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

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

Disco Zhivago is now the name of my band. Thank you!

np

A bit Gogol Bordello tho, unfortunately

nooh, it's not.

Anyway, novels don't get remasters, deluxe editions

They get the equivalent though. By the 1980s the multiple forwards, notes and appendices of The Naked Lunch took up more space than the text itself. Also see the number of different translations of Proust you can get, not to mention the publication of the original manuscripts of things like The Wasteland. And that's before hardcover, collectible reprints, books being made into graphic novels etc etc. Literature is just as bad for raking over the coals of its canon as rock music.

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

Agreed the analogy doesn't work (possibly because literature more comfortable with its own past, not so attached to a ideal of permanent novelty as pop/rock, & hence less riven by contradictions when drawing on its past), but I'd say new editions, new translations (Zhivago last year), luxury editions, fresh covers (especially by name artists/designers) occupy the same space - & the closest analogy probably that funny period when HarperCollins added talking points, essays & author interviews to paperbacks of their book-group friendly fiction titles. (do they still do this?)

xp but i'm posting it anyway

I understand what you're saying but there's such a big market for stuff that plays hard and fast with what you're saying.

The current trend for books like Pride, Prejudice and Zombies for example.

that funny period when HarperCollins added talking points, essays & author interviews to paperbacks of their book-group friendly fiction titles. (do they still do this?)

This was so lame. Haven't seen one in a while though

Is "Pride, Prejudice and Zombies" retro though? I'm not sure it could be classified as such. Also, republishing of old books isn't really retro either, or at least it doesn't have the collective nostalgic impact that say the Beatles Anthology box sets had in the mid-90s.

for example, this 'revised critical edition with a new translation' is the same as a remaster no?
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Anne-Frank-Revised-Critical/dp/0385508476
i mean.. there's no difference surely?

I guess... feels like there is one though

From the BBC piece:

"Astral Weeks is one of the masterpieces of rock. Lots of people would almost see it as a sacred work. But he did it again in perfect sequence. So there's this terrible version called Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which is just really tawdry."

And this "whole album" phenomenon is a huge trend, with many older bands reforming and re-recording.

"Having said that, I now live in LA, and if he had done it while I was there I might very well have gone, because it's Van Morrison."

I wonder what Simon has to say about all the post-punk bands playing early classics in their entirety. He was too young himself to see that material live the first time around. I personally am glad I got to see Mission of Burma play Vs., for example.

I love the first comment:

Yeah, and our local orchestra plays Beethoven every year, can you figure it? Maybe some stuff is worth hearing again.
Joe, Birmingham, UK

I say it's about fucking time some music of my own generation is considered significant enough to revisit. I don't know if I'll agree with Retromania, but I look forward to it, and am sure it'll be a good read. It's not out until July 19, at least in the U.S.

Reynolds in the Guardian: "What is different about the contemporary retromania is the aspect of total recall, instant recall, and exact recall that the internet makes possible."

Yes. Wait. I wrote a lengthy cover feature on this subject in the LAWeekly on this in 2003. Shit, Simon's catching up!

And my bit was really just an expansion on something Julian Cope had written, which I found totally compelling as a defense of lifting from the past:

"In those bad old days, it used to be that certain of the more eclectic pop groups had such a wide range of styles that once in a while a song might be released that the public definitely needed more of. But the originators were just so totally on one that it surely weren’t gonna be them who provided it... Take the Zombies’ 1964 epic 'She’s Not There,' which the band themselves never even came close to revisiting but whose bass parts, drum parts, keyboard stylings and minor-key melodrama was lifted with extraordinary vision and percipient thoroughness by the Doors for a magnificent (and genuinely exploratory) six-album career of sub-Nietzschean post-Jungian pub-banter."

Simon is one of my closest friends, and I spent a year of my life working on 'Rip it Up and Start Again' as his assistant in 2002-2003, so maybe I'm slightly biased here. But it's strange to me that so many people (on this thread, and elsewhere) have formed strong opinions on 'Retromania' without reading it. It's not even out in the US yet.

how was working in Rip It Up Geeta?! hugely, HUGELY influential book in my neck of the woods (Manchester UK). can't be overestimated how influential in fact; i musta had fifty conversations about it with different kids. i mailed SR in '06 to tell him of all the flyers and posters for clubs here that were using the jacket's yellow and pink colours in their designs. still one of my fave books of all time.

it looks.. thick this Retromania book. a photo of it in MOJO makes it look easily twice the size of a regular book.

