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 Fairarticle by Kurt Anderson.
But I guess these are the eternal returns and endless recycles of our recursive culture, innit
I saw an early version of the James Lavelle doc at a festival a few years ago and what amazed me, first and foremost, was how many UNKLE albums there'd been.
the first was bad enough - so i guess i'd assumed that that would have been it
but no, no, they persisted after Psyence Fiction (yuk wot a title) - there's something like FIVE subsequent UNKLE albums!
and what's worse is that they get increasingly rocky, involving such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age
like Lavelle started buying into this really naff idea of rock rebellion and intensity and authenticity
like a less tastefully executed version of the Death in Vegas approach - a studio assembled simulacrum of rock, without the actual rhythmic engine of band-energy powering it
i guess it shows the odd lingering prestige of rock - and especially the punk strand within rock - as the ultimate stand-in for rebellion and individuality, which continues to exert its thrall over people who've come up through hip hop or dance music, and whose creative procedures are radically different
for some reason deep in their hearts their burning desire seems to be to collaborate with Noel Gallagher (as with Goldie circa Saturnz Returnz) or Pete Doherty or somebody like that, despite being light-years ahead sonically of those guys
the other thing I gleaned from the doc - and Lavelle's embrace of rockism - was that he'd managed to convince himself that being a curator really is the same as being a creator - that's there's really nothing to writing songs, creating a distinctive band-sound, a band-voice.
all you need is some famous pals, and some connections - and taste, and attitude
simply convening the ingredients would somehow generate vibe in itself, hey presto, through the magic of chutzpah
wrong!
hubris 101: not knowing your limits, the nature of what you are actually good at (in his case, arguably at any rate, branding, packaging, spotting talent in others i.e. Shadow, Krush, building a buzz)
yet despite this, UNKLE is still going - there's a new album out at the end of March - The Road: Part II/Lost Highway - a "filmic" affair whose cast includes the Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss, BOC, spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, and more
first single
press release:
“Once you have walked the road, everything becomes clear,” says Elliott Power on the Prologue to the sixth album from genre-bending pioneers UNKLE. ‘The Road: Part II / Lost Highway’ is the sound of an artist forever in transit on life’s journey of discovery. “My work has always had an eclectic essence and soundtrack-influence in its structure,” says Lavelle. “If you go through the back catalogue, there’s a continuity between the motion and the ambition of the sound. Ideally, you’re constantly collaging and sampling elements of what’s relevant at the time to create something new. “Now, there’s a lot more freedom. When I first started, the walls between genres in front of you were a lot greater to climb. We’re at a much more open-minded and eclectic place with music now.” "I started doing a show on Soho Radio last year, which made me think about playing records in a different way,” says Lavelle of his life after ‘Part I’. “It wasn’t about trying to make people dance in a nightclub. It was a breath of fresh air, and about playing a more eclectic mix. ‘The Road Part 2’ was made in the same way – it’s a mixtape and a journey. You’re in your car, starting in the day and driving into the night. The language of it was for it to be the ultimate road trip. He continues: “It’s the mid-part of a trilogy. The first record is like you’re leaving home; you’re naive and trying to discover. There are elements of my early days in there, as well as a bit of everything since. There’s an optimism and excitement to it, as there was with me having to direct this project alone for the first time. “This record is the journey. You’re on the road, out there in the world. There are let downs, highs, lows, love, loss and experiences. The third record to come is basically about coming home; wherever that may be." With the album split into two acts each with a beginning, a middle and end, the trips from light to dark, from brute force to tenderness make for both the full arc of the adventure and suites to be enjoyed separately. It’s a bold, assured and confident collection – from the Americana of ‘Long Gone’, to the Kanye West ‘Black Skinhead’ - inspired ‘Nothing To Give’, the alt-orchestral rush of ‘Only You’ to the guitar-heavy mantra of ‘Crucifixion/A Prophet’ and the electronic child’s lullaby of ‘Sun (The)’ – via covers of ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ made famous by Roberta Flack and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of the euphoric ‘Touch Me’ by Rui Da Silva. Helping to travel further down the myriad avenues of UNKLE’s sound are the full spectrum of