Pop music critic Simon Reynolds, in his book Retromania, and style-writer Kurt Andersen, in his “You Say You Want a Devolution” essay, have their finger upon a certain pattern in our contemporary cultural scenes of recyle-ment, repetition, and lack of forward motion.
To be more specific, Andersen holds that from 1992 to 2012, Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. (Pomocon readers, does this sound right?)
Andersen was prompted to this epiphany upon looking at a 1985 fashion spread, and noticing that people from then do not look dated by today’s standards, whereas in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examine a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world.
Andersen thus begins from fashion, but goes on to consider nearly all our cultural scenes. In all of these …the modern sensibility [going back into the 19th century] has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned. But this normal modern pattern has for some reason ceased.
Reynolds, whose fine book and futurist longings I discussed in the last two Songbook posts, begins with pop music and keeps his analysis within its borders, concluding Retromania with the following description:
‘Entropy’ is not the right word for today’s music scene [ed.--notice the assumption that pop/rock is THE music scene]. What we are witnessing is not ever-decreasing circles but ever-accelerating circles. On a good day, this doesn’t seem such a dismal predicament. At other times, the centrifugal churn of quasi-new microgenres resembles the ‘febrile sterility’ that, for Alain Badiou, characterizes contemporary culture. That feverishness is digiculture’s hallmark: rapid movement within a network of knowledge, as opposed to the outward-bound drive that propelled an entire system into the unknown.
During the writing of this book I came up with my own glass-half-empty concept to describe the conditions that others gesture at with buzzed-up words like ‘atemporality’ or ‘postproduction.’ The term is hyper-stasis. It popped into my head after too many encounters with hotly touted records by new artists that induced a frustrating mix of emotions: feeling impressed by the restless intelligence at work in the music, but missing that sensation of absolute newness, the sorely-craved ‘never heard anything like THIS before.’ Hyper-stasis…describes situations in which potent musical intellects engage in a restless shuttling back and forth within a grid-space of influences and sources, striving frenetically to locate exit routes to the beyond.
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How do Reynolds and Andersen explain this stylistic phenomenon? I count four basic causes offered between the two of them.
1. Digiculture’s Total Access: as Reynolds puts it “We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organize, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data.” Our unprecedented obsession with the past is caused by our unprecedented ability to access it.
2. Style Democratization: this is Andersen’s argument alone. The idea is that we’ve all become amateur stylists, …scrupulously attending, as never before, to the details and meanings of the design and décor of their homes, their clothes, their appliances, their meals, their hobbies, and more.
All this is a quest for signifying authenticity. And the more stylists, the more style recyle-ment. My initial impression is that only a style writer could entertain such an argument seriously, although it has certain parallels with David Brooks’ true-enough notions of the Bourgeois-Bohemians, the Bobos, setting the major cultural patterns of our times.
There are lots of problems here, but the biggest is to explain why style democratization necessarily causes hyper-stasis, as opposed to the old pattern of a mode of fashion dominating several seasons, and then being replaced by another. That mass market dynamic still happens, although with less power than before. So I guess what Andersen really means to describe is Style Individualism, whereby it’s easier for a person to set his or her own fashions—we can imagine someone saying, “Despite what the mainstream was doing, the 90s were the mod era for me, and the aughties were when I went punk.” (Clothes-fashion and music-fashion do tend to blend together like that.) When many persons or cliques of persons do this, there is no main stream. We get a culture of multiple sub-cultures. And yet, does not an elite class of Devils Who Wear Prada still rule the fashion roost in the way that movie showed, setting the options we get to choose from? Overall, the fashion angle seems an unpromising approach to the phenomena we’re trying to understand, for the fashion industry elites, and their counterparts in other art-scenes, will always do what they can to generate a need for the new out of whatever larger cultural currents are at work, regardless of whether those currents are individualistic, conformist, nostalgic, forward-looking, or what-have-you.
3. Nostalgia as Defense Mechanism: as Andersen says, “People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness…and right now we’re maxed out.” So the present re-jiggering of old styles comes from stability-seeking and nostalgia, the sort of thing George Lucas was denounced for when he made American Graffiti in the early 70s, or which the rock n’ roll revivalist bands were in the early 80s. Reynolds, however, is aware that music-wise, the older sort of retro often had a different spirit than the recycling we’ve got now. Still, he attacks both sorts of “retromania” and blames the older retro scenes for establishing certain practices taken up by the present retro-recyclers. Neither he nor Andersen display any openness to the conservative insight, perhaps most beautifully expressed in a Mark Henrie essay on “Traditional Conservatism” available here, for how nostalgic sentiments can lead towards wisdom.
