Saint Etienne, Sassoon, and the Sixties
 
"Can you be wildly ahead of your time and hopelessly behind it, too?" asks David Colman in this New York Times Fashion & Style section piece  that's sort of about Saint Etienne but mainly about Sarah Cracknell's home in Oxfordshire, which is tricked out with a lot of Sixties artifacts and collectables. Prompting Colman to perorate: "in a world filled with practical, pedestrian stuff, why strive to live in the present? The past is not only prettier, it’s a lot less crowded."

Personally I'd have never have fingered Saint Et as that Sixties-fixated (it's just one of many moments in music they've been drawn to and have drawn from). Or even that retro-y (they've generally had their ears trained on what's going on now in pop just as much as they've rifled through the archives).

Cruel paradox: it's the very mod-ness and modernity and modernism of the Sixties that makes it so alluring, so tempting to pastiche. As Cracknell says: “It’s an era with such a great sense of design, with these crazy things like Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Mary Quant dresses. So stylized, so deliberate. The furniture, too. Or cars!"

That reminded me that when Vidal died recently, I kicked myself for not featuring him in Retromania's chapter on Fashion. He should have been in there right alongside Courreges, Cardin, and Rabanne. As the obituaries and tributes noted, Sassoon was one of the decade's greatest avant-gardists of pop culture and pop couture. The Corbusier of coiffure;  his handiwork and scissorwork as startling and angular and neophilia-inciting as the Philips Pavilion. Indeed his geometric five point cut, introduced in 1963 - the year I was born -- was inspired by Bauhaus. Originally he wanted to be an architect, not a hair stylist.

"Nowness presents!" how appropriate...  nowness becomes then-ness, present-ness becomes the past(iche)

Nitsuh Abebe column from a little while ago that uses Rock of Ages (and the Japandroids record) to talk about the death of rock: 

"These [80s hair metal era] were the decadent final days of an arrangement that now seems nearly as quaint and dusty as the giant front wheel of a penny-farthing bicycle.... If you understand "rock" in those terms, then "rock" is long dead. Don't get me wrong: People have made plenty of wonderful rock music since then. But you'll notice it always has a prefix or an alternate name: It's indie rock, garage-rock, punk-rock, folk-rock, metal, emo, power-pop, etc. It comes from people who cheerfully accept the death of Rock-rock, and are content to occupy artsy anti-commercial niches, to rummage through the deceased's pocket for useful ideas, to bang together its bones to make new sounds, to bionically reengineer the body like the Six Million Dollar Man's, to do whole hilarious Weekend at Bernie's routines with the corpse, or, in particularly bleak cases, to labor with shock paddles over the moldering patient, happily admitting that they're trying to "Bring Rock Back"-- from the dead, one assumes."

Also enjoyed the riffing on the edgeless, degraded version of "camp" that is so ingrained in our culture at this point:

"this is what we do now, we find pop-culture artifacts that Americans remember fondly, trot them out, pose them in funny positions, surround them with winking and giggling and mugging for the camera, dip their pigtails in inkwells, throw things at them, make fun of their hair, and laugh the way children laugh when they've been told a sex joke they do not entirely understand. We call this "camp," which makes it sound sophisticated, but I'm not sure it is anymore: Camp involves a certain sensitivity, whereas this stuff is mostly self-conscious goofery. And it's a surprisingly large component of how we look at pop music once we think we're done with it, as evidenced by the average VH1 countdown show"

what Nitsuh says about the Japandroids record seems to relate to this tenor of  triumphant-yet-desperate embattled-egodrama epic-ness that you can hear in a lot of stuff these days, from "We Are Young" to "Uprising"...    and that does seem to have evolved through emo and alt-rock to end up at a place close to "Don't Stop Believin'" and "We Are the Champions"

at SPIN online, Marc Hogan finds "5 Signs of Retromania" in SoundScan's 2012 Mid-Year Report

the short version

1. Vinyl and Digital Album Sales Increased. Vinyl went up by 14.2 per cent.

2. This Year's Only Million-Selling Album Came Out Last Year. .ie. Adele's 21 . And it's retro-soul.

3. The Top Three Non-Adele Albums Were By Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, and a Boy Band. LR's Tuskegee sold nearly a million.


4. The Best-Selling Vinyl Album Was the Vinyliest of the Vinyl. i.e Jack White's  Blunderbuss, followed closely by Black Keys's El Camino.

