Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: An Opening Salvo

 Mark Fisher: k-punk 

(Repeater Books, 2018) [a]

 

I started the blog because it seemed like a space in which to maintain 

a kind of discourse that had all but died out, with what I think are 

appalling cultural and political consequences. - k-punk (2005)  

 

 

I. 

 

According to Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation' [b].  

 

I pretty much belong to that generation: born in the '60s; raised in the '70s; graduating in the 1980s [c]. However, I must confess to having never read a word written by Fisher until relatively recently. This despite the fact that he and I were both in the philosophy department at Warwick as doctoral students in the 1990s, and shared many of the same obsessions and points of reference.      

 

I suppose, post-Warwick, I had my own projects to keep me occupied. I certainly had nothing to do with the blogosphere until November 2012, when the Little Greek set up Torpedo the Ark and suggested I might enjoy publishing posts more than merely scribbling private notes in writing pads. She was right, of course; as the 2,700 or so posts published since that date testify.    

 

Still, better late than never ... And having just bought a copy of k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016) - a big, fat book containing many of the posts from his seminal blog - I now hope to discover for myself the "elegance and reach of Fisher's writing, the evangelical urgency and caustic critique that seared through his rapid-fire communiques" [d].

 

I suspect the philosophically-informed posts will interest me more than the ones on pop music and film. I'm particularly keen to investigate how Fisher moves from being a Ccru-inspired accelerationist who exalted "the border-dissolving flows of capital and scorned socialism as a decrepit early 20th-century relic" [e] to becoming such an absolute opponent of neoliberalism and a pioneer of acid communism.  

 

This post, however, is merely setting the stage for such an investigation and future posts will engage more fully with Fisher in his k-punk alias. For when I say the k-punk book is a big, fat book, I mean exactly that; if you include the index, it's 750 pages long and so, obviously, I can't be expected to perform the kind of close reading that I recently subjected Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) to.  

 

It took me four days to read through the less than ninety pages of that book and write a five-thousand-word, three-part post. At that rate, it would take me over a month to work line-by-line through K-punk and, frankly, as much as Fisher is a fascinating writer, I don't have that level of interest, stamina, or dedication (certainly not when the sun is shining). 

 

What's more, it would be disrespectful to Fisher to pretend that I could provide a definitive overview or, worse, place his thinking in a nutshell. So, all I'll do - for now at least - is simply share some thoughts on the foreword by Simon Reynolds and the introduction by the book's editor, Darren Ambrose. 

 

 

II.

 

I can only hope that, when I'm dead, I have a friend like Simon Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. Clearly, the latter misses his friend and the chance to converse with him on a wide range of subjects: 

 

"There are many days when I wonder what Mark would say about this or that [...] the clarity he could bring to almost anything [...] I miss Mark's mind. It's a lonely feeling." (7)    

 

I was pleased to be reminded that Fisher's worldview - certainly in the days when he belonged to the band D-Generation - was shaped by punk and a love-hate relationship with Englishness. That makes it easier for me to feel affection for Fisher. As does the fact that he so effectively dissolved the distinction between popular culture and high art, as well as that between philosophy, politics and literature: 

 

"Often, and most crucially, Mark wrote about many - sometimes all - of these things at the same time. Making connections across far-flung fields, zooming in for vivid attention to aesthetic particulars and zooming out again to the widest possible scope [...]" (2) 

    

However, I'm not quite so comfortable with the idea that he had a total vision and that his ideas were heading somewhere; that a "gigantic edifice of thought was in the process of construction" (3). But we can let Fisher's modernist ambitions pass for the moment, even if it's a crucial point of difference between the two of us: Fisher the grand architect and systematiser; me a believer in the ruins and advocate of chaos.  

 

He and I may share a certain writing style - "rigorous and deeply informed" (3), but non-academic. But whereas the "urgency in Mark's prose came from his faith that words really could change things" (3), I have no such faith (as a nihilist, I have little time for progressive optimism). 

 

And whilst Fisher wants to make "everything feel more meaningful, supercharged with significance" (3), I want to void everything of meaning and hollow out all substance and significance.  

 

In other words, despite a certain degree of affection, I wouldn't say Fisher and I were comrades-in-arms. And, despite some uncanny similarities, I wouldn't say we were brothers under the skin. I think he and I would have been, at best, respectful frenemies had we ever known one another [g]. 

  

That said, I very much look forward to reading his k-punk posts to see if they're as provocatively brilliant and as fizzing with fervour as Reynolds insists. And I'll endeavour to read them in a good spirit, although, as Reynolds points out, there's always an undercurrent of competition between writers and "severity towards 'the opposition' is the mark of seriousness, a sign that something is at stake and that differences are worth fighting over" (5) [h].

 

 

III. 

 

I think my ambivalence toward Fisher is, then, already pretty clear ... 

 

On the one hand, I admire the fact that he was not - and never wanted to be - "a conventional academic writer, theorist or critic" (9); that his writing was, as Darren Ambrose says, "too abrasive, polemical, lucid, unsentimental, personal, insightful and compelling for that" (9). 

 

But, on the other hand, I am far more sympathetic to the postmodernism that a great deal of his writing was "undertaken in vehement opposition to" (9) [i]. I prefer irony to sincerity and would wish to curb Fisher's enthusiasm and grand ambition to invent the future and reshape human experience. I mean, c'mon, Mark: wtf d'you think you are? (You're not the Messiah, you're just a very clever boy.)       

 

I may say I wish to torpedo the ark, but I'm aware that I'm never going to be able to sink the bloody thing with just a few smart lines written in a short post; mostly, one blogs so as to be able to explore one's own obsessions and refine one's own writing style - as is recognised by Ambrose, with reference to Fisher:

 

"k-punk posts encapsulated an intellectual moment of reflection on the world: they are responsive, immediate, and provide an affectively charged perspective." (10)

 

But they're not going to bring about the Revolution or provide a path to Utopia. Ambrose may find in Fisher's work "reasons for continuing, against the odds, to hope for an alternative to the dystopian present" (11), but I'll be happy if the k-punk posts occasionally provide an amusing idea or clever turn of phrase. 

 

A bit like Nietzsche's Will to Power, surely Fisher's blog remains first and foremost a space for thinking the thought from outside - nothing else. That is to say, thinking a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in that hybrid genre known as theory-fiction.

