Finally finished Simon Reynold's Retromania. Mostly I think it's a small idea from about 2005 that has been fleshed out into a stream of consciousness extended essay and finally a book and lecture tour. I have to pay respect to his vast knowledge of the music industry but ultimately I find it all just a little irritating. It's not helped by flashy technique like running two strands of thought simultaneously on the top and bottom of 10 pages or so.
The circular nature of the game is fun to watch. I was recommended the book by Bruce Sterling in his State of the World discussion on The Well this year. Then I find numerous quotes and references to Bruce within the book.
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/430/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html
Thoughts from the book that I felt needed addressing. So much art is time based.
1) Are there any examples of art that are deliberately not part of a timeline in that they don't anticipate the future and don't reference the past? To some extent this is of course impossible as art always exists in time and cannot be completely divorced from it's context. However, it's extremely common for art to pay respect to it's influences. True originals that emerge from nowhere fully formed are unusual at best.
2) Is there a sense in which some art consists of not just the original piece but also copies by other people? So for instance can some of Warhol's pieces (eg Monroe, Soup tin) be seen not just as paintings but also as installation or performance pieces that include all the imitators and copies. Because you have to think that he was aware that what he was doing was both easily copied and actually would be copied. And so the copies become part of the 'Art'. Perhaps Warhol can be seen here as a modern example of the renaissance idea of the Art School where having a pool of apprentices and followers was part of being a great artist.
Finally, this piece about Burial is another fine example of Pseud's Corner art criticism. This time filtered through the theme of the book. All I can say is Bravo, Simon, Bravo! It's so good, I've transcribed it all.
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The other rave flashback came courtesy of a single artist, Burial. Like The Klaxons, his music harked back to hardcore and early jungle, but filtered the euphoria but filtered the euphoria through a misty-eyed prism of loss. Although Burial's fidgety, clacking beats mimic the hyper-syncopated bustle of British rave music, the fog-bank synths, yearning slivers of vocal and shroud of sampled rainfall, and vinyl hiss makes his music more suited to melancholy private reverie than rave-floor action. This is hauntological dance, music for abandoned nightclubs. True, his music is partly inspired by its urban environment, specifically South London: the isolation and anomie of living in the city. But Burial's own interview comments suggest that even though he never participated in rave first-hand but experienced it vicariously through his older brother's DJ mix-tapes and stories, the post-rave comedown is a large part of what his music addresses. The track 'Night Bus', for instance, evokes the loneliness of catching the late night bus back to the outer zones of London after going to a club. But it is also a post-millenial nocturne for the loss of a collective sense of purpose: it says, 'After the nineties, we're all on the Night Bus now'. Another track on the debut album, 'Gutted', makes a similar point using a sample of Forest Whitaker's voice from Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: 'Me and him, we're from different, ancient tribes ... now we're both almost extinct ... sometimes ... you gotta stick with the ancient ways ... old school ways.'
Burial's label mate Kode9 pinpointed the mood with the title of his 2006 album, 'Memories of the future'. In an interview, Burial talked about 'the tunes I loved the most ... old jungle, rave and hardcore, sounded hopeful'. Elsewhere he claimed, 'All those lost producers ... I love them. but it's not a retro thing ... When I listen to an old tune it doesn't make me think "I'm looking back, listening to another era". Some of those tunes are sad because they sounded like the future back then and noone noticed. They still sound future to me.' Burial resolves the contradictions of retro-futurism by imagining that the this music still IS the future, somehow: a bridge to tomorrow that was never finished but just hangs in space, poised, pointing to something out of reach and unattainable.
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And finally, some particularly fine final words.
I remember the future-rush. It's different from the thrill of encountering a true original. The sensation is electric but impersonal; It's about new forms not new faces; It's a much purer, harder hit. It's the same scary-euphoric rush that the best science fiction gives: the vertigo of limitlessness. I still believe the future is out there.
Retromania
It's tricky. I'm really interested in the second order of whether art criticism has attempted to deal with the question rather than actual examples. We've become very used now to Post-Modernist art that is deliberately referential. Previous to PM there is clearly art that is accidentally referential, perhaps all of it. And there was Art that did PM things, we just didn't have a name for what it was doing. The question is how often (if ever) art appears that doesn't really fit and doesn't have obvious sources and influences. And is there anyway we can identify it. Can we even describe it and comment on it without constantly looking for "what it's like" from its recent or distant past?
Then we all suffered from pre- and post-millennial tension. Which meant that 2000-2005 or thereabouts felt like a lot of working stuff out, filling in the details and not so much that was actually new. But then look what happened. 2009->now feels like an explosion of creativity just at the same time as other parts of the music biz have jumped the shark and are unbelievably decadent in their cynical exploitation. It's all kicking off again.