retrotalk2022 nostalgia deathgrip

Stone the crows, here's yet another piece on retroculture -  this time by Quietus-man Luke Turner, writing for New Statesman.

 It bears the headline: "Macca and the Stones? The past has a death grip on our culture" and it starts by noting that "if you include the holograms, this week nine musicians with a combined age of 686 – Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and ABBA – are once again the biggest cultural news in the UK"

Amusingly, Turner notes right near the top of the piece that "to attack nostalgia is nothing new. More than a decade ago, the critic Simon Reynolds published Retromania, an incisive look at a musical culture that seemed to wallow in ironic takes on the past rather than aspiring to anything fresh." Mark Fisher gets his due props too. 

But Turner wants to have it both ways - see things  from the viewpoint of the ahistorical young, "for whom it is all new, right now" and who feast on the atemporal banquet of streaming blahblahblah. 

He wants to be negative and positive simultaneously (difficult trick) and so as well as  complaining about rockpop's gerontocratic oliogopoly and their full-spectrum dominance of the attention economy, he also points to new shoots of growth -  small but teeming shocks-of-new still out there to be found (the kind of thing covered in the Quietus - the New Weird this or that). 

I sympathise: nobody wants to be the old grouch if they can help it.  

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