The Songbook has been a heavily 60s affair so far, with occasional forays into the 70s and 80s. Why the neglect of the 90s and the aughties? Well, I hold that 60s rock set the basic patterns of the ongoing rock sound and attitude; and that while these patterns get some major adjustments in the late 70s and early 80s, from grunge onwards, a mode of recycling/recombining them dominates.
A more personal (if somewhat related) reason is that I tuned out around 1994. I hated grunge from the bottom of my heart, and there was so much else that had grown horrible in pop music by the 90s. I was working, married, becoming more adult, more educated in ideas and sounds classical–as well as with classic swing sounds–, and I sure couldn’t see the point of keeping up with rock.
And in 2012? Well, hipsterism seems easier, or at least less expensive, than it was back when I was a DJ (“Karl Marx” was my ironic/edgy air name!) for SDSU’s great college radio station KCR, and won DJ of the Year in 1987. You often had to buy recordings in those days to hear them, or have friends who did. These days one has You-Tube, and so a middle-aged professor like myself can figure out more than a bit about what trends are percolating. All I need is a little quality college radio (thank you Skidmore, thank you Washington and Lee), a little fussing with a website like PopMatters or a web-critic like The Needle Drop guy. From there, it’s onto You-Tube, where one group can be a doorway to ten others. Of course, there’s no substitute for finding a hip independent record-store worker and just asking about what’s new…so long as he’s not like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity!
My overall impression from such sporadic tuning into Millennial-Gen rock, is that there really has been an indie-rock renaissance of sorts over the last five years or so. If you have a sweet-tooth for mid-60s pop-rock or the better 80s New Wave sounds, there are college radio DJs out there that can play sets of new music that will sound like an aural candy store, given the number of bands revisiting or blending such sounds, such as the band Real Estate that our commenter Stephen referred to.
But the new music cannot quite present itself as New, at least, not in the way each crop of new music did during rock’s 1965-1983 heyday could, or to speak more broadly, during the recorded pop-music boom of 1918-2000. And that’s not all that bad a thing to my mind—it can serve as a return to reality in which pop music can better face up to its limited resources and purposes, and in which more of its hipster participants can ditch the addiction to hype. But that habit is hard to break, and in rock especially, the line between avant-garde hype and secular faith-in-faith can be a thin one. Witness this PopMatters music critic Matt James gushing on about a synthy band (scroll down in this link–a link to the song is there also) called Crystal Castles:
One of my greatest fears is that I will lose my passion, my hunger, my fever for new music. That I will no longer feel the burning desire for the alchemy of holy noise as I did in my youth. …But each time I threaten to fall into dust something brings me back. Crystal Castles give me that fire again. Daylight in the dark. The possibilities, the glamour, the romance, the danger, the underdog ambition, the lifeblood. So much depended on this second record being everything I needed it to be. …It is all this and more. From frenzied feral ferociousness (“Doe Deer”) to fragile poetry (“Celestica”) to contorted freakshow oddities (“I Am Made Of Chalk”) it rages triumphantly against the dying of the light. I still believe in magic, I still believe in Crystal Castles.
Yeah, this is from a year ago, from a 2010 list, and so if you want to be right up-to-date, I guess you should check out the PopMatters best-of-2011 music lists. But so little of this stuff really changes. Crystal Castles is a group making certain refinements to 80s synth-disco. I’d welcome any efforts to explain to me why this is really new music.
Let me make my question more specific: why it is it less retro to be revisiting 80s synth (and note, even its associated clothing fashions!) in 2010 than it was to be revisiting, say, 50s rockabilly in 1980? If the Crystal Castles count as New Music in the 2010s, then a band like the Cramps, or to make it more painful for the hipsters, a band like the Romantics, should have been counted as New Music in the 1980s, right? Well, back then, the 80s synth-bands that Crystal Castles borrows from certainly did not want to dignify the 50s/60s retro bands as new. And for the critics championing the New in those days, the Cramps were perhaps excusable as a punk-ety camp-art guilty-pleasure, but as for teenagers dancing to “What I Like about You” and sending it to the top of the charts, that was simply Guilty. Guilty of (cue: melodramatic gasps of “no, no, no, not that!” ) Nostalgia. Moving ever-forward was the goal, and the deliberately futuristic-thus-minimalistic bands and DJs, you know, the likes of Joy Division, Ultravox, The Human League, etc., seemed to flaunt a kind of advanced pass into the future, mainly by being all science-fiction-y.
