+ bonus Croatian concrete
Sunday, April 5, 2015
"Will the Web Kill Nostalgia?"
A piece by Paul Hiebert at Pacific Standard asks "Will the Web Kill Nostalgia?":
"2015, sometimes it seems as though our not-so-distant pop-culture past is just as prevalent as our pop-culture present. In the movie world, for example, producers are currently developing new live-action films based on the animated adventures of '80s fixtures He-Man and Jem and the Holograms. .... Then there’s Throwback Thursdays and Flashback Fridays, the weekly reminiscing fests that involve thousands, if not millions, of people sharing bittersweet memories across social media....
Nostalgia is everywhere. Childhood merchandise, music, and music videos are archived and readily accessible on sites such as eBay, Spotify, and YouTube.....
But here’s the thing: For nostalgia to work, the objects that evoke it have to go away for a while, or at least be beyond reach. There must be distance. With the Internet, smartphones, and a 24-hour news cycle, however, everything from the recent past is relentlessly present. There's simply too little to long for if it's always available. If we take nostalgia to strictly mean a wistful longing for, or melancholic memory of, someone's past personal experiences (as opposed to, say, someone alive today yearning to live at the height of the Roman Empire), it seems conceivable, then, that for coming generations the feeling of nostalgia might eventually disappear—not due to over-exposure or diminished effect, but because of its inability to form in the first place."
"2015, sometimes it seems as though our not-so-distant pop-culture past is just as prevalent as our pop-culture present. In the movie world, for example, producers are currently developing new live-action films based on the animated adventures of '80s fixtures He-Man and Jem and the Holograms. .... Then there’s Throwback Thursdays and Flashback Fridays, the weekly reminiscing fests that involve thousands, if not millions, of people sharing bittersweet memories across social media....
Nostalgia is everywhere. Childhood merchandise, music, and music videos are archived and readily accessible on sites such as eBay, Spotify, and YouTube.....
But here’s the thing: For nostalgia to work, the objects that evoke it have to go away for a while, or at least be beyond reach. There must be distance. With the Internet, smartphones, and a 24-hour news cycle, however, everything from the recent past is relentlessly present. There's simply too little to long for if it's always available. If we take nostalgia to strictly mean a wistful longing for, or melancholic memory of, someone's past personal experiences (as opposed to, say, someone alive today yearning to live at the height of the Roman Empire), it seems conceivable, then, that for coming generations the feeling of nostalgia might eventually disappear—not due to over-exposure or diminished effect, but because of its inability to form in the first place."
1985, the year of doublethink
An example of "old becomes new", a/k/a fashion doublethink infiltrating rock discourse:
"Nobody was looking at anything pre-1977... The first time I noticed somebody doing that was when we first went up to Seattle and saw Green River. I realized that there were people up there making reference to music that pre-dated punk, which was such a radical thing to do at the time" - Thurston Moore, talking to Punk Planet.
So Green River - Pacific North West proto-grungesters who contained future members of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam - get the nod from Sonic Youth's mainman for being ahead-of-their-time in being behind-of-their-time. The first ones to dare to go back before the cut-off point of 1977.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
Now, obviously, someone like Moore is not going to big up a group like The Cult, who were harking back to Led Zeppelin and hairy hoary pre-punk heaviness on 1985's Love, possibly earlier with Dreamtime, which I've not heard.
Still, I'm not sure if this is completely true even in the parochial way Moore meant "nobody" - ie. nobody within the post-hardcore noisy-gtr world of bands who might get reviewed in Forced Exposure.
After all, Meat Puppets had already been reactivating aspects of Grateful Dead and Neil Young on II and Up On the Sun... Black Flag had started to get Sabbath-dirgy and stoner-burnout vibe with My War. Husker Du verge on Mahavishnu zones of foaming abstraction on "Reoccurring Dreams" on 1984's Zen Arcade. I think there are a few other examples too.
Well, there's also Sonic Youth's own "Death Valley 69", released late 1984, although that is more a case of late Sixties iconography than a musical influence.
Nonetheless, 1985 - the year of "Swallow My Pride", off Come On Down E.P. - does seem right in terms of being the pivotal year in terms of when it all goes in reverse. When indie-rock / alt-rock comes to mean non-contemporary. When post-punk principles cease to apply (albeit having a half-life in areas like industrial and EBM).
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
Of course, what Moore really means is not just pre-1977 - more precisely, he's talking about pre-1977 but also post-1967. Green River, he is asserting, were the first to go into the off-limits late Sixties and first-half Seventies.
