Since Ariel Pink loudly shat himself onstage earlier this year, the hipoisie have turned their attention to his former collaborator (and philosophy prof - bonus points!) John Maus. It came as no surprise that Pitchfork yawped and I yawned at Maus' latest release for more or less the same reasons: coyly blurring the borders between "Top 40 cheese [and] ironic cool"; using his academic stature to silhouette otherwise vague & swampy songwriting; and an album title that sounds like a try-hard undergrad thesis that would prompt derisive laughter before being suffocated in red ink.
Like so many of his '80s-pop-pilfering peers, Maus' reviews are peppered with allusions - which is unavoidable, given how openly derivative Maus' music is. For example, both the song & video for his "Believer" single are basically Spectrum's "How You Satisfy Me" if Pete Kember had handed vocal duties off to Ian McCulloch. But as Adam Harper has pointed out, Maus is not only apologetic but proud of resurrecting bygone sounds:
I don't see this as a returning, I see this as a palette that we have to work with. These sounds are part of the vernacular. I resist this idea that we somehow move on to 'better' sounds. It's not about nostalgia or some kind of remembering, at least not consciously for me; it's what the work necessitates.
...I think it's supremely contemporary to use these so called 'nostalgic' effects, in the sense of the contemporary being out of joint with the moment in some way.
Which begs the question of when the contemporary has been anything other than "out of joint." This is one of problems I have with the hauntology "movement" (I suppose "stasis" would be a more appropriate term): it's indistinguishable from stock post-modernism in its cherry-picked anachronism, and suggests that the march of history was, until recently, a linear narrative untroubled by cataclysm, disruption, sudden exits, and unexpected entrances. Time is more wrinkled than Rupert Murdoch's brow; history is a slapdash patchwork of unmatched epochs; the contemporary has always been out of joint. The difference is that now we've the time, access, and materials to retreat from the future's shock-&-awe into the warm embrace of nostalgia.
But I agree wholeheartedly that we don't necessarily "move on to 'better' sounds" and that the past bequeaths artifacts & ideas that "warrant exploration right now, here, today." But Maus is being too generous in describing '80s synth-pop as a "palette." Imagining an Alesis drum machine & Yamaha DX-7 constitute a "palette" is as coarse and reductive as remembering the 1950s as America's Golden Age while conveniently forgetting segregation, patriarchy, the Korean War, and McCarthyism. It's not a palette, it's a colour.
If Maus and others wished to be heard as anything other than nostalgic tribute acts, they'll have to far less conservative in their pillage of the past. There have been musicians (e.g. Public Enemy or Amon Tobin) whose music has been constructed solely of samples, of existent material, of second-hand semiotics, yet has sounded ferociously and utterly contemporary. This is because they imposed no limits upon their source material: if it sounded good, it was fair game. Panning for gold across every decade and genre, then melting it down into a single white-hot mass - that is what made their music so unmistakably immediate: a total implosion of temporality. However, once too much attention or emphasis is put upon any particular source of antiquated inspiration, the trap of retro-referentiality has sunken its teeth into you.
Man, I'd better post something about music I enjoy soon, otherwise everyone's going to think my sole preoccupation is shitting on other people's enthusiasm.
Even if not one single other soul vanishes today from this earth, this proves that the Rapture has indeed come. Give God the ol' figure-4 leg-lock for us, Randy!
Feign outrage! Set phasers to "troll"! Clothe your indignation in inanity! A Pitchfork feature has prompted online controversy and lively debate! (Vomits in overreactive excitement)
Actually, for once the conversation isn't about how hard a certain review pandered, or trainspotting the number of Bon Iver headlines in a single week, or if the Vampire Weekend cover girl is "tappable." Barthel and Abebe are using the Top Videos of the 1990s countdown as a cultural weathervane, examining the balance of sincerity-VS-irony. While any discussion of irony/"irony" will be, to a certain extent, frustrating and inconclusive, Abebe's made the valuable point that Aught-style irony is fundamentally different from '90s irony.
