simon reynolds: classic or dud

i just knew someone was gonna make that joke

No you don't understand, Ryan Giggs is the name of my dog.

his debunking of some of the tony wilson / factory myths in WORD this month is a right lol. i half agree with him.

so now he's atacking Factory? IS NOTHING SACRED?!

In this Sunday's Observer, Nick Cohen debunks the myths about Grunwick and Lady Falkender.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1923&Itemid=105

this is getting into jom jones territory tbh.

k-punk undermines himself by dismissing the role of funky and also typically (not so much of him but of "hardcore continuum" boosters generally) completely mischaracterizing it.

Plus a perfect example of my strawman "people will argue that Kode 9 being into funky makes it interesting" complaint.

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

neither is a great way to go about listening to music.

i guess the desire for a 'rupture' comes from 1) some kind of notion that this shit has something to do with revolutionary politics 2) the fetishization of 'rupture', change in 'paradigms' or 'epistemes' in various once-fashionable theorists.

but it sounds more than anything like some old lag demanding a 'new punk', on the misguided assumption that there was an 'old punk' that was as savage and beautiful a rupture as one might read about in books.

The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is. You could make as big a case for nu-school breaks being part of the continuum as you could for bassline house. But no-one will because it's shit/uncool.

and he does really need to get his head out of his ass boosting bassline house while being down on funky. I'm no stan of the latter and hold it in far less estimation than a lot of people on ILM but damn, bassline is exciting but funky is undercooked?

I think Simon himself is a bit more nuanced about the way he talks about the "continuum" - or, rather, more straightforward: the continuum is the audience, and by extension whatever the audience listens to. Which helps to separate the theory from his own personal tastes. Simon's own stuff on funky (which he doesn't like by and large) basically says "this is the current incarnation of the continuum but i don't like it much."

I don't mind the basic model that Mark is using here but I think where he goes off track is in his tendency to box things very quickly and then diagnose a broader theme that relies on that boxing process. Funky isn't going to shock you if you have mentally decided that it starts and ends with "Do You Mind" and therefore refuse to listen to anything else under that tag. If he actually heard Lil' Silva's "Seasons" or Pro2Jay's "Skank Calm Down" or Roska's "Climate Change" or Donaeo's "African Warrior" (all of which sound much more "continuum"-ish than bassline or dubstep) the whole argument would quickly founder.

I agree with Mark when he says that a 1998 techstep or 2-step garage track would have sounded very odd 4 years earlier, but this has more to do with the general speed of sonic advances across the board - you could as easily say that of a 1998 Timbaland track, or a 1995 IDM track, or etc. etc. In its early stages "the continuum" was swept up in this same process - how could it not be? But I don't think that's ever been a central fact of this music.

While it's correct to say that this population of listeners switch up their tastes very quickly, it's also been clear since the emergence of speed garage (i.e. for the last twelve years) that this tendency does not possess the futurist linear narrative progression that mark ascribes to it here. Yes the transformation into 2-step made things more interesting sonically, but this is more about the way in which this music generally tends to absorb music from outside of itself and quickly mutate it, rather than some conscious dedication to futurism. You can hear the same thing going on with funky.

"The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is."

Again, I think the term works only in the more pragmatic/prosaic reynolds sense of describing an audience (east london basically).

tbf, once upon a time reynolds would have been alone among his peers in picking out a random nu-skool breaks banger in the name of ardkore continuuist cheese.

what makes k-punk most intolerable for me, quite frankly, is that he totally lacks flair.

otoh, if the two of them think a new miserly continuum is the best available stick for beating down bullshit like zomby then MARCH ON, MY RHIZOMORPHIC NODES!!!111!

tim's last par makes a lot of sense on just... commonsensical grounds. an air of mystification envelopes the nuum otherwise, especially when it's apparently a matter of (forgive me) spoddy white dudes with degrees peering in enviously at what other people are listening to in east london.

i suppose i mean it isn't music criticism as such. im also a bit suspicious of the futurist-rush element, too -- it's obviously tied up with ulterior, irrelevant stuff, and k-punk is not exactly good at being specific about what makes x more future-y than y.

i also think that the notion of 'scenius' is soooort of... dodgy. brian eno and other culture heros get to be individuals who make decision. but the nuum has a kind of 'course correction' because it has a perfect producer-consumer loop. i suppose it's a matter of personal preference, or in k-puink's head political choice, but he and reynolds are ok with romantic individualists when it suits them. (and why not?)

