RetroTalk 2 - Kieran with a counter-vision to "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" gloom

 

Listen and watch here

retrotalk2023: the Nostalgia-Industrial Complex

 Pitchfork's Jayson Greene on what he's cleverly calling Music's Nostalgia-Industrial Complex - a tag that here describes the consolidation of song catalogues by legacy artists in money-minded hands looking to maximise every conceivable form of earning back on their huge investments in publishing rights.  

One way is to instigate the interpolation of hooks from these bits of prime musical property into songs that become Top 40 hits. Like this one:

"After clocking the 1987 smash’s internet infamy, Primary Wave acquired a percentage of the rights to [Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"]....  then pitched the idea of an interpolation to Yung Gravy’s manager. At the same time, a member of Shukat’s team reached out to a producer who worked with Gravy. “Within a day, we literally had a track to listen to, and Gravy rapped over it two days later, which was fucking dope,” Shukat says over the phone. He was less enthused by the original track’s name—“Get Pussy”—and requested a rework, which was obliged. The song went on to peak at No. 30 on the Hot 100 and currently has more than 200 million plays on Spotify. When I observe that Shukat is describing a role more akin to a music producer than a publisher, he says, “I’m comfortable with that. We’re producing on a daily basis.” 

Primary Wave's chief of marketing is involved in the work of "'“artist re-development.' His team assembles three-to-five-year marketing plans for each new acquisition, and then presents a pitch deck to the artist or their estate."... Primary Wave treats their catalogs the way powerful record labels treat their star artists—except all of the publishing company’s talent is either dead, a legend, or both. And when you own the rights to some of the most important American popular music ever recorded, opportunities have a way of presenting themselves in perpetuity.

It's the wave of the (no-)future - retro-necrosploitation of golden oldies with proven hookability and nostalgic triggers in-built. 

"In the past few years, Primary Wave has been joined by what Shukat estimates are more than 20 similar companies. He points directly to the pandemic as the cause for the catalog stampede, which erased touring income from everyone’s ledger sheets for nearly two years. Now it feels like a week doesn’t go by without a major artist’s catalog getting scooped up."

Alongside Primary Wave, a company called Hipgnosis (unrelated I assume to the record design company) are big players in this field. 

"The rise in catalog acquisition helps to explain how we’ve arrived at a moment when the pop charts are littered with chunks of old intellectual property. Nicki’s “Super Freaky Girl” and Yung Gravy’s “Betty” are just two high-profile examples; you don’t have to look far for more. The Santa Clara, California rapper Saweetie’s “P.U.S.S.Y. (Powerful, Utopia, Supreme, Sacred, Yummy)” samples Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit,” the basis for Biggie’s “Juicy.” Atlanta’s Latto double-dipped Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” famously sampled on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” for her song “Big Energy,” bringing in Mariah herself for bonus points." 

"... In some ways, the Hot 100 right now feels as recursive, all-encompassing, and allergic to new input as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "

retrotalk 2023 - the commemorative churn / retromAInia

From a little while ago, a piece at the Guardian by Shaad D'Souza that notes the shrinking of the turnaround time for commemoration - a trend for 5 year anniversary reissues and repackagings. 

"Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs.

It’s in keeping with a frantically shortening nostalgia cycle that’s seen frenzied media coverage of supposed emo and “indie sleaze” revivals and music publications churning out cheap anniversary content – although these repressings seemingly offer little to the consumer other than a coloured disc. But Hannah Carlen and Ali Murphy – marketing directors for heavy-hitting indie conglomerate Secretly Group, which released Bridgers’ album – insist that fifth anniversary pressings allow artists to “give new fans something, and say ‘you’re welcome here too – you don’t have to be a day one fan’,” says Carlen.".... 

"The timeline of a record has changed so drastically,” says Ali Murphy. “Twenty years used to be the span of time in which people were celebrating a record, and now it’s got so much shorter, not only due to the quickness of everything coming out.”

C.f. my earlier post that detected an intensification of the commemorative churn with odd-number anniversaries of significant releases or events, and the odd habit of wishing dead icons or cult figures a happy birthday.

