Hold on, hold on, children / your parents are leaving

Simon Reynolds knows a lot about the his­tory of rock, pop, soul and all forms of pop­u­lar music, as well as the inter­est­ing bits from the edges. He, over the years, has recited this per­fectly — in per­fectly formed books that I mostly — with reser­va­tions as below — always enjoy read­ing. And, too, online, where his blog is a must-read. His knowl­edge is detailed, arguably ency­clopaedic in scope. I’ve always had a lot of space for his words and the jour­ney through places I know fairly well that those words often take you to.

Over the past few nights I’ve addi­tively read Simon Reynolds’ new book, Retro­ma­nia, Pop Cultures’s Addic­tion to Its Own Past.

That said, despite my lik­ing for his works over the past decades, I wasn’t going to.

The cen­tral premise of the book — that pop­u­lar music has become so involved in its own past that it’s now going around in what Reynolds describes in the book as ever faster [and, by impli­ca­tion, destruc­tive] cir­cles; that it has lost track of a future and seems over­whelmed by its mul­ti­ple and var­ied obses­sions with rock’n’roll (and soul and elec­tron­ica — insert what­ever genre you want)‘s glo­ri­ous, and often inglo­ri­ous his­tory — seems to me in mid-2011 to be vaguely ridiculous.

Mostly, he says, music has eaten itself:

It could be like in jazz, where young play­ers come for­ward who do good stuff, but it’s not going any­where and it doesn’t have any con­nec­tion to the zeit­geist. But it’s not just rock that’s ail­ing; it’s everything—including elec­tronic music now.¹

That said, Reynolds writes well and I wanted to see where he took the argu­ment, so I found myself unable to move the pointer away from the one-click.

Even hav­ing done that, I found myself reluc­tant to leap in. It sat on the hard-drive for ages whilst I read two other books. I though about delet­ing it, but knew I wouldn’t. A few days back, hav­ing fin­ished a fas­ci­nat­ing but pon­der­ous his­tory of the British Empire, I needed some­thing like this. It was time.

I was drawn in — so much so, that I was on seat’s edge, read­ing this on kin­dle, wait­ing intently for the killer hypoth­e­sis that would draw together the pages — upon mul­ti­ple pages — where he care­fully doc­u­ments the many revival­ist sects, tribes, sub-movements, the year 1965 — where, if I get his point, the begin­ning of the endgame began, albeit in the fash­ion world, fas­ci­nat­ing the­o­ries and essays on future/past and more — before round­ing, in the final sec­tions, on tech­nol­ogy: the iPod, blogs, mp3 and the abun­dance of the dig­i­tal mar­ket­place, both legit and oth­er­wise. It’s a mighty sweep and gath­ers large amounts of fas­ci­nat­ing data, sto­ries and more, many of which make intrigu­ing and engross­ing read­ing. I loved the tales of the con­cert / event re-creationists — the folk who recre­ated Bowie’s final July 1973 Ziggy show in 1998 gave the show a red-tinge to match the fil­ters used on the famous D.A. Pen­nebaker film,  so that those who were actu­ally there in ’73 would not feel cheated by their now rearranged, and DVD-distorted mem­o­ries of the event.

And there is the brief, rather funny, look at the most non-collectable records ever — in the USA it’s the likes of Alan Par­sons Project, a (non)band so ugly that even decades on they have acquired absolutely no retro, cul­tural or musi­cal value. Or Bob Seger. In the UK it’s Ter­ence Trent D’Arby. In New Zealand, sadly, it’s tail end Split Enz — the last cou­ple of albums, and those form­less 90s albums by for­got­ten major label acts like World Gone Wild. These are the records that never leave the cheapie bins no mat­ter how many years pass.