collaborators and guests. ‘The Road: Part II/Lost Highway’ welcomes The Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss, BOC, Philip Sheppard and artist John Isaac among others – as well as spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox (who used to be Lavelle’s landlord) and Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiana, who leant her trust and voice to Lavelle following his acclaimed exhibition to the seminal director. The two names who crop up most throughout the record however are rising West London singer and producer Miink and experimental rapper Elliott Power. “They’re just both so incredibly talented, and everything I love about London right now,” says Lavelle. “I’ve been playing a lot with going back to sampling and going back to certain aesthetics from when I was first buying records and DJing, then to mix that with something contemporary. They’ve helped me create this ‘Bladerunner meets London Soundsystem’ kind of vibe.” But then, Lavelle has always been an artist as inspired by the past as he was racing towards the future. “The way that things are now are what we were always doing with Mo’Wax,” says Lavelle. “The legacy was that we broke down barriers, took down everything culturally-lite and put it into something. Now street culture is the predominant visual culture of the world. It’s mad to think that Supreme is more popular and recognised than Louis Vuitton. Every major label and rapper is making sneakers and toys. At the time it was seen as vanity and gimmicky, but look at the way culture is now. That’s what we started.” The striking artwork of the hooded knight that adorns the sleeve on 'Lost Highway' is by celebrated artist John Stark – renowned for drawing upon magical realism and using the more mystical elements of the past to reveal something profound about the present. "It’s about the yin and yang, night and day, the rolling journey," says Lavelle of the artwork. "Here's a Ronin-like, lone warrior. It represents what it means for me to be going out into the world and finding myself."
from Jon Caramanica's New York Timesprofile of the Angloid emo-rapper Ratboy
"A couple of months ago, the 22-year-old musician who records as Rat Boy rented a huge empty warehouse a short walk to a lovely little stream and a slightly longer walk to a small black sign leaning against a decayed wall that reads FARM TOILET. Here, slowly, he, his father, and brother have been building out the raw space into a place — inspired by the Beastie Boys’ old G-Son Studios in Los Angeles — where he can work, and also play. A few days before Christmas, it was mostly empty save for a roughly fashioned studio. On one wall was a Public Enemy “Fear of a Black Planet” poster. On a shelf was an autographed vinyl copy of the Beastie Boys’ “Hello Nasty.” On the center table, an old issue of the Beasties’ publication Grand Royal and some obscure graffiti magazines. Up against the wall, a small-scale screen printing rig and several of Cardy’s ghoulishly realistic illustrations. Sitting on a pallet under a blanket was an Amek Einstein console, the same kind that the Dust Brothers used to work on, that Cardy bought for about 6,000 pounds on the internet from Peru. It’s the most money he’s ever spent on anything, he said, but he still wasn’t sure it worked.... The 1990s are the leading touchstone for Cardy, who has studied the era with loving devotion and built a specific, refined aesthetic from it: “It’s a bunch of people that are around my age making something for themselves. I love the way stuff looks — making their own magazines, the music, being motivated to put stuff out,” he said, slumped in a chair wearing a Supreme bottle cap T-shirt, his hair pink and scraggly. “They did everything right, but did they know they were doing it right?” “I kind of see Jordan as the nexus of what was happening in the ’90s when punk and hip-hop were blowing up,” said Brett Gurewitz, the founder and chief executive of Epitaph Records, which is releasing “Internationally Unknown” via its Hellcat imprint. “Rat Boy is the embodiment of that time.” ... When he became curious about music, YouTube was his university. “I used to watch thousands of videos,” he said. Cardy’s natural artistic curiosity was buttressed by a creeping sense of outsiderness. “When I was in school when I was a kid, I did feel like there were not, like, people that were into the same stuff,” he said. “Everyone was into what was happening around here, and I’m just liking [expletive] that happened 20 years ago.” ... One of the first people in the music business he met was Drew McConnell, who plays bass in the British band Babyshambles (which is fronted by Pete Doherty) and was introduced to Cardy’s music by an intern at his publishing company. Before long, McConnell was setting up management and label meetings for Cardy, who was sleeping on his sofa. “He had obviously listened to a lot of records,” McConnell said. “The way he would sing would remind me of Elvis Costello, or Robert Smith from the Cure. But at the same time he’s a huge hip-hop fan.”
