....is a bit too huge of a question for me to tackle but briefly*
But a lot of what happens in popular culture is relatively new or contextually new – it might be the drifting into (or conscious borrowing of) innovations that developed elsewhere (jazz, avant-classical etc) or from non-Western traditions. There are artists who do a mixture of things – some that are absolutely new (Beatles with “Tomorrow Never Knows” etc) and others that are contextually new (the kind of expressivity in “Eleanor Rigby” had never been heard in pop music before, I don’t think – although clearly in the novel or film that kind of mood had been broached before).
Or a more recent example – there was a phase in hip hop and R&B in the early 2000s, where you heard all these sounds and riffs from techno and house – it was very exciting (Timbaland et al) but at the same it was ground already broken in the early 90s in Europe. But in the context of rap it was a new thing and very exciting to hear on MTV / BET / the radio.
In terms of how innovation makes itself felt as such, I think there is no better analysis than Fredric Jameson’s in A Singular Modernity, particularly with this passage that I’ve quoted before, which captures the paradox of how we can listen to an old piece of modernist art or music or whatever, that ought to be stale and familiar, but somehow we can still feel its future-shock:
"the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation..... "The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame" [and as a result the modernist work] "encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole."
That implies that innovation is always a move within and against an established tradition... I don’t think that is actually case – I think there are moments of absolute innovation (musique concrete, early electronics etc). But those are few and far between and you can’t count on a steady supply. So more often it’s a case of the push to make-it-new occurring within and against the old - e.g what Hendrix did with the electric guitar and blues, or what house did with disco, hip hop did with funk, etc, or jungle even more so with funk and reggae, or postpunk with its various sources.
Another thing to consider is that innovation can also be linked up to more regressive (politically or emotionally or simply in terms of narrative structure) elements. So - by far the most cutting-edge things going on with film on a technical level (effects, CGI, editing, sound, high def etc) occur in the most pulpy, lowbrow, and often reactionary or just simply juvenile areas of cinema: thrillers, action, superhero, kids cartoons etc. Likewise you can have radical sonic things or techniques going on within genres that are otherwise very traditional in their musical structures and their emotion affect or mode of usage. The engineering etc in a Top 40 hit is cutting edge, but everything else in it might be fairly conservative.
I don’t think the future-shock effect is really relative to how much music history you know... because what we’re talking about is musical events that are not reducible to references or influences... it’s a more-than-the-sum effect... not addition but multiplication
I suppose the super knowledgeable might be more likely to hear the older elements (the residual, traditional stuff that is being reworked or cancelled)... they might also happen to know of obscure precedents that preempt the supposedly new... but when something really truly new happens, the knowledgeable elder and the ignorant neophyte are in the same place really - dumbfounded.
Futureshocked.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* "briefly" - famous last words! Well no one ever accused me of being a man of few etc etc
I'd argue the defining feature of 2020s culture is atemporality. The jamming together of past & present once confined to sampledelic hip hop has bled over to the culture writ large (now everything is digitised, the past is as accessible as the now) - see, for instance, the recentish Spiderman movie that featured the three actors who have played the character since 2002 putting on the gear again to coexist simultaneously, or stuff like "Ready Player One" or the "Space Jam" remake where pop culture from across decades (from Pac-man to the Shining to Jurassic Park) is crammed together on some hyperreal stage. I dont recall this sort of thing ever regularly happening before (the original "Space Jam" just featured WB cartoon characters - it didn't have Bob the Builder, Batman, Bogart, Judy Garland and the droogs from "A Clockwork Orange" making cameos as happens in the 2021sequel.)
ReplyDeleteRelatedly, my wife was watching a rom-com from 2008 the other day, and I was immediately struck that aside from the absence of phones, the characters did not present as in any way being from a different era - the clothes, hairstyles etc. would fit comfortably into 2025. Compare however, the difference in presentation between movie characters in, say 2000 and those in 1983, or between those in 1983 and in 1966 and the differences are immediate and overwhelming.
The slow cancellation of the future indeed.
It seems to me that there is a larger critical view which would encompass both the absolutely and contextually new, trying to understand their proportionality within the same cultural field.
ReplyDeleteIn that view, one could look at the Sixties and mark its health by the existence of both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Eleanor Rigby".
If you look through that lens today, what stands out is the near-absence of 'Tomorrows' and the crushing saturation of 'Rigbys'.
For me it's about that proportion. I don't mind living in a period dominated by the contextually new, because culture has always had its alternating peaks and valleys.
But when I take that larger view, and consider the out-of-whack proportions of the absolutely new to the contextually new-- really, as I said, the near- absence of the former-- it does make me pessimistic because the scene starts to resemble, not a valley we're passing through, but a larger, structural breakdown of the peak/valley alternation we used to take for granted.
