And who is to say that they might not have been the innovators if only they had come along a little earlier? The fact that someone is technically skilled in a particular genre doesn't preclude their having the ability to innovate too. But in general there is always a tension between the innovators in a sound and the followers, I often think that people often venerate people who made "proto" something more than those who made the actual thing, but without that actual thing developing into a genre then there would be nothing to venerate them for creating.the figures that Pound sneers at are actually playing a useful role, they are like craftsmen, they have musical skill - they can do good work, once they've been shown the way forward
that's assuming that the people who were into Big Beat were the same people who had been into rave and then retreated it from it
in fact i should think there was virtually no crossover
the people who had got into Big Beat were probably in large degree people who had been (and still were) into Britpop
so in a certain sense that is a forward movement for them, into some form of beats-and-bass-and-samples culture - a rock'n'roll version of it for sure
meanwhile no one who was actually into rave / hardcore is retreating from - they are actually following its logic through with jungle, drum and bass etc
actually that's not entirely true
the cowardice move there would be people who had been into rave /91-92 hardcore and then went back to softer option of club-oriented house - handbag, funky house (the original kind), progressive house
i think the idea of a cultural retreat is based on an idea of there being a single unitary pop culture
whereas in fact the kind of people who never accepted or had any time for rave remained non-accepting
they weren't up for it, and then suddenly not up for it
thirdform loves it when i quote ezra pound so here we go
"When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.
Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.
He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. "
yeah well, that sounds like 18th century enlightenment french salon shit.
no wonder he became a fascist. he was obsessed with existence being an actual predicate rather than mediated through the subject. he was even behind Kant on this. he cannot prefigure the future and his avantgardism becomes conservative for exactly this reason.
you would be better off chewing your food before swallowing.
you would be better off chewing your food before swallowing.