"PBS-ification"

"But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk and of the mid-Sixties and rock'n'roll, has faded,  so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...

Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable–the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of 'fine music', which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art."

Simon Reynolds presents a transcript of a talk he made at Harvard University in 2012.

"There's No Ad Libbing Because It's All Ad Libbing"

"Trump, being extremely old, is attached to the old-fashioned pageantry of spectacular power--rallies,  parades, inaugurations and other ceremonies attendant to high office.  All that Billy Fisher as President of Ambrosia stuff--marching at the head of regiments, addressing rapt crowds in stadiums through tannoy systems. He is famously obsessed with crowd sizes, etc. But he's not any good at oratory, he's a leaden speaker when given a high-flown pre-written speech to read off a teleprompter. Can't summon a grand cadence or soaring climax to save his life. His forte is the rambling inner monologue conducted in public, aka the weave. Which if not as cogent as a tweet certainly seems to have more in common with the driveling rants and quickfire riposte of, message boards, text messages, influencers, social media, blogs even.  That sense of unguarded exposure... 'being yourself' but with an audience...  like a webcam YouTuber. A rhetoric-free mode, not anti-theatrical but un-threatrical."

Simon Reynolds at his Shock and Awe 2 blog writes that in regards to Donald Trump, "[w]e're not looking at a show, we're pulled into his show."

"Inimical in a Number of Ways to the Things We Most Value About Music"

"All these micro-genres are based around an ethos of participation. That's why scenes like noise or dubstep have such a high ratio of performers to punters, with the remainder of the audience often involved running labels, promoting gigs, or just writing about the music. As well as the attraction of commitment and effort, another reason to be involved in these scenes is a yearning for cultural intimacy: the desire to enter a space that is special, set apart. You could call this need to be in the know 'tribal' or 'elitist', depending on your own sympathies. But either way, this kind of secret knowledge is precarious, hard to maintain, precisely because of the web. It's easier than ever for people to find out about other people's business."

Simon Reynolds in a 2009 Guardian article explores the impact of the internet on "underground" music.

"This Was His Knack, and His Downfall: to Take the Uncommercial and Make It Sell, to Commodify the Explosion"

"Gorman describes McLaren as 'the ultimate inside/outsider'– which is perhaps a nice way of saying that he tried to play it both ways. In a prefatory essay, Lou Stoppard says that McLaren was caught between his impulse to rebel and his secret desire for 'some kind of recognition from the "system"', resulting in a career emblematic of 'the ever so delicate trade-off between success and opposition'. If his objective truly was 'the most flamboyant failure', he was thwarted by success. With the King's Road boutique, each anti-fashion move backfired almost immediately: attention, appreciation and acceptance came from 'enemy' institutions like Vogue. The Sex Pistols, he declared, 'were anti-music and anti-business', yet 'God Save the Queen' outsold Rod Stewart twice over."

At the London Review of Books, Simon Reynolds reviews Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren.

"Artists Who Thrill Because of the Way They Say Rather Than What They Say"

"Still, You're History benefits from the author's commitment to engaging only with what turns her on, rather than dutifully undertaking a wider survey. A slim, fast read, the book offers a pure hit of prose pleasure. The writing embodies the polemic, which is refreshing at a time when music criticism has never been so virtuous and so inattentive to the bliss that is pop’s greatest gift."

At 4Columns, Simon Reynolds reviews Lesley Chow's You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music.

"The Contemporary Left, Then, Must Be Relentlessly Modern"

"The questions with which Fisher began his last lectures–about what we are capable of wanting and envisioning–are questions of consciousness. Their roots can be traced to the concept for which Fisher is most famous: 'capitalist realism', the title of his first, bestselling pamphlet, published in 2009. The original definition–'the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it'–is not, Fisher would later say, 'quite accurate'. Capitalist realism is less a conviction than 'a set of behaviours and affects that arise from [it]'. It entails a 'deep embedding in a world–or set of worlds–in which capitalism is massively naturalised'. 'The best way to think about capitalist realism,' Fisher told an audience in 2016, 'is as a form of what I'd call consciousness-deflation.'"

Lola Seaton at New Statesman reviews Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures.

