a seed of Retromania

LAMENESS ON THE HORIZON

Unfaves of 2001

(off the old website A White Brit Rave Aesthete Thinks Aloud) 


I was enjoying the Avalanches show at SOBs, NYC, late 2001: not the full band playing live, but the two DJs doing their mesh-it-up back-2-back across four (or was it six?) turntables thingy. Really enjoying it, actually, but somehow through the pleasure I could sense what I can only describe as "lameness on the horizon". The set was consistently surprising and clever, full of delightfully incongruous-yet-apt juxtapositions and montages, all executed with consummate turntablist skill. You couldn't help smiling when "Like A Rolling Stone" surfaced out of the midst of some banging house track, like nothing could be more natural.
But as I say, there was something vaguely disquieting at the back of it, a premonition of disappointment, ennui, sort of "is that all there is?" mixed with "how much longer can this kind of thing carry on being exciting/worthwhile/surprising." At the end of the day, everybody's got cool records, everybody's got interesting taste and provocative ideas about links and secret connections. (Well, not everybody, perhaps-- but most people I know, and most people reading this, I suspect). In a certain sense, everybody could do what The Avalanches do--maybe not with anything approaching their degree of flawless dexterity, but then again, seamlessness is over-rated, donchathink?.

I felt a similar split response to Gold Teeth Thief, DJ Rupture's highly-regarded three-turntable mix-CD, which mashes up a taste formation that's right on the money vis-a-vis my personal audio-erogenous zones (post-Timbaland R&B, street rap, dancehall) spiced up with some Ambush-style splatterbreaks and bhangra for nice non-obviousness. It's a great selection, and technically dazzling, but once again, doesn't quite transcend the hey-I've-got-some-wicked-tunes-wanna-hear-em? syndrome. (Coldcut's celebrated Journeys By DJ mix-CD of many seasons ago, always left me underwhelmed for similar reasons. i.e. the ultimate lameness of "eclectic" as concept/praise word).

Sort of on the same tip, and inducing a similar ambivalence, are all those Kid606-and-friends homage-through-defacement/dismemberment jobs on Missy Elliott, NWA etc: these are well-intended expressions of genuine enthusiasm for mainstream black pop, and because that music is often underestimated and patronised within IDM circles, there's a certain heretical-polemical edge to these releases. And yet in the end all they're really saying is we really REALLY like these Missy Elliott records. Plus there's a certain pathos to the tribute-cum-desecrations: if only we could be this cool, if only we could pull off the avant-garde yet massively popular/potent balancing act too.
Now wouldyabelieveit, in the interval between starting Unfaves early in the New Year and actually completing the bugger, an entire subculture, nay movement, has sprung up that gives my premonition of lameness-on-the-horizon all-too-solid form. I'm talking about the bootleg/"bastard pop" [i.e. mash-ups] craze, of course.

Well, that was my initial knee-jerk reaction, and having checked out some of them, it's only been slightly tempered: reams of poor man's plunderphonia, cackhanded and so-very-far-from-alchemy (ie. the kind of transubstantiation which the Avalanches's actual album achieves), leavened by the occasional mass-cult chimera (The Normal + Missy Elliott = Girls On Top's "Warm Bitch") that sounds genuinely striking and even makes an interesting meta-pop critique by linking two apparently remote yet secretly compatible artists.

It's tempting to speculate wildly on the phenomenon. Bootlegging as the expression of subconscious ressentiment on the part of the peon-like punter, a desire to somehow cut down to size the tyrannical uber-pop that invades our consciousness, literally fucking with it by forcing pop stars into kinky congress (a preview of the inevitable D-I-Y movie-remixes to come: Cameron Diaz fisting Brad Pitt while he reams a donkey, etc). Bootlegging as a reversal of the monologic vertical structure of the music industry: the force-fed consumer answering back, with regurgitation. Or (a more positive punk interpretation, this) bootlegging as an attempt to participate in pop, which is otherwise delivered from on high, totally out of reach and inaccessible; the DIY impulse achieving that million-dollar sound the only way it can, theft.