Another Guardian piece from a little while back (by Rich Pelley) looks at how a band of wannabes got AI to concoct a simulacrum of Liam Gallagher's vocals to front their own Fauxasis tuneage. "We got bored waiting for Oasis to reform" the culprits say - so they created something even more boring and redundant than Oasis actually reforming. 

“We’ve brought a band back from the dead!” says one of the band. “And I think that’s something we’ll see a lot more of.”

This is the future - mind-blowing technology being used to do mundane / inane  things.

Another AI phenom - AI-assisted upmixing - a 2023 clarification of "Sister Ray"

retrotalk2022 - Dylan Reenactment Special Edition

 1/ Cat Power to recreate / reenact the entirety of Bob Dylan's legendary 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall... at the actual Royal Albert Hall, this November. 

2/ The Guardian's Ben Beaumont-Thomas has a good old rant about the "Blowin' in the Wind" £1.5m fetish object auction: 

"For this sale at Christie’s auction house, Dylan rerecorded the song in the studio for the first time since its original take in 1962. The take was then etched into a lacquer-coated aluminium disc – only one will ever be made – and housed in a bespoke walnut and white oak cabinet with an etched titanium plaque. This new format, Ionic Original, is the lobotomised brainchild of producer T Bone Burnett [who] hails the format as the “pinnacle of recorded sound” in terms of sound fidelity.... Part of me thinks that if Burnett can hoodwink millionaires out of their wealth, more power to him....  [Yet it's] also the absurd pinnacle of vinyl fetishism....The Ionic Original format is the grotesque extremity of this malaise, and one which, in its high-profile financial success, deepens it....  The elitist endeavour runs counter to the very spirit of popular music. The cheapness and replicability of pop – which, ignoring its own financial inequalities for now, streaming takes to a frankly glorious scale – is what makes it such a defining cultural medium. To rerecord one of history’s greatest songs and let only one person hear it is a ghastly reversal of the very concept of “popular”.... a song isn’t an artefact: it blows in the wind. To trap it in a single white oak box – the same hoarding instinct that has destabilised so much culture over the years – dishonours music itself."

retrotalk1974 - "You Can't Go Home Again"

 

There's been a surprising uptick in retrotalk recently - hence the Retrotalk2021 and Retrotalk2022 series. I've also done "Pre-Echoes of Retromania" posts about prior spurts of retro-talk in the '90s, and the '80s. Moaning and groaning about nostalgia and revivals has an extensive and a long-established history. Anxiety about it seems to come in waves then fade back into the background (perhaps because of a surge of newness in the music culture).

 Well, here below is an example of vintage retrotalk - an excellent 1974 essay by Michael Wood that originally appeared in New Society. It's the first piece in a 1977 Fontana collection of articles from New Society . 

(Which magazine should really be archived on the internet - look at the lineup of contributors here: Reyner Banham, John Berger, Angela Carter, Dennis Potter, E.P. Thompson.... People like these and Simon Frith and so forth were writing on a weekly basis about arts and culture and social trends + issues all through the '60s, '70s and '80s, from a left-wing, Brit-centric perspective. What a trove of discourse, all inaccessible unless you have academic privileges at a UK university, I should imagine). 

(I have actually contributed to New Society in a certain sense, having written for the New Statesman around the time it absorbed New Society - for a while the amalgamated periodical went by the name New Statesman & Society, if I recall right). 

Michael Wood is a Brit-born professor at Columbia University in New York (then) and later at Princeton. At the time of the Fontana collection's publication he'd written a couple of books including one titled America in the Movies. Later came The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction among other titles. 