 

As Ambrose writes, Fisher had a strong commitment to "fugitive discourses which have been legitimated by neither the official channels of the establishment [...] or traditional forms of publishing" (11). That, again, is something on which he and I are in accord and whilst Fisher's loyalty is to Spinoza and Kafka - mine more to Nietzsche and Lawrence - we agree that "it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split" [i].   

 

If anyone wants to find an alternative to capitalist realism, then let them read the above four authors; or let them read k-punk and/or Torpedo the Ark. You may not find any traces of acid communism in the latter [j], but there's a delicious poison (or pharmakon) seepig throughout (i.e., the playful production of différance).    

   

I said earlier that, after I'm dead, I hope I have as loyal a friend as Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. But I hope also that TTA finds a posthumous editor as skilled and sensitive as Darren Ambrose, who does an excellent job in assembling Fisher's writings. 

 

If his aim was to "provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the blog [...] by selecting pieces that reflect both its eclectic content, its theoretical pluralism and most of all its remarkable consistency" (15), then, from what I've read so far whilst flicking through the hundreds of pages, I think he's achieved that. 

 

Hopefully, Ambrose also manages to retain a sense of the posts immediacy and informality, despite the fact that the work has been abstracted from its original format and the very specific context of the blog. I guess I'm about to find out ...

  

  

Notes

 

[a] This work was edited by Darren Ambrose and has a Foreword by Simon Reynolds. All page references given in the post refer to this 2018 edition published by Repeater Books.    

 

[b] This was the title of a piece written shortly after Fisher's suicide and published in The Guardian (18 Jan 2017): click here to read online; or here to listen to an audio version on YouTube. 

 

[c] Whilst Fisher, born in July '68, was pure Gen X, I belong more to the tail end of the Boomers (or what some sociologists now call Generation Jones), having been born in 1963 (the same year as Simon Reynolds). This gives Fisher and myself slightly different perspectives and means, for example, whilst I experienced punk in real-time as a 14-year-old adolescent, Fisher came to it retrospectively via the hybrid forms of post-punk. 

 

[d] Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation', see link above. 

[e] Ibid. 

 

[f] As mentioned, Fisher and I remained complete strangers to one another at Warwick and whilst he was a core member of the Ccru, I couldn't make head-or-tail of the wilfully hermetic publication ***collapse, even though I once contributed some artwork to it and was on amiable terms with Nick Land, who oversaw my progress as a doctoral student in the philosophy department, under Keith Ansell-Pearson's supervision.

 

[g] I agree with Reynolds that "it is this negative capacity - the strength of will to discredit and discard" (5) that keeps culture and criticism alive; "not wishy-washy tolerance and anything goes positivity" (5). As a philosopher, nothing is more important than to access nihilation. 

 

[h] Ambrose praises Fisher for his "exemplary antipathy and negativity towards PoMo hyper-ironic posturing" - see his introduction, k-punk (2018), p. 12.   

 

[i] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 154.    

 

[j] Acid Communism was the proposed title for a book Fisher was working on at the time of his death (by suicide) in 2017. According to the unfinished introduction, the promise of such a post-capitalist ideology was "a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving" (p. 687) - that's not quite what's on offer on Torpedo the Ark ...  

 

 

This is essentially just an introductory post to a new series of posts inspired by Fisher's writings during the period 2004 - 2016, to be published intermittently over the coming months (that's the plan at least). For a second round of fire, click here.  

 

Regular readers will be aware that I have previously discussed Fisher's three published works - Capitalist Realism (2009), Ghosts of My Life (2014), and The Weird and the Eerie (2016) - on Torpedo the Ark in multi-part posts.

 

    

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 5: Tomorrow (Chapters 11 and 12)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Cover of the German edition (Ventil Verlag, 2012)

I.

In chapter 11, Reynolds - a former sci-fi fanatic - indulges in nostalgia for the Space Age; a time of giant steps and final frontiers, as he describes it. 

 

He also mourns the "absence of futuristic-ness" [a] in the fabric of daily life and says neostalgia became an increasingly widespread feeling during the opening decade of the 21st century, though, I have to admit, I didn't feel this "pang for the future that never arrived" [362]; perhaps because I preferred The Flintstones to The Jetsons [b] - or maybe because I hate motorists at ground level and the last thing I would want to see is flying automobiles blotting out the sky. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm not particularly disappointed the future didn't arrive - for I never really expected or wanted it to. And when it has interfered with the present in the form of advanced (and alien) technologies, it's not been entirely advantageous - are we really any happier or better off now that we experience the world via a series of screens or have outsourced our thinking to AI? 

 

I don't think so: and Reynolds isn't particularly impressed by the digital age, which he describes as more decadent in character than heroic. He wants the world of Star Trek and to be able to beam on board the USS Enterprise - not the future glimpsed in Blade Runner in which it rains all the time, or the grotty on-board conditions of the commercial starship Nostromo, as seen in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).  

 

 

II.  

 

Sooner or later, Reynolds was always going to relate this idea of nostalgia for the future to the world of popular music - which I guess is fair enough, considering he's a music journalist, critic and author. 

 

But, if I'm honest, it gets a little boring reading about bands and DJs and genres of music I've never heard of and I can't help wondering at the kind of books Reynolds might have given us had he spent a little more of his time reading literature and philosophy and a little less listening to records ... [c] 

 

III.

Is nostalgia chiefly a "not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation" [370]? That seems to view it as tied to a model of deficiency and/or lack; a model which, as a Deleuzian, is obviously problematic for me. 

 

Might we not think nostalgia as a form of desire; something positive and productive? By tying nostalgia to the (socially constructed) idea of lack, Reynolds views it as the pursuit of a missing (ideal) object, which is all very Freudian and Lacanian, but is that really where he wants to go? 

 

(I think perhaps he does, but I don't.)

As for alienation ... Why bring in a dated 19th century concept like this; one that relies on the very deficiency model rejected above? Further, if there's no human essence - and there is no human essence - then how can a subject ever really feel or be alienated? 

 

Perhaps Baudrillard is right to say (rather amusingly) that we are today alienated from alienation and that we have moved beyond the dramas of alienation played out in modernity. Either that, or that alienation is now total within an age of simulation in which the individual is fully codified. 

IV.
 

"In recent decades, nostalgia for the future has gradually lost its vagueness and become tied to a specific idée fixe: an archaic and sometimes comically ossified idea of what the future is going to be like." [370] 

 

In other words, it's become a retro-futurist emotion, stimulated by popular culture and in particular a vision of the future that was in large part invented by the Disney Corporation: 'Tomorrowland' (1955) providing the material blueprint for the plastic utopia to come. 

