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

lovely.

exactly how I thought it'd look. (xposT)

Undercuts: Where did these come from?

Thompson Twins?

If you watch the old quiz shows on Challenge TV on freeview, seeing contestants in clothes that scream "80s!" is a pretty sure sign that the show was filmed in the 90s.

― ledge, Thursday, 25 August 2011 10:59 (2 hours ago)

ha, yeah playing 'guess the year' in those late-night sessions of watching Challenge TV we'd always be about five years early.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Undercut.jpg

wikipedia really bringing the good stuff here. i've never heard the term undercut before, is there a particular distinction between it and bowl cut?

i've never heard the term undercut before, is there a particular distinction between it and bowl cut?

It's shaved underneath the floppy bit. I had one between 94-6, but the top bit was longer, almost chin-length, and it was so I could tie my hair up and put it under my Sea Cadets hat. So much of that sentence is making me convulse in self-loathing.

A bowl cut was more, well, bowl shaped. There was a slight distinction between an undercut and a step in that the undercut was shaved sometimes right up to the top of the head with hair hanging over it. Step was a poor-man's undercut in that it was simply shaved into the head. Often kids would grow their hair while maintaining the shaved-under bit. Bit hard to explain this, but there were differences

http://freyajane.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/undercut.jpg
http://magnetiquemtl.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/witz-topfschnitt.jpg
http://thehindsightletters.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/hairstyle1.jpg

To be worn with Spliffy jeans

okay, makes sense. round my way they all just came under the umbrella of bowl.

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTO0EMi7-9Vpe9tBRgWxCyUVZ6bAh5rUkXFUAel0w6pPxjdU0Mb

I liked the recent Zomby interview in Wire where he starts romanticising early-90s street fashion.

http://www.tradereadingorder.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/green-lantern-guy-gardner.jpg

Haircut thread is number one on ILE right now.

Speaking archly about haircuts is what I do best, apparently.

i for one am talking about haircuts in every thread possible.

haha

Wtf is a spliffy jean. Is this lol britain?

Like how they had a hip hop mag called "big daddy"

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lprpkimmsG1qe6p6uo1_500.png

Sorry, that turned out bigger than I thought...

xxpost yeah the most lol Britain thing really - a slightly chavvy (although the word didn't exist yet) trend among high school teenagers to wear jeans with spliff-men on the back pocket. Also: Dready, Hard Act, Truth etc. Very popular for about a year at my school.

http://www.dreadybrand.com/prodimages/dpt01-denim.JPG

http://imagecache5.art.com/p/LRG/8/845/XCVY000Z/dready--free-up-de-herb.jpg

Worn with a black bomber jacket and Reebok Pumps or something.

90's were buggin'

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kApto83SZK4/TANTFBsREpI/AAAAAAAAJI8/fVTraUTdqRQ/s1600/CROTCHWATCHTWELVE.jpg

http://www.streetsondemand.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/emeli-sande.png

lol at me for avoiding all the discussion on this thread until after I read the book. good stuff though.

been reading the book, v interesting info contained w/in

From Doran's latest Menk entry:

I’ve recently finished reading Simon Reynolds’ excellent Retromania and I’m reminded of something he said about the positive nature of having fuck all to do – a nostalgia for a “sensation of tedium so intense it was almost spiritual”. These kids are so bored out of their skulls that they have become innovators and originators. This is brilliant. They are geniuses. They should carry on destroying my shit unimpeded by me. I’ll just go into the other room and eat cake.

Besides, I know how it feels. I was so bored growing up in St Helens, I feel like stabbing myself in the face with a screwdriver just thinking about it. I remember my friend confessing to me one night while we were on mushrooms that boredom had led him to the most pivotal event of his childhood. He came home from school one day with a box full of red noses which he was supposed to be selling around town in the run up to the first ever Comic Relief. He put one of them on his nose. Then he put another on his tongue. Then he got some glue and decided to see how many he could attach to his head. He fitted nearly the entire box on his head and face, just with gaps where his eyes and mouth were.

He ran into his mum’s room to surprise her but she was on the bed with his dad, who had come back home early from work, where they were performing a baroque sex act. He then ran out of the house in tears, head still encased in red noses.

baroque?

that's the best Menk so far imo.

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music.

Righto. Sex with grandeur and exaggerated movements.