There's also this quote in the introduction by Paul Barker:

'One cumulative effect of mass communication nowadays is that, though transient in intention, it more and more puts itself on record. So the music, manners, and modes of the past are instantly and synchronously to hand in a way they have never been before. Revivals of style can go with ever-gathering speed. The cycle, rubbish-camp-acceptable-antique, has now become almost totally telescoped. Mass communication is like the memories in a mind half-asleep. Or like your mind when drowning? In everything, the mass media are flatteners and foreshorteners, like zoom-lens photography. Every high street with the same advertised brands; every newscast with the same news; every singer with the same tune. Even what is local becomes merely another candidate for mass consumption : good for a joke by Eddie Waring on It's a Knockout.'

A couple of further examples of 1970s nostalgia discourse in the mass media

retrotalk2022#6 - the Nineties

 

Chuck Klosterman  has been getting some blow-back recently for the above observation, made in a Vulture interview around his latest opus The Nineties: A Book  - i.e. the idea that there was no epistemic essence to the 2000s or indeed the 2010s

Forgive me but it does feel like a thought that's been around the block a few times already - c.f. me on  the Noughties as a Zeit without a Geist, similar formulations by Mark Fisher, or indeed this 2011 Vanity Fair  article by Kurt Anderson. 

But I guess these are the eternal returns and endless recycles of our recursive culture, innit

retrotalk2022#5 - the Eighties again, again

 Why can't pop escape the Eighties? asks Dorian Lynskey at Unherd

"It’s not just that old hits are doing gangbuster numbers on Spotify. When artists such as Taylor Swift, Angel Olsen, Laura Mvula and Mitski want to pivot to pure pop, they turn to Eighties signifiers. You can hear it, too, in the glittery ebullience of Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware. There are even meticulous Eighties fetishists who create multiverse remixes of recent hits: Initial Talk made Lipa’s New Rules sound like Tiffany and Dead or Alive, while Louis La Roche turned Adele’s Easy on Me into the Madonna ballad that never was.

"Top of the pile right now is The Weeknd, whose latest album Dawn FM is framed as an oldies radio station playing in purgatory. It’s the dream hybrid of new wave, electro and Thriller-funk that the Canadian has been working towards for a few years now: his neon-bright 2019 single Blinding Lights is the biggest Billboard single of all time. Among Dawn FM’s blatant homages to the mega-pop era are a monologue by Quincy Jones, a song named after Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, and a very peculiar English accent. The Weeknd has long aspired to be the kind of pop colossus who bestrode the Eighties, so why not explicitly sound like one?"

A friend quipped to me in 2010, when I was finishing up Retromania, that the Eighties revival had been going on longer than the actual Eighties had - way more than a decade. In the book I titled a subsection "... the Endless Eighties"

As Lynskey observes, in 2022, "the self-conscious Eighties revivalism of the electroclash scene is now 20 years’ old, as distant from us as it was from the heyday of The Human League."

Indeed I was teaching it as history - two separate 80s revivals in fact: electroclash and also the minimal synth redux movement - in a class on DIY only last week, as a coda to the main part of the class which was on synth-punk / early-industrial / DIY electropop of late '70s / early 80s i.e. the future that then became a retro-future or multiple retro-futures

And old piece by me on some of the other Eighties that were going on alongside the ones that's been memorialized and mined to exhaustion

 

retrotalk2022 #4 - the Eighties again

Why Are Some Zoomers So Wistful For the '80s? asks Ashley Reece at Jezebel

"There’s an ‘80s community on Instagram and TikTok, dominated by Gen Z’ers who have such an affinity for the decade that they’ve decided to make the ‘80s part of their lifestyle. What begins as a cursory look into mom’s closet morphs into a harmless obsession with an era that was over nearly a decade before most of them were even conceived. Their clothes scream Pretty In Pink, their hair is straight out of Heathers, and even their bedrooms look like the set of Valley Girls.

"The surface appeal of the ‘80s is obvious: the music was great and the fashion was out of control. But just as the ‘80s were marked by MTV, malls, and Madonna, they were also plagued by the nearly decade-long reign of President Reagan, the AIDS epidemic, and the last vestiges of Cold War paranoia. One of the most popular pop songs of the decade was “99 Luftballoons,” an upbeat pop song about nuclear annihilation. But the young members of the ‘80s community are savvy enough to acknowledge the era’s faults, and after interviewing several of them, it’s clear that their love of the ‘80s goes well beyond an affinity for Caboodles or synth. Coupled with their passion is a yearning for a time when adolescence was synonymous with freedom. Less meticulously curating feeds, more hanging out with your friends at the food court.