The distinction is fundamentally the same as that which separates two styles of post-modernism: retro-necro pastiche and hauntology (which respectively resemble '00s and '90s irony). Both employ a knowing referentiality, and thus are formally similar, yet they express very different relationships to the contemporary mainstream: the former revels in artifice and built-in obsolescence, mischievously celebrating a culture whose facades are its substance; the latter mourns the same condition, pining for alternate paths not taken and now impossible. The latter understands the emptiness behind the facade is not an erasure of taboos, not some fissure into a realm of anarchic hedonia - it is existential abjection.
Now, to rephrase in slightly more useful terms... Aught-style irony is (was?) all about arrow-straight citation, expressing uncynical affection and even reverence for its references. A commentary-free pop-cultural patchwork of purely aesthetic concerns. Abebe offers Weezer's "Buddy Holly" video as an early specimen, though I'd say this "pointless, morbid game of references and sarcasm that never actually says anything" was first fully articulated on Odelay! by Beck.*
However, '90s irony was born of disgust at the flattening-out of culture, at the commodification of fringe elements, and at the realization that so many of our memories & developmental milestones were cooked up by some Madison avenue huckster. When Nirvana appeared with natty suits & blinky innocence for the "In Bloom" video, of course they were having a dig at the geeky politesse of rock's infancy. But more importantly, they were saying, "Okay, we're on Geffen, we're on MTV, we've been swallowed by the monoculture. We might as well be the fucking Dave Clark Five with a fuzzbox."
Which is where slack comes in. Were it not for that sloppy scoffing not-giving-a-shit, '90s irony would be nothing but more mawkish referentiality. But these artists had come from an audience that was too savvy to fall for Bill Bernbach's thimblerig and were well aware that any conventional success meant assimilation. Resistance was futile, but at least they could demonstrate an awareness of their own appropriation instead of appearing as guileless rubes (or worse, brass ring-snatching apostates). Slack signified that these artists neither cared for nor sought mainstream approval. The Malkmusian smirk was the last, best defense against total co-option.
This indifference against the machine is the earnestness that Abebe sees underlying '90s irony, "irony to communicate completely earnest things, that the audience would receive completely in earnest." The problem - that is, the transposition of '90s irony into '00s irony - is that the mainstream absorbed the medium without the message. It became a cheap trick to pile up pop-cultural detritus while completely ignoring the gestures of subcultural revolt. Perhaps the resurgent sincerity of the past decade was in reaction to the mainstreaming of snarky pastiche - and yet, if audiences are now attuned to endlessly floating signifiers taken with shakers of salt, this would result in more distance and less earnestness than in the '90s. Sincerity cannot survive as such if it's perceived ironically, and consequently it's become a simple affectation, mere aesthetic, just another branding tactic - like lo-fi or slack.** I accept Abebe's point that "you’d have to be a lot more committal to front Fischerspooner than to front a grunge band!" But to call electroclash "almost tragically sincere" begs the question: sincere about what? Fischerspooner et al. (and indeed many of today's most "earnest" acts) didn't offer sincerity, they performed "sincerity" - a gestural sincerity, an aestheticization of sincerity. Again, this only serves to underscore the subtextual vacuity of today's culture.
Remember the Lollapalooza-spoofing episode of The Simpsons?
Gen-Xer 1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool. Gen-Xer 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude? Gen-Xer 1: I don't even know anymore.
Finally, Abebe is rightfully wary of remembering the '90s as a ten-year sneer: "They seemed, as a young person, strikingly earnest and optimistic, especially around Earth Day." Political causes of every possible persuasion - from global warming to AIDS awareness - sprouting like dandelions in the wake of "PC" fatuity. And of course, this was the decade that gave us emo, "conscious" hip-hop, and the testosterone-soaked confessionals of nü-metal.
(*) - In film, the blame falls squarely at the feet of Tarantino. (**) - No matter how ratty your hair or anemic your stated ambition, you ain't slacking if you have a booking agent before your first tour.