I much prefer the Rococo period.

woody allen's midnight in paris is pretty OTM re: idea of retromania

I was imagining sex with a harpsichord.

pluck

When I was just about done with my piece I revisited this long, long, thread, but it seems like only about two people actually read the book. Not to say the discussions here aren't good. Anyone else read it? I enjoyed the book even though I disagreed with most of it.

http://www.fastnbulbous.com/retromania.htm

I can't believe how long it's taken me to read this, but I'm pretty much done. It's a victim of time - seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry got its rear in gear and started making non-retro music again. Also, I agree that while it's a great read and makes some interesting thoughts, it does suffer from assumptive and often contradictory opinions.

seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry got its rear in gear and started making non-retro music again

...uh? Could you explain?

Like, I'll be reading a passage and thinking "Careful now Simey, careful now". Luckily, most of the time he manages to just about avoid any "when I were a lad" potholes most of the time, but you get the impression he really really wants to go off on a tirade about how music was all better when he was younger and now it's all ringtones.

xpost

seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry got its rear in gear and started making non-retro music again
...uh? Could you explain?

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 25 October 2011 15:54 (44 seconds ago) Bookmark

Just, from a personal POV, 2011 seems like a bit of a creative unblocking on the whole for music (speaking very generally). We seem finally able to wave bye bye to all the garage rock and furry folk revivalists from the last decade, and maybe looking to move forward again.

Sorry, I'm at work and not explaining myself very well.

seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry got its rear in gear and started making non-retro music again

um

no

2011 seems like a bit of a creative unblocking on the whole for music

like...no just no no NO

you may not have been paying attention to the uh "non-retro" music being made in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 et cet et cet but it was assuredly there

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/20/jarvis-cocker-music-fandom

Also Tom E weighing in on the 'does technology mean music means less than it used to?' discussion from upthread.

lex, i know for one you haven't read the book and therefore are not familiar with the arguments in it. for the record, i don't agree with his argument in its entirety, but i'd be interested to hear what you think is music from the last decade that is neither:

a: a revival of something from the past
b: a continuity of a style from a previous decade

Reynolds argument is that in the '60s you had rock, psychedelia, garage the beginnings of Jamaican pop; the '70s brought disco, punk, funk, reggae, glam etc; the '80s added hiphop, new-wave, synth pop; and in the '90s (or thereabouts) other movements like rave, jungle, etc were also introduced. He argues that the 2000s were largely concerned with recycling of old forms and did not really contain any mass youth or music culture revolutions in the same way as punk or rave or psychedelia. He says that even in dance music, many of the variations on house and techno were incremental and often harked back to styles originally invented in the 80s and 90s. Dubstep (prior to the time of his writing the book) had yet to emerge as a household force (he does mention Magnetic Man as a token dubstep crossover, but sweeps it under the carpet as being weaksauce).

This argument does sound like a shout at the clouds, but there's still a resonance that is hard to disprove, especially considering the old question: "Show me music that is of 1994 and something that's of 2006 and tell me the essential differences" - because other than software getting more streamlined, there've been few innovations (like the invention of the electric guitar, or the synth or music software etc) since then.

I would argue that there's nothing like a socio-political sea-change to get the creative hivemind flowing. I think that with the recent climate of global protest and economic collapse, we're seeing more people with more time on their hands to channel frustration and thoughts into their music. But that's just a theory.

the sound of robots fighting

seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry go

this is your official bugbear now isn't it

i love the Drive soundtrack, I just think its existence and effects have been hilarious

every piece of music since 1836 has been a revival of Faraday's cage

Finished this last week.

The problem with the closing argument is that Reynolds begins to start seeing retro and derivativeness in almost everything. It's almost as though he wants a clear bolt-from-the-blue paradigm change in pop music, when that's clearly not how it works. He even points out that movements as ostensibly revolutionary as punk rock were actually routed in fifties and sixties revivalism.

He points to post-punk and rave as future-facing movements, but even these had foundations and influences from long before.

The only way a brand new music can ever exist is through a new interface; like how the advent of synthesisers helped to create electronic dance music. But it's also dangerous to romanticise the notion that one minute we were all sitting around listening to the Smiths, then someone invented the TB303 while pilling his face off and changed everything. Rave music wasn't a bolt from the blue - it was a culmination of events dating from as far back as the birth of rock music. Similarly, the post-punkers were largely art-school kids re-appropriating funk and disco licks several years after the fact.

The look, the attitude, the delivery had changed, but isn't this a bit similar to all the revivalism of the last decade that gets knocked in this book?