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

I mean, Reynolds argument seems to be that music is on the decline because of too much borrowing from the past. And yeah, he recognizes that there's a big historical precedent for such activity, and yeah, he's complicit in the retromania, and yeah there are contemporary artists who borrow from the past that he likes because they're good, but still, it's a path that's doomed to lead nowhere. I guess it makes sense what people are saying about ignoring his whole ridiculous introduction and conclusion. I'm not sure I could make it that far since I read these articles he's been writing lately and I disagree with basically every sentence in the first and last third of each piece.

you guys are making this book sound fucking terrible

saying jamc doesnt reference the past is wtf. its the beach boys w/ hella guitar distortion + whiney otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJS_lKvBgLI

re: be my baby beat...

I guess this is similar to my issue with the dubstep stuff where people focus on the rhythm above all else. Sure they used the Be My Baby beat on one song. But everything else about that song and everything else they did sounds totally unmistakably '80s.

multi xposts

sometimes I wonder if half of the people who mention the beach boys have ever actually listened to a beach boys song.

the whole of "Just Like Honey" sounds like Phil Spector via Husker Du, dogg

sometimes I wonder if half of the people who mention the beach boys have ever actually listened to a beach boys song.

― lizard tails, a self-regenerating food source for survival (wk), Friday, July 29, 2011 4:24 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have, in fact, listened to many beach boys songs fyi

I guess this is similar to my issue with the dubstep stuff where people focus on the rhythm above all else. Sure they used the Be My Baby beat on one song. But everything else about that song and everything else they did sounds totally unmistakably '80s.

multi xposts

― lizard tails, a self-regenerating food source for survival (wk), Friday, July 29, 2011 4:22 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

isnt the issue more that you seem to just ignore rhythm?

stereolab doesn't sound totally 90s?

But everything else about that song and everything else they did sounds totally unmistakably '80s.

How could I forget this Jesus And Mary Chain classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8rZWw9HE7o

A band like the Lyres were more fundementally postmodern than the Jesus and Mary Chain, I would think. "More specific" meaning lots of detail.

What about that song sounds like the Beach Boys besides a simple I IV V progression and a major key melody? There are no vocal harmonies, no intricate arrangements, and the lyrics aren't remotely beach boysesque. I can't hear anything that I would consider to be a signature of the Beach Boys.

stereolab doesn't sound totally 90s?

Maybe I just don't have enough perspective on it yet, but early Stereolab still sounds pretty convincingly '60s french pop + '70s krautrock + '80s shoegaze to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb4OJ4EQajk

yes. that's a cover of a beach boys song. that sounds like an '80s shoegaze JAMC song. simple cover versions are postmodern now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JhbR4XbN4U

this song is actually more explicitly 'beach boys' than 'my little underground' crossed w/ some john cale shit

the BB cover was just ~tweaking u~

I don't know, the Beach Boys were primarily about the vocals, and JAMC just sounds like typical '80s moaning british dude who can't really sing stuff to me. But if you want to prove that JAMC were on the vanguard of this retromania decline then knock yourself out.

the whole of "Just Like Honey" sounds like Phil Spector via Husker Du, dogg

what sounds spectorish besides the beat? and husker du is an '80s band too dogg

Why not The Smiths even?

Or is the key with Stereolab that they never really pushed a singular personality that was distinct from their source material, such that you can spend all day playing spot the arcane influence?

Would you distinguish them sharply from Saint Etienne?

Perhaps Stereolab are the moment that bands stop trying to cover their tracks and instead start signposting them?

I might accept that perhaps.

wait, who do the smiths sound like? lol, I'm like the tuomas of '80s british music here.

that they never really pushed a singular personality that was distinct from their source material

It's not that they didn't push a singular personality - they most assuredly did - but compared to Saint Etienne, I think Stereolab's source material was just a bigger part of their overall essence.

to my mind, the sharp distinction between stereolab and saint etienne is that stereolab were good.

Have you heard Good Humor?

The key in my description was "distinct from" - i.e. what emerges as the "vibe" of Stereolab is not fundamentally different from (and does not "transcend" - though I hate that word) the stuff they're playing with.

