Simon Reynolds - C or D

hipster-black?

not just parenthesizing a racially loaded term but wondering what music is being referred to

Neither do I. Is Adele retro or something new? I think she's both really. That's the core of the problem I have with Reynolds' thesis. Doing a slightly different spin on something old is one of the primary ways that art evolves into new forms.

He doesn't disagree with you. Perhaps one way to frame the debate is whether as a matter of probability the first slightly different spin on something old is more apt to give rise to new forms than the twentieth, esp. if that twentieth is also informed by spins two through nineteen?

One of the issues here is precisely the other factors you raise: the availability of new technology or potentially untried genre fusions to enliven and render unfamiliar the "something old" component.

These intervening factors don't break the causal connection though, because I always get the impression that SR sees increasing retromania as partly responsive to those factors.

haha, so how do you distinguish which is retro? an interest in 20 year old music isn't retro, it's just where that music "happens to be"? Why can't another form of music happen to be in a mode that looks back 40 or 50 years?

No, I'm saying it is retro, and consciously so, but this is not part of some scene-wide decision to abandon the present in favour of a particular moment in the past. Next year the same DJs / dancers may be interested in something that doesn't sound remotely like US garage or the early 90s for that matter. So that's what makes it a really good example of what SR is referring to: the fact that here is a scene where people are listening and dancing to sets full of tunes from 20 years ago and contemporary tunes that have been recorded specifically to sound like they're from 20 years ago, while those people may not even be committed genre-revivalists per se.

I don't. That's the point. Stagnation, innovation, and "retro" are all far more relative and subjective than Reynolds lets on. There might be just as much difference between a "garage rock" band from 2013, '03, '93, '83, or '65 as there is between say house music from '13, '03, '93, or '83.

Sure. And? I think Reynolds would agree with you.

I guess it's the difference between a continuous tradition vs. a revival of something that was lost or forgotten. But to me the latter is actually more interesting and holds more possibilities for coming across as something genuinely new, while the former often feels like stagnation.

Isn't that the basic reason SR offers for the attractiveness of the past as a source for potential innovation/newness? The issue then becomes how much possibility is inherent in repeated revivalism of a particular idea. And there's never gonna be a hard and fast rule, never a moment where we can say "that's it, garage rock or straightforward house music will never surprise us again". But I would hazard a guess that it becomes harder to pull off over time.

In general terms I think you're punishing SR for not being able to isolate some pure retro-gene which can be distinguished from newness or nowness or whatever, whereas to my mind he's not even remotely trying to do that.

xp

skrillex is the musical analogue of the transformers films - except much better - so, yeah

nobody got irremediable brain injuries in the making of a skrillex lp

well idk, ray manzarek didn't last long

Perhaps one way to frame the debate is whether as a matter of probability the first slightly different spin on something old is more apt to give rise to new forms than the twentieth, esp. if that twentieth is also informed by spins two through nineteen?...

The issue then becomes how much possibility is inherent in repeated revivalism of a particular idea. And there's never gonna be a hard and fast rule, never a moment where we can say "that's it, garage rock or straightforward house music will never surprise us again". But I would hazard a guess that it becomes harder to pull off over time.

I think it's the other way around. It takes time for new forms of music to evolve and emerge. The idea of overnight revolutions is a fiction manufactured by the music press. I think it's possible that music that's currently being written off by some critics as being too retro is going to evolve into distinctly new genres that will become unrecognizable from their roots. Look at the evolution from the blues revival into Hendrix/Cream/Zeppelin style electric blues, and then the subtle shift into heavy metal with Sabbath and then trace that lineage all the way to something like black metal. It was a slow and continuous evolution that led to a result with no discernible connection to its blues revival roots. The critics who wrote off Sabbath in the '70s couldn't anticipate how influential they would become.

In general terms I think you're punishing SR for not being able to isolate some pure retro-gene which can be distinguished from newness or nowness or whatever, whereas to my mind he's not even remotely trying to do that.

No I'm annoyed by the fact that he takes all of these processes that are totally natural and even necessary to the creative process and gives them the dismissive label "retromania." I'm not the one trying to reduce everything down to some kind of retro-gene.

hipster-black?

― the most promising US ilxor has thrown the TOWEL IN (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), 10. juli 2013 01:24 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Metal. As in Liturgy and such. The most nowish concerts I've been to lately has been with EDM and BM. But yeah, hipster-black was way too vague a term, especially in this discussion.

http://www.factmag.com/2013/07/11/filmmaker-and-massive-attack-collaborator-adam-curtis-on-why-music-may-be-dying-and-why-need-a-new-radicalism/

this adam curtis interview could be simon reynolds speaking. i wonder if hes read retromania. or maybe its reynolds whos read adam curtis.