Non-Time and Hauntology

[Canadian_watcher]

[The fascists usually place the subversive artists fairly high on their list of targets. Maybe trying to understand reactionary movements in the cultural sphere is a good idea if one wants to understand fascist undertones in society or at least that used to be true. But maybe now it's not and maybe it's a good idea to understand why or at least talk about it. And then go pick some wild greens and make a salad for lunch.

I heartily agree.

[Aldebaran]

E UNIBAS PLURAM: Television and U.S. Fiction
David Foster Wallace
Excerpt

Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do?

Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

Whole essay (fantastic read) at http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

[Plutonia]

Actually, I'm with Hugh on this one. I don't get what you all are on about.

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

Really? As I said I read it three times and was uncertain I understood. Upon reading some of the comments and rereading a fourth time I think I got what was there to get and it was less than it seemed, but nonetheless, has a point, albeit less clearly and simply written than it could have been.

But maybe that's because of where I live.

Art and culture are everywhere and effect everyone. You have an internet connection. No?

I ran into a friend yesterday who told me that she's seen more foragers out harvesting nettles this year than ever before- the new sprouts are excellent for eating and abundant. So are dandelion flowers BTW.

Are you suggesting we should stop discussing mass arts and humanities movements and harvest dandelions instead? Can't we do both?

Also, to test the OP's hypothesis, I suggest that you all get a bunch of people together with picks and shovels and head towards the nearest graveyard. You'll be experiencing history lickity-split.

I do enjoy graveyards. They're so peaceful. But I don't think this exercise would help clarify anything to do with the OP.

We are REAL specific groups of people.
Abused by REAL specific groups of people, many in REAL military-industrial groups with NAMES.

Pull head out of ass and fight back.

I don't need Hugh telling me this, nor is it likely that anyone posting to or reading in this thread needs to be told this. The fascists usually place the subversive artists fairly high on their list of targets. Maybe trying to understand reactionary movements in the cultural sphere is a good idea if one wants to understand fascist undertones in society or at least that used to be true. But maybe now it's not and maybe it's a good idea to understand why or at least talk about it. And then go pick some wild greens and make a salad for lunch.

Okay I don't agree with the ass part of what Hugh said.

Both of the examples I gave are indicative of the presence of the past in our present.

Can there be a more a-historical activity than foraging nettles in the spring?!! And yet, this year is different, which could mean that people are poorer. When people start eating skunk cabbage, we'll know we are in a famine.

Also, we don't think about ancestors like other cultures do, we even think we don't care about them, but cemeteries are not neutral spaces, which you will find out if you go into one with a bunch of people with shovels.

That's the past, viscerally in the present.

That's what I'm saying.

[justdrew]

well, looks like we caught the wave a week ahead of the nyt... NY Times goes hauntological.

May 13, 2011
Something About a Witch
By JENNIFER MENDELSOHN

FOR years, Scott Murdock was haunted by a cinematic image fluttering at the periphery of his memory. It involved a witch. She was serving pancakes. And there were lots of colorful bubbles floating over the screen.

He couldn’t shake the vision from his mind. Yet he had no idea where it came from.

“Everybody I asked about it thought I was nuts,” said Mr. Murdock, a 41-year-old computer programmer in Kansas City, Mo.

He wasn’t alone. In Madison, Wis., Ann Imig, a 37-year-old humorist, had a similarly unsettling memory. “I would ask people, ‘Don’t you remember that movie with the witch and the magical blueberry pancakes?’ ” she recalled. “They’d say, ‘No, Ann, you’re high.’ ”

Repeated queries and, for some, years of online sleuthing confirmed that the film is real: a 1969 short entitled “Winter of the Witch.” The film, now easy to track down on the Internet, is being discovered by a generation of adults in their 30s and 40s with a fervor more typically associated with locating a long-lost relative than a kiddie movie.

Scroll through the movie’s reviews on IMDb, a film information Web site, and you might think you have stumbled upon a support group for people who have experienced something akin to alien abduction. Typical subject lines read “Validation for all” and “I’m not the only one!” Then there is, "OMG!!!...Finally!!! I have been wondering about this movie for YEARS!!!”

The resurrection of this long-dormant little movie is one more example of the ways in which the online world has become a de facto nostalgia clearinghouse. Sites like YouTube and eBay now provide instant access to millions of pieces of everyday ephemera that most people assume had been lost forever: educational filmstrips, old-time commercials, kitsch toys, school lunchboxes — the list goes on. Rediscovering such things can be surprisingly powerful and emotional, a visceral connection to the magic of childhood.

