BRAND NEW, YOU'RE RETRO

essay for Sleek magazine, Germany, early 2012

by Simon Reynolds

“Brand New You’re Retro”, sneered the British rapper Tricky back in 1995.  This taunt, directed at some unknown adversary, could easily be repurposed as a general indictment of pop culture in 2012.  Tricky’s cutting catchphrase conveys just how often the superficial appearance of freshness and novelty masks recycled derivativeness and stale familiarity. 

Another line in the song “Brand New You’re Retro” speaks of “a dread of the past and fear of the future.”  There’s no shortage of future-fear at the moment:  anxious uncertainty rules the day, tomorrow looks less and less likely to be an improvement on the present.  A shaky Eurozone; nuclear war in the Middle East looms as a possibility; economists wondering whether economic growth is an unsustainable dream;  an environment that, frankly, looks fucked. But “dread of the past”? Quite the opposite! Here in the 21^st Century, we’re obsessed with 20^th Century pop culture, mesmerized by its mythic giants and fascinated by all its obscure corners and forgotten figures.  Perhaps it makes perfect sense: future-fear and nostalgia are two sides of the same coin, in precarious times people look back to a past that was more stable. But if you’re the kind of person, like me, who looks to popular culture for forward-looking energy and the promise of endless renewal,  all this retrospection and rehashing just adds to the gloom. 

Take pop music. The 2000s were consumed by a long Eighties revival that took in synthpop, postpunk, and most recently goth/ industrial/EBM (with acts like Zola Jesus, and Xeno & Oaklander). Now, right on cue, we’re seeing the start of Nineties-retro: bands inspired by  grunge (Yuck, Joy Formidable, EMA), shoegaze (Cults, M83),  and early house (outfits like Miracles Club and Teengirl Fantasy,  labels like  100% Silk and Ecstasy Records).  Yet you couldn’t say that current music is unified by a dominant “Nineties-flashback” character, because virtually every other decade of pop history is getting ransacked too.  “Revival simultaneity”, I call it: a temporally confused music scene where Fifties rockabilly-influenced artists like Dirty Beaches coexist with Sixties garage inspired bands like Thee Oh Sees, Sixties psychedelia-homaging outfits like Tame Impala,  late Sixties folk-rock-oriented ensembles like Fleet Foxes, 70s raunch rock resurrectionists like The Black Keys, 70s punk invoking groups like Wild Flag, 80s hardcore rejuvenators like Fucked Up.... and on....  and on.  Disparately dated, diversely derivative, these groups have created a musical landscape that lacks anything that could be construed as a Zeitgeist. What, one wonders, will future generations find in this era that’s distinctive enough to be worth reviving? Or even feel nostalgic about?

“Pop will eat itself” , a saying coined by the British music journalist David Quantick in the Eighties to describe the effect of sampling on music, has spread so far and wide that it’s a cliché now.  In the trendy Manchester market Afflecks Palace, I saw a T-Shirt slogan that declared “Fashion Will Eat Itself”. But the truth is that fashion was munching on its own flesh long before rock and pop got into auto-cannibalism. Fashion started revisiting its own history as early as 1967, but in recent years its cycles of recycling seemed to rotate ever faster.  Every few years it seems, grunge and Goth, Sixties style and Seventies chic, come around again. Punk, apparently, is next up, with black leather and spikes strutting down runways soon courtesy of fashion houses like Gaultier, Burberry, McQ, and Balmain. Meanwhile, vintage clothing just keeps getting bigger, to the point where high street clothes manufacturers have started slapping the word “vintage” onto their merchandise even though they’re obviously brand-new rather than original garments from the past. 

