retroragga

Droid tells me about a new tweak in reggaestalgia:

"If you ever do an extended edition of  Retromania, you need to take a look at the

Euro digi-dancehall scene. Though it probably peaked a few years back, its no exaggeration to say that much of the best reggae these days is being made in (mainly) Northern Europe with JA vocals. The interesting thing is that much of it is/was based on the original 80's digital dancehall template with the likes of Tubby's 'Tempo' as the holy grail. People like Jahtari & Raggattack, who are using all the same gear - old Roland and Casio's to create a perfect copy of the original. This seems to me to be perfect retromania material as you have a genre that was obsessed with technology & computers and a particular vision of the future, now being fetishised by modern producers using ancient technology to recreate the same sound. General updates on the scene can be found here: http://digitalmidigital.blogspot.ie/

He adds:

"Its funny in that the 'digital era' in dancehall really only lasted maybe 4 years before samples took over and the overtly 8 bit sound disappeared and that video game style with loads of bleeps and overtly synthetic instruments dated incredibly quickly, despite many tunes referencing computers & technology. Peak years probably 85-88. Not to say that the vibes weren't there. What's interesting about euro digi dancehall (as opposed to UK digi-dub, which is more of a homegrown variant on UK steppers) is how completely convincingly the style and vibes are captured. These guys are picking from the point where the punanny redefined dancehall (again) and digital fell out of fashion, using the same gear, (Linn drum, Oberheim DX, Yamaha RX5, Casio MT-40, DMX etc...) and they make some serious tunes."

Duly noted, Droid! 

So, when it comes to the 10th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Expanded / Updated) of Retromania, what else should I add, do you think? The last three years have seen rich pickings on the new-old, old-new, recreativity and hyperstatic fronts, much of it documented on this blog. (There's also been a few future-reactivated currents that gainsay the book's gloom-with-a-view that would warrant acknowledgement).  Obviously Daft Punk and Random Access Memories could take up a whole chapter. Haim, a few pages. But what else?  (Not limited to music, either).  

The Memorial-Industrial Complex, or, How the Internet Uses Nostalgia

Megan Garber at The Atlantic very interestingly explores how the internet uses the warm, endorphin-glowy feelings associated with nostalgia as bait for our restless digital twitch:

"Nostalgia, the copious literature on it suggests, comes in two basic forms. One is organic... [that comes over you] unexpectedly, as a kind of pleasant pang—the stuff of sudden songs and serendipitous scents and sour-sweet Madeleines. The other form is a media product. It's the re-introduction of Uncle Joey and/or Dawson’s Creek's Joey and/or Blossom's Joey, appropriated to arouse a vague sense that we have lost something as we’ve moved, inexorably, into our future. This form of nostalgia is usually invoked, in one way or another, to sell us stuff.

"... It’s also notable how ambient nostalgia has become. The memorial-industrial complex ensures that our past—our collective past—permeates our present. That complex markets directly to memories that are shared, across generations and across demographics and across the culture. And the complex is extending, now, to the Internet."


Examples include Spotify's recommendations, oriented not just to your listening choices but "according to a user’s birth date... Spotify uses those data points, in part, to read users’ pasts back to them, offering up a fairly faithful (re-)rendition of the popular musical landscape as it existed when they were younger....  surfacing the songs that were popular across the culture when you were in junior or high school. The service is making the fair assumption that there will indeed be some overlap between your own musical past and the collective."

 "The point of all this past-leveraging, from Spotify’s perspective, is to realize the vague-but-also-urgent goal shared by many social networks and services: user engagement....  And an experience of the past that is customized—if not to a person, individually, then to that person's generational demographic.... It’s a targeted ad, essentially—and the thing being advertised is a person’s own past."

"Social networks in general, you could argue, are implicitly—preemptively—nostalgic, combining our pasts and our presences into a unified experience. Networks, however, are also experimenting with more explicit forms of nostalgia-baiting. Earlier this month, Facebook rolled out “Look Back” compilations that collect users’ most-liked photos, statuses, and life events into an easily viewable video. ...

"An app called Timehop promises to show you “photos and updates from this exact day in history.”

"Even Pinterest, which is most commonly associated with future-oriented and aspirational image-collecting, makes use of customized nostalgia. Gabriel Trionfi, Pinterest's user experience researcher, is a psychologist by training, and he points out that the flip side of anticipation—one of the emotions Pinterest uses to generation its own version of user engagement—is, yep, nostalgia."




“Nostalgia is a known way to boost people's mood,” Trionfi told me.... So people are using Pinterest’s future-oriented platform, Trionfi says, to re-collect images from their past. "

" Many media outlets ("content producers," you could call them) are selling nostalgia in one form or another: There’s Retronaut and @historyinpix and the many similar—and controversial—features dedicated to the resurfacing of the past."



