the semiotics of old school

Nice piece from Lauren Cochrane at The Guardian  - with a few quotes from me - exploring the slippery and increasingly multivalent concept of "old school"  a/k/a "old skool" as it figures in music and fashion, referring to different lost golden ages and bygone moments of virgin emergence - early hip hop, hardcore rave, and so forth.

the perils of retro-pastiche, part 234

Or, "it's a thin line between love and theft"

"... The songwriting credits for Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk have been expanded. It is now attributed to 11 different writers. The new credits have been given to the writers of the Gap Band’s Oops Up Side Your Head: group members Ronnie Wilson, Charles Wilson and Robert Wilson, plus producers Rudolph Taylor and Lonnie Simmons. They join the six writers already credited: Ronson, singer Bruno Mars, producers Jeff Bhasker and Philip Lawrence, plus Nicholas Williams (Trinidad James) and Devon Gallaspy, who received credits for the use of a sample of Trinidad James’s All Gold Everything." (The Guardian) 

11 writers! A sort of coalition of "inspiration"

"The credits followed a claim by the publisher Minder Music, reports Billboard. The claim, rather than being sent to Ronson’s label or publisher, was filed with YouTube’s content management system in February. The Oops writers are believed to be taking a 17% share of the song."

I thought the Marvin Gaye estate was trying it on big-time re. "Blurred Lines" - different melody, you can't copyright a vibe -  but can't help feeling  "good for the Gap boys" since Ronson's whole career is recycling-based, Bruno really doesn't need the money (and is also a serial recycler and retro-nuevo "renovator"), and the Gap Band deserve more.... everything, really.   Love, respect, collective-memory-share, and $$$$. If not inventors, they were prime exponents of the Downstroke Snare-Thwack. Started many, many a party. And had a great look. 

Earlier thoughts on "Uptown Funk"

Deze morgen was

(via Archaic Inventions - more information on this 1957 seven inch single here )

more Henk tomorrowness

this was tomorrow (the beer of the future)

(via Jody Beth Rosen)

post-identity pop

"If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you?" asks Nick Hornby, in a short essay at Billboard from last month that is ostensibly about what would the sequel to High Fidelity be - but really about the stubborn resurgence / persistence of record shops and solid-form music commodities (including vinyl) and what that says about how people engage with music.

"One of the great benefits of digital consumption is that it is democratic: In cyberspace, there's nobody to judge you [i.e. no snobby sneery record store assistants a la High Fidelity] .  And yet part of the point of culture is that it allows us to demonstrate our tastes publicly -- it helps us find our tribe... The arts are the most elaborate and most precise social network ever invented, but if it's going to work properly, you have to get out of the house sometimes and show who you are and what you love. You have to go to shows and galleries and bookstores, you have to ask for what you want out loud. And this expression of taste must involve an impulse that, at its heart, is anti-democratic: Somewhere you have to believe that what you like is better than what all those other losers like. So maybe we need those record-store guys; maybe the reason so many of them are still around is that, without them, the whole system grinds to a halt. If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you?"

What Hornby is touching on here is the breakdown of the role music used to have in identity formation...

This could be individual / solipsistic, or it could be tribal (us versus them), but it was reliant on the either/or distinction  - the good/bad, urgent/trivial distinction.  It was divisive - creating a gulf between  me / not-me, us / not-us

But with the glut of options, the overabundance of choices - with decisions carrying no weight financially or existentially - - first fanaticism goes, then any kind of intense cathexis. Ultimately you're processing things too fast to feel them. 

As to the "anti-democratic" impulse in public displays of taste and allegiance...  One of my never-attempted projects, during the tail-end of the Poptimism Wars, was to see if I could come up with a defence of the idea of cultural snobbery. 

This mortal dread of being a snob, of making a critical utterance that could be deemed as snobbish, was leading, as far as I could see, to a paralysis of judgement altogether. People (I mean critics mainly, but some critic-minded civilians) got caught up in this bizarre competition to find things to not-dismiss, not-demean. It's still going on, a sort of frantic note of "what are we missing? what are we failing to cover?".  It became a kind of inverted Bourdieu-an cultural capital, this ostentatious display of non-elitism.  But there was an idealistic element, for sure, a "wanting to be good".  

The energy behind this ever-more-inclusive overcompensation for the supposed slights of rockism seemed... nothing really to do with music - with taste or passsion, or how any real-world individual engages with music. It had a quality of impersonal conscientiousness, an aspiration to virtue that felt faintly bureaucratic, done on behalf of some Big Other.  Like a policy that had been formulated by some public body for best practice.