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Do you feel there are some particularly good or bad approaches to reissuing music?
On the subject of the reissue industry, do you feel there are some particularly good or bad approaches to reissuing music? I’m not just taking about “Deluxe Edition” repressings of classic albums with bonus tracks and remastering jobs, but also archival compilations, the sort labels such as Soul Jazz base their output on.
There are labels who do the job with integrity and take great care to get as good quality sound as they can, to annotate the project with well-researched notes. Soul Jazz, Numero Group, Blood & Fire, LTM, Acute… there’s loads of them. Some of the stuff they are digging up is genuine lost treasure. The difficult question I raise in Retromania is whether the culture can absorb all this salvaged material, especially as the crate-digger labels are increasingly extending their reach into the pasts of foreign countries.
The cult for obscurity also leads to historical distortions: people who know about some private press ‘80s soul album but haven’t actually heard the indispensable ‘80s R&B artists that were actually commercially successful at the time and are about ten times better. This goes on across the board, from minimal synth to psychedelia to you-name-it.
I myself am keenly of these historical distortions you mention—I’ve seen your example manifest in the form of people who are well-acquainted with rather-average R&B obscuros but have no idea who Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are, or folks really into ultra-rare ‘80s goth who are unaware of Bauhaus or the Sisters of Mercy. There’s so much music being turned up these days by so many narrowly-focused niches that it’s become very easy to not see the forest from the trees, historically and quality-wise. Going back to the question you raise in Retromania: do you think the culture can absorb this avalanche of unburied material from the past?
At the moment, it seems like the answer would be “no”, the channels are choked, causing a sluggishness to set in. But who knows? The coming generation clearly has the ability to process information and manipulate it a lot faster than those that came before. Perhaps one just has to have faith that the really musical people will find a way to swim in this clogged data ocean and to make meaningful new patterns out of all this stuff once it’s completely lost all anchoring in history and geography.
Your journalistic career began in the 1980s, the age when the British music weeklies (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds) were the prime movers in musical critical discourse. Aside from the obvious game-changing nature of the advent of the Internet and the mass diffusion of critical voices that has resulted, how has the art (so to speak) of music criticism evolved from those days? What ideas and approaches to music writing have come and gone since then?
It would take a small book to track that story. The main change I’ve noticed, partly related to the erosion of the gatekeeper function of music critics, is that the messianic or prophetic mode of rock-writing has faded away. Because the critic is rarely introducing readers to something for the first time, the whole “I have heard the future” approach is no longer called for. But also the idea of “the future” of music has eroded for all the reasons I explore in Retromania. We don’t really think so much anymore of a style of music being more advanced than other music forms, or a particular genre or artist being a herald of how music will be. That idea of an axis extending from the past into the future, and which certain artists, records, genres, are further along than others are—who thinks like that anymore? It’s precisely this linear model of time as having a direction that seems to have collapsed under digiculture.
How has your own approach to music criticism changed due to the advent of digiculture? One thing that’s readily apparent is that the army of blogs you run devoted to various functions including short off-the-cuff thoughts, footnotes to your books, and archives of old print articles—all functioning as a sort of “public notepad”, shall we say—certainly wouldn’t have existed pre-Internet.
I have definitely allowed myself to succumb to the logic of digiculture and its facilitation of everything: the instantaneity and impulsiveness it incites, the sheer volume of material you can put “out there”. I don’t know why it took me several years to realize it but I suddenly realized, having been blogging for a while, that there was no reason why you couldn’t have multiple blogs simultaneously, and from there I just went wild with the idea. I enjoy the way you can write a small book if you want, or a blog post of just a few words. The thing about having a blog is that it is not just providing an outlet for the thoughts you’d otherwise not express. The existence of a blog incites the mind to generate bloggish thoughts. For every post that makes it on to one of my blogs there’s 19 that never leave my head. So there’s a joyous hyper-generative aspect to blogs, but also an element of insidiousness and out-of-controlness. That applies across the board to digiculture. All these platforms have worked their way into our lives and wrapped themselves around our mental and emotional functioning in a slightly alarming way.
Rip It Up and Start Again halts its narrative at 1984, with the waning of post-punk and the coalescence of alternative rock as its successor genre in the underground rock scene. Out of curiosity, which of the main ‘80s alt-rock bands do you rate the most? I ask partly because you were pretty harsh to the Jesus and Mary Chain and the C86 bands (unrepentant retro junkies all) in that book’s Afterward section!
