"Boring Revivalism," in a retro-Tom style

yea i've been thinking about that npr piece a lot, realize your question niels is bigger than the NPR piece specifically, but anyways i posted this in the other thread

i generally agreed w/ emily lordi but i also thought she was perhaps a little too harsh on leon bridges? i mean i agree that complete devotion to replicating a retro sound is not particularly interesting but it did seem like she dumped a lot of criticism specifically on bridges himself and perhaps less so on the general phenomenon of white audiences feeling particularly pulled toward this purely retro sound.

her discussion was centered on political implications of revivalist retro soul specifically rather than all revivalist music and she knows her shit of course but i also felt like she maybe just prioritized political music because it is political, like the fact that neo-soul had afro-centric themes and was often political made it more meaningful to her than something like leon bridges' sam cooke revivalism, especially since the latter doesn't musically or thematically acknowledge decades of black radical music esp. hip-hop (though cooke did have "a change is gonna come" but whatever). the question of political vs. apolitical music seemed really to be at the core of that interview almost as much as retro vs. new.

idk i just recently read that raccoon tanuki "what happened to political rap" thread that was somehow salvaged into a decent ILM thread and it made me kind of question this overall negative judgement against apolitical music that was running through the npr piece. anyway i am not a huge fan of leon bridges, his music is very pleasant but not particularly interesting, and i would prefer to listen to same cooke or something. i also thought lordi's points about the music video were pretty spot on and interseting.

(which is why i end up appreciating someone like erykah more than that guy they focus on in that NPR thing.)

dang that Leon Bridges song is really boring

my answer in general to whether revivalism is worthy anything varies a lot i guess. i mean MV + EE are just aping this 70s neil crazy horse vibe with more distortion and psychedelia and it isn't particularly innovative but i have a lot of time for it. i've already exhausted my neil albums and i appreciate people paying homage if it is fun/interesting to listen to/has good vibes. same goes for sleep/om/dead meadow/electric wizard doing endless variations on basically 4 black sabbath albums, i still dig listening to it

xp to Noodle: It's true that realizing revivalist music is revivalist may be a turn off, but it can also be the point - I knew very well that stuff I was getting into was revivalist back then - it was part of the appeal! I remember thinking something along the lines of "how incredible is it that this kind of music is STILL BEING MADE!"

I guess I also have something like Scott's 80s metal where too much of the same of a good thing is just perfect (can't think of it now, but I'm sure it's there)

hehe marcos, indeed when trying to figure out what revivalist thread to revive, I skim read this one but it had too much good time rock&roll appreciation going, and I know a lot of people who love that kind of music, and actually, if I had to pick a revivalist genre to enjoy I might go for stoner rock

(see, hip hop, in general, fits my definition of progressive traditionalism. which is one of the reasons i still love it after all these years.)

(but yeah what marcos said. why listen to not-sam cooke when you can listen to sam cooke? but there are a LOT of people who just love the idea of new sam cooke. and i get that.)

what started these confusing thoughts was me not fully enjoying a show this saturday with danish psych rockers spids nøgenhat who last year (after years and years of playing to a pretty small psych crowd) had a proper hit with this cool ode to growing weed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC6Q9Ri1CUE

and I was thinking maybe the reason I didn't fully enjoy it was that it was too revivalist (I did enjoy it though, they play well and had some really cool visuals and I was a bit high even)

and earlier this year I saw Horisont at a festival and I couldn't really get excited about it (again, I thought because of the revivalism) but maybe I'm just not target audience? this youtube commenter seems to get it: "i like these guys cos there so different there right up there with kadavar. they really take influenced from scorpions & ufo so much especially this song"

hip hop is great for progressive traditionalism!

but don't like traditionalist hip hop too much - saw Jurassic 5 a month ago and had to wonder if the band members just don't care for contemporary sounds at all? maybe that's the key - that I see some revivalist music as conservative, and I don't like conservatism?

Like, Sam Cooke was not a conservative artist at all, right? So there's something very paradoxical in honouring him through mimicry?

I remember when I was in college and first got into Desco soul/funk revival stuff (which I think more or less morphed into Daptone, although I'm not clear on the specifics), I was immensely excited about it. The way they not only revived the styles but actually recreated the studio techniques, recording quality etc. actually felt RADICAL to me at the time rather than reactionary, although it's hard today to justify why that is other than just I was all hormonal and collegy and excited about everything. Of course it was partly because the energy of that music itself, at least the best stuff, was just so high. It was performed in a way that seemed to really inhabit the spirit and not just recreate in an overly reverent way. The vibe wasn't "lets remember the days when music was MUSIC," it was more this strange, ecstatic exercise, like the sheer strangeness of someone actually bothering to make these records that could really fool me into thinking they were from 1969 or 1972 had a certain creative energy to it.

xp BTW I felt exactly the same excitement when I heard the group choruses on Jurassic 5 EP, which I still think holds up pretty well. Because I had just never heard ANYONE do that kind of old-school rap revivalism. But then it got stale pretty fast.

I mean their style did.

OTOH I remember seeing Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings live man years later and thinking that, as much as I loved her and the music overall, some of the band members had this faintly necrophiliac vibe to them.

*many years later

"but don't like traditionalist hip hop too much"

i've never had any need for it in a genre that honors tradition so well while adding the new effortlessly!

The way they not only revived the styles but actually recreated the studio techniques, recording quality etc. actually felt RADICAL to me at the time rather than reactionary, although it's hard today to justify why that is other than just I was all hormonal and collegy and excited about everything. Of course it was partly because the energy of that music itself, at least the best stuff, was just so high. It was performed in a way that seemed to really inhabit the spirit and not just recreate in an overly reverent way. The vibe wasn't "lets remember the days when music was MUSIC," it was more this strange, ecstatic exercise, like the sheer strangeness of someone actually bothering to make these records that could really fool me into thinking they were from 1969 or 1972 had a certain creative energy to it.

I kinda had this response to Blue, the recent jazz album by Mostly Other People Do The Killing. For those who don't know, it's a note-for-note re-creation of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, right down to the reverb, room sound, etc. They really tried as hard as they could to sound exactly like the original recording. And of course a lot of dickhead jazz critics took the bait and A/B-ed the records so they could point out that MOPDTK's drummer didn't get the kick drum part right on this one measure, blah blah blah. But what I thought when I heard it was, Wow! Now imagine if they recorded their next album of original music using those exact same reverb settings, microphone placements, etc. It would be new music, full of circa-2015 technique ('cause despite this experiment, MOPDTK are not normally a retro act at all) but deliberately designed to sound like it was recorded to analog two-track tape in 1959.

The thing about that NPR piece, though, is that it seemed to presuppose that all innovations in "black" music since the 1960s have been improvements, and that politically engaged music is better than apolitical music. I disagree on both counts.

pleased to find that this particular Leon Bridges song is a jam and not boring revivalism at all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztfyj1dVgk