Based on a 1963 children’s picture book called “Old Black Witch,” the movie stars Anna Strasberg (wife of the late Lee Strasberg of Method acting fame) as a single mother who moves with her young son into a country house haunted by a witch, played by the velvet-voiced Hermione Gingold. The witch turns out to have a handy knack for cooking pancakes that make people instantly happy, as illustrated by a blast of circus music and a burst of colorful bubbles crudely superimposed on the screen.

The first project of Parents’ Magazine Films and the producer Thomas Sand, “Winter of the Witch” was distributed by the Learning Corporation of America to schools nationwide (though just what its educational message was supposed to be is unclear to its many fans). Countless thousands of students watched it on old-fashioned projectors in gyms and libraries and auditoriums; for many it was a favorite rainy day activity or a Halloween treat.

By all rights the quirky little production should have faded away, just like the quaintly dated turtlenecks and headscarves it features. But something about “Winter of the Witch” burrowed its way into the consciousness of a subset of children who saw it, and it never left, leading many to search for it well into adulthood.

“Those colored dots must have burned themselves into some peoples’ brains,” wrote Gerald Herman, who directed the low-budget film for $500 while a student at New York University, in an e-mail. He now runs an art-house cinema in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Certainly the psychedelic dots make the movie all the more intriguing for grown-ups. “It was obviously a drug film,” proclaimed one viewer online. Another gleefully recalled the “magic trippy pancakes” and added, “What I love most about this movie is that somehow our schoolteachers felt this was a reasonable movie to show in school year after year.”

Mr. Herman, the director, dismissed the notion of any latent drug theme.

“Magic food that gives people a rush and makes everyone happy,” he joked. “Definitely an educational message there! But seriously, we didn’t have any hidden agenda while making the movie. This was Parents’ Magazine, after all.”

Tony Humrichouser, 44, an actor and director in New York, was so enamored of the film that he scoured the Internet for years looking for a copy, finally finding one on eBay. Now he holds “Winter of the Witch” viewing parties. It was the first film he showed his partner, Stephen Wallem, the actor who plays Thor on “Nurse Jackie,” when they were dating. Mr. Wallem missed out on the film as a child but calls it “one of the strangest, most fabulous things I’d ever seen.”

In a world that seems fraught with anxiety and danger, the film and others like it are a kind of emotional comfort food, a direct link back to a simpler, safer era — a time when getting to watch a 22-minute movie at school was a special event, not something you could do on a phone, and when children’s entertainment wasn’t replete with product tie-ins.

Filled with period details like Volkswagen Beetles and TV dinners, the film’s slightly homespun, melancholy look also encapsulates what it felt like to be a child 30 and 40 years ago, right down to the crackling of the splotchy, color-saturated 16-millimeter film.

“It was a safe and cozy feeling sitting on the shag rug in my preschool watching that film,” said Ms. Imig, a mother of two who likens the experience of seeing “Winter of the Witch” again — the film is now on Google videos and can be readily purchased on DVD — to being in a time machine. “There’s just something wonderfully validating to know it exists.”

Mr. Murdock’s 2007 blog post about his four-year-long search to find the film has become one of the places the witch faithful convene. They share their eerily similar tales of reconnecting with the film, drawn there by searching variations of "happy pancake witch," not unlike the way characters in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” are inexorably attracted to Devils Tower. Buoyed by continued interest, Mr. Murdock recently registered happypancakewitch.com.

Occasionally, however, the reunion is not an entirely happy one _ — an experience akin to the thrill of rediscovering a lost childhood friend on Facebook, only to find that you now have nothing in common. Such was the case for Jim Knipfel, a writer in Brooklyn, who chronicled his search for the happy pancake movie in “Slackjaw,” his online column.

“I’d held on to very sharp, distinct images from that film for 35 years,” he said. “After finally tracking it down again it didn’t come close to matching those memories except in the vaguest sense. ...I’ve since reverted to my childhood memories. They make for a better film all around.”

Ms. Strasberg, now 72, who starred as the mother, said she was “hot stuff if I passed a school during recess” at the height of the film’s popularity. But she confessed she was almost afraid to watch it again for the very same reason.

“Does it still hold up?” she asked timidly. “I couldn’t bear it if my memory — the thing I see in my head — doesn’t hold up.”

Nonetheless, the grandmother of five was delighted to hear about the legacy of the long-forgotten project, made when she was a newlywed pregnant with her first child: “Things do come full circle, don’t they?”