Now, I don’t really like Crystal Castles, and their genre is not rock strictly—rather, they produce the sort of arty-disco that gets embraced by rock hipsters, and sometimes by clubbers. So, scroll up then in the PopMatters link to a band whose sound I am actually drawn to, Women, and let’s see what another Pop Matters critic, one Scott Branson, says about them:
…Women play counterintuitive noise pop that mixes the best of rock over the last few decades: the sunny singalong melodies of ‘60s pop set to the driving minimalism of ‘70s Krautrock with the sharp angling guitars of ‘80s post punk all buried under the ambient feedback squall of ‘90s indie music. It’s like listening to the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle or the Beach Boys’ Smile while in a coma. The pop perfection drowns in echo, reverb, darkness, but tries to pull you into the light. …like a fight between Sonic Youth and the Hollies that no one wins…
Now, I like this music. (A good thing, too, because their article-free name would otherwise oblige me to say, ha-ha, “I don’t like Women.”) But does it count as New? At best, we could argue that it does as follows. Simple pop perfection and straightforward beauty simply won’t do for the postmodern people of now. But we can’t live in a maelstrom of noise or formlessness either…so we’d still like our Hollies-esque sweetness, but we need it adorned with the delicate dressings of feedback and wrapped in other distancing features, all of which serve to remind us of our perpetually undermining ironic selves. Pop Prettiness, yes, but please also bring the Noise.
Of course, this stance is itself not new nor “counter-intuitive.” Sonically, stabs in this direction were made by the Velvet Underground in 1966, and feedback-pop-prettiness came on the scene to stay with the Jesus and Mary Chain back in 1985. And today, some degree of this has become almost de rigueur for indie bands.
Women and Crystal Castles are both, then, about “mixing the best of rock/pop over the last few decades” along such postmodernist lines. And as far as I can tell, that basically describes what 80% of today’s indie bands, and almost all the ones I tend to like, are doing. Some, like Women, do it better than others. Add some 1983 to 1966, filtered through 1992 sensibility, and given a few 1971 ornaments, and voila, Something New. Very strictly speaking, it is–it hasn’t been done quite this way before, but ever more refinement, ever more collage-art subtlety is needed to find these little niches of newness, the little pathways not fully explored back in the day or the cross-decade combinations inconceivable then. And Matt James’s commitment to championing the New in all of this has actually become atypical. Plenty of the newer groups, particularly the rock-focused ones, seem to just accept that what is coming out of them is drawn from a genre or two whose basic patterns were established somewhere back in the 1965-1995 canon, regardless of whatever 90s or aughties refinements count as their more immediate influences. It’s what one does. It’s what one is.
I find it very interesting that this dominant strand of Indie Rock does not seem as comfortable taking on revivalist trappings the way the rockabilly, ska, 60s-garage, and swing-jump movements, all of them more or less “dance-craze” oriented, did from the late 70s onwards. One senses that Crystal Castles is playing with the limitations, absurdities, and remaining potentialities of 80s synth-pop, and not really championing its qualities, or at least not championing them the way Nick Lowe and his Textones really were championing 50s-60s West Texas Rock and Roll, or the way the Specials really were championing early 60s Jamaican ska. There was an intensity to such championship, that posed their revivalist music directly against the leaden Rock dullness of the 1970s. Crystal Castles do not revisit the 80s with that kind of fervor, and they and their critical advocates probably think it would be false, false, false to try to re-live or re-work the dance musics of old Jamaica or West Texas, or to speak to the entire Country and Western genre from about the 60s on(!!!), to try to do so with the 50s-era Nashville Sound; rather, they look into our ever-more Wired Future, and give us (again!) those minimalistic robot sounds. This is as much as to say that we have to learn to live with such sounds as the most authentic representations of who we are. Or, slightly less portentously, that the revival of these circa 2010 is momentarily fitting for those truly tuned to the times, whereas the employment of old ska sounds by Reel Big Fish or of old country and blues sounds by The Stone River Boys isn’t. For such reasons, I guess, Crystal Castles must be counted as New Music, but not those other bands. So these sorts of folks say.
