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

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.

i feel like adorno will probably be in the index of the actual book

i kind of want to read this but by god that cover is awful. also: i am not convinced reynolds has the chops as a thinker or theorist or whatever to actually do the topic justice. also the guardian article i kind of skimmed and still went 'yes but WHAT ABOUT X' at least three times so i don't know.

Doglatin you don't think you might be just a little over-romanticising a lot of things you haven't experienced?

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.

I'm no expert meself, but you're like 10-15 years out of date there aren't you?

LOL, Matt DC, I had a feeling you'd pop up here, but to answer your question I think.. not really - at the heart of all these movements was a sense of danger and political charge that quickly dissipated with popularity.

It's no coincidence that rock'n'roll came out only a few years after WWII - a celebration of new found freedom and values following that period of austerity and fear. There's no doubt in my mind that the earliest of hippies really did want to bring peace to the world - again, a direct consequence and reaction to Vietnam etc. Punk was a revolt against troubling economic and political times in the UK and US etc...

I really do believe that music doesn't exist in a vacuum - that lyrics and ideas are influenced by the world around the artist. Without major change in the world, it's harder to catalyse similar changes in art and music.

This is why it's the countries going through major changes, for better or worse, that will be producing the most forward-thinking and visceral music. I'm not saying that inert environments are devoid of new ideas, but that they will be the ones prone to recycling ideas from the past when they were going through those changes.

― orchestral pygnoeuvres in zee park (contenderizer), Friday, June 3, 2011 12:32 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

Love this post. can you write the book instead of SR please?

Punk was a revolt against troubling economic and political times in the UK and US etc...

Never bought this one. Anyway, the 80s were more troubling economically and politically IMO.

Also !!!!! at the notion that there isn't any focus for dissent or protest in the UK in 2011.

Paul Nicholas endlessly appearing on Top of the Pops singing "Reggae Like It Used to Be" was more of a wellspring for revolt than the balance of payments deficit

xpost Yes there is, of course there is, which is why UK music has been going great guns this last year or two. Dubstep and Funky were THE soundtracks of the recent protests, for example.

But the evolution of dubstep and funky has nothing to do with recession or public sector cuts! You're just cobbling together bits of musical and social received wisdom with a side order of romanticism. There was a decide between the WWII and rock and roll. The current South African house scene is 20 years after apartheid. You're drawing very very spurious connections between events.

Also you're suggesting that we're having a period of vital 'forward-thinking' music AND a period of slightly aimless comfy nostalgia at the same time, which is probably true but it kind of undermines the rest of your argument.

Paul Nicholas endlessly appearing on Top of the Pops singing "Reggae Like It Used to Be" was more of a wellspring for revolt than the balance of payments deficit

― Tom D has taken many months to run this thread to ground (Tom D.), Friday, 3 June 2011 12:34 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

Don't know what this is, but surely you're now referring to the medium, not the reason.

There's so much that can affect music - house prices (if there's no cheap practice space, how do bands get started and how do scenes like Ladbroke Grove and LES flourish?); unemployment (can't get the hours in if you've got a fulltime job, can you?), politics (cos everybody hates the Tories (sic)); new technology (someone gets their hands on a 303 or 808 or autotune and uses it differently from normal = a new sound and a new scene). What I'm saying is that changes and innovations in music don't just HAPPEN - they need to be catalysed by seismic or incremental changes in the general conscious. If everything's running in a comparatively smooth way, music will struggle to move on - it still will move on, but you're not going to get huge game-changers happen for no reason.

xp yeah there's a massive difference between actual protest music and someone spontaneously hooking up some kid's ipod to their system at a demo

surely you're now referring to the medium, not the reason.

Not sure what you mean

Anyway, Tom E OTM here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/02/tom-ewing-adele-success

Specifically: Music business stories – like most business stories – are a cocktail of post-facto rationalisation and wishful thinking... A lot of good music gets released all the time: sometimes, some of it gets bought. Beyond these boring facts, the rest is storytelling and hope.

It's obviously OK to discuss a book before reading on it, based on one article, but you have to give SR some leeway in the meantime. No point saying "yes but WHAT ABOUT X" when X (and Y and Z) are in the book.

Anyway, the 80s were more troubling economically and politically IMO.

That's a strange reading of history. The mood in the mid-late 70s was one of unravelling and collapse. The 80s had plenty to enrage the left but not that pervasive, across-the-board gloom.

