Energy Flush

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2009/05/culture-technology-energy-rave

I was going to do an FT post on this but my day is filling up rapidly so I thought I'd throw it to the wolves here instead.

Comments

What I said on Moggy's LJ

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Man, this is some lame sh1t. I suspect it comes from Keith seeing the entire universe through a H*rdc*re C*nt*n**m shaped lens - to make the post-99 stuff fit into it, not only do you have to magnify the importance of the parts of garage/grime/bassline/dubstep that do refer back to d'n'b/jungle/hardcore, you also have to magnify the extent to which the references are there in the first place. If yr whole musical worldview is based around a dubious continuity that supposedly kicked off 15ish years ago, then of course you are going to think that nothing much has changed in the last 15ish years.

[cis.livejournal.com]

1. yeah it's a pity how his claims for "an energy crisis in culture" are based on-- the feeling that dance music these days is too easy to relate back to dance music ten years ago (which is his stock in trade! "the fact that i can do what i always do means that culture is dead!!").
(I don't know much about northern soul, particularly, but was that part of an energy crisis in culture? cos as far as i'm aware that actually used records from the previous decade, rather than records that are not unimaginable given the sounds of the previous decade. but no-one talks about it as a crisis of creativity, as the loss of youth's energy)

2. there is a whole other rest of culture, mister punk! you could actually have *bolstered* your argument by talking about videogames in a grumpy-old-man way! (i mean really aren't most videogames just doing things we could have imagined them doing in the nineties?? is this because the youth have no-- imagination??)

[cis.livejournal.com]

I also don't think it's true that "we can't hear technology any more" - we can even see it!

His CGI mention is pretty apposite: as CGI gets smoother and better, we become more capable of seeing old less-polished CGI. Watching the Matrix today feels like watching an Ed Wood movie. In situations where technology is getting smoother, our ability to perceive (older forms of) technology becomes refined, almost by accident. This wouldn't affect our immediate experience of every new thing if we experienced only new things, one after the other, in a cultural vaccuum: everything would seem as transparent as the previous thing. But... we don't! Every new book affects all previous books. Knowing new sounds, we listen to old sounds and are struck by how ragged their edges are, and we think 'cor that sounds awesome' or 'man how lame' and cherish or ignore accordingly.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Besides the point that he is looking at the stuff that still seems familiar to him, this strikes me as the kind of moan we hear from middle-aged people all the time. The idea of periodic revolutions in music goes back a long way, and people are always wanting to know where the latest one is. This argument is usually constructed fairly lamely, and distorted to fit some kind of regular cycle: '56 rock 'n' roll, '66 psychedelia, '76 punk and so on. This considerably overstates, in my view, the importance of psychedelia, as well as being a bizarre date for the start of rock 'n' roll, and the usual timeline people construct on this omits hip hop, surely the most important development of recentish decades.

[rechabite.livejournal.com]

the sociopolitical perspective of this is quite fascinating and it's a pity mark didn't look into it further, i.e. in times of crisis people look back to reassuring music from whatever perspective so just as country is now resurgent in the us, from rascal flatts to carolina liars, so is early nineties rave - once the plateau of unapologetic futurism - coming back to cushion uncertain uk citizens with prodigy as entirely logical status quo equivalent plus blindingly obvious-but-dammit they work things like tiny dancer.

the sticking point viz. tech rupture is that it is still clearly capable of happening despite/because of slick 2009 streamlining as anyone who's listened to the halfway point of "bonkers" will know. also fergie's PEOPLE IN THE PLAYYYCE coming on like techno-etna in the midst of boom boom pow (revenge for b/board stopping planet rock at #49 back in '82 despite selling 2m?) is up there with davey payne on rhythm stick, no really!

but like anything (and to get all constant lambert abt it) the best music tends to be about discovering new perspectives on the existing rather than forming new languages per se (since not everyone is stockhausen or bailey but wow what a consolidatory slipstream!) and at the moment pop/dubstep/hip hop/etc. seems to be doing that just fine.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

"Energy Flash was, of course, the title the critic Simon Reynolds gave to his compendious study of rave music and its progeny."

uh...has Mark Fisher actually heard the Beltram track itself? Not like SR plucked it out of thin air...

As ever I am in two minds about this argument. I have come to accept that as technological innovation isn't really a constant flow, the same can be said of creative invention esp. within something like pop music and commercial pressures. But big whoop, I still get entertainment out of it every year and I would say 'but less so than even 5 years ago' except I remember having this dreadful feeling that things were running on empty even then (looking back this seems daft or just not important - I think doing my Ultramix project helped me here tho).

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Argh. more fuel on the fire on my Simon Reynolds loathe/hate relationship.

I think I may have to link to this on my own journal, because it seems wrong not just musically/culturally, but technically. So, er, thanks for alerting me to this irritating article.