Yesterday's Harvest

TimH Gabriele picks up on a recent FACT magazine story on the excessive number of  returns by legends in 2013, which he describes as "a litany of comebacks and reunions, the past regurgitating itself, a perverse ouroboros wherein death is staged, sometimes only for a few years, only to facilitate the cycle of rebirth". 

He argues that this is not revivalism but "the zombie vanity project... a ouroboros that doesn't engender recreation, just reaffirmation", i.e. "brands" who rematerialize in a swirl of hype. "The reaction to the music itself"--The Next Day, m b v, Random Access Memories, Tomorrow's Harvest-- "is almost secondary. Simply returning in and of itself reestablishes the brand, and thus pushes the act into the contemporary.... The result is a 2013 in which a flood of old names have become the zeitgiest."

 Gabriele finds something "almost heartening" in this trend, evidence of "a  collective nostalgia" for the Album as Event. Certainly Daft Punk have explicitly restaged the mass psychology or mass fan-libido structure of anticipation/delay/witholding/mystery as a renegade act of time travel, a return to the Analogue System. 

I would also argue that these acts -- Bowie and My Bloody Valentine, but to an extent also Daft Punk and Boards of Canada, whose rise to eminence predates the broadband era - are Analogue System creations, whose high stature in the popular imagination stems from the ability of the old Analogue System (i.e. major labels, centralised music media, etc) to build  legends (even semi-popular legends or cult legends in the case of My Bloody Valentine,  in which particular case it also worth remembering that the music of m b v wouldn't even exist without the extraordinary largesse of Island Records for the better part of an entire decade, their belief in investing in music's outer edge).  

In other words, these comebacks are the reactivation of latent or dormant or stored monocultural energy.... the recapitalization of assets accrued and built up in the past  through a system that has now almost wholly crumbled away and whose replacement, the Digital System is not, I suspect, creating phenomena with equivalent mythic profile or durability....  or future reactivate-ability.  

Our God Is Speed's thoughts on this and related subjects can be found in a post titled All Tomorrow's Yesterdays

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 Gabriele also notes gloomily that "there hasn't been a whole lot that has popped up from the margins to demand attention like Death Grips did last year" and that "as I scan the blogs and the zines... it still seems like music at the current moment is being swept up in investment into (diminishing) returns rather than the shock of the new."

With which I would pretty much concur. Unless you're placing under your magnifying glass  fluctuations  in the history of IDM, or prepared to argue that vaporwave is anything more than hypnagogic 3.0, or can somehow convince yourself that a House Resurgence is any kind of future..... I think you'd have to conclude it's been a year of small beer, so far at any rate.

Maura Johnston asks "Why Can't We Leave the '90s"?  (at Seattle Weekly)

"Last month Microsoft, in the hope of burnishing the reputation of Internet Explorer, launched an ad that essentially asked, "Remember the '90s?" Called "Child of the '90s," the ad opened with a decade-appropriate bit of self-deprecation ("You might not remember us . . . ") before launching into a listicle of artifacts that existed between 1990 and 1999... They're hardly alone. ABC Family is readying the third season of Melissa & Joey, a sitcom based more on the premise of having Melissa Joan Hart (Clarissa Explains It All; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch) and Joey Lawrence (Blossom) share a small screen than on anything resembling a plot. The Twitter account @SeinfeldToday fast-forwarded that NBC sitcom's '90s-rooted characters and racked up 410,000 followers and a couple of parody accounts. And this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, set for two April weekends in the California desert, will feature three headliners—the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Stone Roses, and Blur—better associated with the (touring) Lollapalooza era than the music-blog age."

Strangely in the whole quite long piece, Maura doesn't mention the My Bloody Valentine record and the huge nostalgia-driven swell of attention, discussion, etc about what is effectively a time capsule from the mid-Nineties.

(My initial reaction to the news of the album was to feel vaguely inconvenienced, as if by the sudden arrival on your doorstep, without any advance warning, of an old dear friend you haven't seen in 20 years -- you know you should be overjoyed, but life's moved on a lot, your head is in a completely different place, the timing feels off)

(My initial reaction to hearing the record, having finally succumbed to curiosity and proddings from the wife, was "Can I have my 42 dollars back please?".  Hopefully that'll fade on repeat plays. Hopefully the vinyl, whenever the fuck it turns up, will be glorious sounding. But in MP3 form, even when burned to CD-R and played on a good stereo, m b v mostly sounds dead to me, in an eerie but not particularly pleasing or compelling way. There's something rhythmically suppressed, aurally suffocated about the bulk of it - like my slight misgivings about Loveless were premonitions. If only the last track were the first track and it took off from there).

Back to Maura... 

"But the relentless march back to the '90s—whether through reunion tours by the likes of the Afghan Whigs and Pulp or 95-page photo galleries of the decade's toy crazes—seems to be more intense than the nostalgia of previous generations. (Yes, even more the Boomers', whose self-glorification sure seemed oppressive.) Reunion tours; full-album concerts; galleries of fashion from the decade; listicles that stroke readers' lizard brains until they're endlessly looping the question "Remember when?": These all reflect a culture that seems much more interested in looking back instead of moving forward."

Another recent piece on the 90s revival -- Smells Like 90s spirit  - and I make a brief appearance in that one

{via Tim H Gabriele}

"a note-for-note, sound-for-sound cover of Loveless"
 
http://soundcloud.com/gordrann/loveless-album-new