The irony though is that a lot of the emphasis on the scenius angle in simon and (especially) mark's writing dropped away circa grime, at which point more traditional cult of personality stuff took over. Which is how Burial then became such a pivotal figure for both.

funny that r|t|c invokes zomby at this point because I was just thinking about him in connection to this thread. One issue I have with the way the "hardcore continuum" argument is trotted out is that it increasingly becomes "tell don't show" - producers and artists are praised because they explicitly align themselves with this theory, in a kind of grisly feedback loop that ultimately results in museum pieces like "Where Were You in '92" (not that Zomby necessarily talks about the "hardcore continuum", but there's a sense in which this kind of boomkat-approved revivalism is the easiest way to get critical nods nowadays).

Back circa 1999, reynolds would praise New Horizons tracks that brought in a bleep'n'bass plonky metallic feel, but there was no sense that the value of these tracks was the way they paid tribute to early LFO or whatever, or even that the producer necessarily knew about LFO. It was the unintentionality behind these coincidences that made them interesting and that made the "continuum" an interesting idea - this sense of an ever expanding bank of dancefloor tactics that could be redeployed in new combinations and reiterations.

I may have mentioned this in the funky house thread, but now you get everyone actively ignoring the (increasingly prevalent) LFO influences in funky until the point where Mr Roach releases a rather weak tune actually sampling LFO and suddenly everyone's mind is blown. Which strikes me as the musical equivalent of tuning into the new 90210 because you might see five minutes of Shannon Doherty.

See also: everyone overrating Lil' Silva's funky remix of "Pulse X". I guess critical hardheads need to be hit with blunt objects in order to register anything.

Re scenius: I'll make the tired point again that you don't actually see people writing about Dubaholics and Groove Asylum in the same glowing celebration-of-scenius sense that they write about Remarc.

These people have terrible, terrible taste

perhaps they just have broader taste than you

Our Hannah has broader taste than etc etc

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

This was pretty apparent when he went through that I-like-Girls-Aloud-they-herald-a-new-age-of-robot-people phase.

They might have broader taste than me, and terrible taste

They might have narrower taste than me in some areas, and terrible taste

gonna stick with 'just broader' for now

grow up pinefox

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1949&Itemid=105

^^ cif makeweight dan hancox, explaining the meaning of the term 'procrustean bed' and amusingly attributing it (or so it seems) to lenin.

annoyingly right, though, i guess.

'procrustean bed'

Sounds rather unpleasant

hard lols at thinking Lenin invented the term procrustean bed but basically very otm article.

redux:

if u don't like funky
LEAVIS ALONE
if ur not a badman
LEAVIS ALONE

ha ha.

I've decided that my efforts to get with K-Punk's position usually founder on the following contention (snipped from his website):

"The 'moral' critique that Alex detects in my post - though I'm not really sure that 'moral' is the right word - is aimed at writers, for allowing slackening rates of innovation to become normalised; or what amounts to the same thing, for succumbing to the general condition of reviewing - as opposed to criticism - where records are assessed on blearily defined hedonic criteria alone, part of the background twitter of tepid cheerleading for late capitalism's minimally different commodities."

The broader issue is "what is the point of writing about music". At base Mark's position seems to be that we should write about music in a way that somehow challenges the capitalist status quo (either because the music does or because the writing does).

The narrower issue is "how does one identify innovation".

This raises pretty much the same perspectival issue that I was discussing w/r/t louis in the ILM Albums Poll. Funky (like - let's be honest now - garage and grime) is a genre whose "innovations" can only be discerned close up, when you're exposed to enough of the music to see what it's doing. I think part of Mark's argument above involves an implied insistence on standing back from music for fear of being tainted by the dirty job of mere reviewing - if the innovations don't leap out at you across that distance then they're not real, they're a hedonic mirage. (jungle is in a separate category: I think its obvious futurism at the time is more indicative of a general technology/drugs/culture based futurism that characterised early house/techno/etc. almost across the board from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties)

US writers by and large never acknowledged what was so distinctive about garage or grime ("Timbaland does this better"/"Southern hip hop does this better"). Mark did but I wonder how much of that was due both to access and prior official endorsements given by people like Reynolds (this is perhaps an unfair allegation but let's leave it in for the sake of the argument). Certainly (Dizzee Rascal excepted) he always seemed to talk about the idea of these musics more than the music itself (again perhaps part of his rejection of "reviewing").