Making good on the promise of his provocative entry in the "I Hate ____" sweepstakes, Carl published a brilliant take-down of Burial, casting the clandestine South Londoner as a hyper-test-marketed lifestyle accessory to doomy cultural theorists. Yeah, I own copies of both Will Belvin's albums, but I can't say Carl's wrong - especially in calling out how "pedestrian" and "same-y" it all sounds. Debuting a full seven years after The Caretaker (which itself was theoretically-enhanced rehash of Badalamenti's Twin Peaks theme, itself already sampled of course by Moby, and down the infinite regress we stumble...), Burial is basically Tim Hecker's billowing oblivion pruned down & set to a skittering beat to soundtrack the Starbucks set. It's that (fucking overrated) first Massive Attack record reimagined for those who want something a little more zeitghost-y. It's a sound I like but have also heard before - which, of course, is the precise point, but as Carl says, that's not The Point.
Unfortunately, Carl continues & kinda ruins it by digressing into an embarrassingly naked & bitter indictment of "career artists":
Why can’t more people just pack it in and go and do something else/ take a look at themselves and decide they’re basically never going to produce anything worthwhile and not bother in the first place? ...Why do they HAVE TO make a living as musicians? I’ll happily and have happily not made a living as a writer despite having written for years and in my own estimation having a fuck site [sic] more talent than half the rubbish gets in Waterstones because if you really do care about the art you approach it full of doubt, humility and trepidation, you fall horribly and continually short...
What was clearly started with the intent of echoing Tyler Durden's eulogy for the posthistorical Everyman ultimately sounds like neither a satirical deconstruction of the star system, nor a populist manifesto for the dignity of common hard work. Instead, it comes off like the whining of a self-styled "unrecognized genius" with an adolescent sense of entitlement. Why is it anything but emancipatory to recognize artistry as just another form of nose-to-the-grindstone craftsmanship? Why must art be cloaked in cheap voodoo, restricted to the speaking-in-tongues Shock & Awe of shamanic snake oil salesmen, instead of the patient, earnest product of normal people with bright ideas? And why only cement the cultural stratification erected by the media industry by agreeing that fame is the only valid qualifier of True Art? Moaning about "why are they special?" only reinforces the illusion that they are special.
Given that already five years have passed since he found himself "beguiled" by Coldplay, I'm probably well late in calling this, but let's make it official: JUMPED THE SHARK.
Mark "K-Punk" Fisher is the online polemical analog to Morrissey: an exquisitely-posed dilettante driven by a romanticism so cerebral & idealised that every facet of reality is met with supercilious pessimism, twinned with an arrogance that allows him to argue in favour of his (or his paladins') own failures while glibly dismissing positions or accomplishments that conflict with his imperturbably self-contained weltanshauung. Also, despite incessant use of variants of the word "libido", there's no clear evidence that K-Punk enjoys anything in a sweaty, smelly, unintellectualised, reflexively feral, excretion-of-bodily-fluids way. A Robert Christgau for British Pierrots.
Ooh, is this skirting too close to an ad hominem attack? Here are my terms for detente: instead of ducking your obligation as a critic by weakly reversing my question, Mark, please explain what is so totally uncompelling about Sonic Youth's entire 16-album oeuvre, where is this bridge between the '60s and post-punk SY rebuilt, how they've contributed nothing to the advancement of music as an art. You can lob the "tepid, flannelly, terminally uninvolving college alt-rock" grenade at, say, Washing Machine, but not EVOL. And don't detour into some More Alt. Than Thou game of The Price Is Right by "gesturing to artists more marginal" like DNA or the Dead C.
So that's it. Between the metapolitical miserablism and helping legitimise head-drillingly dull split-hair dance (d/s)ubgenres with moronic names like "wonky", I'm tuning out of K-Punk's frequency. Anyone who can turn an apology for fucking up a live mix first, into an exprobation of the ghetto set-up; second, into a masturbatory epode about a "sound [that] is in no sense normalised; on the contrary, it is volatile and eratic [sic]"... suffice to say he's on very thin ice for lambasting anyone for being "vaguely bohemian/arty middle class urban professionals" who dabble in the "most self-conscious meta-art."
...it's not my hostility towards SY that requires explanation - it's SY's hegemonic support that needs to be accounted for.
Fuck you, Daydream Nation is mind-blowing. How's that for accounting? How's that for a shattered sensus communis? Go back to your Hyperdub 12"s, stiff.
It's no wonder why print publications & word counts are dropping like birds over Chernobyl, now that "tweet" and "text" have become verbs. But if anything has rendered music writing obsolete, it's as much the critical overreach that Mark Fisher calls for (rather uninspiringly) as the consumptive nanocycle to which the relay of all information has been reduced. Yes, I'm going to tread that perilously close to hypocrisy: grossly po-faced laptop scribes are writing themselves out of relevance, dagnabbit!
Mark himself knows a bit about critical overreach - such as his touristic retreat into the realm of doom "superstars" SunnO))) that betrayed far more chin-stroking conjecture than genuine intimacy with the materials & their context. Yet, when he accuses Sonic Youth of being the first band to recycle culture into a closed circuit (as opposed to by refraction or expansion), it reads like rhetorical underachievement by his own standards. Bad Moon Rising was considerably earlier than Beck's kitchen-sink po-mo; earlier still than bland tribute acts like Mudhoney or Oasis, so points for that. But weren't there plenty of dead horses beaten to gluey pulps before Bad Moon Rising?
Punk, for example - and specifically the trichordal adolescent hissy-fits peddled by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Those bands made no secret of their intense affection for the eighth-note strum & clang of old rhythm 'n' blues 45s. The only wrinkle separating, say, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" and "Beat On the Brat" is an extra dollop of au current, tailored-to-outrage antagonism.
Yet we can push back even earlier to proto-punk. Perhaps the Stooges' Fun House was the first retroreferential record. The elemental primitivism of rock 'n' roll's nascent wave is echoed both in spirit (the album was produced by Don Gallucci, of the Kingsmen & "Louie Louie" fame) and in sound: "Down On the Street" and "Loose" flex the same gnarly sinew as Link Wray & Duane Eddy's "rebel music", albeit with more explicit incitements to street violence and prurience.
But hell, why stop in 1970? If Sonic Youth are going to be backhanded for their "curatorial" roles, can't the same accusation be leveled at Frank Zappa? His numerous doo-wop homages were as honestly affectionate as his frequent piss-takes of contemporary artists were vicious. (Not to mention his umpteen nods to various modern classical composers.) Come to think of it, what was quintessentially new about any of the music that white musicians - Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Elvis, etc. - stole from Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, so on & so forth?
But this line of argument is more than a little absurd and ultimately useless. To one degree or another, all music nods to its antecedents; torches are passed, picked up, or rekindled. Of course, music is only beholden to the past to the extent it feels the need to either worship or mock what went before. Actually, it isn't impossible to create music in a cultural vacuum, but y'know what music utterly unencumbered by historical context sounds like? The Shaggs.
Not that Mark Fisher has a problem with artists burdened by history - quite the opposite, what with his essays' manifold mentions of "remnants", nostalgia, "ghost genres", and the like. But what makes The Advisory Circle good and Ciccone Youth bad is Mark's boderline-fundamentalist adherence to hauntology. Initially an intriguing cultural phenomenon, hauntology has come to inspire the kind of unblinking fanboy devotion usually reserved for World of Warcraft and Japanese animation, which makes some of these discussions as enjoyable & open as speculating on the afterlife with a Catholic. The greater problem, though, is that hauntology is a dead end and proud of it; miserablist ruminations over doors locked and out of reach; rubbernecking backwards at all the exits along the highway we didn't take.
Well, hang on - that sounds a hell of a lot like... post-modernism. And it is! As Alex of SBA outlined it with laser accuracy, "hauntology" is fundamentally a chicken-wire fenced erected around "good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism" and ironic pastiche. To put a finer point on it, hauntology is the scrapbook of the underdogs & losers of culture wars past, where as po-mo "proper" celebrates every goon who got his 15 minutes.
