A Fan's Dilemma (3 of 3)

                             

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

Worn Copy

A counter-current to the digitalization of everyday life, analogue fetishism became one of the defining developments of the 2000s. Entire micro-genres sprang up oriented around cassette releases with handcrafted packaging, there was a burgeoning antique market for modular synths, and a resurgence of vinyl took off that would lead to overpriced platters popping up in Whole Foods next to the artisanal soaps and organic almond butter.

Arriving smack in the middle of the decade,  Worn Copy chimed with the emerging hip taste for the distressed and faded  - even when those effects, as with Hipstamatic, were actually digital simulations of decay and ageing.

The title Worn Copy had a particular reference, drawing attention to Ariel’s means-of-production: the 8-track Yamaha MT8X cassette-recorder. Where most of his DIY contemporaries used digital technology to record and then released the results on “dead media” formats like vinyl or cassette, Ariel’s process was analogue from the ground up.  The Yamaha MT8X is a long discontinued piece of equipment that – like the similar Tascam Portastudio – only existed for a few years before digital technology made it obsolete. Rather than the 2-inch or 3-inch reel-to-reel tape used in professional recording studios, these home studios recorded directly onto cassettes, where the tape was slightly wider than an eighth of an inch. Your master tape was a C60, C90, even a C120 if you were really cheapskate – something you could buy at Sam Goody or Radio Shack.

These were machines designed for amateur musicians looking to teach themselves the rudiments of mixing and overdubbing, or for songwriters and fledgling bands to record demos.  “The function, and appeal, of the Yamaha and Tascam, was that you had the studio and the mixing desk in one,” explains Ariel. “You didn’t need to have a reel-to-reel unit and a separate mixing board, and then another medium to dub copies down to from the master tape. You could monitor and record on a single machine.”  Very convenient, but the downside was a brutally reduced level of sound quality. The eight channels of sound on the mixer got distributed as eight bands across tape far thinner than the tape used in a recording studio. “Each band can’t process as much information, can’t take as much signal, without bleeding onto the other tracks”.

Ariel gives me a glimpse of his archive of master tapes. Rather than the film canister-like containers that word usually suggests, these are scores – maybe hundreds – of decidedly cheapo-looking cassettes. Most appear to be normal-bias (i.e. not the superior-grade chrome or metal tapes that hi-fi listeners preferred). A few even look like pre-recorded cassettes that he taped over. “I wanted to get the most bang for my buck,” Ariel laughs.  You could improve the sound somewhat by recording at double-speed… but the end result didn’t exactly sound like it hailed from the Record Plant.

The paradox of Worn Copy and the other Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti albums of this era is that Ariel was using a preliminary process to make a finished product, and further, that he was attempting to make music with the layered arrangements and intricate production of, say, Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, using technology even more basic than what was available to DIY pioneers like Swell Maps and Television Personalities (who at least got to see the inside of a professional recording studio).

This gulf between ambition and means is heard most gloriously on Worn Copy’s opener, “Trepanated Earth”, an 11-minute, multi-segmented epic that swerves through style switches and crescendo upon crescendo, resurrecting the bygone drama of a lost golden age of radio rock.  “ I feel like it’s being transmitted from my ears, being broadcast from 1979,” says Ariel. “Pomp and massiveness” was what he was aiming for, he says. That and a feeling of unhinged, off-the-rails momentum: “the nuance and the chemistry of a real band playing – a band at their prime or at their most unleashed, when they had all their energy stirred up and didn’t know what to do with it. In that song, I just wanted to do everything at once – a real showcase of what I can do.”

“Like all the stuff in a way, ‘Trepanated Earth’ is intended to catch someone off guard while they’re listening in a record store,” Ariel continues. He puts on a nerdy-dude voice to impersonate the startled customer: “’ Wooah, what is this, man! I’ve never heard this stuff before! What year is it’s from?’” He deadpans the clerk’s voice - “It’s from this year” – and then switches back to the customer’s stunned “What?!?” 

A former record store clerk himself, Ariel effortlessly breaks down the component stages of “Trepanated Earth”,  connecting each section in turn to the theme song of the TV sitcom ‘Full House,’ to the glassy guitar-chimes of English DIY cult figure Martin Newell of The Cleaners from Venus, to Can’s slippery bass-motion, to the raging guitar-thrash of Simply Saucer. But the whole transcends its parts, and the raging conglomerate is truly transcendent – possibly the most ecstatic rock blow-out of the 21^st Century so far. 

But what about that strange title?

“I looked it up in the dictionary but there’s no such word – there’s ‘trepanned’ but not ‘trepanated.. I just liked the way it rolled off the tongue.” Non-existent word or not, the title communicates a potent image: just like primitive peoples boring holes in the skulls of persons we’d  nowadays recognize as mentally ill, in order to release evil spirits,  you picture our planet being perforated and unloosing black flaming clouds of psychotic energy. It’s easy to imagine “Trepanated Earth” as an album cover – “a psychedelic explosion” as Ariel puts it.  