But even if we were to endorse Andersen’s and Reynolds’ basic hostility to nostalgia, we would admit that “fear of change” doesn’t work to describe what’s presently occurring. There was clearly a lot more socio-economic, political, moral, and ideological flux from the 1910s to the 70s to deal with, so why didn’t the flight into stylistic predictability occur then?
And as Reynolds is aware, the present spirit is not nostalgic in the 70s-thru-90s pattern. As I said in the post on LINK Crystal Castles, that group is more about “playing with the limitations, absurdities, and remaining potentialities of 80s synth, than about championing its qualities.” Moreover, they and other groups are ready to mix the synth style with whatever else, especially any other “ready-made” style that goes well with it. Reynolds must know that these groups are often more about striving to locate exit routes to the beyond than they are about a desire for stability.
4. Post-production: just as we no longer make things, our culture no longer does. Culturally we work with what past production gives us the same way we materially work with what Chinese factories do.
This basic parallel can be made to fit with other economic theories of dubious bent, such as Andersen’s claim that “our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability.” Somehow it’s key to him that automobiles look the same as they did twenty years ago, and that Starbucks doesn’t want to change the way its stores look. I also think of that scholar of “Industrial” rock I linked to last time laboring to explain why the genre takes off in the early 80s just as the West is becoming postindustrial. There’s a stale Marx-like odor to these sorts of theories.
But returning to the basic parallel, there is nothing that suggests it is more than a coincidence. For does it make any sense to say that a key reason why a suburbia-bred college-attender(or drop-out) makes mid-60s/early-80s derivative noise-pop music, as opposed to questing on into original sounds of the future, is because there are no more factories for her lower-class cousin to get a job in? Or because technological development may have slowed down? I don’t see any.
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With the exception of the first one, these explanations fail.
To Reynolds’ credit, he doesn’t toy with the second, does not buy into the third as simplistically as Andersen does, and seems ambivalent about the fourth. Tuned to music, he is more astute than fashion-focused Andersen. As Plato knew, music takes you deeper into the character of an age.
My better explanations come next, but I nonetheless thank Andersen and Reynolds for helping us to notice that, whether or not The Revolution or The Singularity ever arrive, The Cul-de-sac is here.
June 17th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
“There’s a stale Marx-like odor to these sorts of theories.” That is sort of true, but I think slightly more legalistic, or considerably more so.
But I sort of agree with all these theories, and actually at this point I think you are nearest to the end of the concentric circle where the explanation is not about music, but more about politics. That is these are explanations that don’t just work to explain music.
One additional theory is that the U.S. is getting older. How this relates to music exactly is not my forte (I am almost perfectly un-musical) But obviously this relates to demand for music. I don’t know if it would count as a theory, but a sort of analysis of market demand for music backs up 1+2, and in my opinion 3 once you figure out demographics.
If Anderson is making a big fuss about the fact that “Starbucks doesn’t want to change the way its stores look.” Then he is talking tradedress which is a branch of trademark and not copyright.
So Anderson’s claim: “our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability.” might be wrong about the “naturally”, but I can think of legal reasons to seek stability and predictability. That is there are copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret reasons for this.
So All 4 of those explanations has partial credibility and functional truth, if it applies to music is beyond me, but if you understand why any of these theories is functionally true, then you might broaden them to include music.
Technically I don’t think automobiles look the same as they did 20 years ago. I can see the differences. I think if you are going to collapse into a generalization that accomodates the notion that cars look the same as they did 20 years ago, then you are likely to accomodate the notion that music sounds the same, that we have hyperstasis.
I actually think there is less hyperstasis in vehicles than there is in music. That is vehicles today have more copyrighted, more trademarked and more patented components than ever before. As it sort of relates to music, perhaps you haven’t noticed MTV’s “pimp” my ride…MTV has sort of changed in the past 20 years.
On the other hand the wind tunnel is an old invention, and for the past 20 years, you always have a similar battle between form and function, often times a “new” form doesn’t lead to a “new” or “improved” function. Older can be better at least for certain purposes.
immagination wise there are many car forms, but functionally much fewer that accomplish/maximize the ends of the vehicle demographic/market.
