More on “Synthetic Nostalgia”

Escort’s Dan Balis answers a question from Nick Sylvester in a way that…well, read it first (I bolded the good part):

RC: How does your ‘memory of disco’ affect the disco you make? Do you knowingly exaggerate some elements while downplaying others, etc? What, if any, is the personal moment with disco each of you is attempting to recapture?

DB: Paraphrasing Barney Frank, I’m going to revert to my ethnic heritage by answering your question with a question: Can you be nostalgic about something you didn’t experience yourself?

…in a way that really syncs up well with that recent article I wrote, or should I say, syncs up well with an idea that maybe should have been teased out a bit more in that piece.  I called this idea, when it’s expressed in Hipstamatic-encoded digital photography, or through old photos on album covers that speak to us through a shared “old” aesthetic but not a shared memory, “synthetic nostalgia.”  It could equally be called (and has been called) “ersatz” nostalgia and “armchair” nostalgia.

The important thing is that this is a sort of nostalgia that doesn’t require the person (the nostalgee?) to have ever experienced the thing itself (and which therefore should maybe not be called nostalgia at all).  It’s a shared feeling not as much for the quality of the experience itself (a dicey area to get into; I’ll avoid it), but for the ways in which that experience is rendered and circulated.

In a section of the article that I wisely sliced off before submitting, I riffed for a paragraph on what it actually was that drew me to the Dum Dum Girls’ I Will Be cover. I didn’t know Dee Dee’s mom, had never “chilled” with her, wasn’t even born when that photo was taken.  But in lieu of remembering that room in the house I grew up in, or the way the woman still makes that face today–like Dee Dee might–I do something else.  I see the woman, but I see her bathed in the washed-out colors, with long, straight hair and a slightly agape expression.  I see the closet.  I focus in on the invisible formal infrastructure that makes up the photo.  That’s what I’m “nostalgic” for–not the representational content of the photograph, but, for lack of a better term, its style.

To answer Balis’s rhetorical question, then: yes, we can be nostalgic about something we haven’t ourselves experienced, but only to the limits that our language will let us speak about it.  He’s not remembering, as we know that word, as much as he’s accessing a shared store of memories.  Instead, what Balis is doing is borrowing from a psychic public domain that was seeded with the memories of those who were there for disco’s original moment (or what we’ve congealed that into), and which has grown or wilted as it passed through time and space, depending on how often its been refreshed, by whom, and with what aim.  Large portions of this psychic public domain have been fictionalized and romanticized (and thank god), and equally large portions of it have been visually indexed through photographs, which carry with them their own assumptions about truth.  Balis is situating himself toward this era with a sense of longing and reverence, and turning that passion into music.

In a similar way, when I look at the photo of Dee Dee’s mom on the cover of I Will Be, my mind creates an aggregate of my own family photo album (it helps that I’m also white, I grew up in the suburbs, that closet and haircut looks really familiar, my mom’s probably around the same age as Dee Dee’s), and it looks similar.  The photo and the person aren’t the same, but they’re both activated, I could say, within a similar genre of memories.

My own imagination, with its own storehouse of imagery, meets that photograph on a particular plane.  Not one of nostalgic reminiscence–that’s unique to the family–but one in which a technology’s generic imprint becomes saturated with cultural meaning.  I’m nostalgic for how the instant camera extended itself into Dee Dee’s mom’s bedroom and framed a section of mundane activity as fit for aesthetic contemplation.  And if I let it, it strikes me that this private photograph has left the realm of Dee Dee’s family’s shared memory, and the shoebox or photo album that contained it, and is now sitting in my living room–at the moment sharing space with a photomontage of Nick Lowe playing dress-up, and a realistic drawing of Marvin Gaye as a Greek god.  In private, that photo signifies a wealth of shared knowledge and culture and memories in unpredictable ways.  Circulating through my living room as the frontispiece for a flat musical commodity, it stands out as a striking tile in my floorbound taste mosaic.

But that’s not all.  I’m most nostalgic for the idea that this technological signature shows its age.  This is where Hipstamatic (and its clones), pre-distressed jeans, “old movie” filters on editing software, and any other ultramodern veneer-producer comes into play.  They take our mundane objects or creations and lend them a metaphysical space of engagement on their surface.  Even though we know this surface has been applied after the fact and not “earned,” we unconsciously react to it as much as the actual object (I haven’t thrown away my “non-aged” jeans, but they’re in a corner of my closet ready to reappear once their time comes again).  But enough about jeans, let’s get back to culture.  If publics are instantaneously created through the circulation of (musical, filmic, literary, televisual, etc) texts, then what sorts of assemblages are we creating through the way we react to the veneers of texts?  Generationally-defined ones?  Yes, but then what?  Texts inherently give us something to talk about and react to. What do veneers do?  Do they lock us into an idea of the past, making it a necessary piece of luggage for a trip to the future?  One thing’s clear: for Apple, Levi’s, and the guys who make the Hipstamatic app, veneers make lots of money by embedding the the psychic allure of age into commodities that are otherwise perennially shiny and new.  They’re smart, because like the music industry, they’re selling us frozen time.

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But music isn’t a digital photo, or a pair of jeans.  Musical inspiration and creation is a lot messier than veneers (though veneers are always an option)–a recorded song is always already not a thing, but a montage of tracks representing micro-performances that happened at different times and places–and there are regimes of value associated with the quality and fealty of reverence to one’s chosen past.  In a piece for the New Yorker, which Sylvester’s own piece was written in response to, Sasha Frere-Jones considers the implications of the closeness of bands such as Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the Budos Band, and Kings Go Forth to their obvious predecessors.  He ends the first section with this question:

Very few of these bands like the word “revival,” probably because it robs them of credit even before they take the stage. But how much of the past does one need to draw on before shifting categories from new to retro?