"We've Gone Past the Future Somehow"

"William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist, recently tweeted the following astute observation: 'In the 1920s, the phrase "the 21st century" was already pop-ubiquitous. How often do we see the phrase "the 22nd century", now?'. And it's true—we don't have these dates anymore. As a boy, as a young man, I had mental pictures of the 21st century. But I don't have any sense of 2050 or 2100—except as a deterioration or a collapse."

Simon Reynolds at New Perspectives writes "that there is no intrinsic link between technological innovation and progressive politics."

"Death by Data"

"[I]t's particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era conditions of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. People–such as my children–who are digital natives don't have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things but they feel no need to own the MP3s. People from my generation grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could then afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes also cost money). That's how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth. "

Simon Reynolds in Der Tagesspiegel discusses "archive fever."

There Is No Love in This World Anymore

"'I'm not interested in being able to play. A musician is like another brand of entertainer.
"'There are plenty of musicians that I enjoy watching that are entertainers. But I wouldn't want to be that, because the thing with an entertainer is that there is always that dishonesty, which is what punk tried to get rid of.
"'It was like, you're not pretending to be something you are not. You are just what you are. Punk is an art of action. It's about deciding to do something and then going out and doing it.'"

Kevin Rawlinson at The Guardian reports the death of Pete Shelley.

And Jason Heller at NPR writes an appreciation.

As does Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork.

"The Interface Between Popular Music and Science Fiction"

"As Heller notes, it's striking that several of the very first magazines containing rock criticism were launched by figures who came out of the s.f. fanzine scene. Later, music papers like NME would regularly profile writers like J.G. Ballard. Science fiction and rock both have an association with youth culture. While some stick with either or both for their whole lives, fanatical involvement is generally associated with adolescence and the early twenties. That super-intense seriousness—seeing s.f. or rock as a world-transformative force, or as a world unto itself—is an overestimation you're supposed to grow out of."

Simon Reynolds at 4Columns reviews Jason Heller's Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded.

"Making Meta-Music"

"You could call this alternative aesthetic 'record collection rock', in so far as a band is interesting in ratio to the esoteric scope of its musical learning, the extent to which it avoids obvious influences. The camp frisson involved in rehabilitating something formerly beyond the pale is something that wears off quickly.  For instance, when late '80's band like Butthole Surfers and Tad revived Black Sabbath's ponderous riffs, it felt like a thrilling challenge to the approved canon of underground rock (e.g Velvet Underground, The Stooges).  But after grunge and the mainstream success of doom-metal bands like Alice In Chains, Sabbath-style heaviness is no longer a novelty, it's an oppressive norm.  In indie music, the smart operators seek out neglected eras or genres, in order to titillate the hipster's easily-jaded palatte."

Simon Reynolds in a 1993 New York Times article writes that "[w]here financiers speculate in futures, bands today speculate in pasts."

It's in the Post

"Instead, I wanted to recover my own lived sense of the period not as a dwindle into disparateness but as the true fruition of punk's ideals. The after-zones of rock history are hard to grasp precisely because they're so various. This rich muddle demands identifying labels that are umbrella-broad and open-ended. Hence post-punk, not a genre so much as a space of possibility, out of which new genres formed: Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, and many more.

"I can think of at least a couple more 'post-' terms that could usefully redraw the map of pop music history:"

In a 2009 Slate article, Simon Reynolds discusses the "'in-between' periods in pop."

"I Play to People's Fantasies"

"Early in his career, Trump grasped that--like a pop star--he was selling an image, a brand. Licensed out, the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn't own, let alone run. He's an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a 'glamour stock': an investment that outperforms the market based on an inflated belief in its growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool and buzz. Twitter has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money. A glamour stock will keep on winning right up until it loses--when the gulf between its perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge, when reality finally disrupts the reality distortion field surrounding it."

In The Guardian, Simon Reynolds compares Donald Trump to David Bowie.

"A Blend of Craft and Cruelty"

"Working on my glam history Shock and Awe, I became fascinated by rock's peculiar compulsion to comment on itself or fold back on its own history self-reflexively, through mixed motives of irreverence and nostalgia, campy irony and sentimental affection. Teeming with homages, invocations, references, and revivals, glam rock was pop culture inventing postmodernism all by itself, years before the concept achieved mainstream currency. That spirit remains a riotous presence in our culture with the explosion of online parody. As much as we feel awestruck fascination for the famous, it seems we're equally driven to demystify and deride them."

Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork presents "a chronicle of those who have turned pastiche and mimicry into an art form across the last 50 years."

"A Fetish of the Swoon"

"The connective thread with all these sensations is the relinquishing of control, the scary bliss of losing orientation and agency.
"I don't think it's too much of a reach to imagine that this had some kind of semi-conscious resonance for a generation that felt powerless. It's quite hard to reconstruct how bleak things seemed in the late '80s and early '90s; in both Britain and America, conservative governments were in third-term ascendance, and mainstream popular culture from hair metal to Hollywood seemed be in sync with the rightward shift. For many—not all, but many—this encouraged resignation, a withdrawal verging on hibernation. That's why American nu-punks L7 wrote their anti-slacker anthem 'Pretend We’re Dead' as a wake-up call from apathy. That's why Welsh nu-punks Manic Street Preachers declared that they hated Slowdive more than Hitler—for being so dreamily disengaged, advocates for reverie rather than revolution."

Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork reviews the new CD box Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995.

"Abundance Breeds Boredom"

"When there's no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing. Listening to or watching one thing means you're not listening to or watching all the other things you might be listening to or watching. Reynolds quotes a telling line from Karla Starr's 2008 article 'When Every Song Ever Recorded Fits on Your MP3 Player, Will You Listen to Any of Them?' Confessed Starr: 'I find myself getting bored even in the middle of songs simply because I can.'"

Nicholas Carr at Rough Type reacts to Kenneth Goldsmith's "It's a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content" in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

"Anticipation Is So Much Better"

"As a reader in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a writer (for Melody Maker) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I recall the way that any striking stance or provocative idea would trigger both complementary and opposing views in the next issue. Allies took the baton and ran further with it, while rivals and enemies took violent exception. That still happens on the Internet, with Tumblrs and tweets, but in a much more accelerated and ephemeral way. A week feels to me like the ideal interval for the formulation of a considered response. 
"With its superfluity of options, its decentralized focus, and the blurring of past and present into what William Gibson calls 'atemporality,' the Internet stokes a restless, distracted, omnivorous music libido, the opposite of the intense and lasting attachment fans gave to a single generation-defining band like Joy Division or Nirvana, or to a movement like punk or rave. "


Simon Reynolds in The Pitchfork Review contrasts music journalism, then and now.

This Woman's Work

"As words and as music, none of these scream 'hit single'. Yet all but one of them were. It's therefore hardly surprising that Bush's name gets reeled out, with varying degrees of appropriateness, as the ancestor for any new female artist trying to merge glamour, conceptualism, innovation and autonomy: recent examples include Grimes, Julia Holter and FKA Twigs. Yet, strange as it seems now, Bush was not always impregnably cool. In fact, despite her massive record sales and mainstream fame, she was not afforded much respect by critics or hip listeners in the late 1970s."


Simon Reynolds in The Guardian writes an appreciation of Kate Bush.

"A Sort of Hyper-America"

"The scrambling of pop time is a culture-wide phenomenon in the West, but it feels unusually strong in LA, where pop radio is dominated by old music: classic rock, New Wave and eclectic stations like Jack fm that mimic a 40-something’s iPod Shuffle. Flicking between stations, there’s a visual analogue to what you hear in the endless interplay of different eras of commercial signage and shop-front décor. In no other city have I had such an overwhelming sense of the erosion of a cultural timecode, that pulse that once synchronized the sectors of the contemporary scene (fashion, design, music, etc.) and constructed a sense of epoch."


In a 2011 Frieze article, Simon Reynolds discusses "'Hypnagogic pop' and the landscape of Southern California."

"Living Like a Cross between a Chameleon and a Magpie"

"But there’s more to Mr. Bowie’s compulsive changeability than a career strategy. What he was really developing during the ’70s was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability. His great precursor and influence here was Warhol, the inspiration for his 1971 song 'Andy Warhol' and a role Mr. Bowie would actually play in the 1996 biopic 'Basquiat.'  Analyzing Warhol, the art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of 'the protean artist-self with no core'—a description that could also fit Mr. Bowie."

Simon Reynolds in The New York Times welcomes the return of David Bowie.