The song starts with Ariel’s guttural growls of misanthropy – “the human race is a pile of dogshit”, “mankind is a Nazi”, “humanity is the devil”, “do you really think I give a fuck about the world?” – offset by a boyish, innocent alter-ego Ariel speaking about dream worlds and the power of the imagination.  This is a devil versus angel shoulder scenario, Ariel explains. “They’re having a little dance, the two voices, the two viewpoints.” Then “Trepanated” shifts into a love-hate song. “It’s a schism between a couple – I’m just pleading, telling them I hate their guts while I love their ass. It’s a kiss-off that’s also like a love poem”.

“Immune To Emotion,” the next track on Worn Copy, is the calm after the storm of “Trepanated”. But the serenity is only surface-deep, a mask of impregnability. “That phrase just rolled off my tongue really easily – it’s what I would have liked to have seemed to everybody. I’m completely just bluffing. It’s a pose - ‘nothing’s going to ruffle this guy’ -  but of course inside I’m a screaming manlet who needs attention.”

“Life In LA” drops the bad-ass façade with the candid confession that “life can be so lonely”. The melancholy mood is softened by a daffy quacking refrain that recurs (Ariel vocally squawking melodic lines for his clarinetist friend to follow and double) and by a syrupy golden sound that oozes gorgeously over the entire song. “The wah pedal is introduced on Worn Copy – that’s the effect du jour on all the songs. It gives ‘Life in LA’  that sort of fake-funky feeling. An easy-listening, AM Gold vibe, like ‘Girlfriend;, that Paul McCartney song that Michael Jackson sang. I picture palm trees, light reflecting off of sun-blockers.” The mise en scene seems similar to Ariel’s later cover of the Sixties pop-psych song “Bright Lit Blue Skies” – where the summer sunshine feels like a lie to those exiled from happiness, who carry a cache of wintry coldness inside them all year round.

There are lighter moments scattered all across Worn Copy. Whimsies like “Jules Lost His Jewels”, the true story of Ariel’s cat getting neutered because he sprayed over his girlfriend’s leg. The jaunty “Artifact” -  a sort of sci-fi fable or message to his future-self sent via song, laced with water-bong sounds.  Bouncy comic cuts like “Credit,” with its hilarious lyrics about how the game is rigged against consumers, and “The Drummer”,  a third-person veiled-autobiography about “an anti-hero starting his own band,” who gets the chicks dancing to beats played “with his tongue and his teeth”.  “One On One” shimmers gorgeously like Can in Afro-mode, the dreaminess offset by a lyric about an orgy: “Take your neighbor’s hand / And throw them on the ground… Don’t fret if you’re going to come / When you’re finished, get another one.”  Starting with a sample from obscure German psych-prog outfit Missus Beastly, “Somewhere In Europe” is a spoof on Americans abroad that Ariel compares to Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. 

There are also pure moments of aching near-abstract beauty – the ambient caverns of “Foilly Foibles / GOLD”, a reverberant chamber redolent of Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly”, although Ariel’s own comparisons are Saucerful of Secrets and Cluster. Or “Jagged Carnival Tours”, which Ariel describes as “like some futuristic tunnel at Universal Studios in the Eighties”. This noodling amorphousness is something that Ariel used to jam out by the yard, or C120, reflecting his love of Sun Ra and ultra-obscure, beyond-the-Nurse-With-Wound-List experimental oddballs.

Still, the heart of the album, as with all of Ariel’s work, is the clash of opposed impulses: pop’s pleasing prettiness and shapely structures, stained and shook by the sort of wounded / wounding emotions that  normally funnel themselves into genres like death-metal, industrial and Goth.   

The literary critic Randall Jarrell believed that you could take any poet or writer’s work and boil it down to a handful of keywords that crystalize the kernel, the creative matrix, of their vision.  In Ariel’s case, way out in front, the hands-down winner, would be “perverted”. That word and variants like “pervert” and “perversion” crop up repeatedly in his conversation, serve as the go-to adjective to describe his approach to processing sound, warping influences, and writing lyrics, as well as his taste and his worldview.

“I think I’m a little bit perverted in my reasoning,” Ariel muses. “I flip things on their head and re-encrust the diamond with coal, if you get me. I pervert the meanings of things, I pervert the sacred. I profane things – but in a really G-rated way. I’m not the Marquis de Sade, I’m not even Genesis P-Orridge. But I’ve always been kind of morbid.  That’s why I love rock’n’roll -- it’s bad. When things are bad aesthetically as well as morally -- there lies my interest.”

Things starting going awry when Ariel was only two and his parents got divorced. He went through therapy as a kid. After a period at a Jewish private school, he attended a public junior high in Beverley Hills. The transition was difficult. “Being very small, I was made fun of a lot.” So Ariel got into death metal as a kind of retaliatory counter-strike.  “There’s no question I was trying to over-compensate for the fact that I was a little pipsqueak and completely harmless, by listening to really aggressive music. Embracing something to intimidate people.  I decided I had to get my revenge. I was like a Columbine kid, except this is before Columbine. But there was that total pathos thing of using the craziest music to express my extreme antipathy to normies. I wore Goreguts T shirts and I was like ‘why don’t people want to talk me?’!”

Things improved after a sojourn at an American private school in Mexico – the death-metal CDs were traded in for the less overtly offensive miserabilism of The Cure and The Smiths.  Still, a taste for the dark and perverted  manifested still through his high school artwork, which had a “a grotesque quality - corpses, sculptures I made of human flesh. Deep-gutted and disemboweled. All these terrible sadistic things happening to them, charged with erotic or religious imagery.”

 “Craft” is another Jarrell-style keyword that flickers through Ariel’s conversation, with a palpable pride in what he achieved on the most basic set-up. Listening, you can sense an innocent Lego-like delight in song building, the deftness with which he strings together intros, builds, middle-eights,  transitions, codas, into surprising but logical pop constructions.

Craftmanship is something that Ariel was praised for from a very early age, albeit in the visual rather than sonic arts: the first time he can remember receiving encouragement and attention. “From the age of three, I was an extremely skilled craftsman,” he told me in 2010. “I was always raised to think I was supposed to be an artist” – here he put on a squeaky old parent’s voice - “’Oh my god, look at him, he’s like a Picasso’. They thought I was going to go into graphic design.” But when he got to art school, he found that his particular talent for illustration was out of synch with prevailing conceptual approaches. That’s when the songwriting impulses of his pre-teen years resurged, resulting in his presentation of CD-Rs sold from a kiosk as his artistic contribution to the end-of-year thesis show at Cal Arts.  

In his songs,  two stages of Ariel’s development -  the child’s awakening to the rapture of pure pop beauty, the adolescent’s angst and bratty nihilism - mesh into art-pop that’s simultaneously classicist and expressionist.  The violence of emotion is what gives Ariel’s work its charge, flooding the formalist pop structures with raw feeling -  like the virulent hues of graffiti sprayed against the side of a building.

A Fan's Dilemma (2 of 3)

                             

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

House Arrest

The title “House Arrest” sounds like an allusion to Ariel’s reclusive, home-bound lifestyle circa its 2002 recording. His world revolved around a one-room apartment above an ashram in Crenshaw, South Central LA. The living space was spartan: “I had my bed on the ground, I didn’t have any furniture – just my little Sanyo stereo, two speakers and the 8-track recorder right in front of it. There was a table in the corner and a bunch of garbage bags full of my clothes.” He had to share a bathroom with several other people who lived on the upstairs floor above the ashram. 

Ariel fell into a routine. By day, he worked as an art teacher’s assistant at an elementary school (the same one he’d attended as a kid, in fact). Come four in the afternoon, he’d head home. Contravening the ashram rules he’d signed as a condition of living there  - which among other things strictly forbad strong flavors like garlic and smoking -  Ariel ordered kung po chicken delivery every night and got stoned. Then he slipped on headphones and started recording.  He made music all evening and deep into the night.

Ariel lived there for two years and only left because he got mugged twice right outside the house. “I would've stayed there for longer – that was by far my most productive period. I recorded five albums while I was there. I was working all night, so I don’t even know when I slept. Maybe I slept every other day, I can’t remember. Certainly I was burning the candles at both ends.”

The best part of the day was when the sun came up and Ariel was finally able to take off the headphones and play what he’d recorded through proper speakers. “Getting really stoned and listening to it - trying to pretend like I’d never heard it before.”

Ariel would come up with track sequencings for albums, make CD covers using color-marked Polaroids, get them miniaturized and printed at Kinko’s. But he was still a long way from having an audience.  “I had two or three friends in my life, barely, and even fewer than that knew me as a musician. There was just John Maus. My wife didn’t think of me that way. And I wasn’t playing live to turn people on.” 

His appearance wasn’t super-inviting either in those days:  red clogs with eyeballs painted on them, grey sweats (“the slumlord look”, he calls it), no shirt but just a hoodie zipped down. “A Nazi space monk, a German hippie with a very sick, death obsession,” is how Ariel describes his image, adding – not wholly convincingly - “there’s definitely lots of people that felt that style.”

Asked whether he was making the music just for himself at this point, Ariel nods and says “and just for a sense of purpose in life. I was really infused with the Lord, so to speak.”

