One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward

i think there is alot of this kind of thing going on
taking music that has more commercial use as library music or advert music, etc or even something like disco which on the surface are quite ordinary with ordinary uses and exploiting the unstable elements of those things to make something stranger and nostalgic filling these things with unanswered questions..

anyway incase you don't know warpmart have these http://www.warprecords.com/?mart=WAP199 broadcast very limited microtronics series very radiophoniky business as an aside .

Great thread topic!

I've mused over this occasionally but have never come to any satisfactory conclusion. There's definitely a bit of politics in there to I reckon - I tend to think of retro-futurism in the post-punk etc is a bit reactionary, thought not so much in the context of electronic/disco stuff.

I guess progress, simulation, and a culture's relationship to history are all important concepts in this context. Can you have nostalgia for something you've never experienced first hand? I'd tend to say yes, but perhaps nostalgia is not the best word for it.

I really quite like the idea of rewiting history and imagining different futures - though if done badly it can sort of decontextualize/depoliticise movements.

I've never really experienced a movement second time around, maybe someone who has has some insights on this.

How long has this phenomenon appeared in history for ? - the nature of modern society has definitely changed the way this phenomenon works, and the cycles are definitely smaller, and perhaps more localised.

Is there such a thing as retro-historicism? like re-imagining the 50s through the filter of the re-imagining already done in the 80s? I guess that's just one way in which history is constructed.

owen said:

you could map this onto a (disputable, so someone come and dispute it please!) binary between modern/postmodern. i.e;

with the postpunk thing- something like the DFA or Erase Errata might nick bits from pp and add various other bits of pop detritus and combine them in new and interesting ways, giving them a new fecundity, new possibilities not in the original forms- while something like (say) the futureheads merely replicate particular elements, without any real recontextualisations or ideas....

or in chicago house revivalism- 'aceeiied' nostalgia, places like bangface (which i'm sure is fun but i digress) the fetishising of sweaty t-shirted pilled up manhood and along with this the incessant 303- or someone like Booka Shade or Chelonis R Jones, stressing ignored elements (diva vocals, ostentatiously gay physicality, iciness) and so somehow reactivating the original...

the problem with this though is that the revivalists don't really inspire developments of new forms...'losing my edge' frinstance elicited pretty much diminishing returns...am reminded of a line in 'blissed out' on c86 running along the lines of 'imagine the children of the BMX bandits' (and obv much 90s scottish indie rock was just that)

(ok that was my last attempt and then i'll let this thread die!)

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Have been thinking about this a bit over the last few days and how it ties into genre theory, and thus relates to the interminable debates here on whether rock is dead, dance music is dead, whether grime is hip hop etc. I was going to try and track down an article that i vaguely remember reading in the context of film theory about the development of genres over time, through classical, baroque and various other phases ... and seemingly from this discussion one could perhaps conclude a revival or'simulation' stage. Owen, I thought you might have come across this article, I think the original idea on genre change was borrowed from outside film theory though.

re: dfa - even some of their stuff is just pure simulation really - delia and gavin, much as i love their stuff, is really just nothing more than 70s/80s prog synth stuff. But there seems to be such a perceived value in pure simulation that while the content may not have changed, the fact that the music is pure replication makes it somehow more modern and relevant. So whats valued is perhaps not any changes in form/content but the fact that the music is basically faking something else, and thus challenging the separation between what's 'real' and what is simulated. It's getting late, maybe that's going a bit far ...

I did stumble across this site, a strange project on genre evolution - the database is exceptionally geeky but quite cool in its own way.

owen said:

y
or in chicago house revivalism- 'aceeiied' nostalgia, places like bangface (which i'm sure is fun but i digress) the fetishising of sweaty t-shirted pilled up manhood and along with this the incessant 303- or someone like Booka Shade or Chelonis R Jones, stressing ignored elements (diva vocals, ostentatiously gay physicality, iciness) and so somehow reactivating the original...

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in defense of bangface it's not really revivalism, it is all over the place, respected old school, new school and general music, it's just about trying to work the fun feeling of raves up with a little more knowing irony i think .

