1990 / Time For The Souffle

chris lowe talking about making
'behaviour' by pet shop boys in 1990 in germany :

'i felt like we were missing out on so much that was
happening in england, it was possibly the most exciting
time in english culture since the 60's '

b) 'we've been through it before' = we've also been through 'who do you fancy?' many times before. As you know very well, different occasions produce different results. If you can't be bothered to think about the 1990s again, then at least use your magic blue powers to tell me where the discussion was.

c) Tom E: I would much like to hear what you have to say. Your theory of cowardice sounds promising. Please tell more.

This is merely a personal idea but since I've been smugly saying that its okay for people to like pop as well as obscure indie and it is all the same thing I tend not to get as excited about indivudual cultural artifacts.

just experimenting

to see if the e + Alt Gr key combination works online at ilXor

Alt Gr on a European keyboard = the right Alt key on a US one.

I am being unkind to the P F by ignoring his question. I blame the distractions of the heat, pain in my leg not letting me sit down & the fact that the smell of a dead animal decomposing under our portakabin office is a bit disgusting.

But this was tangled up with the perception that the trashiest, most mass produced art could still be informative about what society is really like (which is maybe the old popart thing?) which is a very post modern, intellectual idea (the kind of thing that an educated music critic or song writer might think)

So the importance of valuing everything was coming from both directions - from the public and from the critics. And because 'alternative' music needed critical support to develop it got a bit bogged down.

? maybe ? I am very ill informed about this kind of thing sorry. Maybe it would be interesting to see if that devaluing of criticism happened in other spheres eg fiction writing or classical music performance which were a bit more elitist (ie had a higher value for critics) to start with.

One bit was the creation of huge media conglomerates. In the US there are what- about 5 companies that own nearly all the major magazines/music & film studios, tv channels, book publishing houses... so there has been an incredible collapse of diversity of media ownership, ie GE owning huge cable networks, etc. This probably had a bit to do with it, as I think prior to the 90s there was consolidation but not quite to the same extent.

Add to this the pseudo-science of demographics and niche marketing for the magazines which previously played the gatekeeping role and it becomes apparent that they are no longer gatekeeping at all. They are instead having a matey conversation down the pub. (And I think the tone of said reviews has changed somewhat from where they were in the early eighties). It might have been concerned with such a role in the nineties due to fear - the journalists did not know what else to do so retreated into the last bastion of attempted superiority.

I also disagree that what they were talking about was often crap - but then I think we should be widening our viewpoint from the NME.

What I mean is that baby-boomers became 45 to 55 in the 90's and they couldn't admit they were middle-aged so they still went around (and still do go around) acting as if they're in their prime which means that their offspring are stuck in a horrible post-puberty but pre-prime limbo which is getting more and more uncomfortable due to the fact that people born in the 1980s now think that they are young adults (rather than adolescents) because some of them are in their 20s but they don't realise that they can't become young adults until those born in the 1970s get to stop being young adults and they can't do that until those damned baby-boomers start acting their age. Get my drift?

in the pub i went to with my sistra two weeks ago there was a bunch of grizzled old male drinkers in their mid-60s at the next table to us discussing the g-spot and the clitoris!! hurrah!! (kinda)

Oi! Ewing! You WANKER!!!

[Actually Tom E: glad you got my mail: reply when it suits: thanks for your attention: I look forward to your thoughts.]

a question: media ownership / conglomeration was raised - where is the best place (book? or www?) to read the facts on this?

Which is to say that it was maybe a social-organization change more than a cultural one. It was also very urban, which I think is telling: it introduced to the nation as a whole this idea of a more fluid cosmopolitan existence, an existence that previously wasn't entirely possible.

Maybe? That's just a gut reaction, which I'll have to think about a bit more.

I know it could be argued that we are hypothesizing at such an abstract, or indeed subjective, level that our models here are worthless anyway. But I don't think so - for the moment these models are all we have to go on. So I would like to hear more.

One thought I have is that some themes were alibis. eg: in the UK there was a lot of talk about 'Britishness'. But was anyone actually anxious about this, or were they really pretending to be anxious about it, where actually they were (as Tom E says) 'comfortable' with it - and the major issues and challenges were elsewhere?

= ???

I always assumed the company that does Lexis-Nexis would have linked up their interface with someone holding UK indices -- they have major UK media and plenty of UK scholarly journals folded in over here already -- but I guess not. What's the rough equivalent for you?

Access to any of these is pretty expensive, but usually university libraries will have a subscription and uni staff should certainly be allowed to use it.
However, if you're not searching for specific things then I would have thought good old bound volumes and microfilms would be better (and cheaper, and easier on the eye) for getting a general feel of the articles of the time.

>>> Access to any of these is pretty expensive

How are these 2 reconciled? If we discount telephone bills.

For this to be part of the argument, Rock would have to have had SOME of its counter-culture identity left: if it was already assumed to be wholly moribund then the 90s process would be over before it started.

2. My other theory would be: there are more students, and graduates, than ever before!! Surely this is significant?

Its significance in this case, I think, = creation of a massive new audience for a culture based on / using signs of 'alt' culture but essentially 'mass'.

Its significance in this case, I think, = creation of a massive new audience for a culture based on / using signs of 'alt' culture but essentially 'mass'

kind of but then Students are hardly the same breed they were when they were all classed as bedsit miserablists listening to the Smiths. These days they just aren't as different as they used to be to "ordinary folks"

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/04/cultural_revisi.php

enigmatic thread.

Good revival!

Thought provoking and occasionally cringey piece in the NY Times about the end of cultural progress in form

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html

It's something I think about a lot. And I often think about something Simon Reynolds said a long time ago (ca 2002?) about rock music not really being new any more but feeding on itself cannibalistically