Garber also points to Buzzfeed's microgeneration-oriented quizzes like “25 Ways to Tell You’re a Kid of the ‘90s,” “50 Things Only 80s Kids Can Understand,” “53 Things Only ’80s Girls Can Understand.”)

Her conclusion: 

"Nostalgia, under the stewardship of the Internet, has been made nimble."

Adam Curtis on "static culture" / Adam Curtis on the death of "utopian thinking" (this was tomorrow text only supplement #3)

Adam Curtis, in the New Statesman a fortnight ago, talking about "static culture" and the zombie-fication of rock:

"All culture always goes back and feeds off the past... but there are two ways of doing it. Either you can go back and get inspiration from the past and create something genuinely new... What bothers me at the moment is that you get a very different sense out of pop culture, which is that it is literally like a form of archaeology. It's going back and rebuilding it almost as a sort of work of art in itself. .. It’s not just in pop music, you get it in a lot of avant-garde art at the moment. There are people going back and making plays based on Fassbinder films of the 1970s, and they're just literally replicating it, and it's very odd. And that's why I was being a bit rude about Savages because, whilst Savages are technically extremely good, and live are extremely powerful, they are a bit like archaeologists from the 1920s, going back and digging up the tomb of Tutankhamen, and laying it all out for you to see, but they’re digging up The Slits, or New Order, or Siouxsie Sioux, and presenting it to us, and that's it.... What I'm really complaining about is a lack of progressive ideas in music. Everything seems to be about just going back and reworking it and it becomes static – sort of like a zombie culture. As I listen to Savages, I have a terrible vision of Siouxsie Sioux coming towards me like a zombie. And nothing will kill that kind of music, because, and this is rude, but what is now called post-punk – that slightly angular stuff that borrowed off punk but took stuff from funk and all sorts of other devices – had its time and had its place. At the moment it’s just being reworked and it doesn't have any meaning to it."


Seem to remember him going on about this in an interview last year, and again mentioning Savages as culpable. He seems to have a bit of a fixation about them!


(Have to say also that, while I'm sure he's worked all this stuff out for himself, it is a little surprising nobody appears to have pointed out to him that there's this chap what wrote a whole book about this very topic).

(Interesting also, that like some of us, Curtis takes a little heart from the now-pop, the NOW!-ism of radio dance divas - in his case, Rihanna). 

And here he is again,  Mr Curtis - in the latest issue of  The New Humanist, approaching the same subject from a different angle.

It's a a cover story interview by New Humanist editor Daniel Trilling (formerly of New Statesman, funnily enough) and this time the mise en scene is not neo-postpunk music but Brutalist architecture - the Thamesmead Estate, "a vast modernist housing development built from the late 1960s by the now defunct GLC" as Trilling puts it  - born out of technocratic optimism, for a long while thereafter seen as the acme of urban decay and social engineering hubris, but now increasingly gazed wistfully at as "the last outpost of a wave of 20th-century progressivism".

Prompting Curtis to muse thusly:

"They wanted to take rational ideas and use them as an inspiration to cut through the mist and the fog of conservatism to make the world a better place. utopian thinking was a kind of kick-start for that."

Ah, so in this case, echoing, unwittingly, Owen Hatherley ;)

But it's all good acerbic stuff. More from the New Statesman piece: 

"Why do you think we’ve got so many zombie movies? It's quite obvious – it's so obvious when you know it – it's because the dead won't go away. We are surrounded by the dead. Okay, The Stone Roses are touring live, but it’s a dead album. There’s a lot of music – like Kurt Cobain and all these people – they’re dead. The Rolling Stones; the music is dead, but it won’t go away. It's constantly replayed to us, and it is like zombie culture. So many things just go back and dig up the bloody grave. I'm sorry, but that's what Savages do."

"All the so-called radical art that was around in the last two Manchester festivals I've been at could have been done in 1919 by Marcel Duchamp. That’s not to say it’s bad, but to pretend that it is somehow a new radical vision of the world is wrong and it's reinforcing what's been around since the early days of modernism.... This idea that somehow art can point the way to the future is not what seems to be happening to me at the moment. Art is stuck in the past, just like music is stuck in the past, and journalism is stuck in the past."

"All these radicals – including myself – we think we are somewhere radical but actually we are deeply, deeply, deeply conservative at the moment. And what has a veneer of radicalism is actually possibly the most conservative force at the moment. By that I mean radical culture, art, music and a lot of radical journalism and radical politics – whilst none of it is bad – its mechanisms, and ways of seeing the world are borrowed from the past and its stuck in the past. It’s stuck with a nostalgia for a radicalism of the past and that’s not the radicalism that’s necessary"
 "It’s quite exciting because you know it can't go on like this. Something is going to come along"

this wasn't tomorrow #2

(via DJ Food)

this wasn't tomorrow #1