retrotalk 2023 - the commemorative churn / retromAInia

From a little while ago, a piece at the Guardian by Shaad D'Souza that notes the shrinking of the turnaround time for commemoration - a trend for 5 year anniversary reissues and repackagings. 

"Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs.

It’s in keeping with a frantically shortening nostalgia cycle that’s seen frenzied media coverage of supposed emo and “indie sleaze” revivals and music publications churning out cheap anniversary content – although these repressings seemingly offer little to the consumer other than a coloured disc. But Hannah Carlen and Ali Murphy – marketing directors for heavy-hitting indie conglomerate Secretly Group, which released Bridgers’ album – insist that fifth anniversary pressings allow artists to “give new fans something, and say ‘you’re welcome here too – you don’t have to be a day one fan’,” says Carlen.".... 

"The timeline of a record has changed so drastically,” says Ali Murphy. “Twenty years used to be the span of time in which people were celebrating a record, and now it’s got so much shorter, not only due to the quickness of everything coming out.”

C.f. my earlier post that detected an intensification of the commemorative churn with odd-number anniversaries of significant releases or events, and the odd habit of wishing dead icons or cult figures a happy birthday.

Another Guardian piece from a little while back (by Rich Pelley) looks at how a band of wannabes got AI to concoct a simulacrum of Liam Gallagher's vocals to front their own Fauxasis tuneage. "We got bored waiting for Oasis to reform" the culprits say - so they created something even more boring and redundant than Oasis actually reforming. 

“We’ve brought a band back from the dead!” says one of the band. “And I think that’s something we’ll see a lot more of.”

This is the future - mind-blowing technology being used to do mundane / inane  things.

Another AI phenom - AI-assisted upmixing - a 2023 clarification of "Sister Ray"

The Science of Ghosts

 

Hantologie...

Two weeks ago I was in Taipei for a terrifically stimulating conference titled A Future Slowly Cancelled, mounted by the Taiwanese arts organisation C-LAB. Most of the papers touched upon Mark Fisher's work and notions like lost futures, hauntology, acid communism, etc (including my own keynote speech).

The night before the conference proper kicked off, there was a showing of a 1983 film that amazingly (I ought to have my Hauntological Association membership revoked!) I had never heard of: Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance.  And knock me down with a feather, who should pop up on screen, in a sort of acting role (playing himself), but ol' Jacques Derrida. It's 1983 but he's already talking the kind of ghost talk that would lead to Spectres of Marx, published a full decade later. 

Quick as a flash, I start taking phone pix of Derrida talking about ghosts -  the bright idea occurs to me that I can drop a few of these into the Google slide-show of my lecture just at the points where concepts like mal d'archive and hauntology feature. So it'll be the re-apparition of Derrida on the very same screen he'd appeared on the night before, mediated by the sort of tele-mediamatic technology of the digital era that JD alludes to  in Archive Fever (albeit glancingly so). Levels of image degradation  multiplied: faded made-for-TV video, shakily snapped on a mobile phone from a hasty distance, uploaded to Google, then reprojected in the lecture hall via my Chromebook. A ghost of a ghost of a ghost (of an actual ghost - a man no longer living). As academic wisecracks go, this ought to bring the house down.  (Well, in the event, not quite... )

Here's another scene with Derrida and the "heroine" in it (she's his student, but she... ) 

Jacques looks very debonair and dashing with his plume of fair hair. 

Now what is even more bizarre is that - although they don't share the screen at any moment - another major role in Ghost Dance is played by the young Robbie Coltrane.  Who could have dreamed it - Monsieur Archive Fever and the future-Hagrid, in the same Channel 4-funded art movie.

There's an odd sequence at the end where there's a kind of ghosting of images - the faces of Derrida and other characters appear on a seaside ridge of rock (ever so slightly redolent of the ending - or one of the endings, there are different versions, I'm talking about the TV version - of Videodrome).

Pascale Ogier - tragically soon to be a ghost (she died in 1984 aged only 26, of a heart attack)

 

Here's the whole film for the watching - a poignant flashback to the days when Channel 4 did adventurous and experimental programming. Lost futures, eh? 

There's some wanky overwrought bits, but many striking sequences and it's well worth a view, I'd say. Part of the slim corpus of hauntological cinema. 

Happy Deathday

 Aspects of retromaniacal culture seem to wax and wane (my overall feeling is that the R-thing is prominent but not quite as dominant as when the book was writ) but one phenom that seems to have gone into overdrive recently is the commemorative churn.

