Searching for the Sound of Now (published as The Songs of Now Sound A Lot Like Then)

New York Times, July 17, 2011

by Simon Reynolds

ONCE pop music was something by which you could tell the decade, or even the year. But listening to the radio nowadays is disorienting, if you’re searching for a sound that screams, “It’s 2011!”

Take the biggest hit of the year, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” The song is basically 1960s rhythm-and-blues tightened up with modern production. Everything about “Rolling” — its melody and lyrics, Adele’s delivery and timbre, the role played by the backing vocalists — gestures back to a lost golden age of soul singers like Etta James and Dusty Springfield. Then there’s Cee-Lo Green’s “F*** You,” a hit from last year that’s still on the radio, and which moves a decade nearer the present through being steeped in the ’70s soul of acts like the Staple Singers.

Elsewhere on Top 40 radio you’ll hear a lot of brash, pounding songs that sound like ’90s club music. Recent smashes by performers like Black-Eyed Peas, LMFAO, Kesha, Pitbull, Taio Cruz, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears recall the “hip house” sound of hitmakers like Technotronic and C&C Music Factory, or mid-’90s trance anthems by Paul Van Dyk and B T. It may require a mental exercise to bring out the true weirdness of this development: Imagine how peculiar it would have been if in the early ’90s the charts were suddenly flooded with music that sounded exactly like ’70s disco.

Figures like Lady Gaga and groups including the Black Eyed Peas reach even further back and throw ’80s flavors into the ’90s Eurohouse mix: the resemblance between Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was widely noted on its release this year. “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the Black Eyed Peas references Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” while their song “The Time” borrows its chorus from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life.”

Much of this déjà entendu dancepop is exciting in its crass, energy-drink-blast kind of way. So why does the aural overfamiliarity matter? Well, up until the 2000s pop decades always had epoch-defining sounds. Two or three (sometimes more) genres would emerge to achieve dominance or, at the very least, prominence in the mainstream. Musical styles usually build on the past to some degree, but these genres always took their sources in striking and fresh directions, and they often wrapped the music up in subcultural garb, with a distinct fashion element, new rituals and dance moves, and so forth.

The ’70s generated heavy metal, punk, disco, reggae and more. The ’80s spawned hip-hop, synthpop and Goth. The ’90s had grunge and the techno/rave/electronic explosion. But the decade and a bit that followed the turn of the millennium has produced — well, what exactly? Hip-hop and R&B have built incrementally, at times imperceptibly, on where they were at during the ’90s. Emo is a tuneful and melodramatic merger of pop-punk and Goth. True, if you venture into the musical left field, you will find various underground genres that can claim at least relative freshness: grime and dubstep in Britain, the post-indie sounds of Animal Collective and similar bands in America. But their effects on mainstream pop music has been minimal.

Those who don’t have much personal investment in the idea that popular music should always be pushing forward probably won’t be especially troubled by the current pop scene’s muddled mix of stasis and regression. But those whose expectations have been shaped by growing up during more fast-moving and ever-changing pop decades — which is basically all of them to date except for the 2000s — are likely to be perplexed and disheartened by these developments. In particular the innovation-obsessed ’60s and the cyber-optimistic ’90s instilled an ideal of pop music as herald of the future, a vanguard sector of the culture that was a little bit ahead of the rest of society.

The fading of newness and nowness from pop music is mystifying. But in the last couple of years a concept has emerged that at least identifies the syndrome, even if it doesn’t completely explain it. Coined by the co-founders of cyberpunk fiction William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, “atemporality” is a term for the disconcerting absence of contemporaneity from so much current pop culture. This curious quality can be detected not just in pop music but in everything from fashion to graphic design to vintage chic.

A prime example of atemporality is the fad for photography apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which digitally simulate the period atmosphere of pictures taken in the ’70s or ’80s, using the cameras and film stock of the time. Instant-nostalgia snapshots are part of a culture-wide fascination with outmoded technology and “dead media” (Mr. Sterling’s term) that encompasses everything from the cults for manual typewriters and cassettes to the steampunk movement’s fetish for Victoriana to the recent movie “Super 8.”

Mr. Sterling sees the time-out-of-joint nature of today’s pop as a side effect of digiculture. One of the curiosities of the futuristic-seeming information technology that we now enjoy is that it has dramatically increased the presence of the past in our lives. From YouTube to iTunes, from file-sharing blogs to Netflix, the sheer volume and range of back catalogue music, film, TV and so forth that is available for consumption is astounding.

We can access all this stuff with incredible speed and convenience, share it and store it with minimal effort. But a potential downside of this sudden “affluence” is a flood of influences that can overwhelm the imagination of young musicians, who are absorbing five decades of pop history in a frenetic jumble. Their attention is also being competed for by music from outside the Anglophone rock and pop traditions, everything from West African guitarpop to Soviet New Wave music to Ethiopian electronic funk from the 1980s.

