necro versus neo

further to the previous post, about the popcult past competing with the popcult present:

Elvis Presley hologram follows likeness of Tupac

 "Digital Domain Media Group announced Wednesday it is creating a Presley hologram for shows, film, TV and other projects worldwide, including appearances. They've gotten the OK from Elvis Presley Enterprises."

 

 

 

Julian Sanchez wonders why copyright terms are so long, and offers a retromaniacal speculative theory: it's a form of "protectionism against the past":

"Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive.

If that’s right, there’s a perverse sense in which retroactive extensions for absurd lengths of time might actually, obliquely, serve copyright’s constitutional imperative to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”: Not by directly increasing the present value of newly produced works, but by shrinking the pool of free alternatives to the newest works... If that’s true, though, it’s not enough in itself to justify the longer terms: The question is whether the marginal new content is actually worth losing universal free access to the older material. For reasons unclear to me, there often seems to be an undefended assumption that more newer stuff, whatever the quality, outweighs wider access to existing content at any conceivable margin. I’m not sure how you’d go about quantifying that, but it strikes me as wildly implausible on face."

nifty snippet from the new issue of The Wire, #2

"Dirty Projectors are a vanguard case of a development both promising and problematic - the imposition of cursor-dragging collage on the structures of rock songwriting. The sudden transitions, disparate materials and what-the-heck conceptualism of their songs internalises...  the jostling data of the web page...  "

-- Dan Barrow on the DP's newie Swing Lo Magellan

DB concludes, sadly, that "the digital dreamwork of their juxtapositions has turned leaden... where once the proggily spiralling forms of their work suggested an infinite capacity for invention, it now seems like a dismal scramble for shortened-span attentions"  But wait there's worse: "they seem to belong to a moment that's past. Their work's profusion reflected the shadow economy of the web, and the virtual bubble of financialisation that was its partner"

A bad augury for the third album from the similarly located Vampire Weekend, then

But judge for yourself: the first single off Swing Lo:

compare with when-they-were-good

nifty snippet from the new issue of  The Wire, #1

"Unlike the faux soul of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Joss Stone et al, a green eyed soul consumed with envy for another time, there’s nothing stylistically retro about this project...  What it sounds like is right now, not Miami or Memphis in 1965”

David Toop on Bobby Womack's comeback album as produced by Damon Albarn and XL's Richard Russell

well I'm feeling a little green eyed vis-a-vis "green eyed soul consumed with envy for another time" !

Toop concludes however that the contemporarisation of Womack doesn't quite come off right:

“a reckless compulsion to be du jour also combines with an equally modish and somewhat  sentimental dedication to history” that strands Bobby W in some kind of atemporal limbo -- a real Nowhen Man

I saw Womack perform at the Oxford Apollo in... must have been 83, or 84? It was a nostalgia revue already, pretty much, even though half the songs came from the recent Poet albums. The framing by the music papers was "The Last Soul Man". (Title of a great Barney Hoskyns piece in NME if memory serves). The impossible gravitas of a figure from another age. He would only have been 39 or 40 then (a lot younger than me now) but seemed like a venerable elder, craggy with dignity and experience.  That raspy, weathered voice. Being a BH disciple, and something of a (whisper it) soul boy for a moment there, I went along with it wholesale: tracked down many of the 1971-75 albums Toop reveres, bought Poet II...  Then, some years later parted with the lot, without too much pain. 

I think the rep is a bit overblown, to be honest. Still, there's no doubt the man has Presence and Authority and he memorably blew away Albarn's bandmate, spotty Coxon, on  Later With Jools a few years back.

this is a good old one, as first heard by me on the Lost Soul compilations

once upon a time, I could read En Attendant Godot, Moderato Cantabile (that's Marguerite Duras that is), and de Toqueville's L'Ancien régime et la Révolution -- in the original, the lot of them.

it's all gone to rust, through disuse, my A-Level French

so I'll be needing to dust off my trusty Harraps French to English Dictionary if I'm to have any hopes of making an ounce of sense out of this thorough looking article on La musique hantologique by someone called Fabien (he neglected to leave his surname and I can't find it on the piece)