All that is won­der­ful read­ing, but I realised as I turned the last (dig­i­tal) page — the counter said 73% so I was still highly expec­tant of that killer blow but the bal­ance was index and notes — that I was to be left dry. I’d been fed a litany of quite glo­ri­ous and cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ries but I was expected to make the case myself by pulling all those together. And I couldn’t. I wasn’t even offered a vaguely appeal­ing batch of straw­men. Instead, I was left with the pot­ted introduction:

This is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to play­ing and an over­priced ticket to the track-by-track restag­ing of the Pix­ies or Pave­ment album you played to death in your first year at university.

and a bunch of sub­jec­tively hand­picked sto­ries that were sup­posed to illus­trate exactly why that was the case, but failed to do so when the niches and rail­ing against tech­nol­ogy were left to their own devices to solid­ify into a coher­ent case with­out Reynolds draw­ing the con­verg­ing lines he clearly sees in his head. And that was it. I was frus­trated. Worse. Gutted.

Con­trary to expec­ta­tions, I was left feel­ing that Reynolds has con­structed his own exer­cise in nos­tal­gia, in retro­ma­nia for the pas­sion he’s now los­ing for a core part of his life to date. He seems to flur­ry­ing around try­ing to work out why this is, and instead of deal­ing with the obvi­ous, has instead drawn a cir­cle around a series of fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tural mark­ers — beau­ti­fully put and won­der­fully detailed, sure, as a way of deal­ing with this. At the end, I sat back and all I can see was a rather unnec­es­sar­ily sad doc­u­ment, albeit one that will find some res­o­nance with many older read­ers and scribes, as indeed it already has. In fact, Reynolds asks:

How many records released in 2011 will be as worth­while an acqui­si­tion for a neo­phyte lis­tener as Rub­ber Soul, Astral Weeks, Closer, Hat­ful of Hollow?

Prob­a­bly quite a few — just not for the author it appears, who, while feign­ing opti­mism towards the end — well, he’d have to, wouldn’t he — seems stuck in a slightly cur­mud­geonly and unlinked sweep against a long list of evils and por­tents of cul­tural dis­as­ter which he uses to try and explain his dis­il­lu­sion­ment. I really don’t want to state the obvi­ous, and Reynolds tries to counter it, but those two inevitable words, gen­er­a­tion gap, are some­thing we all have to deal with: Reynolds just has the elo­quent means to turn his con­fu­sion into 449 quite read­able pages (in the printed version).

Most of us just go to the pub and sing the old songs. Or go and see The Buz­zcocks one more time.

I really enjoyed the writer’s book, Rip it Up and Start Again: Post­punk 1978–1984 — it doc­u­mented exhaus­tively a time that mat­ters to me, but like his ear­lier book on dance cul­ture, another era I was intensely involved with and have an emo­tional tie to, it seemed some­how divorced from the music. It was words — good words. It cov­ered the ground, listed the acts, but failed to con­vey much of the pas­sion. It was oddly blood­less. And yet, now that we have the dig­i­tal means to add the miss­ing soul to the sto­ries and progress doc­u­mented in those books (RIU was printed a year or two before YouTube arrived) he finds rea­son to rail against its neg­a­tive impact.

Actu­ally, I’m not sure music of any kind really works in a museum, a place of hush and decorum.

Isn’t that exactly what the self-anointed role of so many music crit­ics is — Reynolds included? As a teen, I used to look at the pages of lists printed in mag­a­zines like Melody Maker and NME: things like the ‘100 Great­est Sin­gles of All Time’; ‘The 100 Great­est Albums of All Time’ (yes, really, they were that ridicu­lously defin­i­tive) com­piled and anno­tated by rev­er­en­tial scribes as doc­u­ments from above. I wanted — I needed — those records, many, if not most of which I couldn’t get. That obscu­rity was part of the rea­son they were so desir­able. Sadly, many let me down when I did hear them: Spirit’s 12 Dreams of Dr. Sar­don­icus any­one? ²

End­less fawn­ing over The Beach Boys, Sun, The Vel­vets and Motown filled acres of print. It’s hard to argue that Rip it Up and Start Again doesn’t have some­thing of the air of a museum cat­a­logue about it. You really can’t have it both ways.

