Will youth be fooled again?

k-punk said:

What is largely missing - and I really, really don't think this is an 'old fogey's perspective' - from Pop atm is that sense of Event. It's like thre's a direct, inverted relationship between 'techniques of archivization' and (to adapt a Badiou-ism that doesn't work too well in English any way) 'eventality.' Morbid attention to one's own place in history goes along with a revivalist approach to the past.

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this is undoubtedly true, and i'm as guility as anyone

if you don't like what's going on today, you can all too easily lose yourself in music from the past

all the info is there to be found on the internet, sound clips can be hunted down

used to be that if you didn't like the times, you had to work to change the direction of music -- champion the most promising new sounds, support the best new records and artists -- or forever hold your peace

k-punk said:

I think there's a problem of overavailability . . . . Many records we'd consider classics now were not very easy to get hold of in the post-punk period. Modernism in culture was about the moment, the unrepeated broadcast, a Now that was indifferent to its archivization . . . . There is no real need to watch the broadcast the first time round - and therefore no possibility of it becoming an Event.

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surely that's how it used to work w/ 12" dance records -- if a record was any good, you had to get the record that week or the next week at the lastest -- especially if you lived in america

today there's gemm, plus several non-gemm-affiliated on-line stores -- all dealing records from the past, tracks you missed the first time around b/c things were moving so rapidly

so as you work your way through RIUSA and you're interested in a record that the author's describing, just hop on line and do a quick search -- and then you'll have what few people back then had

so it's our sense of time that's changed -- from newspapers to libraries

the sense of event may be lost from broadcasts (but I don't see that this is necessarily true; the Olympic opening/closing ceremony, counting the points on Eurovision, waiting for the Crazy Frog to kick Coldplay's ass on the radio), but it is ever present in live performances, especially when made by a group or individual who is genuinely special; it's the sense of event that e.g. drives immense sales of Robbie Williams' Knebworth DVD - this almost becomes a 'must buy' for those who were there, but it's the having been there, and experienced it as it happened, that's important - much like an MC on Rinse will take your breath away if they hit something special while you're in the car, but not with the same intensity listening to it later on an MP3/cassette/whatever.

Also I have a feeling heavy compression may be partly to blame for recorded music being less eventful; but it's mainly down to there being less good songs at the moment, and that will change.

k-punk said:

Strikes me there's a MASSIVE gap in the market for contemporary angsty goth disco.

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second that!

at some point goths will be able to move on from the 80s...

Technology is a red herring. You couldn't buy an electric guitar until the '60s? Charlie Christian to thread. It was Thatcherism/Reaganism that gave you your cheap synths/samples/etc. What matters is what you do with technology. Things like Interstellar Overdrive, Here Come The Warm Jets, Escalator Over The Hill etc. had to be rattled out on tinpot instruments and recorded in studios with the capacity of today's average bargain basement Walkman. If any new or mind-altering sounds were to come out of this, it was down to the imagination of the musicians to provide them.

HOWEVER I think the reason why things like Mantronix, Schoolly-D - and indeed most of what SR wrote about in MM at the time, viz. Young Gods, AR Kane etc. - still sound fresh is that they're as askew now as they were then; they've never really fitted into The Canon, and therefore have never been suffocated by The Canon as the likes of the Pixies and Buttholes, or even Beat Happening, have. Same with acid house and early, i.e. good, jungle - I see no Rhino Handmade 4CD Ecstasy Flash boxsets.

I don't think "impress me much" is synonymous with "ooh, wonder what that sounds like?" - here I'm talking about innocent curiosity being superseded by the cynicism of experience, i.e. I've lived long enough to hear it all, prove to me you're different. The only way I can get surprised is if I catch something for which I haven't been pre-prepared to receive, i.e. on the radio, in the record shop, in the club.

The Mary Chain were the indie Frankie GTH - the first three singles would have been sufficient, and the album was the inevitable comedown (with parallel inevitable comedowns for ZTT/pre-MBV Creation). Thus those Wiley, Kano and Roll Deep albums are very much IMO the Psychocandy de nos jours - a straightforward compilation of the 12-inchers would have sufficed in all instances. With grime I haven't got beyond the "I went through all this in '94, only better" stage. Perhaps it's just too male a music for me; I never really got into heavy metal either.