I really loved J&MC’s first album Psychocandy. But they lost me with Darklands when they stripped away the feedback. I recoiled when on “Nine Million Rainy Days” they did these “woo woo” backing vocals as this cutesy citation from [the Rolling Stones’] “Sympathy for the Devil”.
The whole back-to-the-‘60s thing in ‘80s indie was something I got totally caught up in. It felt like a logical reaction against what post-punk had become, which was overly schematic and rational. I was a big fan of the first two R.E.M. albums. I worshipped Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets. I loved the Replacements. I was into pretty much all the things you would expect from that time. By the late ‘80s, my favorite US and UK bands were pushing into the late ‘60s but adding elements of guitar-reinvention or sonic overload: My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr., Loop, Spacemen 3… Looking back, a lot of this was somewhat retro-tinged and as a writer celebrating these bands for Melody Maker I was coming up with quite ingenious ways around this. At the time, it felt like there was a difference between the Butthole Surfers and the pure retro stuff around like Thee Hypnotics or B.A.L.L.. But it’s quite a subtle difference. The Buttholes had songs that were rewrites of [Black] Sabbath or obvious tributes to [Jimi] Hendrix or Donovan.
It’s interesting that you say you had to work around the retro-tendencies of these bands in your writings. Was there a bit of intellectual guilt being an avowed fan of the post-punk vanguard writing about all these artists who gleefully took cues from the past, or is that just your retrospective evaluation of the work you did at the time?
By the second half of the ‘80s, post-punk ideas seemed fairly irrelevant, it seemed like we were in a new phase. That said, a vague idea of the Future as something music should be always looking to certainly hung around like a specter. So on the one hand when I heard acid house for the first time I was really blown away and I did write about it as being like the second coming for “avant-funk” ideas from the post-punk era, comparing producers like Phuture to Cabaret Voltaire. Equally, that sense of retro-shame would also spur me to critique, e.g. Creation Records as Recreation Records. It was hard to pinpoint exactly but there was a borderline between bands who were just trading off the ‘60s and bands who were doing interesting violence to that legacy (My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth reinventing psychedelia and uninventing the guitar). Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, and the Buttholes were poised exactly on the borderline. Primal Scream and the Stone Roses were most of the time on the wrong side of it, but would slip into righteousness now and then with some help from collaborators like Andy Weatherall or, in the case of the Roses, thanks to their osmotic influence from house music.
Obviously I don’t reject all music that stays true to a tradition or that has a heavy involvement with rock’s history—I was a big fan of Royal Trux and I’ve even enjoyed the odd White Stripes tune. But I think it’s easier to make allowances for bands that are talented throwbacks if you also have a lot of future-oriented action going at the same time. When the music scene is dominated by reproduction antiques, heritage styles, and pastiche, then I think intolerance is called for. Retromania is an attempt to sow seeds of discontent.
Lastly, I thought I’d mention that in Totally Wired, your supplemental volume to Rip It Up and Start Again that collects interviews conducted for that book and related writings, there’s this humorous part where Andy Gill of Gang of Four is talking about guitar feedback and at a certain point he stops himself because, in his words, “I was going to say something pretentious”. But you tell him, “Oh, go on, I’m a big supporter of pretentiousness in interviews! From the interview subjects as well as the writer!” I suspect that’s true of many critics, but I doubt they’d be willing to admit to it like you!
One of the first things I ever wrote for publication, in this zine Margin that my friends and I started at Oxford, was a defense of pretentiousness. It was inspired by arriving in Oxford expecting it to be full of poets and philosophers but being taken aback by how frequently you came across people who used the word “pretentious” as an insult or who complained about “pseudo-intellectuals”. There was a surprising amount of anti-intellectualism at Oxford. So I wrote this mini-manifesto reclaiming the concept of pretension as a form of aspiration.
Of course, there is such a thing as the genuinely pretentious, people who are posing or writing in a ridiculously affected way. Still, more often than not, “pretentious” is used as a deterrent; it’s mockery that aims to stifle adventurous thinking. You can tell when someone using the term “pseudo” is not likely to be any more welcoming to the genuine-article. It’s not like they’re calling for some “real” intellectuals!