But I digress. I don't want to prattle on about hauntology today, especially since that conversation's already been had. I do, however, want to call attention to Mark's use of "hauntology" as some kind of meaningful aegis under which he can lump the music he likes, safely squirreled away from the music he dislikes. Clearly he's not concerned with philosophical consistency, because otherwise it'd be fuckin' nonsense to cast the Pop GroupandThe Fall as dub- and kraut-damaged conduits of primal animus & political dissonance... and Sonic Youth as mere retro-necrophiliacs. Oh, it's certainly possible to like any one and not the others, but on aesthetic terms (and even then, just barely), not philosophical ones.
This is how critical overreach functions as a crutch for petty & fickle opinions. The elaborate scaffolds writers erect provide them a form over which to drape their critical assessments; the larger & more laboured the framework, the more solid it seems. This means any bad review is given the appearance of studious consideration & self-accordant logic - a far more noble & ego-inflating position for a writer, rather than have to admit that, for reasons as inarticulable & irrational as emotions, they just don't dig something.*
Mark Fisher obviously anticipated being set upon by rabid Sonic Youth supporters like myself, adopting a Magazine song-title as his first line of defense: "My mind, it ain't so open..." I don't particularly care if Mark enjoys Sonic Youth or not. But it's bloody difficult to contend convincingly that SY are "dilettantes" who fail to "[draw] on any unconscious material" and whose cachet is derived "from gesturing to artists more marginal than them." They are inarguably one of the most influential & inventive guitar bands ever. On the one hand, it's impossible to reimagine the rock landscape of the past twenty years without their influence (or, yes, their latter-day curatorial presence); on the other, they carved such a singular niche for themselves that anyone who wears their influence on their sleeve is simply dismissed for ripping off Sonic Youth. And don't even try to claim they contributed nothing new to the conversation - I would die to hear any obvious forerunners to songs like "Death To Our Friends" or "Eric's Trip".
Is any of this reason enough to like the band? Nah, not really. But please, Mark, instead of taking potshots at a band twenty years past their peak, just say you think Thurston comes off like an aloof dick, that the beats are too loose to dance to, that the sound is all rusty shrapnel & bleating car-horn doppler. Don't say Sonic Youth are "reducible to a set of easily verbally explicable intentions" - at least not without then verbalising what those handily explicable intentions are.
Others have already rushed to Sonic Youth's defense. Zone Styx Travelcard described Bad Moon Rising place on the geocultural landscape most elegantly. Meanwhile, Simon Reynolds acknowledged the "pernicious adequacy" of Sonic Youth's decade-plus holding pattern, arguing that they've perhaps outlived their usefulness for those who keep "keen the blade of one's dissatisfaction, one's impatience." But he still called for Sonic Youth to be afforded what respect they've earned:
[SY's late-'80s run was] a gorgeous noise where No Wave's stringent modernism merges with numinous psychedelia (a new psychedelia, one that barely references anything in the vocabulary of Sixties rock). As irritating as they can be that shouldn't be taken away from them. One might even feel an empathetic twinge for the vanguardist hoisted by their own reinvention-of-the-guitar petard and faced with the problem of reinventing themselves. Why shouldn't they be like Neil Young, an alt-institution, criss-crossing back and forth within the range of sound they've established?
Of course, none of this appears to have persuaded Mark Fisher, who steered largely clear of critiquing the music itself, instead making a series of contextual accusations that could just as easily be leveled at some of his favourite artists. ("Curators... who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff"; "so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn't appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them"; etc.) At times, he appears to deliberately misread Sonic Youth & their place/purpose on the musical landscape, such as when he casts them as an unworthy contemporary standard for "experimentalism" - I don't know anyone obnoxious enough to call the concise pop songcraft of Rather Ripped "experimental". There's something in his tone of a kid who lost cred because he didn't "get" something cool, and now he's come for his revenge.
