MASSIVE ATTACK - BLUE LINES (1991) POLL

ugh @ the reissue industry reaching my generation, money-spinning wheezes for nostalgia-addled old people with disposable income

NOSTALGIA IS THE EMPTIEST EMPTINESS FIGHT IT WHEREVER POSSIBLE

'intrigued' was a pejorative.

how dare people spend money on things they like, they should be ashamed

the first generation ever to be different from and better than all preceding generations!! somebody had better study these people

Money-spinning wheezes for nostalgia-addled old people with disposable income probably one of the few things keeping the music industry going right now. Releases like this always seem pointless unless the original mastering is really poor. Blue Lines certainly doesn't need it.

ugh @ the reissue industry reaching my generation, money-spinning wheezes for nostalgia-addled old people with disposable income

― lex pretend, Monday, 24 September 2012 12:48 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

NOSTALGIA IS THE EMPTIEST EMPTINESS FIGHT IT WHEREVER POSSIBLE

― lex pretend, Monday, 24 September 2012 12:49 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

don't really get how you can have been party (often approvingly!) to numerous discussions on here about trip hop being in the air with ware/delilah/etc and then your best effort for this is some thick empty grandstanding. whatever man

oh have ware and delilah got on to their reissues already? i didn't realise that

possibly life might be more interesting and less ultra-linear than new music is new, good, old music is old, bad

indeed it is

Money-spinning wheezes for nostalgia-addled old people with disposable income probably one of the few things keeping the music industry going right now. Releases like this always seem pointless unless the original mastering is really poor. Blue Lines certainly doesn't need it.

― Matt DC

it is real quiet, though.

its quietness is one of its big strengths IMO

maybe from an audiophile perspective or something, but i am more interested in my playing-it-together-with-other-crap perspective

i understand the beefs kinda but hymn of the big wheel is essential

lex which is worse comedy or nostalgia

it's not quiet.

then how come i have to turn it up to hear it?

The poor showing for "Daydreaming" in this poll upsets me.

It's probably not true but I always feel that these deluxe anniversary reissues are more aimed at giving the album's status as a "classic" the appearance of objectivity, so as to encourage people who never got around to buying it to finally lay down some cash.

Would be interesting to see some actual stats (though who would bother to compile) on the proportion of purchasers that have owned the album before vs first timers.

then how come i have to turn it up to hear it?

bcz your volume knob was too low in the first place

lex which is worse comedy or nostalgia

comedy

nostalgia is a natural emotion, i just dislike the way it's raged out of control in the wider culture lately

comedy is unnatural and abhorrent

Lex do you think nostalgia is actually getting more pervasive or are we just noticing it more as it eats into our own past?

Kinda uncertain myself. I do think that maybe a difference is that even today's kids seem open to the idea that the 90s were better than today, which is something I disapprove of even if that turn out to be correct.

well the nostalgia industry is certainly bigger

Are you guys actually trying to lure the Lex into an agreeing-with-Simon-Reynolds elephant track or is this just an amusing by-product of the conversation?

pretty sure 1960s pop kids weren't getting hype for deluxe Bing Crosby reissues

obv this needs its own thread and i really shd work

Don't think 2010s kids are that arsed about Blue Lines either.

i assume the industry is just targeting the people who never got out of the habit of actually paying for music. i'd guess overall the reissue industry, like the rest of the music biz, is contracting, but i have no figures to prove this.

xposts

I work with someone who actually paid the £200 or whatever for the Blur box set.

i think people do that kind of thing to prove something to the world, like they've "put their money where their mouth is" in terms of their interests. a bit like a football supporter buying all the merchandise.

yes tbf reissues probably aimed at "new" listeners in that respect, they're at least aimed at an audience that was roughly aware of the record when it originally came out.

i do feel that there are new conditions in the sale/marketing of "classic" albums in the 21st century that haven't previously applied. factors feeding this include
- the album as artefact
- a 30/40-something audience for whom pop culture is not radically different to what it was in their teens, in a way that was not the case for 1960s, '70s, maybe even '80s teens
- stuff LG mentioned about the mechanics of "acquiring" music in 2012
- a mainstream media discourse which has absorbed pop music in a way unestablished prior to, say, the mid-90s

just pondering out loud

probably not aimed at new listeners

bottom line for me is that popular music, its audience and its discontents, has been in a unique-ish position for the last 5-10 years. this nostalgia is not the same as nostalgia used to be.

bottom line for me is that popular music, its audience and its discontents, has been in a unique-ish position for the last 5-10 years. this nostalgia is not the same as nostalgia used to be.