“It was kind of like the last decade before social media, cell phones...internet,” explained Anja Arvesen, a 19-year-old who goes by @offbrandpollypocket on Instagram. “Obviously it’s easy to romanticize something that you never experienced. But it sounds nice, in theory, the way people interacted.”

retrotalk2022#3 - the dead oppressing the living

" Is Old Music Killing New Music?" asks Ted Gioia at his substack The Honest Broker, and goes on to explore the steady growth of catalogue sales in music. 

"I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market....

"The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

".... the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. 

"The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century...

"....Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. 

"... Old recordings, like zombies in those bad films, are out to kill the living"

Gioia also points to declining audience figures for the Grammies, radio programming trends, hologram tours, A&R and other music biz executives losing confidence in the present, and other symptoms. 

In Retromania, I looked into this issue of catalogue outselling new and recent ("deep catalogue" being a particularly potent category) and asked Billboard's Ed Christman for his specialist-knowledge low-down. So I'm not surprised to see the tendency has continued and escalated... 

It's a kind of oligopoly of the elderly -  a gerontocracy comprised of those who were able to establish  enduring stature through the Analogue System aka the Monoculture. Now as Gioia observes, they are selling off their publishing for massive sums, to investors betting on a posthumous dominance that will continue to hold sway: 

"The hottest area of investment in the music business is old songs—with investment firms getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars. The song catalogs in most demand are by musicians in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)—if not already dead (David Bowie, James Brown, etc.).  Even major record labels are participating in the shift, with Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others buying up publishing catalogs—investing huge sums in old tunes that, in an earlier day, would have been used to launch new artists."

retrotalk2022 #2 - nostalgia

Alexandra Fiorentino-Swinton asks "how can we ever be nostalgic for media that never ends?". It's part of Real Life's column series New Feelings, which is "devoted to the desires, moods, pathologies, and identifications that rarely had names before digital media." 

“While much has been made about the overload of nostalgic pop cultural mining in music, fashion, and other media content, the very structure of our most prevalent plot devices indicates a cultural atmosphere of temporal erosion. Fictional plots today may be taking our increased continual connectivity into account, eschewing the tight contours of the singular, removed adventure narrative that once defined youth media...  In contrast to the “analog era” movies that featured encounters with “hard nostalgia” — idealizing youth as a bittersweet place of departure, as something that is over just as it’s happening — my experience of youth media is one of continuity. Movies and TV shows today account for continuing digital connectivity in their use of equally weighted character perspectives, stop and starts of individual storylines, and a default industry-wide push (granted the viewership numbers) toward a stream of sequels and reboots. In popular entertainments marketed to me, stories are supposed to go on forever — bolstered by endless spin-offs and fan extensions....  An entire cottage industry has emerged out of finding nostalgic and referential easter eggs in these kinds of films, reifying the iconic nature of what came before as it is continuously brought into the present. They survive on the commodification of their own history — and so do we, in a social sphere that mirrors the entertainment sphere: in ongoing curation, narrativization, and calculations of value in an algorithmic setting."

retrotalk2022 #1 - meta-nostalgia

Atlantic piece on how the newest film in the always-meta Scream series takes the meta-piss out of legacy sequels, pandering to the nerd-fanbase, and that target market's own bad faith of endless reconsumption

David Sims writes: 

"This franchise... can submit to obvious tropes while its characters roll their eyes at them; you can always count on a scene in which a character smashes through the fourth wall with a knowing monologue about the predictability of horror films. However, the latest film, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not), takes aim at not just the genre it’s working in but Hollywood culture at large, wherein studios rely on familiar names instead of the barest bit of originality.