Vintage chic extends beyond clothes to retro-styled décor and accessories of every kind imaginable: the hip fad for archaic appliances like manual typewriters and outmoded formats like cassette and vinyl; period-look spectacles;  beards and moustaches beamed in from 1969 or 1975;  retro toys, retro games,  and even retro sweets.  ETSY, the online marketplace for handcrafted goods, is where the fetish for “dead media” and antiquated production techniques converges with nostalgia for childhood to form the  aesthetic I call “cutesy-poo”:  posters depicting reel-to-reel tape recorders, belts whose buckles are made from the plastic shells of cassettes, notepads with covers repurposed from 1970s school textbooks and children’s fiction paperbacks,  letterpress cards and silkscreen T-shirts that juxtapose birds, deer,  or narwhals with turntables, typewriters, or cassettes. Then there’s the huge  vogue for digital photography apps like Hipstamatic,  Instagram, and ShakeIt, which give your pictures the period ambience associated with the film stock and cameras of the  ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s.  The popularity of this kind of ersatz-analogue “instant nostalgia” has led to gadgets like Fuvvi’s The Bee, a miniature-sized simulacrum of the Super 8 camera that digitally simulates the grainy, jerky look of 8mm home movies.

Dead media and archaic formats have featured in cinema, like last year’s Super 8, a homage to early Eighties Spielberg centered around kids who are amateur movie-makers and which features clumsy appearances of Walkmans and other antiquated technology from that decade.  But obsolete media are also at the fore of a separate trend in movies that The Guardian newspaper dubbed “retrovision”:   films that aren’t just set in the past but are made in the style of that era, to the point of deliberately adopting the technical limitations of the time.  Hence Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, a pair of 1970s-style horror movies with digitally-faked production defects and even fictitious trailers for similar films to play in the middle of the double bill.  Michel Hazanavicius studied the camera angles and stylistic quirks of the silent movie era to make The Artist, his own mute and monochrome version of that bygone genre.  The approach has crept into TV too: Mad Men, not content with fetishizing the clothes, furniture, décor, and cigarette smoke of the early Sixties, is also shot on film to enhance the time travel effect, at a time when high definition digital cameras are the norm in TV.   Retrovision, though, is separate from two other backwards-looking trends in mainstream movies: the endless stream of remakes and cinematic adaptions of TV shows of yesteryear, and movies that are heavily referential (and reverential) to past eras of movie-making, such as Drive, an exquisitely put-together piece of nothing that homages Walter Hill’s The Driver from 1978.
 

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Retrospection in pop culture isn’t a new development, off course. There have been revivals in pop music going back as far as the early Seventies (when Fifties rock’n’roll made a comeback), while film-makers like George Lucas and John Carpenter often make witty, affectionate nods to the Hollywood pulp movies that thrilled them as kids.  What’s new is the scale and intensity of the looking-back: the mania in “retromania”. In the Nineties you started to get a new breed of geek-scholar forming indie bands or making independent movies: figures like Quentin Tarantino, who’d worked as a video store clerk, or Pavement, who worked in record stores.  In those pre-filesharing days, it was only people whose day jobs gave them unlimited access to the artform they were obsessed with and the time to listen to a huge diversity of the genre’s output,  who were able to develop a special kind of meta-consciousness that  would  lead them to make music or movies dense with references and allusions. But the Internet has made all that hard-earned knowledge available to all, and at zero cost, for those who are prepared to download illegally (which is almost everybody).  

Having total access and instant access to all this previous creation makes it very tempting to kick-start the creative process by reworking something you’ve found, rather than attempting to dream something completely new into existence, ex nihilo.  If you’re not feeling terribly inspired, what better way to get the juices flowing than by flicking haphazardly through the archive until you find something you think most people won’t have seen or heard, or that you can tinker with slightly until it’s “new enough”?  Or if you’re feeling slightly more energetic, you can take a bunch of separate old things and combine them into a new-ish composite. It’s easy to tell that this is how a lot of  “creatives” today operate just by looking at the fonts and imagery used on so many album sleeves, book covers, band flyers, etc. Digital technology not only makes it all too easy to roam the online archive looking for “inspiration”, it vastly facilitates the procedures of cut-and-paste,  tweaking, processing, and so forth.

