"Boring Revivalism," in a retro-Tom style

(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