"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. 

the hauntological artist

Guardian Long Read by Charlotte Higgins - "How Mark Leckey became the artist of the YouTube generation"

.....

"When, in January, Leckey gave a talk to a rapt group of art students at the Slade School of Art in London, he said: “This is the best time to be an artist and making work. It is a magical time – I mean it is unanchored and fantastical. It is terrifying and exciting. The access that you have to all points of history, through the internet, is a kind of haunting. The internet is full of ghosts. We don’t know what is substantial and what is not.”

.....

on his early formative days as artist in late 90s:

 “At that time one of his demons was nostalgia,” said [Martin] McGeown [of Cabinet gallery]. “It haunted him as a kind of condition, a sickness. He was trying to rid himself of it, but also re-experience it.” McGeown was certain these ideas and emotions would soon find some kind of expression. He said: “I didn’t care what it was – whether a film, a piece of music, a painting, a drawing. I didn’t need to know and it wasn’t necessary to ask.” This effort – to re-experience feelings and things that had been lost, or never really possessed – would come to define Leckey’s work."

......

on Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

"It consisted of edited-together footage of dancers in nightclubs that, on the one hand, charted a history from 1970s northern soul to 1990s acid house; and, on the other, conveyed the pulsing, ecstatic, out-of-mind glory of the dancefloor in a churning, heady rush. The work is perfumed with wistfulness and tinged with ghostliness. It speaks of an evanescent youth: the time codes on the amateur video footage tick away ruthlessly, as eloquent a memento mori as the skull in the corner of a Holbein. The title, Leckey said, was about the notion that “something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be taken by a group of people and made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming.” He made it in a kind of ecstatic fugue. “I cried while I was making it. I make this stuff to feel joy and melancholy and sweet-sadness.”...

"Fiorucci changed the game. In its sampling – and deeply skilful editing – of found film sequences, it anticipated the YouTube generation’s easy manipulation of digital sources. It activated a painful yearning for a recent past just out of reach, rendered almost touchable by the tantalising immediacy of the footage. It expressed a delight in forms of expression that had rarely before been the material of “high” art. And it portrayed subjects – working-class, mostly white, mostly male teenagers – rarely accorded dignity and grace in the wider culture. At the same time, in an art world that could often seem wry, or ironic, or knowing, Fiorucci was different: disarmingly sincere"

....

on the idea that the significant artists are those operating at time of technological rupture who seize the possibilities of the new while emotionally rooted in the previous phase of techne-culture

"He had a kind of heightened awareness of the generation in which he stood – those whose adult experience was on the junction of the pre- and post-internet eras. As [Polly] Staple put it, Leckey could remember “the days when you had to warm up the television” but he also swam with sure strokes in the waters of the web.

"Through this acute consciousness of the historical turning-point between the analogue and digital eras, he had indicated a route to a generation of younger artists: among them Ed Atkins, as well as figures such as James Richards (who was himself nominated for the 2014 Turner prize), Helen Marten and Camille Henrot. These younger artists had, in different ways, developed ideas about the nature of the image in the internet age; about the way that pop culture could invade their art; but perhaps most of all, about having the confidence to make work that was not wry, or ironic, but raw in its emotional intent."

.....

On his most recent work On Pleasure Bent:

"It was a memoir, the story of his life.... He had had the idea for it one late night, drunk, when he had been messing around on YouTube and had come across a bootleg recording of a concert he had seen in 1979 at Eric’s, a club in Liverpool. He’d gone there to see Swell Maps; Joy Division were playing, too, so he saw them by accident. What Leckey had considered a significant but essentially lost and private episode was all of a sudden there, at his fingertips. He realised that he could reconstruct his own history from its traces: from music, from film, from adverts. These scattered shards, which once would have been impossible to reassemble and amass, had now migrated on to the internet as if gathered by an irresistible centripetal force..... For another section of the film he was reassembling the experience of being at the Joy Division concert; it was a process of collage, he said. He was mosaicing together hundreds of sounds and images. “I’ll go through hundreds of pieces of footage. Getting towards evoking something that feels close to that experience, or something that resonates with it.” He paused. And yet, he said, “These words are wrong.” He never felt that what he was creating was authentic, was true to the lived experience."