 

Amusingly, Tomorrowland is now a museum - and, after visiting, Reynolds came to much the same conclusion as Bruce Handy writing in Time in 1998: The future isn't what it used to be - i.e., it's "desperately uninspiring and lugubrious" [372] - which is shit in anybody's language. 

 

But is the fault less Disney's and more ours? Have we lost the ability to dream as a culture and "to come up with visionary goals to aim for" [372]?

 

Possibly. 

 

But again, let's enter a note of caution before throwing ourselves on the floor and bewailing our own inability to imagine the future. For mightn't it be a sign that we have wised up a little as a culture; that the postmodern abandonment of grand utopian visions - particularly when these are tied to dangerous political ideologies - is something we should be proud of. 

 

I certainly don't wish to resurrect the myth of rational progress and recommit to a single telelogical future; I rather like the ambiguity of the present and have no desire for a better world. I believe in the ruins of The City of Tomorrow and if that makes me a cynic, or a pessimist - or even a defender of capitalist realism - well, so be it. 

  

 

V.   

 

Moving on ... and essentially skipping a couple of sections, we come to the end of chapter 11, in which - to my surprise - Oswald Spengler again puts in an appearance; just what is Reynolds's fascination with this historically significant but intellectually marginal (and marginalised) figure? 

 

He refers us to the Faustian spirit identified by Spengler in his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik - a spirit which, says Reynolds, "is the dynamic behind modernism and modernisation, the impulse that propelled both the space race and twentieth-century music's exploration of sonic space through electronics" [394]. 

 

That may or may not be true, but this Faustian spirit is also tragic in nature and Spengler is adamant that there can be no prudent retreat into the past - not even one made in order to recover a lost future. He also dismisses optimism as a form of cowardice [d], so, ultimately, I can't see the appeal of his work for Reynolds, though he has clearly been influenced by the latter as this paragraph illustrates:

 

"When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so - the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with decor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society - the total picture does look a lot like decadence. Retro culture would then be just another facet of the recline and fall of the West." [394-395]          

 

Reynolds suggests that this leaves opens "the possibility of the new coming from outside the West, from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted" [395]. He specifically mentions China and India - "set to be the economic and demographic powerhouses of the century" [395] - and two cultures which, interestingly enough, Spengler also regarded as high-level, equal in spiritual greatness to the West. Obviously, both are ancient cultures and yet, paradoxically, they "feel 'younger' than us at the moment" [395].    

 

I have to admit, I have my doubts (and concerns) about the idea that the economic and geo-political future belongs to Asia; for there are multiple factors (including some we cannot foresee) that might prevent the global dominance of China and India. 

 

Nevertheless, Reynolds also seems to pin his musical hopes on the non-Western world, now that the "Anglo-American pop tradition is all innovated out" [396]. But again, I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party will allow an explosion of "popular energies and desires" [396] amongst the young. 

 

And the last time they encouraged such it resulted not in the Summer of Love, but the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, so those who advise the West to simply rest and outsource the future to Beijing should be careful what they wish for.    

 

 

VI. 

 

I smiled to hear that even William Gibson has given up on the future; that he prefers these days to speak of atemporality and the digital Now. 

 

When I was in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s and the CCRU was a thing (if it ever was a thing), Gibson's 1984 novel Necromancer was required reading. Unfortunately, I found it to be one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read - right up there with Naked Lunch (1959) and Silas Marner (1861).   

 

However, I agree with Gibson that the 21st century is richer, stranger and more complex than any imaginary future and that science fiction, therefore - at least in the traditional speculative sense - is now redundant: the future is here already and our task today is to explore the alien present [e]. 

 

Reynolds, however, isn't of this view: "Gibson's perspective is so completely other to my own that I'm flabbergasted." [397] I'm sorry about that, although it's always nice to see a piece of 18th century British slang being used.

 

 

VII. 

 

And now, the end is near - chapter 12 - the final chapter: 'The Shock of the Old' ... Time for Reynolds to address those questions he posed, but perhaps failed to fully address along the way. 

 

Questions such as: Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful? [403 - italics in the original].

 

I'm tempted to suggest it's because, Simon, you still labour under the illusion of psychic depth. If you were a little less soulful - became a little more floral - you'd miraculously find much of the shame you experience (which seems more moral than instinctive in nature and which often serves to hinder your enjoyment) simply fades away. 

 

Of course, becoming-flower isn't easy. But, if a wasp can manage it, I'm sure you'll be able to find a way (and can always turn for advice to Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus).  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Reynolds admits that his understanding of rock and pop is very much infused by the "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future" [403]. The funny thing is, he says this in part due to the fact he was born in 1963 - 'The Year That Rock Began'. 

 

But I was born in the same year, and my understanding of popular culture isn't weighed down by this belief. Perhaps that's because I was born under a different star sign [f]; or perhaps it's because I took the work of postmodernists such as Lyotard more seriously than Reynolds and have made terms such as irony, incredulity, and insouciance watchwords rather than belief, teleology, destiny, etc.        

 

Again, by his own admission, his obsession with and loyalty to music served only to consolidate his outmoded ideas and beliefs:

 

"Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, the spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock. These surges of renewal served as a booster shot for me, reconfirming the modernist credo [...]" [404] 

 

That's a really rather terrible admission of bias; superhonest, but shocking. And for me it confirms Jamie Reid's idea that music prevents you thinking for yourself [g]. 

 

Reynolds continues: "There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment [...] [404] - well, yes, I made exactly this argument earlier in this post. 

 

But despite having his belief in progress badly shaken by recent events, Reynolds sadly chooses to avoid the argument and instead just doubles-down on his position: "As a died-in-the-wool [sic] modernist [...] I would find it hard to break the habit of a lifetime [...] Giving it up would feel like giving in, learning to settle for less." [404]  

 

Again, that's honest, but disappointing: he sounds like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific desert island for many long years and refusing to accept the war finished long ago. I know some people admire holdouts - and perhaps there is something admirable about an act of defiant resistance - but ... well, there are surely better hills to die on than that of popular music. 

 

 

IX.  

 

Reynolds doesn't like flatness and so he won't think much of Pancake Tuesday, Jane Birkin's physique, or the Deleuze and Guattari text recommended earlier. 

 

For as the title suggests, Mille plateaux is all about flat terrain and molecular politics, rather than mountain peaks and what Reynolds describes as the momentous and by which he refers to molar events and the idea that these alone bring about significant historical change or progress. 

