Simon Reynolds: Retromania
(Faber and Faber, 2011)
Note that page numbers given in the text refer to the 2012 edition of Retromania.
Part 1 of this post can be accessed by clicking here.
I.
It's telling that Reynolds still thinks the crucial element of pop is the music; that all the rest is just ephemera - disappointing that he should still posit such a clear distinction between the sound and the look.
Nevertheless, I share his horror of rock and pop museums and probably wouldn't visit one (unless, I suppose, it were in the name of research) and I'm pleased to see him quote Julie Burchill's line about anything that can fit into rock's rich tapestry (i.e., be conveniently and seamlessly sewn into the fabric of history) is dead at heart.
This includes pretty much every genre, every band, every record, but I'm happy that Reynolds chooses to give a special mention to the Clash's London Calling (1979), which "re-rooted punk in the riches of rock 'n' roll and Americana, and was duly anointed Greatest Album of the Eighties by Rolling Stone" [10] - the kind of album your older sister buys you for Christmas [a].
Apparently, "Theodore Adorno was the first to point out the similarity of the words 'museum' and mausoleum'" [11]. It's a phonetic resemblance rather than an etymological link, of course, but true to note that the former too is a final resting place for objects that have passed on and are now similar to "medieval sacred relics [... which] elicit morbid awe rather than scholarly respect" [13].
I understand why people defend museums and public collections of work, or why some people think it crucial to document, commemorate, archive, preserve and restore, etc. But, like Reynolds, "there's a part of me that will always thrill to, and agree with, the Futurist manifestos" [21]. Marinetti called on us to flood the museums, just as, many years later, Malcolm McLaren would insist that history is for pissing on.
In sum, we can all agree that there's been a massive cultural shift; from the modernist obsession with making new and leaping into the future, to our current preoccupation with heritage and the protecting of things deemed to have historic value. The problem is: "History must have a dustbin, or History will be a dustbin, a gigantic, sprawling garbage heap." [27] [b]
II.
Generally speaking, like Reynolds, I avoid band reunions. For
as he notes, they are usually a "recipe for disappointment" [39]. I saw the Sex Pistols play Finsbury Park in the summer of 1996 at a
friend's invitation (and insistence) and wasn't impressed.
As for rock 're-enactments' ... What's the point: "It seems obvious
that the simulation of 'being there' fails on every level: you know
there's no real danger [...] you know what the outcome is going to be"
[51].
Having said that, however, Reynolds offers a fascinating and strong defence of the
latter, which ultimately relies upon what Derrida terms the myth (or metaphysics) of presence and a dash of what Walter Benjamin describes as an artwork's aura:
"Although they've emerged out of the art world rather than from
rock culture itself, rock re-enactments resonate with a buried hunger
within the music scene for a spasm like punk or rave that would turn the
world upside down. On the face of it, re-enactments seem just to feed
into a backwards-looking culture that's taking us ever-further from the
conditions in which such total transformations and singular disruptions
were possible. But perhaps the artists are onto something when they talk
about failure as the goal: a goad to the audience, simultaneously stirring up and frustrating the longing for the Event." [53-54]
"Re-enactment art is at once an extension of and an inversion of performance art, which is event-based by definition. Performance art is all about the here and now. Its components include the bodily presence of the artists, a physical location and its duration [...] Re-enactment is like a spectral form of performance art: what the viewer witnesses never quite achieves full presence or present-ness." [54]
In other words, authenticity is tangible whilst the ghostly is never quite the real deal (no matter how haunting it may be).
III.
I mentioned YouTube in passing in part one of this post and Reynolds devotes a whole chapter to the question of music and memory (Ch. 2: Total Recall), describing the online video sharing platform as an "indiscriminate chaos of amateur cultural salvage" [56]. That would make a nice tagline, but I'm not sure Google would go for it.
Reynolds continues:
"YouTube's ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection is a prime example of the crisis of overdocumentation triggered by digital technology [...] the astronomic expansion of humanity's resources of memory." [56]
Nietzsche wouldn't like it - innocence and becoming are tied to forgetfulness, not memory - and Heidegger wouldn't like it; we remain unfree so long as we remain enframed by the essence of technology, whether we spend hours on YouTube or not.
Because we have instant access to the past, "the presence of the past in our lives has increased immeasurably and insidiously" [57]. And this erosion of the here and now is probably not great for our well-being: we become unable to live in the moment; incapable of focusing on work, or fully immersing ourselves even in the things we enjoy:
"Attention-deficit disorder is the name of this condition, but like so many ailments and dysfunctions under late capitalism, the source of the disorder is not internal to the sufferer, nor his or her fault; it's caused by the environment, in this case the datascape." [73]
Amusingly, Reynolds confesses that he's now nostalgic for an era of boredom contra this time of total distraction and a million-and-one possibilities; "a cultural economy of dearth and delay" [74] and an experience of tedium so intense "it was almost spiritual" [74]. Technology has even robbed us of this.
