Pop music is stagnating in its own past, argues Retromania author Simon Reynolds.
Simon Reynolds
In the interests of full disclosure, the first five songs that come up on my iPod when I put it on shuffle are: Wild is the Wind from the three-CD deluxe edition of David Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station; Lula Reed’s I’ll Drown My Tears from the four-CD boxed set The History of Rhythm & Blues 1952-1957; Andrew Hill’s La Verne from his 1986 album Shades; John Kirkpatrick and Brass Monkey’s George’s Son from the seven-CD Topic Records boxed set Three Score & Ten: A Voice to the People; and Orchestre Régional de Kayes’s 1970 Sanjina, from World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love’s a Real Thing – The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa.
I am 22 songs through the shuffle before I encounter anything that could be even half-described as contemporary, and that is Hurts’s Devotion from last year’s Happiness album – a pastiche of late 80s/early 90s pop.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who abhors nostalgia, but it seems I’m as culpable as the next listener when it comes to the Retromania with which music writer Simon Reynolds (author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture) titles his latest book.
The book’s subtitle is Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and it’s an addiction that manifests itself in many ways, from the likes of Hurts paying obeisance to their influences, rather than using them as a launching pad for something fresh, to the likes of me heading backwards into the land of boxed sets and reissues (including far-flung and previously unexplored territories such as West Africa and British folk music), rather than engaging fully with the present.
By the end of the book – notwithstanding Reynolds’s final line, “I still believe in the future”, and the holes in his argument – he has built up enough of a case to leave me feeling decidedly pessimistic and heavy-hearted. Did he, I wonder, begin the book in such a lather or did he think himself further and further into that state while writing it?
“It was written from a mindset of concern and bemusement about what was going on music-wise,” says Reynolds, on the phone from his home in South Pasadena, near Los Angeles. “Why has no major new thing on the level of hip-hop or rave culture or punk happened in this decade? Just observing how the music scene was going. The overload of that stuff that was either recycling or that was reunion tours, stuff to do with the past.
“It’s a fairly negative book, but it’s written quite energetically. I’m as fascinated as I am alarmed by a lot of these developments. I think by the end of it, right now, I’m being a lot more … not positive but really intrigued to see what happens next. I think when the new generation of musicians comes through who’ve only ever known the internet and this overload of the past and all the different eras being jumbled up, I think maybe something interesting could happen out of that.” Meanwhile, though, we have the here and now. Or, rather, not nearly enough of the here and now.
Reynolds is a writer of considerable intellectual resource. Since the late 70s, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard have been par for the course in music journalism, but he calls into service the less-likely Harold Bloom and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. He turns over many stones (and indeed Stones) during the course of the book, and digs around beneath them. There are ideas he fails to pursue (not least how pop music has always been entwined with nostalgia almost from the moment a song is first heard), but those he does he interrogates comprehensively (even if he does sometimes contradict himself or seem to lose faith in his own polemic). On the one hand, there are the consumers of music. Thanks to the internet, the iPod and YouTube (Retromania is a jeremiad against them, too), we have access to anything, from anywhere, from anytime in music history. And whenever we want it.
“A while ago, I felt a strange pang of nostalgia for boredom, the kind of absolute emptiness so familiar when I was a teenager … Those great gaping gulfs of time with absolutely nothing to fill them …” writes Reynolds. “Boredom is different nowadays. It’s about super-saturation, distraction, restlessness.”
On the phone, he says: “The idea of living in a world where you could hear anything you wanted at any time, and it could be accessed for no cost [Reynolds is handier with file sharing than perhaps you or me], when I was young that would have seemed like paradise. But I suppose when you get there you find it has as many downsides as upsides.” Looking to the past is also encouraged by all those reissues, boxed sets and reunion tours – some of the latter solely comprising performances of a classic album.
Meanwhile, “curator-compiler types, as they run out of ways to remap the relatively recent pop musical past … are going further back in time and further out geographically from the anglophone music world”. Then, on the other hand, there are the producers of music. Because before they are producers they are consumers, too, they have been subject to all the above and are making music that reflects it. This might be direct pastiche like Hurts, the more complex referencing of a band like LCD Soundsystem, or what Reynolds calls the “glutted/clotted” music of Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma album, with its “skittering scatterbrain sound of networked consciousness”.
The result, argues Reynolds, citing British art magazine Frieze, is an age of “super-hybridity”. The past, he writes, “is just material, to be used”. But hasn’t the past always been “just material, to be used”? In the book, he traces the antecedents of punk and highlights the ludicrousness of the Clash lyric “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977”. He also quotes Teenage Fanclub songwriter Norman Blake: “Any music that doesn’t sound like anything else in rock history always sounds terrible.” The difference, says Reynolds, is between influence as a starting point and as an end in itself.
“The fact the Stones listened to blues records doesn’t make them a retro act. They used Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf but as a launching pad and went on to Sympathy for the Devil and Moonlight Mile – songs that no black blues-playing musician was producing. They took it somewhere. It was the same with folk music and Bob Dylan and the Byrds and Fairport Convention. They weren’t replicating.
“The White Stripes, to use just one example – it’s very much like they’re harking back and invoking the glory days of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and whoever else they’re influenced by. And there’s an awful lot of groups around that do that, the way they dress, the way they carry themselves on stage, it’s very much a homage to the golden age of rock.” Ironically, given Reynolds is such a devout modernist, Retromania – bemoaning the present and its sense of exhausted possibility to such an extent it might keep us clinging to the past – could be seen as part of the problem, not the solution. As could Reynolds’s Rip It Up.
“I talk in Retromania about how if it’s an indictment of retro culture then it’s an ambivalent one because I’m obviously attracted to rock history and enjoy watching documentaries. I’ve even been in them as a talking head, and I’ve written a book that’s a history of postpunk. “I think there’s a difference, though. I don’t really have a problem with history. I think the idea of writing a history book about an era of music and bringing alive that era is perfectly valid. We should be trying to do that, I think. What I’m talking about is much more the strange, empty replications. “A good example I just learnt about is that at the Reading Festival in England this summer there’s going to be a stage where they’re going to put a screen up and they’re going to show the 1992 performance of Nirvana at the Reading Festival and people are going to watch it.
“It’s a document they’re showing of a great historical event in pop music terms, I guess, I wasn’t there. But if you think about it, that space occupied by a document of a past event is preventing any kind [of other act]. It’s literally a non-event that’s going to happen on that stage. An anti-event. It’s filling up the space in which an event might happen. The chances are nothing as earth-shattering as Nirvana is going to happen in that particular hour, but if you think how much there are these sorts of replicas and simulations, how much time and energy is devoted to this stuff to do with repeating the past, it mathematically squeezes out the chance for history to be made now.
“I hoped when I wrote Rip It Up not that groups reading it would want to sound like Gang of Four, but that they’d be inspired by the mentality or the spirit or the general ethos of that time, and try to do something like that now. I think there are groups that have more of the spirit than the actual substance of postpunk. I really like Vampire Weekend. I think Gang Gang Dance are a really cool band. Animal Collective I also think have done interesting stuff. Whereas a group that just tries to sound like Wire or Gang of Four, I think they’ve missed the point.”
RETROMANIA: POP CULTURE’S ADDICTION TO ITS OWN PAST, by Simon Reynolds (Faber and Faber, $39.99).