new/nu/neo-pop

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...
 

scissors

Member
xpost! repeating mark a little

Is a vanguardist perspective always about desiring certain positive qualities/sources/sonictwists? What about the question of how source is twisted/fused/referenced? Or maybe this is always reducible to a subjective structural preference.

For instance, the appeal of the ghost box artists seems partly to be the "inappropriateness" (= allure) of their library music source and yet they are more interesting than something like Harmonic 33 because of this drifty lapsing arrangement of sound. Not just perfect fidelity to a past sound, the evocation of hearing the past itself becomes a formal element.

I think the hauntology thread was somewhat about hearing things in strange (spectral?) lights, about possible 'hows' rather than 'whats'. For me at least, Ariel Pink's raiding/playing of memory banks is more interesting than the 'pop' itself that fills this place (probably because i'm not old enough to have the [actual] memories). What I worry about is this may simply be like the negative of a privileged picture - it's tempting for me to prefer Villalobos over Booka Shade because the more overt mangling/smearing feels like a 'bizarre envelope' instead of a positive referent (especially wrt vocals). But this envelope itself is possibly just the stuff of IDM, just strangeness announcing itself in obvious, familiar, and ultimately self-defeating ways.
 
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martin

----
It can carry on as a monologue, I can't be arsed to argue about it on an Internet forum on a crisp, sunny day like this
 

martin

----
No, I just felt an unusual compulsion to comment 'bullshit' on your assessment of the Pogues because I believe it to be bonkers; however I do agree with you that the Stone Roses were tripe. Anyway, there's a mod watching us now, so we'll have to be relatively sensible on this one.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Surely some sort of record? The Verinder appearance/fight/flight cycle now so fast it's become imperceptible.
 
new/nu/neo-poop

There seems to be concern in whether the intentions of cutting edge music of the past has filtered to the present or for that matter… the perceivable future. I think there’s a serious problem here. The problem seems to me to be due the popular music press and it's interest with self-promotion and voicing established sub-music industry marketing agendas rather than reflecting independent observations/music.
It’s as if the music journalist's sole desire is to be the musician/poet or the pop hero/icon!
I read and hear less and less concern by the music press on nurturing new ideas and more and more zest in ‘stealing’ or ‘hijacking’ ideas. More to the point, ‘new music’ by innovative artist’s is ever more invisible and unknown purely because of the fact that ‘insiders’ are cloning them and in turn regurgitating those sentiments to unsuspecting sub-cultures. There’s no innocence anymore...... it’s all hyper-real. Has this always been the case?
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Or is it just that the UK pop scene never really recovered from such a weird time as the 80s? To have that must have been weird for all concerned. I mean, you listen to something like Morning Musume's 'Yes Yes Pocky Girls!', and I'm not gonna deny the Spice Girls, or even 'Overload', but the rush from that record, the 'PSYCHO PSYCHO' bit...the melodic rush from 'No Scrubs', didn't pop just move out of the territories it had previously inhabited and grow in other pastures? Didn't pop just, well, get eaten? I kinda say get off the colonial horse...
 

dHarry

Well-known member
k-punk said:
[The Stone Roses] 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.
blissblogger said:
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).
The Stone Roses for all their apparent conservatism were a kind of flipside to Nirvana's bitter struggle with the failure/death of rock - the Roses combined the psychedelic nostalgia so derided by k-punk with the postpunk "Glory Boys" will-to-belief in rock (that perhaps links them with Joy Division?!).

Much more than a simple re-hash of old familiar styles, with every note they played on their first album they tried to will into being the affect/passion of the 60s' and early 80s' belief in rock's future. That this led to diminishing returns on their follow-up Led Zep pastiche or Oasis' etc. retro'n'roll can't dim the fiery determination and almost unbearable pathos of thir debut, which is just as much a swansong/lament for rock in its way as Teen Spirit; probably the last time anyone could - almost? - believe in music this way.

Not as self-consciously dramatised as Cobain's futile rage and frustration ("Here we are now/Entertain us"), the Roses arguably dramatised the same predicament - it's in the halo of nostalgia which cocoons the sound, the combination of post-Joy Divion/U2 guitar heroics with blissed-out Byrds-texture and rhythmic elegance, an attempt to preserve the 60's to 80's tradition in the sense of Badiouan fidelity to the Event, rather than the pointless re-hashing for which they unwittingly may have paved the way.

Nirvana may have re-animated the dead horse for a final flogging, but the Roses believed enough to wring some last drops of magic from it against all the odds. I Am The Resurrection's outro and Fool's Gold then attempted to go beyond this, a re-imagining of Hendrixian freak-out and Can-funk for a sampladelic age; a version of My Bloody Valentine's progression from Isn't Anything to Loveless. But whereas MBV succeeded through solipsism and studio-isolation, the Roses attempted to stake out a new future for rock and take the audience with them.

