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

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).

And specifically what technological advances are you thinking of that allow for "great bass response and loads of subtle detail" that weren't available in the '90s? Because no offense, but that kind of sounds like nonsense.

Well actually I love electronic music, which is why i find that particular viewpoint a bit frustrating.

me too, for the record. I've been obsessed with electronic music since I was a young child, recorded electronic music for about 15 years, etc.

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).

Yeah I think you're probably right. It's just that a certain generation of British fans and writers came of age with electronic music so that kind of defines their framework for what they consider "new".

A British thing? Up until very recently it's the UK rock press that's been championing retroism more than any other outlet I can think of. I assume y'r referring to dance music in the uk here.

A British thing? Up until very recently it's the UK rock press that's been championing retroism more than any other outlet I can think of. I assume y'r referring to dance music in the uk here.

― Post-Manpat Music (dog latin), Wednesday, July 27, 2

more in the music press heyday (1990s), turnover of genres both dance and non-dance based (how long did some of these things - shoegaze!? actually last?)

but yes probably more prevalent in dance-genres - but - significantly, british dance genres

(I think you're conflating "championing future music" with "looking for the new next big thing" which is really not the same thing at all?)

(I think you're conflating "championing future music" with "looking for the new next big thing" which is really not the same thing at all?)

― Aphex Twin … in my vagina? (Karen D. Tregaskin), Wednesday, July 27

yes true - i am now!

my original point was about just the idea of electronic=future being a british thing rather than a specifically electronic thing

then my explanation was meant to be that this was partly because of the british media (and that there is a parallel in non-dance genres, the turnover aspect, but without the future thing)

Wk - I'm no tech head, but i'm gonna assume that since 1993 rigs in clubs, studio equipment and audio software have come on quite a bit in order to satiate bass-hungry ears. Half the point of dubstep is that the beats aren't as furious and clattering as d'n'b, allowing for the sub-frequencies to breathe and expand. Sure you could have made something like dubstep in the mid '90s but it wouldn't have had the same resonance with audiences as it would today when we have vibrating floors and rigs designed for maximum bassweight. It's one of the main factors that's allowed and encouraged a lot of dance music in recent years to slow down while retaining its muscularity - goes as much for house and other genres as well.

xpost, more random thoughts

The paradox of it, is that these constantly changing micro-genres promoted by the British press actually create a stasis of their own. I guess I value variety and eclecticism so to me, when I hear jungle, d&b, garage, 2 step, dubstep, etc I feel like they should be 5 different tracks on one artist's album, not entire genres that are mined for a couple of years. And then you hear a song from the '60s or '70s that doesn't sound like anything else, that represents some underexplored possibilities and ideas that haven't already been driven into the ground, it's logical for an artist to want to borrow from the past.

I'm no tech head, but i'm gonna assume that since 1993 rigs in clubs, studio equipment and audio software have come on quite a bit in order to satiate bass-hungry ears.

I really don't think so, but I could be wrong. Certainly on the production side, no. But I don't know much about live sound reinforcement. I haven't heard much of a noticeable difference in live sound over that period, and amps and speakers still ultimately abide by the rules of physics. I guess there are some new materials being used for speaker cones and maybe some different trends in cabinet design but I don't know how much of an impact that's actually made on the end result.

Half the point of dubstep is that the beats aren't as furious and clattering as d'n'b, allowing for the sub-frequencies to breathe and expand.

So it is just a simple question of arrangement then, rather than a technological change.

no idea what you're talking about re:house music dog latin - definite emphasis on a) vinyl and b) (old) analogue equipment in house music

c) how long have funktion ones been around?

my original point was about just the idea of electronic=future being a british thing rather than a specifically electronic thing

I don't think that really makes sense. When electronic music was new, there was obviously an objectively futuristic quality to it. But that was in the '40s and '50s! That feeling lasted for a while though since the technology took time to mature and it took a while for electronics to be fully absorbed musically. And then subsequent technological developments came with their own temporary feeling of newness (drum machines, sampling, autotune, etc). But the same is true for earlier advances in technology like electric guitars and organs, or even the drum kit.

then my explanation was meant to be that this was partly because of the british media (and that there is a parallel in non-dance genres, the turnover aspect, but without the future thing)

Yeah that's true. I think the problem is really with dance music specifically rather than electronic music more generally. It's a form that on the one hand has a hunger for the new and yet simultaneously creates all of these stylistic and musical constraints (such as prescribing particular bpms) that lead to a stasis.

I would have gone crazy for an album like Person Pitch if that came out in 1997

Me too, but mostly because it would have fit in perfectly with all the stuff I was already listening to around then...

I didn't remotely get the sense from this book that Reynolds thinks music has gotten "worse" -- I mean, he's obsessed with Ariel Pink, so looking backwards clearly isn't an absolute sticking point for him. The most interesting parts of it aren't really about "stasis"; they're a bunch of different micro-histories of revival movements, collectors, reissue labels, etc., mostly in the service of getting a big-picture look at how we think about new/old anyway. (And part of his take is that it's people who "know" about music who experience the stasis, while plenty of genuinely new music still comes from the usual places -- e.g., dance crazes for city teenagers, music that has a function and is attached to a specific pocket of culture.)