..........

Yes indeed, I do feel I screwed up by not working Leckey and Fiorucci into Retromania...  Would have fit so perfectly in the chapter on Hauntology, or perhaps the various parts that explore rave nostalgia, or even next to the YouTube data-sea pearl-divers like Oneohtrix/Chuck Person/Sunsetcorp....   

Here's my thoughts on Fiorucci for the Serpentine Gallery retrospective.

black liberation atemporal maximalism

"The new album is a thicket of inspirational, historical references; you’ll find critical race theory, George Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Richard Pryor, Exodus 14, respectability politics and six separate levels of meta-analysis about the meaning of Lamar’s success and messiah status. It seems almost designed for parsing in a college classroom.... 

"Lamar, himself, might not quite know what he has created. There is a hoarder’s mania to this album – he seems to have gathered every idea and influence he could find without too much care for what all that clutter reveals, knowing only that there is something beautiful in it. When he homes in on what exactly that is, hip-hop will have another classic. Until then, we will have to be satisfied with watching him make an exciting but still-unfinished transition"

- Jay Caspian Kang, "Notes on the Hip-Hop Messiah", New York Times magazine.


Of course, there's a big difference between the atemporal maximalist archivalism of Kendrick Lamar and the atemporal maximalist archivalism of, say, Ariel Pink. The difference is that the Lamar album is about stuff that actually matters, that couldn't be more urgent or present-attuned. (In that sense not atemporal but totally timely). Whereas Pink and most other white history-bingers serve up banquets of perfect inconsequence.  "Retrolicious", but not nutritious, not soul food.   

(This ability to escape into havens of the jumbled-up past = white privilege? Well, it's a thought). 

A negative angle on the maximalist excess of To Pimp A Butterfly from Passion of the Weiss. Not sure I agree but a sharply argued take-down: 

"Kendrick parrots back all his influences, but there’s no synthesis. He’s excessively complicating sub-genres that worked before — songs that felt vital because of their simplicity and directness." 


Listening the first time I immediately thought of the analogue maximalism of D'Angelo's Black Messiah, an album I was surprised to find myself digging quite a bit, despite being ideologically averse to neo-soul as a proposition. (I was intrigued by a comment of David Toop - who mentioned not being able to remember anything about Black Messiah afterwards because it's so dense, while being wholly absorbed while actually listening to it, on account of its "brilliance of execution").

But To Pimp piles it on even further by being both analogue maximalist and digital maximalist at the same time (all the Sa Ra, Fly Lo element)....

Another thing that struck me instantly is how "this kind of thing" is a genre now: it's a record in the tradition of  Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), Common's Electric Circus, The Roots Phrenology, Outkast's Aquemini and Stankonia  .... the sprawling, influence-omnivorous, conscious and/or politically charged aspiring-Masterpiece that evokes, draws on, and honors the Seventies run of musically ambitious, lyrically radical black albums from Sly, Gaye, Wonder, P-funk, Isleys, Mayfield, Last Poets, Scott-Heron, Miles et al. 

^^^^^^^^^^^

Another retromaniacal / hauntological aspect to To Pimp A Butterfly, the ghost "interview" with Tupac. Kang, again:  

"At the end of “Mortal Man,” Lamar finally steps out of his dense thicket of references for a conversation between himself and Tupac. (Reviving Tupac has become its own odd industry in recent years. This exhumation was done by taking audio of an interview Tupac gave two years before his death in 1996 and splicing it together with Lamar’s new interjections.) "


'Tis the season for awkward, honorable, likeably earnest if not-fully-realised attempts to repoliticise music - i.e. Jam City's Dream A Garden. 

STOP PRESS:  very interesting (albeit, as he freely admits, unfinished post by Aaron at Airport Through The Trees, titled "The Aesthetics of Politics", and grappling with issues related to To Pimp A Butterfly and Dream A Garden. 