If you need a scapegoat, blame the La's or Rocks Off-era Primal Scream for the current post-Oasis desert of the real old grey whistle test ring-tone karaoke.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
dHarry said:
Not as self-consciously dramatised as Cobain's futile rage and frustration ("Here we are now/Entertain us"), the Roses arguably dramatised the same predicament - it's in the halo of nostalgia which cocoons the sound, the combination of post-Joy Divion/U2 guitar heroics with blissed-out Byrds-texture and rhythmic elegance, an attempt to preserve the 60's to 80's tradition in the sense of Badiouan fidelity to the Event, rather than the pointless re-hashing for which they unwittingly may have paved the way.

O come on, what is POST Joy Division about their sound? They might be post-U2, I'll grant you - the empty stadium bluster and preening egotism transformed into student union bragging and stroppiness.

But rhythmic elegance? Dear god...

Surely fidelity to the EVENT of 60s-80s rock would precisely not require fidelity to the FORM; on the contrary it would entail the total rejection of the latter. As for 'unwittingly paving the way' towards re-hashing... they themselves are that re-hashing. I still recall the crushing sense of desolation when Simon made his case for them at the time... something along the lines of the fact that the very obviousness of their influences - the uber-canonic Byrds/ Pistols etc - is what made them interesting. I don't see any difference between the Stone Roses and Oasis except that Oasis are bit less weedy-sounding.

Nirvana may have re-animated the dead horse for a final flogging, but the Roses believed enough to wring some last drops of magic from it against all the odds.

Yes, but it was that very belief that was so damaging, and so depressing, as against the exhilaration of Nirvana's total nihilation. It is their very belief that is culpable; because that belief has kept that retro-train on the rails for the last twenty years.

Belief... belief... The Roses have always sounded more like a Liverpool than a Manchester band to me... that Merseybeat sound, all that blustering 'belief', it's like the Farm or Wah! or something.

I Am The Resurrection's outro and Fool's Gold then attempted to go beyond this, a re-imagining of Hendrixian freak-out and Can-funk for a sampladelic age; a version of My Bloody Valentine's progression from Isn't Anything to Loveless.

There is no re-imagining, there is just a weak-as-piss, cut-rate, carboot sale, clodhopping student's union attempt to copy those things. Someone please, please, please tell me how the Roses' boringly produced, could have come out in 1968 debut has ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with a 'sampladelic age'? Point is that Can and Hendrix ANTICIPATED the sampladelic age. The Roses went back to Can and Hendrix to bolster up rock AGAINST the sampladelic age. Isn't the reality that these entirely extrinsic and in the worse sense fantasmatic projections (about influence from Dance music) are just legitimations for Trad rock conservatives to listen to what they always secretly wanted to - SONGS, written with GUITARS, by REAL PEOPLE (i.e. BOYS!).

But whereas MBV succeeded through solipsism and studio-isolation, the Roses attempted to stake out a new future for rock and take the audience with them.

They took the audience with them alright, but not into any future. After the Roses, it would the past, forever...

If you need a scapegoat, blame the La's or Rocks Off-era Primal Scream for the current post-Oasis desert of the real old grey whistle test ring-tone karaoke.

They're all grotesque of course (the wheedling 1963 forever Merseybeat whine of There She Goes the worst record ever made [apart from everything by U2 obv]), but I don't see much difference between the Roses and Rocks Off era P Scream. It's just the Stones instead of the Byrds... why is that worse? Stone Roses need to be especially hammered because their influence was the biggest.
 

dHarry

Well-known member
twilight of the idols

k-punk said:
O come on, what is POST Joy Division about their sound? They might be post-U2, I'll grant you - the empty stadium bluster and preening egotism transformed into student union bragging and stroppiness.
Listen to Bernard Sumner trying to play a "real" guitar solo (struggling with his basic technical ineptitude and winning, just) on Shadowplay - Joy Division weren't all Atrocity Exhibition fractured noise-squall. This I believe led (unfortunately) to the U2 sound, and the Stone Roses combined these influences with their sixties influences.

k-punk said:
But rhythmic elegance? Dear god...
The Roses rhythm section was peerless, able to rock, glide and funk with ease, grace, power and poise. If you don't like that, fine, but they were able to sustain instrumental tension and interest in a way that no conventional band has... since Joy Division (in their case without ease, grace, or poise)? I can't quite believe you can't hear or feel the supple dexterity, the effortless peaks, plateaus and troughs of every track...

k-punk said:
Surely fidelity to the EVENT of 60s-80s rock would precisely not require fidelity to the FORM; on the contrary it would entail the total rejection of the latter.
Depends whether you think the event in question entails a break/rejection to allow a new event or steadfast belief in the original - you wrote a blog-post a while back in praise of Dido's "I will go down with this ship" single that depended on the latter. Dido, that formidable cutting edge of modernism...