I would have thought Saint Etienne's source material - girl-group pop, Bacharach, Gainsbourg, dub, dream-pop and house - all were a pretty big part of their overall essence! I would actually describe them in exactly the same terms - they def. have a personality but it's one intimately bound up in the things they're reviving.

Whereas The Smiths are obviously influenced by rockabilly and 60s pop and Marc Bolan and the like but their personality doesn't feel so much like an expression of these influences.

No, I actually think one of the striking things about Stereolab was how distinct their personality was from that of their influences, even though those influences were so crucial.

I don't know if I've ever really heard girl-group pop or Bacharach in Saint Etienne to the extent that I hear, say, Neu! in "Jenny Ondioline" or "French Disko." I know Saint Etienne were very postmodern, but I don't know if they were as specific.

I think we're talking at cross-purposes.

My point with the distinction with The Smiths is that even when you hear the rockabilly or whatevs the imprint of "The Smiths" on top tends to obscure them.

Whereas it's almost impossible to think of Stereolab (but also, I would argue, Saint Etienne) separate from their influences.

Tim have you heard Saint Etienne's "Grovely Road"?

But at what point are you just talking about kind of general pop group influences and references? I mean, the Stray Cats were rockabilly influenced. The Smiths, not so much. The Beatles and a million other bands did cod reggae numbers but that's not really the same thing as, say, On-U Sound.

even when you hear the rockabilly or whatevs the imprint of "The Smiths" on top tends to obscure them.

Exactly.

No, I don't know that song - just listening to Tiger Bay without the expanded track listing, though. Was the electronica element on it retro in 1994? (I ask because you'd mentioned house, but I didn't know if that qualified at that time as a retro element.)

There's also a real drama to Saint Etienne's music that is very strong and which I cannot pin to the past. I think it pervades the music and overwhelms its postmodern aspects more than what Laetitia Sadier did in Stereolab.

I don't think there are any Stereolab songs that sound so much like Neu! that they actually could be Neu! songs in a parallel world. Stereolab may be a new kind of paradigm, but not because they don't "transcend" their base material. A band like The Strokes might fit the bill better, in that they have songs that more or less could have come out in 1978.

Obviously all bands "reference" the past in some way, so if retromania is a valid concept it can't just be about referencing the past but the way one does it.

Obviously all bands "reference" the past in some way, so if retromania is a valid concept it can't just be about referencing the past but the way one does it.

yeah, I can't believe that anyone would deny the obvious differences between the bands we're talking about. When Stereolab came up, Tim F immediately said "[shift to] To sounding like Neu?". Which is a pretty common response to Stereolab. I've never heard anyone say "The Smiths? oh, you mean that band that sounds exactly like Gene Vincent?" "Hey mom, you like the Beach Boys? You might also like the Jesus and Mary Chain."

No, I don't know that song - just listening to Tiger Bay without the expanded track listing, though. Was the electronica element on it retro in 1994? (I ask because you'd mentioned house, but I didn't know if that qualified at that time as a retro element.)

No, not at all (though not achingly modernist either, unless doing a handbag house single counts which maybe it does). It's more that doing the "hey let's connect past musical ideas with current ones" seems to be a fairly standard m.o. including in respect of Stereolab (and other bands in the early 90s from Primal Scream to Pulp to Pram to other bands that don't even start with a "p" like Laika).

At any rate I wasn't denying that Stereolab might be different to previous evocations of the past in pop music, I was just saying I don't think they are year zero for post-modernism in music, and it seemed odd that Tim E was saying that they represented a "major shift" in underground rock when the ways they can be distinguished from other bands evoking the past seem pretty specific to them.

No, definitely not year zero - I actually grew up with the '60s revival in the '80s.

I was in the U.S. and can't speak to Pram or Laika. Bands like Jessamine might have been an American equivalent as far as other, perhaps comparable things going on at the time. There was a sense with Stereolab, though, that they were just nailing it, no? That they were really taking it pretty far?

Maybe "major shift" was not the right way to put it. To me, they were something to take seriously and there hadn't been anything that postmodern to take seriously since the '80s.