But the evolution of dubstep and funky has nothing to do with recession or public sector cuts! You're just cobbling together bits of musical and social received wisdom with a side order of romanticism. There was a decide between the WWII and rock and roll. The current South African house scene is 20 years after apartheid. You're drawing very very spurious connections between events.

― Matt DC, Friday, 3 June 2011 12:38 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well, I'd say 5 years technically between end of WWII and the dawn of rock'n'roll. It took years after WWII for countries to recover, so do you not think there's a correlation here?

Apartheid ended 20 years ago - exactly. Those 20 year old producers are the first to have lived outside of this. It represents a new exuberance that would have been repressed were they born before. And it's not as though the troubles aren't still going on, which gives the music a certain roughness that you don't get in other kinds of house.

Have you been to South Africa?

Have been reading this book this morning. It's better than the Guardian precis, but I hafta say, Grimey Si's US exile leads to some rather baffling statements, such as:

"In some ways chavs are Britain's last bastion of futurist taste..."

Well, I'd say 5 years technically between end of WWII and the dawn of rock'n'roll. It took years after WWII for countries to recover, so do you not think there's a correlation here?

Except rock and roll started in the USA and it certainly did not take the US years to recover from WWII, they actually did rather well out of it

Except rock and roll started in the USA and it certainly did not take the US years to recover from WWII, they actually did rather well out of it

Well if they did, that's the catalyst - and once the UK and other countries were ready, they joined in.

Music is a soundtrack to a time and place - reflecting and influencing in equal measure - from Morissey's humdrum towns to George Harrison and Ray Davies' Taxmen to Bob Marley's Exodus to Shut Up And Dance's Ravin I'm Ravin - all these represent social and political change in some way, and all are iconic of their place and time.

sorry, I'm feeling very tetchy and tired today btw because of having to walk my bike all the way home after finding the back wheel missing at 2am following the Ford & Lopatin gig.

You are kinda like that guy who keeps predicting the world's about to end and when it doesn't, just says he got his calculations slightly wrong this time

"Also !!!!! at the notion that there isn't any focus for dissent or protest in the UK in 2011."

there is but there is little/no music reflecting it. def not funky. def not dubstep. grime perhaps. but that was a long time ago.

Not sure I want or have the chops to wade in to this argument, but I did think that SR's recent Wire article was much more coherent and convincing than the Guardian article.

So for those who've read/are reading the book, does Reynolds make a convincing argument that "It's the mania that's new" to quote from Dave Haslam's review?

people running down the street smashing cops in the face with electric typewriters and old yardbirds LPs

the unabomber impulse is strong if slightly half-hearted. won't be long though before every beardo in the land has a humble underwood on their desk and no internet connection. they can talk about secret sources for the best vintage typewriter ribbons and carbon paper.

Ha -- that immediately reminds me of Patrick Farley's "The Guy I Almost Was":

http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

From 1998! About growing up in the seventies, envisioning a retreat to typewriters etc. as time goes on and then...discovering the Internet.

does Reynolds make a convincing argument that "It's the mania that's new" to quote from Dave Haslam's review?

Yes imo. Short answer why: the internet.

OK will tackle when it hits these shores. Thanx!!!

As long as SR can explain to me why my complete remastered collection of every Twilight Zone episode ever produced sits lurking in my hard-drive, unwatched - the very thought of beginning it fills me with anxiety, yet not beginning it at all also fills me with anxiety - then I'll be pleased. No pressure.

Honestly, now that I'm in my 30s there's just not enough time to be retro. Once I dug through crates. Now I bookmark reviews of books about digging through crates and forget I've bookmarked it. Actually maybe I'm in my 60s.

yeah you are a fogey

Just wait'll the reissue of my 2006 bookmarks comes out, it's gonna be a must-read. I'll send you guys a review of it.

i love you, tracer

Ha -- that immediately reminds me of Patrick Farley's "The Guy I Almost Was":

http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

From 1998! About growing up in the seventies, envisioning a retreat to typewriters etc. as time goes on and then...discovering the Internet.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, June 3, 2011 1:09 PM (2 hours ago)

This was so great! I still get that fantasy a couple times a year, "I will forsake...phones. I will wear only...knapsacks."

I'm content with 2011. There's a lot of things IN 2011 that are crap, in the same way that much about life is crap, but it's still life and still 2011 so rah.

200+ houses destroyed by a tornado up the road from me in springfield the other day. i ain't complaining about nothing.