In any case, it seems a kind of Retromania and Perpetual Repetition is upon us, and has been for some time; but to my mind, it isn’t what a lot of Rock folks, dutifully opposed to Nostalgia and silently confused by the continual absence of their expected doorways into sonic newness, think it is. To my mind, it is a clue, one that leads us to the fundamental character of our democratic modernity.
January 20th, 2012 | 4:43 pm
Let’s see if my comment comes out coherently. Apologies if it doesn’t!
Preface: I don’t mean any of the following to cut; I’m not trying to be curt, just brief. I’m a traditionalist conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran and, basically, an art elitist. (Whereas hipsters throw away the past for the present, an elitist loves seeing tradition force its relevance on the traditionless; think 2011 Tim Hecker or Bjork.) I’m a native of a small Wisconsin town, but I listen to a ton of music from around the world. That album was still my favorite of that year. I think art/classical music is mostly dead, James MacMillan and Arvo Part aside, but I think popular music is better than ever thanks to globalization and market forces decimating artistic bureaucracies. I also am frustrated by political and religious conservatives’ awful taste in modern art. I wouldn’t condemn you with that last sentence, but you’ve acknowledged that you’re slightly ignorant.
I don’t think your interpretation is unreasonable, so I won’t refute it point-for-point. That said, Crystal Castles recruited The Cure’s Robert Smith to rerecord 1 of their most accessible songs for a single, and they let him do a non-Cure-like performance. They use modified 1980s video game hardware not because of superficial affection (despite the massive amount of crossover between your Shimomuras and Mitsudas and your Yellow Magic Orchestras and Pixelords, they hate video games), but because they make unique sounds that have intrigued them for decades. So, to set aside the debts their artistic output’s accrued, their artistic SENTIMENT isn’t a simple reaction to 1 idea of what the 1980s were. As their stage and interview presence demonstrates, they (and many other modern acts) just aren’t interested in pop music as a proxy culture war. Instead of bludgeoning the 1990s with the 2000s, they simply think the possibilities weren’t tapped before “history” moved on. Sometimes it leads them to make songs like Doe Deer, and sometimes it leads them to make something as orthodox as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4pOrJK-bYY
To catch them being dissonant sometimes and consonant at others is not to catch them at all. Music can only be 1 of the 2.
My alternate interpretation is 1 of geography, not chronology. I think fast-moving economies disrupt the folk music traditions that eventually produce the newness you value in music. Supplier-goosed demand and overconsumption of art (individually and as a populace) creates premature artistic turnover. The sons kill the fathers. It may have happened to the U.S. at a different time than, say, France, but it leaves generations bewildered and unable to make sense of anything that’s not immediately in front of them. It creates a Doctor Luke in America and a Girls’ Generation in South Korea. Where stagnation or slow growth has occurred, you get musicians like Mujuice. Check the new takes on Russian folk traditions in songs like Youth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elnLVqyRFp8 and the commercial-style-video-game-influenced sounds of International Deadline Lifestyle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcb13HlxOTk to see how an unhealthy economy can boost a healthy art scene. The same goes for any continent.
