Talking about self-disgust, Andrew Parker chips in with a thought about the audio-cornucopia:

"Looking at my hard drive and seeing all the music files I've collected over the year is like walking into room flooded with my own vomit. I feel ashamed as I recognise almost all of it and know that it was only partially digested before being expelled."

Haha! In my case, the shame is the arrayed accumulation of things acquired but never unzipped - and the frequency of non-recognition: what the hell was that then, and why did I download it?

Andrew also mentions how his music-processing speed has massively gone up, his ability to extract nutritive-value from something in a single listen. I do think most civilian consumers are now in the position that critics and DJs (radio and club) have been in since forever, getting tons of stuff and learning to how to sift based on a single or partial listen. But with streaming etc it’s even more overwhelming the amount of music / TV that is available and you fall into an even faster browse/sift mode since you don’t even have to take things out of their packaging, place them on turntables or insert them into CD players…

On an earlier occasion of discussing these sort of issues here, an Anonymous Commenter suggested acidly that there was a kind of puritanism lurking behind the worries about the musical glut / gluttony. On the contrary, I asserted, these complaints are really coming from a completely opposite place: anxiety about the loss of pleasure, the dulling of aural sensuality. It's more based in a kind of "home economics" of the libido / psyche: excess of supply causes demand to wane and wither. Music fandom defeats itself.

You don't have to regard gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins to be wary of it - it might be unhealthy physiologically or emotionally.  There are reasons not to do the audio equivalent of stuffing 18 chocolate eclairs down your gullet in quick succession.  For instance, trying to listen to the complete works of an artist in a single chronological listen removes the interval in which digestion can take place - and which, in historical real-time, involved gaps of a year or more, multiple replays of the work in question etc. You can't really reconstruct that experience nowadays, but you can at least leave a gap between masterworks, before ploughing on into the next one.

If a truly profound art of listening could find an infinity in a single piece of music listened to for the rest of one's life and nothing else ... the inverse seems to imply a logical outcome in the other direction. A near-infinity of listening (both in amount and variety) available to you as individual, without any impediments of cost or effort, will lead to the ultimate form of undeep listening... pre-fatigued ears skim across everything in a futile attempt to take it all in.

There's disorientation too: Pelle Snickars, co-author of  Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music, has talked about the downside of audio clutter: how you "lose track of your tracks". (Of course, that happened with the solid-form modes of music commodity, but there is something about the absolute inconspicuousness of immaterial sound, whether in your hard drive or in the cloud, that makes it easier to not-see and soon-forget).

But I know people have many other - and completely opposite - experiences with streaming.  And yes, there's a generational aspect.

Living with a TV journalist means that I see these syndromes play out in another field of entertainment that's been absolutely transformed by streaming. But most people are familiar with the downsides. The dither-inducing dizziness of all those options, a Tinder-ization of culture as you flick through deferring the moment of commitment - the decision on how to spend time, invest your leisure capital. Desultory browsing suddenly galvanised in the potlatch splurge of the binge session, the delirious release from choice through submission to the crack-fiend commitment to a single storyline and set of characters... knowing exactly what you'll be doing for the next X number of hours or days. (The uneasy laugh of recognition off of this Portlandia sketch about the couple who consume an entire series in one sleepless jag and then - in severe withdrawal - pressure a man they mistakenly believe to be the show’s creator to perform new episodes just for their own private delight).

Further, even more stray and shard-like thoughts...

Awards Ceremonies were never such a big deal in the past, were they? I don't remember watching a single one in my UK youth. Like the phone-in voice contests and the reality eliminations, these ceremonies are re-constitutions of the General Public, running counter to the centrifugal tendencies of everything else going on. Mark Fisher wrote and spoke about this, even saw something hopeful in it.

I wonder what Mark would have thought about the spread across all the end-of-year lists of what is effectively (regardless of genre or sonic specifics) a new singer-songwriter ethos...  recordings approached and analysed and felt largely as literary expressions... narratives of self, social comment, political stances and statements, representations of identity, thematic links  ....  the criticism surrounding it somewhat more attentive to sound and rhythm than Paul Nelson's purely literary appreciation of  Jackson Browne in Stranded, but fundamentally coming from the same place, the same understanding of how popular music works and what it's for.  Today, listening to and reading about this kind of album (fucking Norman Fucking Rockwell the supreme example), it feels like what's going on between artist and critics is a performance of  Importance and Seriousness - Masterpiece Theater you could call it - one that harks back achingly to a time when such major statements could be presumed to be of universal significance. In that sense, true retro rather than surface retro (although NFR is laden with the surface kind too, while Weyes Blood is a singer-songwriter era reeanctment).

The thought of Mark's scorn is a painful pleasure, since we'll never know how he would have worded it or what insights he'd have filleted from the middlebrow morass. He probably would have felt similarly about much of the quality TV of our time - the "must-see" stuff where the "must" connotes not so much "compulsive" as "compulsory"  - claiming our attention via an appeal to a vague dutifulness, the necessity to keep abreast of Important Statements.

I suspect Mark would have felt this kind of thing to be the diametric opposite of "pulp modernism", i.e. mass entertainment of a seemingly escapist and purely spectacular type (escapist even when dystopian), within which are secreted  concepts and philosophical-political thought-bombs - arguably all the more potent for being inveigled into minds that are not already primed to be edified or "challenged".

He would instinctively have been supportive of the kind of movies and TV that only get nominated for awards in technical categories like special effects, editing, lighting, etc.

He'd probably have liked Chernobyl though - for the science-fiction-NOW landscapes of catastrophe.

Others (including the missus) have noted the rise of culture/entertainment that feels like work (or homework). No wonder so many are going truant, returning to vegetative modes of watching that are purely relaxing (as with the popularity of Friends reruns, even used by some as a sleep aid). 

What will the next decade bring? Sometimes I imagine a sort of attention recession. An involuntary, reflexive reaction of withdrawal on the part of consumer-spectactors.  Appetite and interest wane to almost nothing in response to the escalating overload, as supply vastly exceeds conceivable demand. Turn off, tune out, and drop away.

For my own part, as I sit on the sofa, eyes arrested by some new accomplishment in art-TV,  I sometimes remember my teenage self discovering the work of the Situationists - theorists of boredom who coined the concept of “the spectacle” to characterize the passivity and isolation of mass media.

At the end of day, it doesn't really matter whether what you watch is quality or garbage, enlightening or vegetative: it's all TV, a way of taking your mind off your problems (even when you are informing yourself about other people's problems, or past problems). Your butt is stuck in the sofa either way. Real life is elsewhere. And so is politics.

Which is a reminder also that all of the above is among the least pressing of our problems heading into the 2020s.