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.

///

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.

Imagine you find a record you like in a genre you don’t usually listen to very deeply. Here are two broad ways you might talk about it publically:

“I don’t listen to much [genre] but I really like [artist].”

“[Artist] transcends [genre] and exposes its limitations.”

These positions are what I’m calling weak and strong exceptionalism – the adjectives not meant as value judgements, incidentally. In weak exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the relative yardstick of the listener’s experience of the genre, which is admitted to be low. In strong exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the typical qualities of the genre.

Tom is incisive as usual, but there’s something in his idea that assumes too much, maybe, that genres are out there (something only “to be experienced”), and we work with them as yardsticks to evaluate the relative quality/effectiveness/progressiveness of a particular artist.

This is not to say that Tom’s not right, or that we don’t do things like this as music listeners/fans/critics, of course.  I wouldn’t be responding to this post if it weren’t worthwhile enough to do so.  What I’d add to it is the idea that when we make these rationalizations, we’re not doing so against some objective set of boundaries, but we’re helping to actually make those boundaries ourselves.

Genre lines are as fluid as the subjectivities of individual listeners–they have to be, if we want to give listeners the agency to make meaning from music other than what the artists or labels or radio stations want–and so when we utter some sort of comparison, we’re by default laying them down for ourselves (and perhaps others), no matter how fleetingly. When we say, in Tom’s parlance, “I don’t listen to much [genre]“, we’re also defining our idea of what’s in and out of that particular category, which is not something we’re always going to share with everyone else (particularly in scenes or cultures with endlessly proliferating micro-genres).

Of course, there are those–critics, especially, but also record store owners, labels, playlist organizers for radio stations/Pandora, etc–whose opinions are weighted more than others.  Which, in the case of Pitchfork, say, can lead to a sense of resentment within particular quarters, because it’s seen as having far too much sway in this particular contest.  Tom’s always been one to say that categorization is part of the joy of music fandom, and I very much agree with this.  It’s just that I’d like to add that part of this joy as well is making up, or at least helping to shape the categories as we go.

One might even say that genres are performative in this way: when we categorize, we inevitably create.

“Wanna be the big teen in hardcore circles?  Get some other dillheads together, call yourselves Antagonistic Decline or Vicious Tendencies or Unrepentant Youth or some such thing, copy every lick from the Dischord collection and write songs about military intervention, whether you know anything about it or not, and you’re guaranteed a good review in Maximumrockandroll.”

Steve Albini, Matter, 1983 (via)

“That’s very simple. ‘Indie’ is short for ‘independent.’ Independently released music is not directly financially dependent on any of the four major labels (WMG, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal). ‘Indie’ does not refer to a style of music; it refers to the financial circumstances of its distribution. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and should be viewed with suspicion.”

Love Douglas Wolk’s definition (which he earlier offered at Moistworks–great stuff all around on that post), and all discussion should stop here, really.

But it never will, will it?  Which is why it’s good that Carrie Brownstein’s tackling The Big Issues over at her NPR blog, and not doing the “OMG rock lyrics are quite crazy when you think about it, right?” stuff anymore (hopefully).  This is the epitome of pub chatter, but it’s a lot of fun.  Al Shipley’s take, for instance, is a nice step outward:

“‘Indie’ was already well on its way to primarily describing an aesthetic criteria, more than a business model, ten years ago. The main difference since then is that where it once was used colloquially as an abbreviation for ‘indie rock,’ the rock is gone and indie is just indie now. Indie pop, indie dance, indie hip hop, every genre has its own variant filtered through the indie sensibility, and what little rock still exists in indie doesn’t rock very hard anymore.”

It’s tough for some folks to think of music genres as anything other than the folkloric/musicological ideal of “co-occurrent formal features,” but it’s necessary.  American indie used to be linked to post-punk, hardcore, white-dude guitar rock because that’s who was making the most out of independent music–from a numbers perspective perhaps, but mainly from a discursive angle, i.e., using the term as a badge of honor.  It’s a historical coincidence of music and market, really: indie started to show some market mettle at the same point it was dominated by a particular strain of style.  Done, and done.

Over the past 10 or so years, of course, independently-released music has become “the majority of worthwhile music,” with a few notable exceptions (hip-hop primary amongst them, but probably not for long).  I think one of the important future-predicting questions to ask, especially as more labels get savvier with distribution and promotion: When will “indie” cease to really mean anything even in economic-distinction terms?  When will we (will we ever?) stop thinking of “the majors” as anything resembling a force in musical culture?  When will thinking about “major labels” as a creative force be dismissed out of hand as residual longing?  Are we almost there?  I think we’re almost there.

