FOOTNOTES to Introduction : THE RE DECADE
/ THE RETROSCAPE
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ running out of past?
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A
sign of Retro's cultural pervasiveness is the fact that the very word has become unhinged from the domain of
entertainment/design/fashion and drifted loose as a freefloating buzzword, used
to describe anything old-fashioned or out-of-time.People talk about "retro politics."
When I interviewed Devo's Gerald V. Casale at the height of the Iraq War, he
railed against President George W. Bush as "stupid and mean and grotesque
and retro".In 2008, discussing the
credit crisis and toxic mortgage debt, political blogger Andrew Sullivan used
the word to savagely mock the irresponsibility of bankers and Wall Street
financiers:"the idea that people
should live within their means is such a retro position, isn't it?"
The word "retro" has also become a
kind of tic of historical condescension, its use serving to at once acknowledge
and reinforce the transience of all things (beliefs, passions, habits, values)
within the hyper-accelerated consumerdrome that is late capitalism.
An example:
I'm watching an episode
of Dirt, a short lived TV drama set in the glitzy-sleazy Los Angeles of movie
starlets and gossip columnists (like the character played by the show's star
Courtney Cox,the editor of a
muck-raking tabloid).At a party, one
movie starlet offers a pill to her friend, who quips, with a cynical smirk,
"Ecstasy? Retro!"Ashudder-sigh went through through me hearing the pairing of the two words, "Ecstasy" and
"Retro". It was the inverse of the memory-rush that hearing a classic
techno anthem can induce. A drug that once
seemed to herald the brightest of futures, wasconsigned to an era (theNineties) as
laughably as kaftans and hippie beads had been a decade after Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love. See also the episode of "Peep Show" where they go to a safari park at Mark's suggestion, which seems embarrassing lame and old-hat to one of the characters, until the nice girl says, "it's cool -- it's retro"
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commemorative logic / anniversary and retrospective issues of magazines
this has infected even the world of metal!
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retro everything / retro sweets
as seen at Afflecks Palace, Manchester
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It's
as though the sheer richness of pop’s first three decades has made it too tempting
to be derivative. The result is a kind of reverse vampirism: young bands
drawing nourishment from ancient blood.Hence that peculiar "undead" aura that you get off a lot of
notionally contemporary music, what I call “anechronosis”.A composite of "anachronism" and
"necrosis" (the premature death of living tissue), this ungainly
coinage refers to the vibe given off by music (Goldfrapp, the White
Stripes/Kills/Dead Weather, most British indie bands) that seems neither fully
modern nor from a particular historical period. Instead it inhabits a kind of
ersatz limbo.The anechronotic
sensation is queasy but too sterile to be uncanny or spectral in any kind of
genuinely provocative way.Not unlike
looking at a Jeff Koons.Or a
reproduction antique.
The simplest expression of anachronesis is Lenny Kravitz, a prime example of music in this limbo
where it's referring back to the past but it's not there, and [it's] not in the
present, either.
There are so many things like that today, like Steve
Martin pointlessly remaking Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther.
It's a really unpleasant sensation. Things under the sway of anachronesis are
just nothing. You might as well be dead.
Embarking on Retromania, I feel two opposed impulses.
I want to defamiliarise retro, show how what has come to seem natural and
normal, "just the way things are", is really a historically novel
state of affairs. I don't remember retro and nostalgia being anything like as
widespread or pronounced a phenomenon when I was in my late teens and first
getting into music, back at the end of the Seventies. And my sense is that
retro was even more marginal in the 1960s, to the point of barely
existing.
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ironically, just as pop/rock was entering into its high phase of self-conscious modernism (the post-Sgt Pepper progressive moment) at the end of the Sixties, modernist art was in the throes of swan-song, which in the Seventies would take the form of pluralism and the early stirrings of postmodernism
This
could mean that pop was (or still remains?) modernism's last, best hope. Or that pop
just went through its own life cycle of modernist innovation followed by
postmodern referentiality and citational references to its own past -- just starting out on that cycle much later than the art world. Or, it could
equally mean that high art distinctions can't be applied to mass culture; that
pop cheerfully rubbishes them, by managing to be modernist and postmodernist
simultaneously.Each of these
conclusions has different implications for an appraisal of retro.
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The Retroscape
the seeds of the retroscape idea come from this blogpost I did back in 2006, i think. It was titled A Past Gone Mad, after the Fall song, and became a shortlived series (very shortlived - there might only have been two, maybe, three A Past Gone Mad's. Made up for it, though, by writing a 400 page, 140 thousand word book, with another 100 thousand words of footnotes!). This is the first post in the 'series':
Perusing
the gig and tour ads at the back of Uncut is a
dizzy-makingly anachronic experience. You get the most incongruous
juxtapositions and unseemly adjacencies. Why, just on p. 173, divided into
quarter-page ads, you'll find New Model Army, Seth Lakeman (whoever the fuck he
might be), and Dreadzone rubbing shoulders with Bob Dylan. (Who you might have
thought could afford a whole page of his own, i mean, Jesus, he just had a documentary
on him that was some kind of world cultural event!!!). It seems like
everybody's still treading the boards again: The Levellers, the Pogues (minus
Shane), the Proclaimers, Was (Not) Was, Swing Out fucking Sister, Lee Scratch
Perry, Jethro Tull. Durutti Column gets sandwiched in a bottom-of-page
threesome with Kate & Anna McGarrigle and Eliza Carthy (well, foursome I
suppose)! Sinead O' Connor with Sly & Robbie, and I don't mean ads next to
each other, they're performing together, presumably they're her backing band!
Now, I don't begrudge Roy Harper his annual tour, though, some fifteen
decent-sized venues across the UK. Don't begrude it one bit, and in fact if I
lived in Britain I'd pay to see the man, never have had that pleasure. Hey
Woebot, hey K-punk, you surely know, right, that Jeff Wayne is restaging your
much-loved War of the Worlds across the
country, April next year, with extra shows in response to public demand, later
that summer? Delightful-sounding venues like the Glasgow Clyde Auditorium and
the Bournemouth BIC, where'll he be conducting the Black Smoke Band and the 48
piece ULLAdubULLA Strings., Special guest Justin Hayward and Richard Burton in
ghost form.
But all generations are catered for in this long night of the living dead. P. 170
has an almost conceptual unity, baggy-tastic and scally-delic, with Ian Brown
in the upper right corner, Happy Mondays (plus support The Farm!) in the lower
left, and Scousters The Coral and Echo & the Bunnymen squaring off in the
middle. And bloody hell, directly opposite, a group called The Hacienda
Brothers! (And I just learned that there's going to be a recreation of the Hac in all its
pills'n'thrills'n'bellyaching glory, promoted by none other than Tony Wilson's
young son Oliver. I would go if I lived in England, having never caught the Hac
in its rave-on prime, but gone a little too early when it was still a little
too indie). But I guess all this shouldn't be surprising, as it's just the
live-music corollary of the retro-reissue explosion, an over-population of
music with bands dying at too slow a rate c.f. the birth rate, and worse, many
of them resurrecting. I suppose you can't blame 'em for having a second go, or
trying to eke out a living; what else are they supposed to do? But it all
contributes to what I increasingly feel is a key issue of our pop time, namely
the erosion of a sense of time, of forward temporal propulsion.
A recreation of the Hacienda at the Victoria and Albert Museum