The man’s religious love and awe for pop announces itself with the opening track on House Arrest, the rhapsodically melodic “Hardcore Pops Are Fun.”   Somewhere between a hymn and a mission-statement, its lyrics are deceptively off-the-cuff, but lay out the Ariel Pink credo in clearly devotional terms:  “Pop music is free/For you and me….  Pop music is wine, it tastes so divine”. The “hardcore” in the title “Hardcore Pops Are Fun” is Ariel’s playful way of asserting the deadly seriousness of his dedication to pop as craft and vocation: his belief that prettiness and sweetness can be as intense and powerful  as supposedly more challenging and rule-breaking forms of music like noise, industrial, extreme metal. “Whatever I was doing I thought was really heavy, but in a different sense.”  There’s an echo of Lou Reed on “Heroin” in the line “Pop music’s your wife/Have it for life”: pop as addiction, as God-surrogate, as an absolute commitment.

“Interesting Results”, the track that immediately follows, is  “another total manifesto song”, Ariel says.  You could slot it into the tradition of self-reflexive showbiz songs – ABBA’s “Thank You For the Music”, Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” – except that it’s far more interesting, taking you inside Ariel’s process. The song freeze-frames the moment just before taking the plunge into creation, hesitant and crinkled with doubt.  “Will I write /A song you love / Today?/There’s no way to tell/And who cares/Well I don’t,” Ariel teases the listener, adding in mock self-deprecation “Thank the Lord that my standards for success are so low”. The chorus swings the other way into ebullient confidence: “Every time / I pick up a pen/ I get / Interesting results/Every time / I sit down and try/I get /Extra-terrestrial results”. The kicker at the end turns it around on Ariel’s – then non-existent – audience: “It may not be much, but let’s see you try.”  Ariel laughs in recollection: “That was me really trying to milk the meta-narrative, for lack of anything to actually write about!”

“Getting High In the Morning”, another stand-out track on House Arrest, could also be construed – at a pinch – as a working-methods-revealed song.  It sounds frazzled, the corrugated riffs and effects-soaked textures resembling a malfunctioning TV set whose color balance is grotesquely out of whack. Ariel compares it to Zappa at his most zany and to ‘International Feel’ on Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star.  

That late Sixties acid rock vibe resurfaces on “Netherlands.” Here the brittle, painfully bright guitar recalls Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s - Ariel’s piercing, high-pitched, edging-into-too-sharp vocal even sounds like Grace Slick. There’s that same sense of perceptions stripped raw, of visionary overload straining the nervous system to breaking point. “It’s got that Moby Grape on a bender vibe,” nods Ariel. “That totally fried thing. The fuzz bass.”

Ariel is a deep scholar of Sixties psychedelia, although his tastes lean less to the Nuggets-y raw ‘n’ basic garage punk end of things and more to the pop-psych: the Byrds, the first Love LP, Electric Prunes, even Strawberry Alarm Clock. “I just love the Sixties”. He likes to say that he “brought the Eighties to the Sixties” – a joke, but one that does convey, if somewhat inscrutably, the sense that something else is going on here than the usual kind of revivalist procedure: something more uncanny. Obsolete technology (the long-discontinued Yamaha 8-track), dead musical languages, disinterred memories, and a lifetime of poring over recordings and assimilating the sonic signatures of their specific Zeitgeists - all converge to conjure songs that suggest parallel pop realities or counterfactual histories, how things could have gone down if…  

Temporal sequence gets scrambled, history goes haywire.  “The People I’m Not”, for instance, is described by Ariel as “a demo from Rocket From the Tombs, but playing a Fleetwood Mac song – there’s some Tango In the Night, ‘tell me sweet little lies’ vibe in there” – in other words, a song from a decade-or-more after the Cleveland proto-punk group ceased to exist.

But it’s always personal with Ariel, never merely “record collection rock”:  clever-but-empty games with taste and references,  sterile crafting of period-precise fakesimiles.  He jokes that his version of psych-rock is really “psychotherapy rock…. I’m always going  back to those earliest memories”. Indeed there’s an unreleased song from the House Arrest / Worn Copy /Doldrums era in which the 8-track is actually his shrink. The machine listens patiently to Ariel unburdening himself, and then in a pitched-down, masculine-medical voice offers soothing advice and support.

Of his lyrics, Ariel says “I have to trick myself… pretend everything’s like a scratch track, write the words down quickly…. And then later, I’m like ‘Nope, Ariel, the lyrics are done’.” Each lyric, he says, “is like a little piece of me preserved against my will” – and the totality of them add up to a warts-and-all psychological self-portrait. “There’s an ongoing narrative under all this stuff. And it’s really like some weird transference therapy thing”. Through his music, Ariel has found the missing link between The Cure and the talking cure. 