[8bitagent]

Scroll through the movie’s reviews on IMDb, a film information Web site, and you might think you have stumbled upon a support group for people who have experienced something akin to alien abduction. Typical subject lines read “Validation for all” and “I’m not the only one!” Then there is, "OMG!!!...Finally!!! I have been wondering about this movie for YEARS!!!”

Very interesting story/article. It's like the idea that many children in the 70's and early 80's would hear a strange ringing buzz tone when they were in a Sears Department store, or the even more bizarre story of all the "phantom clown" sightings in the early 1980's

I wonder if there's even more esoteric commercials/short films/images on tv kids remember of which there may not be concrete proof ever existed. Kind of like parents trying to believe the Ruwa school children's UFO story

Mr. Murdock’s 2007 blog post about his four-year-long search to find the film has become one of the places the witch faithful convene. They share their eerily similar tales of reconnecting with the film, drawn there by searching variations of "happy pancake witch," not unlike the way characters in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” are inexorably attracted to Devils Tower. Buoyed by continued interest, Mr. Murdock recently registered happypancakewitch.com.

That whole premise would make such a wicked idea for a film or documentary, if done right.

“I’d held on to very sharp, distinct images from that film for 35 years,” he said. “After finally tracking it down again it didn’t come close to matching those memories except in the vaguest sense. ...I’ve since reverted to my childhood memories. They make for a better film all around.”

Make sense, often things do not hold the power or shape of when we remember something and come across it years later.

[justdrew]

my own "happy pancake witch" was a little less obscure, but hard to find nonetheless, back in the days before everything was being unearthed and uploaded to youtube... ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Fantastic Journey. (lost largely to being confused with Fantastic Voyage (the movie and the animated tv show) and it was only on for ten eps in 77, not sure if it wa sever re-run either, because I didn't meet anyone who remembered it. (unearthing shared memories of obscure cultural output was a fav pastime late in the late 90s))

[marycarnival]

They said 2005...sound's about right!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-dept-of-retro-warns-we-may-be-running-out-of-pa,873/


My 'happy pancake witch'--the Purple People and the Purple Panda from Mr Rogers'...took me ages to track down any info, or even find someone who knew what the heck I was talking about. Even now there's just a passing mention of Purple Panda on the Wiki. I had thought that everyone had seen that, and was totally starting to think that I had imagined it.

[kelley]

more re: mark fisher etc:

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/may/18/hauntology/

[Canadian_watcher]

Very interesting story/article. It's like the idea that many children in the 70's and early 80's would hear a strange ringing buzz tone when they were in a Sears Department store, or the even more bizarre story of all the "phantom clown" sightings in the early 1980's

I wonder if there's even more esoteric commercials/short films/images on tv kids remember of which there may not be concrete proof ever existed. Kind of like parents trying to believe the Ruwa school children's UFO story

yes, really neat article, Justdrew!

8bit - I have a movie memory like that... it was sci-fi, and involved a female character named Mrs Fellows or Dr Fellows, who I think was a scientist of some sort, and there was a little kind of developmentally challenged alien being thing. I remember the scene where Fellows was leaving the being for the last time and they had bonded and it was very sad. She had been the only one to understand and show sympathy for the creature.

Ring any bells for anyone? It must have been on TV in about 77 or 78 I'd guess. It's bugged me for years!

[justdrew]

Very interesting story/article. It's like the idea that many children in the 70's and early 80's would hear a strange ringing buzz tone when they were in a Sears Department store, or the even more bizarre story of all the "phantom clown" sightings in the early 1980's

I wonder if there's even more esoteric commercials/short films/images on tv kids remember of which there may not be concrete proof ever existed. Kind of like parents trying to believe the Ruwa school children's UFO story

yes, really neat article, Justdrew!

8bit - I have a movie memory like that... it was sci-fi, and involved a female character named Mrs Fellows or Dr Fellows, who I think was a scientist of some sort, and there was a little kind of developmentally challenged alien being thing. I remember the scene where Fellows was leaving the being for the last time and they had bonded and it was very sad. She had been the only one to understand and show sympathy for the creature.

Ring any bells for anyone? It must have been on TV in about 77 or 78 I'd guess. It's bugged me for years!

maybe this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_%281972_film%29

do you remember anything else? was it British or US?

[Canadian_watcher]

maybe this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_%281972_film%29

do you remember anything else? was it British or US?

