great moments in retrophobia

At The Ringer, a  whole feature about Pitchfork's Most Notorious Review. 

The year was 2006, the album was Jet's second effort Shine On, the writer was....  well, that's the mystery that Ringer's Nate Rogers sets out to solve. 

And the review? The review was wordless, consisting only of a brief video of a chimp peeing in its own mouth. 

Scott Plagenhoef, an editor at Pfork, recalls: 

We were talking about the central problem as we saw it with the record, how the Return to Rock trend that started with the Strokes, White Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and really rock in general—had curdled into a set of lazy signifiers and poses. When the point or driver of what you’re doing is reclamation it’s inherently limiting and resistant to new ideas. It’s a creative cul-de-sac. Progression—whether it was in hip-hop, pop, guitar music, electronic music—was important to us at the time. Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, became so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing.

This what things were like in the 2000s. A state of affairs that might lead someone to write a book called Retromania.

Mind you, a magazine doing an in-depth historical investigation into a single record review could be taken as an example of retro culture.

Or if not retro exactly, then a kind of chronically historical culture.

Only way to make it more archive-feverish would be if it had been an oral history of the Shine On review.

As it is this piece  - including a sidebar on Other Famous Pitchfork "Stunt" Reviews -  is nearly six thousand words long. 

Never listened to Shine On, or indeed any Jet album, but I confess I've always liked "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" - always turned it up when it came on the radio. It's an immaculate recreation, boosted with modern production.  

They get down pat the surly, rocket-in-my-jeans-front-pocket mannish-boy swagger of, I dunno, the Pretty Things. 

Perhaps justifying one's weakness for such a record would require resorting to the "time travel" metaphor, the futurist critic's self-respect-saving rhetorical maneuver.

Going back to the mid-to-late 2000s, when the retro-talk really started in earnest.... 

Momus amusingly castigated this sort of thing at that time -  reactivating Peter York's concept of Art Necro and talking about Retro Necro. 

One post in particular at his blog Click Opera I remember vividly, although possibly imprecisely: 

Momus is at an airport and what is clearly a rock band arrive at the same gate. The Groop come swaggering in, elegantly wasted, in the appropriate dress for a rock band sonically oriented towards the pre-punk Seventies. Suddenly Momus feels like he's looking at employees at one of those "living history" museums, whose job it is to wear Medieval garb and do traditional crafts all day long - , working in the blacksmithy, churn butter, that kind of thing . 

I suppose it's possible the band at the airport might actually have been Jet.

Not that there wouldn't have been many other contenders to trigger this epiphany - Kasabian. Probably most groups that appeared on the cover of NME during the 2000s. 

Yes, it was a chronic culture of revival and reenactment... which now feels stabilized, just part of how things are and will always be... 

But at the time it seemed inundating and alarming...  the escalation of  preexisting trends and their synchronized convergence, combined with new digital archiving platforms = Crisis. 

Particularly disorienting and dispiriting for post-punk veterans such as me and Momus and Mark. 

Jagger versus Morley, or, The Life and Death and Living Death of Rock and Roll Music

While working on Retromania, I read a very interesting book, Is Rock Dead?,  by Kevin J.H. Dettmar. It's a scholarly but entertaining work that is not an attempt to take rock's vital signs, not at all,  Rather it's an examination of the decades-long discourse of rock vitality versus rock necrosis : the way that, almost from the very start of this music, fans, critics, and artists have fretted and fought over questions such as: "is rock dying?", "is rock already dead?", "it is about to be reborn?", "can we bring it back to life?", and sometimes even whether rock and its culture had degenerated to the point where it is something that needs to be killed off quickly and completely. Dettmar is fairly caustic about the impulse to proclaim rock to be ready for the knacker's yard, on its last legs, in terminal decline and decay. He characterizes that as a form of projection by the no-longer-young, with the babyboomers being particularly prone to this kind of "generational ethnocentrism". He diagnoses a syndrome in which the state of the critic's flabby, middle-aged body and depleting libidinal reserves gets fatally confused with the vigour of the music. In a Blissblog post spurred by Is Rock Dead?, I argued that the insistence on the possibility that a given music form could die (usually referring not to the exhaustion of musical resources so much as the genre's relapse into the blandness and respectability it once opposed) was actually a form of fidelity to the sheer force of its life in its emergence. Dettmar himself makes the  similar point that "the birth and death of rock aren't just coincident… they are, in fact, two different ways to talk about the very same thing."