Except that he's always been willing to get his hands dirty w/r/t dissecting dubstep (esp. Burial and Kode9), Junior Boys, even wonky, for all his reservations about the last. The common thread being that all these artists tended to be pursuing individual aesthetics with a faintly intellectual (or at least music-history-savvy) agenda. So in form he appears to be tied up in engaging with a "genius" model of music while at the same time deploring the relative depletion of "scenius" criticism.

Perhaps Kode9/Burial/Mark now all have a very similar "critical" approach (obv. Burial only through his actual music and interviews etc.) which involves always seeing the present as something which needs to be redeemed by the past. One of the first articles Hyperdub ran (when it was still a thinkpiece website) was on No-U-Turn's garage sub-label 'Turn-U-On'. Still think that was a great name trick and the Horsepower records they put out were ace. But the overall implication was very much: "you can measure garage's worth by the manner in which techstep is now buying in - i.e. garage becomes interesting insofar as it continues (albeit twists beyond easy recognition) the legacy of techstep". This logic is repeated in Kode9 making "funky" records which redeem funky by drawing them into a dubstep narrative, and of course Mark then ritualistically bigs-up these records as being a potential means by which funky might actually be useful and meaningful. This is the most heavyhanded way to go about endorsing the hardcore continuum: looking for moments when the old music actually doffs its cap to the new.

I would love to see Mark write about honest-to-goodness 2-step garage (rather than Burial, or dubstep, or some cop-out halfway position like Dem 2/El-B/Zed Bias/Steve Gurley aka the "roots of dubstep" godfathers) because I would love to be proven wrong in my suspicion that his distaste for hedonism extended to basically not liking much of the genre in actuality.

I do remember an article he wrote at the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001 hating on a Dreem Teem mix-cd and bigging up So Solid Crew etc. He might have been exaggerating his antipathy towards the former so as to be more obviously on the side of the future, but the mix in question actually had a fairly unimpeachable track selection, not to mention quite a bit of So Solid related material!

To my mind an emphasis on futurism at the expense of hedonism is a really dubious way to think about garage in particular. It cuts out 90% of what the scene was about and basically makes it into the dubstep-forerunner that so many fans of dubstep like to pretend it is.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2028&Itemid=101

tl;dr (xp)

Simon Reynolds' recent bit on the 'nuum (which is the worst name ever) is positively embarrassing. Dismissing the post-rave fringes for not being suitably popular just seems pathetic. "Look history is on my side! See I was right all along!"

I find that if you squint hard enough, history's always on your side.

^^^ OTFM

Simey on the 'nuum: "it's not a theory...it's a fact. it's an objectively existing entity."

Suuure it is.

lol hegel

i was googling guido fawkes's rave past and wondered if grimey had every addressed the fact that not everyone in rave culture was a smiley-faced party-in-the-face-of-fatcher type, and it turns out he did indeed, in 'energy flash'. in fact he discussed guido (aka paul staines) himself. so kudos there.

but among reynolds' many many stans there seems to be a misconception that rave represented a progressive social movement of some kind. some dude at this reynolds talk i went to said jungle was 'the most militant music in history', in a good way. he was one angry bro too.

and a lot of this hauntology/dubstep stuff seemed predicated on same analogy. bit like 60s pirate radio, which robin carmody says was all run by really shady right-wing mofos iiirc.

some dude at this reynolds talk i went to said jungle was 'the most militant music in history', in a good way. he was one angry bro too.

if he was an intense speccy redhead from leeds, then i totally went to univeristy with this dude.

i can't remember. think he might have been indian?

http://www.jazzyworkshop.com/lp_pics6/apache_indian_chok_there.gif

I have always hated the subject of Energy Flash, but the current (UK?) edition's cover art (the one Fopp are selling anyway) must be offensive even to people who like the idea of the book

"but among reynolds' many many stans there seems to be a misconception that rave represented a progressive social movement of some kind."