>'imagine the children of the BMX bandits'

well when i wrote that (early 87) i couldn't have imagined A/ soup dragons going baggy and druggy and covering a Rolling Stones song and B/ teenage fan club with their (briefly) quite invigorating mix of neil young/T-Rex/Big Star/boogie

also C86 had more of a scattered and interesting set of half-lives than i'd of imagined then -- whether it was primal scream circa screamadelica, or saint etienne, or Riot Grrrl/Hugyy Nation -- or Belle and Sebastian... and even K Records, you'd never have imagined Calvin doing Dubstep Narcotic Sound System

true it also led to Sarah Records and twee-core etc etc

but i suppose the idea is that no matter how spent/used-up/wretched/on its last legs/anorectic a genre or sound seems, it might have a few surprises or swerves up it's sleeve

* * * *

genre-ology: maybe there's a standard evolutionary path that could be mapped onto all genres

the initial phase of the genre forming out of disparate elements

combustion/cathexis with a mass following/the surge of first 5 to 15 years when all the basic possibilities in the sound are followed through by a vanguard who are also popular and sell a lot

the three way split phase:
1/ conservationism (to an audience that is growing older with the music, but not growing)
2/ purism/abstraction (for a vanguard that is unpopular and selling not a lot
3/ fusion (maybe reaching a younger audience?)

the first is freezing the sound at its perceived peak and reiterating/maintaining (often with a nostalgic, restore-what's-been-lost impulse)
the second pursues a path of distillation, complexification, abstractification, highbrowification, rarification, conceptualisation, etcetc
the third seeks to extend the life of the genre by forging connections with other genres, often a downwardly mobile move towards the popular dance forms of the day, or to way outside the genre (world influences, etc)


that three way split has obvious applications to jazz
-- trad (a whole bunch of periods are fixated on as A Good Place To Stop, but this is different from retro, cos it's not about going back, but it's about not going any further), see also Wynton Marsalis
-- free/fire music/improv etc
--- fusion -- jazz-rock, jazz-funk, don cherry ethnodelic 4th worldism, ECM's eurovision etc etc

final phase: the retro-postmodern/recombinant/pastiche-craftsmanlike formalism
you saw it in jazz with John Zorn maybe

i think you could maybe map this model onto all genres, esp. rock and electronic dance music.

* * * * *

the questions raised by owen have been on my mind a lot recently, not so much re. ghostbox who i think tap into that whole uncanny/revenant/hauntological aspect that isn't retro because it's not comforting, but with ariel pink, whose worn copy is my favourite record the year but i have to acknowlege that there's an element to what he does this is very close to pasticheurs that i normally would dismiss e..g marshall crenshaw, or chris isaak. mastering of period pop styles, that sort of craftsmanlike approach. to me though Ariel more often than not summons something ecstatic and transcendent that just blasts through the stylisation. but i'm at a loss to really say how.

also been thinking quite a bit about what you might call "the sentimentalisation of the vanguard"
i.e. why do "we" have a bias towards the pioneering, the first or early instances of a given radical form? it's perfectly possible, theoretically, for instance, that someone in 2005 could make a classic dub record (or classic acieeed record) that was better on every level than the ones make in the roots heyday/1987. but i would still , i suspect, be less interested in it, and more crucially, less affected by it. so for me, for instance, there is something always going to be something intrinsically more exciting about a psychedelic record from 1967 than something by, say, bevis frond. i wonder why though, is there really some quality (absorbed from the zeitgeist) that permeates those being-done-for-the-first-time pieces of music?

blissblogger said:

why do "we" have a bias towards the pioneering, the first or early instances of a given radical form? it's perfectly possible, theoretically, for instance, that someone in 2005 could make a classic dub record (or classic acieeed record) that was better on every level than the ones make in the roots heyday/1987.

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For me, all roads lead to Kandinsky on this one:

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the
mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture
produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts
to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an
art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel,
as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to
follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity
of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation
is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human
being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn
over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for
him no real meaning."

from Concerning The Spiritual In Art, by Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

Nothing compares with the excitement of being confronted with something new (both subjectively and objectively); by a piece of work that connects with you in spite of the fact that you can have no real benchmarks by which to judge it; by something to which the only honest initial response can be: "What the fuck was that?!"

In my case, it was the first time I heard "Voodoo Ray", or "Dirty Epic", or "Port Gentil", or "9 Hours Into The Future". And I guess it's always more acute when you're younger because, effectively, everything is new. But I still got it this year; off Jackson & His Computer Band, off "Arabs In The Desert" by Dandy Jack, and (belatedly) when I finally got hold of Ariel Pink - altho in that case, part of the WTF-factor came from it sounding like everything (and nothing), so maybe that's not the best example

owen said:

it's interesting to me (as the 'folk memory' element of this isn't such an issue if one was born in the 1980s ) how it's very utilitarian things that are being fetishised- library music, incidental music and so forth- music that has no pretension to 'art' but because of the personnel involved is often incredibly daring. that exactly the constriction of having to be 'useful' that enabled inspiration- a similar thing to say hollywood from the 30s-60s- geniuses being forced to work like hacks. who now would submit to that sort of discipline? (has anyone read the jonny trunk book on library music btw?)

