I generally like Simon Reynolds stuff, though he can get a little insider baseballish and sometimes misses the woods for the trees (there are parts of Generation Ecstasy that read less like narrative history and more like endless lists of obscure records you’ve never heard and probably never will). In a recent post, though, he doesn’t just miss the woods, but the whole planet. After discussing an article about a new strain of music called “hypnagogic pop”, which seems to consist largely of lo-fi new age music with various sound landmarks from the ’80s stuck in it, Reynold ends with this:
One question raised for me by the piece was: does this mean that every generation from now on will come up with its own equivalent of hauntology/hypnagogic, a working-through of the music/popcult assimilated during infancy and early childhood? You can see something like this process happening with wonky maybe, in the way that games music is such a strong influence… that palette of day-glo synth-tones seem to be heavily coded as “halcyon”, presumably because for an entire generation, a high percentage of the total amount of music they heard as children would have been via video and computer games…
The only answer to Reynolds question I can conceive is: Haven’t they always? Name an artist, in any medium, at any time, who hasn’t drawn on the surrounding environment, particularly the environment of childhood. This is so basic and obvious as to be almost not worth stating.
The only real difference I can see is that now the process is much more transparent: the references are less personal and more universal, as well as being more readily identifiable since they exist in an easily retrievable form and are more widely dispersed though the culture; and the artists themselves are young enough that they haven’t yet absorbed and personalized their early environmental influences in such a way that those references don’t stick out all over the place in their work.
Of course, coming up with a new name for the process, whether you call it hypnagogy or hauntology (Reynold’s own favorite term) or simply calling it “influence” as critics of a previous generation did, is part of the process as a whole, so I don’t blame Reynolds for his coinages. But to see it as something completely new, as opposed to a modern twist on an ancient game, suggests a lack of historical, or maybe even human perspective.
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1. He’s not referring to “influence” but to sampled use of old records, which I think is different than the kind of folk process you have in mind.
2. The history of rave IS largely the history of records that most people don’t know as records-unto-themselves, because techno-etc. is recordings as much as anything. As someone who went to a LOT of parties and heard this stuff in situ (though not in the U.K.), those lists/examples of what went on and what it/they meant in context is something SR gets very right.
1. I was probably wrong to use the word “influence”, which I agree is a somewhat different thing. But even if you refer only to sampling, I’m not sure there’s that much difference between now and what has gone on in the past. Folk musicians throughout history (the blues probably being the example most people are familiar with) lifted melodies, snatches of lyrics, chord changes, and rhythms from their predecessors and their contemporaries wholesale, in a process that, except for the technology involved, was little different from sampling. They also lifted from magazines, poetry, newspapers, movies, radio, advertising, and things they overheard on the street. Classical composers did it as well (John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which used existing folk melodies for all its songs, is probably the best example).
I wasn’t so much faulting Reynolds for the concept, which I think is correct, as for limiting it to a recent technological source. It goes much further back than that. I think that sort of narrowing of focus is ultimately detrimental to criticism and to the genre itself. It isolates rave too much and disconnects it from the flow of history and culture. I know that may seem to diminish it’s importance, but I don’t think that’s true. Genres don’t have to be entirely new (none are) to be fresh or to reignite a tired form, which is what rave did. But I think connecting it the general flow of culture increases its importance, and I’m not sure Reynolds feels the same way (about which I could be entirely wrong).
2. I was probably being too flip with that comment. The records are getting easier to find, and digging through Reynolds’s discography and checking on eMusic and Rhapsody I’ve found quite a few. But there are still moments in the book that cause the eyes of a neophyte like myself to glaze over slightly.