The musical omnivorousness that the Internet has encouraged and enabled is one reason atemporality is even more pronounced when you listen to alternative radio stations, which specialize in music by bands that consciously aim to have broad taste and to develop unusual portfolios of influences. Listen to KCRW (89.9 FM), the NPR-affiliated station in Los Angeles whose programming often wanders between genres and decades, leaving listeners to wonder if a particular track was recorded in 2011 or in 1981, or in 1971.

A few weeks ago the station played a gorgeously dreamy tune whose rippling, dewy-with-reverb keyboard part and yearningly melodic bass line seemed uncannily redolent of late ’70s Fleetwood Mac. Was this actually a lost Mac song circa 1977’s “Rumours”? Or was it an offering from one of the growing number of contemporary indie bands influenced by ’70s soft rock? The song turned out to be “Roscoe” by Midlake, a group of 21st-century soft-rockers from Denton, Tex. But it was a remixed version made by the British outfit Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve with clear intent to bring out further the Fleetwood Mac-iness of the song. And then, to show they were in on it, the programmers at KCRW followed “Roscoe” by playing “Rhiannon.”

That 1976 Fleetwood Mac hit is the kind of staple tune you’d normally hear on a classic rock station rather than KCRW, whose sensibility is like a slightly more adult version of the online hip music magazine Pitchfork. And this shows how atemporality has not just jumbled up the decades, it’s eroded the barriers between genres. The iPod shuffle is the era’s defining music technology. One result on the radio dial is the rise of formats like Jack FM that seemingly mimic a middle-aged man’s iPod in shuffle mode: a restless drifting that nevertheless stays within defined taste limits.

The iPod shuffle and similar digital platforms for music listening have a contradictory result: on the one hand it serves to erode the historical divisions between kinds of music by its decontextualizing effect, on the other hand it enables fans to avoid entirely music they don’t like. So the programming on Jack FM (whose slogan is “Playing what we want”) slips back and forth between ’70s and ’80s, Old Wave and New Wave, with occasional excursions into the late ’60s (Hendrix, Creedence) or the ’90s (Sublime, Smashing Pumpkins). It’s a world where hip-hop and techno-rave never happened, but also where ZZ Top and the Clash are no longer on opposing sides.

Does the atemporality of so much modern pop music mean that when in the future we listen back to early-21st-century pop, we won’t be able to identify a sound that characterizes the period? Fans often identify periods of pop by their production hallmark. So they’ll talk (usually to complain) about ’80s drum sounds. If there’s a modern equivalent, it’s the superhumanly perfect vocals featured in so much current pop and rock thanks to Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction processor made by Antares Audio Technologies.

The slickness of Auto-Tuned singing seems to have a similar aesthetic quality to the design of smartphones and MP3-players and other hand-held gadgets, or to the C.G.I. effects in modern Hollywood blockbusters and the glossy hyper-real imagery in video games. Auto-Tune vocals even seem a bit sci-fi. Which is why in one Black Eyed Peas song Will.i.am sings, in heavily processed tones, about how he’s got “that future flow/that digital spit” (not a reference to saliva, but to rapping). Take away the Auto-Tune sheen, though, and there’s little about Black Eyed Peas records to indicate they weren’t made in the ’90s. The same applies to other recent dance pop smashes by the likes of Taio Cruz, Kesha and Lady Gaga.

Pop music in the 2000s may not have made any huge strides on a formal level (the way songs are written, grooves constructed and so forth), but on this cosmetic level of the digital gloss that’s been applied to the vocals you could say that it does sound of its time. (Which is also why the rasp of Adele and Cee-Lo Green is a deliberate throwback to the era of vocal grit and grain, a bid for “timelessness.”)

For better or worse Auto-Tune is the date stamp of today’s pop: it will date badly, and then it will go through all the stages of starting to see charmingly quaint, cute, cool. Who knows, at some point in the near future it might well become a revivable sound, embraced first by early adopter hipsters who will hunt down “vintage” Auto-Tune plug-ins in the same way that they currently collect antique synthesizers and old-fashioned valve amplifiers.

HERE COMES EVERYTHING
guest "Musica Globalista" post for Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired.com
September 2, 2011

by Simon Reynolds


This is the last in this summer’s series of guest blogs from me c/o Beyond the Beyond. But before I hand over to Geeta Dayal, I’d like to say ‘big up’ to my host Bruce and close out with something of an epic: a sprawling almost-essay looking at Retromaniacal-parallels in a realm of music that’s outside my customary remit–contemporary classical composition.

