Back to the Future

Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.

 According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article,  I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.

 All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.

When Logic And Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep -- if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching -- need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

Thomas Pynchon Vineland

Gonna Be All The Rage In Those Fashionable Pages

Desecration Acts, Continued

Part Two: Highway 61 Revisited as an Emergency Evacuation Route

New York City's a good "working musician" kind of town...if you know how to hustle, you can always find a gig. Such was the case with the members of Shockabilly. As the world would come to know them, Shockabilly consisted of guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, bassist Mark Kramer, and drummer David Licht -- all three of whom had played in differing capacities throughout the eclectic and more "avant" quarters of the city's music scene. The band had originally been started by Chabourne and had a revolving personnel (including at various times John Zorn and cellist Tom Cora) for a few years before finally simmering down into a trio. The group's formerly diverse set had by that point settled into that of "covers" act -- a lounge act whose repertoire most involved running the Nuggets songbook through the shredder. "Psychotic Reaction," "Eight Miles High," "Purple Haze" -- it was all fair game. Eugene brought the amplified garden rake to up the noise factor, while Kramer brought along some tape machines that allowed him to punch up random snippets and "samples" culled from the detritus of the media landscape.

The trio had a nice run out of it for a while, even landing a couple EPs out of it, mulchifying a number of "classics" and having a long and gleefully noisy romp on the grave of the Age of Aquarius. When the opportunity arose to record a full-length album, however, it seems the band decided that the schtick might wear a little thin over the duration of a long-player, and decided to augment the outings with a larger share of their own original tunes. The result was a pair of albums -- Vietnam and Heaven (1984 and 1985, respectively) -- that amounted to a dark, surreal, and often bleak and nightmarish plunge into the country's recent history. Popping up in the middle of the "Reagan Years," some of the songs sounded less like a cry of protest than a resigned and bitter croak drifting up from the bottom of a well.






YYes, there was a new round of hippie-era favorites being lined along the trenches for a hearty mowing-down. "Born on the Bayou,""Instant Karma,""Lucifer Sam,""Life's a Gas," et al make an appearance, but they only served to thread the narrative like recurring brown-acid flashbacks, mere bric-a-brac adorning a revisitation of the American Dream -- a waking dream now strewn with shrieks and howls from monster movies, the babble of TV commercials and political speeches, the aforementioned croak, and the rumble of cognitive dissonances bubbling up through the socio-economic substrata. In the end it amounted to scattered scenes from a road movie, one where the journey's a scrambling flight from an impending apocalypse. You pile all your belongings and essentials into your car and getting the hell out of the city, away from the vulnerable coast…punching across the FM spectrum for some driving music, only to find a selection of "oldies" that now sound mockingly confident and alien to your ears…all of which is overlaid by news reports and howls of the damned bleeding through the transmissions and following you as you drive inland, as you try to get as far from it all as you can in search of refuge…driving into the landlocked depths of the country, away and into the heartland, the sounds of a nation's recent cultural history folding back on itself, swallowing its own tail, chasing you -- a reprise of John Lee Hooker protesting "(I Don't Wanna Go To) Vietnam," Charles Manson ranting from prison that he's "your lost son, America," and beatnik poet and former Fugs frontman Ed Sanders stepping in to offer a plaintive critique of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Eventually the signal fades into static as you approach your destination, which turns out to be a wasteland littered with missile silos and long-abandoned gas stations.

Either that, or the the two albums can be listened to as some sort of evil, bipolar, quarrelsome conjoined twin for Springsteen's Nebraska. You be the judge.




Within a couple of years, the nostalgia industry had stepped to reclaim the 1960s. Some would claim that this revival involved looking back to the decade's idealism, but mostly – some argued– it mostly just amounted to the "Baby-Boomer" generation selling its own past back to itself. Amidst it all, the Grateful Dead experienced a huge resurgence in popularity, their audiences swelled by the ranks of a new generation of fans who followed the band around on tour. The Dead lyric what became something of a recurrent slogan in the years that followed. That slogan eventually becoming the title of a gloating TV special in which Rolling Stone magazine took a gloating 20-year anniversary rewind on its own history..."What a long, strange trip it's been."