This doesn't address the political question, but given that Acid was pointedly apolitical until the CJB forced it to become political, and that the underlying subtext of practically all mainstream hip-hop and R&B in the last 20 years has been essentially right-wing/materialist, it's hardly surprising that the music has failed to engender, or even soundtrack, any genuine political change.

egg said:

the sense of event may be lost from broadcasts (but I don't see that this is necessarily true; the Olympic opening/closing ceremony, counting the points on Eurovision, waiting for the Crazy Frog to kick Coldplay's ass on the radio), but it is ever present in live performances, especially when made by a group or individual who is genuinely special; it's the sense of event that e.g. drives immense sales of Robbie Williams' Knebworth DVD - this almost becomes a 'must buy' for those who were there

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This isn't quite what I meant by 'event' really. The Olympic opening ceremony, jesus god, the most boring thing in world history (I agree with Danny Baker, London shd say it isn't going to have an opening ceremony, it would win straight away!). The Olympic opening ceremony is a commemoration, precisely not an event, because choreographed, hyper-predictable, producing no new effects/ affects. Robbie Williams ditto, the very personification of pop as non-event, triumph of will plus vacuous citational frenzy plus demographic/ marketing calculation. Of course people want the DVD, the reason for going to such exercises in collective narcissism is so they can buy the DVD afterwards. Does Robbie's pomo posturing have any effect on their lives, on how they see the world? No, of course not.

Rachel Verinder said:

With grime I haven't got beyond the "I went through all this in '94, only better" stage. Perhaps it's just too male a music for me; I never really got into heavy metal either.

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I agree. Watching those live grime DVDS, I feel simultaneously ultra-tense AND bored... all that aggression, but with no finesse, no means of transforming it into anything fascinating, sublime... just an oi-like assertion of the brute fact of existence... Much of it doesn't strike me as that different from reality TV ... people who just want to make a mark on the world for being them... with minimal effort... cheap MTV cribs fantasies imported from hip hop... What interests me in grime is the 'music', the atonal electronics... just wish that the MCs would shut up most of the time....

Rachel Verinder said:

This doesn't address the political question, but given that Acid was pointedly apolitical until the CJB forced it to become political, and that the underlying subtext of practically all mainstream hip-hop and R&B in the last 20 years has been essentially right-wing/materialist, it's hardly surprising that the music has failed to engender, or even soundtrack, any genuine political change.

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Yeh, it's about time some pressure was put on hip hop now. It's THE most complacent music ever. Prog rock/ 70s soft rock like the Eagles were cornucopias of crazed innovation compared to the tedium of rap, which has enjoyed twenty years of hegemony now . People have to recognize that there is nothing more mainstream than hip hop, that its boring and stupid fashion, its boring and stupid macho posturing, its boring and stupid glorification of violence, its boring and stupid worship of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ are entirely negative. Time for some honesty. There is nothing interesting about any of this shit. Yes, the occasional good record comes out, and yes, not all hip hop is like this (but the alternatives, the dull and worthy likes of Black Eyed Peas, is usually infinitely worse). Hip hop makes it easy for indie shit to appear like some kind of alternative, but it's that easy opposition - between bores and boors, between amoral id and moralizing superego, between brutality and sensitivity - that means so much mainstream pop simply reproduces the social at its most facile rather than offering any alternative to it.

egg said:

at some point goths will be able to move on from the 80s...

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I wouldn't put my money on it. I happen to know a lot of more-or-less-goth people, and they're simply obsessed with the eighties, they're usually not even aware rave happened. Well, I actually think very few young people today are. But anyway, dark angsty goth disco... wasn't this exactly what The Horrorist tried to do, making slightly eighties-sounding gloomcore directly targeted at goths? And it didn't really work the way he hoped. There's an underground following for gloomcore, but it isn't goths. After all, they allready have their own angsty goth disco from the eighties: Depeche Mode.

Actually, I'd even say that worshipping the eighties is an essential part of being a goth today. If they moved on, they wouldn't be goths anymore.

sapstra said:

Nowadays i don't hear any really new sounds (the playstation sound i think isn't really new), so probably that means people don't have the experience of the new anymore, and don't think new things are possible, inside or outside music (whether they are possible is another discussion)

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I think there's a reason, not usually recognized, for things not really moving right now: there's simply evolutionary limits to how much a style of music can develop. Rock had more or less exhausted it's possibilites by the mid eighties (J&MC again), and even if electronic music have a few more wild cards left, it have obviously not the wide open field of possible invention as it had in the early nineties, and no amount of generally available technology, idealism or global communication can change that. There's still new stuff that blow me away, but now it's more often individual odd records, rather than whole scenes.

sapstra said:

I think these limits are caused by the limits of the existing technology being reached and the non-availability of new technology. (as said in my earlier post) When new technology becomes available, people first use it as it is intended, then they use it in non intended ways (Hendrix, the acid tones from the 808) and then it's waiting for new things.