^^^^^^^^^^

Last week I stumbled across a piece by New York magazine’s classical music critic Justin Davidson, a critique of what he termed “a new New York School” of composers whose eclecticism and border-crossing echoes the downtown movement of the 1970s. The article is actually several months old (but in this atemporal world, who cares?) and reading it I was immediately struck by the convergences with Retromania’s concerns.

http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/new-composers-davidson-review-2011-3/

The piece’s subtitle is: “An omnivorous generation of composers could use something to rage against”. Davidson vividly and not unappreciatively describes the music made by a new breed of “composer-performers who go merrily Dumpster-diving in styles of the past and of distant parts… These composers in their thirties worry less about categories, narrative, and originality than about atmosphere, energy, and sound. .. they churn out somber symphonies, wry pop songs, laptop meditations, filigreed chamber works, endearing études, and occasional film scores. This cornucopia of new music seems perpetually promising. It bristles with allusions and brims with ambition—yet it somehow feels stifled by all that freedom.”

One of the composers focused on in the piece is Tyondai Braxton, whose 45-minute suite Central Market is “a high-voltage score for orchestra supplemented by amplified and effects-enriched kazoos, electronically tricked-out voices, piano, a pair of synthesizers, and six electric guitars… The music pounds through a sequence of musical landscapes with the manic intensity of a movie foot chase. Insistent syncopations, deliberate sonic overloads, whistled melodies, music-box tinklings, jaunty motifs that repeat and trip over themselves—Braxton grinds these ingredients together with the exuberance of a sorcerer on speed. The piece is euphoric, crazy, and irresistible.”

Sounds eminently resistible to me, to be honest! Regardless of whether you enjoy the work or not, “Central Market” appears from Davidson’s account to fit the profile of what I’ve termed “hyperstasis”: a syndrome that affect music at all levels from the individual works, to the style/oeuvre of specific artist, to entire genres/scenes/fields of sonic endeavour. The hallmark of hyperstasis is restless energy and a fluid but ultimately facile transition between styles/modes/moods – facile because related to digiculture’s facilitation of long-valorised-in-music-criticism techniques of hybridization, mix-and-blend, versatility, stylistic range, etc. In hyperstasis, creativity rends itself apart in a paroxysm of optionality, it’s wracked by a sort of frenzied indecisiveness, a fervour of non-commitment.

Davidson makes the digiculture connection himself, talking about how composers like Tyondai Braxton ”use computers as compositional tools and alchemizers of sound” and observing that “for the YouTube generation, technology… grants entrance to a virtually infinite thrift store of influences.
A century ago, Bartók had to haul his gramophone through the mud of Moravia to learn about folk music. Now a curious kid in Brooklyn can track down an Azerbaijani song in seconds. Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography. No combination is too weird.”

“Nonsectarianism” is Davidson’s term for what popular/semipopular/barely-popular music critics like myself would probably call impurism. Being a sectarian and a purist is invariably regarded as a negative, for reasons I explored a decade ago in an essay called “Pure Fusion: Multiculture Versus Monoculture” (which you can find in the Bring the Noise collection recently put out in America by Soft Skull). But it is way too easy to equate “nonsectarian” and “impurist” with musical virtue. As Davidson astutely notes of the new New York composers, their “freewheeling mash-ups aspire to hip nonsectarianism, but the results can prove shockingly tame.”

Worse still, with the musical past’s archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress: “Their range of choices oppressively wide, several composers have taken comfort from the past, masking retrenchment with style and panache.”

By the time Davidson is writing about “well-crafted but oddly familiar works [that] display the virtues of facility, versatility, and curiosity, but… also showcase a group that seems disoriented by its own open-mindedness”, or noting that “rules can be a crutch or a cage, but they can also act as stimulant… Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, [these] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints”, I’m imaginary-high-fiving the dude.

Tyondai Braxton is better known as former member of Battles, a fact that leapt out at me because I’d only just got around to reading the Battles cover story in The Wire from several issues back. Here too I was struck by the band’s post-everything omnivorousness and the way both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion. Writer Daniel Spicer points to the way Battles draw on “elements as disparate as Tropicalia, soca, Techno and synthpop”. I feel queasy already.

One of Battles, Ian Williams, observes that “if you think about the music that was available to experimental people and cool hippies in the 70s, it was probably classical music, jazz, and rock, right? And Prog came out of that. With the internet, everybody’s exposed to World Music now, and a much wider wealth of influence that come from everywhere. The library that people are exposed to is much bigger now.”

I enjoyed the previous Battles album Mirrored, but on the new, Tyondai-less Gloss Drop, the results of all these inputs leans to the ludic(rous), the kind of chops-heavy comedy prog purveyed by Primus.
What Davidson, Spicer, Williams, are all talking about is the notion expressed at the start of Gang Gang Dance’s recent Eye Contact album: “I can hear everything. It’s everything time.”

But–as the fusion and prog analogies show–it’s actually been everything time for rather a long while the only difference is that it’s cheaper (virtually costless, thanks to file-sharing) and easier (thanks to digiculture) to access that Everything.

