My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

Billington, James H., “Culture, Media, Memory” in Sewanee Review, Spring 2001, Vol. 109, Issue 2.

Earth to Retromania.

(via imageobjecttext)

It’s a good quote, and it was my initial reaction to consider it in light of Retromania, too. But I don’t think Reynolds has a problem with influence or having a sense of history. He considers himself a modernist, after all, and it’s impossible to contemplate modernism without Stravinsky’s recontextualization of the past (or Kandinsky’s or Eliot’s or H.D.’s or Joyce’s or …). The difference, as I suspect Reynolds sees it, is that Stravinsky, Kandinsky, etc. used the old to create new forms, while today’s obsession with the past (and, more specifically and importantly, the recent past) manifests more often in simply re-experiencing it via recording or recreating it with a mind toward accuracy (or, worse, “authenticity”!) instead of innovation.

Whether you agree with Reynolds on the overall goodness or badness of our current predicament has everything to do with whether you think rock/pop music is intrinsically modernist-minded and has worth largely in its forward momentum, or if you think it can also function as a sort of folk music in which closely adhering to tradition can be a virtue.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Myths And Depths, Part 4

For good reason, I haven’t been keeping up with Internet Things lately, but I didn’t want to let this Simon Reynolds-conducted interview with Greil Marcus slip away without comment. The above quote is from Reynolds, and I’m so glad he brought up Dettmar’s  excellent book (which he includes in the references for Retromania, but oddly never mentions, at least in the published version). I’d have to think that Reynolds, being aware of Dettmar’s argument, would have been fairly self-conscious about writing what’s arguably a “rock is dead” book. He covers himself fairly well in the above quote, but Marcus’ slightly more optimistic response is even better:

I suppose I’m more interested in music now as a field of creativity, rather than as a version of history. But if it remains a field of creativity, then you have no idea what’s going to come of any given creation and how far it might travel. I stopped using the term ‘rock’n’roll’ around the time I wrote that Esquire piece [”Notes on the Life and Deathand Incandescent Banality of Rock ‘n’ Roll”]. I write about rock’n’roll in that piece as something that provokes feelings of hatred and loathing in me as much as anything else. That Poison video [“Every Rose Has Its Thorn”], which just drove me nuts: I couldn’t get it out of my head. There was a lot of anger and disgust there. So I just started calling it pop music, because that’s a completely meaningless term: there’s no metaphor there, it has no poetry to it, you might as well say ‘shoelaces’ or something… .

This is something, with that Poison video, that ought to be killed. And if you have to kill the whole form to get rid of insults like that, maybe this is what you have to do. But then I talk in the piece about hearing ‘Out in the Cold’ by Tom Petty on the radio and not giving a shit about any of those questions, because it sounds so great, so full of desire and happiness and energy. And then finding my way into ‘Mind Playing Tricks On Me,’ which wasn’t a song that explained itself to me right away; it was as confusing to me as it was to the singer who’s describing his own delusions.

I like the three possibilities here: sure, rock (or, perhaps, the broader-ranging “pop”) may seem dead or deserving of death when only the most banal aspects of its history* are reflected in its present (or, well, 1992); but it’s still alive because a Tom Petty song, just as derivative in its own way as Poison’s (or anything in Reynolds’ book), can be a source of “desire and happiness and energy”; and it’s also still alive because there remain individual moments of modernist disruption in the form** even during the kind of stagnation that Reynolds observes in Retromania.

* Subjective, naturally, but who hasn’t felt what Marcus does for Poison for some artist or another?

** Again, the essay under discussion is from ‘92, but if you switch out “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” for “Bad Romance” (mentioned later in the interview), it’s pretty clear that Marcus still thinks this holds true. And I’m not sure Reynolds exactly disagrees, given the apparent joy he finds in newer artists as disparate as Flying Lotus and Vampire Weekend; he’s just more glass half-empty about it.

