KLF: zieners

None of this meant that music got worse. There were still great songs being written and great performances given. Recording became cheap, the ability to record music and reach an audience became more democratic, and access to the entire history of recorded music became easy. But the idea that there were major new continents of unexplored music slowly faded. The frontier had been colonised. We had discovered the edges of the territory.
Bill Drummond did not know this at the time. Despite machine-gunning the music industry at the point when its engines of creativity died, he did not imagine that he really was killing it. Correlation does not imply causation, after all. But regardless of what he thought he was doing, he was still the one man in the room whose actions were in sync with the wider picture.

As the band left the stage a voice declared over the PA: 'The KLF have left the music industry.' This wasn't intended as a statement of fact or premonition, but as a challenge to themselves.

John Higgs - The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds

De maanlanding en het idee van de toekomst

Lynn Barber in gesprek met J.G. Ballard voor Penthouse (1970) uit Extreme Metaphors, de zeer uitgebreide interviewbundel van Ballard (onlangs verschenen in paperback):

We're ahead of the clock, that's the whole point. It's like Buckminster Fuller, you know, saying that World War III is already over and we lost. People aren't interested in the future anymore. The greatest casualty of World War II, I think, was that the past ceased to have moral authority for people, the authority of precedent, tradition, one's father, social background, everything. That ended with World War II, and thank God. But what has happened in the twenty-five years since then is that the future has become a casualty too. One could say that the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority. No one thinks the future is going to be a better place- most people think it's going to be a worse place. 

Nieuwe ouderdom

Is this a problem? Well, kind of. Except that it's not about age, exactly, or some, simplistic “the old should retire with dignity and give way to the young” thing. That's not really the issue. It's not so much that the old guard of artists have necessarily redeemed themselves, or rediscovered their old powers, it's that the critical mood has changed. The iconoclastic scepticism of the punk generation gave way, in the conservative, nostalgic, Oasis-dominated 1990s to a reverence for wealth, prestige, superstardom, a longing for the old days of mega-mania, rather than interesting, diverse, locally sourced clusters of new music. This has gradually intensified, as a sense grows that the mainstream rock narrative has run its course, the smoke is clearing, and we can look back at the legends of yore with renewed biographical clarity, their often trite sayings and doings regarded with utter fascination, their present day activities reviewed with slavering, uncritical awe. 

David Stubbs - 'Rock Of Ages: Mick Jagger At 70 & The Rise Of Pop's Elders' in The Quietus. Mooi ambivalent artikel over het ouder worden van de klassieke rocksterren. Supersaai, de hele verzameling has-beens, maar fascinerend en vanzelfsprekend met het volste recht om door te spelen tot ze erbij neervallen. Aan de andere kant, Marc Bolan in 2013, kortharig en grijs voor de miljoenste keer 'Get It On' spelend...flip that! Ook daar is ongetwijfeld een mythische dieptestructuur in te ontwaren, de tragedie dat het idool op tijd moet sterven om een eeuwige kracht te behouden (denk hierbij als relativering aan het bezoek van Odysseus aan Achilles in de onderwereld.)

 
Stubbs hint hier overigens herhaaldelijk naar de manier waarop ouderdom de afgelopen decennia is veranderd (opgeschoven). Nu dat toch wordt aangekaart bedenk ik me dat wij ouderdom als levensstijl compleet moeten heruitvinden. Maar hopelijk wel als iets anders dan de gerimpelde tiener.

De Rode Draad van 2013?

Uit het uitstekende interview met Boards of Canada in De:Bug:

Simon Reynolds strongly relies on you as the forefathers or originators of certain musical and theoretical concepts of the last ten years, like Hauntology or Hypnagogic Pop. You’re actually the starting point for one aspect of his Retromania concept – making music sound old, worn out, triggering memories etc. Those were things you did and talked about almost 20 years ago and have become the principles of many young producers. What are you thinking about that today?

Mike: That’s still absolutely a driving force in our work. It’s something we love doing, we can never run out of inspiration in this direction, because if you only pay attention to current music then you can’t help sounding pinned down to the fashion of today. But when you allow yourself to explore music from various eras in the past, you can find starting points that were never fully explored, like tangents that didn’t actually occur in the real history of music, and that’s really exciting to me. Especially in the face of so much current music that is becoming indistinguishable because all the producers are basically using the same tools.

Overproductie

Interessant om weer terug te lezen. Simon Reynolds in 1995 over het gevaar van muzikale overproductie. Gewoon een "voorspelling" die is uitgekomen (behalve die Ballardiaanse subsidie):

As a music journalist, I'm in the frontlines of what may be a crisis for the post-industrial West in the 21st Century: cultural overproduction. For it's not just music, it's the entire mediascape that (with the cable revolution, on-line, desk-top publishing etc) is afflicted by an excess of access. There's gonna be too many creators, not enough consumers.  I can imagine a future World Government doing something similar to what the European Community, faced by surplus 'food mountains', does when it subsidises farmers to leave their fields fallow, i.e.  pay people to be uncreative.
   
The punk ethos of anyone-can-do-it lives large in music, from lo-fi indie to home-made techno, and that's fine. But when you move from amateur music-making to putting out a record, you're staking a claim on people's time.  So my message to music-makers is: think hard before you put it on disc and out into the marketplace. And to music-lovers:: if you're lucky enough to get obsessed with something, go with flow, forget about the rest.  Music should be precious, not something you channel-surf through.