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Ha ha, this is an interesting take. I've been making production music for libraries for a year or so.

The cool thing about it is you dont have to get involved with any of the dull bits of being a commercial musician, like promotion, legal stuff, etc. You can just bang out tunes at your own pace, and thats very attractive for a lot of people.

I spent 8 years making very arty techno and trying to convince people to buy into my vision, but it didnt work - I'm not a natural scenster or self-publicist which i think you have to be to get on as a commercial musician, even an arty one.

I think it's false to draw a line between 'utilitarian' library or media music and 'arty' commercial music. Most successful pop and dance music is primarily functional and the people making it dont have any sense of it as art. The music making process is usually a mediation between what the creator wants to do and what the audience expects. Only the most interesting and magnetic personalities living in the most turbulent times can express themselves without any mediation, and still get an audience. For those of us not blessed (or cursed?) with those circumstances, making music will always be more of a craft than an art.

Sorry I'm OT, this post just caught my eye.

Omaar said:

Can you have nostalgia for something you've never experienced first hand? ...

I've never really experienced a movement second time around, maybe someone who has has some insights on this.

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I think 'nostalgia for something you've never experienced first hand' is one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism. This was very much Jameson's take, which emphasised not nostalgic content but nostalgic form: for instance, although a film like Body Heat was notionally given a contemporary setting, formally it was a film whose conventions had been established in the 40s. Many of the 80s viewers of the film were unaware of this, much in the way that young fans of whatever the latest r and r-evivalism being hawked this week are.

This does very much connect with the 'death of rock' question raised on other threads. John Effay raises the example of his generation being shocked by the fact that the Stooges had pre-empted the Pistols. Yet this seems to me the very opposite of the situation today, where such shock is pretty much unthinkable. Rock fans, especially the young ones, aren't under the delusion that what they're listening to is new. Their dilemma is to be caught in a period in which there is an excess of the past but a deficiency of the historical. History is over, bends in upon itself, loops.... through a past that is re-permutated, forever...

On the other hand, perhaps we could say that ALL nostalgia is 'for something you've never experienced first hand'. Nostalgia is always for something that was 'never there' , precisely a 'full presence' that, paradoxically, can only ever be posited retrospectively, in terms of a homely past. One of the things that separates Ghost Box and Ariel Pink from Franz Ferdinand/ Kaiser Chiefs/ The Editors is that 'full presence' is both gestured to and undermined (in the case of FF etc such presence is not referred/ deferred but assumed). In this respect, and contra to what Simon said above, I would say that Ariel is MORE hauntological than Ghost Box. Some of the Ghost Box tracks could happily sit next to Radiophonic recordings of the 60s, whereas Ariel's tracks sound more like MEMORIES or dreams of the past rather than pastiche reconstructions.

To close, for the moment, some observations from this beautiful site on hauntology:

'Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past, even if the apparition represents someone who has been dead for many centuries, for the simple reason that a ghost is clearly not the same thing as the person who shares its proper name. Does then the 'historical' person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, as at once they 'return' and make their apparitional debut. Derrida has been pleased to term this dual movement of return and inauguration a 'hauntology', a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non- origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity." (Buse & Scott, 1999, p.10-11)'

the kandisky quote is great

and what k-punk has to say about nostalgia seems valid

but isn't it also possible that pop music and pop consciousness moved too quickly from 1965 to 1995 -- i.e., that the rate of change was somehow false and *unsustainable*

isn't it possible that not enough credit has been paid to the notion of tradition -- i.e., the development of new folk and pop traditions over the past 40 years -- i.e., isn't 1965 kinda like year zero for the world we now live in, such that nothing pre-dates it -- so that while past 40 years saw birth of many new genres, which shouldn't expect to see such generic fecundity from here on out

so the hypothetical dub record, made today, belongs to a tradition of dub music that is only 30 years old (i.e., hardly the same thing as aping the greeks 2500 years after the fact)

the hypothetical acieed record, made today, to a tradition of music that is less than 20 years old (i.e., a very young tradition, in the grand scheme of things)

maybe we have unrealistic expectations for how quickly music cultures and genres should change

i.e., i'm not too big on dancehall or hip hop, but surely there's something to be learned from the practitioners and fans of these genres -- they stick with it

and maybe what seem like returns to the pop past, appropriations of previous forms, are in fact instances of the development of genre -- not as linear forward movement, but the early stages of *spiraling tradition*

last, i've yet to buy the ariel pink album (it's on my to-buy list) -- but this whole notion of "weak presence" sounds rather off-putting -- why should people want to make due with "weak presence" -- isn't this gianni vattimo or someting??? -- i.e, isn't the whole notion of "weak presence" born of an error in thinking, a hangover from the modernist addiction to the perpetually new???

