Retromania: Pop culture's Addiction to its Own Past. (New Simon Reynolds book).

yeah, i don't think phil was going for straight-up nostalgia. like sha na na were. it was a very modern cover of an old song. obviously people would be reminded of the old song, but i think he just liked the song! i dunno. i don't things now are all that retro now either actually. especially in the undie/indie world. people are using old sources, but they aren't using motown, they are refrerencing pretty obscure stuff that a lot of people have never heard in the first place. this is true of rap and other beat-derived music too. and modern r&b too.

To be fair the clip rather hit you over the head with the revivalism angle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYC5E4perb8

strict retro re-creates almost totally. like The Faint did with 80's stuff. people who steal a synth line from a Goblin track aren't retro. they just know a cool sound when they hear it. and as we all know theft is timeless.

In dance music definitely there has been a shift: 10 years ago you could talk sensibly about various strains of classicism and traditionalism and revivalism, but these have all have been done so much now that it all codes as this kind of hazy contemporaneity, music doesn't code so clear as present-focused or past-focused any more.

yeah - after ten years of instant digital availability the history of pop music feels more like a continuum than discrete eras

yeah, totally. about phil. but it sounded perfectly normal next to huey lewis and john cougar and john fogerty or whoever on 80's pop radio. it was totally in keeping with the 80's thing. it really was a modern cover.

Collins also, unwittingly, sold a song from his past back to fans. It worked as a gesture to the fans his age who remembered the Supremes and were already getting teary-eyed about their lost youth, and to young'uns like me and Scott just discovering the Supremes.

but it sounded perfectly normal next to huey lewis and john cougar and john fogerty or whoever on 80's pop radio. it was totally in keeping with the 80's thing. it really was a modern cover.

Yeah I can see how a revival of early motown was just like a logical extension of all sorts of tendencies in 80s pop (thesis: eurythmics as singlehandedly summarising the 80s' drift from future to past).

Today's equivalent (though not as good as Phil) would be "The Time (Dirty Bit)" - which sounds very 2010/2011 if only because so much contemporary music is informed by the 80s with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness and intentionality.

(thesis: eurythmics as singlehandedly summarising the 80s' drift from future to past).

Reynolds and Marcello Carlin would say that the success of Eurythmics signaled the ossification of New Pop or something -- the duo's obsession with The Canon, ec.

*etc

what about those godawful Motown covers by James Taylor and Linda Rondstart in the 70s. more like clumsy appropriations I suppose - or hijackings.

and the retro-soul trend in 80s black pop. Nelson George coined the term "retro nuevo" in a Village Voice review of Regina Belle

it's the post-modern thing, no? probably starting with rap, i guess. collage. pastiche. use anything and everything for effect. pop art. whatever. everything is fair game. its simpler in a lot of ways, but its also confusing to sort out. and post punk/indie-rock its also in many ways the only choice a lot of creative people in the underground have because most of them can't read music or play actual instruments and that has changed the game in many ways. people don't sit in rooms practicing scales ten hours a day like they used to unless they are metal/classical/jazz musicians. in many ways, people are incapable of aping the past because they can't play the past. and the people who DO ape the past faithfully are fully-fledged revival artists playing old blues, old rock, old folk, etc. older forms that are more folk art now than anything and not really critically or (pop)culturally relevant to a lot of people.

christ that was some sort of x-post but hell if i can remember to what. i went away for a smoke...

and yeah the reissue phenomena is amazing and all that, but just because people are obsessed with collecting every afro-pop and afro-psych and cumbia-psych comp that comes out doesn't translate into people everywhere MAKING that music again. cuz, like i said, lots of people wouldn't know how. it does make for cooler record collections though, and i'm all for that. and a wider awareness of past coolness. maybe some of that will rub off. we can only hope.

My problem with current (Top 40) music is that it's too stagnant and everyone are using the same handful of producers or not borrowing songs from other writers once in a while as an effort to "keep it real" so the artists end up burning out faster.

what about those godawful Motown covers by James Taylor and Linda Rondstart in the 70s. more like clumsy appropriations I suppose - or hijackings.

Along with Motown, how about the endless hijacking of Great American Songbook?