I love reading this series for that reason. You’ve explicitly grounded this series in antagonism. I’m a Burkean right-winger and theologically most sympathetic to Martin Luther and Soren Kierkegaard, so I clearly don’t dislike antagonism. It’s just that where you largely see the good kind of competition, the kind that spurs development and creates useful cultural signifiers, I see a largely North American phenomenon of enforced obsolescence. Crystal Castles happens to be 1 of the best at picking up the pieces left by Chuck Berry.
Of course, I could be totally wrong. Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath 1972 (which you REALLY must address with relation to series) or Bjork’s Biophilia might just be 1910s art music scrambled through audio software. Just know that the defining trend of pop music in the last decade is that there was no defining trend. For every bleep-blooper or neo-folk hippie, there are always simple people who like simple things. My favorite song of 2011 was by 1 of my favorite Japanese bands, Tenniscoats. They got tired of the trend you describe above, moved to a small town in Hokkaido, and recorded a simple album called Song Of Time. Japanese harmonic structures and American rhythmic ones got fused in lovely and exciting ways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMzzArcCBU8 If Airplane doesn’t smack down Retromania, I don’t know what can.
(And now, I’m going to click “Submit Comment” and run away for a bit before checking to see if I’ve embarrassed myself.)
January 21st, 2012 | 12:39 am
GhaleonQ, many thanks. Meaty comments from electronica-enjoying Missouri Synod Lutheran art elitist Burkeans are always welcome here at postmodern conservative.
And I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the series. I can’t claim to understand everything you’re talking about, but I’m already somewhat intrigued by the Tenniscoats and will get to work on Tim Hecker on one hand, and James McMillan on the other.
I am antagonistic to “Doe Dear” and the type of trangressivist instinct that produces assault music like that, but I should say I can certainly hear the attraction to Crystal Castles overall–”Baptism” has got that dopey-fun main line, and songs like “Celestica” sound like what OMD wished it could have sounded like in the 80s. And when you say CC ” simply think the possibilities weren’t tapped before history moved on,” I know exactly what you mean, even if 80s synth was never my thing. Still, even if it was more my thing, I would ask: is CC more about music than transgression set to music? The signs do not appear good. And I can’t help but noting that groups that go for the futuristic aesthetic, whether in the 80s, 90s, or now, seem predictably more addicted to transgressive gestures.
I certainly would welcome more comments from you, GaleonQ, because my Songbook series certainly needs input from those more attuned to the latest trends, and even more so, from musically informed persons who disagree with my main ideas.
Two things, though. You say “I’ve explicitly grounded this series in antagonism,” and you speak of the “the newness” you say “I value in music.” The weird line I’m trying to walk in the Songbook is to attack Rock and Middle-Class Homogenized Music in General from two sides–from the direction of the older folk traditions (including, in a way, r n’ r), and from the direction of elitist art music–BUT ALSO to see what we can learn about ourselves from and appreciate what’s best in that Middling Music. (And so BTW if you’re right about classical music being played out–I think my whole framework collapses.) As for newness, this particular post is one of many messages I hope to send Rock’s way to say that the Cult of Newness is over. I want to get us OUT of the tired avant-garde expectations of the 20th century get us to think more in terms of the following question: among the things we can still do, what is best to do? For what purposes do we, and should we, use music?
January 22nd, 2012 | 1:08 am
I really appreciate the separation of lower-, middle-, and upper-class art that you’ve used to shape the series. I suppose my main contention is that the motivation for art isn’t necessarily contentious. If there is some middlebrow art that is aspirational (aiming toward elitist art, climbing over those who separate them) and some that is revolutionary (aiming toward populist art, overthrowing those who separate them from “the folk”), there is also bourgeois middlebrow art. It’s art that can be consequential artistically, but doesn’t want to be consequential ideologically.
When I note the unironic and atypical use of Robert Smith and video game hardware synths, things that were likely placed in front of them as children for them to consume, I’m trying to suggest that they’re opting out of either the “time machine conservative” approach of The Specials and the “up against the wall liberal” approach of Nirvana. They’re aren’t approaching 1980s synthpop and house as a social movement or a genre, but as a standardized set of tools that has no baggage attached to it. Robert Smith has no “default style” to them, and noise music and Amiga hardware have no pre-considered ties to video games to them. This “lazy,” libertarian attitude is the normal one among people my age.
