How much longer will our cultural past dictate the present?
‘Pop music today is not what it used to be.’
Blink and you’ll miss it, but there lies a semantic problem in this statement. When broken down into its constituent parts, it emerges that it is essentially meaningless. Maybe ‘meaningless’ is a little unfair; the instant flurry of your internal response, brimming with opinions already half-formed, is proof enough that the statement has significant ‘meaning’ to whoever reads it. But if we already accept an idea of existence as transient, in which nothing remains exactly the same as time goes on, a statement telling us something is not ‘what it used to be’ should do nothing but state the obvious.
And yet even so, we still understand what the statement is trying to get at. Even if there is no real meaning held within its syntax, we are able to understand the sentence because we all share in the underlying assumption that with time comes a degradation. There is nothing there to say that the change in quality is a decline, but the statement works nonetheless. Its entire significance relies upon a nostalgic view of the past.
That last sentence likely weighed heavy on the mind of Simon Reynolds leading up to the release of his 2011 book Retromania. Looking back at the pop music trends from the first decade of the 21st century, Reynolds was horrified to find that “instead of being about itself, the 2000s [was] about every other previous decade happening again all at once” (Ret. p.x). A statement dealing in such broad strokes might at first glance seem to smack of alarmist juvenoia, but as Reynolds’ evidence starts to mount (all of it catalogued meticulously in the footnotes to Retromania’s introduction), the relentless carousel of tribute acts and museum exhibits, all more interested in canonising than archiving, becomes impossible to ignore.
Not alone in these concerns, the late Mark Fisher wrote of two disorientating experiences that he felt exemplified the temporal confusion he lived in. In the first, the film quality, musical style and fashion choices of the music video for The Arctic Monkeys’ ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ caused him to mistake it for a product of the post-punk era it was so obviously trying to evoke; in the second, whilst walking through a shopping centre he overheard Amy Winehouse’s version of ‘Valerie’ and momentarily thought The Zutons’ track must be a cover of this previously unheard ‘60s soul relic. So closely was the present mimicking the past, that for Fisher the two were often becoming indistinguishable. Only under close scrutiny were the “discrepancies in texture - the results of modern studio and recording techniques” revealing that these songs belonged “neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied ‘timeless’ era, an eternal 1960s or an eternal 1980s” (Ghosts Of My Life, pp.20-1). It was not the existence of these retro-acts alone that Fisher found so troubling, it was that these artists were not being marketed as ‘retro’ in the first place. Writing for his blog k-punk in 2006 he asked: “where is the chorus of disapproval and disquiet about a group like the Arctic Monkeys?”. Across the Atlantic, the perceived extremity of Daphne Brooks’ essay ‘The voice which is not the one’, in which she accused Winehouse of performing vocal blackface through her African-American inflections, was due in part to a lack of acknowledgment from the UK press that there was anything odd about the British female soul invasion being so blatantly out of time (and place). Confronted on all sides by reunion tours of aged rock bands, live performances of classic albums, and retro acts “leeching off ancient styles” (Ret. p.x), it was this chronic inability to identify the present that caused Reynolds to anxiously envision a future of pop music that denied its modernity through the constant regurgitation of its own recent past, recycling and rehashing old tropes over and over to the point that we ‘run out’ of history, its seam exhausted like a great ouroboros snake devouring its own tail until there is nothing left to chew on.
Despite Reynolds’ own admission that scenes such as these perhaps sound “unnecessarily apocalyptic” (Ret. p.ix), the relevance of Retromania has in many ways increased over the last eight years. Netflix, the foremost among the quintessentially modern media platform of streaming sites, has a flagship show that revels in its faux 80s aesthetic, from its promotional material, to its score, to referencing frame-by-frame movies of the time. Eerily echoing the ‘eternal 80s’ of Fisher’s imagination two years after his death, Netflix were also behind the Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’, in which the uploaded consciousnesses of the elderly and deceased are able to flit between physical incarnations of previous decades. However, ‘San Junipero’ is smart enough to do more than just portray the way we vicariously ‘live’ in previous decades through digitally immersing ourselves in their media. Even before the episode’s plot twist is revealed, there is something undeniably off about Kelly and Yorkie’s environment - the ubiquitous spandex, neon glow and gravity-defying haircuts are more 80s caricature than actual 80s - yet we are so used to retrospectively experiencing the decade with all its memorable features exaggerated that we readily accept the fantasy as the real thing. In response to Yorkie’s apprehension to be openly flirtatious since it might result in homophobic abuse, Kelly wryly informs us that “folks are way less uptight than they used to be.'' It is only on second viewing we realise this is a jab at the actual 1987, when their marriage later in the episode would have still been illegal. Even whilst wearing rose-tinted glasses, ‘San Junipero’ is careful to remind us that when we fetishize eras there are certain aspects that go conveniently forgotten for the sake of nostalgia.