k-punk said:
As for 'unwittingly paving the way' towards re-hashing... they themselves are that re-hashing.
You've already made this point clearly, repetition doesn't add anything to your argument. I disagree, despite more generally siding with your rigorous modernism I might add!

k-punk said:
I still recall the crushing sense of desolation when Simon made his case for them at the time... something along the lines of the fact that the very obviousness of their influences - the uber-canonic Byrds/ Pistols etc - is what made them interesting. I don't see any difference between the Stone Roses and Oasis except that Oasis are bit less weedy-sounding.
Do you really prefer your music all testosterone-and-lager-fuelled and spoiling for a fight? Maybe you should re-listen to the Streets second LP ;) I admired the Roses' pro-feminism and pro-socialist utopianism. On a sonic/production level their general vaguely lysergic lightness of touch was the real e-generation factor, not the blindingly obvious occasional four/four bass drum beat or funky segue.

k-punk said:
Yes, but it was that very belief that was so damaging, and so depressing, as against the exhilaration of Nirvana's total nihilation. It is their very belief that is culpable; because that belief has kept that retro-train on the rails for the last twenty years.
Don't agree - they were possibly the last of the "true" believers, and all the ensuing charlatans (including the Charlatans!) are the culpable ones. As I said, they were a kind of doomed flip-side of Nirvana, who ultimately could be seen as much more damaging in a pointlessly negative sense of amounting to an egotistical footnote: "rock is dead and I missed the funeral - aarrgghhh" Vs. the Roses' "rock is too revolutionary to be left to the rockists - We are the resurrection!" (spot the Zizek-on-St. Paul reference).

k-punk said:
There is no re-imagining, there is just a weak-as-piss, cut-rate, carboot sale, clodhopping student's union attempt to copy those things. Someone please, please, please tell me how the Roses' boringly produced, could have come out in 1968 debut has ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with a 'sampladelic age'? Point is that Can and Hendrix ANTICIPATED the sampladelic age. The Roses went back to Can and Hendrix to bolster up rock AGAINST the sampladelic age. Isn't the reality that these entirely extrinsic and in the worse sense fantasmatic projections (about influence from Dance music) are just legitimations for Trad rock conservatives to listen to what they always secretly wanted to - SONGS, written with GUITARS, by REAL PEOPLE (i.e. BOYS!).
Well, Fool's Gold is based on a sampled drum loop... having proved without doubt that they could be funky as hell on the outro to I Am The Resurrection. Obviously many the lysergic/e-cstatic elements of the debut were retro, but of course retro can be a cultural intervention by virtue of the fact that it is retro i.e. out of time. Mainstream rock was so ugly, banal, bereft in the late 80's - Bryan Adams, U2, Mike + the F*#king Mechanics, Texas, Simple Minds' ghastly late phase, REM sliding into stadium pomposity and pointlessness, the tail end of US hair metal... the prospect of the Roses competing with these for the hearts and minds of all-a de yout' was of far more relevence than their proximity to trad rock. For the record I have no vested interest in boys with guitars - in 1989 I was listening to Black Box (props to the 'ardcore precursors!), Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, MBV, Dinosaur Jr, the Young Gods, S'Express, AR Kane, Soul II Soul, Pet Shop Boys, Acid House...

k-punk said:
They took the audience with them alright, but not into any future. After the Roses, it would the past, forever...

They're all grotesque of course (the wheedling 1963 forever Merseybeat whine of There She Goes the worst record ever made [apart from everything by U2 obv]), but I don't see much difference between the Roses and Rocks Off era P Scream. It's just the Stones instead of the Byrds... why is that worse? Stone Roses need to be especially hammered because their influence was the biggest.
It's worse not because the Byrds trump the Stones, but because the Roses trounced the Scream in terms of what they were able to do with their influences - the Scream then were a ghastly parody, an embarassing karaoke, of the Stones, while the Roses were magnificent in their way. And they'll survive your hammering. A pity they succumbed to Squire's delusions of Jimmy Page grandeur on their second - that was the real step backwards, insofar as it didn't manage to rise sufficiently above the influences.
 
The children have the whooping cough,... pop! Goes the weasel.

..... this Virus thing that's been going around since the mid to end 90's has been getting on my nerves lately. I mean what can a virus do to popular consciousness but spawn more chaos. I sort of liked the idea initially until I found out that it has nothing to add to what we have already. I believe 'popular music' and 'serious music' can and should/must mix. The idea that Depeche Mode, The Smiths or Japan, Human League, Nirvana, The Jam etc be confined to the corridors of "serious music' would have been ..... well......boring.
edit:removed last sentence upon later reflection.
 
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