I'm not sure I agree with this at all. We're all in our 30s or older (I think), and whilst we're obviously still engaged with popular culture, the popular culture we're engaged with is very much not the same popular culture as 13-21 year olds (as an example age split) are engaged with. We're not, I'd wager, listening to and watching the same things, using the same channels of engagement, the same mediums and technologies, even if, superficially, to ourselves, we like to think we are. I have the tastes and habits of a 33-year-old professional man; I haven't a fucking clue what 15-year-old kids are doing now (though I suspect it may involve Rizzle Kicks and drugs). I think our nostalgia (as an age group) is exactly the same as every other kind of nostalgia that went before it; pining for lost youth and feeling vaguely jealous but uncomprehending of those who are enjoying it now.

i don't claim to "get" what teenagers' experience of culture is now but i'm pretty sure that contempo popular music sounds waaaaay less alien to me than it did to my old man when he was my age, nevermind how 1965 must've sounded to most peeps born in 1925

it's the difference between stylistic tweaks of the established and fairly radical ruptures imo

also i don't have nostalgia for popular music in any meaningful way, certainly not half the crap that was in my milieu in 1992

feel like the alternative is a kind of Whig History of pop music which makes me shudder to even contemplate. that same Whig History is close to the mainstream narrative tho i fear

I think our nostalgia (as an age group) is exactly the same as every other kind of nostalgia that went before it; pining for lost youth and feeling vaguely jealous but uncomprehending of those who are enjoying it now.

why on earth give in to this? it sounds horrible.

why pine for your fucking youth unless you're dissatisfied with your life and your self as they are now?

why pine for your fucking youth unless you're dissatisfied with your life and your self as they are now?

Because people have kids and mortgages and stomach ulcers and bad knees and work stress, Lex, and without those things society would crumble and we'd all die and your magical zesty exciting life would go to shit, too. You can be entirely recobnciled to (and, indeed, happy, and actually heart-burstingly delirious) with all of those things, and still go a bit misty-eyed over dancing in the disco when you were 16.

Because nostalgia can be quite a pleasant thing in certain circumstances. Didactically dismissing it out of hand shows a lack of empathy for people who do engage in a bit of it. I doubt, in fact I know, that most people our age don't walk around in a permanent 90s fug, crying at the thought that no one will ever release a single as good as Unfinished Sympathy or Country House again. It's not the evil force that you seem to think it is. People's lives and tastes change, and every so often they want a reminder of how things were; and that's fine.

More specifically, I don't think many of the people who engage in discourse on ILM are the inveterate, helpless, perpetual nostalgia sufferers that you seem to be wanting to straw-man; that fact that we're here, talking about new music (and old music) says we're still hungry and engaged. My point is just that we're not engaging with the kinds of things that the actual bona fide youth are engaging with. Probbaly not even you.

why pine for your fucking youth unless you're dissatisfied with your life and your self as they are now?

some things become better, others are lost forever, it's the nature of life. nostalgia is hardly owned or dominated by the crappy reissue industry, lost youth or mortality is at the root of huge swathes of the greatest works of art ever made. it's a matter of debate which old things were better and which were worse.

ironically you're arguing that nostalgia today is worse than it was before...

there is a serious difference i think between nostalgia as a personal emotion/experience and nostalgia as a form of cultural expression/production. and i might concede that the former is an unchanging aspect of human nature (tho i don't believe it) but i'm certain that the latter changes thru time and social landscape

Lex is fronting on this a bit, I know full well that if he was at a house party and someone put on Relevee or In White Rooms he would lose his shit and maybe get a bit misty eyed about peak raving days. But that would be defended on the grounds that those records also sound great NOW and in the moment, and arguing about "nostalgia" seems to be denying Blue Lines that same privilege here.

Maybe there are 18 year olds listening to Blue Lines still, it's part of the core DNA of modern pop music, probably more so than the Beatles nowadays. Although if I had to guess which Massive Attack song is most popular among young people it would probably be Teardrop. But none of those kids will be buying the overpriced remastered reissue.

it makes sense to think of some places and eras as more culturally nostalgic than others, i think, even while we recognise that public culture is far from monolothic and human beings are not reducible to the product of a culture

In any case house music (and post-UKG British dance music) are constantly reappropriating and recontextualising the classics. Think how many times 'Show Me Love' has re-emerged over the years.

reissuing a record might just give it to people who hadn't heard it... it's hardly as if the only reissues that ever happen are massive canonical classics, but even so, not everyone has heard every massive canonical classic.

xpost not to mention all the 2-step revivalism that Lex likes.

i think people do that kind of thing to prove something to the world, like they've "put their money where their mouth is" in terms of their interests. a bit like a football supporter buying all the merchandise.

This and Noodle Vague's points OTM, I think there's an element of wanting to have your Absolute All-time Favourite Classic Album(s) stand above and apart from the rest of your record collection, buying something like that Screamadelica boxed set in the massive tin is one step removed from literally putting the album on a pedestal. It doesn't really bother me, I can never afford these things anyway.

I've no idea what '90s music young people listen to or where Massive Attack might fit in but would be interested to know.

At our university open day earlier this month I spotted four teenage boys wearing Beatles t-shirts, one wearing a Who t-shirt, and one wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, but none in Blur or Massive Attack t-shirts.

why pine for your fucking youth unless you're dissatisfied with your life and your self as they are now?

the weird thing to me is that you seem determined to align your "life and your self now" with cultural commodities that are, afaict, very consciously made for people much younger than yourself. it's like your pining for/identifying with other people's youths in an effort to maintain a perpetual state of youthiness.

says the armchair psychologist

personally I don't think things were "better" in the 80s or the 90s or any other decade in which I was more directly/heavily invested in youth culture, but it is interesting to remember and reflect on things. this is a basic human reaction to living in a world where time only flows in one direction.