blissblogger said:

>the third seeks to extend the life of the genre by forging connections with other genres, often a downwardly mobile move towards the popular dance forms of the day, or to way outside the genre (world influences, etc)

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[is it poor form to quote yourself?!]

no but i just wanted to pick up on another example of this which was the 80s moves by herbie hancock (with 'rockit' etc) viz electro and Miles Davis with his covers of scritti and cyndi lauper and desire to work with "that cat" Nik Kershaw (who was a crypto-progger as it happens) and all that Tutu-era type marcus millery sutff. in fact miles used to go on about how he wasn't making jazz, because jazz was dead, it was history

>spiralling tradition

nice trope, very visual

carducci is good on the potency of tradition, on how it's actually easier to break with tradition (wilful no rules avant-fuckery) than is to sustain and develop and contribute to a tradition -- the hardcore continuum idea is influenced by carducci, this idea of something that is simultaneously operating on a push-things-forward and roots-invoking front -- break on through and solid foundation combined

dom i have indeed sometimes wondered if the surge years of pop (which i'd date not from 65 to 95 but more like 63 to 85 -- mid-eighties being when sampling kicks in, and record collection rock/metapop) did create unrealistic expectations of how fast things should move, constant change, endless surprise etc etc...

but i was born in '63 so my cultural metabolism is unavoidably accelerated, i expect too much from music maybe

blunt said:

For me, all roads lead to Kandinsky on this one:

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the
mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture
produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts
to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an
art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel,
as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to
follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity
of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation
is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human
being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn
over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for
him no real meaning."

from Concerning The Spiritual In Art, by Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

Nothing compares with the excitement of being confronted with something new (both subjectively and objectively); by a piece of work that connects with you in spite of the fact that you can have no real benchmarks by which to judge it; by something to which the only honest initial response can be: "What the fuck was that?!"

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two questions coming off the quote and your comment, though

1/ what happens when it's no longer a shock of the new to you, when you become used to it, familiarity breeds... what? does there have to be something else to it in terms of expressive content or beauty or does it somehow continue to work as a memory-of-having-been-new-shocked?

2/ what's going on when we listen to stuff that was once new/epater le bourgeois-y/boundary-breaking but that was a long, long time ago
... like when i listen to old musique concrete and electronic avant-classical records, having already heard much of this stuff and other kinds of electronic music, -- some of the shock-of-the-now effect is irrecoverable, cos i've had a lot of exposure to these sort of sounds and live in a world that these composers kind of created. but i still find myself drawn to this stuff... the boundary-breaking stuff of the past, in preference to to the music that subsequently was cultivated in the terrain opened up by the boundary-breaking frontier artists

seems like there's all kinds of paradoxes and complicated sensations/emotions/projections going on when when one listens (reads, looks at) the once-was-pioneering...

Time is not linear, it has many curves and directions, in all dimensions; you could observe it as a nice finite object, but only outside of it.
Entropy degenerates (musical) genres, something was new, more definite, more full of active energy, then is fuzzy, energy at lower standard, alas only comfortable heat. Not that this awareness of degradation can't be interesting. Entropy is the reason why we can only remember the past, and not the future, except in dreams.

blissblogger said:

also been thinking quite a bit about what you might call "the sentimentalisation of the vanguard"
i.e. why do "we" have a bias towards the pioneering, the first or early instances of a given radical form? it's perfectly possible, theoretically, for instance, that someone in 2005 could make a classic dub record (or classic acieeed record) that was better on every level than the ones make in the roots heyday/1987. but i would still , i suspect, be less interested in it, and more crucially, less affected by it. so for me, for instance, there is something always going to be something intrinsically more exciting about a psychedelic record from 1967 than something by, say, bevis frond. i wonder why though, is there really some quality (absorbed from the zeitgeist) that permeates those being-done-for-the-first-time pieces of music?

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don't get me wrong, i share your sentiments -- as i suppose all of "us" do -- though i'm not sure if this is true of all genres (true imo for dance music, though, as i'm not nearly so moved by anything in dance music post-93 as before)

but getting back to 65-95 (or 63-85), maybe the advent of pop culture allowed for the release of popular creativity, the rapid development and blossoming of popular forms that had hitherto been limited by a relative lack of technology (i.e., people had simple instruments) and exposure (no mass media market) -- and so perhaps we're now living after the dawn of this new age -- i.e., the dawn saw the rapid proliferation of genres and forms, and now we must simply live with the forms that exist and have modest expecations for the appearance of new forms