"Because everything old must be new again, this film is simply called Scream, not Scream 5, and the three biggest characters from the prior editions return. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the usual main target for Ghostface’s villainy, is now a flinty, gun-owning mom; Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), an ambulance-chasing TV journalist, has become a morning-show host; and Dewey Riley (David Arquette), the town sheriff, has fallen on hard times.... 

...The effective opening sequence mirrors the original Scream: Tara talks on the phone with the killer as he quizzes her about scary movies. This time, though, she scoffs at questions about horror fogies such as Freddy and Jason; she’s into “elevated horror,” she says, like The Babadook or It Follows. That shift in the genre is what Scream now wants to mock—after all these years, are audiences still going to fear the familiar specter of a guy in a mask with a knife?

"... It can’t reach the terrifying heights of Craven’s original, but none of the sequels could; each one always leaned a little more on meta-humor as the series went along. That type of self-skewering, à la the latest Matrix sequel, is far more familiar in Hollywood now than it was in 1996. This film, however, takes that tactic one step further, jabbing not only at legacy sequels but also at the intense fandoms that inspire them. Befitting their postmodern outlook, the Scream movies have a fictional horror-film series within them titled Stab, and viewers learn that the Stab sequels have apparently gone off the rails, as the newest entry (which was “directed by the Knives Out guy”) angers enthusiasts by upending established rubrics.

".... In the fifth Scream, the killer is motivated to bring things back to basics and reeducate the next generation about classic scares of yore. Given the franchise’s DNA, it is naturally a movie where horror canon itself is the villain; even if the person in the mask has changed once again, the real adversary is film fans’ unwillingness to let go of the past."

retrotalk2021 #7

 Here's a new study of nostalgia and retro culture from Zer0 books  - Alessandro Gandini's Zeitgeist Nostalgia: On Populism, Work, and the 'Good Life'. 

Release rationale: 

"We live an age of nostalgia, incarnated by populist fantasies of “taking back control” and making nations “great again". In the long aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis, nostalgia has been established as the cultural zeitgeist of Western society. Populist fantasies of nostalgia represent a cry for help against the demise of the societal model of the postwar era, based on stable employment and mass consumption. The promise of an impossible return to the 'good life' of the 20th century, Gandini contends, particularly appeals to the older generations, who are incapable of making sense of the evolution of Western societies after decades of globalization and neoliberal policies. The younger generations, in the meantime, are instead trying to build a new 'good life' based on another form of return, this time to old practices of craft production and consumption."

So more about retro-politics - Brexit, Trump, and similar "make ___ great again" / neo-traditionalist moves in Europe - than about, say, retro-pop as in hologram tours, artists stealing from the 80s/90s/early 2000s, etc.  And  about hipsterism and its consumption patterns as a rejection of dematerialised lifestyles but expressed more in the realm of  Etsy / micro-breweries etc than the music domain of vinyl fetishism, the antiques market for analogue synth hardware, etc. 

retrotalk2021 #6- heritage techno

The arrival of  heritage techno -  Guardian's Jake Tapper reports on the consortium of Berlin techno DJs and promoters who are lobbying the German government to request Unesco to grant ICH ("intangible cultural heritage") status to the city's club scene, currently languishing from lockdown 

Detroiter turned Berliner Alan Oldham says "Unesco protection would go a long way towards maintaining that old spirit. Legacy venues like Tresor and Berghain for example would be protected as cultural landmarks."

Explains Tapper, "....rRecognising techno would open up access to government subsidies and other funding sources, and clubs would gain extra protection under town planning laws."

Oldham again: "“Unesco protection would help a lot towards establishing techno and club culture as a legitimate social force with historical value and worthy of government support, not just hedonistic, disposable club music and drugs. Eventually, my hometown Detroit could maybe also benefit.”

The New Orleans-isation of once disreputable (and fertile), now touristic (and developmentally-arrested ) music-towns - well, exactly 20 years ago, I imagined this happening to the NY house scene... 

