Sam Davies  has been dropping some good retro-related thoughts at his blog Zone Styx Travelcard:

"the past is a foreign country, and we are living under its occupation"

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"The persistence of love; the time of love. If you love something - really love it - do you want to stop loving it? Aren't there ways - perfectly natural, non-neurotic ways - of just wanting more and more 60s bebop, or 70s funk, or 80s metal, or 90s jungle. And feeling that new forms aren't just unlovably different but actively destructive of the love object (because often of course, that is precisely the polemic charge new forms come loaded with). You could think of it as musical monogamy - is it so deplorable?Again, the pace of technological change, as with each shift the new reconfigured medium reconditions the message, creating new forms and makiung new fossils of the old forms. (There's an instinctive understanding of how the medium is the message in the way that people resent and dread upgrades of social media & its user interfaces, the stifling effect of having to re-adjust even to minute changes in how your communiques, whether status updates, tweets, DMs, emails, texts, posts, are shaped). Looking back through the last two centuries is to witness an unprecedented compression of technological paradigms, a pressure crushing cultures flat to destructively create space for thrilling new forms, while the newly-old, the survivors of the previous paradigm, stagger around like peculiar living fossils, dazed by their sudden world-historical irrelevance."

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"Alex Williams once wrote of culture running out like a natural resource, but the problem in reality is very different, its chronic, almost insupportable overabundance. As Reynolds discusses, what seems to define 2001-2010 technologically is rather underwhelming: a technology which has 'mastered' not matter but culture. Interstellar space remains unconquered, unless you mean you want some Coltrane on MP3 and you want to download it out of the cloud in the middle of nowhere. And meanwhile music history just keeps on accumulating and accreting, not just because of the passing time and increased levels of output (home recording online distribution) but the ongoing excavation of its every corner.

The optimist view on this is celebratory. More of everything. No excess is absurd. And it rejects any suggestion that this plenitude might lead to a flat plane, and any negative reflections on glut/clotted music. Partly this is to do with a very strong cultural reflex towards the genre-transcendent. Music-writers are prone to getting excited about certain kinds of juxtaposition or hybridization. I remember reading with something bordering on disbelief a writer rhapsodizing over a footwork track that sampled The Lion Sleeps Tonight because - what a thing to sample! the writer was raving. Except it has been sampled, years ago by Shut Up & Dance's Rum & Black on either ESQ or Slave [it was Slave]. See also writers getting excited about auteurs that break genre rules, crossing Genre X with Genre Y: because it feels like you're hearing something at once a little bit transgressive, a little but sublime in its exceeding of borders; to mix X with Y puts artist and listener in a 'meta' space and promises a kind of procreated newness. It allows the listener to hear the words (and declare at the same time), My Mind is So Open! Oh, the Interconnectedness of All Things! 

But genres depend on the negative. The whole grammar of genre depends at least (if not more) on what the genre isn't as what it is. And the more densely populated the cultural context, the more bristling with sub genres and subdivisions, the harder it becomes for things to *signify* on the same scale. And again, to insist on the exceptional, common-sense defying conditions of the present era, it's not a crisis so banal as the old panic about finite notes, meaning finite melodies and finite songs; its rather a question of semiotics and space: space to make your mark. Imagine a crude binary of prog - punk, then imagine punk happening in a late 70s which was already heavily populated with bands already mining the fine gradations between Topographic Oceans and Ramones.

I used to think of this abominably vast and persistent cultural store as like Swift's Struldbruggs in Gulliver, - his thought exercise in careful-what-you-wish-for addressing eternal life. The Struldbruggs are immortal, but not immortally youthful, and so end up doomed to decline into eternal senility. This cultural situation is like a Struldbrugg in full possession of their faculties, with perfect recall, never sleeping, ever more frantically twitching with nervous exhaustion as their synapses fire and fire and fire."

Looking again at this "interview" with Tortoise I did in 1996 -- exhumed by The Quietus in collaboration with Rock's Backpages -- I was struck by how the concerns of both Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania are already present in it. Well I'm nothing if not consistent....

"American rock seems to have come to terms with the fact that it's now an essentially conservative force.... Reverence and referentiality are all-pervasive; parricide and canon-busting nowhere to be found."


"The current moment in white American rock feels uncannily like Britain in 1979. Kurt Cobain's suicide seemed like a death-knell for rock itself... just as Johnny Rotten's auto-destruct of the Pistols and Sid Vicious' OD signaled "rock is dead" back in '78. ...  Lydon formed the experimental, studio-based unit, Public Image Limited, who quickly became figureheads of an anti-rockist vanguard....  the result was Metal Box, music that retained the emotional force of rock but expanded/exploded the form. Post-rock, in other words. Perhaps Tortoise are the American PiL.... [and] Millions Now Living Will Never Die is the US underground's long overdue Metal Box"

Or perhaps not.

Ah, the lost promise of Tortoise. Who would have thought (not me then, clearly) that "Djed" and "Gamera" b/w "Cliff Dweller Society" would be as good as it got.

And then a further doubt: how good was that, then?

It's music I've not gone back to, subsequently. Like certain other touchstone-totem-talisman type bands whose music became a blank sheet for projections and prophecies (Loop, Butthole Surfers...) I have shied away from a revisiting. (Whereas there's other T-T-T-type music  I've never stopped listening to--hardcore, jungle, 2step--or never stopped for very long--MBV, AR Kane).