P.S. -- In terms of dubstep, and most every other UK dance trend of the past 10 years or so, the giant tech development I see is software synths. There's a particular dry / hollow / "cheap" sound, totally characteristic of all that software, that's all over every one of those genres -- I don't know why it's never remarked on that this is the one new technology that's had a massive effect on how things sound. It just happens to be a slightly rinky-dink sound, not some mind-boggling futuristic one.

the whole 'future' concept/buzzwording is a bit misleading - i mean in the early 70s i doubt led zep sounded like 'the future' or that ppl imagined led zep were pointing to some brave uncharted world, but they were def sounding diff to what came before, doing something that didnt really sound like the previous generation, hence they were innovative. i think thats all SR is asking for. and for it to get into a mass-accessible space, though thats just harder these days.

no idea what you're talking about re:house music dog latin - definite emphasis on a) vinyl and b) (old) analogue equipment in house music

c) how long have funktion ones been around?

― post, Wednesday, 27 July 2011 17:56 (28 minutes ago)

I banged on about this in a review of Nicolas Jaar a wee while ago, but house/techno has been getting slower and more minimal throughout the last ten years but retaining its power and muscularity.

The paradox of it, is that these constantly changing micro-genres promoted by the British press actually create a stasis of their own. I guess I value variety and eclecticism so to me, when I hear jungle, d&b, garage, 2 step, dubstep, etc I feel like they should be 5 different tracks on one artist's album, not entire genres that are mined for a couple of years. And then you hear a song from the '60s or '70s that doesn't sound like anything else, that represents some underexplored possibilities and ideas that haven't already been driven into the ground, it's logical for an artist to want to borrow from the past.

― lizard tails, a self-regenerating food source for survival (wk), Wednesday, 27 July 2011 18:51 (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

This is a good point. Before my induction into dance music proper, I used to scoff at people who "like melodic uplifting trance but have also been getting into dark melodic trance recently", but for a long time now dance is about having an idea and running with it for the length of a DJ set or mix CD. Rock doesn't really work like this, and yet it's the rock press nicheseekers who weirdly seem to want to achieve the same thing. They hear something and try to turn it into a movement rather than accepting it as a single statement or song.

well except in house music most dj sets are still vinyl only, and people use analogue kit to get away from the flimsyness of vsts

lots of traditional music works that way though

Me too, but mostly because it would have fit in perfectly with all the stuff I was already listening to around then...

Like what!!??? I would have been totally hungry for something like that back then.

I guess I should read the book. Based on the premise, what I've read about it here, and what I've read of Reynolds writing in the past, I was assuming that I wouldn't like it. Still, I think there's an implicit value judgement if he's asking why there's less forward looking music now, and if he thinks there's a danger in "retromania".

I also disagree with you on the differences with softsynths which are subtle at best.

and again, those technical changes would apply to every other form of music including the most boring stuck-in-the-'90s cookie cutter rock music, since everyone uses vst synths, plugin effects, pitch correction, sample replacement or layering, drum retiming, etc.

it's not the sound of software synths that has changed things drastically, it's the fact that DAWs and soft synths have gotten both way, way better and way more accessible since the '90s. that's had a massive influence on the musical content of '00s electronic music.

Yeah, and I think that's true with everything. Accessibility. The accessibility of self-recording for all types of musicians, the easy access to all of this music from the past, access to what's going on musically in the rest of the world at any given moment. All of that had a massive effect on all types of music in the first decade of the 21st century.

it's almost as if some huge information sharing system has come to dominate everything we do in the last 20 years.

ham radio killed music :(

There's many truth bombs in this thread but the one that resonates the most is Nick's point that we all speak from our own history. I'm in my mid-40s and am experiencing that common mid-life crisis where nothing penetrates my psyche like it used to and/or things that used to give me PLEASURE merely satisfy now. When it comes to music, I'm still finding things to love albiet not nearly as often as I used to. As far as I'm concerned that has little to do with the music being made today, it's all about my own expectations and open-mindedness (or lack thereof). Right now I'm finding more to love from the past but to cast aspersions over the entire output of the present is foolhardy. It's right and appropriate that my reaction to new music today is wildly different than when I was 17 and it was ALL new.

Having said that, I'm never going to give up searching for new sounds but the effort required feels greater than the reward at this moment.

You don't have to make an effort or chase things, just let things come to you. You may be surprised by what comes into your life. I chase after nothing, I read no reviews or articles, and yet I hear more great new (and new to me) music than I ever have.

And it wouldn't matter if there was less

The "we all have our own history" seems like a good way to halt conversation and avoid looking at the objects we all have a different perspective on

Wk very wrong about the way dance music works itt. Or just music in general, really.

The "what would this current thing have meant to people in the past" is one of the worst ways to think about music because it simply ignores the fact that music's meaning is built from shared codes, assumptions and uses. We might as well ask what kids in the eighties would have thought of "LOL" and "OMG".

You don't have to make an effort or chase things, just let things come to you.

That may be true for your life circumstances, but I assure you if I didn't make an effort I wouldn't be finding a damn thing.

