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.

Sometimes, you strike when the iron is hot.  And by strike, I mean “type” and by “when the iron is hot” I mean “when I’m drunk walking home from the bar.”  That’s the particular moment when the myriad orbiting ideas in my head coalesced into this piece, and when I clumsily started typing notes about it.  Thanks to Scott and Mark and Tyler at Pitchfork for letting me publish and helping me polish.

I’d been thinking about album covers as possessing a unique kind of rhetorical force since starting to follow No Caption Needed, a blog run in part by John Lucaities, a professor in my department, and designed to accompany and build from the book of the same name.  But it wasn’t until I read this post (excerpted in full in the piece), by Christy, a recent Bloomington transplant and all-around cool chick (this is her new blog–see what I mean), that everything clicked.  I ran into her at a show, I was drunk, we chatted about the post, I stumbled home and everything hits at once.  A few more conversations, a few books flipped through, and it basically wrote itself the week after the 4th of July.

Yes, it’s the other thing I was working on when writing my prospectus, which you may or may not have figured out if you read this post.

The piece might tempt a tl;dr, but I hope you give it a shot.  I basically cover three domains that I see intersecting on these photos-as-album-art: the aesthetic predecessors (Jandek and William Eggleston) who allow everyday snapshots such as these to circulate as objets d’art; the music (or certain music) itself that also reflects a larger sociological/cultural compulsion overlapping significantly with the ideas represented in these photos; and the technologies and technoculture that greatly facilitate the way we see them as nostalgic objects.

There’s tons of stuff that didn’t make its way into the piece, for obvious reasons.  I’ll chunk them below.

–I didn’t include the Sleigh Bells or Tanlines covers inter alia, because they’re not the same thing.  Scanned images from publications (and altered, in the Sleigh Bells case–looks like it’s from a yearbook), are public, which sort of does away with the privacy ideas rampant in the other ones.  Yet this idea is something I also chatted with Chris about, and which he and Ryan (and Panda Bear, and earlier, Robert Pollard) are obviously big fans of.  As with Polaroids, scans from old magazines, particularly of the rich Kodachrome stock from mid-20th century National Geographics or the hazy retro-futuristic patina of Omni (ahem) give the same sense of tactility and grain when surrounded by the sharp lines of a web browser.  It’s the same ahistorical, “found” sense I get when I listen to mp3s from GvsB or Altered Zones, which makes sense.

–In terms of songs that negotiate nostalgia well, but which I couldn’t shoehorn into the piece (though on an early draft I tried), there’s well, all of Village Green Preservation Society, but primarily “Picture Book” and (especially) “People Take Pictures of Each Other.”  And the refrain from “Sound of Silver” is also a nice rebuke to the overwhelming sense of childhood regression so omnipresent in indie these days.

–I could have talked about Jamie Livingston, the Impossible Project, the “make your own indie album cover” memes, Harmony Korine, Marc’s great cassette piece (which I swear to god I’m just now seeing has a title almost identical to my own.  Ha.), Pitchfork’s own A>D>D series, and so on and so forth.  But.

–I wanted to write a bunch more about the connections between music and visual culture, and the rituals associated with album art and imagination, etc.  But I have a feeling there may be a venue where I can do that soon

–I didn’t use the word “retro” once, I think.

–This is Virginia Heffernan’s article, which didn’t get linked in the piece.  Here’s Warhol’s Polaroid book, too.  The Trubek quote at the top of the second page is from Jandek on Corwood, a well-meaning and very informative if not necessarily overly compelling documentary.

–One night I went a little nuts reading about Edwin Land, who messed around and eventually invented Polaroid.  It’s a cute story that’s sort of DIY and punk as fuck–dropping out of high school, moving to NYC, breaking into Columbia at night to use their facilities.

–If you want to read more academic-style stuff about nostalgia and culture, there’s Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (chapter titled “Consumption, Duration, and History”) and Boym’s absolutely wonderful The Future of Nostalgia (which is more about nationalism, but still a great book).  There are probably more, but these are the two I (re)read while writing this.

