>'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
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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.
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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?