Actually, the fad seems driven by little more than the age-old phenomenon of fandom: people who like music, all sorts of music, and the only way they can think to express that all-gates-open (a nice way of saying "uncritical"?) enthusiasm is through arranging it into different patterns, except now they have the technology to do it in a much more extreme way, and live in a time more inundated by pop past and present than ever. Bootleg as more compressed form of the mix-tape-for-your-mate, in other words. Take Osymyso's "Intro Inspection"--a witty and expertly executed montage of hundreds of famous pop intros, from "The Message" to "Love Cats", Sinatra to Spice Girls. It is possibly the zenith of the bootleg phenomenon, if only because in 12 minutes it manages to cram in all the enjoyment and all the incipient-lameness-ahoy! that the Avalanches DJs mustered across a three hour set. It's impossible to listen to "Intro Inspection" without a fat grin creasing your face for most of its duration, and also impossible (for me at least) to not feel a certain shame tainting the glee. Cos that Cheshire grin is a smile of recognition ("oh, yeah that's X... isn't that Y... ah!...nice!"...) and as sensations-that-pop-music-can-induce go, it's all a bit cosy and self-congratulatory and selling yourself short.

Not wishing to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo, but underlying and unifying all the above, I sense a tendency towards entropy: indistinctness, inertia, ultimately indifference. Whether it's good (Since I Left You) or bad (most bootlegs), what we're witnessing is the kind of sonic grand bouffe only possible during a late era. Could it be that the age of retro-mania/file-sharing/sampladelia--where time has effectively been abolished--enables us to use the abundance of the past to obscure the failings and lacks of the present? Well, it's a thought...

I SUPPOSE I DID WISH TO RESURRECT SOME ANCIENT NOTION OF CREATIVITY EX-NIHILO DIDN'T I? EARLY BUT FAR FROM  EARLIEST APPEARANCE OF THE WORD 'RETROMANIA' THERE !

BLIMEY, THEY DID IT TWICE. NOW THAT IS A BIT LAME...

CROSS REFERENCE WITH - A LATE 2000s / EARLY 2010s PHENOMENON I ALWAYS THOUGHT WAS "LITERARY CRITICS WHO'VE HEARD A GIRL TALK MIX AND ITS' BLOWN THEIR MINDS"

reggae box sets

BIG YOUTH

Natty Universal Dread, 1973-1979

(Blood and Fire)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

A Jamaican Story

(Trojan)

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds 

In Jamaica, the DJ isn't the guy who spins the records (that's the selector), it's the bloke who chats over the music. As misnomers go, it's a good one, though, since DJ is short for disc jockey, and the whole art of reggae deejaying is vocally riding the riddim--whether it's a loping nag as with the mellow skank of Seventies reggae, or a bucking bronco as with digital dancehall. 

Alongside U Roy, Big Youth was one of the first and greatest roots-era DJs, his smoky voice unleashing a gentle torrent of prophecy and prattle: "one love" beseechings, get-up-stand-up exhortations, psalm-like chanting, but also boasts, children's rhymes, laughter, shrieks and grunts. As a less musically compromised natty dread soul-Jah than Bob Marley, Big Youth was a potent icon of radical chic for white youth during the punky-reggae era; John Lydon was a fan, and even persuaded Virgin to sign the DJ for their Front Line reggae imprint. Songs like "Is Dread In A Babylon" and "Every Nigger Is A Star" capture the militancy of a period when Jamaica was feeling the cultural tug of postcolonial Africa while remaining geopolitically very much within the American sphere of influence/interference. Perhaps that's one reason Big Youth forged connections with the US's own black "enemy within", interpolating lyrics from the Last Poets into "Jim Screechy".

Worth acquiring just for the glorious rhythm tracks over which Big Youth toasts, Natty Universal Dread is Blood & Fire's best since their Heart of the Congos reissue, and typically for the label, this 3-CD set is a beautifully designed fetish object. Trojan's A Jamaican Story is a curious looking thing, by comparison. 