This last question is one that’s helped significantly guide much of music criticism since its inception, particularly over the past few decades.  “Retro” and “revival” have become bad words in music crit circles, which tend to privilege difference and newness.  Read ten record reviews at random: I bet that some form of these ideas are present in 7 of them.  In which “shaping influences into something new and exciting” is good, while too much dedication is a “retread” or “unimaginative” (from today’s lot, for instance: second sentence) I know this because it’s often a kneejerk reaction I have to artists like the Dap-Kings–I dismissed them for seeming too conservatively indebted to a bygone era and recreating it like a wax museum, while I loved other bands who draw just as strongly from more obscure, less admired, or more heterogenous source material.

Critics aren’t unique in looking for these qualities about music.  Critical discourses are part of a larger way of looking at the world–anthropologists and economists have argued that we see in cultural objects unique hybrids of past cultural objects and ideas as a part of being modern and buying into the necessary capitalist mindset.  In many different ways, we want musical culture to work like good commodities, to play into what Sean Nixon brilliantly has called (in advertising discourses) “the narcissism of minor differences.” As Frere-Jones points out, Sharon Jones is not just acceptable, but near-great because they tweak James Brown and Stax just so much. Re-applied elsewhere, this worldview drives entire economies (it’s Pitchfork’s engine since 2004-5), making us do ridiculous things like buy new-looking cars when our current ones are running just fine, and nod our heads approvingly at the result of boardroom decisions about five fucking blades.

But retro and revival bands aren’t unwelcome everywhere, of course.  Far from it.  I’d bet that globally, there’s as much if not more of a premium on the conservative impulse to maintain a tradition through music than on incessant hybridization and new-seeking.  Cultures with perceived life or death stakes in keeping their traditions alive in the face of creeping modernity take huge strides to make certain that performances hew closely to what they’ve been for centuries.  The argument for these societies (boiled down to generic bones) is in its own way as rife with existential dread as my earlier question about possible publics for veneers: if our performances change by bending to the whim of the market, then what’s left of us?  Who are we?  What are we talking about?

In a lower-stakes example, you can see retro and revival ideals held up highly in the cultures (and massive fanbases) surrounding professional tribute bands.  These groups play to the tons of people who want the music of their youth handed down like myths, played with respect and fealty to the original–the “Pledge of Allegiance” model of music circulation, perhaps.  This is most prominent with boomers and their classic rock bands, but there are more than likely elements of this desire in all art.  For instance, I used to date a figure painter, and she was extremely gifted at representing the human form using the following tools: oil paints, brushes, her hand and arm.  But the response that she got most often–mainly, it must be said, by those who didn’t have MFAs et al–somehow replaced these with “camera.”  “It looks so real!”, they would say, inevitably followed by “like a photograph!”  To an artist’s artist, painting from a photograph is comparable to a particularly obedient tribute act.  And this is something that many artists, and fans of artists, spend careers striving for: duplication and reverence to an original, to the degree that they turn into something of a veneer. But this approach doesn’t get much, if any, play in critical circles.  Which is why Frere-Jones recommends at the end of his piece that “perhaps we simply adjust our expectations and give less credence to the importance of novelty.”

That might be a good start.  But maybe it’s also a matter of shifting our focus a bit to dial in on what it is that travels through musical performance.  That stuff, the residual culture reappropriated and just slightly hybridized, must be something pretty important, mustn’t it?  To travel that well, that relatively cleanly?  Not everything is lucky enough to travel at all.  Here’s Balis again, with an anecdote about what usually stays at the gate of the original disco moment:

Bobby Vitteretti, a legendary DJ from San Francisco’s Trocadero Transfer came to our last show. So naturally, we’re both thrilled: here’s this sweet guy from disco’s halcyon days and he loves the show. But after the show, he asked us both the same question: why don’t you have more ”bombs” in your set? Blank stares. He explained what he meant to Eugene — the high-pitched “boooom” synthetic tom drum sound that most people know from “Ring My Bell.” And while we get where he’s coming from, it’s the sort of thing you have to be careful about. Certain timbres and musical devices — and it’s hard to put your finger on why — don’t date well. There are plenty of things we’re perfectly happy to leave behind: dance tracks about dancing sometimes seem a bit redundant, or songs about music.

Certain stuff about disco is pure kitsch, and other elements from the same time period sound really fresh in a different moment.  In the same way, Sharon Jones and the Daptones should be credited as savvy cultural laborers as well as die-hard soul fans: they’re no retro-revivalists, but are keenly able to balance the best aspects of the JB’s/Otis/Stax/Motown salad days in the same way as that massive group was carefully sieving the church out of their music.  Tweaking in different ways, but in both cases just enough to allow the music to circulate outside parochial contexts.

Though a photograph is different in many respects than a song, the I Will Be snapshot is good to think with here, particularly when you think about artists composing with genres as much as notes or sounds.  It makes you think about the fact that it’s not just the music or photo itself that travels through time and space in unpredictable ways: sometimes the ineffable sense of age and wear that arises as a cultural object decays–the visible remainder of a technology’s unique operation–splits off and circulates on its own.  We’re not nostalgic for those veneers–there’s no way we could be–but we sure know them when we see and hear them.

Filed under: album cover art  disco  Dum Dum Girls  genre  Nick Sylvester  nostalgia  Pitchfork  Sasha Frere-Jones  selling culture  Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings