pre-echoes of Retromania #5 - "the nostalgia gap"

A piece by Tom Vanderbilt from The Baffler way back in December 1993, classified as a "salvo" and titled on the cover "Toward the Retro Apocalypse", but inside the magazine itself headlined "The Nostalgia Gap". He detects a malaise of '70s nostalgia among twentysomethings aka Gen X, whose "deeper insidiousness lies in the speed with which we arrived to this time of 1970s nostalgia, when it seems that only a few short years ago America was still in the twilight of its homage to the 1960s."

"....  Like some nightmare vision of Left Bank intellectuals gone awry, people coalesced in seventies preservation societies, adopting the trappings of some artistic vanguard (THE PAST EXISTS FOR OUR PLEASURE, their graffiti might read). They hashed out mythopoetical tales of the Brady trip to the Grand Canyon...  and played digitally remastered versions of “Midnight at the Oasis.” What is strange about this equation is that the people celebrating seventies nostalgia are for the most part early twentysomethings, whereas the sixties nostalgia was powered by early thirties Baby Boomers.... According to the historical precedent, the early twentysomethings should not be reminiscing about the 1970s, but the mid-to-late 1980s, when their formative tastes in music, film, and literature were being consolidated and they were blossoming into the much desired 18-24 demographic. And this should happen in the next few years. But why did we not wait? Why did we jump the nostalgia gun?...

"The answer seems to be that the speed of nostalgia has increased. We find ourselves in the strange condition of time sped up—a shrinking of the future to look back on the past. The rise of a global media network means that events, styles, trends, fashion and other sources of future nostalgia are disseminated instantly, and as each new trend is promoted and participated in, a previous one is made obsolete.

"....The speed of consumption has accelerated to the point where things that happened only a few years ago already seem laughably archaic, distant from memory and covered by a creeping nostalgia. ...

"There is some concern that with our increased nostalgia speed—a rush to remember—we will miss the 1980s in the blink of an eye, the decade reduced to some peeling billboard on a slick, open road to the halcyon days of the 1970s. Relax. In the New York Times “Styles” section, a kind of Weather Channel for predicting which way the winds of mainstream taste are blowing, a recent headline announced: “Barely Gone, 80’s are Back.” In the article, Village Voice columnist Michael Musto claims that “we’ve sped up to the point where we’re looking back to three years ago … everything’s happening faster in popular culture.” 

"Scenarios of the future, given a continuation of this speed in nostalgia, border on the absurd. We will look wistfully back to last week’s television...... The previous month’s Top 40 will appear in boxed-CD sets..." 

Vanderbilt muses upon the snake-eating-its-own-tail, ouruborus nature of revivalism... 

".... Would a future 1990s nostalgia take into account this decade’s 1970s and 1980s nostalgia, and then by extension the 1950s or 1960s nostalgia of those decades? Like Magritte’s La réproduction interdite, in which a man looks at a painting of himself looking at a painting of himself, stretching into eventual nothingness, a true nostalgia would envelop all previous nostalgias, a rather dizzying prospect indeed."

A difficulty with thinking these issues through is that you can get in a muddle by confusing personal biographic/generational nostalgia with the phenomenon of nostalgia for something you didn't live through (which falls into the domain of retro, whereas the painful personal kind of nostalgia doesn't necessarily - unless you start making music that sounds like the music of that lost golden age). The nostalgia-for-something-didn't-live through is disconnected from an individual's seasons-of-life rhythms (looking back that starts as soon as you've accumulated enough stuff to look back at).  And then there's actually a third set of rhythms, the fashion economy - here there can be recycling  that started much, much sooner than the normal generational rhythms of 20 years or whatever. That is a process that doesn't really have anything to do with nostalgia, in the sense of ache for a bygone time. Fashion recycling is based in the desperate hunger for something novel in comparison to what was only just a la mode.  

Only the first of these three forms of retrospection is ruly nostalgic - the second is actually more like discovery, things from the past that are new to you, the surprise of the charming specificity of the past,. And the third mode is just the senseless churn of trendiness, the inbuilt emptiness of the fashion economy. 

Vanderbilt does introduce this nuance, talking about "the strange sensation of “displaced nostalgia,” where one generation is nostalgic for the music and fashion of a period which passed before they were born?"

He also deploys a nifty, typically stern quote from Christopher Lasch: “Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present.”

Vanderbilt continues:

"....  more often than not what is romanticized is “the way we never were,” and history, the one thing that the media-constructed “twentysomething” generation honestly shares, is lost amidst the celebrating."

And notes:  

"The future of an artistic vanguard seems equally threatened. The notion of a radical “vanguard” has itself already become the stuff of memories, catalogued in so many retrospectives, the work of Constructivists and Situationists resigned to coffee mugs and calendars, their patron regimes long discredited." 

He seems to have read the recently published (well two years earlier) big fat tome by Fredric Jameson. 