Wait a minute, I'm confused here - he's 90s-redux and 90s-obsessed, but he sounds like New Wave?
And elsewhere in the piece as Caramanica does his breakdown of constituent parts, it sounds even more atemporal and mish-mashed:
"This month Cardy will release the second Rat Boy album, “Internationally Unknown,” a high-energy collision of punk convulsion and hip-hop storytelling full of raucously fun, sharp-tongued songs about slackerdom, resistance and disorderly joy. It’s shaped by late 1970s punk with flickers of dub, nods to 1990s hip-hop (and also the early 2000s English rapper the Streets), and embraces the musical exuberance of 2000s pop-punk. Which is to say, it is an extremely of-the-moment amalgam, refusing to draw distinctions between genres. It’s also part of a long continuum of British punk that looks for kinship in black music and part of a wider re-engagement with the 1990s as source material."
Further confusing me
"In person, Cardy is gentle and soft-edged. But on both his first and second records, his attitude is consistent: a permanently extended middle finger to authority, and a robust sense of working class agitation."
What working class kid in his very early twenties can afford to drop 6000 quid on a vintage studio console? Because it was used by the Dust Bros?
He's certainly obsessed with the Dust Bros, whose claim to fame eludes me (Pauls Boutique? that Urge Overkill album?)
"Cardy went to Los Angeles and spent six weeks working with Armstrong at the Boat, once the studio of the Dust Brothers. (John King of the Dust Brothers also worked on the new album.)"
This stuff about his dad Brett also puzzles me -
"Cardy recalled how Brett never pushed him to pursue things he didn’t feel strongly about, like schoolwork: “It’s always been, like, do what you want to do.” They spoke about Cardy’s music and the unlikeliness of his performance intensity, joked about living in close quarters and celebrated hating authority. Recalling when Cardy was first learning to race cars, Brett explained his hands-off parenting philosophy, which felt like the foundation for all of Cardy’s subsequent life choices. “Just let him crash,” Brett said. “He ain’t going to do it twice."
Is it rebellion / slackerdom / DIY if you learn it from your dad? Or am I being old fashioned here, myself?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
also on the topic of different kinds of Nineties, a Nineties you might have barely intersected with, and "is this even the Nineties we're talking about here"? - just got this press release through the mail, for a Hip Hop Brunch thrown by an organisation called www.The90sBrunch.co.uk -
Whether you’re the ultimate ’90s fan or you just
really like gettin’ jiggy wit it, this affair isn’t to be
missed. The 90s Brunch’s entertainment this weekend has been seasoned with the
spiciest nostalgic flavourings in the cupboard. We're talking glitter, transfer
tattoos, lip-sync battles, dance-offs, and a full soundtrack that pays homage
to the best decade ever. Now how’s that for 90’s nostalgia?
And you can’t forget the best part – a
lip smackin’ three-course meal and an hour (yes, an hour) of bottomless
cocktails – that should really get you in the mood to dance (or roller skate)
like it's 1990.
Held on Saturday, Jan 19th from 12-5pm at a secret London venue,
this brunch is guaranteed to be the best day-party out there.
“I call it the lost generation, because from 2000 to 2017, nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture. Like, how would you look back at 2000 to 2017 and remember anything? How would you see somebody wearing some gear and say, ‘Hey, that’s gotta be from 2014?’ There’s no music there, there’s no pop culture, there’s no fashion that defines the generation. I look at the Nineties like it’s the last truly great decade." - Vanilla Ice
That's like a vernacular version of the Gospel according to K-Punk and Simonretromania being ventriloquized through Vanilla Ice's mouth there!
Ice is quoted in this piece by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone about Nineties revivalism, the Nineties nostalgia circuit that Ice and others are doing very nice business on, and decade-consciousness.
Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray also quoted on the Nineties: “It was the last heyday of the music business. When you were a kid in your garage, you could pick up a guitar and dream of being part of that. I compare it to these young kids playing basketball, wanting to be in the NBA – then all of a sudden the NBA disappears, and the NFL disappears. Now people are still playing basketball, but it’s the local rec league; people are still playing football, but you gotta go find some guys and get some games together. The infrastructure of stardom is gone. So you look back on that – not just as a business, but romantically. ‘Boy, that was fun, going to Tower Records to see what’s new, watching MTV for a world premiere.'” Sheffield lays on McGrath this idea of Nineties as the last proper Decade with a sense of itself c.f. first two decades of the 21st Century being Zeigeist-ly amorphous:
“Right – what would you call it, the Noughties? The 2000s? No one knows what to call it. No one knows when it started or ended. It took a while for the stink of the Nineties to go away, because nothing replaced it. The industry imploded, so there weren’t new bands coming up. Name the last rock star. The top ten touring bands in Pollstar – it was still the Chili Peppers, it was still Soundgarden – God rest his soul, Chris Cornell – it was still the Dave Matthews Band. Nothing replaced the Nineties, even though the decade was over.”
This doesn't seem true to me, seems a bit of a self-serving fiction - there are plenty of definitively 21st Century pop stars, some of whom have taken on and taken over the old functions of rockstardom (excess, outrage, political statements, being taken seriously / taking themselves very seriously) .... indeed Rockism is alive and well in pop itself, ironically (and boringly)... rock anthems of the 21st Century is a shrinking category, true... guitars are rarely heard in the Top 40, for sure....
As for the no-feel-to-2000s/2010s ... I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if early-Noughties nostalgia kicks in. Won't be long now, if the 'stalgia is already settling in on the late Nineties, eve of Y2K moment.
YeahI wouldn't be surprised if a certain look (to clothes, hair) and feel 'n' finish to entertainment products will start to become apparent as we move into the future - something we couldn't put our finger on at the time, what with the welter of revivalism and pastiche
the clunkiness of an era becomes its charm
(although films and TV of the late Eighties and early Nineties often look really shit)
Conrad Flynn with a guest post following up on the idea of Quentin Tarantino as video store clerk auteur and meta-movie maker. Conrad relates QT "the king
of junk culture re-appropriation" and pioneer/ populariser of a "How many movies has
this guy seen!?!" pomo-pastiche style of mash-up-movie..... to a condition (at once spiritual and in many cases literal) of growing up in the Valley., i.e. near to Hollywood but not in it.
The
internet's effect has been to make the rest of the world feel like the Valley.
The
closest thing you could've had to the internet experience, in terms of a gluttonous
diet of porn, and movie and music history.... before there was
the internet was growing up in the Valley, and that Anything Goes aesthetic
that raised Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow and others... that embarrassment of riches -- and
junk -- meant multiculturalism became a-culturalism, because there's no
perspective passed on to you -- just a Hollywood library -- and it can create a
cynicism and exhaustion because it burns you out if it's not given a context,
or if that's all you ever feasted on. Regarding the myth of Tarantino working in a
video story and seeing everything.... His father had been an actor in
Westerns in the 60s, and Tarantino was
already a film-fanatic - that's why he was at the video store to begin with.
It was correlative, not causative....
Tarantino's
sensibilities are Valley even if he technically lived somewhere else in the Los Angeles area. [He did take an full time acting class in Toluca Lake, in Burbank, "the media capital of the world" and an incorporated city within the Valley]. That
somewhere else was always just on the outskirts of Hollywood or L.A., it seems,
so he was a nose pressed to the window, which ties into the Valley sensibility
anyway.
The three tent pole
characteristics for the Valley are nostalgia, kitsch and
pornography. Susan Sontag technically
graduated high school from North Hollywood High. Her own interests in camp and
pornography in the 60s are relevant here. Camp being a form of deviant or
subversive form of nostalgia and kitsch. And, of course, the aesthetic
relationship between kitsch and pornography has been noted before many times.
Some even going so far to say that pornography is a form of kitsch; certainly
an ersatz form of sexuality. There's that Milan Kundera quote:
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick
succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
"The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by
children running on the grass!”
