The New Republic is running my review of Simon Reynolds’s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. It (the review) begins like this:
“Who wants yesterday’s papers?” sang Mick Jagger in 1967. “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: “Nobody in the world.” That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday’s papers and carry on with yesterday’s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past — with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.
Nowhere is the past’s grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the “exploratory impulse” that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and — God help us — eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the “curated” playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive. …
Nick,
It’s not only in music. It’s in the frozen music art of architecture also. A professor I had years ago, used to comment that many occupiers of famous works of architecture found they could not live in their homes, owing to the world tour of architects who would come around shoving their SLR camera lenses up against the glass. I had a friend from Italy who was chased across a field by an angry occupier with a shot gun, because he had been too intrusive. So houses that were designed to be the perfect living environment for a client, become dusty museums to their creator. There period of real occupation is limited. I once made it all the ways to Utrecht in the Netherlands to see Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroder house. A strange thing happened to me outside the house though. I couldn’t go in. I stood outside for a while and watched my colleagues proceed to take the nickel tour of that diminutive architectural wonder. But I couldn’t bring myself to debase the object in such a fashion. Like my English teacher said to me in school once, that writers often find it hard to analyse poetry because it means breaking it down to its pieces. A very ignominious end for something so well put together in the first place.
The best lecture I attended probably in the last decade, was sort of on this subject, by Spanish architectural magazine editor, Luis Fernández-Galiano. I don’t know if he ever put his lecture into published format. A cursory search revealed this part quote from a 2008 lecture:
“Likewise, Palladio’s prestige and influence was based more on his Quatro Libri, whose precepts are illustrated by his villas, than on the buildings themselves that doted the Venetian plain. And the stubborn fascination with the Seven Wonders of the ancient world is inconceivable without their popularisation in prints, which played the role of iconic minting that todaxy is entirely the task of photography.”
One of my favourite quotes from his Dublin lecture from a few years back was, on the subject of Chaos theory. He had a slide of a stealth airplane, and commented how chaos theory had come into design and become embedded in our culture. To the extent where bottles of perfume got names like ‘Chaos’. Chaos became sexy he said. Buildings by famous architects had to appear like they had been hit by an earthquake. He showed some slides of actual finished works, and shots of catastrophe hit structures, and the similarities were remarkable. The point is that many of these new building designs become backdrops for fashion shoots etc. The physical manifestation of the architecture is only secondary to its purpose to create an imagery we all become accustomed to, from seeing it re-produced over and over again in magazine images and on screens around the world. The real becomes culture faster than we have a chance to visit or understand the real object. You see it an awful lot in public buildings nowadays. They get photographed so much, and are supposed to communicate some deep meaning about living and philosophy, which we all seem to understand, and know, without ever visiting the actual structure.
Great post Nick, about a book I’ll have to read. As a Juilliard graduate and a passionate student of concert music for the stage, one glance at the 20th century shows that there is a vast, rich direction for pop music to move forward.
I refer to pushing the boundaries of harmony and melody…something the vast majority of pop musicians are simply afraid (or unable) to do.
In the early 20th century, composers like Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich pioneered entirely new harmonic languages that weren’t just experiments—they were brilliant explorations of a harmonic “final frontier.”
Alas, the harmonic discoveries of these composers was all but forgotten. I’ve never quite understood why. It’s as if everyone else (other composers too) stood in awe of these composers…listening to the sonic worlds they created…and then just shrugged and went back to their worn-out, I-IV-V chord progressions.
The musical languages of Stravinsky and Bartok are still there…waiting for someone to pick them up and master them. In these composers lies the key of the future of not just pop music, but music in general. But I’m pessimistic about the likelihood of anyone doing this.
Scott
Scott,
Steve Reich was on Irish radio here lately, talking about Stravinsky and his attempts to break out of the mould. Reich mentioned how in the end, even Stravinsky himself got tired of it, and returned to more traditional lines at some point in his career. In order to order to gain some acceptance and rewards for his labours no doubt, having blazed the trail earlier in his life.
I guess, standing out there, gets lonely for individuals like that. Maybe that is why folk choose instead to huddle together so much, and simply ignore the vastness of space beyond.
To his notion that, “the interval between something happening and its being revisited seemed to shrink insidiously” – perhaps a time will come when everything retro will be in vogue all of the time? With metropolis living and thousands of channels of ultramedia, the time between what was in and what is in will vanish.
I think that there will always be those who insist on seeking/creating the “cutting edge”. What may be changing for those who don’t is that they will be able to completely avoid accidental exposure to it and there’s the pity. I hope this will only compel the seekers and creators to want to work harder toward smashing guitars.
