reviving the already revived / real it so fake i am beyond real

 "It’s a strange business, 'reviving' something that’s been revived a few hundred times already"

Nitsuh Abebe on "What New Folkies Share With the Old Ones"

New folkies being "Mumfords, Avetts, Lumineers & Co", old being the Fifties collegiate types who made a cult of Leadbelly, "squeaky-clean crew-cut folksters in jug-band drag sing[ing] songs about railroads"

What they have in common, basically, is an obsession with authenticity that inevitably, even instantaneously, generates inauthenticity

Nitsuh traces the seed of this instant-ersatz, or one of its sources anyway, to this paradox:

"what we consider folk today [is] not a living tradition, really. It’s more like a snapshot of a tradition—American rural music as it existed at the precise moment that someone thought to make recordings of it. At some point in the twenties or thirties, once enough of those recordings had been made, the whole thing was trapped in amber: It became, officially, the oldest version of rural-American “folk” music that anyone could go back to consult and imitate using their own ears. It became, almost by technological accident, the wellspring and the touchstone, leaving every generation of revivalists looking like a bunch of people holding blurry Polaroids of Eden and arguing over how to resurrect it. It’s like a cargo cult in reverse: Instead of “primitive” people coming across a modern object and surrounding it with elaborate mystical explanations, we get modern people discovering something traditional and erecting intellectual fetishes around it."

The fake-folk, Abebe, argues, is basically arena rock with a small gestural component that harks back deceivingly to the very "organic" "communality" that rock/pop as a mass leisure industry has done so much to eradicate

 "If you want to talk about the diminishing returns of folk, this is the fascinating one: As soon as we started recording this stuff, it became awfully difficult for it to exist. So now our revivalists live in a world of authorship and property, documents and influences, and every once in a while they all shout “Hey” in unison, a faint echo of the proposition that music can also work differently."  

The invention of recording, then, makes a break in organic time, the temporality of barely perceptible but steady evolution in communities and traditions....    Recording makes preservation of the music past possible, but at the cost of proliferating embalmed traditions, time warp cults, xeroxes of xeroxes... It makes these traditions live forever, but in undead rather than truly vital form

Nitsuh Abebe column from a little while ago that uses Rock of Ages (and the Japandroids record) to talk about the death of rock: 

"These [80s hair metal era] were the decadent final days of an arrangement that now seems nearly as quaint and dusty as the giant front wheel of a penny-farthing bicycle.... If you understand "rock" in those terms, then "rock" is long dead. Don't get me wrong: People have made plenty of wonderful rock music since then. But you'll notice it always has a prefix or an alternate name: It's indie rock, garage-rock, punk-rock, folk-rock, metal, emo, power-pop, etc. It comes from people who cheerfully accept the death of Rock-rock, and are content to occupy artsy anti-commercial niches, to rummage through the deceased's pocket for useful ideas, to bang together its bones to make new sounds, to bionically reengineer the body like the Six Million Dollar Man's, to do whole hilarious Weekend at Bernie's routines with the corpse, or, in particularly bleak cases, to labor with shock paddles over the moldering patient, happily admitting that they're trying to "Bring Rock Back"-- from the dead, one assumes."

Also enjoyed the riffing on the edgeless, degraded version of "camp" that is so ingrained in our culture at this point:

"this is what we do now, we find pop-culture artifacts that Americans remember fondly, trot them out, pose them in funny positions, surround them with winking and giggling and mugging for the camera, dip their pigtails in inkwells, throw things at them, make fun of their hair, and laugh the way children laugh when they've been told a sex joke they do not entirely understand. We call this "camp," which makes it sound sophisticated, but I'm not sure it is anymore: Camp involves a certain sensitivity, whereas this stuff is mostly self-conscious goofery. And it's a surprisingly large component of how we look at pop music once we think we're done with it, as evidenced by the average VH1 countdown show"

what Nitsuh says about the Japandroids record seems to relate to this tenor of  triumphant-yet-desperate embattled-egodrama epic-ness that you can hear in a lot of stuff these days, from "We Are Young" to "Uprising"...    and that does seem to have evolved through emo and alt-rock to end up at a place close to "Don't Stop Believin'" and "We Are the Champions"