Also Oscar Wilde on sentimentality, relating to kitsch:
"A
sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury
of an emotion without paying for it.
That can be tied to the retro/nostalgia
culture's superficiality: how it wants to enjoy the past or be sentimental
but not pay a price for its indulgence. Similar to the pornographer wanting
sexuality but rejecting an emotional intimacy
and the price that comes with an actual connection. And with all this there's
the degree of separation: making movies about other movies, music about other
music, Kundera's kitsch shedding a tear over a previous tear. It can be tied
into your own Retromania theories about current pop culture
feasting on dead cultures and things that are no more. Not bringing them to
life or adding them somehow, as a good revival of something might do, but
making the corpse dance. You want to say to a lot of young artists "Yes,
but what about your experiences and life? Don't you have anything of
your own?" That question was leveled against Tarantino 20 years ago, and
I'm sure even earlier against other artists, but now, as you've written, it's
an aesthetic and a tag for a generation. The internet is a non-stop "Look
what Junior found in the attic!" showcase.
Judd Apatow went to
school in NYC but he lived in the Valley early on in his career, and had a
failed TV pilot he created called "North Hollywood" that was about
the vagaries of trying to make it in the entertainment industry and living in
the Valley, on the outskirts and being an outsider who's almost made it. So with all these
directors [see also Paul Thomas Anderson, Burbank-brat Tim Burton]they were enamored and obsessed with entertainment from an early
age, and had a knowledge of "the canon" and even the anti-canon in a
way that was hard to pull off pre-broadband. They all had family in the
business as well. It's Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" about the people
who made movies of themselves.
Back to the meta-ness of their films: movies that are about
movies, the history of movies, or are about entertainment and don't really
reference anything outside of it. Religion doesn't factor in any of their lives
-- not even peripherally or superficially. That's something you notice about
the Valley: you wonder where people would even go to church, or if anyone,
outside of the Latino and presumably Catholic population, even does. LA's
conservative demographic moves to either Orange County -- heavily Republican -- or to Santa Clarita (where a Mormon represents them in
Congress). A lot of other Christians moved east to Colorado or out of state. So the
Valley, again, just being Hollywood's less-glamorous sibling, also pre-figures
and puts a landscape to America's changing religious map that is increasingly
irreligious, if not atheist.
That's another thing that pre-figures the feeling
you get when you go online or watch media and think there's something like a
7-1 agnostic to believer ratio. There's even the angle that the religious
impulse, being so absent in the Valley, transmutes into a worship of
entertainment. As much as anything
else it's the post-religious atmosphere in the Valley, and the greater LA area,
that was prophetic. It's not that Malibu, Brentwood, and the richest areas of
the county and country are more religious, but they have ways of putting some
glamor into their religious impulse, and what they replace it with. Whereas in
the Valley you'd see a young man who is a monomaniac about something.
Monomania: that other great characteristic of the internet. If you lived in
Topeka, Kansas, in the 70-s there was a limit to how much film culture, or any
culture, you could take in, but in LA there's a bottomless pit and history. So
we're dealing with "the archives" and the "But wait! There's
more!" element that the internet would bring to the rest of humanity years
later. And there were other people in LA, who could enable you in your
subculture and obsession, something that the internet would give you later but
wasn't around for the rest of the country.
On ILX, years ago, I started a thread where you had to compare a director to a
band, aesthetically: Tarantino's band was Pavement. They were both
historians of their form, had the same breakout year (1992), and would steal
from their idols and reference works every chance they got. They both flatter critics
by putting in references that only critics and fellow buffs would appreciate --
they're the ideal artists for cinefiles and record collector geeks in the Nineties and Noughties. It's ultimately all
nihilistic because you feel if you took their record collections and films away
they'd have nothing important to say. Entertainment about entertainment.
That's the feeling the Valley gives you: entertainment is to
it what Catholicism is to Vatican City. In many ways it's just Hollywood with
its make-up worn off. Filled with has-beens and up-and-comers. There was a women
who, when this friend of mine introduced himself to her and said he was living in North
Hollywood, she said "North Hollywood? Are you on your way up or on your way
down?"