Also: “For does it make any sense to say that a key reason why a suburbia-bred college-attender(or drop-out) makes mid-60s/early-80s derivative noise-pop music, as opposed to questing on into original sounds of the future, is because there are no more factories for her lower-class cousin to get a job in.”
No clue if Andersen says this, or if this is the proper test, and I sort of even doubt it follows from point 4 which in certain sectors of the economy is somewhat true… But it seems to me that there might be good explanations/rationalizations for the straw man hypo. Obviously there are only certain types of sound that can be heard by the human ear… That is sound is finite, or perhaps even the english language word combinations…that is copyright sort of draws from a finite field. Not all of this finite field is even comprehensible, and some of the finite field is not pleasing. Catagories are somewhat fluid. But once we have divided all possible sounds into certain catagories that are pleasing, then we have key genres, at this point there really is no real New sound of the future that is possible. Even if there was new sound possible, there might not be an audience for the sound that would recognize it as music. Mid 60′s/early 80′s derivative pop music, already has a client base. In addition maybe your hypothetical artist doesn’t know how to make this sound, or isn’t inclined to do so. I think point 4 works with the insights of point 2. That is the more sophisticated the audience or phosita the more the underlying work is perceived as being unoriginal, or the subject of prior art. That is to some people a sound that was Mid 60′s/early 80′s derivative might be original or the sound of the future, but as a sophisticated person you can hear the parts and hear a repetition or rhyme, so instead of being “New” it is simply “derivative”. I think the genre and the fact that people like it is more important than the “derivative” language which is more or less of legal significance. I generally assume that there exist a certain finite number of sounds, that music is what we call sounds we like: i.e. “It’s music to my ears”, that “New” is more or less a low standard, like a modicum of Originality, and that derivative (unauthorized) is a sort of legal claim by the owner of the sound, unless congress goes ahead and extends copyright protection again, I assume that 1960′s-1980′s music will not be new until around 2100 give or take (life plus 70), of course then some might argue that it is just a derivative of 2012 beach pop sounds:)
June 17th, 2012 | 4:33 pm
John, lots of interesting insights…and I agree with you about there being a finite number of sounds, as well as the way younger listeners find it easier to hear things as new. I’m glad you agree that pop music has been in a repeating mode, even more so than car design.
I’m not sure I’m tracking with your understanding of #4, nor that you are tracking with my rejection of it. But what it seems you are discussing in the long paragraph is basically what I mentioned last time, the fact that the pop-song form just has bottom-line limits. All music does, really, but it hits you sooner with the pop-format.
June 18th, 2012 | 10:47 am
When in doubt about the cause of what ails modern society, blame 1) Baby Boomers, and 2) the internet.
Of course post-boomer generations are going to be “nostalgic” for music of a few decades ago. All they’ve heard their whole lives is how great The Sixties were. Forget about going west (California is a dump, not worthy of your dreams)–go back to the Sixties, young man.
But slightly more seriously, the internet is the thing here, I think. I’m not quite sure why you diss #2 so thoroughly, since the fact that the internet, via youtube and other places, means that anyone can be their own DJ now surely means that the musical trend-setters of the past have much less power and influence than in the past to shape “the mainstream” scene in music, fashion, etc. Even in the 1970s regional DJs mattered A LOT (i.e., Joe Anthony in San Antonio), and regional scenes in music flourished. By the 1990s MTV and consolidation had radically changed things (someone young moving to San Antonio in the 90s would have wondered why the heck the local rock station played something called “A Private Affair” by someone called Garfield so often, instead of the same songs every other station everywhere played), which enabled grunge to immediately explode from regional niche to national domination (middle school conversation in the mid-1980s was dominated by what was shown on MTV the night before–oh my gosh, did you see Slash on the MTV awards? He was totally plastered! And did you see that new Motley Crue video? That was HOT!), but that sort of left those who didn’t actually, um, like grunge out of luck. But then the internet came and blasted apart the relevance of the old guard altogether. Whether I want to hear Rolling in the Deep or Paradise City or London Calling, I don’t have to channel surf or make a request–I can just go to youtube and dial it up. Considering that the “mainstream” music culture is a pitiful shadow of what it used to be (google and apple could pay cash for every music label and not even notice the loss), worrying about the differences in trends, directions, etc., isn’t really useful.