Mark: hey Eric
Me: hey Mark
Me: what’s up
Mark: are you into metal?
Mark: haha
Me: nah not really
Me: i like metal when it’s hybridized with other things
Mark: yeah, me too
Me: i really don’t know anything about metal, post like Slayer, early Metallica, etc.
Mark: something just popped into my head, I was thinking about the soundtrack to Gummo, and it seemed very novel at the time that a bunch of black metal and grindcore and what have you was on an indie movie soundtrack in 1998
Me: oh wow yeah, Gummo
Me: man, i’d forgotten about that film
Mark: I mean, look at this track list
Me: wow, yeah
Mark: for an indie film in 1998, that was super fresh, and I was wondering if that kicked off anything in terms of critics coming around
Me: hmmmm yeah
Me: on a young Domino, no less!
Mark: yeah
Me: i could definitely see that. i mean, film soundtracks seem to often be used as a way to smuggle subterranean music into a wider consciousness
Me: but jeez, like i’ve not heard of any of these bands
Me: except Destroy All Monsters
Me: but they’re old, i think
Me: oh shit, yeah, Niagara and what not. Ron Asheton
Me: Mark, I know you’re extremely aged
Me: were you at any point in the band Destroy All Monsters
Mark: yeah, i went to middle school with the Ashton brothers
Me: ha
Me: but your point, i think, holds generally
Me: re: soundtracks
Me: i think like any sort of comp, it allows dilettantes to dip their toes in
Mark: I’ve yet to read a convincing article about why the critical focus on metal in the last 5 years
Me: hmmmm
Me: hasn’t metal seen the same sort of niche resurgence as a lot of other forms of music?
Me: now that eclecticism is the way that people engage with music as the default
Me: like, there’s more music period, and there are beats to cover
Me: “beats” in the journalistic sense, y’know
Me: but like
Me: i think that there’s always been residual metal dudes writing about music, and there’s an audience for that
Me: like, all those metal rags in the 80s that were mixing coverage of Slayer with like, Poison
Mark: yeah, it’s true – always been a genre that people like to pick up magazines about
Me: but now, i think the coverage has gotten a lot more eclectic, as the music’s gotten a lot more eclectic
Me: and i’m saying this as someone who hasn’t ever listened to an entire Sunn O))))) song
Me: i think the field has widely expanded in general
Mark: so there are more entry points
Mark: if you like drone, there’s a way in, or ambient stuff, even
Me: yeah, like i think there’s always been dudes making weird variants on metal, but now they have the capacity to get a public
Me: a small public, but a devoted one, for sure
Me: this is a concept i generally use to discuss a lot of stuff with music post-Napster
Me: i still think it’s ridiculous for people to assume that, like, pitchfork’s gonna be on top of every doom band that comes out of Denmark, though
Me: without considering that Pitchfork’s serving an audience that’d much rather read about Andrew Bird
Me: i think a lot of things like this are explainable by looking at production, promotion and distribution
Me: and how artists can rise up through these things with a few carefully-timed releases, strategic associations
Me: and then, genres come into play
Me: like, do you know the concept of “the narcissism of minor differences”
Mark: yeah, I am familiar w/ that concept
Me: smarter people have used it, quite well, i think, to describe how genres form. they’re talking more about the actual people involved, but it’s an interesting application of the thing, regardless
Me: basically that genres coalesce when something, for whatever reason, becomes popular, essentially turning a “public” into a “market”
Me: and then other bands who are doing the same thing with minor differences get ass’d with a “scene” or a “genre”
Me: i think that’s sort of how the process works
Me: and like with metal
Me: how it’s fragmented into all these niches
Me: i think that a) that’s a function of so many options, post-Web and whatever
Me: and b) that there’s arisen a new crop of dudes whose job is to make sense of it
Me: but i think it’s important that it’s metal, though
Me: inasmuch as we don’t see huge waves of like Rhys Chatham disciples getting blog love
Me: because there’s always been a devoted base for metal and its variants
Mark: yeah, one other possible thing with metal is that, while it’s always remained popular among a blue collar base lower on the socioeconomic scale, in the last few years, too, there’s been a shift among the educated hipster elite types where certain things from this other world have become fashionable
Mark: ironic mullets, and next thing you know you are listeing to metal
Me: ah, yes
Me: we can see that with indie rock, too, right?
Me: like its roots with the British “working class,” at least initially post-punk
Me: and now, we’ve got that “Dark is the Night” compilation. Which is good, but which represents a different form of homogenization, gentrification, etc.
Me: i think the main audience for this sort of fringe music has definitely shaken out to include a large number of upper-middle class
Me: with colleges that have free Web access
Me: and creative-class jobs that let them sit at a desk all day and do nothing
Me: well, “used to,” WHAT WITH THE ECONOMY AND ALL
Mark: yeah ]]> http://www.marathonpacks.com/2009/01/metal-and-its-discontents/feed/ 0