ZONING OUT (published as Leave Chillwave Alone)

Village Voice Pazz and Jop 2010 issue,   Jan 19 2011

by Simon Reynolds

Last summer, Pitchfork launched Altered Zones, a site dedicated to the "explosion of small-scale DIY music": all those recent protean micro-genres that reach a hardcore audience through ultra-limited cassette or vinyl releases, but accrue a much larger listenership thanks to blogs and file shares. What was intriguing was the decision to outsource the content—MP3s-with-blurbs, video premieres, artist-curated mixes, the occasional profile—to an "international team" of 15 blogs. Deftly balancing deference and co-optation, the move was a tacit admission that something was going on that the webzine itself couldn't quite handle, and a shrewd enlisting of those who could.

Altered Zones is invariably called Pitchfork's "sister site," but the missing word here is "younger"—there's an age difference large enough to be considered generational, maybe even epochal. Pitchfork thrived through adapting the print-music magazine to the Internet; its mindset still belongs to the era of criticism. But Altered Zones is an expanded version of the MP3 blog, with a sensibility that could be fairly described as post-critical: You'll almost never read a negative comment (MP3 blogs, by definition, don't post sound files they don't rate), and nothing gets graded on a 10.0 scale.

Founded by people whose formative musical experiences occurred before the Internet really took off, Pitchfork retains an attachment to notions like "importance" and "significance," along with such related pre-Web concepts as the geographically located scene, the gig as a privileged site where the community forms around a band, et al. But the Zones generation, artists and listeners alike, have never really known a time when music wasn't enmeshed with the Web. They have only a tenuous sense that music is something you pay for, and a much-diminished investment in live performance. In the '80s and '90s, Amerindie fans typically withheld judgment on a band's worth until they saw them "deliver" live. But when the Web is your primary new-music portal, live performance fades in importance. In the Zones, buzz bands are rarely bands as such: More often, they're just a guy in a bedroom.

The godfather of all this, of course, is Ariel Pink, who built a cult through mid-2000s albums The Doldrums, Worn Copy, and House Arrest, made at home on an eight-track, every last note played by himself. Like My Bloody Valentine with shoegaze, the sound Pink invented—'70s radio-rock and '80s new wave as if heard through a defective transistor radio, glimmers of melody flickering in and out of the fog—was so striking it could only become a chronic influence. Ironically, just as a legion of one-man bands emerged brandishing pre-faded sounds, Pink returned after a five-year silence with 2010's Before Today, an album recorded with a proper band, in a proper studio, and—in this realm, almost unheard of—with a proper producer. On songs like "Can't Hear My Eyes" and "Round and Round" (Pazz's #8 single, and Pitchfork's #1), Pink stripped away his trademark reverb-haze to reveal the formal perfection of his song structures in all their intricacy and ingenuity. As the title hinted, the album harked back to a lost golden age, approximately bookended by Rumours and Synchronicity, of professionally crafted, crisply produced pop-rock. That is to say, the very slickness and adultness that the lo-fi indie tradition originally defined itself against.

I wish glo-fi had caught on as the name for the genre spawned off those three Pink albums (a sound that Before Today ultimately leaves behind), since it at least captures something of their gloss and mess. But "chillwave" seems to be what we're saddled with, a term coined as a joke and wielded most energetically as a brick bat. For 2010 wasn't the Year of Chillwave so much as the Year of Chillwave Backlash, a flurry of jibes almost as formularized as detractors make out the music to be: obligatory reference to Hipstamatic + snigger at the name + invocation of nostalgia as a priori Bad Thing = entire region of music dismissed.

A fundamental human emotion, nostalgia is a perfectly respectable subject for art (see Proust, Nabokov, much poetry, and plenty of pop music, actually). For sure the gauzy sub-Galaxie wistfulness of all that beach pop gets tiresome. But the elegiac mode can also generate things like Mark McGuire's Living With Yourself, on which the Emeralds guitarist weaves "field recordings" of his burbling five-year-old self, originally taken by his father, into the rippling radiance of tracks like "The Vast Structure of Recollection." Living With Yourself, Emeralds's Does It Look Like I'm Here?, and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal (all released on the respected Austrian experimental label Mego) have similar temporal coordinates to Before Today, but draw on different resources: the late-period Krautrock of the Sky label, Manuel Göttsching, and soundtrack-era Tangerine Dream; New Age and the Ambient Series (Budd and Hassell as much as Eno). But the almost-clinical clarity of the textures and the mood-blend of serenity and sadness point to common ground between the instrumentals-only Oneohtrix/Emeralds sector and the song-oriented school of Pink.