5. The Most-Streamed Digital Song Was the Viralest of the Viral. Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"  -- I don't get why this is a sign of retromania, to be honest. 

^^^^^^^^^^

 

in other retro-y news:

 

MTV's Retro Mania slot includes Daria (proper 90s alt-nostalgia), but also programs as recent as The Hills. 

 

That Rock of Ages Eighties-hair-metal/Sunset-Strip-nostalgia-mining jukebox musical got turned into a movie

A New (Old?) Brutalism

Love the retro touch of the "embossed label printer" typography on the cover of Perc's A New Brutality

Overlaid on top of that icon of Brutalist Architecture, Trellick Tower.

Do you remember those embossed label printers? I had one. Everyone had one, it seemed like. Then they just disappeared. Bit like slide rules, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators. But I can't recall what it is was that made the embossed label printers obsolete. 
 

And Perc's A New Brutality.... well, judging by the preview below, it sounds a bit like an old brutalism.

(You can hear a longer preview here, along with a bunch of Perc mixes and EPs and what not)

90s hard minimal techno, with touches of industrial and Test Dept in dancefloor mode ("Compulsion"). Stark, ascetic, punitive...   Slaphead-severe;  proper faceless techno bollocks...  at times flashing me back to that 1992-93 London club Knowledge....  a more refined and subdued / slower and less banging take on 80 Aum and Meng Syndicate... 

here's a preview selection from last year's similar Wicker & Steel

the embossed label look has a kind of officialdom / bureaucratic, folders/filing cabinets kind of look that reminds me of that whole side of industrial to do with reports, data, documentation, dossiers...  records in the archival or governmental sense as opposed to musical

see also this Perc Trax artist

love the title here -- "Greyed Out Life"

And "Mandate" !

Does this relate to the H-ological reinvocation of the Public?  institutions and planning bodies and research units dedicated to the welfare of the commonwealth... 

Brutalism, as an architectural school, was part of this current...  the "we know best" paternalism of urban planning and coordinated development

^^^^^^^^^

bonus beat - Test Dept's Compulsion

"test department" itself sounds bureaucratic...

People have written that I coined this word "retromania", but that's not the case.

I've seen vintage clothes boutiques and retro bric-a-bric shops with  the name
Retromania.

There is also a Def Leppard bootleg that came out in 2010 called Retromania, what looks like a collection of rarities and alternate takes, the title obviously a play on Pyromania. (The band also officially released a rarities/B-sides collection in 1993 called Retro Active).

So the word has been floating around for a while. However I did recently discover, when going through some old pieces of mine, that I wrote a piece in the early Nineties whose working title was "Retromania" (it ended up being printed, by the Guardian, under another headline). But even then I think I was just picking up on a word that was in the air. As coinages go, it's a pretty obvious, occurs-to-many-people-independently type word.

But in other Def Leppard news, I learn (via Marathonpacks) that the group are doing a Gang of Four/Return the Gift and are recording forgeries of old hits like "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Rock of Ages", in order to get back at the Universal Music Group, who own their catalogue. Full story at Billboard.

Joe Elliott explained that the dispute is over proper compensation for digital rights (which has resulted in a deadlock where none of Leppard's studio albums are currently available as downloads)

"When you're at loggerheads with an ex-record label who...is not prepared to pay you a fair amount of money and we have the right to say, 'Well, you're not doing it,' that's the way it's going to be. Our contract is such that they can't do anything with our music without our permission, not a thing. So we just sent them a letter saying, 'No matter what you want, you are going to get "no" as an answer, so don't ask.' That's the way we've left it. We'll just replace our back catalog with brand new, exact same versions of what we did."

Shades of Borges!

 And it's challenging too:

"You just don't go in and say, 'Hey guys, let's record it,' and it's done in three minutes. We had to study those songs, I mean down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries of them. Time-wise it probably took as long to do as the originals, but because of the technology it actually got done quicker as we got going. But trying to find all those sounds...like where am I gonna find a 22-year-old voice? I had to sing myself into a certain throat shape to be able to sing that way again. It was really hard work, but it was challenging, and we did have a good laugh over it here and there."

But that is not the limit of Leppard's retro action"

"Elliott... is also working on a second album of Mott The Hoople-related covers with the Down 'n' Outz, his side-band project with members of the Quireboys that he expects to release in 2013."

A second album of Mott covers?!

I knew Leppard were obsessed with glam 'n ' glitter

They did this rather decent and intelligent version of David Essex's "Rock On" a while ago