This reminds me of critical theory at uni - couldn't stand any third-party paper on derrida, but quite liked the guy's own stuff, most of the time anyway. The viewpoint above seems more k-punk/dissensus than reynolds. If I recall correctly Energy Flash seemed more devoted to the notion of rave as intransigent youth culture rather than progressive or rebellious per se.

It would be fair to say that reynolds starts to lose interest a bit when rave can be more easily assimilated with what he calls "the leisure industry". I guess he liked the sense in which early rave culture seemed almost incommensurate with ordinary existence (certainly the notion of weekly raving and heavy drug use combined with full time work exhausts me personally). That's the real thread b/w Energy Flash and Blissed Out, which was kind of unofficially a positive treatise on eighties alt-rock as decadence.

i.e. bohemian as wastrel rather than bohemian as progressive

Pretty sure the fellow NRQ refers to is my friend Bat.

!!

Isn't Bat a marxist social worker now (not that I know him)?

He is SWP, yeah.

Though not a social worker!

I think I can live without hearing this angry bro talking about Heidegger too many more times, but if there is one episode in his history of public interventions that I wouldn't mind witnessing again it is his epically inflamed stand-off with mild child Kate the Saint on Throwing Muses: Experiment vs Pop.

Elvis Costello and Martin Amis: Prophets of Doom
Simon Reynolds, Arena, Summer 1991
The highbrow hysteria of Elvis Costello and Martin Amis

Listening to his new album, Mighty Like A Rose, I had an abrupt, blinding thought: Elvis Costello is the Martin Amis of pop. For people who don't read many books and don't listen to many albums anymore, Amis and Costello are the only ones left who dare to go for the grand, over-arching vision of our time. They take the pulse of the age and diagnose the malaise. Nobody else has the ambition or temerity to take on this task, which is why Amis and Costello are seen, by some, as saving graces and solitary saviours.

Amis has made two stabs at encapsulating the fear and greed of the Eighties in Money and London Fields, with their Dickensian anti-heroes John Self and Keith Talent – repulsive incarnations of the era, pimples on the zeitgeist's backside. Costello, too, has been lunging for the Big Picture’s jugular for over a decade. His albums arc cross-sections of a diseased British body politic, drawing tile dots between personal and political squalor; between the husband's brutal fists and the election-winning war (Armed Forces was originally titled ‘Emotional Fascism’).

Against this backdrop of degraded private and public language, Amis and Costello dramatize themselves as solitary bulwarks against the moronic inferno of popular culture. Amis flinches and shudders at the masturbatory nature of remote-control culture (TV, porn, video games). Costello has produced perennial diatribes against tabloid culture, the ‘chewing gum for the ears’ of conveyor belt pop. On his new album, ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ is a predictably vituperative blast against dance culture: "The dancing was desperate, the music was worse." ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ similarly dramatizes Costello as one of the few who refuse to collaborate with the new regime of "non-stop Disco Tex and the Sexolettes".

For Amis and Costello, one of the reasons the world is in such a state is precisely because no one reads books or listens to albums any more – or at least the kind of books and the kind of albums that tell you what a state the world is in (precisely the kind they write and record). Both mourn the disappearance of substance in a world of superficial slogans and clichés, the withering of attention spans. For Amis, the role of the author has been usurped by soap operas, the gutter press, even style mags. For Costello, the problem is the decline of the songwriter in the face of a pop culture organized around videos, 12-inch remixes, the sampler and the DJ. In their embattled world view, the kind of audience they demand is an endangered species: people who’ve absorbed a lot of literature, who are schooled in the rock canon, and well-versed enough to get the references that riddle the Amis/Costello oeuvre. The prospect of a ‘disliterate’ population (technically literate, but who never bother to read anything), or, in Costello’s case, a rock culture no longer based on the reverential interpretation of lyrics, is terrifying. A future based around TV/ video/12-inch, rather than novels or albums, bodes a nightmare world of emotional illiterates, like John Self in Money, who doesn't have the self-analytical skills to know why he's fucked up, or the teenage girl in ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ who's "crying cos she doesn’t look like a million dollars", but "doesn’t seen to have the attention span" to work out how media and advertising have messed with her mind.