My problem with current (Top 40) music is that it's too stagnant and everyone are using the same handful of producers or not borrowing songs from other writers once in a while as an effort to "keep it real" so the artists end up burning out faster.

waht

modern pop and r&b totally cyborgian 22nd century stuff more often then not. even when it steals from, like, 90's trance tracks.

If there's a phenomenon that distinguishes this period from others is the degree to which "Top 40" is a discrete entity with which no listener has to engage unless the exposure is impossible to escape.

the future is now as far as that stuff goes. but maybe even futurism is old hat.

Alfred, to get back to one of your earlier points, when I hear the Association, it's not just me interacting with some text in 2001. There's also this awareness that I am NOT interacting with the text in 1967, when it was created, and that the song, in a way, belongs to that time.

pretty much everything is a discrete entity now.

I mean -- it's easier for, say, an avid Pitchforker to avoid "Top 40" than it was in 1989. The success of "Paper Planes" only seems weird when I remember that a half dozen "Just Like Heaven"s and "So Alive"s and other weirdo college radio one-offs infiltrated the Top 40 regularly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsCyC1dZiN8

i learn something new from the past every day. i'm inspired by the past every day. but i don't live there. i live here. i think that's true of a lot of people.

Alfred, to get back to one of your earlier points, when I hear the Association, it's not just me interacting with some text in 2001. There's also this awareness that I am NOT interacting with the text in 1967, when it was created, and that the song, in a way, belongs to that time.

Yeah, I get that. If you meant to say "yet" in that last clause I THINK I get you.

but i haven't read this book! i don't even really know where it goes. just going by one publisher blurb.

i blame antiques roadshow.

i do think people are definitely hungry for the past. in bad ways (tea party) and good ways (more cumbia fans). and people have access to stuff that they never had access to before. its great!

ILM posting w/you guys on a Sunday night feels retro - very 2006ish

yeah really. where's jess and aja?

(a) the past becomes "the past" culturally much faster now than ever before;

Just want to mention here that Nuggets came out in '72.

Scott - I wrote a cover feature about this, more or less, for the LAWeekly in 2003. http://www.laweekly.com/2003-09-25/news/the-kids-aren-t-alright-they-re-amazing/

I think that Phil Collins cover of the Supremes scanned as "80s" because a lot of music that decade felt "60s". You mention "huey lewis and john cougar and john fogerty" and they were in their mid-30s (40s in case of Fogerty) and inspired by the music of their teenage years, which was the 60s. Point carried over from my "senior year of high school" thread, where a number of no. 1 hits were covers of songs from the 60s and early 70s.

i do think people are definitely hungry for the past. in bad ways (tea party) and good ways (more cumbia fans). and people have access to stuff that they never had access to before. its great!

Haha for a second I was like "I'm not a The Tea Party fan but I wonder why Scott is singling them out."

"Scott - I wrote a cover feature about this"

dude, totally! see, everyone's just reviving old jay b. articles now. and everything i've said on this thread is basically a rehash of that thing. i'm totally retro.

If there's a phenomenon that distinguishes this period from others is the degree to which "Top 40" is a discrete entity with which no listener has to engage unless the exposure is impossible to escape.

Like I've been telling people! Pop is just the biggest subculture of them all, one of an infinite number.

that Phil Collins cover of the Supremes scanned as "80s" because a lot of music that decade felt "60s".

There were also many, many, many other covers of '60s (and probably to some extent '50s and '70s) pop songs on the charts all through the '80s, so Phil was hardly alone. Its kind of what a lot of '80s pop just plain was. (Not sure whether anybody's pointed that out on this thread, or not -- have only skimmed.) Also, at least in the States, lots of actual oldies by the original artists re-entered the chart (from movie soundtracks mainly, I think) around the same time. So no, video styling or not, Phil's cover definitely never struck me as especially retro either (at least not in the way, say, the Stray Cats reviving rockabilly or the Cult reviving Led Zep riffs seemed retro in the '80s). Just seemed like a cover version, period.

As for "retro" now, I think I'm basically of the opinion that the '90s pretty much never ended. I'm still waiting, but not holding my breath.

(Could probably say a lot more -- this seems like a pretty interesting thread, what I've read of it -- but I can't afford, time and effort-wise, to get sucked in.)

the past becomes "the past" culturally much faster now than ever before

Also, sorry, assuming I'm understanding it, this just seems so wrong to me. When American Graffiti came out in 1973, the pop era it covered -- it was set in 1962, but concentrated on music of the late '50s -- seemed like it could have been centuries ago, almost. In contrast, I honestly don't get how pop music has fundamentally changed anywhere near that much since 2001, or the late '90s. It's not even close. But maybe that's a function of me following music much closer now than I did between 1962 and 1973. Or maybe it's just a function of age, who knows. What I'm fairly sure about is that kids growing up now do not find music of the '90s (or even '70s!) anywhere near as quaint or antique as say, kids of the '70s would have found music of the '50s.

http://www.joaap.org/6/another/rodriguez.html

xp

That is an interesting point, and I think that is specifically up to the rupture of the late 60s. An example I like to use is the live recording of VU's "Sister Ray" from the 1967 Gymnasium bootleg; that was 10 years after "Jailhouse Rock", or the same length of time from 2001 until now. And I honesty think very few people alive in 1957 could have even imagined that music existing in 10 years. It's hard to think of anything going on now that was unimaginable 10 years ago (pretty sure there is a thread that speculates on just this somewhere).

xhuxk, Tim was responding to talk of much earlier, pre- mass media periods of time. I think the "now" Tim was talking about would include the whole era of mass media (or at least some point after it got rolling).

(I agree with your perception that the 50s seeming a lot more distant in the 70s than the 70s did in the 90s, or now even.)

I guess I'm interested in aspects of this thread after all. Maybe I should read the book.

Yes, I was trying to get at why centuries of people playing the same folk tunes does not mean that "retromania" has always existed in the way it exists now. The "culture becomes the past faster now" refers to the 20th century onwards in general, not the immediate recent past of pop culture.

It's harder to say whether cultural progression has started to slow down (say, in the last ten years) because those immediate judgments are much more tied up in one's own relationship to culture, aging etc.

Yes, I was trying to get at why centuries of people playing the same folk tunes does not mean that "retromania" has always existed in the way it exists now. The "culture becomes the past faster now" refers to the 20th century onwards in general, not the immediate recent past of pop culture

I can see why this is a seductive argument but I'm not overly convinced by this. Surely this could only really be compared another 100-200 years down the line. 1940-2040 might look at lot more homogeneous in 2190 than it does today.

It's less about homogeneity or lack thereof and more about the way in which people relate to their immediate past. From the limited amount I know, the 19th century strikes me as being as much a time of flux as the 20th, but I'm not aware of people in the 19th century reviving trends mere decades old for the specific purpose of recalling/resurrecting the trends of that prior decade.

and that's basically cuzza technology. why people do it now and didn't do it then. though i'm sure there were always mini-movements of people resurrecting or re-appreciating composers and songwriters of the recent past back then too.

yes, absolutely.

i think the Victorians probably had a much stronger ethos of "progress" than we do in the post-everything 21st century too, but if my brain was less fuddled i'm sure i could come up with good examples of 19th century micro-nostalgia

i'm also guessing that in the 19th century (and earlier) a piece of music that was 20 or 30 years old could be considered pretty current! i mean, unless you had access to the sheet music or were lucky enough to hear a performance of something new, it might be years before you came into contact with some stuff.

I think what Scott argues about Collins 'You Can't Hurry Love' being a modern cover is interesting and i guess it's a situation where personal prejudices are brought out. my first thought was to compare its modernity to other big hit covers from around the same time e.g. Siouxsie & The Banshees 'Dear Prudence'. The latter was more unusual but not necessarily more contemporary-sounding despite the band's position (but tbh I don't know the reasons why they covered and released that song at that time).

one example in the united states of some sort of retro-mania was the huge popularity of stephen foster in the years after his death. (i mean he died penniless on the bowery in the 1860's, and by the turn of the century those songs were literally everywhere and he was a national treasure. not that his songs weren't known when he was alive, but his posthumous fame reflects the desire for that down home/minstrel/old south nostalgia that was really strong well into the 20th century)