Culled from this veteran label's formidable archives, its cardboard chest contains 10 smaller boxes, shiny packets that look like bars of Ritter chocolate. Each of these three-CD micro-boxes is devoted to one era or aspect of reggae history: ska, rocksteady, lovers, DJ, et al. Unlike the Big Youth set's exhaustive annotations and accompanying essay, there's minimal information provided, just a rudimentary sketch of the specific genres. You don't even get dates of recording/ release, or the identity of the producer and the engineer who did the mix (absolutely crucial information with dub). Truthfully, it's hard to know who A Jamaican Story is targeted at. Reggae fiends will want Blood & Fire-style data overkill (plus those vintage photo overlays and deliberately faded-looking graphics that emphasise the sense of bygone times), while neophytes are hardly going to shell out a few hundred quid for this thirty CD colossus.

All that said, it's impossible to quibble with the quality of music here: Story is a treasure chest. Its span stretches from Desmond Dekker to Scientist, a sonic journey from ska's two-dimensional cartoon jerkiness to dub's haze-infused chambers of deep space. Story also serves to remind just how much Jamaican pop falls outside the rudeboy/rootsman dialectic---there's goofy instrumentals, novelty songs, topical social comment, pure dance music, and love song after gorgeous love song. 

What's faintly terrifying, though, is that, as crazily copious and encompassing as it is, A Jamaican Story still warrants that indefinite article: 500 tracks long, it only scratches the surface of reggae's ocean of sound.

dancehall scholarship

Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

by Norman C. Stolzoff

(Duke University Press)

director's cut, Village Voice Literary Supplement, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

For a small island with a population barely more than two million, Jamaica has exerted a disproportionately vast influence on global pop. Beyond briefly touching upon his own conflicted passion for Rastafarian reggae as a white middle class teenager in California, though, Norman C. Stolzoff doesn't  deal with the music's impact outside its Caribbean home. His real interest is  probing dancehall's internal workings as a cultural economy, and examining why it is such a controversial and fiercely contested phenomenon within Jamaica itself.

What emerges in Wake the Town is a picture of Jamaican music as powerfully conditioned by economic forces, and of a native genius for transforming these constraints into creative opportunities. Sound systems, for instance, emerged in the 1950s when the tourist trade priced live bands out of the popular market. Thrift was partial inspiration for two crucial Jamaican innovations, the dub's studio-as-instrument trickery and the re-using of rhythm tracks for different songs and vocalists; producers realized they only had to pay the session band for a single performance if they put dub versions on the B-side of singles or released "one riddim" albums. Similar implacable financial logic led to today's digital dancehall music, where computers and drum machines enabled the downsizing of human instrumentalists altogether.

Stolzoff is not a flashy writer, and theoretically he offers few surprises, wielding the usual mish-mash of  cult-studs faves: Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of taste in terms of class distinction, Dick Hebdige-style subcultural decoding, Paul Gilroy's work  on hybridity. His conclusion is a tad inconclusive and sat-on-the-fence: there's good in dancehall (a vibrant vulgarity that resists the Eurocentric refinement of Jamaica's ruling class) and there's bad (virulent homophobia, misogyny, gun talk). Wake the Town's real strength is its field research, the vivid and precise details gleaned during the months the author spent  observing the Killamanjaro sound system in action, and hanging out at the Dub Store recording studio. Because they engage in "soundclashes" with each other, sound systems need a constant turnover of  fresh "dubplates" (exclusive pre-releases) to sway the crowd and slay their rivals. At the studios, there's a bustling trade in both killer and filler tunes, with established stars and hustling aspirants chanting patois-rich raps over whatever riddims are currently hot, and  "champion sounds" paying anything from US $25 to $3000 for each addition to their arsenals.

The slanguage of the soundclash, with its "sound boy killers" and "burials," reflects not just the routine violence of Kingston where the homicide rate is three per day, but the dog-eat-dog struggle of capitalism's war of all against all--which is fiercer in this postcolonial corner of the globalized world than most elsewhere.  But although dancehall can appear to merely mirror and perpetuate "reality,"  the culture still contains flickers of utopian hope for a better way. Sound systems can cut from a rude-boy toast about murderation to a Rasta song about roots 'n' redemption in the blink of a cross-fader. In the selector's mix, these contradictions--glamorizing Babylon's ways versus dreaming of Zion--achieve an uneasy co-existence.