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

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.

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

Autotune durr.

To be "this era's answer to Madonna" is to be quite something, whether you approve or not

Autotune is to this era as slap-bass and sax solos were to the mid '80s, tis true.

Autotune far more prevalent though, I think

I feel like pop has kind of already made his thesis redundant. Give or take an Adele here or there, 2011 (and 2010) pop is nothing if not self-consciously modern, regardless of where its composite pieces come from.

Like, he started thinking about it three or four years ago and while he was writing the book everything changed.

Isn't "defining an epoch" through pop music - as a manageable and even inevitable cultural/critical exercise - as much a relic of the 60s/70s glory years as anything else, and thus the continued desire on the part of S Reynolds (and many others) to continually return to this mode of non-niche, Ed Sullivan, Top of the Pops imagined community itself a hopelessly retro way of thinking about the world?

yeah in some ways i think hes otm

in terms of underground/hipster music

kinda

but a look at the pop charts and while yeah you do have the duffys and adeles (though adele doesnt really sound retro per se, she just symbolises old fashioned music values) the bulk of it is horrendously ultra modern, same as the 80s

for all the retro soul groups, you also had a lot of ultra modern artists dominating, and technology was ruling over all

gagas records, like them or not, could not have been made in any other era, same for the black eyed peas, some of that is just that the modern sheen and post-mp3 production prferences renders them modern whether the actual content of the music is or not, but usher, ne yo, guetta, all this stuff can be traced back to the 90s in some ways, but the end result is definitely, very very of the time. people like retro music but the masses will almost always buy music that sounds of its time more than anything else imo.

xposts
To be "this era's answer to Madonna" is to be quite something, whether you approve or not

― Tom D has taken many months to run this thread to ground (Tom D.), Thursday, 2 June 2011 12:49 (35 seconds ago) Bookmark

Sure, but the question is - is it new and original enough to evade the "retro" tag? I'm not sure about this really. First, Gaga doesn't really sound like Madonna/Jones, but she does fill the requisite pocket or category left behind by those artists.

I don't know if Reynolds touches on this, but music can work a lot like Darwinian evolutionary categories - there are pockets that will always need to be filled.

A few years ago I remember a bloke in his early thirties bemoaning emo culture, "what is this music? why are they all so depressed?" etc. I pointed out that every generation of disillusioned middle-class teens needs an angsty rock act or scene to align itself. "It was the Smiths when I was at school", he said. And grunge for me.

the masses will almost always buy music that sounds of its time more than anything else imo.

The ol' masses are more complex than that I think

I feel like pop has kind of already made his thesis redundant. Give or take an Adele here or there, 2011 (and 2010) pop is nothing if not self-consciously modern, regardless of where its composite pieces come from.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 2 June 2011 12:51 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Like, he started thinking about it three or four years ago and while he was writing the book everything changed.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 2 June 2011 12:52 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yep - definitely feeling that pop has taken a laxative lately and managed to move on significantly from revisionism in this decade.

Thesedays, the sixties is "history", the seventies are "retro", the eighties "old", and from the nineties up to now, you only get a sense that it's not today from the technology involved.

So, imagine that 90% of things from the last 20 years can avoid looking dated, it's not that we're looking at the past, it's more that the 'past' still looks like the present.

compare that to 1975, say, where stuff from the sixties was still around but old-fashioned, and the 50s looked like another era.

It's all subjective of course. I'm sure a twenty year old would view Blur/Oasis in the same way as I might Echo & the Bunnymen or XTC or someone.

Yeah, but how the view for someone that liked The Faces, looking at The Ink Spots?

