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

For me, cover art is still very important even if it's only a thumbnail in your Spotify window.

xp But we're not talking about 2011 releases alone. Nevermind was impactful almost right away - you don't need a decade to see which records have cultural weight.

Hope listening services like Spotify will eventually allow for more art from individual releases somehow.

its like dizzees first album, everyone knew instantly it was significant

The mysterious "everyone" again.

http://www.factmag.com/2011/06/20/five-minutes-with-simon-reynolds/

“There does seem to have been a long moment when music had a particular prestige and and it does feel like that moment has passed. Music was a sort of sovereign zone: it demanded the listener’s complete immersion, you were subjugated to the temporality of the Album. Now music is much more about being at our disposal, it’s become convenient, a backdrop to other activities, a space-filler. Music is ubiquitous today in a way that it actually wasn’t in the Sixties and Seventies. It’s in the soundtracks of games and movies, it’s in TV commercials, it’s piped out as Muzak in supermarkets and cafés. We take it wherever we go with our iPods and iPhones. Yet this omnipresence and superabundance has ultimately led to a depreciation in music’s value."

“The other thing is that music had a privileged status where it wasn’t just one option in a range of entertainments, or merged with them in various transmedia combinations. Music was rather the central prism through which all other fields of culture were seen, a glue connecting various disparate zones of progressive culture and politics. Just look at how important rock in the late Sixties/early Sixties sense was to Martin Scorsese – music ran through all his films, with The Last Waltz he created a memorial to an entire era as it was fading out, decades later he did the Dylan documentary. Or look at how the New York artists of the late Seventies were all in bands and saw rock as the power spot of the culture. Rolling Stone was defined by its founder Jann Wenner as being a magazine not just about the music, but all the things and attitudes that music embraced and was about. There was a long moment when there seemed to be hardly any limits to the things that music could be about."

That is completely contradictory and incoherent.

i suppose this is the point i just admit to being old

Basically everyone, from Lex to Dog Latin to SR, is writing their own versions of history, when there's actually a million different histories.

How is it incoherent? It's hardly controversial to say that pop music used to be front and centre of cultural change in a way that it isn't now because there are other equally (or more) exciting, relevant and innovative artforms and technologies competing for that role.

I think the "central prism" thing is more to do with genre fracturing than with any change in depth or impact.

I think there's a bigger vote-split these days (websites, video games, DVDs, multiple TV channels), true, but I don't think music was ever quite the ONLYT thing that defined youth cultures / cultural change. There's always been cinema, fashion, football, etc etc etc (well, as long as there's been recorded music).

It seems a lot simpler just to make the argument that musics value has declined because it is now cheaper..but its a reach to talk about omniprescence and the rest of it (I dont think music is omnipresent at all - and think of people who have for decades have had the misfortune to be hammered over the head with music radio at their places of work for decades)

xpost
and also that now the mainstream is only really host to stuff that fits with the status quo, theres little that challenges it getting in

And singles were WAY more important than albums in the 50s and for most of the 60s.

All you have to do is go back and look at previous decades to see how significant - even revolutionary - pop music was felt to be - how it seemed like the great 20th century popular artform with resonances in cinema, fashion, visual art, literature and so on. It does not hold that position anymore. That's not to say that listener x's experience is going to be any less joyful or fulfilling but SR's interest isn't listener x.

The omnipresence is a side-issue - related but not the cause.

Although having had the misfortune to work in a place with music radio one the other week it certainly felt omnipresent

i suppose this is the point i just admit to being old

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:43 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Uh huh. I guess you could say there's only a relatively tiny moment in the average music fan's life where one has the right to commentate on the musical zeitgeist (if such a thing exists) - between later high school and university* - simply because one has access to the opinions and attitudes of a large number of music consumers. After this people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture. Which is one of the main we seem to be bickering ITT.

*and even this will vary from uni to uni, social group to social group...

The golden age of rockism type stuff always seemed to me to be kind of racist.

xpost what is going on with my grammar/typing todee?

people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture.

dedication to what? dedication to impressions of the musical climate at large?

All you have to do is go back and look at previous decades to see how significant - even revolutionary - pop music was felt to be - how it seemed like the great 20th century popular artform with resonances in cinema, fashion, visual art, literature and so on. It does not hold that position anymore. That's not to say that listener x's experience is going to be any less joyful or fulfilling but SR's interest isn't listener x.

The omnipresence is a side-issue - related but not the cause.

― Strictly vote-splitting (DL), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:50 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

It always surprises me when people are into fashion for fashion's sake. I'm no fashionista and know little about the industry, but I always felt that fashion should be a reflection of oneself - and part of that is the music one listens to. Was the link between music and fashion (and indeed cinema and other artforms) so much stronger before? Has fashion always been this sort of fancy-dress thing where "the rock chick look" will go in and out of style regardless of whether the wearer listens to rock music at all? I guess the cynical view might be that these days a fashionista having a rock star on their arm is the equivalent of a rock star dating a model chick back in the '70s.