IV.
"This is one of the big questions of our era: can culture survive in conditions of limitlessness?" [77]
The short answer is: it depends on what Nietzsche terms the plastic power of a people; i.e., their capacity to incorporate the past and the foreign and to balance an overwhelming amount of knowledge with the need for action and forgetting. A strong, healthy culture possesses high plastic power and is able to use history for life rather than allowing the past to become the gravedigger of the present [c].
Unfortunately, I'm not sure ours is a strong, healthy culture. But maybe my post-Nietzschean pessimism and Reynolds's cultural anxiety will prove mistaken ...
For maybe the digital environment is that rhizomatic utopia that Deleuze and Guattari term a plane of immanence; i.e., a non-hierarchical virtual field of pure connectivity, where all concepts and forms emerge through, and are defined by, their speed, movement, and intensity.
Or, to put it another way, maybe the internet is an open, unmediated, and self-organising space that exists without fixed structures or transcendent rules, making it a fantastic place for creating new possibilities.
But then again, maybe not: maybe it's a kind of hell to which we are damned for all eternity.
V.
Chapter 3 of Retromania is on record collecting and provides a fascinating psycho-philosophical insight into the phenomenon, with references to all the usual suspects - Freud, Benjamin, Baudrillard, et al.
Having said that, one can't help wondering at times if Retromania might have benefitted from a ruthless edit; I'm sure I'm not the only reader to find it a bit meandering at times. I understand it's a work of critically-informed journalism and not an academic text, but, even so, a sharper analytic focus would've been nice [d].
Anyway, as someone who doesn't collect records, has never downloaded or file shared music, and doesn't own an iPod or an MP3 player, this chapter doesn't particularly interest. Though I do like this observation:
"First music was reified, turned into a thing (vinyl records, analogue tapes) you could buy, store, keep under your own persona; control. Then music was 'liquified', turned into data that could be streamed, carried anywhere, transferred between different devices." [122]
Should we, then, demand the return of objects? As an objectophile and object-oriented philosopher, readers will probably be able to guess my answer to this.
VI.
Chapter 4 is on the rise of the curator - and that does excite my interest.
For, in a sense, I feel myself to be the curator of Torpedo the Ark; someone who doesn't merely connect ideas and images, but reimagines and recontextualises them; someone who - most importantly - cares as well as creates (etymologically, the word curate comes from the Latin cura, meaning to care or safeguard, as Reynolds rightly reminds us).
Moving on, here's another line that seems indisputably true:
"Once, rock 'n' roll was a commentary on adolescent experience; over time, rock itself became that experience, overlapping with it and at time substituting for it entirely." [135]
I get the impression Reynolds feels that this results in ersatz emotion and cliché; "songs aren't torn from the soul so much as lovingly pieced together" [139]. But is he really defending the "rock ethos of blustery authenticity" [139] here ...?
It certainly feels like it when he takes a pop at The Darkness and describes their amusing take on metal as malignant; "a tumour of not-really-meaning-it that eroded any actual power that metal still possessed" [140]. That's more than a bit harsh or histrionic; to write of the cancer of irony that has "metastasised its way through pop culture" [140] has unpleasant echoes of Nazi rhetoric [e].
Again, one is obliged to ask: is it really so terrible if a band assembles their identity "within a kind of economy of influences" [141], rather than "drawing from deep within their personal life" [141]? I don't think so. Art doesn't have to be inhuman, but there's always an impersonal element to it otherwise its just an emotional expression of the individual and a washing of dirty laundry in public.
And, further more, reference is not always deference; nor indeed is citation merely a "form of showing off or connoisseurial conceit" [141]. It can be. But it doesn't have to be. For the most part, it's an acknowledgement of the fact that Romantic ideals of originality, authenticity, and genius are just that and all creation takes place within an intertextual context. To some extent, we are all monsters made from multiple parts and dead tissue and even the good doctor Frankenstein himself was basically a Promethean plagiarist playing God.
VII.
I mentioned earlier - a couple of times I think - the importance of forgetting. And so I'm pleased to see Reynolds write this:
"Maybe we need to forget. Maybe forgetting is as essential for a culture as it is existentially and emotionally necessary for individuals." [159]
But there's not much chance of forgetting in the age of the cathedralesque box set ... in which the past is repackaged and remastered and made Whole; "the box set is where an old enthusiasm goes to die: a band or genre you loved frozen into an indigestible chunk [...] bloated with out-takes [... and] impossible to listen to all the way through" [161] [f].
VIII.
Apparently, Japan is not only the land of the rising sun, but also the empire of retro:
"No other country on Earth [...] has dedicated itself so intensively to archiving the annals of Western popular, semi-popular and downright unpopular music. And no other music-producing nation has blurred the border more thoroughly between creation and curation." [162]
And that gives me yet another reason to love Japan apart from the cherry blossom, the literature, the beauty of the women, and the fact that - as noted by Barthes - it's a place in which symbols and signs play freely rather than begging to be interpreted or seeking to impose meaning.