 

As an object-oriented philosopher, I subscribe of course to a flat ontology, which is to say, to the idea that all objects exist on the same plane of reality and I can't help suspecting that Reynolds would not care for this model of being; that he rather likes hierarchical structures that allow for judgement. 

 

Or perhaps he just has a fear of feeling emotionally flat and this explains his need of newness and constant stimulation, including, during his rave days, the entactogenic drug ecstasy [h].

 

 

X. 

 

Another thing Reynolds does not like is stillness; he wants things to keep moving - and moving forward at pace. But hasn't he heard that sometimes one can be quick even when standing still (that speed and intensity do not necessarily require movement)? Stillness isn't synonymous with stasis and stagnancy.

 

I refer him once more to Deleuze and Guattari, and their notions of lines of flight and deterritorialisation; neither of which are progressive ideas - there's no linear movement from A to B - but both of which allow for radical change and the breaking away from established habits, structures, and identities so as to invent new ways of thinking and acting. 

 

Stillness is a keyword for me now; as it became for Roland Barthes in his late work on the Neutral  and I'm pretty sure the latter also writes in praise of flatness too.  

 

 

XI. 

  

This couple of sentences made me smile: 

 

"This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?" [408]

 

Apparently not! 

 

But is it any more mystifying than why the author of Retromania should wish to cling on to ideas from the late-19th and early-20th centuries to do with progress and making everything new.   

 

Maybe young people don't give a shit anymore about when a genre was first invented and don't feel that "vague nostalgia [...] for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity" [410] that Simon and Sandi Thom think they should. 

 

Maybe they prefer music that is less potent and less meaningful, but also doesn't demand that they adhere to it with fanatic loyalty and at the exclusion of all other interests; maybe they don't need mythical rock gods (or even the NME) to tell them what to think and feel any longer [j].     

 

 

XII.

 

Reynolds's closing remarks on the economics and politics of pop culture in an era of postproduction were provocative. I particularly like the bit about meta-money and meta-music being connected at some fundamental level (although I don't know if it's true outside of Marxist analysis):  

 

"Culture, as the superstructure to the economy's base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." [420-421]

 

For Reynolds, it is fashion which provides the "nexus between late capitalism and culture" [421] - the point where they intermesh. If video killed the radio star, fashion killed popular music; infecting the latter with its "artificially accelerated metabolic rate, its rapid cycles of engineered obsolescence" [421].

 

The logic of fashion has polluted the sweet river of time that once flowed gently but inexorably from past to future. Or as Reynolds writes: "Fashion - a machinery for creating cultural capital and then, with incredible speed, stripping it of value and dumping the stock - permeates everything." [422]

 

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I smiled at this. But I also feel I have to push back a little - even if Reynolds himself slightly qualifies the above by conceding that the fashion-isation of the world "can't totally explain the rise of retro rock" [422].

 

Firstly, it's a little surprising that a self-professed modernist like Reynolds should so dislike fashion - the most modern of all modern phenomena. But then lacking any telos - any final purpose - I suppose fashion was always going to seem trivial and superficial to Reynolds. 

 

One might have imagined, however, based on the experimental and radical nature of the music he privileges, that he'd rather approve of the manner in which fashion ruptures the order of referential reason, dissolving old values and conventions. It may only provide the illusion of change, but there is a genuine passion at its heart: the passion for empty signs and cycles and for making the insignificant signify and it's this which makes it of interest (to me at least). 

 

 

XIII.    

 

If fashion is for Reynolds is a non-starter and if "it is now pretty clear that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy" [422], then where do those who care about cultural vitality and rescuing lost futures go from here?   

 

Reynolds says he'd "love to nominate hauntology" [423] as the answer to this question and as "the alternative to the curatorial model of art" [423]. But he can't bring himself to do it. For he knows that in many ways even those figures he admires working in this area, such as Ariel Pink [i], "are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation" [423].    

 

By his own admission, this leads to a tricky question for Reynolds as an Ariel Pink fan and champion of the hauntological in general: what exactly is this music's contribution? 

 

"In fact, what in today's musical landscape is rich enough, nourishing enough - which is to say, sufficiently nonderivative - to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? Surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further use-value can be extracted." [424]. 

 

That seems a fair observation. But surely then, when this point is reached is precisely when people will - from necessity - create new sounds. So he should find comfort in this idea - and that thing he cherishes called hope. 

 

And indeed, he does: concluding his study with a line that might have come from Fox Mulder's bedroom wall: "I still believe the future is out there." [428] 

 

So, there was really nothing to worry about all along ... 

 

  

Notes

[a] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 362. Future page numbers will be given directly in the text and refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Strangely, however, I prefer Lt. Ellis in her silver mini-skirt [click here] to Loana in her fur bikini, although I'm not blind to the appeal of prehistoric women: click here.  

 

[c] His brief reading of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet on page 369 is excellent and I only wish Mr Reynolds wrote more on Portuguese poets and French thinkers such as Baudrillard - whom he mentions several times, but never really engages with - and spent a bit less time discussing rap music, rave culture, and obscure electronic groups from the 1990s.     

 

[d] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. C. F. Atkinson, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1932), p.103.  

 

[e] That's really not such an outlandish view; J. G. Ballard said much the same thing way back in the seventies; i.e., that sci-fi should stick to exploring the all-voracious present and mapping inner space and the impact of modern technology on the human psyche. For Ballard, in sum, the job of the writer is to invent reality as we already live inside a fictional world order. See the Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (1974): click here.  

 

[f] I was born on 13 Feb and that makes me an Aquarian; Reynolds was born on 19 June and that makes him a Gemini (and so more prone to belief and less sceptical in character) - or so I'm told by someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.  

 

[g] I'm referring to Jamie Reid's 'Stratoswasticastor' design: click here for details on punkrocker.org.uk 

 

[h] See Simon Renolds, Generation Ecstasy (Routledge, 1999), in which he takes the reader on a tour of the world of rave culture and techno music as a dosed up and blissed out insider. For Reynolds, MDMA was the essential ingredient or catalyst; the magic pill that allowed for a communal and transformative experience bordering on the spiritual (although he does also acknowledge its more troubling aspects).   

 

[i] Reynolds names the American musician and singer-songwriter Ariel Pink as (probably) his favourite artist of the 2000s, even if his hypnogogic sound is "woven out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio pop from the sixties, seventies and eighties" [xxiii] - i.e., the "grand period of primary pop productivity" [423].  