I mean going back upthread this is what I don't get why you want things to have some definable cultural impact. Adele has 2.6 cultural impacts and Nirvana had 4.9 cultural impacts?

people's dedication tends to dwindle and any impressions of "the musical climate at large" turns into conjecture.

dedication to what? dedication to impressions of the musical climate at large?

― post, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 17:06 (30 seconds ago) Bookmark

General dedication to music. I'm not talking about ILMers here, but how many people do you know whose CD collection stops around the same time they left university?

I mean going back upthread this is what I don't get why you want things to have some definable cultural impact. Adele has 2.6 cultural impacts and Nirvana had 4.9 cultural impacts?

― post, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 17:07 (54 seconds ago) Bookmark

Not lobbying or wanting for anything - this is just the way things seem to be.

Being into music and giving a shit about wider cultural impact are the same thing now?

no, they're getting further and further away, possibly.

I just think that music culture - whatever that is - is more global and less governed or shaped or framed by elites. Of course some people are going to have adjustment problems with that.

no, they're getting further and further away, possibly.

― Post-Manpat Music (dog latin), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 4:12 PM (1 minute ago)

i hope so!

xp Speaking for my racist, elitist friends, I want to say thanks for clearing everything up so eloquently.

post - it's amazing to me that you wish music to live and breathe in such microcosmic isolation. honestly - i have serious trouble getting my head around this, unless all you listen to is the most minimal of minimal music.

Same here. I don't know how you can separate music from the culture that produced it or have so little curiosity about the world outside. I've always loved how music could be a way of understanding and learning about the world.

All you have to do is go back and look at previous decades to see how significant - even revolutionary - pop music was felt to be - how it seemed like the great 20th century popular artform with resonances in cinema, fashion, visual art, literature and so on. It does not hold that position anymore. That's not to say that listener x's experience is going to be any less joyful or fulfilling but SR's interest isn't listener x.

Leaving aside the point that viewing pop music as "the great 20th century popular artform" was diddling jazz and cinema itself somewhat, surely not obviously not ALL pop music fulfilled that role, even in the 60s. One of the things I like best about Popular is how Tom overlays discussion of certain myths or received ideas of an era with an examination of what was actually popular at the time and how jarring these can be, and shows up what's been airbrushed out of pop history. And the bits that stay in are, time and time again, the bits with mystique or bohemia or exoticism, things that Simon is bemoaning a lack of, and things you never notice if you're actively looking for them in the same places they used to be. Whether you're complaining that nothing has the same impact it did in the 60s to saying that nothing feels as significant as the music that came out when you were 13, it's basically the same thing.

There's still resonances of pop music in visual art, cinema, literature, fashion - very obviously in some cases. But there seems to be an arbitrary divide between "glue" (pop music in a Scorcese film) and "space filler" (pop music in a video game, or a film by a less fashionable director). You only have to look at the changing critical treatment of disco (or, say, Black Sabbath) over 30 years or so to know that the people constructing narratives sometimes drop the ball - who's to say they're not dropping it now?

I'm not really that interested in artists or personalities or whatever or even narrative - maybe in history to an extent but not about modern music. I wouldn't say I'm looking to separate it from culture, I'd say I'm not looking for it to have some kind of impact other than on myself (I don't need to read about or even know who the artist is and I don't care what the man in the shop says about it)

I kinda find "this record in this one genre sounds a bit like this other record in this other genre" type stuff annoying

I disagree with Simon's points in that piece to some extent, but the idea that the the things people use to discuss or arrange or consume art have usurped the art itself is a pretty good one imo. There was a time where music was a big connecting thing for people, a way of making the world seem smaller. Post-internet how could it ever be this way? As I said before, is Spotify a bigger deal culturally than any of the albums on it?

I think where I'd disagree with Simon is the implication that this means music is worse. Plus there are certain tribal communities still around where music still is a focal point, obviously there are loads.

Jazz was an enormous influence on urban culture - it informed the fashion, the architecture, the nightlife - yet it got little credit by boomers (and their kids, apparently).

Again, it's about time frame. I thought we were talking, as is SR, about the pop era from the mid-50s onwards, at which point it usurped jazz. I'm not denying jazz's enormous, pivotal significance in the preceding decades.

xp Interesting, post. Like the more extreme death-of-the-author lit-crit. I don't come across many (any) people who are that purist.

Oh yeah, we're talking about post-1950 really, that was just an aside.

i'd say lots of people here feel that way DL, or i'd have thought so.

xp Interesting, post. Like the more extreme death-of-the-author lit-crit. I don't come across many (any) people who are that purist.