I don't think it's that, because I'm pretty sure there was a space ship involved. Hmm.. good question about the origin. It wasn't fancy so it might have even been Canadian but I really don't think it was British. I'm trying to remember the one line that I used to think about.. if it comes to me I'll post it. Thanks for looking into it though!

[elfismiles]

Wow! Cool!

its the origin of SLIDERS!!!

[justdrew]

Wow! Cool!

hell yeah. take a look at those character archetypes, good stuff.

sliders, yeah. but there was also another show about a family jaunting through dimensions, short lived early 80s. not really very good, but funny bad iirc.

[justdrew]

maybe this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_%281972_film%29

do you remember anything else? was it British or US?

I don't think it's that, because I'm pretty sure there was a space ship involved. Hmm.. good question about the origin. It wasn't fancy so it might have even been Canadian but I really don't think it was British. I'm trying to remember the one line that I used to think about.. if it comes to me I'll post it. Thanks for looking into it though!

Well, this isn't it, but folks might want to look for this recent film...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Foundling
A Foundling, also known as The Mojave Experiment, is an American feature film which premiered at the 13th Annual Dances With Films film festival in 2010. Directed by Carly Lyn, the film stars Cindy Chiu as a Taiwanese-American woman in the Old West who finds the wreckage of a mysterious aircraft in the California desert.
http://www.afoundling.com/

[gnosticheresy_2]

Simon Reynolds has a new book out Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

Review in the Observer

Like many people of a certain age, the first thing I did upon going to university was to blow my entire student grant on records. Sixties French chansonnières, 30s Greek rembetika, seven-inch singles on the Glasgow-based Postcard label: this kind of music, John Peel's radio show aside, was hard to hear or find in the late 1980s. Only after I'd lugged back my newfound treasures to my room did I remember: there was no turntable to play them on. For the next few months, I stroked the records' sleeves, studied their liner notes, sniffed the vinyl. When I finally got round to listening to them, they were mostly underwhelming, but it didn't matter: my relationship to the music, one full of yearning and conjecture, already felt very rich.

These days, as Simon Reynolds describes in Retromania, things are very different. Pop music, even though sales of vinyl and cassettes are going up, is less likely to exist in material form. There's no need to dream about what a particular Velvet Underground bootleg or Frankie Wilson's famously rare northern soul stomper "Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" or 20s field recordings of Inuit might sound like: they're available at the click of a mouse. The deleted, the obscure, the exotic: archaeological layers of musical history are constantly being rediscovered, circulated and filtered into records being released today.

For Reynolds, the past is calcifying contemporary music. More than that, it threatens to disable the possibility of new or futuristic music being created. Retromania describes a pop ecology festering with reissues of late-70s German synth-wave, 28-CD box sets of Sun Ra club residencies, bands such as the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls reforming, Sonic Youth playing shows in which they perform old albums in their entirety. Drawing a comparison with the fashion industry's tendency to recast old or secondhand clothes as "vintage", he bristles against those hipsters who create micro-genres such as Welsh Rare Beat or West African psychedelia, as much as he bemoans those rock museums full of cheesy cutouts of Dizzee Rascal.

What distinguishes "retromania" from other ways of assessing or using the past? After all, forms of nostalgia or arcadianism – the Victorian revival of Gothic, say – have arisen, sometimes very productively, throughout history. Reynolds argues that retro revives a past that is barely the past (all those I Love the 1990s-style shows), and does so, using video- and internet-enhanced documentation, with a forensic precision that precludes creative distortion and the art that comes from misremembering.

The retro sensibility, he adds, isn't animated by the modernist anger or subversion found in the work of collagist John Heartfield or the productions of Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee, but a general mood of eclectic irony. Put this way, Reynolds seems to be describing the kinds of bricolage and hyper-referentiality of postmodernism. But he's also narrating the trickle-down effect, philosophically as much as technologically, of the remix culture of the late 1980s, when cheap samplers allowed artists to treat the whole history of recorded music as a free zone for resource extraction.

The title of Reynolds's last book, about post punk, was Rip It Up and Start Again. That's what he wants pop music to do; not to think of its past in terms of repertoire or standards, but as a series of chokes and shackles from which, in existential fashion, it must perpetually break free. Though far from being a Luddite, he worries about websites such as YouTube that clog the present with too many yesterdays: "History must have a dustbin, or history will be a dustbin, a gigantic, sprawling garbage heap."