 

[j] As a father of children, Reynolds recognises that younger people do not think the same way that people of his generation think; do not care about the same things: "they're not the least bit interested in the capital 'f' Future, barely ever think about it" [425-426] and their urge to escape the present is satisfied "through fantasy [...] or digital technology" [426].  

 

 

Other posts in the Retromania series can be accessed by clicking here. 

 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 4: Tomorrow (Chapter 10: Ghosts of Futures Past)

Simon Reynolds: Author of Retromania (2011)
and an 'old modernist-minded post-punk'

I.

Technically, this is not really a review, so much as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Reynolds has generously opened up in his book Retromania and meet him there in and on his own terms.

But it is also the staging of a confrontation or reckoning [Auseinandersetzung]; an attempt not to find common ground - I clearly share with Mr Reynolds certain interests, ideas, and points of reference - but key areas of difference, so as to open up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators.

Readers who have worked their way through the first three parts of this post can decide how successful I've been in that aim so far ... 

II.

The title of chapter 10 suggests that the hauntological theme with which Reynolds closed chapter 9 is going to be developed. And obviously, that makes me happy, as I'm somewhat smitten by this spooky pop cultural concept developed by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2005, based on Derrida's philosophical work in this area [a]. 

 

I even like the punning neologisms that have been coined, such as ghost modernism and seance fiction - though maybe Reynolds might be challenged when he describes sampling as groove robbing (not because it's a pun too far, but because it implies intellectual property and the ownership of sounds) [b].  

Sampling isn't theft; it's a practice that reveals the musical equivalent of intertextuality (this is sometimes known as sonic resonance, or intersonority); i.e. the manner in which all recordings echo and refer to other recordings. To put it simply: there is no such thing as an original pop song or an original piece of music; everything's a cover version and the dead are always with us.   

Reynolds finds this uncanny - "because different studio auras and different eras were being placed in 'ghostly adjacence'" [c] - but then, as he goes on to point out, it's not unusual. For recording has "always had a spectral undercurrent" [312], not least because it separates "the human voice from a living body" [312]. 

 

He continues: "Records have certainly habituated us to living with phantoms [...] In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it's a trace of a musician's body, the after-imprint of breath [...]" [312]. That's true. At least that's true of analogue recordings, but not digital works, in which the direct physical relationship with the sound source is replaced by a reading of such in terms of binary data.    

Reynolds concludes: "Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it." [313]. Though the same can be said of photography, of course; "both are reality's death mask" [312]. Sampling simply intensifies this inherent supernaturalism, creating a "musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance" [313]. 

 

(Again, at this point I have to express my admiration for Reynolds's thinking here - I love all this stuff on the art of musical ghost arrangement, etc.)

 

But is sampling a form of exploitation? Reynolds seems to think so: 

 

"In a certain sense - neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical - sampling is enslavement: involuntary labour that's been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another." [314]

 

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that's also true: one could just give a Warholesque shrug and say so what? 

 

Alternatively, as a Nietzschean, one might point out that slavery is a necessary precondition for the flourishing of higher culture and that artists have always exploited the work of untold others. Reynolds may find that a politically uncomfortable fact, but, as a cultural theorist he's obliged to acknowledge such an inconvenient truth. 

 

Art is not a form of liberal humanism; it's an aristocratic practice that requires a certain cruelty to impose new forms upon chaos and create new values, etc. For me, therefore, sampling can be defended from a philosophical perspective that is anything other than 'left-wing' [d].      

 

As for the argument that sampling shifts power to the producer and disempowers those "real musicians who think they're so cool and hip", that only holds up providing one wishes to deny the phonographic artistry of the former and see them as merely technicians, devoid of creative talent or skill, just because they wear less "complicated shoes" [e].  

 

Musicianship is, in my view - as a McLarenista - hugely overrated - so more power to the elbow of people like the Canadian composer and audio pirate John Oswald, who on Plunderphonic (1989) "turned sampling into a form of digital iconoclasm, literally smashing pop idols to smithereens" [317], as well as challenging notions of originality and identity [f].    

 

Rock musicians are often the most self-serious and pompous of all artists and so deserve to be "subjected to various degrees of insult, satire or travesty" [321]. 

 

But it should be noted that often digital-era artforms like hip-hop often display an almost reverential regard for the obscure analogue grooves they exploit; "they honour through recycling, in the process conferring a kind of immortality for the music, if not for its anonymous creators" [323]  

 

 

III. 

I was a bit surprised by Reynolds's admission that his sense of Britishness remains so acute after so-many years living in the United States with an American wife.  

 

Obviously, he doesn't define such in terms of blood and soil, but, rather, sees it in cultural terms; nationality is, he says, "a matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points [...] from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts" [337], which, I suppose is true enough.   

Interesting to consider hauntology as a specifically British thing, however; a mourning for a lost time, before the British were increasingly pressured to apologise themselves out of existence or make themselves either more American or more European (isn't this pretty much the same line that Morrissey takes - or does he veer a little too close to ethnonationalism as well as cultural pride?) [g]. 

1958-1978: this is the golden era that haunts hauntologists and ghost boxers alike; and, ironically, it's the era that "rock 'n' roll in some sense rebelled against by celebrating desire, pleasure, disruptive energy, individualism" [338]. The nanny state suddenly doesn't seem so "suffocating and oppressively intrusive" [338] from the perspective of the early 21st century ...

Everything was better, wasn't it, in the sixties and seventies; the music, the fashion, the films, the football, and, of course, the TV: "The memoradelic imprint left by vintage TV on the child's impressionable grey matter is central to hauntology." [h]  
 

The question is: is this just a British thing catering to a certain generation? Or does "every country, and each successive generation within that nationality [...] produce its own version of hauntology - a self-conscious, emotionally ambivalent form of nostalgia that sets in play the ghosts of childhood?" [343]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Unsurprisingly, some commentators are less than impressed with all this; seeing hauntology as postmodern retro by another name. And Reynolds admits: 

 

"It's true that hauntology emerged from the same matrix of baseline cultural conditions - the scrambling of pop time, the atrophy of any sense of futurity or forward propulsion - that generated many of the things I've castigated in this book." [355]

 

But, of course, he's not going to let go of the concept that he and Fisher worked so hard to develop and popularise: "What makes hauntology different, what gives it an edge, is that it contains an ache of longing - for history itself." [355-356] 

 

By this I think Reynolds means that hauntology is a profoundly serious desire for the real pain and actual horror of past events and not just the nice things which make us feel comfortable in the present; he's affirming history as is (or as was). 

 

And he does this because unless you affirm the past as a total economy, you'll never be able to recover the lost futures he and Fisher hope to find. In other words, tomorrow can be ours - but there's a price to pay and it will require courage (not just irony); the one thing that for Ursula Brangwen really matters at last [i]. 

 

 

V. 

 

If Reynolds is, shall we say, ambivalent about sampling, he clearly doesn't like the mash-up; "bootleg remixes that combined two or more pop hits" [356] to produce nostalgia without the ache. He explains that whilst mash-ups may briefly amuse due to their incongruous juxtaposing of elements, there is no "creation of surplus value, musically; even at their very best they only add up to the sum of their parts" [359].    

 

Mash-ups are thus a form of pseudo-creativity "based on a blend of mild irreverence and simple pop fandom" [359]. Worse: "Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data grey pulp [...] devoid of nutritional value" [360], by which I think he means they don't feed the soul.

 

And so, forget about mash-ups and retro. For even if it remains a "precarious and paradoxical strategy" [361], its hauntology which will resurrect the "eyes-on-the-horizon optimism" [361] of late modernism, by radically parodying heritage culture and uncovering "alternate pasts secreted inside the official narrative" [361], thereby turning the past into a foreign country.

 

As Heidegger might say: Nur noch ein Geist kann uns retten ... [j] 

 

 

Notes

[a] See the post 'Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism' (28 Sept 2023): click here.

      Whilst for Derrida hauntology is a framework for understanding that being is always haunted by what is not fully present (traces of both past and present; the no longer and the not yet), for Reynolds and Fisher hauntology is more about the way in which pop culture explores a zone of nostalgia in the hope of finding a way beyond the present (so-called lost futures). It's a little amusing how, on the one hand, Reynolds expresses a certain anxiety about sampling and yet, on the other hand, cheerfully borrows (shall we say) Derrida's term simply because he liked the sound of it.  

[b] It turns out that Reynolds didn't invent this pun, but borrowed the idea of groove robbing from someone called DJ Shadow. See p. 323 of Retromania where he writes of the appropriately Gothic nature of the term. 

 

[c] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 312. Future page numbers will be given directly in the post and refer to this edition.

[d] Reynolds writes: 

      "It's curious that almost all the intellectual effort expended on the subject of sampling has been in its defence [...] nearly always focused on the legal aspect, framing the samplers in punk-like terms (as rebellious, iconoclastic). Academic studies of sampling have likewise generally sided with 'the streets' versus the multinational entertainment companies. This reflects the left-wing bias of academia and a tendency to see the whole area of property rights, including copyright, as intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and [...] the status quo. [...] A Marxist analysis of sampling might conceivably see it as the purest form of exploiting the labour of others. In a more general sense, you could see it as a form of cultural strip-mining, a ransacking of the rich seams of past musical productivity." [314-315] 

      Hopefully, my post-Nietzschean analysis provides an interesting alternative. 

[e] I'm quoting George Costanza here from an episode of Seinfeld, 'The Burning' (S9/E16), dir. Andy Ackerman (1998). 

 

[f] Plunderphonic (1989) was a 25-track CD in which Oswald reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles, and classical works such as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. Whilst sources for all the samples used were scrupulously listed, Oswald was happy to acknowledge that authorisation for their use had neither been given nor sought. Although the work was not made available for sale, all undistributed copies were destroyed after a threat of legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients, including Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as 'Dab': click here. 

      One suspects Jackson wasn't best pleased with the albums cover art either; a photo collage that transposed his head and leather jacket from the cover of his album Bad (1987) onto a naked female body - something that Reynolds compares with "the on-line porn practice of taking images of movie stars and other celebrities and Photoshopping their heads onto nude bodies engaged in hardcore sex acts" [317]. 

      Obviously, this practice has massively accelerated and become ever more widespread and sophisticated thanks to AI. I don't really have an issue with it, but Reynolds insists that, for him, its a "blatant infringement of an individual's rights in their own image" [317] and infringes their dignity, blah, blah, blah.  

      Reynolds does concede, however, that Oswald's 'Dab' is a masterpiece that injects alien DNA into an all-too-human pop song; "micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall of mirrors and a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field" [317]. 

 

[g] Reynolds discusses the case of Stephen Morrissey in terms of reflective nostalgia (good) and restorative nostalgia (bad) in a footnote on pp. xxvii-xxviii. 

      Describing him as the "supreme poet of reflective nostalgia", he neverthless fears that Morrissey has, at times, crossed over to the dark side and flirted with fascism, declaring England to no longer be recognisable to the country of his youth due to mass migration. 

 

[h] Where I differ from Reynolds here is that I never gave a shit about British shows like Doctor Who - it was American shows (and their theme tunes) I loved best; see the post 'Theme Tunes in a Man's Life' (2 Feb 2013): click here. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270. When her uncle asks her "'Courage for what?'" Ursula replies "'For everything.'"

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Heidegger's famous statement - 'Only a god can save us now' - from a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal saviour, anymore than by my use of the term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. 

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.   

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

 

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

To read part 3 of this post, click here. 

 

The fifth and final part will be published shortly.  

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 3: Then (Chapters 6-9)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania  - cover of the US edition

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011)

 

 

I.

 

So, here we are at page 183 and still not half-way through a book which can be summarised in one short sentence: We live in a culture that prefers to curate the recent past rather than create the future. And whilst he doesn't use the phrase, Reynolds seems to suggest that the solution to this is: torpedo the archive! 

 

It amazes me that there are still another 7 chapters and another 250 pages or so to get through; Reynolds is like a spider that has already caught the fly, but can't resist weaving an ever-expanding web, delighted with its own ingenuity.  

 

Anyway, let's explore the four chapters that make up part two of Retromania - and let me remind readers that the page numbers refer to the 2012 Faber edition of the book.  

 

 

II. 

 

Because I like fashion, I do like chapter 6; one which opens with Reynolds expressing his excitement at discovering just how fabulous the futuristic looks designed by the likes of André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne in the early 1960s were - before everything turned psychedelic and full-on hippie and "youth style started to revel in anything and everything that was neither modern nor from the industrialised West" [185] [a]. 

 

I don't quite agree with this: "From a distance [...] retro and historicism blend into each other and look rather like inspiration-starved designers, rifling through the past's wardrobe" [190] - but it's not far from being the case. At some point, even Vivienne Westwood - for all her attempts to justify her historicism - ends up frantically pillaging the past just like everyone else.     

 

The footnote provided by Reynolds on vintage and class is excellent; "vintage is a largely middle-class game [...] The further down the class ladder you go, the more value is set on things being brand new [...] the UK's white working class [...] would not be seen dead in anything that even looked old, let alone actually was second-hand" [194]. Chavs, says Reynolds, are - in some ways - "Britain's last bastion of futurist taste" [194] [b] - heaven help us if that's true!   

 

 

III. 

 

Here's a claim that would make for an interesting discussion: "Pop music exists somewhere between fashion and art, but leans far more to the art side." [196] 

 

I'm not sure that's the case. And it's certainly not always the case. Indeed, one could make a strong counterargument; that music is, as Malcolm McLaren never tired of saying, the sound of fashion, just as fashion is often the look of music. 

 

And it's absolutely false to claim: "People are moved by music in a way that is different to the feelings they might have for a pair of shoes or a jacket. They become attached to music in a more enduring and deeply felt way." [196] 

 

I would remind Mr Reynolds that the king of rock 'n' roll himself valued getting dressed up to mess up above money or performing on stage and that whilst you can burn his house, steal his car, or smash his record collection, under no circumstances would he accept anyone criticising or stepping on his blue suede shoes [c].     

 

Ultimately, trying to defend a hard and fast distinction between music and fashion in terms of emotional value is not only in vain, but a little ridiculous. For the record, I remember the excitement of pulling on a pair of tight black PVC trousers for the first time just as vividly (perhaps more) than hearing the first Clash album. The fresh and bold aspect of punk lay in the fashions created by McLaren and Westwood, not in the records produced by bands strumming and banging away on traditional instruments to a 4/4 beat.   

  

 

IV. 

 

There are somethings I'd rather not know; including the fact that, when a student at Oxford, Reynolds chose to associate with a group of "out-of-time hippies" [202], despite the fact that his "musical leanings [...] were incompatible with theirs" [202] - and despite the fact that Malcolm had explicitly warned to never trust them.  

 

Revivalists and those living in a time warp (whether wilfully remaining there or trapped like insects in amber), have never particularly interested me. It's not that I encourage people to move on; but I don't like the idea of standing still and remaining the same either. The knack is to reverse the past into the present so that one might live yesterday tomorrow and ensure that what returns is difference itself, the engine of newness and becoming [d].    

 

Pleased to see Reynolds write this: "Time-warp cultists [...] seem unable to recognise that the same energies they prize about the music of the remote past can be found in the present [...]" [206], which is both true and important, but one suspects they want more than these 'energies' - though what it is they're after I'm never quite certain. 

 

If it's authenticity then there's a problem, for there's an "inherent contradiction to musical cults of authenticity: fixating on a style that is remote either in time or space [...] inevitably condemns the devotee to inauthenticity" [211]. Reynolds spells out this contradiction:

 

"Either he strives to be a faithful copyist, reproducing the music's surface features as closely as possible, risking hollowness and redundancy; or he can attempt to bring something expressive and personal to it, or to work in contemporary influences and local musical favours, which then risks bastardising the style." [211]

 

That is a dilemma. 

 

Were I to advise, I'd say to the faithful copyists, don't worry about hollowness; be a bit more Buddhist about how one views the idea and worry a bit less about what T. S. Eliot might say [e]. And to those who wish to jazz or punk things up a little even at the risk of bastardising the original, I'd say knock yourselves out; what is corruption and debasement to one man is the laughter of genius to another.     

 

 

V.  

 

"I've never totally understood the appeal of Northern Soul" [214]; no, me neither - so let's skip this section and abandon the faith ... If Reynolds is right to say that the logic of redemption is what defines this subculture, then let me just remind readers that, actually, you can never buy back the past. 

 

As for the post-punk mod revival of the late 1970s - wasn't impressed then, and I'm not interested now. Admittedly, The Jam made some great singles, but Paul Weller's a prick and the band essentially appealed, as Reynolds says, "to British kids who liked punk's high-energy sound but didn't care for either the yobbish element or the art-school theory-and-politics contingent" [224]. 

 

Ultimately, the new mods only contributed to the cultural stagnation; a "betrayal of the original principles of modernism, which involved being into the latest, coolest thing" [229] and not dressing up "in the glad rags of a secondhand subculture" and listening to "copies of yesterday's sounds" [229].      

 

   

VI. 

 

Rave culture: NMCoT. At all. 

 

But I'm sure my old friend Kirk Field [f] would agree with this:

 

"In its early years, 1988 to 1993, rave was like a flash flood-engorged river bursting its banks and scattering off foaming side-streams in a dozen directions. The era's sense of runaway momentum was stoked by the energy flash of Ecstasy and amphetamine." [234]   

 

But would he, I'd be interested to know, also agree with this, now that he makes a living from rave nostalgia:

 

"By the mid-nineties, though, rave's engine of drug/music synergy was sputtering; the participants had hurtled down the road of excess at top speed only to crash into various aesthetic and spiritual dead ends. Once so future-focused, ravers began to look back wistfully. 

      Like everyone else who got swept up in the collective rush, I never dreamed that the culture would ever slow down, let alone succumb to retrospection." [234] 

       

Old skool: it's always been a slightly irritating term; "a shorthand for notions of origins and roots [...] used by epigones [...] who believe that the present is less distinguished than the illustrious past. [...] People who [...] often seem to believe that things could be righted if only the ignorant and insufficiently reverent new generation [...] would let itself be schooled by wiser elders." [235]

 

Well said, that man! Surely, the only thing worse than someone identifying as old skool is someone insisting that we keep it real ...

 

Of course, we're all prone to a touch of nostalgia; Reynolds admits to being "highly susceptible" [239] himself. Which is why, perhaps, he suddenly offers the mnemonic muse defence: "Nostalgia [...] can be creative, even subversive [...] the past can be used to critique what's absent in the present" [239] - an idea that takes us into chapter 8 ...

 

 

VII. 