Greil Marcus on the early days of rock criticism, in the first installment of an enormous, four-part interview by Simon Reynolds at the Los Angeles Review of Books, of which I plan to read every word. Maybe twice. (via judyxberman)

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The first installment of this was quite enjoyable and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect (who knew Greil Marcus’ biological dad was killed in a naval incident that inspired The Caine Mutiny?).

It’s very much an interview and not a discussion/debate, but I do hope Reynolds brings up his own current preoccupation with retro in the later installments. Marcus’ major works of music writing in the past decade have been rooted in the mythology of the 60s (unusually so, even for Marcus), and I’m not sure if this is more manifestation of or reaction to Reynolds’ “retromania.” Okay, it’s probably neither, but I’d love to hear them discuss it.

FWIW, I read Marcus’ book of essays on The Doors recently. It was probably the first time I’ve ever found his enthusiasm for a subject inadequate to keep me engaged with his line of thinking at least for the length of a short piece. I’m not even a Doors-hater, but there was a distinct “you had to be there” vibe to a lot of these.

(via semipoplife)

I finally got around to writing a long-form, non-review piece for PopMatters. I used Springsteen’s SXSW keynote as a jumping-off point, but it goes all over the place from there. Artists covered include… well, check the tags.

I’m going to stop writing now before I undermine this promotion with self-deprecation, as is my habit. But check it out!

rubyshimmer:

apoplecticskeptic:

“People like to make up genre names every once in a while. The people who make dubstep are exactly the same people who were making drum and bass — it’s just that they don’t want to call it drum and bass anymore, or jungle, the American word for drum and bass. Genre is a tyranny in music and it’s usually imposed from without.”

—

Stephin Merritt on Songwriting, Sondheim, & Katy Perry - Music - BlackBook

Funny that it’s Stephin Merritt of all people saying something very accurate about “dubstep,” i.e., that it’s essentially the same genre of electronic music that was big in the 90s with a fancy new name, whether it’s Skrillex or James Blake or Burial. And that’s great! It’s not an insult! It’s the need for rebranding that is silly, not the music itself, or its lineage.

(via perpetua)

While I’m far too old to keep up with the infinite micro-genres in electronic music, I’ve always thought it was sort of a conceit to not acknowledge the differences.  I think electronic music, more than any other form, is the most subject to evolution because it is the most reliant on technology.  I can’t think of any other genres in which the music being made today couldn’t possibly have been made a decade ago, because the technology didn’t exist to make it.

Obviously, this isn’t true of all electronic music, or even all dubstep, but it does cover a swath of the electronic genre.  Yes, the people making dubstep are probably same kind of people that were making drum and bass, but I don’t think it’s accurate to call it the same music.

(via themattsmith)

What Matt said.

I don’t think jungle is an american word for drum and bass. I’ve only heard british use that term and I thought it referred to another style of music.  Americans just call drum and bass, drum and bass.

Yeah, I don’t think the distinction is simply American terminology vs. British terminology.

My (possibly entirely ill-informed) understanding is that drum and bass was largely jungle minus the heavy reliance on the “Amen” break.  I’ll admit reading through Simon Reynolds’s various writings on the evolution of UK dance styles tends to leave my head spinning, since my actual exposure to UK dance music is limited, but he definitely sees distinctions between all of them, be it in the samples used, emphasis on vocals, or other factors.  For instance (bolding mine):

If Jungle really did stem from House, as Navigator claimed, the true continuity between the two genres is not rhythmic or textural: it’s the use of vocals (almost always absent in Techno). At a rough guesstimate, maybe two thirds of Hardcore/Jungle anthems between 1991–94 relied on sampled diva vocals as primary hooks. Producers lifted them from old House or R&B classics, or from CDs packed with a capellas recorded specifically for sampling. While there’s no diva refrain equivalent to the ubiquitous, endlessly revisited ‘Amen’ break, certain classic vocal phrases were reworked time and again, with producers using similar techniques to breakbeat manipulation: acceleration, pitchshifting, timestretching, looping, filtering, and so forth.