And yet, as Reynolds himself points out, one style of music never entirely supplants another: in 1968, a year in which Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison and Frank Zappa released important new records, Bill Haley and his Comets were still able to pack out the Royal Albert Hall. Are revivals necessarily bad? Without 2 Tone's ska revival, the Specials' "Ghost Town" or the Beat's "Mirror in the Bathroom" may never have existed. And what of listening to the listeners? Sceptics may dismiss the likes of the Strokes as punk pastiche, but anyone who heard them for the first time at a club in early 2001 will recall how startlingly fresh they sounded then.

Reynolds's mapping of today's pop environment is often witty; his account of the way in which so many artists position themselves as curators is spot-on, as is his description of internet users – himself included – gorging on illegal downloads. His prose, casually neologistic and making deft use of sci-fi tropes, is bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time – as well as to place – Retromania deserves to be very widely read.

However, Reynolds's belief that pop music needs to be less doting towards the past reminds me of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who saw creative destruction as the linchpin of modern capitalism. Pop's appeal doesn't just lie in its ability to shock and surprise; it can also be a source of safety and succour, especially when life – life under capitalism – feels concussive, brutalising. For listeners, not embracing the Next Big Thing may be a kind of resistance; for music writers, not being able to champion artists solely in neophiliac terms would force them to develop more sophisticated critical lexicons.

Retromania is a book about the poverty of abundance. At malls, on mobile-phone ads, in the background as we work at our computers: pop, usually in the form of anorexically thin MP3 sound, is everywhere these days. Perhaps that ubiquity puts a brake on its ability to astound or shape-shift. Perhaps the process of circulating and accessing music has become more exciting than the practice of listening to it. And perhaps pop's status as a futurist genre has been supplanted by the giddying, immersive realm of video games.

Reynolds says he still believes that "the future is out there for pop", but where is "out there"? The east? The global south? It may very well be that the spirit of innovation and insurgency Retromania craves is to be found in the favelas, shanty towns and sprawling metropolises of the developing world.

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Harper)

Interview with The Oxonian Review

Simon Reynolds has been at the centre of British music journalism for nearly 30 years. After studying history at Brasenose College, Oxford in the early 80s (and narrowly missing out on being a contemporary of David Cameron’s), Reynolds starting writing for the pop music weekly Melody Maker, and quickly built up a reputation as an eloquent champion of futuristic genres like post-punk, hip-hop, and acid-house. The author of major studies like Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1999) and Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005), Reynolds is also noted for his ability to venture outside the confines of traditional music journalism and to turn up in unlikely places: his comments feature on the jacket flap of Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991), for example, and he has in the last decade become a driving force in the alternative blogging community that gave rise to the Zer0 Books publishing venture.

Reynolds’s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (reviewed by Adam Harper in this issue), surveys the recent vogue for heritage culture and nostalgia in pop music. A voluminous work that ranges over literally hundreds of examples of “retro delirium”, Retromania is a powerful crystallisation of one of the most talked-about discussion topics of the age.

So what was the gestation process for Retromania?

Some of the concepts go back a long way. For example I use this term “record collection rock”. I formulated that in the early 90s in a piece for the New York Times, and it wasn’t that new a phenomenon even then. I could have used it to describe Spacemen 3 or any number of 80s bands. So it’s always been there in the back of my mind, and it’s something I’ve never quite made up my mind about. It’s that mindset of being, on the one hand, obsessed with the future, but also liking a lot of things that are based on the past, and feeling almost ashamed of liking them.

But specifically thinking “there’s a book there” came partly from doing the post-punk book [Rip it Up and Start Again]. I posit this break at the end of the book, this point at which indie music gets more about the 60s, where it abandons synthesizers for guitars. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that actually it went back a lot further.

I can remember one time looking through the back of Uncut for some reason and seeing adverts for all these live performances and festivals, and it was like this totally garbled, mixed-up blend of history. There were bizarre juxtapositions, and it just seemed weird. So the concept for the book arose out of bemusement really, noticing that there was this industry developing, quite a significant money-spinning sector of the music economy that’s based on nostalgia.

This was one of the defining things of the last decade, and I was surprised no one had written a book about it. But at the same time it’s such a diffuse and scattered phenomenon that I can see why no one had written a book about it. And as a topic it doesn’t have that cheerful tone. Usually music books are cheerful. This is the first book I’ve done that isn’t enthusiastic.

You use the phrase “tipping point” in the book. There’s a sense that we’re approaching some kind of crux…

I don’t know if we are; it may just stay like this forever! Obviously I’m making it seem dramatic; and the way the whole book’s framed—it’s designed to be inflammatory. We might just enter a sort of stasis. It may not be a dramatic thing; pop may just get more and more clogged with the past being recycled.

