A celebrated remix of The Streets's "Turn the Page"
What its existence would seem to demonstrate, though, is inability to turn the page of this particular book of history.
(What you'd want, really, is not even a new chapter, but a whole new volume).
But this is Overmono whose debut album Good Lies was hailed by the Guardian as “UK rave history... distilled to perfection”
I'm trying to think who would've been the equivalent in rock - when this stage of "history" getting "distilled to perfection" would have got underway..
Oasis seems too obvious, and also belated... I feel like the process was well underway by the mid-Eighties.
You'd probably have to wind it back to earlier in the (re)Creation arc - to Primal Scream
All that said, listening to Good Lies for the first time, I'm enjoying it. There's cleverness, there's craft, it's made up out of or in reference to things I already reverence... but the echoes, allusions and twists are subtly done. In a certain sense, what's not to like?
I was always a bit more vulnerable to the appeal of "record collection rock" than I would have liked. I couldn't quite ever be as stern about it as Mark Fisher.
Still, it's an odd thing - given that the foundational principle of the culture is F-FWD - to listen to this
Apart from the overall sound quality - clean and crisp in a 2023 upgraded sort of way - there is nothing about this track that would sound out of place in 2000. It sounds like Groove Chronicles.
I mean, maybe the wibbly synth wouldn't have been there but it could have been, if GC had wanted it to be.
Surging styles become settled styles.
Bit like how groups operating today can be described as - can describe themselves as - "postpunk".
It's a stable, if not utterly static, form - akin to the blues, or folk.
This "Dubstep Heritage" series only got to two episodes!
2 comments:
It is startlingly to me to realize the peak era of rave and its associated art forms was more than 30 years ago, nearing two generations. Dwelling too much on this makes me feel old - at 46 I was born in that twilight between Gen X and the Millennials that makes rave (and grunge) the key musical turning points in history, and everything that comes after seems like an act of recreation. I know my dead head parents felt the same way about their music, though, so it’s easy to wonder how objective I am in this.
I think it’s too easy to blame the artists though. Rave music has always been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise - first a cottage industry and then a global one. To the extent that it was a folk art - and it also was that - those things happened on the margins and were swept along in the current of bloodless money making. Even a legendary club like the Limelight primarily existed as a cash grab, if not a very successful one. The structures that artists operate within today replicate these earlier events on a much larger scale, repeating earlier revelations and rebellions as currency to attract new (and older) generations of buyers. I don’t think it’s surprising at all that artists caught up in that process replicate the most time honored strategies to evoke the product being sold. Structures outside the frame don’t fit on the factory floor.
Even something with the whiff of the new like amapiano gets repackaged to fit what came before.
I was amused and a little sad to see the (hollowed out version of) Pitchfork drop a positive review of an Eris Drew dj mix the other day. Listening to it - their sound is almost entirely a revival of Big Beat. P4k was treating this as new, but what’s striking is that Big Beat itself was a retro-recombinative genre. So what - are we now reviving ghouls that were themselves stitched together from spare parts?
I don't think the emergence of a sense of legacy or artists conceiving of themselves as being custodians or curators has much to do with capitalism, except in so far as all popular music (and in fact all niche experimental genres) operate primarily through the market and the commodity form. So the curatorial or nostalgia-based forms of popular / unpopular music would have to go through the same mechanisms; if there's a demand for that, then the market will supply.
I think it's much more like an artistic predicament - or less judgmentally - a place artists find themselves and have to work within, owing to the historical arc of genres. Suddenly there's all this history accumulated behind a genre and you can either move off into something else altogether, or do self-conscious patricidal moves.... but if you stick there, then you are bound to start making records with names like "Teachers" or misty elegaic invocations.
It's happened to all genres pretty much - it happened to jazz, it happened to rock. The museum-ification of a genre - with literal museums being built (like the Electronic Music museum in Frankfurt). Exacerbated in the 21st Century by the unprecedented expansion and accessibility of archives.
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