In the Amis/Costello universe, things are always dying: love, language, truth, the planet are all on their last legs. America has a particularly diabolic status; it’s the leading edge of the apocalypse, the original moronic inferno. The replacement of politics by advertising, the castration of rock 'n' roll, a junk culture where porn is the biggest grossing leisure industry, mugging, yuppies, MTV – you name it, the US trailblazes it. Amis and Costello document a Britain slowly succumbing to the crappiest aspects of US mass culture, but without the space and the naivety that is America’s saving grace. In America, the born-to-run reflex is a safety valve for class antagonism: people just move on. In Britain, rage festers and turns to bile. Amis and Costello have a vivid grip on the stuffiness of English culture: Amis is good on the modern British pub, stuck between the fustiness of tradition and the plastic tackiness of the future. Costello could have been a Springsteen, but, growing up in more confined circumstances, became a poet of claustrophobia rather than of wide open spaces.

In their early days, both of them were regarded as bitter and twisted misanthropes. Costello talked of how he only understood two emotions, "revenge and guilt"; Amis was renowned for stories that left a bad taste in the mouth. Both have mellowed with age, but their forte is still the banality of evil and the evil of banality: portraits of bastards, brutes, cheats and crushed inadequates. Revealingly, neither of them can ‘do’ women. Manipulative or manipulated, their female characters are ciphers. Nicola Six, the ‘heroine’ of London Fields, is even compared to a black hole, the ultimate misogynist metaphor.

Ultimately, this misogyny is just a facet of a general misanthrophy. Amis and Costello belong to a peculiarly British strain of satirical imagination, a tradition that includes Evelyn Waugh, the Ealing and Boulting Brothers comedies, and Private Eye. In this world, there are no heroes, only shits and the shat upon – an odious, privileged minority and the loathsome, downtrodden multitude. 'Good' characters aren't admirable, but despicably unworldly and naive, weak and gullible fools like Guy Clinch, the amorous fall-guy in London Fields.

Amis and Costello give this black, bilious brand of satire an apocalyptic, fin de siecle twist. London Fields was at one stage entitled ‘Millennium’; new Costello songs like ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ and ‘Hurry Up Doomsday’ are panoramic panic attacks. Through Amis's paranoid upper-crust eyes, the Portobello Road is transformed into a Hell's Kitchen of lowlife iniquity. Costello's distempered gaze pans across a culture rank with the stench of mendacity, rife with "professional liars" and "perpetual suckers", zombies and bloodsuckers. Like all apocalyptic visions the Amis/Costello line is prone to overstatement, over-ripe imagery, a certain stylistic overkill. And one problem always looms for the professional prophet of doom: how to keep on upping the apocalyptic stakes.

While Mighty Like A Rose suggests Costello is condemned to spurting exquisitely crafted bile in perpetuity, Amis has taken a sideways step with an oblique angle on the Big Picture. His work-in-progress, Time’s Arrow (previewed in Granta 31), borrows its premise from science fiction: the protagonist experiences time running backwards through the eyes of an American doctor called Tod Friendly. This has the salutary effect of making our everyday human procedures and transactions seem eerie and absurd; all power and energy mysteriously originates from the toilet bowl, kind-hearted pimps give money to whores who then squander it on old men, doctors make their patients sick and ambulance men rush victims from their hospital beds and painstakingly insert them into wrecked cars. Although the device has been used before in science fiction and comics, Amis does it well: after reading the Granta excerpt, it takes a while for the uncanny feeling of time running in reverse to wear off.

Abandoning the omniscient eye-view for a baffled and bemused first person is a smart move for Amis, and timely, too. The judgmental gaze is too sneering and know-it-all for these dazed and confused post-modern times. The leading edge in contemporary fiction and music aims to mirror chaos, not offer salvation from it. But this cutting edge can be hard to grasp for those who cling to an old-fashioned idea of art as re-inforcer of values or source of guidance. These people still look for an angry voice of sanity, a Big Figure to tell them what's going on.

Deploring the waning of literacy and the craft of songwriting, but lacking the energy to keep up with the state of the art, such middle-brow types look to Amis and Costello for reassurance: firstly, that the culture is still deteriorating; secondly, that they are on the side of righteousness. In reality, they're part of the problem.

© Simon Reynolds, 1991