Two new syndromes I've noticed:

Odd-number anniversaries

 On Facebook and Twitter and probably the other social media that I don't frequent, it is becoming increasingly common to have people announcing or observing that is the 47th birthday of such-and-such a record, or that it's 23 years since a certain event. So not the usual number-ending-in-zero demarcations of elapsed time, or even the half-decade approach (25 years since, 45 years since), now we are getting these arbitrary, untidy anniversaries.  

Update 3/24 - slipped my mind that the previous post was spurred by a Robyn Hitchcock tribute to Syd Barrett on his 77th birthday! Which also fits the next category.... 

Birthdays of the deceased

This seems like an odd development (would you celebrate the birthday of a deceased person in your family or friend circle? Maybe you would, I don't know). But certainly, it feels somewhat.... extraneous to commemorate the birthday of some famous or notable person who's no longer around to bask in the celebratory appreciation. 

I feel like I've also seen a few deathdays being marked, so maybe that is creeping in. 

With a lot of this commemorative churn - and other retro material that is posted or circulated -  I don't think it's necessarily a product of nostalgia or aging demographic cohorts liking to re-mark the significant persons / artifacts / events of their pop consumer life... I mean that is a factor, but it's also a simple function of the churn of social media: the constant need for new material, for "news" (which in thise case is really "olds"). Even in as  busy a time as this (overloaded, over-observed, over-commented) and with as globally plugged-in a mediascape as ours, the present simply doesn't generate enough noteworthy material to keep everybody a-clicking and a-scrolling. 

It's also very easy to do. All it takes to commemorate something is a video clip or an album cover or an old photo, dash off a quick thought or not even that, just simply observe the fact that it's X number of years since ____ 

Then there's the endless lists of favorite movies and records (done by publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, but also individuals and fan groups)  Like those challenges that circulate (1000 Records That Meant A Lot To You etc) or the self-surveys  (First Gig, Last Gig, Best Gig, Worst Gig  etc). Again, there is the simple content-generation aspect. But there's also an impulse to  sort through / tie together /  make sense of one's life in loving music / film / books.  Winnow down to the essentials and peaks. Create a  map of a journey through taste;  a consumer-biography.  I can't help sensing a morbid impulse lurking beneath this - almost like getting one's affairs in order in readiness for death. 

But I'm certainly not immune to this impulse -  indeed I'm something of a habitual and compulsive ranker, a list-o-maniac. 

"I may well have identity issues" (Retro with Attitude 2)

Penned by Robyn Hitchcock recently as tribute to Syd Barrett on his 77th birthday, the text below is a remarkably eloquent and candid bit of writing - an exorcism of indebtedness. While I'm unlikely to get around to giving RH's urrrv another go, it gives me an angle on how it might be approached with more sympathy and generosity. Simply put, some artists are so towering and imposing that their impact on subsequent artists still in their formative stage is "all I want to be is exactly this".  It's as though the nascent artistic self goes into shock; the anxiety-of-influence that usually fights back against the inspirational influx is paralysed. The sui generis ancestor becomes a genre: an individual personality and imagination transformed into a learnable craft, potentially the dedicated work of a lifetime. But although exact replication is possible (Shakin' Stevens as professional Elvis impersonator), in the better case scenario, originality seeps out almost despite the imitative intent: the secondary artist can't actually live the life of their role model, they necessarily have their own experience, desires, as well as interactions with other musicians, etc.  History doesn't repeat. 

Syd Barrett: The Vanishing

Thoughts on his 77th birthday…

If Bob Dylan is the most scrutinized musician of our times, Syd Barrett must be one of the most pursued. Almost as soon as he’d slipped off the radar, in the dismal wasteland of February 1972, the dogs were in pursuit.

I was one of those dogs. You only had to listen to “The Face of Death” on the first Soft Boys EP to see how completely I’d marinaded myself in Syd Barrett. The song was not, as some assumed, about Syd himself, but another local character who haunted the streets of Cambridge with an expression of terminal hopelessness on a face which looked like it was upside down. The poor guy lived alone in a room full of milk bottles and apparently injected himself with insulin for his diabetes. Rumours travel fast in those small, cold byways. He walked  slowly, as if he’d been punched in the stomach, and he wore a leather jacket; I *think* his name was Arthur.

A few years previously, I even tried to call on Barrett himself, at his old family home on Hills Road. Thankfully he was out. But he was also no longer called Syd, it appeared. I stood on the doorstep pink with embarrassment, my stomach tight with dread - terrified of actually meeting this man who was rapidly becoming What I Wanted To Be - but the compulsion to see him was stronger than my anxieties. I rang the doorbell of the ample, suburban house and eventually a young student lodger answered. I explained my mission and she didn’t seem surprised:

“Oh, right - just a minute: Mrs B” she called up the stairs, “is Roger in?”