Ultimately, Mark is picking the wrong battle. When he noted that "the problem with hauntology is its association with a defeated (and defeatist) leftism," he perhaps forgot to what the left owes its apparent & ongoing defeat: the left spends all its time bickering amongst themselves & atomising into combatant factions, each too marginal to function as a foundation.** Meanwhile, the right quashes its petty infighting and rolls out the heavy artillery, intent on little beyond crushing their enemies. Over the hill as they are, Sonic Youth are far from the most stifling, conservative presence in music culture. What other musicians past a half-century in age have remained so curious & engaged in contemporary underground culture? You really want to strike a blow for modernism & encourage breakthroughs into new paradigms? Impatient to hasten the close of one chapter so that we might start a new one?
Kill Jack White.
(*) - Naturally, it works both ways. Not only can critical overreach perform the semantic sleight-of-hand to excuse not liking something for insubstantial reasons, it can also cast the most negligible mediocrity in the most elysian light. After you've called attention several times to the fact the emperor is buck-ass-naked, and several people have insistently shut you up, instead praising his regal & luxuriant threads, you become fairly certain that everyone knows this guy has no clothes - they just like looking at naked people. So it is with music: surely no one's genuinely convinced that the Arcade Fire or Deerhunter are geniuses, but we like to claim so (at length & ad nauseum) just so we can sound more sophisticated that arguing, "It's got a good beat and I can sing along in my car like an asshole."
(**) - Of course, the problem of critical overreach affects political activism too. When parallels are drawn between Ian Tomlinson and Rodney King, Sean Bell, or Burma, it not only cheapens true horror, it sounds histrionic, a cry of "Wolf!" when a chow is sighted. Obviously I'm not condoning physical intimidation by the police, for chrissakes, but am I alone in thinking that Tomlinson (appearing less-than-sportif) might have just pulled a Jim Fixx by total coincidence?
1. Foo Fighters - "In Your Honor" (00:00) 2. Scratch Acid - "Owner's Lament" (01:40) 3. Ween - "Japanese Cowboy" (Live in Toronto; 06:05) 4. Vangelis - "Chariots of Fire" (10:21) 5. Primal Scream - "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" (13:42) 6. The Fall - "High Tension Line" (18:53) 7. The Dust Brothers - "This Is Your Life" (22:32) 8. Primal Scream - "Kowalski" (25:49) 9. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (31:34) 10. Krzysztof Penderecki - "De Natura Sonoris No. 2" (Excerpt; 35:40) 11. The Fall - "Athlete Cured" (Peel Session; 38:45) 12. Spinal Tap - "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" (43:30) 13. Nirvana - "Come As You Are" (46:05) 14. Killing Joke - "Eighties" (49:36) 15. Jean-Pierre Massiera & Bernard Torelli - "Whistler Program" (53:20) 16. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Child Of My Kingdom" (55:48) 17. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel" (01:02:47) 18. The Mothers of Invention - "Trouble Every Day" (01:07:14)
Of course, Fairey's pop propaganda is less analogous to a misappropriated melody than to, say, DJ Shadow's radical recontextualisation of the churning organ from "Orion" in his own "Number Song". I'm being unfair to Fairey in comparing his icon(oclast)ic stylisation of an AP photo to intellectual theft as lock-stock & bludgeon-subtle as the Dust Brothers jacking "Kowalski".
Now, is it unfair to say the Dust Brothers deliberately traced "This Is Your Life" over Primal Scream's blueprint? Absolutely not. I doubt the Dust Brothers missed anything upon which Andrew Weatherall put his imprimatur. Both songs open and close with an AM-quality voice-over pulled from a film, and sport near-identical bubbling sixteenth-note sub, stacatto funk beats, cut-&-paste production that skips across vocal samples... but Primal Scream got there over two years earlier.
Yet not on their own: the song's martial crackle comes from a sample of Can's "Halleluwah". It's startling how many iterations an idea can withstand before anyone feels compelled to create something anew. But Primal Scream have always walked the tenuous line between sarcastic PoMo scrapbooking, classic rockist role-playing, and a more finespun resurrection of musical spectres in the spirit of hip-hop's oral history. Unfortunately, they more often fall into the first two categories.
