1
Two hundred years before the release of Daft Punk’s
Random Access Memories,
people were losing their shit over a different sort of robot entirely.
This one was known as the Mechanical Turk, and it was built at the end
of the 18th century by a guy named Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Mechanical
Turk comprised a puppet dressed in Turkish robes, sitting on top of a
box containing an apparently complex set of mechanics. And it played
chess. The Turk was so good at chess, in fact, that it toured the world
for the best part of a century before it was finally destroyed in a fire
in 1854. It played for Emperor Joseph II, Frederick the Great, Charles
Carroll, and Edgar Allen Poe, and it actually beat Napoleon Bonaparte,
Benjamin Franklin, and Catherine the Great. On one tour of the UK, it
won 45 out of 50 matches, and it played them all with a one-pawn
handicap.
The amazing Mechanical Turk turned out to be an
elaborate hoax
of course. The machine’s interior was an ingenious system of smoke and
mirrors, expertly designed by Von Kempelmen to conceal the chess master,
a small hunchback nestled snugly
inside.
2
In the realm of contemporary music criticism, there is an equivalent
of Von Kempelen’s Turk, a criticism machine that is making the rounds of
contemporary music circuits, amazing a largely unquestioning audience.
The contemporary music critic machine plays its game by confronting
and demystifying any and all contemporary music as nothing but a series
of historical references — well-known dance outfits from the 1990s, not
so well-known German synthesizer duos from the 1970s, and totally
obscure British sound recordings from the 1960s. We read this criticism
and are impressed at its apparent rigor and erudition — never realizing
that, concealed within the box, something else is pulling the strings.
3
In 2011, Simon Reynolds introduced the world of music criticism to
the notion of “retromania.” The idea was that, more than ever before,
contemporary music is concerned with being “retro,” with repeating its
own very recent past. In justifying this central claim, Reynolds
detailed numerous examples, both pop and experimental, that referred
either explicitly or implicitly to music of bygone eras: the eternal
return of 60s- and 70s-era garage rock, Amy Winehouse and Adele’s
ludicrously successful neo-soul, the onslaught of 90s Eurodance recently
unleashed by David Guetta et al. on the world’s charts. And in
the global underground: chillwave, hypnagogic pop, hauntology, hipster
house. In each case, Reynolds’ diagnosis was almost entirely negative.
For Reynolds, retromania is a sickness, a form of cultural malaise. With
each passing year, he worried, the pulse of the present is growing
increasingly faint.
Reynolds’ book struck such a chord both with the public and in
critical circles, because his account married perfectly with a way of
thinking that has dominated critical discourse about music since at
least the 1960s. This approach is premised on the twin ideas of
“novelty,” on the one hand, and “historical progress,” on the other.
In Retromania, as in so much of the music critical tradition,
including Reynolds’ own previous work, music is at its best — indeed,
achieves its core social function — when it confronts the listener with
the shock of the “new”: the exhilaration of experiencing a soundworld
totally unlike anything they have heard before: the thrill of having
‘been there’ at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, techno, or rave.
Moreover, this shock, this experience of radical novelty, is not only a historical experience, but also an experience of history as such
— albeit a specific type of history. In Reynolds’ terms, the excitement
of new music is the experience of being on the very edge of the present
as it hurtles into the future: it is the experience of the essential
truth of human historical existence as constant progress and change.
The retromania of contemporary music, characterized so astutely by
Reynolds, fundamentally challenges this way of relating to music. Its
contemporaneity consists precisely in its repudiation of progress, its refusal
to create new sounds: in some cases by shamelessly or irreverently
copying or reframing, and in other cases by carefully paying tribute to
or unarchiving the music of the past. Either way, a denial of the
inevitability or desirability of change. And this is why Reynolds
condemns it.
4
In the wake of Retromania, the world of music criticism has
undeniably become increasingly “retro-sensitive.” The contemporary music
critic hears retro everywhere.
Of course, with the likes of YouTube, Wikipedia, Spotify, The Pirate
Bay, Discogs, and a vast data-sea of blogs at their disposal, it is
increasingly easy for them to do so. Struggling for a reference? Google
it! Wondering which precise Ash Ra Tempel record the new Emeralds record
sounds like? Spend just a few minutes surfing YouTube!
The result is a now almost ubiquitous form of music criticism which
we call “retro-historicism.” It can be found in the printed music press
of The Wire, NME, and Rolling Stone, and most
predominantly, of course, on the web. In essence, its critical project
is the reduction of music criticism to a form a historical list-making: a
mechanical exercise in influence fishing, the mere identification and
cataloging of historical reference points before moving on to pass
judgment, as if that were in any way sufficient.
All this is not a tribute to or a continuance of Reynolds’ project,
but a depressing performance of precisely the approach to music he
condemned. Contemporary music criticism has become infected by its own
version of retromania — in other words, its own obsession with the
past. Although, rhetorically, such criticism’s appeal to history
projects a certain kind of critical rigor, it is our belief that
retro-historicism involves nothing less than the abandonment of the
critical task.
Read on at TMT