That said, I don't think the N-word really has much to do with all the '80s ghosts haunting this music. From YouTube to sharity blogs, the Internet is an ever-expanding data sea, and these young musicians are really explorers, voyaging into the past and diving for pearls. Like the real ocean, it's full of flotsam, garbage, kitsch. But sometimes the plastic turns out to be the pearls. The paradigmatic move here is Oneohtrix-man Dan Lopatin's prising apart of Chris DeBurgh's sickly ballad "Lady in Red" to release the sliver of sublime that is "Nobody Here" (one of numerous "echo jams" he deposited on YouTube). But yacht rock and New Age were just the start of the '80s salvage trade. Hitherto disregarded genres of that decade like Goth and EBM entered the influence-mix this year, while How to Dress Well's gaseous take on r&b suggests that the '90s pop mainstream is next in line for archival extraction. Witch house belongs here, too, as just another "zone": Salem's Goth + screw + crunk cuts a diagonal through the '80s, '90s, and early noughties.

In "Hardcore Pops Are Fun," from 2006's House Arrest, Pink provided a kind of hymn/manifesto for this generation's ahistorical omnivorousness: "Pop music is free/For you and me . . . Pop music is wine/It tastes so divine." But he still had a foot in '90s irony ("Hardcore Pops" was actually recorded in 2001). Archness gets burned off completely in the music of those that came after him, replaced by an earnestness that aspires to spirituality. You can see the sensibility in both the music of key figures like James Ferraro and Sun Araw, and in the writing of Altered Zones contributors like 20 Jazz Funk Greats: hyper-referentiality without irony. From a distance it looks like postmodernism, but really it's something else: a mystical merger of Pop Art and psychedelia.

Earnestness is one of the defining attributes of "digimodernist" culture identified by the theorist Alan Kirby—other hallmarks are "onwardness" and "endlessness." On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today's musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (That's me echo-jamming Eighties Baudrillard, by the way).

Which brings us back to Pitchfork's decision to create a sibling site. Why couldn't they just process the output from all these zones themselves, sort wheat from chaff? The answer perhaps is that there's just too much of the stuff, and that filtering doesn't seem to be quite the thing to do with it. This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. Before Today made the Top Tens of most of the blogs that make up this restless circuit, but, one senses, mostly out of sentimental loyalty to the forefather. Signed to a big label, touring to promote his big album, praised and profiled by big magazines, Pink no longer really belongs to the underground. Whether that now puts him in limbo, and whether any of his chill-dren (the most promising, Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian, both add Daft Punk to the mix) will follow him there, remains to be seen.

Total Recall: why retromania is all the rage
The Guardian, June 2 2011

by Simon Reynolds

There's no single thing that made me suddenly think, Hey, there's a book to be written about pop culture's chronic addiction to its own past. As the last decade unfolded, noughties pop culture became steadily more submerged in retro. Both inside music (reunion tours, revivalism, deluxe reissues, performances of classic albums in their entirety) and outside (the emergence of YouTube as a gigantic collective archive, endless movie remakes, the strange and melancholy world of retro porn), there was mounting evidence to indicate an unhealthy fixation on the bygone.

But if I could point to just one release that tipped me over the edge into bemused fascination with retromania, it would be 2006's Love, the Beatles remix project. Executed by George Martin and his son Giles to accompany the Cirque du Soleil spectacular in Las Vegas, the album's 26 songs incorporated elements from 130 individual recordings, both releases and demos, by the Fab Four.

Hyped as a radical reworking, Love was way more interesting to think about than to listen to (the album mostly just sounds off, similar to the way restored paintings look too bright and sharp). Love raised all kinds of questions about our compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history, about the ways we use digital technology to rearrange the past and create effects of novelty. And like Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Love was yet more proof of the long shadow cast by the 60s, that decade where everything seemed brand-new and ever-changing. We're unable to escape the era's reproaches (why aren't things moving as fast as they did back then?) even as the music's adventurousness and innocence make it so tempting to revisit and replicate.

For a moment there, Love looked like it might herald the opening of a new frontier of revenue-generation for rock legends keen to exploit their own archives. Would the Rolling Stones be next, I wondered? So far, surprisingly, the Beatles mash-up has proved to be a one-off, although Kate Bush's "new" album Director's Cut does rework songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes (a disappointing move for an artist once so forward-looking). But Love was a chart success and its platinum sales contributed to a remarkable statistic: the Beatles were the second-bestselling albums artist of the 2000s, shifting nearly 28m units. Indeed the Beatles book-ended the decade with 2000's singles anthology 1 (whose 11.5m copies made it the best-selling album of the 21st century so far) and 2009's massive reissue programme of the entire back catalogue.