Think I've said this before but a lot of the musical innovation of the 20th Century relied on new instruments or new technology - the saxophone, electric guitars, reel-to-reel tapes, synthesizers, mixing decks, samplers, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's this area where innovation seems to have dried up. Or maybe later innovations just haven't caught on?
I think they are constantly churning out new gear, things like the Kaos pad (although that's been around for a while I think).... but apart from Auto-Tune I can't really think of a machine since the sampler that has really opened up a whole new sound and way of making music. There are vocal processing technologies too like the Harmony Engine.
DeleteWith a lot of the gear of the digital era, it's been a facilitator, a speeder-upper of processes that would have been feasible in the analogue times but taken way longer and been incredibly fiddly and intricate, a real mindbending, backbreaking chore to achieve. Now you can get it done so much faster. (In a way the sampler was that in relation to musique concrete, but it did bring with it some new idiomatic ways of organising and playing - the simple thing of having a sample distributed across a keyboard so you make it squeaky fast or absurdly slow, play chords with it, rhythmic vamps or whatever. Taking a vocal sample and playing a solo with it - people started doing that in the early 80s).
I think there's a lot of advances in terms of what you can do live, looping things in real-time etc.
And there's been advances in kind of a sort of memory function - archiving your own ideas and re-accessing them, combining them. Storage. Memory. (As with sample time which used to be only 1 second and a bit for much of the 80s).
Maybe AI will generate the next quantum leap but again that mostly seems like a shortcut, time-saver, do-the-work-for-you type advance.
GenAI is definitely the latter - it's essentially data stitching, but automated, and the only impressive thing about it is the sheer amount of ingested source data and the level of statistical synchronization they've been able to apply to it. We've essentially arrived at where automation theory applies to culture, and contrary to what its frontline sales pitches would tell you, it's a very vexed and often pessimistic field with disabling/invalidating paradoxes everywhere you look
DeleteIs there an element of contemporary myopia here, of only being able to chart the distinctions after the period has passed? I remember a mate at uni around 2006 decrying the indistinguishability of the '90s. In any case, the atemporality of the present is clearly a phenomenon that could only has occurred in these times, since it is a product of technological development. Case in point: just now I decided to look up Moe Tucker's solo releases on Wikipedia, and a minute later started playing her 1981 album Playin' Possum on Youtube. For me to have even heard of the album in the '90s, I would have had to have ordered a book dedicated to the Velvet Underground from my local bookshop. I understand that you're not talking about the consumption side of music, but I still consider it relevant.
ReplyDeleteAs I think on, it strikes me that plenty of performers don't see the ransacking of the past as opposed to innovation, but rather as an impetus to their own, personal innovations. Beyoncé's forays into house and country are paradigms of that. Of course, death of the author and all. And you make a similar point with the relatively new. But the consideration of innovation, in this context, should bear in mind that what an artist considers innovative may mean what is innovative to the artist personally. An American pop star attempting country may not be them exploring undiscovered territory, but they may well be stepping into a region unknown to them.
Going off track, with the issue of resurrecting the past, product placement has become standard within hip-hop and RnB. What's the earliest example of a band using explicit advertising within their music? Sigue Sigue Sputnik included adverts on their 1986 album Flaunt It, which is the earliest I can recall. Apparently, Camel and R.J. Reynolds, makers of Camel cigarettes, nearly came to a deal (the sleeve of their second album Mirage looks like the cigarette packet), but the band backed away after the fag merchants suggested that they record songs with titles like "Pack of Twenty".
Well the Who did it with The Who Sell Out, but I think it was fake-advertising, parodies - the whole concept was the album sounds like a pirate radio show, with commercials interspersed
DeleteI don't know of any one before Sigue doing it for real - i should imagine the problem is unlike magazine advertising where you have the circulation figures so you know how many people will be exposed to your ad, there's no way of knowing with a record, it might be a flop. And you don't know the social composition, A / B / C class breakdown, of the audience necessarily. So why would an agency or a business take a punt on it?
It is actually product placement in hip hop, where they are gettin paid for it, or are the artists just referencing name brands for their connotations of exclusivity or high-class? So free advertising.
The first example of that I can think of was Run DMC, "My Adidas". But I only think of it becoming endemic in the early-mid 90s, with Notorious BIG and that lot. When Snoop mentions "Gin and Juice" I don't think he mentions a brand of gin...
'Another thing to consider is that innovation can also be linked up to more regressive (politically or emotionally or simply in terms of narrative structure) elements.'
ReplyDeleteThis is something I've thought about more in the last decade or so - there's no intrinsic connection between technological, social/political, and/or artistic/cultural 'progress' other than that we use the same terms for them. Sometimes they coincide, but it's just as often that they don't, and there's an open question whether that collective terminology is even the right one for what we're talking about (does this new technological variation really 'advance' anything? since art and culture imply personal investment, is 'progress' the right word to describe it, as if present people are an 'upgrade' from past people, and theoretical future people will be even more so?)