Not posting because I have a dog in this race, but more to marvel at how calm and borderline debonair Gene Siskel is as he lays into John Ritter (Larry Sanders Show, Season 2).  Who knew Siskel was such a stone-faced assassin?  Don’t worry about the intricacies of the “dog” stuff after the jump, either; the joy is watching a roughed-up Geno do his best James Caan. And Rip Torn bleating a “shut the fuck up” that’ll make your hair curl.

From a Harper’s Magazine, early/mid ’70s, that I found in my office the other day.  Anyone else never hear of these? (EDIT: OH GOOD SWEET LORD THEY ARE IN THE 80S TOO)

I’m going to keep posting these examples as they arise.  Hope that’s okay (they’ll be under this tag).  For those times we all have that make us go “these kids/these days.”  Here, we have Bartók, in the midst of the Modernist revolution:

To be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore.  All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest…

From Alex Ross’s magisterial “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century“

(via)

The two biggies have recently sent out their CFPs.  One (EMP) is much more tailored to my interests than the other (IASPM), which means I’ve got a better chance at going to LA than Cincinnati.  So.  If you’re interested, though: EMP is much easier to get into (I’m told) than IASPM, which typically wants academics (unless you want the strange “independent scholar” tag).

The calls for both conferences are after the jump.

(Continued)

Managing Media Work is out, via Sage.  My chapter, titled “Same as the Old Boss? Changes, Continuities, and Careers in the Digital Music Era,” is the twenty-first chapter.  It’s really nothing like the dissertation proposal, but more of an overview of how the hell an American music career works right now.  Amazingly, it’s still current, even though I wrote it 8 months ago!  And David Hesmondhalgh blurbed it!  Which means that David Hesmondhalgh has read my name, and perhaps nodded approvingly (approvingly!) at one or more of the points I make.  On the off-chance that anyone reading this blog also gets assigned in an undergrad Comm course to read this book, and they let me know of same, it would be like the coolest thing I’ve ever known.

There’s Wendy Fonarow, whose Guardian column on indie rituals is as good as her book on same.  This latest bit, on “why say ‘check 1-2′ during soundchecks, is particularly awesome:

This isn’t a matter of creativity. Saying “testing, one two” or “check, one two” is formulaic and serves the same function as other formulaic expressions, such as greetings. People often claim that formulaic expressions are meaningless, ignoring the work they do. When someone says, “How are you?” in English or “Have you eaten?” in Thai, they aren’t really asking about your well-being or your last meal, they’re expecting to receive an answer from a predictable repertoire of replies. This opens lines of communication and allows the parties to focus on other important interactive information. With formulaic speech, you don’t need to focus on content or specific words, but rather the acoustic information provided by slight variations in sound. By saying the same thing at a soundcheck, crew and performers can hear the significant contrasts in sound quality. The content of a formulaic expression is arbitrary. However, “check, one two” has a variety of sound units: the voiceless postalveolar affricate in “ch” (which has a lot of turbulence) and an alveolar plosive (which has a strong expulsion of air). Additionally, the audience are also aware of this routine and, therefore, don’t pay attention to it. If something different was said, such as a movie quote, it would draw attention to the soundcheck and create confusion. However, if you ask a crew why the soundman says “one, two”, their answer is “because you lift on three”.

Re: that last mega-post, there are plenty of people doing similar sorts of work out there.  If you don’t read Tom, and you were at all interested in what I wrote in that earlier post, start!  Tom’s point here, about pop music, is anthropologically valid!  It’s also called “capitalism.”

Put crudely, you succeed in pop music (or any kind of commercial art) by a mix of novelty and comfort. When critics want to put novelty in a good light we call it innovation. When we want to put comfort in a good light we call it “timeless” or “classic”. But this rapidly turns complicated. Stuff that used to be novel can become comforting, stuff that used to be comforting can be finagled into seeming novel again. And both terms are only meaningful inasmuch as they’re relative to the people you want to sell the records to – who might well construct their own comfort AS novelty. So it’s all hugely tactical even IF you accept the idea that this commercial art is by its nature “manufactured” and the desires and preferences of the creators don’t really come into it.