The thing with the Japanese fans is they have learnt not only the first rule of punk - do it yourself - but the equally important (but often forgotten) second rule - do it properly - and Reynolds rightly notes that what is striking about the Japanese take on Western pop forms is the fact they get everything so spot on thanks to "the unstinting attention to stylistic detail" [164].
The Japanese don't produce cheap copies, but perfect simulations; more real than the real thing and "liberated from the anchors of geography and history" [170] - it's the smile without the cat! I can't say I'm a fan of Shibuya-kei, but I certainly don't feel its practitioners and adherents are postmodern imperialists "whose fundamental mode of operation is the reprocessing of culture" [170] and who undermine the vitality and expressive power of genuine musical genres such as reggae, rap, and folk.
"Once music is a reflection of esoteric knowledge rather than expressive urgency, its value is easily voided." [170]
That is quite a claim. But whilst it's far from being merely an empty assertion - Reynolds has already assembled a good deal of evidence to support it - I'm still not entirely convinced by what remains ultimately a subjective claim and turning Japanese is not the worst fate that might befall a people.
IX.
Chapter 5 closes on quite a melancholy note:
"When I look back at the development of pop and rock during my lifetime [...] what perplexes me is the slow but steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original [...] from the mid-eighties onwards, gradually but with increasing momentum, that changed into an impulse to create something very much heard before, and moreover to do it immaculately, accurate in every last detail ..." [176]
This is what Reynolds means by the phrase turning Japanese - but as I say above, that's only an issue if you wish to continue valuing the ideals of originality; an ideal which, even in the West, was a relatively recent invention (as Reynolds well knows) [g].
"In some ways, pop music could be said to have held out against the onset of postmodernism the longest [...] the first decade of the twenty-first century is truly when the tide decisively turned Japanese. The cycles of recycling have a senseless quality, uncoupled from History [h] or a social reality beyond music [...] culture can be played for laughs [...] But it's the kind of slightly hysterical mirth that could easily turn to tears." [179]
Hopefully, Mr Reynolds can dry his eyes in time for Part Two of Retromania - 'Then' - which I will discuss in part 3 of this post ...
Notes
[a] The history of the Clash can be bookended by two events: signing to CBS in January 1977 and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2003. They were always the only band that mattered - to the music industry!
Reynold's writes of the band's meek compliance and recalls seeing Mick Jones going up on stage at the award ceremony and looking like a "stoop-shouldered clerk shuffling to the podium to receive his retirement gift for forty-five years' loyal service to the firm" [10]. Ouch!
[b] Reynolds later expands on this line of thought: "History is a form of editing reality; for a historical account to work it requires a filter, otherwise the sheer sludge of information silts up the narrative flow." [28]
[c] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the uses and disadvantages of history for life', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57-123.
[d] Of course, it could be argued that the sprawling, over-documented, and often repetitive nature of the book is itself an ironic reflection of the indiscriminate chaos of the digital era that Reynold's describes.
[e] Of course, I'm not suggesting Reynolds is a crypto-fascist, but, at the time of writing Retromania, he does display a conservative (almost reactionary) desire for affective realness and is clearly contemptuous of what Bob Harris famously called mock rock (with reference to the New York Dolls) in 1973. He also cites Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) and revives that hoary old dichotomy of culture versus civilisation (see page 170).
Ultimately, his rhetoric in Retromania is histrionic - and that's his term - because he treats the end of musical innovation as a cultural catastrophe and defends the idea that a people must move forward into the future - must progress - in order to remain healthy.
I'm told by someone who knows, that Reynolds explicitly frames his 2024 book Futuromania as a corrective to the cultural pessimism of Retromania and posits the idea that if you only find new ears with which to listen you can hear tomorrow's music today.
[f] Of course, box sets aren't meant to be listened to; they are made for "ownership and display, as testaments to elevated taste and knowledge" [161] and monuments to the past.
[g] Traditionally, there was no shame in copying and in fact copying the great masters was seen as crucial to the creative process. The modern concept of
originality emerged primarily during the late 18th century, driven by the Romantic movement which championed individual genius and self-expression over imitation.
What surprises me is that Reynolds knows this, but still can't quite get over his "old modernist-minded post-punk" [173] prejudice - still remains a Romantic at heart who thinks it a sign of moral weakness or vital deficiency to not want to resist influence and produce original work; to find their own voice. "Not only has the anxiety of influence faded away," write Reynolds, "so has sense of shame about being derivative." [178]
[h] Note the capitalisation of the term history - how very Hegelian! For most of us, history is simply a common noun referring to a chronological record of random events. But those who speak of History imagine the rational unfolding of Geist toward a specific goal.
Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here.