People who work with visuals—fashion, design, pop video—seem to have the least amount of qualms when it comes to appropriation.  Designers don’t hesitate to recycle, say, the modernist typography and graphic style of the early 20^th Century.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the famous slant-wise Constructivist poster by Rodchenko--a Bolshevik woman shouting agit-prop—get ripped off: it’s been used in countless flyers for concerts, on record sleeves (most famously Frank Ferdinand’s debut album), and book covers (most absurdly, on a business self-help book Recommended: How To Sell Through Networking and Referrals). As for pop video...  Let’s look at the case of Beyonce’s “Countdown” video, controversial because of its borrowing of moves from an experimental ballet choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.  But the video was omnivorous verging on indiscriminate in its appropriations, managing to also cram in allusions to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Girl, Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise, Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, and Diana Ross in the  Supremes.

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Quotation and homage go back a long way in the arts,  it’s true.  But what was once a sophisticated, marginal and relatively infrequent practice has escalated to the point where it verges on becoming a dominant, epoch-defining sensibility. Digital culture is synonymous with practices like mash-ups,  YouTube parody, fan fiction, videos woven out of found footage (such as Lana Del Rey’s promos for songs like “Video Games”).  The ever-growing vastness of the online archive, combined with the speed and slickness of techniques of sampling, cut-and-paste, etc, has led to a situation where creativity has been supplanted by recreativity as the new paradigm for culture-making.  Visiting a California art college recently, I met a young performance/video artist whose work involved him singing the entirety of the musical Hair under the blazing desert sun: a project that combined the camp of  Glee or vogueing with the physical ordeals undergone by 70s artists like Chris Burden.   When it comes to parody and reenactment, the possibilities for recombination are limitless. But what is this kind of work really saying? What is it actually bringing into the world?

In his famous prose-poem manifesto Junkspace, the architect Rem Koolhaas argued that  “regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation.” And yet what Koolhaas characerises as a gigantic cultural garbage heap, might also be conceived as something  more like a flea-market: a disorderly sprawl, the bulk of which consists of worthless detritus, but which always holds out the possibility of finding  strange treasure. A hell of a lot of ideas and images, personae and styles, were churned up during the 20^th Century: maybe it makes sense that artists are now less interested in making the totally  new and more attracted to strategies of sifting and sorting, mixing and matching.  Some of the best musicians of the last half-decade—Ariel Pink, Vampire Weekend, Oneohtrix Point Never, Gonjasufi, Grimes, Gang Gang Dance, and many more—are effectively rag-pickers who pore through the mountainous debris of 20^th Century pop culture, whether it’s digging for weird records in thrift stores or trawling through YouTube for vintage video clips.  

Filtration, pattern recognition, an ability to surf the choppy sea of information and chart a unique and personal course through the ocean of overload: this is what is required of the modern artist.  Baudelaire, writing in the context of the 19^th Century city with its bombardment of stimuli, described the modern artist as “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness”. Today you would have to update the metaphor and talk of the contemporary artist as a search engine endowed with consciousness.  "I can hear everything,” declares a voice at the start of Gang Gang’s recent album Eye Contact. “It's everything time."  The challenge now is turn that into opportunity, not a paralysing predicament.

 

RETRO ACTIVE / Shabby Chic / Lana Del Rey

director's cut of lead essay for Spin's relaunch issue NOW, March/April 2012

by Simon Reynolds  

“Watch out Adele! There’s another soul lady coming up behind you and her name is Lana Del Rey.” So said a Top 40 radio deejay last month, transitioning between “Rolling In the Deep” and “Video Games”. 

The patter wasn’t just a canny way to introduce an unfamiliar song to mainstream listeners, it was an astute bit of music criticism. Adele and Lana Del Rey are both young women who’ve had their hearts broken, singing about it via overtly non-contemporary musical idioms:  Etta James-style Sixties soul, in Adele’s case, and, with Del Rey, something less tightly anchored to specific sources but equally old-timey in its evocations of the Fifties and Sixties.  The question these two singers raise is: why do these otherwise thoroughly modern women express first-hand feelings in such second-hand imagery? Why coat something raw and real in this vintage veneer?

Lana Del Rey arrived on the scene too recently for inclusion in my book Retromania, but—just like Adele—she’s an absolute gift when it comes to talking it up: “look, see, that’s what I’m on about!” Yet they each represent different kinds of retro-pop.  Adele’s is unselfconscious, an artist adopting an old-fashioned style as if it was the most natural thing in the world, neither adding much to it nor drawing attention to its out-of-time quality. Escort, the New York disco troupe featured in this special issue of Spin, belong in this category. One hallmark of unselfconscious retro is not dressing the part, not looking like you’ve time-travelled from the period in question.  

