Posts Tagged ‘Simon Reynolds’

Just their imagination

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Simon Reynolds:

all these sounds from Euro and club music and the more commercial end of techno, it’s almost like a second B-Boys on E moment, except i doubt E has anything to do with it… it’s not a trend driven by the streets, it’s coming from producers, from their lack of imagination and their desire/need for international sales… so it’s more like a second Hip House moment… rapping figures as part of the hit-maker’s arsenal in the same way as it did for C+C Music Factory

These seems off to me, even though in part I agree with it. There’s no doubt that the injection of recycled Euro-disco into hip-hop is a producer-driven phenomenon—street-driven hip-hop at the moment is more along the lines of crankin’, jerkin, and dougie-ing. But I don’t see what lack of imagination has to do with it. In fact, it may well be the opposite, the practice of individual imagination being, at the moment, more important than organic cultural influences, at least in a commercial sense. Whatever you may believe about hip-hop as music, as culture it’s already past its prime, and though it’s still the dominant commercial form (at least as far as radio is concerned), and it’s not as decrepit in a cultural sense as rock and roll, and may even throw up a few surprises in the years to come, it’s feeling its age. So producers are looking for anything that will juice it up and get it’s blood flowing again. Euro-disco, mimimalist and ambient techno, ’50s rock and doo-wop, even classical and operatic influences.

In some ways it reminds me of the state of swing music in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when A&R men searched through Italian, Cuban, and Brazilian styles, country, folk, blues, even the burgeoning R&B, doo-wop, and rock and roll movements, for anything that would inject some life into a genre that had obviously run out of steam. A lot of terrible music came out of that period, but also a lot of amazing, hybrid records that are as startling today, perhaps even more so, as they were at the time. So although I agree things are bad, I wouldn’t blame the producers. As for the streets, they’ll take over again in time. They always do.

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Here we go again

Friday, July 24th, 2009

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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