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Technology have never been more widely available than it is now, much much more so than in the early nineties, and yet, things are moving incredibly slow compared to back then, so I won't buy the availabilty thing. And really, did all the new (and old) technology that the rave scene used cause any major change or stylistic inventions within rock or jazz?

As for the limits of existing technology being reached, well, who knows? It took five to ten years from their invention until the potential for misusing the Roland machines was truly realized.

Take something like dubstep... now, obviously, the overall sound of this music is defined by current technology, but the way the tracks are actually composed, that could have been done with the early nineties technology. Stylistically, dubstep sound like something that developed out of bleep'n'bass. It's one of the wild cards I was talking about... an evolutionary path not taken first time round, but possible all the time, and not really dependent of new tools.

heh heh! The thought forum turned into yet another music thread, who'd have thought it ...

Whilst what hamarplazt says is true about goths being obsessed with the eighties, what about all that EBM and crunchy goth techno? (not to mention all the cyber-goths, sci-fi goths, ridiculously futuristic goths) - all the stuff that gets played in the top room of Slimelight....Goth is interesting cos it seems to have its own version of every other kind of music/subkultur (rock-goth, pop-goth, (neo) folk-goth, poetry goth, electronica goth, transvestite goth, gay goth, even country goth and old person goth). Not to mention communist goth!

hamarplazt said:

Technology have never been more widely available than it is now, much much more so than in the early nineties, and yet, things are moving incredibly slow compared to back then, so I won't buy the availabilty thing.

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I think the emphasis there was on 'new', the non-availability of new technology.

synthesizers (for example), haven't changed that much over the years aside from the fact that instead of needing a room full of 'em you now can have just one that can do it all(or none if you use software exclusively).

I blame synth makers who can't get over the -the world wants analog modelling- hump. But then I guess there are alternatives like supercollider and Max/MSP and all the amazing stuff by native instruments.....

I fear I'm off topic.

Rachel Verinder said:

With grime I haven't got beyond the "I went through all this in '94, only better" stage. Perhaps it's just too male a music for me; I never really got into heavy metal either.

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i'm sympathetic to your position here -- especially when you hear it out, way too much testosterone -- i.e., i don't want overly "refined" and "sophisticated" sounds, but i'm not down with "male aggression" either -- give it to me bad and wicked

as for k-punk's comments on hip hop, utterly on the mark

and i'll say this in a whisper, i think kudu have a goth dimension -- not their only dimension, but certainly part of their make-up -- and they're black people, imagine that! (hear the sarcasm in my voice for this last bit)

hamarplazt said:

But anyway, dark angsty goth disco... wasn't this exactly what The Horrorist tried to do, making slightly eighties-sounding gloomcore directly targeted at goths? And it didn't really work the way he hoped.

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maybe not -- but "one night in nyc" is one of the very few classic techno records from late 90s

infinite thought said:

Whilst what hamarplazt says is true about goths being obsessed with the eighties, what about all that EBM and crunchy goth techno? (not to mention all the cyber-goths, sci-fi goths, ridiculously futuristic goths) - all the stuff that gets played in the top room of Slimelight....

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Well, EBM is eighties music. I don't know what you mean with crunchy goth techno, but if it's Mover-style doom/gloom-core, then I've never heard of any goths being into it. As excellent as The Horrorist was, gothic rave never took off.

infinite thought said:

Goth is interesting cos it seems to have its own version of every other kind of music/subkultur (rock-goth, pop-goth, (neo) folk-goth, poetry goth, electronica goth, transvestite goth, gay goth, even country goth and old person goth).

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This is true, but except for electronica goth, which I've never hard about before, all this music originated in the eighties.

I think there's a problem of overavailability: that's one of the things that comes across very strongly in Rip It Up. How postmodernity in pop was very much about the simple availability of the past - many records we'd consider classics now were not very easy to get hold of in the post-punk period. Modernism in culture was about the moment, the unrepeated broadcast, a Now that was indifferent to its archivization. Now people increasingly seem to experience things ONLY if they are mediated and recorded. The fact that you know you'll be able to get the DVD with full production details in a short while means that, for instance, there is no real need to watch the broadcast the first time round - and therefore no possibility of it becoming an Event.



The passage of time/O these memories of mine...