Lana Del Rey is closer to the hyper-conscious retro that’s endemic in indie/underground music, where clothes and artwork evoke a bygone era, and lyrics often teem with allusions and references.  Frankie Rose & the Outs, also featured in this issue, are a prime example,   from their Sixties girl group sound to songs like “Thee Only One” (the “thee” nods to various bands led by Sixties-revivalism-pioneer Billy Childish, but can be traced further back to Sixties garage bands like Thee Midnighters) to the  cover of the 7-inch single version of that song, which Rose wanted to “look like a cross between a Blue Note album and an old French pop 45.”

Retro of this kind, where a band’s sound-and-visuals incorporate citations and spotting them is integral to the fan’s enjoyment, is not a new thing, of course. It’s been part of indie almost from the start (The Smiths’s iconographic record-sleeves, Jesus and Mary Chain or Butthole Surfers “sampling” riffs or backing vocal refrains from Sixties and Seventies legends). You can trace it back further still, through glam’s Fifties rock’n’roll echoes all the way to The Beatles’s 1968 Chuck Berry pastiche “Back In the U.S.S.R.”. Yet there’s no doubt that this kind of conscious retro-activity has intensified in the 21^st Century. Partly that’s a result of just how extensive the archive of pop history is at this point (five decades and growing!). And partly it’s because the broadband era made accessing all that history so easy. YouTube, especially, is a vast, ever-expanding repository of videos and music-on-TV clips. It’s also an audio library that holds virtually every instance of pop (and unpop) music extant.  You can school yourself there, free of charge.

Which brings us back to Lana Del Rey. Her rocket-like ascent through the buzzosphere was propelled by videos she put on YouTube made out of footage she’d found on Youtube.  “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” put History in shuffle mode:  a miasma of Americana that drifts back and forth across the decades but is unified by its sustained elegiac mood of not-now-ness.  Amid the appropriated home-movie-footage of swimming pools and skateboarders and kids on mopeds,  specific allusions pop up:  Chateau Marmont, Lana in Lolita sunglasses from Kubrick’s movie, Lana in a racing driver jacket that suggests Evil Knievel or 1970s road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, Lana in a white leather fringe jacket that echoes Easy Rider or Elvis-in-Vegas. 

According to Del Rey, though, the invocations of places like Las Vegas and LA in her videos (and also her lyrics) aren’t really references so much as mood-tints.  “The thing that fascinates me about all of them is the colors of the places,” she says on the phone, in transit to another mythic-Americana landscape she adores, Coney Island.  “The muted blues and greens in California, the bright lights of Vegas...  People ask me about what the Fifties imagery from California represents to me, but actually I’m mainly just a visual person.   Sometimes when my producer and I talk about songs, we talk about them in terms of colors. In a way the album was visually driven. “

Part of the nostalgia effect of the found footage in Del Rey’s videos derives from the properties of the different kinds of film stock, including the specific way that it ages and decays.  The bleached and blotchy textures trigger a poignant sense of time’s passage, an inkling that even your most halcyon memories will fade to nothingness.  “Blue Jeans” explicitly forefronts the idea of “dead media” and antiquated formats with its opening footage of a hand grabbing a pack of Eastman Ektrachrome Super 8 film.

Lana Del Rey may be about to become the first Hipstamatic pop star.  (If she can get past the negative bump of her stilted Saturday Night Live performance, widely and somewhat unfairly deemed disastrous). Photo apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram,  or Fuuvi’s new faux-Super8 device the Bee, offer a digital simulation of an analogue past. Something similar is going on with Del Rey’s music : old-timey instruments like mandolins, strings, harps and twangy surf guitar make up much of its texture, but there’s also  unidentifiable sounds that are clearly sampled and processed, while the beats on Born To Die ‘s more uptempo tunes are boombastic,  hip hop in impact if not  feel.  The result:  the RZA meets Lee Hazelwood. Factor in Del Rey’s choices in clothes, hair, and make-up, and it’s clear she’s the perfect pop singer for the era of vintage chic. 

