simon reynolds: classic or dud

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

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.

...and that's as far as I got.

Shame. You missed some tasty nuggets:

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).

My local Borders book store outside Washington DC has marked down the paperback US version of Rip It Up to $3.99.

you guys...

amis/costello HOW DID I NOT SEE THE CONNECTION?

what a load of shit.

Simon Reynolds on "music-microcultures" (wtf?):

and another interesting post from Styx, drawing a parallel between writers workshops as mutual inhibition milieux with the way that mnml keeps itself on a leash

it probably works this way in lots of music micro-cultures: a sort of collective self-policing system where subtle administerings of approval and disapproval keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint.... that safety zone where non de trop always teeters on the edge of non de script

especially when that peer-review homeostatic system is then enmeshed with a narrative of music having lost its way, "true people"

detroit techno and deep house true-pathers and pedagogues are an obvious example

backpackerland too

--------------

This concept of "micro-cultures" strikes me as more than a little bit cheesy. Has anybody ever experienced these "administerings of approval and disapproval" that "keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint" in any way shape or form outside the world of *ahem* music criticism? I think when you start lumping people's self-determined preferences and tastes (i.e. i have a penchant for early 80s synth pop, 60 british psych, whatever) with some kind of cultural tag you're essentially stereotyping the way that people consume/create music. As if the genre of "MNML techno" is somehow self-aware! And it prefers early 80s synth pop to 60s british psych!?! This all sounds ass-backwards to me...

Some people recognize that to achieve subtlety and effectiveness in music composition/production takes rare skill & talent. Use the word "music" however loosely you like.

Additionally, there is no single ideal within "MNML techno" or any other genre for that matter. There may be "rules" but every musician carries there own ideals as to what constitutes "good music". And obviously these values are always constantly in flux.

Simon's monolithic view of musicians is so tired and naive.

"a sort of collective self-policing system where subtle administerings of approval and disapproval keep everyone cleaving to subtlety/restraint": Anyone who's participated in a "scene" could come up with dozens, if not hundreds of examples to support this. Examine the hundreds of sub-genres of punk rock and try and work out how they police the borders of their genres.

This would almost make sense if dance music wasn't driven by novelty.

Even the old school underground 12" culture that SR refers to in this article is a lot more diverse and inclusive that he would like to admit. Where exactly are the boarders of Dam Funk, Walter Jones, Floating Points, Theo Parrish, Sun Ra, Burial, and Ace and the Sandman? What happens when somebody throws something else into that pot unexpectedly and it works? Does everybody in this loose grouping of people like exactly the same tracks by the same artists in the same way for the same reasons?

Not all dance music is driven by novelty. Most of it isn't. Perhaps it's easy to think of examples which contradict his presumption, but it's just as easy to come up with examples that fit it. He's not saying it's universal.

"Does everybody in this loose grouping of people like exactly the same tracks by the same artists in the same way for the same reasons?"

I don't think that's what the quote suggests at all. I think it's more of a truism point that if a scene has a basic (albeit loosely) defined set of ideas about what characterises the music within the scene, stuff that falls within the scope defined by those ideas will generally be more successful than stuff that doesn't.

I think the mistake in the quote (or in connection with it) is sr's persistent mischaracterisation of minimal as being fixated on subtlety/restraint/refinement - compare/contrast with pipecock's longstanding complaints that minimal is ignorant of history, to steeped in rave culture and drug culture.

I tend to think of minimal (though this is less clear now than it was, say, two to three years ago; mind you "minimal" as a term is much less prevalent than it was then too) as being something of a covalent accomodation between subtlety/restraint/refinement on one hand and raviness/populism on the other. I can sort of see why such an accomodation makes it the worst of all possible worlds for some people, sacrificing whatever positive values those listeners locate in music at either end of that pole. But I think sr's characterisation is off the mark to the extent that it fails to perceive that act of compromise.

However, if anything the very fact that minimal was aiming for a balancing act makes the process of border-policing that much more interesting - e.g. in 2005-2006 big trance riffs were quite common, but by 2007 this option was considered too naff I think. Whereas you simply don't hear trance riffs in "proper" techno (which is not to say you don't hear other forms of anthemic melodicism).

that quoted bit from SR takes out the link to my blog, i guess he was trying to diss us for not being trendy. i wish him lots of luck with that.

i don't understand why the "self policing" of a "microscene" is a bad thing. i for one am quite glad that the nights i go to don't play hipster electro, dubstep, or any number of other trendy shit genres i have no interest in hearing. i don't believe that it is so tightly constrained as he makes it out to be, otherwise it wouldnt remain interesting to anyone. if anything, the "microgenre" i deal with is definitely growing but without getting wack or adopting nonsensical things from outside of its general purpose in order to be cute or ironic.

"I tend to think of minimal (though this is less clear now than it was, say, two to three years ago; mind you "minimal" as a term is much less prevalent than it was then too) as being something of a covalent accomodation between subtlety/restraint/refinement on one hand and raviness/populism on the other. I can sort of see why such an accomodation makes it the worst of all possible worlds for some people, sacrificing whatever positive values those listeners locate in music at either end of that pole. But I think sr's characterisation is off the mark to the extent that it fails to perceive that act of compromise.

― Tim F"

i don't think that there needs to be any compromise in order for a genre to be popular and good at the same time. i do see your point though, and maybe that is part of my irritation with it. i see too many parallels with the weaknesses of "progressive house" for it to be okay with me, but that is probably what allows it to be all magazine cover and Ibiza.

I should note that I meant "compromise" in the sense of two contradictory impulses mutually agreeing to meet somewhere in the middle, rather than in the more specific sense of letting go of a principled stance in the name of populism.

But I can also see how, for you, in the case of minimal, those two meanings of the term would both apply.