Who, I wondered, was Roger? I was about to explain that actually I was looking for Syd, when a calm lady with a faintly lizard-like aura and a print dress padded down the stairs towards me. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, either - pilgrims were already flocking to that door, I guessed. This dame with iron-grey hair, looking like an aunt of my own mother, this must be Mrs Barrett…

“Ah, no, you’ve missed him, I’m afraid - he’s in London now. Was there anything you wanted to see Roger about?”

“Oh, er, I - no, I mean.” I was flustered and breathing fast: pleased that I’d summoned the nerve to intrude on them (hardcore fan that I was) but somewhat relieved that the object of my quest was not actually there: “I - er - he’s in London?”

“Yes.”

“Is he… um… is he making a record?”

“We-ll”, said Mrs B, looking up at me with her head tipped slightly to one side, “I believe he’s by way of making a record, yes…”

Enough was more than enough, and I fled. It turned out that Syd’s real name was Roger, and had been all along. 

The more I looked for news of Barrett, the less there was. Rumours had already made their way out of that house, of Syd (or Roger?) living in the cellar of his childhood home, playing Pink Floyd records at the wrong speed and laughing hysterically. But he’d also been seeing playing local jam sessions. He’d been seen eating chocolate cake. He’d been seen but he was gone.

As the 1970s wore on, it became more and more apparent that Syd Barrett really was no more. When he made his famous visit to his old band at Abbey Road studios just as they were finishing their tribute to him “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” nobody even recognized him for a while. Syd had been a lean, handsome and saturnine figure: Roger was fat, bald and had no eyebrows. Did he drop by that day just to make that point: that his old self was over?

He was no longer by way of making a record. Several attempts were made to lure him back into the recording studio, but when the tapes finally surfaced they turned out to be uninspired 12-bar noodlings: not even chaotic, just boring. Barrett clearly had no more songs in him. Nonetheless he continued to buy guitars until his royalties ran out. Part of him obviously wanted to believe he was still in the game, just as we, his fans, did.

Syd the musician was the flower that briefly blossomed on the cactus that was Roger, his host body. Minus Syd, that host body reverted to what he had been before, an art student. Roger returned to his mother’s house in Cambridge and spent the last 30 years or so of his life painting pictures. And then, apparently, burning them. 

I, meanwhile, had done my best to re-activate my vanished hero in my own Cambridge art-rock combo, the Soft Boys. Of course, you can only be Art-Rock posthumously - à la Velvet Underground or Roxy Music: during our career nobody knew how to categorize The Soft Boys - us included - so we were effectively unmarketable, and the music business soon gave up on us. We didn’t exactly help them sell us. One of our few definite markers was that I sounded very like Syd Barrett. We even recorded “Vegetable Man”, one of his rare unreleased songs. This magnetized the Barrett ghouls - and I’d long been one of those.

I may well have identity issues. Who are any of us if we examine ourselves from close up enough? Take somebody who no longer wants to exist (Barrett), and then add somebody who would rather be someone else (me) and…you get the picture. All I know is that if I like a kind of music I try to echo it, as closely as I can. Whether I absorb my influences or simply continue to echo them isn’t really for me to say. I write and play the music that I want to hear. Sometimes I do feel like the creature in the John Carpenter movie The Thing: that I’m just an amalgam of everything I’ve absorbed. Someone described me once as the Peter Sellers of rock: I’ve had worse compliments…

"Roger Barrett, whoever he was, became a blank canvas onto which his admirers could project their fantasies. It became more about them, and less about him. He continued to live on a suburban backstreet, looking as nondescript as possible. His address had long ago been trumpeted on the Barrett grapevine, some of whom persisted in staking him out on his way to the shops or cycling around town. They were still looking for Syd, or traces of him. I’ve seen footage of what might or might not be Roger Barrett, in a string vest on a cloudy afternoon. I was based in Cambridge till the early 1980s and may have passed him a dozen times in the town centre - I would never have known. 

"In the end, it’s the gap between who you are and who your admirers want you to be. You encourage them to think you’re something you’re not because - oh, boy: wouldn’t it be fabulous if you really were it? And in reality you’re just a lump of aging flesh shuffling along on a dreary avenue. One psychotic Beatles fan chose to rob the world of John Lennon because he felt that John was no longer whom that fan had imagined him to be. So it goes."

As an artist, I know that the best part of me is my art. I’m truly grateful for the music Syd left us, and I’m truly grateful that I never ran into Roger. 

RH, January 6 2023

"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.