A Bit More Detail

• Noisey recently took a fun look at the representation of queerness in American pop music, by Hailey Kiyoko among others.


• Charli XCX sounds like someone I should listen for. Noisey reports.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the factors, including homophobia, that led to the 1979 Comiskey Park riots that heralded the fall of disco in the United States.


• Adam Mason at Popmatters recently made the case, after their LP reissues, of the importance of the Eurythmics. I agree with this line of argument entirely.


• Alan Cross made the argument that, with new digital technologies, the album as a unit of music makes little sense. Instead, singles and playlists will take its place. Global News hosts the argument.

• This Nature feature on the musics of the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer is a must-read.


• Lidia Abraha argues at NOW Toronto that more investment needs to be directed towards the burgeoning hip-hop talent of the city.


• Transit Toronto notes that auditions for the next crop of musicians licensed for TTC stations are now ongoing.


• Ladytron is back, Noisey notes, with a new video for their new single "The Animals".


• This article in The Independent interviewing Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox about their joint musical achievements in the Eurythmics, as their albums are set to be reissued on vinyl, makes me want to buy a record player.

• Arnold Zwicky's Blog is the blog of a smart gay linguist. One post I liked was his examination of linguist John Holm, and how his sexuality and his partner were ignored in the Bahamas whose language he had documented.


• Dangerous Minds is an eclectic examination of different things in pop culture. One thing there I liked was the linkage to a Eurythmics performance in 1983, live at London gay club Heaven.


• The LRB Blog is the blog of the London Review of Books. Hugh Pennington's examination of the use of polonium to kill Litvinenko is a recent chilling example of the short scholarship.


• The NYR Daily is the blog of the New York Review of Books. Garry Wills's look at the people who want to postpone the appointment of a new justice to the US Supreme Court after Scalia's death is good.

Annie Lennox, one of Scotland’s most ground-breaking musicians, has revealed that her songwriting days are over.

The Aberdeen-born singer, who has sold more than 80 million albums since her breakthrough with Eurythmics more than 30 years ago, has called time just months after being honoured by her industry peers.

Lennox, whose last album of original material was released eight years ago, said she now regarded her songwriting as being “in the past tense”.

She has spoken of the pressures involved in retaining a passion for the music industry, saying: “I need to feel I have a purpose in life that’s more than just having a job.”

[. . .]

She said: “Songwriting has been a deep, deep passion for me. I needed it because I was tuned into it. I was deeply committed to that whole way of life.

“But there’s a lot of sacrifice in it, as a woman specifically. It’s a hardcore lifestyle and it’s not for everybody.

Last night I dreamt
That somebody loved me
No hope, but no harm
Just another false alarm

Last night I felt
Real arms around me
No hope, no harm
Just another false alarm

So, tell me how long
Before the last one?
And tell me how long
Before the right one?

The story is old, I know
But it goes on
The story is old, I know
But it goes on

Oh, goes on
And on
Oh, goes on
Goes on

Orwell is, of course, famous for linking totalitarianism to the denial of history and objective reality: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four." But, as Stewart suggests, the bulk of the novel, and the main content of Winston's betrayal, is not an exercise in mathematics, but rather the romance plot.

It is when Julia first passes Winston a note saying, "I love you" that his half-formed rebellion takes concrete shape and form. The couple's first sexual encounter is specifically described as "a blow struck against the Party … a political act." It isn't math or history that strikes that blow, but love. "If they could make me stop loving you, that would be the real betrayal," Winston says. To which Julia replies, "They can't do that … It's the one thing they can't do." Even if you read that as doomed, it's still a fairly romantic bit of dialogue, insisting as it does on the existence of love "in a world where," as Stewart says, "love really doesn't exist anymore."

It turns out, alas, that Julia is wrong; "they" can get inside you.

[. . .]

Orwell is able to imagine Big Brother with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

[. . .]

Orwell is able to imagine newspeak and Big Brother and the chief torturer O'Brien with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's thoughtless, primitive, interested only in things of the body rather than the mind — "only a rebel from the waist downwards," as Winston calls her. We never really learn why, or feel why, she loves the older, not particularly attractive Winston. We merely know she does because she says so and because, as soon as they meet in private, she starts calling him "dear.” She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's part of Winston's story, not the other way around. So it's not exactly a surprise that she betrays Winston immediately, or that, as O'Brien says, just about licking his lips, "All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her." None of it was ever really there to begin with.

[. . .]

I prefer to think, though, that whatever Eric Blair's limitations as a writer of female characters, he did, in fact, believe in love. Winston, at the end, abandons Julia for big Brother. But does that mean that the relationship with Julia never existed? O'Brien would say it didn't. Memory, history, love; for the Party, none of them are real. It seems to me that Kristen Stewart is on the side of the resistance, and of Orwell, when she says that O'Brien is wrong, and that 1984 is a romance.

