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

It would be interesting to look at Top 40 lists from, say, 1967 through the mid-'70s and see how many rock records were up there that were danceable and would have been stuff played at high school dances.

there were dixieland revivalists in the 40s, ragtime would get revived over & over, there was near-constant references to antebellum south, etc

― geeks, dweebs, nerds & lames (D-40), Monday, April 25, 2011 4:54 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, that's a fair objection. easy example in contemporary pop: the riffing on "old-timey" culture & music in the coen brothers' o brother, where art thou?. american country & western music has always long in the nostalgia business, no argument there. and i'm not trying to claim that retro was invented in the 50s/early 60s. i do think that "retro pop" as a distinct thing (yet inseparable from pop itself) did emerge during that era - to be more precise, that era somehow allowed it to be subsequently born.

and in saying that, i realize that contemporary pop as i understand it was in some sense born during the same era, so maybe what i'm thinking/saying has more to do with mod pop as a whole than with any retro reflexivity buried within it.

though i want to cast the backward-looking, childhood-besotted retro pop that really took off in the american 70s as a uniquely modern symptom, i'm a bit at a loss as to how i might make the case. it's not as though i've done a great deal of research on the subject. maybe i'd try to argue that prior to my midcentury hinge point, retro referentiality and pop-as-mythology were not universal aspects of shared culture, but were instead tied to genres and subcultures in which they made a kind of formal sense. like how country and other "old-timey" music has of course always been backwards-looking and thus somewhat self-referential, because the past is its explicit text.

The focus on "freakbeat" in retrospect made it clear how danceable '67-'68 era English rock was, too.

It would be interesting to look at Top 40 lists from, say, 1967 through the mid-'70s and see how many rock records were up there that were danceable

That might be hard to determine. I've got a special dance I do to Yes's "Roundabout," but it never really caught on nationally.

there are some more interesting theories in the book that we're discussing that might cause you to look at things differently -- the basic one being the shift from the sheet music being seen as the thing people were purchasing, while the recording was just a novelty, to the recording & specific performance becoming the point of the purchase

I think '50s rock and roll was 'listening music', too, and maybe just as profoundly as it was dance music.

― timellison, Tuesday, April 26, 2011 12:27 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

we're talking about how people treated it at the time. is soulja boy considered 'listening music'

i know some kids who just listen to it -- they post on this board as 'j0rdan sargent'

like, either all music is 'listening music,' or you're looking at this thru v distorted blinders imho

this has more to do with post-war mass-manufacturing and mass-marketing of commodities than anything else.

― The Everybody Buys 1000 Aerosmith Albums A Month Club (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, April 25, 2011 4:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

agree with this too, though it was offered as a rebuttal to my argument. i don't separate these things. pop retro's metastasis in american culture following the 50s and early 60s was probably in large part due to mass-manufacturing and mass-marketing (read: television).

I'm not sure that "clubs" and "dancehalls" for kids existed in the U.S. in the '50s. From what I know, kids' social experience with rock and roll would mostly have been jukeboxes, and probably not so much in places that had dance floors.

And the old archetypal thing of listening to Alan Freed before you turned out the light was rock and roll as 'listening music' - definitely!

Two experiences with "Roundabout" lately. One was that I watched a home movie of a famous radio DJ from my hometown in the '70s on Youtube just the other night and he was working at an AM station and one of the records he was playing in the clips was "Roundabout" on a 45. And then I saw a clip of a recent Yes tour on TV a month or so ago and they had a bunch of people up on stage dancing when they played that song.

I'd imagine "Roundabout" was played at some high school dances.

plus, a lot of people only got the big city stations that played the cool music at night if they held their radios a certain way.

i think you're misunderstanding the idea of 'listening music' here, or we're simply using the same term to describe entirely different things. of course i dont think rock fans exclusively danced to rock music

'listening music' = high art, high sound quality, sold in album format, meant to 'stand the test of time,' etc etc etc

rock n roll in the 50s: ephemeral, kids stuff, sold on 45s almost exclusively

man how do you dance to roundabout

"Roundabout": I'm sure that it would have been. One obvious example of how difficult either/or is would be "Stairway to Heaven": on one hand, the ultimate in stoned-and-headphones music, but also mandatory at any middle-school dance circa 1974 (like my own graduation dance).

We need someone on this board 60 or older to litigate (which would make them nine in 1959).

(My dance: you kind of hover in and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky, you stand there, then you go nuts.)

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

Those bastards! Where's my cheque?

i still think every sentence of that quote from that book is wrong. its a wrong sandwich!

Your original post said the distinction was "separating 'those who like to dance' from those who took music 'seriously'" and I don't think kids took Sgt. Pepper more seriously than they took Elvis.

i think very different people in culture took both in different ways at the time

he talks about how elvis was seen as 'kids music' at the time, which sgt pepper's wasnt ... it was treated as a 'maturation' of the genre.

Right, but the thought someone might have had about Sgt. Pepper being a maturation was abstract. I don't think it would have affected the basic listening experience to the extent that there was some notable distinction between what that experience was then and what it was before.

well, i fundamentally disagree, and think that this idea of the genre maturing was very much a part of the fabric of its reception top to bottmo

bottom

little kids love dancing to the beatles SO much. its all about walruses and submarines to them.

The only difference I can think of would be that maybe more people listened to Sgt. Pepper closer? But again, the old example of listening to Alan Freed at night definitely implied intimacy.

yeah, it's okay, tim, i'm pretty sure people have always listened to music. in many different ways.

tim, im arguing that the diff between them is, like, the difference between the reception of soulja boy & kanye west. im sure people listen to both on the radio by themselves late at night

not really the point, you know?

There was so much sweetness in '50s rock and roll, though. The raw stuff wasn't really the most commonplace, I don't think.

So, "the point" of, say, the Platters would be that listening experience.

On the early Oldies But Goodies records, half the album was always "the dreamy side."

I'm sure people slow danced/made out to Roy Orbison, but he is also the ultimate bedroom under the sheets listening music.

One thing we might be missing is that from the early days on Rock'n'Roll on the artists/labels were attempting to find cross over appeal to that older audience that preferred "listening" music like Nat "King" Cole and Sinatra. So you had the Everly Brothers doing faster stuff like "Wake Up Susie" alongside slower songs like "All I Have to Do is Dream."

I'd imagine "Roundabout" was played at some high school dances.

yes! every hs mixer I attended 1972-76 featured cover bands playing songs like "Smoke On The Water" and the inevitable slow dance "Stairway to Heaven." I remember getting bummed out at the senior prom by (among other things like my powder-blue tux) multiple renditions of "Lady" by Styx. These songs were not easy to dance to and that's why disco hit so hard a couple years later. punk too, in the pre-moshpit era. it was liberating to dance to something w/a steady beat.

Wow, great thread. With some great links to articles written by ilxors. Somebody upthread (in the very recent past) was possibly looking for this thread, which touches on some of the same things people are talkin about here -

The pace of fashion and style

I think I got made fun of for using Capadonna as a reference point. Or non-reference point.

I do recall the first dances I went to (7th-8th grade, late '70s) had DJs playing all sorts of music that would today be considered undanceable. I remember the Who's "Who Are You" being blared on a dance floor. Pretty much anything that was a hit single was game. A distinct culture of dance music didn't seem to catch on until the '80s unless you were in a major city with real nightclubs. Or maybe it had already happened but hadn't reached the middle-school dance circuit yet so I was unaware it was happening.

Almost every dance I went to when I was 13 featured the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack as its mainstay, until it was displaced by Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall".

related matters:
http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/everything-popular-is-wrong-making-it-in-electronic-music-despite-democratization/

blueski - That's a GREAT piece there. Thanks!

Pretty much anything that was a hit single was game.

I'd say that sums it up very well. People dance to hits, whatever they are. I'm not a wedding DJ--I've got friends who do that--but I'm pretty sure that if you played two songs back-to-back, the first one the most perfect dance song ever written that wasn't a hit and that nobody knew, followed by a big hit that was not what you'd normally think of as dance music ("Roundabout" in 1972, something else today), it's the second one that fills up the floor. That seems obvious to me.

See, I think "Roundabout" is really danceable. "Who Are You," too.

I love "Roundabout," so I agree with you...but obviously it's not what you'd call conventional dance music, and most people would find the idea of dancing to "Roundabout" funny. I think what I'm saying is that between rhythm-in-the-abstract and emotional-attachment-to-a-song as things that might motivate someone to dance, I believe the second factor is more powerful.

The book is not a lament for a loss of quality music – it's not like the well-springs of talent have dried up or anything – but it registers alarm about the disappearance of a certain quality in music: the "never heard this before" sensation of ecstatic disorientation caused by music that seems to come out of nowhere and point to a bright, or at least strange, future.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/02/total-recall-retromania-all-rage

will we hear anything that defines the epoch? Or will we just find a clutter of reproduction antique sounds and heritage styles?

well the obvious answer is duh, lady gaga. and a whole load of other shite that no one will think is good but WILL define this era quite neatly from the current pop charts. so yes, like it or not, we do still have music that defines this era. its pop retooling 90s dance cheese.

lady gaga isn't going to define this era for me. plus you could argue that she's simply this era's answer to madonna or grace jones.

sure. you could argue that. shes a composite. but her records are very much of this era, in terms of the sonics and production etc.

Uh, Madonna's kind of on a different planet to Grace Jones, in cultural significance terms

Yeah because Madonna and Grace Jones didn't define their era at all.