I also don’t think this is ahistorical, just ahistorical as a norm. When, say, The Beatles used a sitar in their music, it MEANT something. The sitar has unique musical properties, naturally, but it associated The Beatles with ideas about religion, geography, drug use, and culture. They subsequently used them to undermine (rightly, in my view) the limited sonic repetoire of rock ‘n’ roll bands of their era. If you suggested that the sitar meant something about Hinduism or hallucinogenic drugs or a certain style of music to a Bangladeshi person who’s always had it around him, he’d consider you foolish. The tabula rasa idea is what, I think, most modern musicians believe. Crystal Castles’ nihilist or absurdist-leaning interviews and concerts reinforce that.
I suppose that’s my answer to your question about transgression. If it was about revanchist conservatism, then you’d expect every song to be like Not In Love, the equivalent to that swing comeback in the 1990s. If it was about taking a bat to an earlier generation, you’d look for lots like Pap Smear, where it’s pleasant and then “distancing.” But that they move from Not In Love to Pap Smear to something in-between like Knights suggests randomness. Sometimes they want to scratch your records and sometimes they want to play something soothing for your mother.
That doesn’t mean that your last questions aren’t relevant. It also doesn’t mean that we have to answer with the boring, standard, “Well, in this digital, splintered age, it means different things to different people.” What it does mean, I believe, is that if a record industry was allowed to thrive and then die, a schism is created. So, where it’s appropriate to talk about continuity in Russia, it’s inappropriate to talk about it in the U.S. post-1998.
January 22nd, 2012 | 1:24 pm
I’m not seeing, GhaleonQ, how you’re really addressing the transgression charge. Just because CC isn’t trying to be “Marilyn Manson-like” 24-7, doesn’t mean that they aren’t de facto defining themselves and the relevance of their music in that way, absurdist interviews or not. And this is linked to the fact that they are not really just saying, “we offer you whatever-sort of music from whatever sources.”
But what I’d really like to hear you talk more about is this tabula rasa idea. If you write something at length that you’d like to be a regular post, I can arrange that, either through these comments, or you can email me: scottc@wlu.edu
January 25th, 2012 | 11:34 pm
there is nothing disco about crystal castles. and their sound is, certainly, not one borrowed from the horror show that is the 1980s. the background of the two faces, if you will, of the band is punk rock. this has lent them a great deal of credibility, simply because they’re not a couple of people bobbing their heads and pressing buttons like most electronic musicians. they have reinforced their electric sound with a very sturdy punk backbone; they seem to have an almost preternatural ability to know the balance between what’s rock and what’s electronic. and this, alone, is reason enough to consider them an extremely innovative band in modern music. this isn’t dance music. it’s not dubstep. it’s a very fresh combination of two genres of music that works in their favor. the noise they create is quite compelling. it’s not meant to be melodic or pleasing. the band has stated, time and time again, that the music is meant to be be grating. this way, the “i love the one song” kind of followers can, for the most part, be weeded out.
though the music is influenced by other music, not once has the band cited any band that isn’t punk or rock among their influences.
February 4th, 2012 | 2:10 pm
[...] such as Simon Reynolds and Kurt Anderson have drawn attention to, and which I talked about in Songbook #36, on Crystal Castles. While it is undeniably true that the retro scenes of the 80s set certain patterns that inform the [...]
June 7th, 2012 | 4:47 pm
[...] hear what he’s talking about, go to my posts on Crystal Castles or on “beach goth [...]
June 23rd, 2012 | 1:00 pm
[...] observation that many bands championed as representative of new music, such as Crystal Castles, really aren’t. While many themes have been touched upon, overall, Songbook posts #36-51 have been about 1) [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact