this isn't tomorrow #1

Simon Price surprisingly indulgent of period accuracy fetish crew Temples:

"Temples don't do things by halves. This isn't a band using psychedelia as merely one of many colours on their palette: Super Furry Animals or the Flaming Lips they ain't. Nor is there any apparent ironic intent whatsoever: frontman James Bagshaw doesn't have an insincere bone in his skinny body. The Kettering quartet's ultra-literalist take on 60s acid rock, which has earned them a Heavenly record deal, the endorsement of trad rock grandees such as Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher, and support slots with everyone from Suede to the Stones after a handful of tracks were anonymously and enigmatically uploaded to YouTube last year, is all about period accuracy.
Baroque, "cosmic" lyrics such as "painting ourselves on a stained glass floor" (Colours to Life) are typical of their debut album, Sun Structures. Their videos, typically, are drenched in the sort of kaleidoscopic effects you'd associate with early footage of the Pink Floyd at Middle Earth. Even their stage gear looks the real deal: the smoke is purple, the amps are Orange, and when Bagshaw switches his electric 12-string for an F-holed semi-acoustic after just one song, you boggle at what sort of vintage guitar museum must surely be lurking backstage....

"The majority of the short 10-song set is mined from the same psychedelic seam and, as a result, the Temples live show is lacking in dramatics and dynamics: it's a flood when it needs to be a fountain.That said, when the strobe-lit overload of finale Mesmerise hits its peak, it attains the kind of surging tidal force that hit Aberystwyth last month. And this 60s shtick is serving Temples well for the meantime. There's a moment during Shelter Song when the entire venue goes nuts, an eruption of flailing limbs and flung lager, and one can almost see the light bulbs flickering into life over a few hundred long-haired heads who've never before heard a rock band playing quasi-Arabic scales drenched in a 10-inch layer of reverb".

You're saying Temples might actually be influential, Pricey? The horror, the horror....

Simon also mentions all the earlier back to the Sixties Psych Era moves - or rather not all (doesn't mention the Soft Boys, and Hoodoo Gurus, and  Mood Six, and Prince circa Around the World, and baggy, and Ocean Colour Scene), but many of them, enough to underline the utter exhausted, done to death, spirit-killing-even-to-think-about redundancy of what Temples are doing.  One thing he points out - the non-irony of Temples versus the comedic/parodic nature of  the early neo-psych (Neil the Hippie doing "Hole In my Shoe", Dr and the Medics, Dukes of euuch Stratosphear that XTC side project), reminded me of a good point I read recently in Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody.  Which is that parody's humorous intent is the justification, the get-out clause,  for what would otherwise be  merely derivative: empty and redundant copying, pointless and sterile formalism.  With parody (a good example is ex-Bonzo Neil Innes, solo and with The Rutles) you enjoy the craft of it in the same way you enjoy the skill of impressionists in the Mike Yarwood/Rory Bremner mold, but that is a secondary aspect, a smaller component, of what is primarily about making fun of something. 

 Retro, then, could be defined as parody without the laughs. 
 

this wasn't tomorrow #3

Valiant revisionist effort from Man Like Joe here but - 

It will never not be too early to revisit, reappraise, or God forbid, revive electroclash

Or to put it another way, it will always be too early to revisit, etc etc...

The recorded legacy is thin.  The influence is not-legion.

It was fun enough to pontificate about at the time, or go to the clubs, but....

Come off it...

^^^^^^^^^^^

Seems like it's part of the structural economy of music media now - all of them, but particularly webzines -- to have these look-backs... these 20 Years On, 10 Years On, at this rate soon it'll be 5 Years On, pieces on "Iconic Albums".... the oral histories ....    I suppose it's the same logic, applied to clicks rather than ticket sales, that causes promoters to pack their festival line-ups with legacy acts and aging cults.The drawing-power logic of the known quantity, the thing you lived through and think of fairly fondly, or perhaps half-wonder you might have missed something by missing out on the first go-round.

this was tomorrow #22

so hauntological it's not true

MUSIC IN SCHOOL:A NEW SOUND
Programme number: EFE1112K Date: 02/02/1969  
Children from infant, secondary modern & comprehensive schools apply methods of contemporary music, including demonstrations of simple tape & electronic techniques. The children discuss with teacher how different sounds may be produced and experiment with electric circuits and loops on the tape recorder.
with: Peter Fletcher - Brian Dennis:

Can't post it here for some reason, but go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsigOnPJTtA


Like a Ghost Box sleeve come to life

"So hauntological, it's not true" -  hmm, is it actually true?

It came out this Creative Archive project. 2006-7, BBC and Arts Council England, discussed at BFI

"When he took on a Creative Archive placement, artist Chris Dorley-Brown became fully ‘embedded’ in the BBC – with a staff pass, a desk and support from archive and legal staff.

Chris decided to focus on a specific geographical area – the East End of London – and explore its representation in the BBC’s programme output. This study of the BBC’s East End could become a model for others to follow elsewhere. He tapped into the output of Lime Grove, the famous current affairs studio, and uncovered some of the very first ‘open access’ projects set in the East End."