June 18th, 2012 | 2:09 pm
Brian, you’re right that the internet allows for more music/style Individualism, and to a significant degree prevents elites from foisting the latest mass fad upon us, at least the way they used to. Still, wouldn’t the result be more variety simply, and not, as Reynolds and Andersen note, more varied use of a the same set of styles? With individuals less beholden to “corporate rock” trends, wouldn’t the opportunities to move music forward multiply? It seems the lack of forward motion has to be explained by something else.
P.S. I can’t tell if you’re blaming me or Reynolds/Andersen (or all three) for whining about the boomers too much.
June 18th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
I would add in support of Brian that hyperstasis needn’t exist person-to-person if there’s a broad enough market for old trends to subsist. Your average disenfranchised teen would have ended up in different places in different times: grunge, gangster hip-hop, rap-rock, post-grunge (Nickelback and the “hurr-derr-hurr” crowd), emo, dubstep (in chronological order). The 1 most appealing to 2012 young people with bad taste, Skrillex, is the 1 getting invited to the Grammy Awards, sure, but all of those genres are healthy ENOUGH. The same person may not have listened to those in succession, but the new “crop” of young people replaced them and they live on.
There are musicians like Crystal Castles who are trying to kill 1 meaning and replace it with their own (depression and synthpop for nihilism and video games), but most genres are in no way hostile to each other. That’s certainly how I think most see it. I guess the impetus is on Carl to explain why it’s a 0-sum game and Pitchfork Media favoring, say, James Blake-like dubstep acts against most dancefloor-friendly or festival-friendly dubstep.
(It seems that Carl isn’t addressing it in this study, but, again, internationalization pitches trends or keeps them alivei in ways it couldn’t before. This is an important part of the puzzle, but I understand the American market focus.)
June 18th, 2012 | 2:51 pm
Carl: To be honest, I confess I’m still not 100% sure what “forward motion” means with regards to the arts (maybe I need to go reread the earlier entries). I guess it means something “new” or “different” but how do we define that? Is “Express Yourself” by NWA “recycling” or “new”? I’d say new, but lots of people say otherwise.
Also, it’s not clear to me that there is in fact NOT “more variety” now than in the past. There’s so many subgenres of every major genre that it’s impossible to describe today’s music as monolithic in any way. Now, if the issue is why today’s “mainstream” music is so dominated by “nostalgia” then I’d say “blame the boomers!”
Which bring us to your PS, and let me make clear that I’m not “blaming” anybody. I don’t actually think it’s possible to whine too much about the boomers. Sorry if my jokiness obscured that.
June 18th, 2012 | 8:05 pm
Ghaleon Q and Brian, If you read his quotes above, Reynolds himself hints that one could look at the present scene in a glass-half full way. That would include the international aspect of recycle-ment (you gotta love things like the huge audiences in Mexico for Japanese ska bands that no-one’s heard of in the U.S.!), the fact that’s it all new to the young ones, and the greater variety in recordings (not in live experiences, though) available to all of us. All good glass-half-full stuff.
Brian, all I mean by the lack of “forward motion” is what Reynolds does. Unlike Reynolds, I think to have expected it, and to have made it the primary marker of musical value was always a mistake. Most rock critics and the techno folks did do that, big-time.
I affirm your suggestion that given a finite number of sounds, there is a sense in which all music (even beyond the pop-song form) has never been really new. We can imagine an ancient music philosopher like Damon of Athens, hearing Indian ragas or Charlie Parker runs for the first time and saying, “the potential for that was always there…it isn’t fundamentally new.”
However, clearly some breakthroughs to formulas that were previously only theoretically conceivable do occur, and seem radically new to us. Quite a few of these in the 20th century, perhaps in jazz most of all.
In any case, your example of NWA’s “Express Yourself” is a great one for this. In retrospect, it’s clear that the funk and soul groups of the 60s and 70s, such as that S.O.U.L. group that NWA sampled the song’s chorus-track from could have inserted raps into their songs, and could have developed,within technological limits, the fatter and more complex beats of hip-hop. It wasn’t impossible, and those who know the funk landscape better probably know of a few songs that stretch in those directions.
But nonetheless, NWA’s “Express Yourself” sounded very fresh in 1989. Along with the De La Soul album, it was one of the first hip-hop things that used extensive sampling to get past the earlier very spare hip-hop sound. I dislike rap overall, but even I admit the addictive lure of those key hip-hop years 1987-1990…
But Reynolds is just correct that fewer of those sorts of moments are occurring these days.
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