When techstep achieved dominance in 1996, vocal samples began to disappear from drum ’n’ bass.

That said, when I guest lecture on sampling and copyright law, I do tend to draw a fairly direct line from the “Amen” break’s importance in Jungle to the types of beats used in dubstep, since the students (mostly 18-20 year olds) are slightly more up on their Skrillex than their Shy FX.  But influence and shared qualities don’t suggest outright synonymy.  Genres tend to be as narrow or as wide as you want them to be, anyway.  The Magnetic Fields and deadmau5 are both essentially “pop music,” right?

retromania: a roundtable with ann powers, carl wilson, and daphne carr - bookforum.com / miscellany

This is a must-read for anyone still processing Retromania (yeah, I know). Daphne Carr comes up with perhaps the best overall response in “I think the argument is too messy and contradictory [to frame future conversations or create a large turn in understanding the zeitgeist], which is, in some ways, why it has served as a perfect launchpad for a many different kinds of think pieces in the book’s press cycle.” 

But what (internally inconsistent) mini-arguments they are!

In the quote up top, Carl Wilson nails one of the things that drove me nuts throughout—the fact that Reynolds, despite having gone through periods in which he was regularly citing Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard, etc. (check out Blissed Out and the earlier essays in Totally Wired), leans so exclusively on Fredric Jameson when it comes to what “modern” and “postmodern” mean. 

He’s uncharacteristically quick to dismiss a lot of acts in this book on the grounds that their reuse of ideas is entirely hollow (Jameson’s notion of “pastiche”), which rings a little false to me for a few reasons. Here are three:

#1 is the point that Wilson makes:  all art comes from old art—we’re just struggling with reconciling this concept to an attractive leftover from the Romantic era (and maintained somewhat in the modernist era), the author genius. 

#2 is that, in developing this postmodern awareness of the borrowed nature of ideas, it doesn’t follow that artists will simply give up and imitate.  When debates were regularly being had in the humanities over postmodernism (somewhat passe now, for whatever reason), Linda Hutcheon articulated a more positive view of postmodern reuse, basically, that truly postmodern use has a sense of historicity and critiques itself (and the reused elements) as it borrows. Naturally, determining which art is historically self-aware is a subjective act and, even from an individual standpoint, probably couldn’t be applied across the board. For instance, I detect self-aware humor in Will Sheff’s decision to make Okkervil River’s “Singer-Songwriter” an early Dylan soundalike (and arguably some in Dan Bejar’s recent turn to Avalon-era Roxy Music); I don’t hear the same level of irony in Interpol sounding an awful lot like Joy Division (I’d use a more recent example, but this one’s more concrete than, say, Toro Y Moi or Washed Out sounding like A Random 80s Synth Band).  But…

#3  There’s also something to be said for developing one’s skills and expressive abilities as a musician working within a genre.  There’s safety in genres, it seems.  That is, we allow that many acoustic folky singer-songwriters work within fairly strict, self-imposed parameters under the assumption that they’re working in a tradition (interesting note—the great, but not particularly innovative, singer-songwriter John Darnielle gets a thanks in Retromania). Who’s to say that Joy Division-inspired post-punk isn’t a genre unto itself worth treating as a tradition?  The self-imposed rules within these sorts of micro-genres are hypothetically no more restrictive than those governing acoustic folkies, who largely escape scrutiny when it comes to sonic innovation. 

Simon Reynolds - Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (p. 122)

I watched some of F8 today, and I can’t help but understand Facebook’s further integration of Spotify in light of Reynolds’ quote above.  There’s been plenty of debate on whether the availability of music online inevitably leads to passive listening, but what I’m most interested in here is the role of music in socialization (and I suppose the role of social connections in the transmission of music). 