(ref: 1975 looking back at 1951, as opposed to 2011 lba 1990 or 2000 lba 1981)

(actually, strike the Ink Spots, I'm way off: Make that Les Paul & Mary Ford instead)

old hip hop looks ancient now compared to modern stuff (not talking about indie stuff obv)

britpop era doesnt look as diff if you listen to that vs current arctic monkeys or kaisers etc

the prob with rock is that you have artists dipping into all its eras all the time and simultaneously so its harder for it to be moving forward and sound diff how the 70s bands sounded so diff to the 50s artists

heard him on Radio 4 this morning

he sounds like a bit of a divot

Everybody grows up listening to something, and doesn't really become capable of making much music of their own until they're 16 at least, so a certain degree of retro is obviously inescapable. And Reynolds' own sacred cows of acid house and drum and bass were in many ways rehashes of disco and dancehall themselves. But, not having read the book, I'd assume the thesis is more nuanced than that....

But the process of revivalism, like any communication, is imperfect and filled with noise. You hear something old, and then go looking for more and depending on what comes up in the record store, on youtube, or from your friend that you ask for recommendations, you build up an impression of an aesthetic that isn't necessarily at all related to what was happening at the time - as someone on here once said "your record colleciton is the map, not the territory".

Thus 00s revivalism could perhaps only be held to be different from any other era in that archival technology was better and people had more access to the sounds and scenes of the past, as they really were, than Dylan had to appalachian folk music or whatnot. But this doesn't really hold water either, as most of the prominent 00s revivals didn't really sound that similar to the thing they were reviving - The-Dream doesn't sound very much like trance music; Nu-rave sounds very little like rave and you wouldn't even have struggled to pull an Interpol record out of an early 80s line-up.

I wonder if it's less about what musicians were doing and more about the weirdly narrowed focus of the top 40, since record sales ceased to mean much. The reason the beatles are the second best selling albums artist of the 00s is nothing to do with their relative poplularity compared to Eminem and everything to do with who actually buys albums...

"acid house and drum and bass were in many ways rehashes of disco and dancehall themselves."

not nearly. just a basic listen to these genres will tell you that.

So you've not noticed any dancehall samples in early d&b or any similarities between the basslines and 80s digi-dub? And you wouldn't recognise that Ron Hardy would have played First Choice records next to DJ Pierre? That's an interesting take...

My point is that all "future music" inevitably starts somewhere and then evolves and it's the evolution that's the interesting bit.

of course i have but if i was at a dancehall club and some jungle came on a lot of people may hate it (and vice versa), because of the great (and clear) difference in the genres. but anyway, back to retromania.

I thought nabisco's point about how electroclash seemed retro at the time but now sounds very very of it's own time was a good one and probably applies here

Its own - apostrophe use is the fault of phone

sign of the times

Wow, SR evens gets his own front-page BBC panel (it's #2 on the domestic homepage; sorry international users) -

http://www.bbc.co.uk

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9501000/9501996.stm

the power of faber PR

kudos to grimey though

"The quality fiction bestsellers of the 60s – zeitgeisty novels by JD Salinger, Philip Roth et al – remain a presence in our culture but did not trouble any noughties bestseller charts. Equally, there are no modern directors copping licks from Dr's Strangelove and Zhivago, nor authors styling novels after Portnoy's Complaint. But there are still bands ripping off the Beatles."

Lololol so rong.

when is this out btw? I checked online and it seemed to say it was already out, but when I preordered on Amazon, they wouldn't even give me an ETA.

Anyway, novels don't get remasters, deluxe editions etc. It's not really a fair comparison

Music used to be exciting because so much was fresh and new. No more. There are no great new riffs - just forgettable ones - no exciting new sounds. No original new melodies. No exciting new identities. just rehashes of old ones. The X Factor eneration has taken over. Frightening thought - has everything that can be done, now been done?

Alan Merricks, Oxted England

The X Factor enervation.

The difference is that music is an unavoidable thing. It's harder to achieve mass-nostalgia among book readers because music is something we're exposed to from a young age, whereas book reading is subjective and will only be relevant to those who've read a book. Comparing Dr Zhivago to, say, disco, just doesn't make sense.

Disco Zhivago