It contains the line of the year, when addressing the futuristic form versus regressive lyric-content mis-match that you get with Mustard style ratchet rap and modern R&B -  

"It just seemed like: even if we put a colony on Mars, there'd be nothing to do there but get drunk and try and meet promiscuous women at clubs."

which serves as set-up to the important point:

"the highest expression of Capitalist Realism is the concession of the contemporary, the new, the modern, and, especially the future, to Capitalism"

recursive disco

Is it too soon to be nostalgic about Random Access Memories and the Daft Punk discourse explosion of 2013?  Disco(urse) fever that seemed to evacuate itself from collective consciousness within six months of its eruption?

Niek Hilkmann writes about all that in  "The Greatest Recursive Disco Medley in The World", referencing Retromania upfront:


"Two years after Reynolds published his stream of thought, Daft Punk released an album that almost seems to be tailor-made to illustrate his ideas".

And it's true, if I'd written Retromania for 2014 publication, I could have dedicated a whole chapter just to Random Access Memories.

Hilkmann writes about the retro traits within disco itself,

"In 1978 a Dutch popstar called Theo Vaness decided to release his first disco record. It was called ‘Back To Music’. The record starts with the sound of machines rattling and beeping in the background while a voice declares:

This is the year 2501.
Our world is no longer a place where you can dream of the future.
Only of the past.
We use our time machine now and then to go back to nature, back to music.

After this a disco beat starts thumping and a countdown commences. Year after year passes, until the listener reach 1978, the year ‘Back To Music’ was made. The journey through time is far from over, as Theo Vaness starts singing a medley of Beatles songs and other popular hits from the fifties, sixties en seventies. After a couple of minutes the trip reaches an euphoric climax and the listener is safely transported back to 2501, the year where there is no place to dream about the future and people go back in time to experience music. The story that ‘Back to Music’ tells can be seen as a mere piece of science fiction, but Vaness’ thoughts on how music might be perceived in the future isn’t so far off from Reynolds stream of thought, or what Daft Punk illustrates on ‘Random Access Memories’.

He also discusses the ‘Stars On 45’ golden-oldie medleys made by Jaap Eggermont for Van Kooten of  Red Bullet Productions

"These bootleg disco records feature soundalikes who sing bit parts of popular songs and artists. For instance, ‘the greatest rock and roll band of the world’ features seventeen Rolling Stones songs accompanied by a relentless disco drumbeat that goes on and on and on. The beat regulates and unifies the songs and takes them out of their context. The  records were scorned by critics, but made a lot of money. The first record, comprising of Beatles hits, sold over a million copies in America and went gold in several countries. In essence, ‘Stars On 45’ appropriated existing melodies to a contemporary sound, much like Theo Vaness did. However, like Daft Punk, there is a recursive mechanism at work. The lengths the producers went through to make the records sound ‘alike’ are quite extravagant compared to today’s standards. It takes some skill to distinguish a ‘Stars On 45’ sample from a snippet of the real deal. There surely is some art involved in making inconspicuous covers, but with current sampling technology this whole process has become so easy that the process, or even ‘recognition of the ambition’ of sounding alike is not that interesting anymore. This makes the Stars on 45 a little anonymous nowadays and it’s hard to feel any form of nostalgia towards the records."

Plenty of other examples of retro tendencies in disco culture, from Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band  to (as someone pointed out here in the comments not so long ago) the glitterball itself, which harks back to the 1930s and the era of dance marathons as in They Shoot Horses Don't They.... and for that matter I Remember Yesterday, the Donna Summer album on which "I Feel Love" appeared, which was conceived by Moroder as a conceptually linked series of songs about different eras (1940s, Fifties, etc) culminating in a song about the future. 

dead end culture - hipster critiques

An essay on hipsterism-critique that references Retromania and Douglas Haddow's Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.

Hadn't realised that Haddow sounds such a Retromania-ish note in this pronouncement:

"Haddow even goes so far to claim that the hipster “represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning” or “a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new”

That's a decadence argument, in the tradition of Spengler and "pattern-work", the devolution of vital cultures into effete civilisations....