 

"There is a paradox right at the heart of punk: this most revolutionary movement in rock history was actualy born from reactionary impulses. Punk opposed iself to progress. Musically, it rejected the sixties idea of progression and maturity that had led to prog rock and to other sophisticated seventies sounds. A concerted effort to turn back the clock to rock's teenage past [...] punk rock also rejected the notion of progress in a broader philosophical sense. Driven by an apocalyptic appetite for destruction and collapse, its vision was literally hope-less." [240]

 

I might phrase the above passage slightly differently at certain points, but I would basically agree that this provides an insightful reading of the slogan no future. The rejection of progress as an ideal is, of course, central to Torpedo the Ark as well: it's a secularised religious fantasy, born of what Nietzsche terms enfeebled optimism. Life is not getting better, humanity is not moving toward some predetermined higher goal, and Sgt. Pepper's is not superior to Elvis Presley.    

 

Was punk the "ultimate time-warp cult" [257]? Again, that's debatable. But let's agree that even if it started out as such it quickly escalated into a revolution: 

 

"Musical influences from outside rock 'n' roll, as well as non-musical catalysts from the worlds of politics, art theory and avant-garde fashion, entered the picture. Everything came together in a surge of energy, and then, Big Bang-like, exploded outwards into new galaxies of sound and subculture." [258] [g] 

 

That's the key: punk was never a unified musical movement; it was an Event or, as Reynolds metaphorically implies, a singularity. Although, strangely, the post-punk universe saw "revivals of every kind" [262] and a "retreat to established forms" [262]; it's hard living in the chaotic period immediately after a Big Bang - much safer to retreat to a prior time [h].   

 

 

VIII. 

 

Billy Childish and Stuckism: I'm not convinced and I'm certainly not on a quest for authenticity. 

 

But interesting that Reynolds should conceive of it as a form of love; fidelity to a golden past that one either remembers or imagines (albeit a form of love that can quickly become obsessive and turn rotten). 

 

 

IX. 

 

Chapter 9 - the never-ending fifties revival; not sure that's a topic that warrants a whole chapter (any more than Childish warranted an entire section at the end of chapter 8), but let's take a look ...

 

Nice idea that glam rock "musically harked back to the fifties without replicating it" [291] - perhaps that's why I loved it so as a ten-year-old (and later loved punk) [i]. 

 

And I'm pleased to see that, despite everything, Reynolds has the courage and integrity to admit that "the glam era's most creative reinventions of rock 'n' roll came from Gary Glitter [...] It was a genuinely new sound achieved by communing with the decade's lost spirit" [292].

 

I think Glitter's writing out of pop history is absurd, quite frankly - and hypocritical. And I agree entirely with what Reynold says here:

 

"Glitterbeat's atavistic-futuristic brutalism sounded totally seventies. If the singer had been a little less camp and a lot younger and scrawnier-looking, songs like 'I'm the Leader of the Gang' could have been a proto-punk sound for early-seventies juvenile delinquents [...]" [292] [j]   

 

And then there's The Cramps ... "a fusion of non-mainstream rock 'n' roll and pulp fiction [...] into a cult of adolescence" [297]. 

 

I can't say I was a big fan, but I know a girl who was and those psychobillies who "fixated on the moment when rock 'n' roll's jungle rhythm and voodoo frenzy was seen as ungodly and subversive" [298] are alright by me [k].   

 

Reynolds concludes the chapter on a hauntological note ...

 

"From the early eighties on, rock 'n' roll recurred only as a ghostly signifier detached from any real-world referents. Like a spook, it moved through the world without affecting it, lingered as a faintly disquieting trace of what-once-was." [307]

 

One might interrogate the above by asking what constitutes a non-ghostly signifier and a real-world referent for Reynolds and what is the nature of their relationship - but as this part of the post is already far longer than I would wish, probably best we leave such questions for another day. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] It amazes me that a young woman would choose to dress like a villager in Bangladesh when she could look as if she had just arrived from Moon Base Alpha. For my take on space age fashion, see my post on futuristic fashion with reference to the sci-fi mini-skirt: click here. 

      Interestingly, Reynolds also seems smitten with such designs invented for a world that hasn't yet arrived, though one might have imagined he'd approve of the authenticity of clothes made in Asia, but no, he prefers ultra-modernism to retro-shit and the Biba aesthetic.      

 

[b] Reynolds wrote this in defence of chavs earlier in Retromania: 

      "In the UK, almost the only people who remain immune to the romance of the antiquated are the 'chavs', a derogatory term for working-class whites who identify with black American style and music at its most flashy and materialistic. Although chav-haters complain about their lack of taste and vulgarity [...] the subtext of the animosity is the chav's un-English lack of interest in old stuff: antiques, heritage, costume drama." [24] 

 

[c] Obviously, I'm referencing Elvis's version of the Carl Perkins song 'Blue Suede Shoes', the opening track from Elvis Presley (RCA Victor, 1956) and later released as a single: click here.   

 

[d] According to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, the key thing is not the return of the Same or the identical, but rather the repetition of difference itself. It's false to think we remain the same person from one moment to the next or that the phrase 'same time, same place' is meaningful. The future, my friend, is not merely blowing in the wind, it actively ruptures the circularity of habit (the present) and the depths of memory (the past) allowing for newness to emerge.  

      See Deleuze writing in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), trans. Hugh Tomlinson (The Athlone Press, 1983) and/or Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994).  

 

[e] In Buddhism the idea of emptiness (Śūnyatā) is a central, liberating truth about the nature of reality and understanding the hollowness of self is an important practice. For the poet T. S. Eliot, of course, hollowness implies spiritual and emotional deadness; hollow individuals lack substance, purpose, authenticity, and the ability to act in a morally meaningful manner.    

 

[f] Kirk Field is a dance culture devotee, promoter, travel agent, and writer; see his best-selling book Rave New World (Nine Eight Books, 2023). I knew him in a previous life when he was a punk rocker (and still, to this day, greatly admire his work as vocalist and lyricist with Initial Vision).   

 

[g] As Reynolds concedes: "Arguably, the non-sonic aspects of punk were more crucial in terms of generating all these 'futures' than the music itself ..." [258] - that must slightly pain him to admit as a music lover and music critic first and foremost.  

 

[h] I understand that this may not make any conceptual sense to a scientist for whom there is no before the Big Bang - but we're discussing pop history here, not physics. 

 

[i] See the post 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' (24 July 2018): click here.  

  

[j] In fact, Glitter was later adopted by the punks as one of their own, many of whom, like me, remembered him fondly from their childhood.   

[k] Reynolds provides an excellent footnote on the punk/rockabilly connection on pp. 303-306, rightly arguing that rockabilly remained a "submerged but crucial component" [303] of punk, repeatedly rising to the surface. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read here. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read here. 

 

Parts 4 and 5 of the post will be published shortly.