Now the Beatles are the Beatles: they tower over the history of pop, so why wouldn't they be giving Eminem (the noughties No 1 bestseller with 33m) a run for his money? But think again, think comparatively: let's contrast pop with other commercial art forms such as film or fiction. David Lean and Stanley Kubrick's 1960s movies are epoch-defining classics and doubtless tick over nicely in DVD rental and TV airings, but neither dead director was breaking box office records this past decade. The quality fiction bestsellers of the 60s – zeitgeisty novels by JD Salinger, Philip Roth et al – remain a presence in our culture but did not trouble any noughties bestseller charts. Equally, there are no modern directors copping licks from Dr's Strangelove and Zhivago, nor authors styling novels after Portnoy's Complaint. But there are still bands ripping off the Beatles. Some are even pretty great, such as Tame Impala, whose latest LP Innerspeaker is a bit like the band decided Paperback Writer b/w Rain was rock's unsurpassable peak and decided to stay there, for ever.

Cinema isn't immune to retromania. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch still gamely fly the postmodern flag with films that are pastiche genre exercises or larded with in-joke references to cinematic history. The remake has become a fixture of the movie business, not so much for pomo reasons but because it's what people in the industry call a "presold concept". Unlike with rock, where most of the biggest-grossing tours involve reunions or wrinkly legends from the 60s and 70s, people won't go into the multiplexes to see a rereleased classic or blockbuster from yesteryear. But they will, seemingly, turn up for glitzy, pointless updates of major movies, such as the recent travesty of Arthur starring Russell Brand. TV has got in on the remake game, too, with new versions of The Prisoner, Charlie's Angels, Hawaii Five-O, and Britcom faves such as Minder and The Likely Lads. You also have the retro-chic series Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes, whose appeal depends heavily on the sensation of utter immersion in the past through a fetishistic focus on period details of clothing, decor, food and so forth.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that pop music is the area where retromania really runs rampant. There is something peculiar, even eerie, about pop's vulnerability to its own history, the way the past accumulates behind it and hampers it, both as an actual sonic presence (on oldies radio, as reissues, through nostalgia tours and now via YouTube) and as an overpowering influence.

If you want further proof, there is no better evidence than the record that at the time of writing enjoys its 16th week at No 1 in the UK album chart: Adele's 21. In the US, her success (No 1 album for nine weeks, No 1 single with Rolling in the Deep) is so unusual for a British artist these days, it's tempting to see it as a flashback to the glory days when the Beatles and Stones sold black American music to white America. Except that those bands were doing it with contemporary rhythm-and-blues. Adele is literally flashing back to black styles that date from the same era as the Beatles and the Stones.
Adele is not quite as retro-fetishistic about it as Amy Winehouse, with her beehive, or Duffy, with her black-and-white video for Rockferry, her sample of Ben E King's Stand By Me in Mercy, and her name's echo of Dusty Springfield. But there is no doubt that her "anti-Gaga" appeal is based around the return to bygone values of gritty soulfulness. Adele's 21 consists of "timeless" songcraft influenced by Motown, southern soul and country, framed by "organic" arrangements featuring horns, banjos and accordions, with the whole package given just the slightest lick of modern slickness. The production involvement of Rick Rubin almost proposes Adele as somehow already an iconic veteran like Johnny Cash, in need of reverent rescue in the form of a "stripped down" sound.

I lived through the first revival of all this in the 80s, with Dexys Midnight Runners, Carmel, Style Council, the Christians, and the rest. It seemed corny and retrogressive then. In 1984, should someone have said to me, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine Alison Moyet emoting into a human face – for ever", I'd have laughed at them. I'm not laughing now. And just wait until the industry – desperate and with dollars signs in its eyes – floods the market with facsimiles.

Retro is not a completely new phenomenon, of course: pop has an extensive history of revivals and creative distortions of the musical past. What is different about the contemporary retromania is the aspect of total recall, instant recall, and exact recall that the internet makes possible. Fans can drown themselves in the entire history of music at no cost, because it is literally all up there for the taking. From YouTube's archive of TV and concert performances to countless music, fashion, photography and design blogs, the internet is a gigantic image bank that encourages and enables the precision replication of period styles, whether it's a music genre, graphics or fashion. As a result, the scope for imaginative reworking of the past – the misrecognitions and mutations that characterised earlier cults of antiquity like the 19th-century gothic revival – is reduced. In music especially, the combination of cheap digital technology and the vast accumulation of knowledge about how specific recordings were made, means that bands today can get exactly the period sound they are looking for, whether it's a certain drum sound achieved by Ringo Starr with help from the Abbey Road technicians or a particular synth tone used by Kraftwerk.