Fragmentatie op fragmentatie

Ik opende net voor het eerst de essaybundel Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses die ik al jaren vooral zocht vanwege Ian Penmans stuk over Bryan Ferry (uit zijn nooit voltooide biografie) en zag opeens het essay ‘Fear of the Future’ geschreven door David Stubbs. Het begint als volgt:

There’s currently a dissatisfaction with the apparent smallness and impotence of pop and rock, their seeming inability to offer any sort of crucial blow. When is the Big Thing due? Who’s going to Drop The Bomb? Now secretly, now openly, everyone’s got their ears cocked for this single happening, a future shock in rock, a sign that it’s tomorrow at last. Networks have been constructed nationally to ensure that anyone who wants to can have a pop. Local schemes, a proliferation of examples and icons have tempted a glut of self-expression. And with all the consequent, claustrophobic bustle, all this running-out, the near-blackening of the screen with honest effort, it’s impossible to make out the note of absolute difference, the note that will bring down the walls of Jericho. In spite of a sandstorm of pluralism, all the hard-won resources at our disposal, new space in the media, historical legacy, it seems rather a long while since anything actually ‘happened’, as seemed to be promised. Early-warning systems are primed and alert, but a watched kettle had failed to boil. Or has all the water merely vaporized, into a fog a steam?

Jaar van schrijven: 1987. Twee gedachten dringen zich meteen op: een jaar later moet acid house als een bom zijn ingeslagen (zoals ik het mijzelf kan herinneren, sloop het meer mijn 16-jarige perceptie binnen)…en: er zijn dus meer van dit soort windstille periodes. Stubbs heeft het over hoe punk een fragmentatie van het poplandschap heeft veroorzaakt en daar is nu een technologische fragmentatie over heen gegaan. Het lijkt mij evident dat dit proces onomkeerbaar is. Zo niet, staat ons iets fantastisch te wachten.

Ondertussen in 1992

Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway? 

Mark Amerika, Avant-Pop Manifesto (1992)

Einde van Muziek?

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

 Glenn Branca, 'The End of Music' in New York Times, 24 november 2009

Kort maar krachtig essay dat de basis uittekent (alhoewel ik uiteindelijk iets minder negatief ben.) Branca's interview in The Quietus is ook de moeite waard. Zet me weer aan het denken over een soort bijproduct van retromania: de totale voorspelbaarheid van optredens. En waag het niet om dat kritisch te benaderen zoals The Knife tracht te doen. Alhoewel gelukkig niet iedereen zit vastgeroest in rockistische patronen: "...tonight it feels as if the Knife have pulled off something of a coup: a magic trick that retains its power long after the artifice has been exposed." (Killian Fox in The Guardian).* Steeds meer raak ik overtuigd dat er een voor en na Shaking The Habitual is.

* Zelf neig ik naar het idee dat het nog niet genoeg is. Een noodzakelijk gebaar, dat ongetwijfeld, maar nog steeds een gebaar in de conventionele structuur van ticketmasters (of hoe die afzetters ook mogen heten), organisators, "poptempels", etc. Ik verlang naar totaal vrije optredens...in een andere context, uniek.

Grote Plaat: de definitie

But instead the duo signed with Columbia, the most major of major labels, which Thomas Bangalter praised in the interview as “the first record company, the inventor of the 33 rpm record”.  Comparing the record business in its Seventies and Eighties heyday to Hollywood’s studio system, he sounded wistful for the era of  “sonic blockbusters” like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Off The Wall, albums that everybody heard or at least heard about.  “Pop culture is the monoculture,” he argued.  “Today the only monoculture is brands.” Using the marketing muscle of an entertainment conglomerate like Columbia/Sony, Random Access Memories  tries to swim against the historical tide of popular culture’s fragmentation into niche markets and micro-genres.

Simon Reynolds in een soort toevoeging bij zijn New York Times interview met Daft Punk. En dat is dus wat ik exact bedoel met een Grote Plaat.

Terwijl ik het interview las bedacht ik dat het meest radicale gebaar zou zijn om Random Access Memories, tegen de meningenstorm in, helemaal nooit te beluisteren...een gefantaseerde plaat, een eeuwige belofte.

De voor en tegens van muziektechnologie

No I can’t agree with technology or computers or software programs sucking life out of music. On the other hand, the computer – or I guess software – evolution has enabled a lot of musicians, a lot of people, to make music that otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Therefore a lot of people that shouldn’t be making music are now making music. I mean, that’s the downside. The upside is that you have a lot more creativity, a lot more ideas coming to the table. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m more interested in the positive and good ideas that come from technology as opposed to the people that aren’t talented or that have no skill just doing it to try to make money, or because they can. You have to take the bitter with the sweet, I guess.

Juan Atkins in South London Ordnance (via Factmag)

Dansen zonder ritme

But it is dub, and what's at work is the old dub trick of suggesting what's not there, what's been dispensed with. I imagine that, at some point in the future it will be possible to dance quickly and furiously to "World of Echo", once the rust-marks of the beat-grid have made a sufficiently inedible mark on the folk-memory, enabling the listener to refer to his ancient insticts to know what to do with his feet.

David Stubbs (1987) in heruitgave Arthur Russell - World of Echo