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Electronic Music is finally set to open in Frankfurt - in spring next year

retrotalk2021 #5 - presentism

 In the NYT  Lindsay Zoladz says 2021 was a year when we couldn't stop looking back and wields the concept "presentism" to describe a tendency to project the concerns of now onto the past and to judge it by today's advanced standards

"The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again."

Seems to be a different use of the concept "presentism" than in Douglas Rushkoff's 2014 book Present Shock: When Everything Happens NOW -  well at least as far as I can tell / recall, given that I started but never got far with it (victim of a presentist inability to concentrate? well, I did then and have since started and finished other books...). 

From the book's website, a breakdown of the major contentions: 

Narrative collapse – the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and highly intelligent post-narrative shows like The Simpsons. With no goals to justify journeys, we get the impatient impulsiveness of the Tea Party, as well as the unbearably patient presentism of the Occupy movement. The new path to sense-making is more like an open game than a story.

Digiphrenia – how technology lets us be in more than one place – and self – at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds – home and battlefield – simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed.

Overwinding – trying to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones, like attempting to experience the catharsis of a well-crafted, five-act play in the random flash of a reality show; packing a year’s worth of retail sales expectations into a single Black Friday event – which only results in a fatal stampede; or – like the Real Housewives – freezing one’s age with Botox only to lose the ability to make facial expressions in the moment. Instead, we can “springload” time into things, like the “pop-up” hospital Israel sent to Tsunami-wrecked Japan.

Fractalnoia – making sense of our world entirely in the present tense, by drawing connections between things – sometimes inappropriately. The conspiracy theories of the web, the use of Big Data to predict the direction of entire populations, and the frantic effort of government to function with no “grand narrative.” But also the emerging skill of “pattern recognition” and the efforts of people to map the world as a set of relationships called TheBrain – a grandchild of McLuhan’s “global village”.

Apocalypto – the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale. “Preppers” stock their underground shelters while the mainstream ponders a zombie apocalypse, all yearning for a simpler life devoid of pings, by any means necessary. Leading scientists – even outspoken atheists – prove they are not immune to the same apocalyptic religiosity in their depictions of “the singularity” and “emergence”, through which human evolution will surrender to that of pure information. 

retrotalk2021 #4 digital nostalgia

Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker from a weeks ago, exploring "Pokémon and the First Wave of Digital Nostalgia" and the poignant pangs triggered by the rudimentary graphics of early Nintendo. 

"The visuals of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, from 1985, consisted of a 256-by-240 grid of tiny squares of color. There were fifty-four hues altogether; each character was limited to three colors at a time...    a time before hyperrealistic 3-D graphics and screen overexposure, the desaturated pixels were innocently entrancing, an immersive other world."

Chayka notes that the 20-year-cycle is bang on cue for "the first wave of nostalgia for early digital life, a longing for our first digital worlds, onscreen spaces in which we could act, create, and communicate." 

"For many people, the earlier era of the Internet represents a time when they still had power over their digital lives, before they became dependent upon the repetitive templates, inhuman scale, and turbocharged content feeds offered by the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.... The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social-media networks have gradually banished, a harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives."

Other symptoms of early 2000s-stalgia

"A clone of the Web site for MySpace, the early-aughts social-networking service, recently drew three hundred thousand subscribers. 

"Some of the most popular recent independent video games, such as the farming role-playing game Stardew Valley and the adventure game Celeste, are entirely pixel art... 

"With all of the gazing backward, the new digital era, which is often labelled Web3, may end up looking a bit like the older, pre-Facebook Internet."

Chayka references an essay by Robin Sloan called "Notes on Web3,” which argues that the retrodigital buzz is about "rediscovering a sense of online ownership and creativity that has been gone since the era of blogs and browser games."

Also interviewed, an artist called Maria Vorobjova whose work includes "Wood Wide Web,” 
a simulated video game of a biological office space, presented in glitching, imprecise polygon models with pixelated, supersaturated textures. The graphics are intentionally messy. Vorobjova, who recalls playing games on her father’s desktop computer as a young girl, uses the rendering software Blender and then films walk-throughs of her creations in low-resolution 320-by-265 pixels, mimicking the capacity of the original 1994 PlayStation. Upsizing the videos for modern platforms only exaggerates the graininess. The work is an attempt to evoke what the Internet used to be, Vorobjova said: “A continuous rabbit hole, leading to unpredictable, mystical destinations.” When she adds small details to the worlds she builds, she added, “I’m trying to make that old aesthetic new again.”