Zuckerberg and his associates are being super sneaky here (and who saw that coming?). Throughout the presentation, they emphasized how music fans on Facebook will be able to “share” music with their friends as if doing so were an utter novelty.  It came off like a deliberate response to critiques, like Reynolds’, that note the increasingly private nature of music listening.  “Don’t worry,” goes the message.  “You are engaging in Social Behavior!  Finding and listening to music doesn’t have to be so lonely anymore!”

This is, of course, illusory.  Noticing that your friend is listening to a song and simply clicking the link is quite possibly the least social way of experiencing music.  It’s certainly less social than talking with your friends about that music, but, oddly, it’s even less social than, say, reading a music review or recommendation online or possibly even browsing the stacks at a store (where you might at least glean some context for an album via its packaging or placement, or by talking with a clerk or fellow customer).  It’s utter decontextualization.  For instance, it occurred to me immediately that I don’t necessarily like everything I listen to; I may be hearing it for the first time.  Furthermore, there are artists that I’d recommend unconditionally to some friends that I wouldn’t dream of recommending to others. 

As with most changes to Facebook, there will undoubtedly be ways of opting out (the most obvious simply being to not integrate Spotify in the first place, I suppose).  But I’m left wondering how many people are actually going to fall for this “real-time serendipity”-as-social interaction line. 

How do you sell an enigma? In the 1990s, American rave was a big but scattered subculture. Packaging its fleeting tunes and site-specific good times for mainstream consumption would take some doing. When rock and hip-hop began show signs of weakness mid-decade, a handful of true believers, funded by major-label money, would make their move.

Matos’ article helps explain an odd thing I noticed while reading Simon Reynolds’ Retromania (a preoccupation that continues to sneak its way into just about every conversation I have about pop culture these days). 

One of Reynolds’ main arguments is that the pop music of the last decade has lacked a specific sort of linear, forward momentum.  It’s not that there have been no forward-thinking artists, but that there have been no movements comparable to what he saw in punk, post-punk, hip-hop, and rave (which he uses generally to encapsulate all of the related electronic-based subgenres from house to jungle to IDM, etc.). 

This last one gave me a fair bit of pause, because, while these various electronic subgenres undeniably constituted forward musical momentum, of sorts, it’s a momentum that I have a hard time wrapping my head around.  This is despite the fact that rave’s heyday occurred when I was exactly the right age to have been paying attention. 

The thing is - I wasn’t paying attention. 

During this time, I was an undergrad at a small midwestern state school, not too keen on dancing, still finding my way around (and occasionally playing) guitar-based indie rock.  As such, I wasn’t inclined to take a road trip to the nearest city in search of a rave, nor did I have friends who would have known where to find one if we’d wanted to!  Rave seemed more subcultural to me than musical, and I have to admit it still does.  Even Reynolds, in his early writing on this music (some of which is collected in Bring the Noise; I haven’t read Energy Flash, his book-length treatment of the topic), emphasizes characteristics of the various subgenres over characteristics of individual artists, timbres and beats over song structure (he admits going through an “anti-song” period), and, perhaps most importantly, how this music makes one feel while listening to it as a continuous wash in a proper rave setting. 

Not to devalue his estimation of rave as a major cultural force and as an important musical influence as a whole, I’m still hung up on the details of it being grouped with the other major musical movements he cites. 

• Context.  Certainly, all musical experience is defined somewhat by the context in which it’s heard.  But punk, post-punk, and hip-hop are actually pretty flexible.  You can listen to them at home, on headphones, in a bar, at a show, etc., and not lose much.  As mentioned above, even while he was writing in the moment—at the peak of rave culture—it seems that Reynolds acknowledges the rave as the single ideal place to listen to much of this music (and it should be noted that Reynolds, while from the UK, lived in the less rave-friendly US starting in the 90s - but he returned to England to experience the rave phenomenon firsthand).  Not across the board, naturally, but much of this music is specifically for dancing; you’d have a tougher time characterizing most hip-hop, punk, and post-punk as being for one thing in particular.
• Songs.  While songs (or proper song form) may have, at one point, been a sticking point for Reynolds, they’re still sort of what grants popular music its popular status, as mentioned in Matos’ article (and I do acknowledge that this may be a specifically American hangup):

“None of them between ‘em had a damn song,” says Charnas. “How could Rick forget that? How could he forget that? Even hip-hop at its hardest hardcore was producing three, four-minute pop songs. It didn’t matter if the group was N.W.A. or Fresh Prince. The song structures were there. And I wondered how you could claim [it was the new hip-hop] if rave wasn’t producing that.”