Because of course prior to '85 there'd been all manner of indie groups ripping off The Byrds, The Velvets, Love.... there'd been the garage punk revival.... lots of Sixties-pasticherie from Hitchcock to the Paisley Underground.
No, it's the punk-decreed 1968-1975 Wasteland that Green River are inching into.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
And certainly 1985 was when I personally really started to assimilate that kind of double-think into my own evaluative mechanism, the "old is now new" switch.... within a few years I'd be praising, say, Walking Seeds for sounding like Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly, or Saint Vitus for cloning Sabbath brilliantly. Making deities of Butthole Surfers, rather than prosecuting them for being rock parodists (an equally tenable viewpoint).
And from 1985 roughly onwards, you might say that this is nearly all that Forced Exposure is about.... praising new underground groups for their resemblances to or reactivation of things prior to the 1977 cut-off.
That, and Albini style liberal-baiting.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Nobody was looking at anything pre-1977... The first time I noticed somebody doing that was when we first went up to Seattle and saw Green River. I realized that there were people up there making reference to music that pre-dated punk, which was such a radical thing to do at the time" - Thurston Moore, talking to Punk Planet.
So Green River - Pacific North West proto-grungesters who contained future members of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam - get the nod from Sonic Youth's mainman for being ahead-of-their-time in being behind-of-their-time. The first ones to dare to go back before the cut-off point of 1977.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
Now, obviously, someone like Moore is not going to big up a group like The Cult, who were harking back to Led Zeppelin and hairy hoary pre-punk heaviness on 1985's Love, possibly earlier with Dreamtime, which I've not heard.
Still, I'm not sure if this is completely true even in the parochial way Moore meant "nobody" - ie. nobody within the post-hardcore noisy-gtr world of bands who might get reviewed in Forced Exposure.
After all, Meat Puppets had already been reactivating aspects of Grateful Dead and Neil Young on II and Up On the Sun... Black Flag had started to get Sabbath-dirgy and stoner-burnout vibe with My War. Husker Du verge on Mahavishnu zones of foaming abstraction on "Reoccurring Dreams" on 1984's Zen Arcade. I think there are a few other examples too.
Well, there's also Sonic Youth's own "Death Valley 69", released late 1984, although that is more a case of late Sixties iconography than a musical influence.
Nonetheless, 1985 - the year of "Swallow My Pride", off Come On Down E.P. - does seem right in terms of being the pivotal year in terms of when it all goes in reverse. When indie-rock / alt-rock comes to mean non-contemporary. When post-punk principles cease to apply (albeit having a half-life in areas like industrial and EBM).
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
Of course, what Moore really means is not just pre-1977 - more precisely, he's talking about pre-1977 but also post-1967. Green River, he is asserting, were the first to go into the off-limits late Sixties and first-half Seventies.
Because of course prior to '85 there'd been all manner of indie groups ripping off The Byrds, The Velvets, Love.... there'd been the garage punk revival.... lots of Sixties-pasticherie from Hitchcock to the Paisley Underground.
No, it's the punk-decreed 1968-1975 Wasteland that Green River are inching into.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
And certainly 1985 was when I personally really started to assimilate that kind of double-think into my own evaluative mechanism, the "old is now new" switch.... within a few years I'd be praising, say, Walking Seeds for sounding like Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly, or Saint Vitus for cloning Sabbath brilliantly. Making deities of Butthole Surfers, rather than prosecuting them for being rock parodists (an equally tenable viewpoint).
And from 1985 roughly onwards, you might say that this is nearly all that Forced Exposure is about.... praising new underground groups for their resemblances to or reactivation of things prior to the 1977 cut-off.
That, and Albini style liberal-baiting.
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
"Such a radical thing to do at that time"
Thursday, April 2, 2015
"a 70s revival seen through the prism of the 90s revival .... the latest example of a revival spiral "
"After seasons of squeaky-clean minimalism, retro is unequivocally back in fashion," asserts Lauren Cochrane in The Guardian. And she says Pulp are the big influence.
"Pulp are a band with a look. Throughout the 90s, the six members dressed like it was the 70s. They wore enough secondhand spoils to stock a branch of Oxfam – Jarvis Cocker in his now trademark 70s tailoring and NHS specs, sole female member Candida Doyle in her skinny-rib stripy jumpers, hotpants and ankle boots.
