futuromania versus retromania - a diagnosis

 

W.H. Hadow - "Some Aspects of Modern Music", published January 1 1915, in The Musical Quarterly, Volume I, Issue 1

(via Sean Albiez)

Woah that is freaky, the perennial application of this - and how well it captures this kind of evolution in the way you respond to music. What is unsettling to me growing older is a kind of stolidity that creeps in. You just become constitutionally less susceptible to being blown away.

I think it's like a weakening of the cathexis faculty. you can't bond in that really super-intense way that you could do. I guess that is because early on music is bound up with identity-formation - whereas once you are fully-formed (or more or less formed, let's say) which is usually by late '20s, you simply aren't using music in that profound way. it's just stuff that's nice to listen to. There are advantages - I've become way more open and wide in my listening - but you don't get that visceral bonding process of 'this is my music, this music explains me' or that it represents some kind of dream vision of how you'd like Life / your life to be.

If I look back at my end of year lists of faves from the 2000s when I was in my late 30s / early 40s, the lists are very long, reflecting having listened to tons of stuff, but an awful lot of it I can barely remember, it hasn't lasted - whereas things like Slits or Ian Dury or later on jungle - these I could more or less "perform" the songs vocally in their entirety (an excruciating thing for anyone else to hear or witness obviously!) but a sign of how deeply they were imprinted. Some of them I could almost  instrumentally 'perform' (via the voice or physical mimesis aka 'air' playing - again not a pretty sound / sight - but shows how all the parts of the music are so embedded in your being - the drums, the guitar riffs, solos, the structural tension and release).

With aging, much of the urgency and obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of proportion. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and the music took precedence. Nowadays I simply don’t have the huge space of time or of emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession. When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you get older, your identity is (hopefully, by that point) formed. You’re not looking to music to be a savior or the primary source of excitement and solace in your existence. 

I also know a lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things become more contextualized. There's an ingrained sense of how cycles repeat in rock culture, how they exhaust themselves and then reconstitute themselves with a slightly different inflection again after an interval. So that breeds a certain serene detachment. You are also less easily impressed. Perhaps that good - I don't know... 

"When hell is full the dead will dance on your iPhone" -   really interesting review of Retromania at Datacide by lfo demon aka Hans-Christian Psaar -- lots of issues and questions raised, and many great sentences

just one of the points, from the footnotes:

"If you are searching for a sphere where the past is still fading away – it is software. There are niches like Retro gaming, but in the mainstream there is still a clear model of historic progress. And everything outside this ends at the digital junkyard"

- that is very true and it relates to things some other folk have suggested to me, e.g. this young man Ashley Bodenham who, talking about feeling an exhaustion with music, said that he'd "turned away from hoping for a really new music and turned to videogames because I think they manage to avoid both the retro and content overload culture; there is a retro tendency in videogames but I think that runs parallel with pretty exciting never seen before things and I also think most people still buy games and they are quite expensive so you tend to commit yourself to them, which is what turned me off seeking out new music, the endless options and easy access"

This got me thinking about my 13 year old, who has minimal affect as regards music (he likes it;  I don't think he would ever buy it) but who is a fanatic for games (and for anything to do with computers - apps, social media, etc). What I find faintly heartening is that, despite the non-interest in music, there's still a chip-off-the-old-block aspect at work, in so far as he's still caught up in that same psychology of obsession, which is inseparably coupled with obsolescence.

So there's that quasi-modernist linearity within which he exists, like I did as a teenager (and subsequently continued to do during my unnaturally extended adolescence, which still isn't fully ended, for better or worse).  A linear propulsion driven by the superceding and discarding of the passé;  a constant moving on, fueled by a restless insatiable desirousness for the "new". This lends his life  a sense of acceleration, that irritable excitement based in the double-sided syndrome of  anticipation / impatience. However the units of obsession and neophiliac fixation are much more expensive than records.... and whereas a certain percentage of music bought tends to survive as abiding favorites, joining the permanent collection, the stockpile of future nostalgia... with the games and other digital pleasure tech, in most cases it does seem to get outmoded rapidly and ruthlessly  (e.g. his Wii, which  sits idle and dust-covered in the bedroom upstairs,bereft and wholly abandoned).  So while he and I can both be accurately and fairly described as dupes of the capitalist entertainment complex, in his case the cost is quite a bit higher and the losses less recoupable.  (I also, of course, feel that music is emotionally and spiritually richer than games;  that music points to things outside itself - the portal syndrome -- much more than the gameworld does. But that is doubtless me being trapped inside my generational biases, being someone who simply missed the whole games thing altogether). 

What is really interesting, though, is that for my son (and his generation?), while he stills lives inside this propulsive linearity of chasing the new and the latest, the concept of "the future" doesn't seem to exist for him. Nor in fact does "space", as in "outer space", the Beyond.  (Like "future", space = Jameson's "desire called utopia").  

Everything that is happening, all the action, is going on inside -- literally indoors, but also inside the non-space or post-space in which things like Minecraft (his big obsession - I should say, current obsession) take place.  I observe in him, with fascination but also concern, a non-cathexis towards the Outer, the Outside as a phenomenological category. The sky seems to hold no special fascination for him. But then perhaps that makes sense: what after all would be the point in projecting out towards something that will remain unreachable in our lifetimes?  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

and here's some nostalgia for the phuture that Datacide crew might find acceptable

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)

Julian Sanchez wonders why copyright terms are so long, and offers a retromaniacal speculative theory: it's a form of "protectionism against the past":

"Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive.

If that’s right, there’s a perverse sense in which retroactive extensions for absurd lengths of time might actually, obliquely, serve copyright’s constitutional imperative to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”: Not by directly increasing the present value of newly produced works, but by shrinking the pool of free alternatives to the newest works... If that’s true, though, it’s not enough in itself to justify the longer terms: The question is whether the marginal new content is actually worth losing universal free access to the older material. For reasons unclear to me, there often seems to be an undefended assumption that more newer stuff, whatever the quality, outweighs wider access to existing content at any conceivable margin. I’m not sure how you’d go about quantifying that, but it strikes me as wildly implausible on face."