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. 

"Retro With Attitude"

 

Interesting rhetorical maneuver here: a defense of a retro band you like even though you know retro is "wrong" -  on the grounds that their sheer fanatical commitment to a long-dead past style takes it all to another level. There's a degree of fidelity-in-recreativity at work that amounts to a form of time travel. So here, in early '92, Steve Sutherland, then deputy editor of Melody Maker, writes about the Stairs and invokes the Tardis.  (There's also echoes of earlier time-travel exponents, specifically The Flamin' Groovies, with talk of action being shaken and so forth). 

Here in his ensuing album review, Sutherland goes for the "beyond retro" trope - they go through retro and out the other side 

This sort of rhetorical move feel like stuff I've resorted to myself at various points over the years, when caught between my liking for something and its indefensibility according to my "official" ideology. Casting my mind back, I thought of a couple of earlier examples - in 1989 describing The Stone Roses as a "resurrection insurrection" (rhyming as word-magic ploy as please overlook my inconsistency ruse). And that same year, in this otherwise mostly dismissive review of a Sub Pop compilation from 1989, I use the "time travel" metaphor to single out Beat Happening as exceptional. 

The full review here, notable for its lack of clairvoyance re. the Pacific North West sound aka grunge's quite soon to be proven ability to shake some action on the mass culture stage. 

As well as "time travel", another rhetorical ploy is "timeless" versus "dated". If I'd ever been in a position to review The La's "There She Goes", I might have tried wheeling "timeless" out. 

Here, in another 1992 review - this time of the second album by The  Black Crowes -  Steve Sutherland wrestles with his own nostalgia and experienced-in-real-time knowledge of pre-punk rock. Around this time in MM he'd be reviewing reissues of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Free, Grateful Dead, records he'd have listened to when they originally came out or read about in ZigZag. (Unless memory fails me, he'd once been in a long-hair band called Merryweather, who played some festivals). Here with Black Crowes it's not so much "Retro with Attitude" as "Traditionalist with Pride" or "The Campaign for Real Rock 'n' Roll" - and the review is a kind of defiant apologia.  

I must say I don't mind Black Crowes... the high-energy Humble Pie-ism of "Hard to Handle",  the scowling Stones boogie of "Remedy"

In some ways, they are only a successful version of Royal Trux, with residual avant-isms bevelled off. 

I also appreciated the way that Black Crowes took the piss out of Metallica's drummer, saying he couldn't swing for shit. Because it's true. 

At exactly the same time Steve was exploring the music of his past through the reissues column at MM - which was, now I remember, titled Retro-Active -  I was exploring much the same zone but from a different angle: their new-to-me unfamiliarity. The hard 'n ' heavy early '70s tantalized as a forbidden and cordoned-off region, an era that as as good postpunker I'd been indoctrinated against, told I didn't even need to bother checking out. There's was a liberation - even a revelation - in listening to music that could swing for shit. 

The staff took the piss out of me for a good month or two, bylining every piece I did as SIMON 'BORN TO BOOGIE' REYNOLDS. 

This season of taking an interest in bygone boogie, raunch, and Southern Rock is recalled in this blogpost, which pins part of it on the influence of reading Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic and Chuck Eddy's Stairway To Hell. The other factors were grunge and the sheer cheapness of the original vinyl for heavy rock of the early '70s. 

Another of my BORN TO BOOGIE era reviews - for contemporary retro-ists Raging Slab and Masters of Reality starts like this: 

"So many bands today like to pretend that punk never died; I can't see how this stance is somehow less regressive than bands who pretend punk never happened." 

Of course, the ideologically consistent response (especially given that I was at this very moment a convert to rave) would have been that both punk revivalism and pre-punk revivalism ought to be equally anathematized. The week after the ZZ Skynyrd review, I wrote this: 

Here the argument is that  Hardcore Techno is the Rock of the Future - the real Resurrection Insurrection. 

Metal's Retromania (updated 7/17)

The blog Hate Meditations, dedicated to musings on extreme metal, has been doing a series of posts called Metal's Retromania. Looks pretty probing, although I confess to being an inadequate reader, since my grip on the doings and goings of extreme metal (or any metal) has been pretty tenuous for nigh on thirty years (nor really was it untenuous before that to be honest, although there was more active curiosity). But should you be familiar with the zone and up for tangling with an argument, this looks to be a fascinating read. 