I could point to just one release that tipped me over the edge into bemused fascination with retromania, it would be 2006's Love, the Beatles remix project. Executed by George Martin and his son Giles to accompany the Cirque du Soleil spectacular in Las Vegas, the album's 26 songs incorporated elements from 130 individual recordings, both releases and demos, by the Fab Four. Hyped as a radical reworking, Love was way more interesting to think about than to listen to (the album mostly just sounds off, similar to the way restored paintings look too bright and sharp). Love raised all kinds of questions about our compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history, about the ways we use digital technology to rearrange the past and create effects of novelty. And like Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Love was yet more proof of the long shadow cast by the 60s, that decade where everything seemed brand-new and ever-changing. We're unable to escape the era's reproaches (why aren't things moving as fast as they did back then?) even as the music's adventurousness and innocence make it so tempting to revisit and replicate.

[. . .]

Cinema isn't immune to retromania. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch still gamely fly the postmodern flag with films that are pastiche genre exercises or larded with in-joke references to cinematic history. The remake has become a fixture of the movie business, not so much for pomo reasons but because it's what people in the industry call a "presold concept". Unlike with rock, where most of the biggest-grossing tours involve reunions or wrinkly legends from the 60s and 70s, people won't go into the multiplexes to see a rereleased classic or blockbuster from yesteryear. But they will, seemingly, turn up for glitzy, pointless updates of major movies, such as the recent travesty of Arthur starring Russell Brand. TV has got in on the remake game, too, with new versions of The Prisoner, Charlie's Angels, Hawaii Five-O, and Britcom faves such as Minder and The Likely Lads. You also have the retro-chic series Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes, whose appeal depends heavily on the sensation of utter immersion in the past through a fetishistic focus on period details of clothing, decor, food and so forth.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that pop music is the area where retromania really runs rampant. There is something peculiar, even eerie, about pop's vulnerability to its own history, the way the past accumulates behind it and hampers it, both as an actual sonic presence (on oldies radio, as reissues, through nostalgia tours and now via YouTube) and as an overpowering influence. If you want further proof, there is no better evidence than the record that at the time of writing enjoys its 16th week at No 1 in the UK album chart: Adele's 21. In the US, her success (No 1 album for nine weeks, No 1 single with Rolling in the Deep) is so unusual for a British artist these days, it's tempting to see it as a flashback to the glory days when the Beatles and Stones sold black American music to white America. Except that those bands were doing it with contemporary rhythm-and-blues. Adele is literally flashing back to black styles that date from the same era as the Beatles and the Stones.

[. . .]

Retro is not a completely new phenomenon, of course: pop has an extensive history of revivals and creative distortions of the musical past. What is different about the contemporary retromania is the aspect of total recall, instant recall, and exact recall that the internet makes possible. Fans can drown themselves in the entire history of music at no cost, because it is literally all up there for the taking. From YouTube's archive of TV and concert performances to countless music, fashion, photography and design blogs, the internet is a gigantic image bank that encourages and enables the precision replication of period styles, whether it's a music genre, graphics or fashion. As a result, the scope for imaginative reworking of the past – the misrecognitions and mutations that characterised earlier cults of antiquity like the 19th-century gothic revival – is reduced. In music especially, the combination of cheap digital technology and the vast accumulation of knowledge about how specific recordings were made, means that bands today can get exactly the period sound they are looking for, whether it's a certain drum sound achieved by Ringo Starr with help from the Abbey Road technicians or a particular synth tone used by Kraftwerk.

[. . .]

Head into the post-indie musical zones of NME/Pitchfork and most of what you encounter is "alternative" only in the sense of offering an alternative to living in the present: Fleet Foxes, with their beards and balladry modeled on their parents' Crosby, Stills & Nash LPs; Thee Oh Sees' immaculate 60s garage photocopies; the Vivian Girls' revival of what was already a revival (C86 shambling pop). In indieland too we're starting to hear 90s vibes creeping in, from Yuck's grunge-era slacker-isms to Brother's Gallagher-esque "gritpop".

[. . .]

What seems to have happened is that the place that The Future once occupied in the imagination of young music-makers has been displaced by The Past: that's where the romance now lies, with the idea of things that have been lost. The accent, today, is not on discovery but on recovery. All through the noughties, the game of hip involved competing to find fresher things to remake: it was about being differently derivative, original in your unoriginality.

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.

Well I was born an original sinner.
I was borne from original sin.
And if I had a dollar bill
For all the things I've done
There'd be a mountain of money
Piled up to my chin...

Well the missionary man
He's got God on his side.
He's got the saints and apostles
Backin' up from behind.
Black eyed looks from those Bible books.
He's a man with a mission
Got a serious mind.
There was a woman in the jungle
And a monkey on a tree.
The missionary man he was followin' me.
He said "stop what you're doing."
"Get down upon your knees."
"I've got a message for you that you better believe."