As for the other songs, all the artists filching riffs & hooks were equally aware of what they were embezzling, given their particular idioms. As the drummer for Nirvana, Dave Grohl once split a single with the Jesus Lizard, who rose howling from the ashes of Scratch Acid - a band Kurt Cobain counted among his favourite acts of all time, not too far ahead of Killing Joke.
Meanwhile, a considerable amount of musical overlap is guaranteed within the diatonic vocabulary of the Western musical tradition - but within the inexhaustible sprawl of microtonal composition? What are the odds that, in his score to There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood would merely happen to compose a legato string swell that crests upon a queasy F# - precisely the same motif that opens Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris No. 2"? Or that Greenwood's chattering derrick fire theme bears more than a passing resemblance to Penderecki's "Utrenja (Ewangelia)", as does There Will Be Blood's title theme to certain phrases from "Polymorphia" by Penderecki?
About the same as the odds that all three Penderecki pieces appear in the soundtrack to The Shining.
And before expressing shock that Spinal Tap would be anywhere on Mark E. Smith's radar, remember that The Fall's gone through over three times as many drummers as Tap. Truth is stranger etc.
...a terminus, perhaps temporarily, has been reached - "that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible". Much as I with [sic] it weren't the case, it isn't possible to bring back modernism by force of will alone.
Boo to that. What a bunch of lazy bollocks. If someone's idea of cultural progress is "to bring back modernism," that speaks more to their own limited sense of aesthetic possibility than a real dead-end. Yes, I know he doesn't mean "modernism" strictly as the historicised aesthetic philosophy with a midcentury heyday, but the very reliance on the term speaks of a self-satisfied defeatism, or at least a languid incuriosity. Anyway, if I recall my adolescence with any accuracy, isn't having burnedbackthroughmodernismalready what got us onto this nostalgic hamster wheel in the first place? Or are we waiting until a new -ism has been codified before we stop complaining and get off our fat asses to join in the artistic adventure?
I've long been convinced that *ahem* structurally efficient art - minimalism, noise, ambient, hauntology, post-whatever - sponges up such critical adulation because it's a palimpsest upon which the higher-minded members of audience can graffiti their own assumptions. This is why SunnO))) have been readily embraced by the art world: their black-matte fogginess is tastefully obtuse set-dressing, allowing plenty of elbow-room for an individual's imaginative ramblings without betraying the truth that they're actually just two dudes who wanna fuckin' rawk. The problem therein is that, when left such generous margins to fill in with our own fantasies, the art becomes a feedback loop that merely reaffirms what (we think) we already know; it reflects only what we show it, without refraction, transformation, or challenge. And, shit, before you know it, you'll be so far up your own mollycoddled ass you'll be lauding the "milky, watercolour diffuseness" of Coldplay - isn't that right, Mark?
If knowing nothing about art while attempting to create is like the old monkeys-at-a-typewriter axiom, then allowing cultural parameters to be defined by people who aren't artists themselves is like asking a 40-year-old virgin addicted to internet porn about sex.
Like so many of his '80s-pop-pilfering peers, Maus' reviews are peppered with allusions - which is unavoidable, given how openly derivative Maus' music is. For example, both the song & video for his "Believer" single are basically Spectrum's "How You Satisfy Me" if Pete Kember had handed vocal duties off to Ian McCulloch. But as Adam Harper has pointed out, Maus is not only apologetic but proud of resurrecting bygone sounds:
If Maus and others wished to be heard as anything other than nostalgic tribute acts, they'll have to far less conservative in their pillage of the past. There have been musicians (e.g. Public Enemy or Amon Tobin) whose music has been constructed solely of samples, of existent material, of second-hand semiotics, yet has sounded ferociously and utterly contemporary. This is because they imposed no limits upon their source material: if it sounded good, it was fair game. Panning for gold across every decade and genre, then melting it down into a single white-hot mass - that is what made their music so unmistakably immediate: a total implosion of temporality. However, once too much attention or emphasis is put upon any particular source of antiquated inspiration, the trap of retro-referentiality has sunken its teeth into you.
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