And that some­how leads me to another prob­lem with the book.

Reynolds:

But then again, isn’t there some­thing pro­foundly wrong about the fact that so much of the great­est music made dur­ing the last decade sounds like it could have been made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier?

It may to you, Simon, how­ever I’m writ­ing this with an iTunes playlist I call Early 2011 play­ing ran­domly (a sin appar­ently — and yes I do tend to lis­ten to songs all the way through: it pro­vides the joy of dis­cov­ery that Reynolds claims we have lost). Its 132 tracks are ones I’ve loved this year — all new tracks (I have another playlist for reis­sues) — and it’s fuck­ing fab­u­lous. It’s fresh, chal­leng­ing and quite deli­cious. Some of the songs stun — I stop and replay. It’s full of ghosts from the vast musi­cal past, but those ghosts are just that. The influ­ences, the bor­row­ings, the ghosts, are not pro­duc­ing music that sounds like it could have been ‘made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier’.

Bor­row­ing — even quite slav­ishly — from the past, or for that mat­ter, from a geo­graphic else­where, almost always pro­duces sub­tle and re-defining change. Reynolds points to The Flam­ing Groovies as a slav­ishly retro band in the 1970s. They copied The Bea­t­les. Not just the music, but the clothes, the hair and the graph­ics. Did they sound like The Bea­t­les? No. They the sounded like a band try­ing to sound like The Bea­t­les and their record­ings opened the door to an inter­est­ing amal­gam of Beatle-ish melodic gui­tar pop that sat on the edge of punk, called power-pop ³. That mutated once again in the 1980s, and found res­o­nance amongst many of the early NZ post punk bands. Some took power pop and added ska rhythms.

I could point to NZ hip-hop too: it copied West Coast US rap quite ruth­lessly in the early days but ended up sound­ing absolutely noth­ing like it, despite the detrac­tors who were both accus­ing the acts of being weighed down by imi­ta­tion and clearly not lis­ten­ing whilst doing so.

We bor­row, we adapt, we steal, we pla­gia­rise, we look back­wards whilst cre­at­ing the for­ward, and the play-list I’m lis­ten­ing to right now has all of that. Punk, post punk, hip hop, The Bea­t­les, house and elec­tron­ica — the touch­stones so beloved by Reynolds, and touted as miss­ing in action now, all had all of those things. They all stole, often quite bla­tantly. There may be no all-pervasive record­ing artist dom­i­nat­ing and chang­ing the planet, but, really, there hasn’t been since The Bea­t­les. Even Michael Jack­son, for all his mil­lions of sales, didn’t change the musi­cal direc­tion of the planet as much as few guys in the Bronx cut­ting up records. Or the kids in urban UK who have changed the face of record pro­duc­tion for­ever with the more inter­est­ing end of dub­step.

It strikes me that Retro­ma­nia is more about a loss of per­sonal faith in new music by the writer, rather than a larger malaise. Through it comes a writer who no longer wants to get it. And nei­ther should he feel the need to — there is no oblig­a­tion to always keep up, to be end­lessly enthralled by the new, to have to sit on the for­ward edge.  How­ever, to assail that loss of faith with an over­rid­ing ‘the good times are gone’ extended essay makes no sense to me. And that, in the end, is what I got from Retromania.

Really, who cares if bands reform to play their com­plete albums as a con­cert piece? Cer­tainly not the kids who mostly haven’t an idea who or what a Joy Divi­sion album or Pet Sounds is, regard­less of how much we elderly left­overs would like to roman­ti­cise that they do. And if they do, what is the harm of draw­ing from that legacy?

Pop ought to be all about the present tense, surely? says Reynolds. I agree. How­ever, my daugh­ter wears an Aladdin Sane T-shirt. She’s six­teen and wants to make music (and movies). David Bowie will likely impact on her present tense when she cre­ates those things, but he won’t define it — that will be done by her own world.

Tagged with: music • new music • technology