K-Punk
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luka
Well-known member
I'm rereading the slow cancellation of the future.
Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st Century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next seventeen years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st Century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were incarcerated in their roadside café.
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st Century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next seventeen years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st Century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were incarcerated in their roadside café.
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
luka
Well-known member
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.
Consider the fate of the concept of ‘futuristic’ music. The ‘futuristic’ in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s.
Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk? If Kraftwerk’s music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.
Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality. When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys’ 2005 single ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, I genuinely believed that it was some lost artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video – the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes – had been assembled to give the impression that this was a performance on BBC2’s ‘serious rock show’ The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Consider the fate of the concept of ‘futuristic’ music. The ‘futuristic’ in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s.
Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk? If Kraftwerk’s music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.
Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality. When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys’ 2005 single ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, I genuinely believed that it was some lost artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video – the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes – had been assembled to give the impression that this was a performance on BBC2’s ‘serious rock show’ The Old Grey Whistle Test.
luka
Well-known member
but it's probably wrong to focus too closely on all the unhygienic detail. There's a lot in the piece which feels right and is uncanny and troubling.
I read it in conversation with Gus and Stan because they take the world described in the piece for granted and celebrate it.
Mark talks about how Sapphire and Steel couldn't be made today because there's no room for the individual author-auteur. Entertainment is made by focus group and by imagining an amorphous market-shaped man-woman who must be catered to.
I read it in conversation with Gus and Stan because they take the world described in the piece for granted and celebrate it.
Mark talks about how Sapphire and Steel couldn't be made today because there's no room for the individual author-auteur. Entertainment is made by focus group and by imagining an amorphous market-shaped man-woman who must be catered to.
luka
Well-known member
Which makes me think of Stan's rhetoric, which I like and I find illuminating in all sorts of ways
Imagine some kind of mechanical satellite drifting through space, and there are several dozen thrusters around its perimeter-sphere. Each one, individually, moves in a unique direction, quality, and exerts a certain force, quantity. And yet, these thrusters can be harmoniously programmed to steer the satellite - by having many adjacent thrusters activate simultaneously, their averaged direction is where the satellite moves. By activating a thruster that is aimed against that average direction, we can program for resistance of deceleration.
Imagine some kind of mechanical satellite drifting through space, and there are several dozen thrusters around its perimeter-sphere. Each one, individually, moves in a unique direction, quality, and exerts a certain force, quantity. And yet, these thrusters can be harmoniously programmed to steer the satellite - by having many adjacent thrusters activate simultaneously, their averaged direction is where the satellite moves. By activating a thruster that is aimed against that average direction, we can program for resistance of deceleration.
luka
Well-known member
We talk about these things here among other places
audible seams in deliberate reaction to the Xanax Zone
There's a real flatness about this kind of music that reminds of HMGs theory about anti depressants cutting off the human soul from its highs and low and leaving it with a steady pulse in the middle regions Kind of unnerving hollowness to it too Do you mean in the sound of it? The digital...
dissensus.com
craner
Beast of Burden
It made me think of him. I was certainly thinking of him when I talked about certain styles of writing dating, Penman as well.
craner
Beast of Burden
Futuristic has become a redundant concept because we are in the future. We tipped over into the realms of science fiction and screen dystopia in the very recent past. You can't really pinpoint a moment it happened, but the last 5 years have felt qualitatively different to what came before. Everybody knows it, and it's unsettling and traumatic. You can see it very clearly when you look at the lifestyles on Selling Sunset.
luka
Well-known member
Something similar happened in the eighties.
A transformation of the human soul. Gestating through the 80s. A time of goodbyes. Goodbye human world. Where we are going you won't be able to follow. Goodbye those fond little emotions, those sweetnesses and sadnesses we enjoyed, the fragility of all those things, goodbye, the human cannot follow us here
A transformation of the human soul. Gestating through the 80s. A time of goodbyes. Goodbye human world. Where we are going you won't be able to follow. Goodbye those fond little emotions, those sweetnesses and sadnesses we enjoyed, the fragility of all those things, goodbye, the human cannot follow us here
luka
Well-known member
the concept of the individual just about still holds up today which proves we haven't reached the omega point yet.
Spring. The primroses are out
and the worst has already happened.
The Threshold has been crossed. There
is no longer any Inside, any Out. No
Sanctuary, no Stronghold, no Escape
no Hiding Place.
Spring. The primroses are out
and the worst has already happened.
The Threshold has been crossed. There
is no longer any Inside, any Out. No
Sanctuary, no Stronghold, no Escape
no Hiding Place.