Hence the noughties phenomenon of the 80s revival. It actually started in the later years of the 90s and just kept going: a friend quipped that it has now lasted longer than the actual 80s did. La Roux's Elly Jackson, whose tunes could be placed right next to Yazoo or Eurythmics without the least bit of temporal disruption, declared recently that "synth pop is so over . . . If I see anything more 80s-themed, I'm going to bust". The gall of the gal! Black Eyed Peas's last big hit The Time borrowed its chorus from the 1987 smash (I've Had) The Time of My Life by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, suggesting that the 80s-extraction industry has run out of good stuff.

Peas's maestro Will.i.am is also a pioneer of 90s recycling: the non-80s parts of The Time sound like boshing techno-rave from the early days of Berlin's Love Parade. On the radio, every big R&B hit sounds less like R&B and more like Ibiza-trance or circa-1991 hip-house. Guest rappers such as Pitbull or Ludacris are obliged to spout party-hard inanities just like the MCs of Technotronic and CC & Music Factory once did.

Head into the post-indie musical zones of NME/Pitchfork and most of what you encounter is "alternative" only in the sense of offering an alternative to living in the present: Fleet Foxes, with their beards and balladry modeled on their parents' Crosby, Stills & Nash LPs; Thee Oh Sees' immaculate 60s garage photocopies; the Vivian Girls' revival of what was already a revival (C86 shambling pop). In indieland too we're starting to hear 90s vibes creeping in, from Yuck's grunge-era slacker-isms to Brother's Gallagher-esque "gritpop".

The deeper you venture into the underground, the more music involves pilfering from the past. This is one of the central mysteries that propelled me through the writing of Retromania: how come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators? In the underground, creativity has become recreativity. The techniques involved are salvage and citation; the sensibility mixes hyper-referential irony with reverent nostalgia.

Some of the music made in this spirit, from Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti to the output of labels such as Ghost Box and Not Not Fun, is among the most enjoyable and thought-provoking of our time. The book is not a lament for a loss of quality music – it's not like the well-springs of talent have dried up or anything – but it registers alarm about the disappearance of a certain quality in music: the "never heard this before" sensation of ecstatic disorientation caused by music that seems to come out of nowhere and point to a bright, or at least strange, future.

What seems to have happened is that the place that The Future once occupied in the imagination of young music-makers has been displaced by The Past: that's where the romance now lies, with the idea of things that have been lost. The accent, today, is not on discovery but on recovery. All through the noughties, the game of hip involved competing to find fresher things to remake: it was about being differently derivative, original in your unoriginality.

All the cool obscure resources such as Krautrock or acid-folk have been excavated long ago, which is why the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Hype Williams and LA Vampires started looking to 80s mainstream pop, megastars such as Hall & Oates, Michael McDonald and Sade. For today's underground bands, enough time has elapsed that the overground sounds of yesteryear seem exotic and mysterious. Certainly it's a lot less obvious to draw on this stuff than the Velvet Underground, Neu! or My Bloody Valentine. But as even these mainstream resources get exhausted – and when I talk about pop's addiction to its own past, the analogy is less with drugs than with the west's oil addiction – the cutting edge of hip music is looking to the pasts of foreign countries. For instance, the latest crush of Los Angeles cool-hunters such as Ariel Pink and Puro Instinct is Soviet new wave music, readily findable on YouTube. Associated with the youth subculture known as Stilyagi, the Soviet new wave offers a slightly askew mirror-image of western pop of the 80s.

The hipster underground is also where musical retromania intersects with the related phenomenon of vintage chic. From the fad for collecting quaint manual typewriters (either as decorative objects or to actually use) to the continuing boom for vintage clothing, there is a striking parallel with underground musicians's fetish for obsolete formats such as vinyl and cassette and with the antique-like trade in early analogue synthesisers. But the trend that is most emblematic of our time-out-of-joint culture is the vogue for digital photograph apps such as Hipstamatic and Instagram, which give snapshots the period look associated with cameras and film from the 70s and 80s. (See also ShakeIt, an app that mimics the Polaroid and works faster if you actually shake the iPhone.)

What does it say about our era that so many people think it's cool to place these pre-faded, instant-nostalgia filters on the images that will one day constitute their treasury of precious memories? When they look back to the early 21st century, their pics will look like they were taken two or three decades earlier, summoning up a long-lost era they don't have any reason to feel nostalgic about.

Just like retro video games such as Mega Man 9 that simulate quaint 8-bit visuals via a modern console, these retro-photo apps embody a central paradox of contemporary pop culture. We have all this futuristic technology at our disposal, endowing us with capabilities that would have seemed fantastical in 1972, but it is getting used as a time machine to transport us into yesterday, or to shuffle and share pop-cult detritus from long ago. We live in the digital future, but we're mesmerised by our analogue past. Hipstamatic-style apps also raise another question: when we listen back to the early 21st century, will we hear anything that defines the epoch? Or will we just find a clutter of reproduction antique sounds and heritage styles?