I’d like to have another pass at this issue, if I may. I want to try and tie it back to Norman Mailer’s point in the debate with Marshall McLuhan, in relation to the 18th century man, whose mind was developed to a high degree, but he still travelled (coming from the French verb, to work), at speeds across the country, that enabled him to experience the changes in culture as he went.
Basically, the Quatro Libri, four books by Palladio the architect, that critic Luis Fernández-Galiano refers to above in his quotation, were actually like guide books for the nobility from places like England who would travel across Europe on their grand tour (presumably in the manner in which Norman Mailer described), and expand their awareness of ancient classical culture at the same time. To the extent, where upon returning to England, the English nobility would build Palladio replicas on their estates and furnish them with European classical objects.
The problem as I see it today, is that the same thing is happening, except on an expanded and accelerated scale. With not-so-noble enthusiasts bringing home flash cards full of digital pics to put on their laptops, having stomped around the globe by means of a jumbo jet. You see the difference?
I think it was the fact in my earlier example of the 1924s designed Schroder house at Utretcht (which Frank Llyod Wright picked up on, with his Falling Water design across the Atlantic in the 1930s), it was not designed to be a museum, where hundreds of people walk through it each month. The Schroder house was designed to be a diminutive structure, that one could enjoy and appreciate over an entire lifetime. This is my problem.
I think what Luis Fernández-Galiano was arguing in his lecture, was that architects have twigged onto the fact, that their structures become tourist attractions and are now designing them, to be that. Luis Fernández-Galiano talked an awful lot about ‘No Logo’ by Naomi Klein. That the architect today is designing his work to be friendly towards photographers, so that the image bounces around the globe and becomes embedded into culture. That is the problem – can a well designed house, or a well written piece of music – be something, that you need a lifetime to enjoy and appreciate, any longer?
I could scarcely tell where the focus lay with this book review. The book? The music? The music as a market phenomenon, or even the music as a media phenomenon? If ostensibly a book review, there appears to be plenty of advice, and exploring the media angle in both the book and the review is logical, I suppose. But discussing music in terms of its market impact is a weirdly misplaced focus. Who cares what’s popular? How about what’s good?
The creative impulse is difficult to pin down in writing, but it’s fair to say that in the arts, creators always have one eye cast over their shoulders to the past, which is not mere nostalgia. How the public responds, shifting its tastes over time, is very much about cultural memory and continuity, so a sense of nostalgia is inescapable. The missing bit of analysis, IMO, is the observation that conditions necessary to foster worthwhile innovation within the fine arts disappeared around the middle of the 20th century. Popular forms picked up the slack for some fifty years but are now succumbing to the same sclerotic loss of vitality.
Interesting comment Brutus. Very nice. B.
Who cares what’s popular? How about what’s good?
Well, sure. But there is a reason they call it popular culture.
Nick,
There is a well worn path through this intellectual conundrum we are discussing. In my university course on architecture, a professor had on his reading list an important book by MH Abrams, called ‘The Mirror and the Lamp’. Basically, all of what I described about the classical revival period in art and culture, the guide books, the grand tours of European aristocrats (kind of like the 18th century Beta version of buying Bob Dylan’s retro Mono recording box set) etc, was countered head on by an equally strong movement by the romantic artists, poets, architects and musicians.
That is what Martha Woodmansee was referring to in his 1992 Harvard thesis paper on collective authorship. Because, in the romantic movement they had to invent this idea of the divine creator, the individual as fountain of creativity. When I read Nick Carr and many other commentators speak about ‘creativity’ (a terrible, plastic word if ever there was one), I am conscious of the fact of how trapped we are inside of that 1700’s notion of romantic individuality. But as I said, the romantic and the classical at every stage from antiquity, have been in tension with each other. That will never change. I suppose the romantic movement was needed in order to counter the elitist preserve notion of aristocrats travelling across Europe gathering up all of the good stuff for themselves. But it is not much different from me travelling through web stores today, picking up box sets of classical Bob Dylan. Around the time, America was being born as a new nation, Edward Young wrote in 1759,
“Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: Of genius in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.”
But what Young was writing about has led us down a very destructive path, in terms of how we define the artist. It’s not about smashing guitars and creating supreme individual talents. It’s about coming up with a real understanding of creativity, which has within it, a good balance of the classical (looking back), and the romantic (looking forward). BoH.
Nick sez: “… there is a reason they call it popular culture.”
The correlation between popularity and quality is a little weak with popular forms. (One-word example: “disco.”) Even where correlation does hold up, that doesn’t quite account for using popularity as a proxy for quality in the either the book or the review. It’s still a weirdly misplaced focus.
doesn’t quite account for using popularity as a proxy for quality in the either the book or the review
Agreed, and in neither place is it used as such a proxy.