Not that she’s the only artist around offering a pre-faded sound-and-vision.  Perfume Genius, also featured in Spin this month, has a similar “warm”,  softened-by-age sound, and a video, for “Lookout, Lookout”, set in a quaint motel, complete with rotary phone. 

It’s not just the stylized form of Lana Del Ray’s songs that harks back to olden days, it’s the emotional content too:  a language of romantic excess redolent of Roy Orbison’s most over-the-top ballads or Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World”. Love as malady and madness, delirium, delusion... and death.  From its title on down, Born To Die is full of it: “I’m not afraid to say that I’d die without him,” “I wish I was dead”...

“I don’t really condone relying on another person to the point where you’re going to die without them,” says Del Rey.  “Something I never really expected was to have gotten into a relationship that ended up being very tumultuous.  But I had met someone who was so magnetic and made me feel differently from the way that I felt for so long, which was sort of confused and bored...  and because in the end we couldn’t be together, it ended up having a do-or-die element to it.  I kept on falling back to that place in terms of inspiration for the songs.” 

Born To Die goes beyond retro-romance, though, to retro-sexuality, retro-gender.  All those yielding, doe-eyed ballads of abject devotion look back in languor to a time when men were men and women were thankful. A pre-feminist world, or more precisely, America before Betty Friedman’s The Feminine Mystique was published (1963).  “This Is What Makes Us Girls” seems to define femininity as being a fool for love:  “We all look for heaven and we put love first/Don’t you know we’d die for it?/It’s a curse.”  At the other extreme, there are songs about women who uses wiles to get what they want. “Off to The Races” recalls Ginger, the Casino character played by Sharon Stone, except if she was as docile and adoring as DeNiro’s Sam Rothstein hoped.  She’s a moll, wasting a rich man’s money (“give me them coins”), breaking into a Betty Boo squeak for the lines “I’m your little harlot, starlet” and purring “Tell me you own me”.

 “I’m an interesting mix of person,” says Del Rey defensively, with just a hint of annoyance.  “I am a modern day woman.  I’m self-supporting. I went to college. I studied philosophy. I write my own music. But I also very appreciate being in the arms of a man and finding support that way. That feeling influences the kind of melodies I choose and how romantic I make the song. Maybe it ends up giving it a slightly unbalanced feeling.”  Asked about the references in other songs  to good-girls-gone-bad  (“degenerate beauty queens” is one memorable lyric), she points to David Lynch’s movie Wild At Heart as not so much an inspiration as a parallel with phases in her life. “The way I ended up having relationships and living life, it sometimes mimics those more wild relationships.”

The Lynch connection highlights a curious quality of Del Rey’s whole shtick: not only does it hark back to the Fifties and Sixties, it also recalls the Eighties’s own invocations of that time. Movies like Blue Velvet, Jim Jarmusch’s Strangers in Paradise and Mystery Train, the S.E. Hinton adaptations Rumblefish and The Outsiders. Musicians as various as Tom Waits, Alan Vega, Chris Isaak, Mazzy Star. This syndrome isn’t  unique to Del Rey, though.  The scene that Frankie Rose belongs to—Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls—reaches Spector’s wall of sound and the Sixties girl group’s via Eighties British indiepop, specifically Jesus and Mary Chain and the “C86” movement of bands like The Shop Assistants. Then there’s The Men, also in this issue, who draw from the harder side of Eighties U.K. psych-revivalism. On their song “( )” they filch not just the riff from Spacemen 3’s “Revolution” but a chunk of its lyric (“And I suggest to you/That it takes/Just five seconds”) along with lines from “Take Me To the Other Side”.

If retro culture has reached the point where we’re seeing revivals of revivals, citations of citations (Spacemen 3’s “Revolution” was itself an already-somewhat-hokey homage to MC5), what are the implication for music going forward? As time goes by, signs become steadily more detached from their historical referents, hollowed out.  All these sounds, gestures, time-honored phrases, are entering into a freefloating half-life, or afterlife, where all they represent is pure style: a dated-yet-timeless beauty.