have no opinions regarding retromania, the book. i'm responding here only to the reynolds' guardian promo/article, with its general tone of alarm at, "mounting evidence to indicate an unhealthy fixation on the bygone."

i'm bothered by the tone, the overstated insistence that this is QUITE NEW and QUITE BAD. i'm bothered by the way the case is built, simple things like reynolds' failure to make the connection between the beatles' love and beatlemania, or his avoidance of the fundamental differences in the way we use/consume pop music in our daily lives when compared, say, to films and books. few people will watch a movie or read a novel more than a handful of times, but many (most?) of us listen to our favorite songs over and over again for years on end, hundreds if not thousands of times during the courses of our lives. and it's absurd to suggest that contemporary writers and directors are categorically less influenced by the past than contemporary musicians. we still see westerns onscreen, still read spy novels that might as well be set in the cold war. the shadow of past greatness looms large in every art form.

There is something peculiar, even eerie, about pop's vulnerability to its own history, the way the past accumulates behind it and hampers it, both as an actual sonic presence (on oldies radio, as reissues, through nostalgia tours and now via YouTube) and as an overpowering influence.

i don't think of this as peculiar, and it's certainly not eerie. artistic modes are a kind of technology, and while technology always pushes forward, it generally retains its best, most useful features. it does not surprise me that certain pop modes prove durable over time. people had hits singing sweet and low long past crooning's heyday. we've been playing simple variations on early rock, blues, funk, soul, gospel, disco and country since these forms were invented. it's sort of like how people continue to live in houses and wear shoes: these are technologies with proven utility and lasting appeal.

and god, that paragraph on vintage fads. people have been accessorizing their lives with manual typewriters since the era of manual typewriters. people have been fond of kitchy vintage tinting in photographs since the advent of color. when i was a kid, my family paid 20 bucks or so to dress as "olde west" types and have a sepia tinted photo taken with an ancient box camera. my dad shot lots of 60s and 70s era family photos in "stylish" black & white. it's hard to separate the distinctive, contemporary manifestations of these impulses from those that have been around forever, but i just don't see any effort put forth in that direction here.

this is the kicker:

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.

this doesn't really exist, not in any universal sense. the "never heard this before" sensation is entirely personal, having more to do with the listener's frame of reference than the artist's. i hear mind-blowingly innovative music all the fucking time, and i'm hardly young. i don't get hit as hard or as often as i did when i actually was young, but a tiresome familiarity is one of the great burdens of age.

i agree in general that we live in an retro-saturated era. as reynolds quite correctly points out, the past is now immediately available to us in a way that's truly radical. this makes the past seem infinite (as it is) relative to a paltry present and an unknown future. i agree that the internet has worked to turn pop away from the promise of radical futurism towards the comfort of a shared, comprehensible past. i've gnashed my teeth about the same thing on these boards, but that doesn't incline me to buy the half-baked arguments and alarmism trafficked in this piece. what we need are arguments that make the promise of that unwritten future soar, that point us towards the wonders we could be inventing ― not grousing about other people's blinkered retro fetishism.

i am certain that when we listen back to the music of 21st century, we will hear a palette of sounds and styles no less distinctive than that which characterizes any other era.

I would much rather read something looking at the lack of a futurism in the modern day. I just don't think his observations ring true. Perhaps to a casual observer great leaps were made in the past, and now we can struggle to see genres micro-mutate into the next new thing in a differentiable way because we have a greater access to a greater mass of information about stuff.

another thing reynold's piece hints at but doesn't quite grasp is that we really are living through the end of the cycle, the dying days. the 20th century was an uninterrupted series of bombs going off in human culture and society, each more powerful than the last. every certainty attacked, every tradition debased, every possibility explored, every perspective deconstructed, every taboo transgressed. it more than lived up to its billing as "the century of the atom," not least in its comprehensive atomization of everything that preceded it.

towards the end of the 20th century, however, art and culture began to hit the wall wr2 "the shock of the new." a resource that had seemed endlessly renewable up to the 70s suddenly began to run dry. history had ended and nothing was shocking. every radical new invention began to seem like a trivial repurposing of something that had long existed. you can only smash complacency so many times, after all, before smashing itself becomes complacent.

electronic pop and dance music have managed to keep the 20th century flame, that inventor's optimism, burning by the simple application of technology. the technology of sound production and recording have kept pace with the utopian dream, allowing radical invention to flourish in these genres long past the point where the rest of the world grew tired of "radical invention" as an end in itself. i suspect that the important challenge for western arts cultures in the early 21st century will not be the manufacture of brave new worlds. it will, instead, be the task of rebuilding, of sifting through the cratered rubble left behind by the 20th century's endless bombardment to see what's worth keeping and what of lasting value might be made with the debris.