So far so good. But wait a minute: 

"Chris tracked down both producers and participants in documentaries made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By recreating interviews and locations he tapped into their emotional resonance, and at the same time offered key questions about representation and motivation."

Confused!

Perhaps this Michael Bracewell piece from Frieze can help... 

Is Bruno Mars the most emblematic pop star of the 2010s?

Defining the era by not sounding of the era, but other eras?

I first wrote "most influential of the 2010s" . But you can't really say Bruno is "influential", because he's so influenced by other things - what could he be actually transmitting to others! But his approach to pasticherie, and its peculiar blithe weightlessness (discussed further below) has been widely adopted. His success has been noted.

Evidence exhibit #1

Invasion of Mars-tian vibes into the world of teenybop! Yet in its clumsiness flashes me back also to the f(l)ailed poptimism of U2's "Discotheque".

(Incidentally, I seem to remember the Pogues were originally called Pogue Mahone, which translates to "kiss my arsehole", right?  Or "arse" - I can't remember.  Does that mean Austin's surname mean translates to....)

Similarly Bruno-y (with a bit of Plan B too, maybe) is "Love Me Again" by John Newman. Like Austin Mahone I saw this on  TeenNick's Top 10 countdown, watched with my precocious  7 year old (  in the process of swapping A.Mahone for One Direction, just like she swapped OneD for Justin B).

Sports bags with patches, talcum powder, whey-faced Brits in Fred Perry's twirling on the wooden dancefloor, a mise en scene more like a 1970s youth club than a modern night club  - this is meant to be a Northern Soul nite, right? Even though the music is as much piano-rave as retro-soul.

All means nothing to Tasmin, of course, which makes me wonder how many kids pick up on the retro-vintage signifiers? Even if they do, what do they signify to them, beyond a vague old-timeyness?


Evidence exhibit #2

Pharrell's "Happy" and G I R L, described thus by the FACT reviewer:

"If Pharrell’s recent success has taught him anything, it’s that you rarely score big by being original. 2013’s most monstrous hits, from ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘Get Lucky’ to Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience, were all shameless in their retro-fetishism and pushed units by keeping one eye on Baby Boomer nostalgia and the other on the bank. Is it any surprise that G I R L follows the same template? From the orchestral string intro of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ to the funk-rock jam session that ends ‘It Girl’, G I R L is 45 minutes of warmed-over retro-pop pastiche, cribbing from Michael Jackson and Chic, from disco and yacht rock. Mostly, Pharrell is content to approximate dance floor fillers from the ’70s and ’80s; at his worst, he rehashes the more soulful and innovative material he made a decade ago."

FACT-man Chris Kelly could have, probably should have, shoved Bruno's Unorthodox Jukebox and its run of hit single in that "Blurred"/"Lucky"/20-20 list .

I don't mind "Happy", actually -- it's not retro I can stand by (as with Tame Impala's mighty "Elephant") but it's retro I can stand  - tolerate, perhaps even sing along to in the car. Reminds me of the better Style Council tunes. Or Mari Wilson / Compact!  Sixties retro with an Eighties overlay. Doubled nostalgia.

Here's what I said about Bruno in that Finland lecture:

"Bruno Mars is apparently 2013’s most played artist on US pop radio. “Locked Out of Heaven” - despite coming out in 2012 - was 2013’s most played song. Although “Locked Out” is a clever update of Police-style New Wave into a post-Timbaland, post-"Umbrella" world, the video is the true retro-fiesta, from the foregrounding of vintage technology like the old skool hip hop era machine the  Akai MPC  to an oldfashioned camera, and the  overall filtered and glitchy, image-wavery look to the promo that has a Instagram / Hipstamatic pre-fadedness. Or as Mars put it, “very VHS-y”

In fact nearly all his promo videos have some kind of analogue-fetish, shabby chic or period flavour to them. For instance, “Treasure”  has Mars and  his band done up as a 70s disco troupe. Even when he went to collect an award at a pop video awards ceremony, he did in a period-stylized way, as if his gratitude had air quotes around it!

But what Mars represents, I think, is a kind of naturalization or normalization of retro. By that I mean that there  is no gestural weight to Mars’s stylistic choices musically or those of the video director. Unlike earlier revivalists like the mod revival or ska revival in the Seventies, this is not a rejection of  contemporary  music, nor is he affiliating himself in any committed way to the  bygone style, It’s not the expression of feeling born too late to participate in a lost golden age. Rather the title of Mars’s album Unorthodox Jukebox suggests a sort of post-iPod, post-Spotify eclecticism, taste unconfined by genre or period.  

That "unorthodoxy"  is actually the emerging orthodoxy of the present - post-ideological pop, a mode of pop consumption and pop pleasure that is uninformed by identity politics, that does not involve identity-formation, of cathexis between the self and a style that engages the depths of an individual's being and directs its path through the world.