"Twenty years after the release of Common People – a No 2 hit in 1995 – the Pulp look is having a moment again. Fashion is looking at the 70s, but not the glamour and gloss of disco. The look now is less the actual 70s, and more the decade seen through the prism of the 90s revival – with the good bits already selected. The video for Common People is this idea in action – the flashing nightclub floor with boys in secondhand suits and girls in lycra and flicked hair. And then there’s the sleeve of Different Class. With its borders and old-family-photograph filter, it predates the Instagram aesthetic by 15 years.
"After seasons of squeaky-clean minimalism, retro is unequivocally back in fashion. Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton shows so far have centred around a sort of late 60s, early 70s uniform of leather jackets, A-line skirts and ankle boots – not that different to what scenester Jo Skinny wears in the Disco 2000 video. Prada’s spring/summer men’s collection was the Pulp look all over: trousers with piping, blazers, bobbly jumpers and candy-striped shirts that looked a bit airline uniform. There were even Jesus sandals.
Cochrane almost immediately dials it back: "let’s not exaggerate this. Pulp’s style influence isn’t overt – I don’t imagine pictures of Jarvis et al are on moodboards at these mega-brands – but it is innate, particularly in a cohort of designers who came of age during the band’s mid-90s pomp. "
(Interesting biographical aside: "I was an extra in the video for Disco 2000. Blink and you’ll miss it, but my secondhand spoils are there to see: the velvet dress and diamante necklace were highly-prized charity shop finds, while my sister, also in the video, is wearing our mum’s leopardprint coat.")
"You couldn’t exactly replicate Pulp’s look but you could make your own version. ... Of course, as with all club trends, fashion eventually cottoned on. It was christened geek chic and, by 1996, Prada’s spring/summer collection was all synthetics, pencil skirts and cardigans, and Plum Sykes was writing about it in Vogue. At the time she reasoned the trend was happening because “when clothes get as chic and classic as they did last season the young and wannabe bohemian find them bland and lacking in individuality. Suddenly ordinariness and bad taste seem refreshing.” Jarvis, meanwhile, was dubbed “king of the nerds”.
And now the moment repeats: "The Pulp look means the 70s as seen by the 90s, tweaked by 2015. It’s the latest example of a revival spiral, but one that, like Pulp’s albums, we’ll no doubt be playing again and again."
So fashion, currently, is repeating its own copying / coopting of a style that in the late 90s was itself a skewiff repeating of the 70s.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Starting as early as the 1970s, fashion journalism pioneered a kind of double-think * that later on would become second-nature in rock criticism over the course of last few decades, which is the idea that the old becomes new, when enough time has elapsed. Inevitably once you've made that move, you open up the possibility of a total collapse of linear / teleological time into an endlessly recursive and involuted pretzel of repetitions of repetitions, reflections of reflections, echoes of echoes, homages to homages. "A revival spiral" as Cochrane niftily puts it (and a line I might well find myself purloining, just like a top fashion designer, in the future)
* I use double-think to reference the way in 1984 history is constantly being rewritten, the records actually physically altered, every time Oceania switches allegiance between Eurasia to Eastasia, or vice versa - so that Oceania has always been at war with that particular empire, always been allied with the other empire. Party members have to revise their own internal archives, i.e. erase the memories in their heads.
Although vastly less sinister, the way fashion annuls the recently-cool as passe, and then anoints the slightly-less-recently passe as cool once again -- it's unsettling. But what's really unsettling is how the mechanism infiltrates one's own perceptions. E.g. the other week, put on a pair of trousers I hadn't worn in several years. Had them on for about 20 minutes and then I had to take them off and put something else on. It was almost physically impossible to keep wearing them - they looked so wrong, felt so bad. Yet only a handful of years ago, they were .... well, not the height of fashion (don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly with-it) but certainly something acceptable to wear in public. But now it was inconceivable that I could go outside in them. More than that, I was uncomfortable being encased in them even indoors, with no eyes observing. They looked wrong. Yet of course they had a great amount of use potential still latent, weren't anywhere close to being worn out. So even someone not very fashion-conscious like myself is affected by processes that occur subliminally, and that make the beautiful into the ugly after an interval of very little time. Or to put that in 1984 lingo, that transform style into unstyle.
Until it's time for unstyle to become style again.
So it's possible, if not inevitable, that those trousers's time will come again. While the trousers I put on to replace them, to feel "all right" again - they will certainly, sooner rather later, feel all wrong.
"Pulp are a band with a look. Throughout the 90s, the six members dressed like it was the 70s. They wore enough secondhand spoils to stock a branch of Oxfam – Jarvis Cocker in his now trademark 70s tailoring and NHS specs, sole female member Candida Doyle in her skinny-rib stripy jumpers, hotpants and ankle boots.
