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blahflowersI don't really have time to properly talk about this now but I really wanted to flag up an article I've just read to nanaya.
In the provocative and interesting Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past Simon Reynolds argues that all music these days is stuck in a rut and feeding on itself rather than looking for new things. It's a provocative thesis but, like all discussions of music completely unprovable, you can hold up NEWBRIGHTSHINY! and Reynolds can tiredly explain how it's all been done before, except for beyond year x, before which everything truloy was NEWBRIGHTSHINY! and, being Reynolds, you can lay good money that year x was probably somewhere around the end of punk, because of course, punk arose out of nowhere and was vouchsafed unto us unsullied by the touch of base clay.
Anyway, Kurt Andersen is doing much the same thing in Vanity Fair, You Say You Want a Devolution? in which he argues that culture in more general terms has also stagnated over the last twenty years. If I were minded to go along with such an idea and I'm not completely disinclined, it would seem that we've finally become too good as archivists. Making claims to be deliberately trying to invent NEWBRIGHTSHINY! is something many do but few achieve and often by accident, often by misremembering the past and not being able to fact check deeply enough. If the internet broke tomorrow and TV and radio stations went dark, would we really have a more vibrant culture in ten years time that is as different as Andersen argues the 80s were from the 70s?
nanaya.In the provocative and interesting Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past Simon Reynolds argues that all music these days is stuck in a rut and feeding on itself rather than looking for new things. It's a provocative thesis but, like all discussions of music completely unprovable, you can hold up NEWBRIGHTSHINY! and Reynolds can tiredly explain how it's all been done before, except for beyond year x, before which everything truloy was NEWBRIGHTSHINY! and, being Reynolds, you can lay good money that year x was probably somewhere around the end of punk, because of course, punk arose out of nowhere and was vouchsafed unto us unsullied by the touch of base clay.
Anyway, Kurt Andersen is doing much the same thing in Vanity Fair, You Say You Want a Devolution? in which he argues that culture in more general terms has also stagnated over the last twenty years. If I were minded to go along with such an idea and I'm not completely disinclined, it would seem that we've finally become too good as archivists. Making claims to be deliberately trying to invent NEWBRIGHTSHINY! is something many do but few achieve and often by accident, often by misremembering the past and not being able to fact check deeply enough. If the internet broke tomorrow and TV and radio stations went dark, would we really have a more vibrant culture in ten years time that is as different as Andersen argues the 80s were from the 70s?