What is significantly different now is the factor of atemporality. Earlier phases of hybridity and eclecticism tended to have an orientation to the present: prog had its classical-music recursions and folk flavours, but for the most part Seventies progressive minded musicians were doing their fusing with stuff that was current or from very recent and usually black music.

So Led Zeppelin got inspired by The Meters and James Brown, while The Police drew on contemporaneous reggae/ (Intriguingly both Led Zep’s James Brown pastiche ‘The Crunge’ and “early Police” crop up as comparison points for Battles in the Wire piece). Fusion aka jazz-rock aka jazz-funk was entirely about jazz responding to contemporary black dance styles or Latin/world influences, and also engaging with the latest technology (synths with Weather Report, Herbie Hancock etc).

Much the same applies to postpunk and early Eighties art-pop: Talking Heads responded to current or relatively recent recordings by Parliament-Funkadelic and Fela Kuti; New Order were inspired by Italo-disco and the club tracks emanating from New York, and so forth.

These kinds of real-time transfers of ideas occurred at all levels of pop music, in fact, not just the self-consciously arty, progressive-minded sector: a band of such lowly ambition as Foghat imitated Larry Graham’s slap-bass techniques on “Slow Ride”!

What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band’s make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives.

This started to take effect even before the Internet took off, on account of crate-digging, esotericism and obscurantism, and the burgeoning reissue industry. A band like Tortoise was an archetype of mid-Nineties, just-pre-Internet nu-fusion: they had current influences (some hip hop, some math-rock) but also dub, Ry Cooder, Morricone, marimba-pulses via Steve Reich, etc. A vigorous brew at first, soon to droop into a sort of Spyro Gyra for Wire readers.

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and all across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.

But most artists aren’t strong enough to withstand such an influx.

What is so interesting about Davidson’s piece on new classical is that it shows how the possibilities and problems of post-broadband music-making are manifesting all across the musical spectrum. I suspect similar forces are at work – sometimes vitalizing, mostly vitiating – in metal, but I wouldn’t know. It is definitely happening with dance music especially with the area I’ve kept an ear trained on, i.e. the post-dubstep zone.

Here the exact same hyperstatic symptoms that Davidson diagnoses in modern composition can be seen leading to a similar predicament: a diverting but directionless impasse. A seeming heterogeneity that conceals a fundamental homogeneity (traceable back, ultimately, to the nature of digital sound and its structuration protocols.) Paradoxically, it is the more insular, technologically-retarded scenes (footwork in Chicago now, hardcore rave in the early 90s) that produce a better outcome: a seeming homogeneity that masks genuine hetereogenity and forward-tilted strangeness.

The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or “superhybrid” styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced “retro” air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever! “New New School” nods to 1970s downtown New York in the Seventies , the post-Fluxus fluxed-upness and post-Cage uncagedness of minimalism, performance artists, and such edge-of-punk / outskirts of No Wave figures as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Arthur Russell.

Justin Davidson’s piece seems to have garnered a slew of annoyed and outright hostile responses from the modern composition community. One of the more measured responses, “The New Challenges of New Thinking”, appeared in Zeitschichten.

http://www.zeitschichten.com/2011/05/07/new-challenges/

Peter Gilbert précis-ed the anti-Davidson stance: “He is called out as being an old school modernist, entrenched in a decrepit idea—that making something new requires rejecting the formerly new”, with commentators dismissing Davidson’s verdict of “a neither-here-nor-there absence of motivational direction” as mired in subjectivity. (Cue a twinge of déjà vu/writerly solidarity in me!).

Gilbert situates the conflict–and the annoyance–in terms of a generational shift. “The thirty-somethings of today… are the second generation of the everything’s-okay, no-style-can-hold-us ethos. For us this thinking is more normal than revolutionary, though we don’t take it for granted—I think we still own our omnivorous tastes with (probably unnecessary) pride…. the core ideal of nonsectarianism has almost complete ascendency now.”

Gilbert astutely notes that the musical radicals of the past who broke down aesthetic barriers created a world where there are in fact no barriers: “the power of their vision led to the open-minded future they wanted and subsequently (unintentionally) denied their students the opportunity to similarly respond”… As a result, the last ardent rigor… has dissolved into transition”.

But (as Retromania argues) the trouble with this state of endless “transition” is that it looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued.

What this means is that the principles and practices of “flux and mutability” have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, “flux” and “mutability” are actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of “flexible” work patterns.

This idea seems to lurk underneath Gilbert’s concluding remarks, where he writes about how “there is something different about this world where everything goes. We, the thirty-somethings, seem to largely be ardent believers of the new order and we readily shoot down dissent, but, as with anything relatively new, there are aspects and consequences of the changes in culture that we can’t yet fully anticipate or understand.”

All that’s solid melts into air, innit.

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?

^^^^^^

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.