Yes, I think it's fair to say that no band before stereolab had seemed so consummately post-modern.

At least I can't think of any better candidates off-hand.

I think the thing about Stereolab was not just the wearing of influences on their sleeve but the distancing effect. It seemed like they were *using* their influences in almost a clinical way - like a graphic design element in a collage or something.

yeah, I think the graphic design / collage parallel is otm

Reynolds shows up on comments thread here to defend book's thesis:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/08/what-ive-been-reading-11.html#comments

That was funny. Citing the mash-up phenomenon to refute the premise of Retromania is some serious point-missing. Almost thought that comment was tongue-in-cheek at first.

John Voorheis August 19, 2011 at 9:58 am

I find it hard to take the last item seriously, except maybe for the sort of music that white people in the US listen to. Essentially everywhere else has most assuredly seen new musical forms – and even the US has, if you count Moombahton for the US (Dave Nada did invent it in DC after all.)

Just off the top of my head, in the 2000′s, you have the whole post-UK Garage family explosion – Dubstep, grime, UK Funky, the sort of nodding-to-pop post-Dubstep stuff a la Jamie Woon, James Blake, et al.; you have the Africa-Diaspora-European Techno artist confluence that results in new Kuduro, Coupe Decale and its Parisian variant Logobi, South African House (which is like Dutch house and sped up Kwaito beats with rapping in Xhosa and Zulu over top); Even Dutch House, come to think of it, is really just Bubbling slowed down and tech-house’d out, kind of an Amsterdam equivalent of Texas trill chopped and screwed; And don’t front on the whole 3Ball MTY scene.

ALL of these things are legitmately pop music, just not to, like I said, white folks in the US. Just because WE’VE dropped the ball on cultural output doesn’t mean other people aren’t picking up the slack.

and now he's having a go at Reading.

thats the best piece i think ive read so far in terms of making his argument clear

I agree with the argument that an event like this is "top-down" nostalgia that people maybe didn't even ask for, but I'm not sure that I see it as an example of nostalgia culture being hegemonic.

Waiting until it would take more time to read the thread than to read the book to think about actually reading the book.

simon r & nostalgia make me think of this

Simon Reynolds has an adorable, little-boy-lost smile - and a truly superb penis, long and thin but firm and silky, which I had the pleasure to fellate some time in the early nineties, in the glorious, dying hours of a South London rave.
― Patrici4 Far4, Monday, May 15, 2006 9:41 AM

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thats the best piece i think ive read so far in terms of making his argument clear

― funky house septics (D-40), Wednesday, August 24, 2011 3:03 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

Agreed.

If I can be self-serving I would say that the shift in the article to a more reflexive stance vis a vis the media's erm mediating role is basically the point I was trying to make upthread.

This decision is perplexing on a number of levels. First, there's the obvious oddness of interrupting the schedule of live groups in favor of a dead group. Then there's the curious fact that Reading's promoters, aiming to capitalize on 2011's status as the Official Anniversary of Grunge, are showing the footage of the gig on its 19th anniversary, a year ahead of customary schedule. (Nirvana did actually appear at Reading in August 1991 but were still relatively unknown and played midway through the bill.) Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this exercise in time travel, though, is how it isn't really that surprising. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd kinda expect from a pop culture increasingly characterized by a compulsion to revisit and reconsume its own past.

Also, that the performance is available on DVD anyway.

The retrospection feels rote, the predictable upshot of the way that commemorative cycles have become a structural, in-built component of the media and entertainment industry. This revival is largely top-down, not grass-roots. Everybody benefits: Magazines generate content to fill their pages, record companies can bolster their ailing bottom line by rereleasing archival material (guaranteed profits, since the original recordings were already paid for long ago) in spiffy, bulked-up form, and the commentariat gets something to reassess and pontificate about.

i think this is really the boring (capitalist-materialist) truth of it; and it results not from the threat of "running out of past" but by unprecedentedly cheap access to an inexhaustible mountain of it

The final para reads as uncharacteristically GreilMarcusian for SR!

it's a bit rmde