Elsewhere in our visual culture, there is a trend of elevating pop stars of old to a new mythic status that suggests a failure to take the same caution in our re-viewing of the past. Writing for the Guardian, Steve Rose noted that this year’s duo of Yesterday and Blinded By The Light are far more unsettling in their canonising of The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen than the biopics of other music icons we have seen in recent years, since by moving the film’s narrative focus away from being biographical, they provide “uncritical, feature-length promos for heritage bands” that affirm their artistic brilliance, while conveniently avoiding any examination of the lives of the people responsible for the music in question. This airbrushed veneration of famous figures from music history must seem an enticing prospect for major film studios to latch onto: why bother navigating the uncomfortable terrain of Bowie espousing drug-addled views some have called fascist sympathising or the accusation that he slept with a minor when you can have a charming South Asian man simply tell you how much of a songwriting genius he was?
Modern artists self-consciously mimicking the stylistic features of their forebears functions as the sonic equivalent to the uncritical idolisation we see in film. Upping the ante of mid-noughties outfits like Wolfmother or Darkness, for whom sounding vaguely like a ‘70s hard rock band was enough, over the last few years Greta Van Fleet have turned the retro-fetishism dial all the way up to eleven by doing away with the outdated mode of having influences in favour of painstakingly replicating the exact sound of Led Zeppelin. Aside from their very existence being the waking nightmare of an “algorithmic fever dream”, lost amidst the conversations surrounding Greta Van Fleet’s authenticity was the fact that Led Zeppelin themselves have a detailed history of trying to pass other people’s songwriting ideas as their own. For many commentators, the idea that Zeppelin were a band of unparalleled innovation was taken as a given, with Greta Van Fleet’s massive commercial success proof of the enduring brilliance of Zeppelin’s style nearly forty years after their break-up. Little to no mention was made of the plethora of artists, mostly of colour, whose lyrics and melodies Zeppelin often lifted and repurposed for their own material. If this wasn’t already enough cause for concern, Greta Van Fleet’s lack of self-awareness means that they transplant into the modern era cultural byproducts that are as dated as their sound. Presumably in a nod to the fashion of 60s psychedelia, frontman Josh Kizka often performs in a pseudo-Native American get-up just a few years after widespread disapproval towards white festival-goers donning war-bonnets caused several festivals to ban them, while the chorus of ‘The New Day’ (“you’re a child in the garden/you’re growing up I’ll watch you bloom/and your dreams are not forgotten/you’ll be a woman soon”) contains the kind prepubescent ogling so uncomfortably prolific in classic rock that Spinal Tap already parodied it back in 1984. It is from within this discourse that a more insidious side to ‘retromania’ rears its ugly head: self-consciously ‘retro’ acts like Greta Van Fleet are more than just emblematic of the pop culture stagnation Reynolds envisaged; they actively contribute to a regression in cultural attitudes by refusing to acknowledge their musical heroes’ more problematic aspects that were in part products of the time. By removing individual artists entirely from the context in which their art was created, we place them on an exclusive pedestal that encourages a superficial revision of their history.
Yet even as my own anxieties surrounding Greta Van Fleet mirror Mark Fisher and The Arctic Monkeys, I’d be hard-pressed not to admit that the saturation of retro-media over the last decade has shortened our patience towards a previously “extraordinary accommodation towards the past” (Gho. p.19). Greta Van Fleet’s debut may have sold handsomely, but the album was universally panned by critics largely because of its deliberately retro style. Where the first two seasons of Stranger Things were praised for engaging with the visual language of 80s blockbusters whilst creating something unique, many criticised the direction the third season took David Harbour’s character in since it was so busy paying homage to 80s action heroes that it inadvertently resurrected several of their abusive behavioural tropes, and the setting of another Netflix original Altered Carbon (alongside upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077) has come under fire for so obviously recycling a visual aesthetic Blade Runner pioneered nearly forty years ago. Charli XCX’s new single ‘1999’ parodies modern nostalgia trends by reminiscing for a year that her and featured artist Troye Sivan were barely old enough to recall, the line “does anyone remember how we did it back then?” sounding less like a middle-aged rallying-cry for lost youth and more like a genuine inquiry. The conversation surrounding nostalgia in art has changed since Retromania, and is now mainstream. Though familiarity in media continues to prove financially viable, it is clear that there is a limit to how far we can tolerate the uncanny recreations of our past. Perhaps Greta Van Fleet aren’t the harbingers of cultural decay I’ve painted them out to be, but a tipping point on how much nostalgia we can handle, before we decide the past should go out of fashion - again.