which makes "retromania" a potentially positive symptom...

was kinda with you on that first post, lost u on the 2nd one

dang. shoulda stood pat.

but yeah, that 2nd post was essentially a rebuttal to the first. at that point, i was critiquing my own argument as much as reynolds'. not sure i buy the ultra-conservative "now is a time for rebuilding" schtick myself, but i've been tempted to offer it as an explanation for our current (seeming) fondness for the comforts of the past. as an inveterate sci-fi nerd, my fondest hope is that it's just a lull before the next great leap forward.

towards the end of the 20th century, however, art and culture began to hit the wall wr2 "the shock of the new."

Whoa boy y'all need to read some Frankfurt School. And this book:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51kNPQbe-OL._SL500_.jpg

but yeah first post basically OTM.

god, the third paragraph in that 2nd post is SO FUCKING POMPOUS. sounds like winston fucking churchill wrote it. regrets...

not at all familiar with either the frankfurt school or petro. book really worth a read? any other suggestions? i ask cuz "the frankfurt school" seems to include an enormous amount of published work.

Do disagree with this assertion in the article:

"When they look back to the early 21st century, their pics will look like they were taken two or three decades earlier, summoning up a long-lost era they don't have any reason to feel nostalgic about."

Disagree because I do think there's reason to feel nostalgic. Not philosophically, but aesthetically? Definitely.

xpost

I'd read the title article from Aftershocks of the New. I don't agree with its conclusions re: Madonna vs. Kiki de Montparnasse but it's still a gorgeously written reminder that "the shock of the new" is historically contingent.

For the Frankfurt School on these matters, check out several essays by Kracauer in the collection The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, esp. "Those Who Wait," "The Group as Bearer of Ideas," The Hotel Lobby," "Cult of Distraction," and "Boredom."

Actually, the title of the Petro essay is "After Shock, Between Boredom and History."

thanks, kevin. often feel lost in discussions of philosophy, political theory, and academic crit, especially when it comes to precedents and names. i just don't have the background.

kiki de who's that again?

She's one of the gals on the cover of Petro's book above. More here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiki_de_Montparnasse

"But it's strange to me that so many people (on this thread, and elsewhere) have formed strong opinions on 'Retromania' without reading it."

dude, i think people are really gonna read it though! no such thing as bad publicity. plus, people are thinking about this stuff a lot. i know i am. it's a good spark for discussion. and yeah disagreement. i'm gonna read it. like i said here before i was thinking about writing something about this kind of thing and then seeing simon's thing at the EMP conference made me think some more. it made my head hurt! but then i read jay's thing and realized i didn't have to write anything, cuz he was kind enough to have already done it.

i still plan to steal some of simon's material though. you know, for other things. once i bastardize it, nobody will know where it came from. hey, he inspires theft. that's a good thing.

kiki de who's that again?

― scott seward, Thursday, June 2, 2011 6:49 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

the shock of the nu

in the times article - paywalled so i cant link to it - he concludes that perhaps its just a western thing, that pop culture/music is dying HERE. but perhaps in india and china and the middle east, that may be where the next big thing will come from, where things WILL move at a faster, fresher pace. im not sure about that, and if it did, then it will have to be in english for people to really latch on to it here (or westerners will copy their innovations and sell it back to us/them). but thats an interesting point. the whole 'dont talk about it til its out thing' idea is a bit weird i think - were discussing other things hes written about it, if not the actual book, so its all related.

I think in some cases it can take political and social upheaval/dissent to spurn people into making truly new and unique music. Otherwise they start getting misty-eyed about the days when there was some common stomping ground or political focus to work against - leading to revisionism of punk, hippie, rave etc...

This is why I find things like South African house music so exciting and vibrant - this is music made by the first generation of musicians after apartheid, and I can see parallels between what's going on there and the post-war '60s movement in the West. It's celebratory, but still has an edginess to it that expresses dissent.

The Western world doesn't seem to have had a unifying banner for young musicians to cluster under, and so they seek out the sounds of previous eras - i.e. Dance music used to have an undercurrent of the illicit - driving to secret locations, avoiding the cops etc. Now dance music has become more acceptable - superclubs, famous DJs, TV ads. Same as punk music and hippie music before.