There's stuff on the aesthetics of NFTs and a Madeleine moment of the author's - "Succumbing to my own digital nostalgia, I recently bought the newly rebooted Pokémon Brilliant Diamond for the Nintendo Switch console... It has been a comfort to immerse myself in a digital environment that doesn’t update or change every minute, as social media does, with its thousands of blips of new content. I thought that it might be boring, too slow or simplistic, but playing Pokémon is easily more satisfying than an hour spent checking Twitter. My decisions have actual consequences, at least within the game; instead of shouting into the public void, I am performing for myself alone." 

retrotalk2021 #3 - pop will (rep)eat itself

Alexis Petridis in the Graun wonders why pop has got so predictable...  

Starting with Adele's endless misery-go-round, ABBA-in-aspic, the sheer(an) bloody comfiness of ginger Ed's latest, Lana Del Rey's copiousness, and yet another yearly glut of Drake, AP wonders whether "perhaps what people want from pop music" - nowadays - "is reassurance and comfort rather than startling novelty"

"There was a time when artists who wilfully repeated themselves were the subject of mockery – think of all the jokes aimed Status Quo’s way in the late 70s and 80s, and the snarky comparisons to Status Quo lobbed at Oasis once Britpop’s shine wore off...  In 2021, however, it frequently felt as if the best way to maintain one’s place at the pinnacle of pop was by doing exactly what audiences expected them to."

He offers various candidates for an explanation - comfort in a time of turbulence, the longing for authenticity / relatability, or simply allowing ourselves to be steered by streamers to things like things we already like, in the confusing welter of newstuff and microgenres and hybrids...  

In the comments, Mark Fisher comes up a bunch of times (and Retromania gets a mention)

retrotalk2021 #2 - a cross-culture innovation drought?

From a few week ago, an Atlantic piece on an innovation drought in American culture, titled "America Is Running on Fumes". Derek Thompson focuses on the shortfall in three specific areas 

Film 

"Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4, etc. Of the 10 top-grossing movies of 2019, nine were sequels or live-action remakes of animated Disney movies, with the one exception, Joker, being a gritty prequel of another superhero franchise....  Americans used to go to movie theaters to watch new characters in new stories. Now they go to movie theaters to re-submerge themselves in familiar story lines."

Science

and

Economy

“New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did,” the economists Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen wrote [in the 2020 paper Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]. In the past few decades, citations have become a key metric for evaluating scientific research, which has pushed scientists to write papers that they think will be popular with other scientists. This causes many of them to cluster around a small set of popular subjects rather than take a gamble that might open a new field of study. 

"In science, as in cinema, incrementalism is edging out exploration."

“Everywhere we look we find that ideas are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT concluded in a 2020 paper. Specifically, they concluded that research productivity has declined sharply in a number of industries, including software, agriculture, and medicine. 

".... Setting aside a spike during the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. business formation has been declining since the 1970s. 

".... Until about a century ago, the U.S. was building top-flight colleges and universities at a dazzling clip. But the U.S. hasn't built a new elite university in many decades.... 

"f you believe in the virtue of novelty, these are disturbing trends. Today’s scientists are less likely to publish truly new ideas, businesses are struggling to break into the market with new ideas....  we are less likely than previous generations to build institutions that advance new ideas.

“What about all the cool new stuff?” you might ask. What about the recent breakthroughs in mRNA technology? What about CRISPR, and AI, and solar energy, and battery technology, and electric vehicles, and (sure) crypto, and (yes!) smartphones? These are sensational accomplishments—or, in many cases, the promises of future accomplishments—punctuating a long era of broad technological stagnation. Productivity growth and average income growth have declined significantly from their mid-20th-century levels.