The "we all have our own history" seems like a good way to halt conversation and avoid looking at the objects we all have a different perspective on

It's not meant to halt the discussion, if anything the implication is there's value to all our experiences so it's worth sharing them.

Wk very wrong about the way dance music works itt. Or just music in general, really.

specifically.... what?

It's not meant to halt the discussion, if anything the implication is there's value to all our experiences so it's worth sharing them.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Wednesday, July 27, 2011 11:08 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

agree w that

The "what would this current thing have meant to people in the past" is one of the worst ways to think about music because it simply ignores the fact that music's meaning is built from shared codes, assumptions and uses. We might as well ask what kids in the eighties would have thought of "LOL" and "OMG".

If that's in reference to me, I wasn't asking what something "would have meant to people in the past." I was saying what something would have meant to me personally a decade ago. I think it's equally ridiculous to assume that you know what somebody else hears as new and radical. I hear all kinds of current music that sounds new to me. Dubstep doesn't. If somebody says that nothing sounds new to them except for dubstep, I'll just have to assume that we're coming from two totally different frames of reference. But if that person tries to make an argument that there in fact isn't anything new going on, and tries to draw some larger cultural comment out of that assumption, I'm going to call bullshit.

The idea that music is "built from shared codes, assumptions and uses" is assigning way too much specificity and clarity to a form that's largely abstract. That argument sounds way too structuralist for my taste.

I was saying what something would have meant to me personally a decade ago.

Actually you presumed to know how a dubstep track would sound to a jungle dancefloor audience in the mid-90s.

You can't talk about what people (whether considered as a group or as an aggregate of individuals with individual opinions and experiences) get from a piece of music or a genre of music divorced from that music's diachronic and synchronic associations of difference (there's some structualism for you).

Dubstep doesn't necessarily sound like "the future" to people who are into it, but it may well sound distinct, novel, or like it satisfies a need that they may not have recognised they felt before they got into it (nb. it mostly does none of those things for me, but that's by the by).

Those needs are both inspired by the music itself (like a craving for chocolate - which I think logically is impossible to experience before you've actually tried it) but also other different-but-related music and music-experiences. I find the story mostly unmoving personally (and I was "there", though only following remotely and from another country), but Martin Blackdown can get very teary-eyed (at least in internet terms) over how dubstep's sudden and dramatic deceleration from 2-step tempo to halfstep tempo circa 2003-2004 felt like a whole universe of possibility opening up.

What is opening up in Martin's head and in his mental projection of the dancefloor space? A sonic sensibility largely defined by

(a) what had preceded it - the jittery bounce of 2-step; and

(b) what existed alongside it - the still-jittery, but also harsh and sometimes suddenly lethargic arrangements in grime.

"Novelty" (let alone full-blown futurism) in music is never a distinct and independent quality that pieces of music or styles of music possess.

It is always more like a response or a riposte, a taking of what was there and what was around it and twisting that.

That twist doesn't have any objective nobility, but for people who follow current music it's like a turn in the conversation, a bridge that leads from one place to another place, a development in a story which, if you care about the story to begin with, might hook you in even further, or turn you off and make you look for other stories.

Trying to abstract back from that process means that you're judging music for lacking a quality (let's call it "objective futurism") that of course it never had in the first place.

And in general (and as I said to resounding silence upthread) I think it's really important to emphasise that this whole debate is not about the music but about the stories we tell about music. In this regard it does largely exist in the heads of critics and internet stans and ILX people because we're the ones who most like to tell stories about music, to ourselves and to others ("the average consumer" has lots of stories about music too but they don't tend to worry over them so much).

One of the key issues in the relative breakdown of the narrative of progress is that the way we tell and listen to stories is changing. Internet writing on music, for instance, has radically democratised this story-telling process by facilitating an explosion of storytellers and a concomitant dimunition of the status of individuals who before were better able to define the narrative.

One of the consequences of this is that retrospective narratives have much more difficulty gaining traction than they used to because the proponents of those narratives have relatively less authority and prominence.

Another is that, on a broader scale, received wisdom becomes more entrenched than before: in the absence of individual voices being able to change the course of debates, the stories that do gain traction are those which have the air of something we've been told before (Adele as representing a triumph for authenticity, for example).

Of course on a micro-level people are telling stories all the time. But interestingly the stories that often gain traction (at a micro-level at least) are the ones that most of the audience weren't there for. Blackdown is one of the most successful storytellers I can think of in the past ten years (which is a sign of their reduced prominence as much as anything else) because he became the spokesperson for a genre that became broadly popular only some 4 years after he started covering it, so a lot of newer fans simply buy the backstory wholesale.

We don't tend to have so many of those long germination periods these days where the narrative can be honed and refined "in secret" before suddenly being taken up on a broader level, so the above is kind of rare now.

"diminution" even.

you presumed to know how a dubstep track would sound to a jungle dancefloor audience in the mid-90s.

Presumption is one thing, but I don't see why speculation about something like this is problematic in general. Someone that knows a lot about Northern Soul, for example, might hear some 1960s soul track and be able to speculate on how it might have sounded to NS fans.