Part 1 - https://hatemeditations.com/2021/02/03/metals-retromania-part-i/

Part 2 - https://hatemeditations.com/2021/02/15/metals-retromania-part-ii-the-great-explosion/

Part 3 - https://hatemeditations.com/2021/03/26/metals-retromania-part-iii-the-eternal-return/

Part 4 - https://hatemeditations.com/2021/05/13/metals-retromania-part-iv-the-icarus-factor/

Part 5 - https://hatemeditations.com/2021/06/17/metals-retromania-whither-is-fled-the-visionary-gleam/

And just added this week a sixth and what looks like final installment 

Part 6 https://hatemeditations.com/2021/07/17/metals-retromania-part-vi-until-the-light-takes-us/

I invite the metal-informed to assess what is convincing and unconvincing in Hate's argumentations here. 

The subject of retro-ism within metal has cropped up before on this blog, or actually it was Blissblog now I think of it - including the question of what differentiates doom metal from retro doom metal, given that doom metal is already looking back, more or less a Sabbath reenactment society.

From my slenderly-informed perspective, I should imagine retro-revival currents within metal, a folding back on its own extensive history that parallels what has happened to almost every other genre that's a bit long in the tooth - this must get tangled up interestingly with the tendencies within extreme metal to reject modernity: to cast back, oftentimes more than a tad dubiously, to the primordial, the pagan, the Medieval etc etc. 

Tangentially this has reminded me of my favorite TV show of the moment - the Norwegian series Beforeigners, a  wonderfully witty satire of the modern day struggle between multiculturalism versus nativism, the fraught politics of immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, etc etc. It uses a simple science-fiction premise that - if you go with it,  let it be unexplained - yields plentiful amusement. 

Timeholes have sprung up in the sea off the coast of Norway through which people from earlier eras  of the country are popping out, bedraggled, half-drowned and utterly disoriented. Three epochs specifically: Stone Age, Norse (people from both sides of the Vikings versus early Christians conflict - which is why I was reminded of this in the context of extreme metal, church-burning black metal singers etc), and 19th Century. 

As Norwegian society struggles to cope with the influx and help these timigrants, these beforeigners, to assimilate...  well, you can imagine the satiric possibilities. Graffiti slogans like "Norway for Nowadaypeople". Mixed-temporal marriages. And (I'll stop here because I don't want to do too many spoilers) there is also the phenomenon of transtemporalism - people who realise that although they were born in the late 20th or early 21st Century, inside, they are Viking / paleolithic / Ibsen-era.

Rather than metal, though, the Vikings in this series seem to prefer EDM / hardstyle when they are letting off steam and throwing back many horn-fulls of mead

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time, #38

(via Found Objects)

(whose Bollops provides the background: in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, various stages of Humanity have come and gone, now it's the Fifth Men, who've "developed a pseudo-time-travel technique which enables them to experience the past by hitching a ride in the minds of people who lived hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago"):

"The access to the past had, of course, far-reaching effects upon the culture of the Fifth Men. Not only did it give them an incomparably more accurate knowledge of past events, and insight into the motives of historical personages, and into large-scale cultural movements, but also it effected a subtle change in their estimate of the importance of things. Though intellectually they had, of course, realized both the vastness and the richness of the past, now they realized it with an overwhelming vividness. Matters that had been known hitherto only historically, schematically, were now available to be lived through by intimate acquaintance. The only limit to such acquaintance was set by the limitations of the explorer's own brain-capacity. Consequently the remote past came to enter into a man and shape his mind in a manner in which only the recent past, through memory, had shaped him hitherto. Even before the new kind of experience was first acquired, the race had been, as was said, peculiarly under the spell of the past; but now it was infinitely more so. Hitherto the Fifth Men had been like stay-at-home folk who had read minutely of foreign parts, but had never travelled; now they had become travellers experienced in all the continents of human time. The presences that had hitherto been ghostly were now presences of flesh and blood seen in broad daylight. And so the moving instant called the present appeared no longer as the only, and infinitesimal, real, but as the growing surface of an everlasting tree of existence. It was now the past that seemed most real, while the future still seemed void, and the present merely the impalpable becomingness of the indestructible past."

"At all times, in all pursuits, the presence of the tragic past haunted them, poisoning their lives, sapping their strength."

Sounds like Olaf had maybe read Nietzche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (from Untimely Meditations) e.g.


"Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. The scholarly habit lives on without it and orbits in an egotistical and self-satisfied manner around its own centre. Then we get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt even a significant talent, a noble need, into an insatiable new lust, a desire for everything really old. Often he sinks so deep that he is finally satisfied with that nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up for himself the dust of biographical rubbish" 

"IT'S NOT JUST A CAR SHOW ...IT'S A UNIQUE TIME TRAVEL EXPERIENCE!"