"New ideas simply don’t fuel growth the way they once did. 

".... This is not the first time that somebody has accused America’s invention engine of running on fumes in the 21st century. (Not even the idea that America is running out of ideas is a new idea.)

"In 2020, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published the instant-classic essay “It’s Time to Build,” which urged more innovation and entrepreneurship in public health, housing, education, and transportation. “The problem is inertia,” he wrote. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.” The same year, Ross Douthat published The Decadent Society, which levied similar criticisms of languishing U.S. creativity. These works are partly descendants of Tyler Cowen’s books The Great Stagnation, which diagnosed a slowdown in America’s innovative mojo, and The Complacent Class, which observed that Americans are self-segregating into comfortable echo chambers rather than taking risks and challenging themselves."

Why is it happening, Thompson asks? 

"I don’t think there is an overarching reason for our novelty stagnation. But let me offer three theories that might collectively explain a good chunk of this complex phenomenon.

"1. The big marketplace of attention

Almost every smart cultural producer eventually learns the same lesson: Audiences don’t really like brand-new things. They prefer “familiar surprises”—sneakily novel twists on well-known fare....

"2. The creep of gerontocracy..."

"Across [politics]. business, science, and finance, power is similarly concentrated among the elderly...." 

3. The rise of “vetocracy”

"What if it’s not American creativity that’s suffering, but rather that modern institutions have found new successful ways to thwart and constrict creativity, so that new ideas are equally likely to be born, but less likely to grow?

"... They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

"Last year, fewer bills were passed than in any year on record. 

"Vetocracy blocks new construction too, especially through endless environmental and safety-impact analyses that stop new projects before they can begin."

The author concedes that "the best objection to everything that I’ve written so far is that there exists a world where young people tend to be in control, where regulatory burdens aren’t blocking megaprojects, and where new ideas are generally cherished and even, perhaps, fetishized. It’s the internet—or, more specific, the software industry. If you are working on AI, or crypto, or virtual reality, you probably aren’t starved for new ideas. You very well may be drowning in them...."

So all the change is happening in this immaterial realm.. 

"... Patents today are more concentrated in a single industry, the software industry, than at any other time on record. We’ve funneled treasure and talent into the world of bits, as the world of flesh and steel has decayed around it....

"What I want is for the physical world to rediscover the virtue of experimentation. I want more new companies and entrepreneurs, which means I want more immigrants. I want more megaprojects in infrastructure and more moon-shot bets in energy and transportation....  finally, I’d like Hollywood to rediscover a passion for cinematic blockbusters that don’t have numbers in the title."

My own less informed thoughts on this deficit of big thinking and aiming high from a piece in Salon from 2007... 

retrotalk2021 #1 - time-reversal pop

here's an ingenious time-runs-in-reverse way of celebrating a derivative and backward-looking contemporary artist that you're nonetheless highly partial to, from Robert Barry, author of  The Music of the Future

"Think of all your favourite songs by Scritti Politti, Grace Jones, Mylène Farmer, Adele Bertei, Wham!. Now imagine that none of the people who wrote those songs really wrote those songs. Imagine they all ripped them off – the melodies, the rhythms, the sound, the feel, the lot. Imagine it was all stolen from some other artist, some obscure studio-bound hermit without the looks and the money and the record label pull. Imagine some baroque conspiracy to have the music of that original artist suppressed. Every copy of their work deleted and pulped. Just one third gen copy remaining, buried in a ditch for decades, then finally dug up, a little warped, a little grimy. Do you ever hear a record and feel like it's been made just for you?"

He's talking about an outfit called Mirage, in the Quietus Best Albums of 2021 roundup (although it's actually a sample from his longer review for tQ in April)

It reminds me a bit of Playgroup's 2002 album, showing that retro cycles are themselves going in circles now... 

I rather like I must admit - have a listen 

That trick - where the earlier, actual influence / source, can be made to sound like they're the one that's derivative of a chronologically later group - it doesn't happen often but when it does, it's eerie