But there was quite a bit of this sort of talk around then - that same season of '93, I wrote the record collection rock article in New York Times, indeed had roached similar concerns a few years earlier, while the emerging concept of post-rock was motivated in part as an alternative to the retrospective turn in alternative rock, a path forward. 

retrotalk2022 - streaming (dis)services

An article about streaming and the dominance of catalog sales  that appeared earlier this month in The New Inquiry. It's written by Jaime Brooksmarch, a musician who talks about catching the tail end of a golden moment of music blogging and online music-fan communities: 

".... Over the course of the decade that followed, so much changed that it’s difficult to know where to even begin talking about it. The file-sharing ecosystem was smashed to bits by cops and lawyers so many times that even the most dedicated archivists lost the will to keep rebuilding it. Smartphones brought most of the world online, transforming the internet from a fringe space that only occasionally surfaced into mainstream popular culture into what basically feels like the exact opposite of that. Most people settled on platforms like YouTube where copyright holders had exponentially more power to issue takedowns and generate ad revenue than they ever had in the file-sharing era. The major labels easily assumed control of the vinyl market, sidelining the independent labels that had been driving the resurgence of interest in the format throughout the 2000s decade. No one can get records pressed up quickly enough to sell them on tour anymore because every pressing plant in the world is booked to press up expanded reissues of albums by Toto and Journey."

The piece then addresses its major topic, which is the changes wrought by the Streamers, referencing a 2014 email by an executive called David Goldberg about music biz strategies addressed to the CEO of a massive music industry conglomerate. 

'“Music is becoming a purely digital product,” Goldberg’s email begins. He goes on to talk a lot about “catalog,” which is the word that the record business uses to describe music that was released more than eighteen months ago. “Catalog provides 50% of the revenue and 200% of the profits of recorded music. This has generally been the case for other recorded music companies when the analysis is correctly done. The correct analysis requires including reissues, live albums, [and] greatest hits releases in catalog.”'

Brooksmarch notes that in 2004, "catalog accounted for 35% of digital and physical sales in America. The vast majority of music being bought and sold back then was new music." 

That was two years before Spotify existed and back when lots of people bought MP3s and were still attached to the idea of owning music and collecting it, rather than renting and having a passing relationship with it. 

"Streaming turned out to be a great boon for the catalog business. In the pre-streaming music business, catalog had to compete for shelf space with new releases in record stores. When a new format like cassette tapes or CDs arrived, labels could squeeze dedicated listeners for revenue by encouraging them to re-buy their collections, but streaming was a complete paradigm shift. Streaming platforms have infinite shelf space. Every single recording the majors own the rights to is a potential source of revenue, regardless of whether or not it has recently been remastered, reissued, or featured in a film. On streaming, there’s nothing stopping an artist who has been dead for decades from outperforming working musicians living today. This is the future that Dave Goldberg was predicting in his strategy email. Infinite opportunities to monetize catalog, very little incentive to bother pushing anything else.

“Streaming revenues tend to be more heavily weighted to catalog,” he wrote. “Pandora and Spotify are probably 65% catalog under this definition.....  The catalog is also primarily generating this revenue off the ‘deep’ catalog that is at least 5 years old or older.”

Brooksmarch observes, grimly, that "today, catalog accounts for 75% of sales and streams. [i.e. more than twice what it was in 2004]  Only 25% of the music being bought or streamed today is “new,” potentially even less than that depending on how exactly “catalog” is defined now."

Goldberg in his strategy memo advises that because most of the moolah is coming from catalog, “new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money… " The gist of the idea that follows from this is that the new groups on a label gets consigned to what is effectively a kind of "internal indie label" within the major company - getting not much in the way of the typical old skool major label promo push, in other words." 

A particularly sharp and alarming observation from Brooksmarch is that early death seems to transform new artists into legacy artists: 

" A fairly startling number of young rap artists who signed to majors off the back of viral success already in progress were killed or incarcerated shortly afterwards. Pop Smoke, Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Juce WRLD, Bobby Shmurda. Posthumous releases by some of these artists were marketed more heavily by the label than anything the artist released while they were alive, which makes sense. In an industry that revolves around catalog, dying young is like graduating early to the part of the business that actually matters to the people running it."

Various solutions and utopian alternate paths forwards are outlined in the piece, which is well worth a proper read. 

sonic polyps

 

"To varying extents, each of these pieces also suggested a problem that electronic music now faces. Its sounds are either deliberately artificial or alterations of the familiar. In either case, electronic swells and sonic polyps, far from becoming abstract musical tools, tend to seem self-conscious, all too vulnerable to cliched imaginings. The basic electronic vocabulary has become inextricably associated with scores that suggest groundlessness or strange other worlds (as in science fiction, horror and nature films)...."

- Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 1992, reviewing League of Composers/ISCM concert tribute to the late Bulent Arel

Polyps! Ambiguous analogy - they can be beautiful coral thingies on the seabed OR potentially lethal tissue growths in the colon

"Groundlessness" is a good, evocative, hard-to-pin description of electronic abstraction

To the larger point, though ---

cf Mark Fisher on future-capture, the trammeling of the once-unknown by cliches, an encrustation of associations - 

"The problem is that the word ‘futuristic’ no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen.  In the 70s, ‘futuristic’ meant synthesizers. In the 80s, it meant sequencers and cut and paste montage. In the 90s, it meant the abstract digital sounds opened up by the sampler and its function such as timestretching. In each of these cases, there was a sense that, through sound, we were getting a small but powerful taste of a world that would be completely different from anything we had hitherto experienced. That’s why a film like Terminator, with its idea of the future  invading the present, was so crucial for 90s dance music. Now, insofar as ‘futuristic’ has any meaning, it is as a vague but fixed style, a bit like a typographical font. ‘Futuristic’ in music is something like ‘gothic’ in fonts. It points to an already existing set of associations. ‘Futuristic’ means something electronic, just as it did in the 60s and 70s." [my underline]

cf Phil Knight, commenting (earlier on this very blog, I think) 

"The Future always has that aura of thrilling trepidation... feeds the Spenglerian hunger for infinity.... The Future marks a further distancing from the natural world, from the tangible, and therefore takes us closer to our destiny, which we expect to be angelic, but know to be alienation. But, the ride to the future in music is not exponential - it just feels that way. The move from acoustic to electric to electronic suggests a teleological progression, but I can't see how you can get any more artificial than synthesized music. Once you are there, you have reached the peak of abstraction.”  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It is interesting that for the NY Times classical / avant-garde reviewer at the Bulent Arel elegy, electronic music was already in the rear-view mirror in 1992 - even as things like Rufige Cru's "Terminator" and a score of other techno-rave tunes / directions were reigniting a fresh future for electronic dance music.

A little less than a decade earlier, John Rockwell was already voicing a similar sentiment circa 1984- that electronic music, once clearly - and for many alarmingly - the future destiny of serious composition, had now slipped into the passé zone - and was now a backwater of serious music. 

"Only a few years ago, electronic music seemed ready to sweep all other music aside. Traditionalists worried nervously about music composed by machines, and predicted a dehumanizing Armageddon. Today, outside a few specialist enclaves, one hears very little about the subject. The odd loudspeaker still pops up at a contemporary-music concert, adding a bit of amplification, synthesized sound or filtering to live instrumentalists. But otherwise, along with their abandonment of serialism, composers seem to have forsaken electronically generated or reproduced sound, as well."

(from All American Music - the chapter on David Behrman, taken to represent a new direction of humanized electronic music - homemade, funky, miniaturized)

"Retrokultur-Experte"

Well I suppose I am, aren't I? And in that capacity I chatted with Ann-Kathrin Mittelstrass of German Public Radio for a program about retro trends of the present, the Nostalgie-Epidemie, etc, including the Beatles Get Back mega-doc (which I loved-loved and meant to write about here but then the moment passed). 

retrotalk2022#7 - indie sleaze and the revival spiral

Lauren Cochrane writes for The Face on indie sleaze and the revival spiral  - lots of good thoughts  in here and some interesting quotes from others

"We have become pack rats of our collective past.... We’re trapped in what might be called a Revival Spiral. It used to be that time and distance were allowed before present culture plundered...  But, in a world where images of the past are just a finger swipe away, all bets are off. We have over-plundered the ​’50s, ​’60s, ​’70s, ​’80s and ​’90s. Even fetishising Y2K is starting to look a bit tired.The solution? The very recent past. The era in the frame? The mid-to-late Noughties...."

"... the ​“Indie Sleaze” movement, the revival of a late-Noughties scene where torn band tees dominated, when American Apparel was a shop, not a scandal, when everyone stuck out their tongues and it was a badge of honour to be photographed by party snapper Mark Hunter, aka The Cobrasnake....  

".... While some of the current retro culture is anemoia – nostalgia for an era you didn’t live through... The Revival Spiral sees us leaning into a seemingly ever-hastening longing for the recent past. This is possibly because change is constant in digital culture, meaning we’re quickly nostalgic for eras that, on paper, we have only just left.

".... This nostalgic state of mind has been magnified and sped up for a generation who have lived through turbulent times: Trump, Brexit and (there it is) a global pandemic. Pre-2016 might only be seven years ago but, given those global spasms, it feels like a lifetime. To immerse yourself in that time is comforting...

".... Sarah Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Visual Culture at the University for the Creative Arts. As a researcher in nostalgia in fashion, she argues that the phenomenon is a direct result of the fact that we consume culture like we listen to podcasts: at 1.5x speed.

“The plethora of images and information we are exposed to means we simply cannot process what we’re experiencing,” she says. ​“For me, revival culture is gaining a sense of control over an ever-shifting cultural landscape and relocating oneself in the recent past in order to fully process the present. [It’s] a way of temporarily stopping time.”.... Lloyd says a solely digital life experience has an effect, too. ​“When growing up without an iPhone or social media is unimaginable, the relatively recent past seems like ancient history.”

Revival spiral - my term for that (or something close to that) is revival simultaneity, where we're caught in the cross-fire of multiple revivals and re-revivals going on at the same time. 

Interestingly Cochrane starts the piece referencing a 1983 piece in The Face piece by Jon Savage, "The Age of Plunder" - about the rise of pomo pop - which intensifies the feeling of recursion and spiraling echoes of echoes of echoes...    as retro intensifies and infolds, so does the commentary on it, the retro-discourse