In November last year, Kieran and I joined Argentine critics Pablo Schanton and Antonia Kon to discuss music writing and music's future as part of the 20-year celebrations for the Buenos Aires publisher Caja Negra. It was framed as "old farts" (me + Schanton) versus "brainrots" (K and Kon) and we touched on everything from ASMR to AI, doomscrolling to meta-genre madness.
The paperback edition of Futuromania has just come out
Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s
An earlier post about Future Shock and the Orson Welles presented TV program based on it.
Early 1980s youth subculture - imagined from 1971
from Disc and Music Echo, March 1971 - it's a sweep of youth cults / looks from the beginning ie. rock'n'roll to the present - and beyond!
A rock book I have never ever heard of before, by a writer I never heard of before - until this moment.
Published 1976.
After this book, David Downing switched to fiction, writing s.f., alternative history, spy fiction, etc
I wonder if Future Rock's any cop? Hard to say from this review by CSM.
CSM is one of the NME writers (see also Mick Farren) who often wrote about s.f. writers in the paper (e.g. Ballard) and could have made a fair stab at a tome about the science fiction and rock nexus. (Farren of course wrote s.f. pulp novels by the dozen).
Dunning's book reminded me a bit of this cat Lou Stathis who wrote about music for Heavy Metal - not about heavy metal but about a continuum of sci-fi rock that includes Eno, Fripp, Bowie, Roxy, but also Chrome, Devo, Ubu, Ultravox, The Normal, Gary Numan etc. He called it "rok"
How "Future Rock" looked in the late Sixties - from Lillian Roxon's encyclopedia .
In November last year, Kieran and I joined Argentine critics Pablo Schanton and Antonia Kon to discuss music writing and music's fu...