To which any number of people probably wanted to reply: "Motherfucker, you don't even know the half of it."

[   <<<   Part One   ]               [   Part Three   >>>  ]

Adams vs. Roses: Different Kinds of Retromania

On the surface of it, She Bangs the Drums by The Stone Roses and Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams are strikingly similar records. Both opt for a sort of ecstatic sun-worship aesthetic. Both draw on the guitar revivalist culture of the late eighties, standout early examples of what Simon is about to classify definitively as retromania. Both have acquired "anthem" status over the last 20-25 years (though in very different contexts). Both are, let's face it, very good, if not great pieces of music.

Classicism is of course the unifying thread. The Stone Roses were traditionalists far more often than they were acid-house-loving modernists, and nowhere is this more apparent than on She Bangs ..., at least on a strictly formal level. The snare drums are histrionic and drenched in reverb, the basslines treble-heavy, the guitars chunky and onanistic.

In fact, remove Ian Brown's vocal line from the equation, and this is, like Summer of '69, an almost G'n'R-style Californian rock party tune: Bill and Ted soundtrack fodder. Listen to the guitar parts in the respective tunes, to the almost identical mixture of Byrdsian jangle and vigorous melodic riffs.

Both She Bangs ... and Summer of '69 are songs of escapism. One pertinent reaction to the miseries of Reaganite and Thatcherite rule was to depart from earlier traditions of protest and critique and posit a fantasy world of endless summer and Dionysian moments. In Summer of '69, the social-critical mode of Springsteen is briefly invoked:

Me and some guys from school
Had a band and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit and Jody got married
I shoulda known we'd never get far

But this is undercut by a sense of nostalgia and conservative pessimism that is even more extreme than that of, say, Bon Jovi's Springsteen-lite Livin' on a Prayer. Aint no use in complaining, says Adams, with tragic pathos.

Summer of '69 may attain to incredible lyrical heights in its key verse:

Standing on your mama's porch
You told me it would last forever
Oh the way you held my hand
I knew that it was now or never
Those were the best days of my life

But overall it is a profoundly hopeless record, a record that both musically and lyrically succeeds in completely burying the energies of a past epoch (the sixties) by perfecting its form and refusing to go anywhere with it. No wonder the hypnagogic pop contingent finds solace in fetishizing this sort of MTV-era romantic-melancholia.

She Bangs ... is equally in thrall to the past. However, its variety of retromania differs crucially from that of Summer of '69. Here tradition is treated with exuberance and even iconoclasm, a fact that is underlined by some startlingly eloquent lyrics:

I can feel the earth begin to move
I hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day
I hear my song begin to say
Kiss me where the sun don't shine
The past was yours
But the future's mine

There is a sense here of the past being positively appropriated. What must not be lost in the discussions about retromania is the fact that certain kinds of backward-looking music over the past three decades have attempted to drag the past into the future, by using classic templates as a means of cultural empowerment. If we need to be clear that this sort of "Britpop" ultimately ended in farce, we also need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water by privileging only radical futurism (which is actually only really possible at certain brief moments in the development of an art form).

For me, She Bangs the Drums embodies a spirit of newness and affirmation, a Motown-esque hymn to youth and the future. If Oasis and others would ultimately marry this affirmative impulse to Thatcherism and nostalgia, The Stone Roses showed that progressions of form could be nuanced and joyous - meaningful steps forward in a difficult period - and that this need not necessarily contradict an ethos of collectivism and subversion. Unlike Summer of '69, She Bangs the Drums was an emphatically hopeful tune of 1989, because it spoke to a living alternative community in a powerful way about the possibility of change.