k-punk
Spectres of Mark
blissblogger said:ah well you see this is where we part company Mark because if you don't think that the Stone Roses were a phenomenon , something to reckon with then... That was a Moment, there was definitely a vibe at their gigs that was special.... and they did some very Sixties-flavored things, true, but i can't actually think of anything that sounded like "I Wanna Be Adored" before it
very bright lads the Roses too... not, in fact, "lads" at all... much closer to the intellectual half of Manic Street Preachers than Oasis
That good, eh?
Yes, they were a 'phenomenon'. Same as Artic Monkeys are a phenomenon. Yes, lots of people liked them. I'm sure there was a 'vibe' at Trad Jazz concerts too. None of this mitigates the fact that their jingle-jangle pop was a disastrous force of reaction.
Nirvana, by Mark's argument, are "revivalist" but they were great, there's no getting round it ....
But Nirvana were great precisely because they dramatized the predicament of rock being washed up and finished. For the revivalists I attack, that isn't the case, because the temporality of the form they are workin in is simply not an issue. They are new simply because their records come out now (so we are supposed to believe).
again, i see the parallel with things like fiction or TV or cinema.... there's always good and great work being done in forms that are not cutting-edge or futurist ... i'm as happy to watch/read a brilliantly-acted and written but formally non-groundbreaking movie /TV drama/novel --
I'm not really. Well, I am 'happy' to watch some formally classicist film or read such a novel, but I accept that it is lesser than something modernist. re: your Jonathan Coe point. I haven't read The Rotters Club (although I did watch the TV programme) but I'm sure that I would find its rendition of the 70s far less compelling than David Peace's modernist version. Likewise, surely the appeal of something like Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven or the Singing Detective was its modernist, formal innovations - compare that with the dreadful portentous vacuity of Stephen Poliakoff's 'Quality' teleplays.
and at a time when the cutting edge is hard to locate it seems to be particularly fruitless to make that the sole criteria
It isn't the sole criteria, but it should be a criteria of some kind. All the more important to hold onto it when times are bad. Indeed, the lack of cutting edge is WHY times are bad, and pretending that isn't the case will only add to the problem.
as you say tim, i don't think what Ariel P is doing either can, or needs, to be justified as 'cutting edge'.... a lot of what makes it magical is about its raiding the pop memory banks, playing with pop pasts...
Agreed, it needs to be justified, as we have done, as hauntological. There's still a sense of 'time out of joint', not a complete bracketing off of the question of history or development as there is in the case of AMs and Franz Ferdinand.
likewise junior boys
(incidentally, how is what they do, with its very pointed and discernible evocations of some 80s strains of music, not devoid of the taint of revivo/retro?)
lol, well Jeremy is always annoyed and rightly so by the fact that interviews consider the J Beez 'retro' whereas rock of any kind is given a free pass. That's because rock is somehow eternalized, whereas electronic pop is destined to be forever associated with a particular period. I've a long argument about this in my forthcoming piece on them. Texturally, there are some borrowings from synthpop. But formally none of the Junior Boys' songs atually sound like 70s or 80s synthpop. In any case, there's a difference between 'evocations' and references and pastiche. If it were about evocations of the past, then everything would be retro (which is partly where this depressive logic is leading of course). But what we're talking about in the case of neo-Indie is things which actually sound like they really could have existed, exactly as they are, twenty years ago. I've heard nothing from AMs on which they escape pastiche mode. As for Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs, well...