― Strictly vote-splitting (DL), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 4:44 PM

I'm not really that purist about it, it just doesn't occur to me to think that way - plus the majority of the music I listen to is either instrumental or the vocals aren't in english - and then with some of the music that is in English (some country) I think of the singers as characters

I'm not looking for, or interested in, the story behind the song or anything like that - find it completely alien

well not completely alien, that's an overstatement but like i would never read an interview with anyone or follow someone on twitter

if it makes people think about the stasis of pop which i dont think most people would disagree with (though there have been exceptions as this board knows like juke, grime, dubstep etc) then thats great.

I can't believe more people here don't disagree with this. His whole premise is just insane to me. Not only do I not see any stasis, but the stuff being mentioned as "new" like dubstep sounds really retro to me.

If you took a random dubstep or grime track and dropped it on the dancefloor in the middle of a jungle set in the mid '90s, nobody would have blinked an eye. It wouldn't have sounded new or alien or blown any minds. But I would have gone crazy for an album like Person Pitch if that came out in 1997. Because while it's influenced by '60s music it doesn't actually sound like anything from the past.

But then I don't understand the desire for music to be 'new' in the first place and find it a peculiarly British thing

It's an incredibly narrow view that privileges electronic music and makes a lot of faulty assumptions in the same way that rockism does with rock. The idea that futurism in music is somehow a form of progress is like wanting every novel to be science fiction. I think the growth of electronic music in the '80s and '90s led to this whole generation of musicians, djs, writers and fans who have a very limited musical education and no historical perspective so they can't see beyond their little niche. That, combined with an antagonism toward rock or anything that's considered old fashioned left a whole segment of people really unequipped to understand what's happening in music now.

If you took a random dubstep or grime track and dropped it on the dancefloor in the middle of a jungle set in the mid '90s, nobody would have blinked an eye. It wouldn't have sounded new or alien or blown any minds.

A dubstep track in a mid-90s jungle set would've cleared the dancefloor!

yeah because the rhythm is a bit different. not because it would be sonically alien to the audience.

Again re: dubstep, the big difference is technological more than compositional. Jungle by modern dubstep standards is crude and trebly. Software and hardware innovations are what make dubstep what it is - music that is as much a product of being able to produce a great bass response an loads of subtle detail rather than a seismic shift in musical attitudes.

I also think if you want to talk about a supposed stasis in pop music there are three separate elements at play which some people are conflating: economics, cultural importance, and the actual style and form of music.

Economically, recorded music is fucked and might never recover. And that has certainly had an impact on what music gets financial and media support. If you're looking for the new Nevermind, you're not going to find it, not because it's creatively not there, but because it's economically unfeasible at this moment in time.

In terms of cultural importance, I think it's pretty obvious that recorded music and film, the two dominant artforms of the latter half of the 20th century, are going to start their historical decline. The same thing happened with theater, poetry, and painting, and it's not like music will go away, but the particular form of recorded music that we're used to is almost certainly going to begin a slow decline into irrelevance.

And I think those two factors are mostly what people are responding to when they perceive a stasis. Revivals of past styles is a wholly separate creative phenomenon that has no bearing on whether or not music has a cultural impact.

Don't know why I said 'again' just there.

Again re: dubstep, the big difference is technological more than compositional. Jungle by modern dubstep standards is crude and trebly. Software and hardware innovations are what make dubstep what it is - music that is as much a product of being able to produce a great bass response an loads of subtle detail rather than a seismic shift in musical attitudes.

I totally disagree, but at any rate these technological changes extend throughout all recorded music at this point. Rock music that's supposedly retro sounds equally different to its influences in terms of the sonic details. I mean consider an album like Andorra by Caribou which sounds like it's heavily influenced by the Left Banke yet doesn't actually sound like any music that was released in the '60s. Now you could accuse it of being "retro" but I'm confident that 30 years from now it's going to sound incredibly "2007."

It's an incredibly narrow view that privileges electronic music and makes a lot of faulty assumptions in the same way that rockism does with rock. The idea that futurism in music is somehow a form of progress is like wanting every novel to be science fiction. I think the growth of electronic music in the '80s and '90s led to this whole generation of musicians, djs, writers and fans who have a very limited musical education and no historical perspective so they can't see beyond their little niche. That, combined with an antagonism toward rock or anything that's considered old fashioned left a whole segment of people really unequipped to understand what's happening in music now.

― lizard tails, a self-regenerating food source for survival (wk), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 5:10 PM (10 minute0

Well actually I love electronic music, which is why i find that particular viewpoint a bit frustrating. I think house/techno is steeped in musical tradition, and connected to jazz and disco - and i don't require anything to sound 'new' or 'alien' (i don't require it NOT to either!) and concepts like new or alien are often contextual and personal (obviously a lot of great dance music is made with really very old gear!). I don't really think the fetish for the new is an electronic thing - i think its a British thing, and historically that has largely been down to the music press (its probably slowed a little since the music press began to wane, but that turnover culture is still in place).