Now just the other week I came across a beautiful chunk of rock discourse that totally fits Dettmar's subject. It's one of those confrontational interviews that ye olde music papers once routinely did with  even the biggest stars, simply because the weekly press still commanded the centre space of the  Rock Discourse and accordingly the stars craved the attention and - to an extent - even the adjudication that the critics bestowed upon them, hostile though it might be. Here, in the New Musical Express, June of 1980, it is Mick Jagger -  who could quite easily have not bothered with being bothered by some spotty young upstart oh-so-eager to shove him into a grave and shovel dirt on top -  who submits, warily, to a dialogue with Paul Morley. The dynamic between the two - the middle-aged myth gamely parrying the insinuations of irrelevance lobbed by the youth - is fun to watch. But the most relevant bit for this discussion is Morley's framing of the encounter - his intro and outro pivot precisely round the metaphorics of life and death.

(whole interview at the end of this post)

Throughout the interview, Jagger shrugs off the burden of all that the Stones - and rock, since the Stones are the quintessence of rock - have come to represent: the excessive expectations placed upon the music to its detriment, in his view.  Jagger insists that it's all been a drastic over-estimation; rock may not be just another form of Entertainment, but it's closer to showbiz than to being a vehicle for, or harbinger, of Revolution. Jagger says that Rolling Stones music is just the blues really, when you get right down to it. It's the band's favorite form of black music, which they've applied themselves to playing at once faithfully and yet authentically (not merely imitatively). Jagger discounts and downplays all the extra things that groups like the Stones brought to the blues - musical  things as well ideological and attitudinal baggage. Mick's a slippery fellow, cunningly yet casually evading Morley's angle of attack. So he'll acknowledge in one breath, the energy surge of punk, but then in the next he'll put it in its place, saying that just like the Sixties explosion the expectations around the New Wave got overblown, the movement was naive in its idealism, and none of the new groups really had the musical strength to sustain. 

Morley meanwhile is arguing that the Stones and the other key Sixties groups once manifested a vitality so excessive it was subversive. For them to simply carry on, professionally providing a milder version of their once electrifying energy, is to contradict everything they once embodied. Once they were living; now they are merely surviving ("survival" being a buzzword of the '70s). Indeed, they have survived, in the literal sense of living longer than their own peak of dynamism and relevance.  This  shameful continuance, the mere adequacy of their records (piss-took by the Stones themselves later with the compilation Sucking in the '70s) makes the Stones  - and people who still buy their records and turn up to their shows - into participants in a form of living death. The sparks of real life in 1980 are, Morley admits, small and marginalized in the scheme of things: almost unknown  (outside NME and Sounds) groups who make a raw racket in poky clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh,  Manchester, Liverpool... 

Some nine months later, Morley will have a similar encounter with a living (just barely) legend of the Sixties -   Jerry Garcia - during the course of which he tells the bemused guitarist about a group from Edinburgh called The Fire Engines, who play 15-minute-sets, into which more zest and vim are crammed than in four hours of noodling slow-build intensity from The Grateful Dead (a name that rings out oddly in the context of this discussion). 

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

In 2013, reviewing the Stones as septuagenarians headlining Glastonbury, Morley slipped back into this register: contrasting the Viagra Swagger of Jagger's pantomime of his lusty younger self versus the anachro-necro "liveliness" of groups like Arctic Monkeys on the same stage: 

"For better or worse, [The Stones] are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive." 

Perhaps in this piece, Morley surprised himself by now feeling sympathetic to the Stones's persistence in the face of decrepitude.... After all, he too is an elder by this point: a legend still treading the boards of rockwrite, a couple of generations worth of whippersnappers sniping at his heels... 

retro necro holo-hauntology (continued)


or,

"that's not 'tasteful', that's umheimlich"

[via Billboard] "Lisa Marie Presley is all good with her father being turned into a virtual image ala Tupac Shakur at this year's Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Core Media Group, which owns Elvis Presley's  name and likeness for project development, and Digital Domain Media Group, which produced the Tupac illusion in April, have announced they intend to create a similar image of The King, with uses that range from a possible duets album and a TV drama series to "performances" at the Graceland mansion in Memphis and perhaps on the road. 

"Lisa Marie, who owns Graceland and continues to hold a minority stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, tells Billboard that  'I've been maintaining that as long as things are done tastefully, I would never have a problem with it. And thankfully we've been very much involved, so we will be formulating how it'll be coming out and everything. There's no definite plans yet.'Presley, who helped curate the "Elvis...Through His Daughters Eyes" exhibit at Graceland, adds that she sees the Elvis image as the next step in something like Elvis -- The Concert, a traveling show that features footage of her father on a massive video screen while a live band that includes many of his former musicians plays live. 'If you want to go to the next level with that, (the image) is where you'd go. You have to stay with technology,' she says."