This appears to be the ghosty place where Lana Del Rey comes from.  In “Without You”, she sings “but burned into my brain/all these stolen images” and I can’t help thinking of Blade Runner and the androids who are given transplanted memories.  Her lyrics teem with sampled clichés (“walk on the wild side”, “white lightning”) and iconic brand-names (“white Pontiac heaven”).  But she says that the Pontiac allusion isn’t for its pop-cultural associations (Two Lane Blacktop and other 70s movies, songs by Tom Waits and Jan & Dean) so much as “just the sound” of the word.  “Lana Del Rey” itself was chosen for its lilting loveliness rather than its rippling resonances (a platinum-blonde Hollywood idol with a turbulent and tragic private life, a 1950s Chevrolet, a California beach-town). “My music was always beautiful and I wanted a name that was beautiful too.”

“Beautiful” crops up repeatedly in Del Rey’s conversation, as it does in her lyrics. She seems to be intensely susceptible to the splendor of appearances, to the point of vulnerability. “You look like a million dollar man/so why is my heart broke?” she beseeches plaintively in “Million Dollar Man”.  The gap between image and reality, between “real and the fake”, is an obsession. So is fame, portrayed as the dangerous desire to lose oneself by merging into a glamorous facade. “I even think I found god in the flashbulbs of your pretty cameras,” she sings in “Without You”, while the words “Movie Star Without a Cause” flash up in the video for “Blue Jeans”.

Then there’s “Carmen”, seemingly a song about a 17-year-old starlet who’s dying inside and only comes alive when “the camera’s on”, but actually a perturbing self-portrait. “‘Carmen’ is probably the song closest to my heart,” says Del Rey. “’Famous and dumb in an early age’—that’s fame in a different way, in different circles, for different reasons. Not really for being a pop star. It’s sort of like, my life”. Born To Die is at once the result of—yet also somehow about--an imagination so colonized by old movies and old songs that real life can only be expressed, or maybe even experienced, through this “cinematic” prism.  Is this an artist’s distancing mechanism, a buffer to manage the emotion? Or was the actual love affair itself contaminated by fantasy and role-play?

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What we have with Lana Del Rey is the problem of the undeniable talent who is also a throwback, and thus sets back the cause of musical modernism. (See also: The White Stripes).  She’s not a straightforward revivalist: the music and the presentation are diversely sourced and the end result is a sophisticated and often seductive concoction.  But it still falls, ultimately, within the domain of pastiche, memorably defined as “speech in a dead language”.  Given her passive persona, it’s tempting to say that the ghosts of pop culture’s collective unconscious are speaking through her.    

Born To Die, haunted by lost lovers (“there’s no remedy for memory”), the spectre of Spector stalking indie-land... it’s all somewhat gloomy and morbidly retrospective.  Are there upsides to the contemporary condition that some call “atemporality”, where past, present and future blur indistinguishably and the entire history of music is at your clicking fingertips?  Definitely. You can travel to time-zones that no one else has, as Destroyer did with Kaputt, a tour through regions of 1980s pop that neither synthpoppers like La Roux nor chillwavers like Neon Indian cared to visit. You can create “superhybrids” that draw on disparate sources from far-flung eras and locations, as artists as wildly dissimilar and energetically inventive as Vampire Weekend, Grimes, and Rustie have done.  You can become mesmerized by “lost futures”  of  70s synth music and attempt to start again where they left off, as with Emeralds and its members’s solo careers (such as Steve Hauchildt’s recent, brilliant Tragedy & Geometry), not forgetting all the Emeralds proteges who record for the label Spectrum Spools.  Similar neo-futurist moves are made off the back of 80s electro-funk and electronic space music by Oneohtrix Point Never, Ford & Lopatin, and their protégés Napolian and The Renaissance. The archive can be a radical resource,  if its immense array of musical precedents are used as launching pads into the unknown, rather than touchstones to recreate. The challenge is daunting but far from impossible: to make music that doesn’t remind you of X or Y, but prominds you of something yet to come.