• Artists. As demonstrated in the article, most Americans only came around on electronic music after it had been granted some faces, like the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Fatboy Slim.  This was never an issue in hip-hop, punk, and post-punk, because the development of those movements has generally been driven by individuals—the greatest artists in those genres defined and expanded the stylistic parameters of the genres and were acknowledged as doing so on an individual basis.  This is particularly the case with Reynolds’ much-beloved post-punk, which owes its basic formlessness to sheer diversity of intent and approach (compare Devo to Joy Division, Chrome to the Slits, etc.).  Which makes you wonder if the U.S.’s initial aversion to the faceless rave subculture owes something to our discomfort with socialism, but I digress…

So what does this all mean for an American like me who missed the boat on rave, aside from its incarnation as individual-driven, Americanized “electronica” (which, to be honest, just felt like another 90s subgenre, with no more of a central ethos or forward momentum than, say, Britpop or American lo-fi rock)? 

Most significantly, it makes me less inclined to empathize with Reynolds’ dismay at the current lack of linear, “modernist” propulsion in any one direction.  From his estimation, at least, I’ve already lived through one of those periods as an adult and simply missed it! 

At the time, I was already cherry-picking individual artists from the various genres and sub-genres of the moment.  It didn’t trouble me then that there wasn’t exactly a massive contemporary movement in which I could wrap up Fugazi, Bjork, or even Pearl Jam (to me at the time, “grunge” seemed inadequate as a movement, even as it yielded a number of artists I quite liked).  And it doesn’t really bother me now that I need to seek out innovative artists rather than innovative movements.  Maybe this, too, is an American thing?

(Source: k8inorbit)

We all long to escape our own subjectivity. That’s what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves connected with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing. But what the televised bombardment of violent events did to me was completely different. I didn’t overcome my subjectivity, rather, my person got stretched to include the whole world, stretched to a breaking point. I became pervious, bruised, and annihilated. That’s what it feels like, this debilitating emotional engagement—annihilation, not affirmation.

Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia: A Novel (p. 116)

It was unplanned, but probably inevitable that I’d find myself simultaneously reading two books preoccupied with pop music and memory.  In approach, Dana Spiotta’s novel Stone Arabia and Simon Reynolds’s cultural critique Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (which I’ll undoubtedly be discussing in many posts to come, so I’ll cover it here only briefly) couldn’t be more different, but the similarities in concern are unmistakeable: Spiotta and Reynolds both force us to consider what’s worth forgetting in the age of the web. 

Just a plug for the excellent music blog, Burn and Shine, where site owner Maximum Jack is in the process of posting an amazing, multi-playlist compilation, Power Pop Explosion! 1980-1983.  It’s the sequel to an earlier, equally amazing multi-playlist compilation, The Birth of Power Pop: The 1970s. 

If 70s and 80s power pop isn’t your thing, his five-volume Rebellious Jukebox series is a thematically-grouped overview of 70s and 80s post-punk that’s hard to beat; a perfect companion to Simon Reynolds’ books on the subject, Rip It Up and Start Again and Totally Wired. 

If it wasn’t clear, he makes all of these compilations available for free download, and I think this provides a nice counter-example for any hard-line anti-filesharing folks.  A lot of these bands were never big to begin with, and many have been forgotten by all but the most obsessive music fans.  Without this sort of exposure, they’d probably never get heard at all.  With it, they might sell an album or two (if said albums are even still in print).

(For the record, I don’t know Jack personally, but anyone who names his blog after a Posies song is more than okay in my book.)