Still, I wasn't alone in over-esteem / over-estimation, that's for sure. There was a micro-climate of opinion. (An NYC gig; my companion, a post-rock fellow-traveler, spies John McEntire in the audience; before he hastens over to hob-nob, the companion informs me that the Tortoise leader/Sea and Cake member/in-demand producer is "one of the fifty most important people in America". Even at the time this struck me as OTT).

Still, when all's said and done, a better 1990s taste-stance to have had than exalting Archers of Loaf, shall we say. 

(Or Carter, for that matter).

Philip Sherburne, at his Spin column Control Voltage, looking at the emergence of "hipster house" + the Portland micro-scene around Miracles Club + their label's new comp Ecstasy

"there's a certain curatorial sensibility at work, which has occasionally led these artists to be branded with the unfortunate tag of "hipster house." But the reality is that a huge swathe of the house and techno community is currently preoccupied with retro forms. Artists as diverse as the Dutch analog maverick Legowelt and Boston's 1990s-obsessed Soul Clap balance on the edge between paean and pastiche. And while the comp includes some seriously retro jams, like Emotion II Emotion's "Night and Day," songs like Leech's "Edgewise" and Garben Eden's "Feel Good Agency" twist up old-school machine vibes into sounds untethered from any particular era"

any excuse to post this again

mini-essay posing as a question to Greil Marcus (from instalment #4 of the epic interview transcript at Los Angeles Review of Books)

 "One of my favorite pieces by you is an essay you wrote for Esquire in 1992, "Notes on the Life and Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock 'n' Roll" ... It's a rumination that roams from Poison's video for "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" — which you find abhorrent: "my image of the death of rock — or of rock as something that ought to be killed" — to Nirvana's video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which you find thrilling and creepy, to a whole bunch of other stuff, before it ends with your fantasy of Geto Boys's "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" as a record that could unite all Americans by making "room for anyone's displacement, confusion, terror, despair."  In that essay you're both monitoring the vital signs of rock'n'roll and rolling over in your mind this notion that rock'n'roll, or any art form, could be declared "dead" at a certain point.  What would that mean, and how would we know?


Now, there's a very interesting book by Kevin J. Dettmar called Is Rock Dead? (Routledge, 2005), and it's a scholarly investigation of this very discourse of rock'n'roll's decline and fall. One of his contentions is that, when critics declare that rock is over, what they're really saying is that their passion for it has withered away. Dettmar maps out examples of this, like Jim Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin, against the writers' ages as they're serving notice on rock's demise. It's always mid- to late forties.  Basically, he argues that writers are projecting their own physical decrepitude onto the music! 


So that got me working out how old you were when you were writing "Notes on the Life and Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock'n'Roll," and you must have been 47, by my count.  And that just so happens to be the age I was when I wrote my book Retromania, arguably a prime example of this perennial discourse of rock's decline.  Fancy that!

But one thing I noticed about Is Rock Dead? is that your essay "Notes on the Life and Death" is conspicuous by its absence, and I think that's because its argument is too potent for Dettmar to countenance. You say that when rock loses it connection to history — political and social reality — it is heading towards a kind of death: irrelevance.


This relates to one of my arguments in my book Retromania: rock becomes bound up with its own history, with reference-and-reverence, and in the process becomes uncoupled from real history. As I read it, your essay is saying the one thing Dettmar cannot accept, which is that if it is possible to talk of rock (or any art form) having once been supremely "alive" (relevant, Zeitgeist-attuned, breaking new ground constantly, a world-historical force), then, logically and inevitably, you can entertain the possibility that it could cease to be all those things. And then it would be in fact be "dead" — even if, as a purely musical form, people in the millions still listened to it and performed it — because the things that made it matter had all faded away.  And, in fact, there have been art forms or entertainment forms that were once supremely timely, the forums in which all the important ideas and feelings of an era were dramatized and worked through. And then they cease to be that forum. So it's not only possible to ask this question "Is it dead? If not, how vital is it?", it's actually urgent, even imperative — at least if you ever cared about what made it so vibrant and important in the first place." 

these fabulous ruins (cont.)
 
"The role of pop culture is interesting here, because it’s both more and less modernist than the capital-intensive world of city-planning and architecture. Hippies, even the smartest of them, basically hated modernism and saw anything in concrete as an appalling monstrosity; but then they partly grew out of Mods, who were called ‘Modernists’ for a reason. Pop goes retro before architecture, in the late ’60s, but its anti-modernism was very different. Postmodernists like to drag Pop into their arguments, but it doesn’t wash for me; the difference between architects like Robert Stern or Leon Krier repudiating everything that happened after 1914 is a very different matter to, say, a producer in the ’80s sampling (and distorting, and making new) something made in the ’60s. Pop kept the momentum of modernism up until comparatively recently – something like Grime was obviously Modernist, an insurgent, futuristic force, and rave, pirate radio and so on strike me as implicated in everyday life and urban space in a modernist, if not always optimistic, way"
 -- Owen Hatherley, with some sharp thoughts about modernism versus postmodernism, both in his main beat (architecture) and in culture generally

oh and look Owen's got a new book out next month (incredible work-rate he maintains -- New Ruins was out not even 2 years ago!), viz:

A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (forthcoming on Verso)

An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the “progressive nonsense” of the Big Society and “the localism agenda,” the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot- and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.

[i didn't even notice there was a 2011 sequel to "Pow"]