"Twenty years after the release of Common People – a No 2 hit in 1995 – the Pulp look is having a moment again. Fashion is looking at the 70s, but not the glamour and gloss of disco. The look now is less the actual 70s, and more the decade seen through the prism of the 90s revival – with the good bits already selected. The video for Common People is this idea in action – the flashing nightclub floor with boys in secondhand suits and girls in lycra and flicked hair. And then there’s the sleeve of Different Class. With its borders and old-family-photograph filter, it predates the Instagram aesthetic by 15 years.
"After seasons of squeaky-clean minimalism, retro is unequivocally back in fashion. Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton shows so far have centred around a sort of late 60s, early 70s uniform of leather jackets, A-line skirts and ankle boots – not that different to what scenester Jo Skinny wears in the Disco 2000 video. Prada’s spring/summer men’s collection was the Pulp look all over: trousers with piping, blazers, bobbly jumpers and candy-striped shirts that looked a bit airline uniform. There were even Jesus sandals.
Cochrane almost immediately dials it back: "let’s not exaggerate this. Pulp’s style influence isn’t overt – I don’t imagine pictures of Jarvis et al are on moodboards at these mega-brands – but it is innate, particularly in a cohort of designers who came of age during the band’s mid-90s pomp. "
(Interesting biographical aside: "I was an extra in the video for Disco 2000. Blink and you’ll miss it, but my secondhand spoils are there to see: the velvet dress and diamante necklace were highly-prized charity shop finds, while my sister, also in the video, is wearing our mum’s leopardprint coat.")
"You couldn’t exactly replicate Pulp’s look but you could make your own version. ... Of course, as with all club trends, fashion eventually cottoned on. It was christened geek chic and, by 1996, Prada’s spring/summer collection was all synthetics, pencil skirts and cardigans, and Plum Sykes was writing about it in Vogue. At the time she reasoned the trend was happening because “when clothes get as chic and classic as they did last season the young and wannabe bohemian find them bland and lacking in individuality. Suddenly ordinariness and bad taste seem refreshing.” Jarvis, meanwhile, was dubbed “king of the nerds”.
And now the moment repeats: "The Pulp look means the 70s as seen by the 90s, tweaked by 2015. It’s the latest example of a revival spiral, but one that, like Pulp’s albums, we’ll no doubt be playing again and again."
So fashion, currently, is repeating its own copying / coopting of a style that in the late 90s was itself a skewiff repeating of the 70s.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Starting as early as the 1970s, fashion journalism pioneered a kind of double-think * that later on would become second-nature in rock criticism over the course of last few decades, which is the idea that the old becomes new, when enough time has elapsed. Inevitably once you've made that move, you open up the possibility of a total collapse of linear / teleological time into an endlessly recursive and involuted pretzel of repetitions of repetitions, reflections of reflections, echoes of echoes, homages to homages. "A revival spiral" as Cochrane niftily puts it (and a line I might well find myself purloining, just like a top fashion designer, in the future)
* I use double-think to reference the way in 1984 history is constantly being rewritten, the records actually physically altered, every time Oceania switches allegiance between Eurasia to Eastasia, or vice versa - so that Oceania has always been at war with that particular empire, always been allied with the other empire. Party members have to revise their own internal archives, i.e. erase the memories in their heads.
Although vastly less sinister, the way fashion annuls the recently-cool as passe, and then anoints the slightly-less-recently passe as cool once again -- it's unsettling. But what's really unsettling is how the mechanism infiltrates one's own perceptions. E.g. the other week, put on a pair of trousers I hadn't worn in several years. Had them on for about 20 minutes and then I had to take them off and put something else on. It was almost physically impossible to keep wearing them - they looked so wrong, felt so bad. Yet only a handful of years ago, they were .... well, not the height of fashion (don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly with-it) but certainly something acceptable to wear in public. But now it was inconceivable that I could go outside in them. More than that, I was uncomfortable being encased in them even indoors, with no eyes observing. They looked wrong. Yet of course they had a great amount of use potential still latent, weren't anywhere close to being worn out. So even someone not very fashion-conscious like myself is affected by processes that occur subliminally, and that make the beautiful into the ugly after an interval of very little time. Or to put that in 1984 lingo, that transform style into unstyle.
Until it's time for unstyle to become style again.
So it's possible, if not inevitable, that those trousers's time will come again. While the trousers I put on to replace them, to feel "all right" again - they will certainly, sooner rather later, feel all wrong.
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