But there is a feeling of “how can this go on?” People are actually murmuring about reviving stuff from the 90s, and you think, “how can you do this? What can you draw on? You can’t revive britpop. How can you do that?”

Do you think it’s a case of an art form wasting its energy? If you look at, say, English theatre in the 18th century, there’s not all that much of note after the high points of the 17th century. Art forms go into recession, sometimes for as long as a century. Do you think that’s what’s happening?

It could be. It could be that rock, specifically rock, like jazz, will carry on as a sort of heritage thing. It could be like in jazz, where young players come forward who do good stuff, but it’s not going anywhere and it doesn’t have any connection to the zeitgeist. But it’s not just rock that’s ailing; it’s everything—including electronic music now, which is in this weird recursive mode of going back to 90s high points and tweaking and tinkering with them.

It’s not just a lack of energy. It’s not to do with a lack of talent. There are loads of talented musicians around, and they all have great technological tools at their hands. So you can’t say everyone’s being crap and unoriginal. It’s much more macro and structural. It’s like musicians don’t have any choice. Some major seismic thing within the whole terrain in which music is produced has shifted, and it’s almost as though you can’t resist these forces.

I suppose my sense is that it has a lot to do with the decline of socialisation and of people thinking in groups, people coming to a consensus about the new modernistic development, through the music press, or through John Peel, or whatever.

People seem very hostile to groupthink, don’t they? Which is bad. I think a bit of groupthink would be good. It happens in journalism. People are very reluctant to get behind each other’s ideas. I totally got behind David Keenan’s hypnagogic pop idea. I don’t care that he thought of it first; it’s a fantastic idea and I like some of that music a lot.

But there’s much more ego value in taking the piss or criticising other people’s stuff. Actually joining together, unifying around things, no one seems to want to do that so much any more. That has a lot to do with the Internet, I think; the people who agree don’t tend to bother to post.

On that note, could you talk a bit about your role in the blogosphere? It seems that you found that galvanizing in the last decade.

It did seem very exciting. The fact that it was very collective was the thing I liked about it—the way that people picked up on each other’s ideas, and disagreed but usually in a fairly civil way. It might be quite heated but usually it didn’t end up in ugliness. Or they agreed and it was like they were adding something more to the discussion—it was like passing the baton. It was very exciting and reminded me a lot of the music press, but on a faster turnaround because in the music press you’d pick up on what someone wrote the previous week or you might argue with another paper. There were trains of thought, conversations going on, and then the letters from the readers would come in.

So the blogosphere was a bit like that feeling. But then it seemed to dissipate quite a bit, and I’m not sure why. Partly, I think, Twitter has drained a lot of brain energy away, and perhaps there aren’t as many music things that people can get worked up about together. But certainly I was very inspired by it, and it was great that you could post something enormously long or enormously short, and that seemed to free things up: you could do some writing that was proper essays, or you could do stuff that was chit-chat really—just an undeveloped thought—and it was liberating. But then there’s the fact that no one’s getting paid for it, and that’s depressing, though it’s inspiring that people are prepared to go to all this effort to write very well written stuff for no remuneration.

Do you see any solution to this problem of payment in music as well?

Perhaps the reason for doing music writing will become completely uncoupled from livelihoods and it will become a different economy. I know a musician, I won’t name him, but he did a record that got quite a lot of critical praise. He told me that he put this record out, and it came out via a very hip label, but he didn’t get any money from it. The label put it out for him and he got 20 free copies and that was it. And this is a record that featured highly on critical polls in left-field music magazines and had features written on it. So it is like vanity publishing, vanity music-making.

On the fringes now, if people are doing it not as their way of living then they tend to release 12 records a year because they can—20 tapes a year or something—so you don’t get the same focusing of energy on the record that’s your statement, on something you want to happen. If it’s a series of micro-events then there’s not that same pressure or focus. And I generally think pressure of some kind or other tends to produce better results. I could have done this book as a series of blogposts, and it might have been freer and I might have gone off on all sorts of tangents, but there’s something about the pressure of having to do it as a book that makes it a stronger statement.

Do you think there might be any artificial means of imposing structure?

People seem to be reaching for the idea that discipline is crucial and makes life better. I did a piece for Wire magazine on [record label] Not Not Fun, who are analogue fanatics. One of the musicians I interviewed was French, and we were talking about why he’s so into vinyl and tape. He said, “you know, in French there’s this word contrainte, I don’t know what it is in English.” And I was like, “well, it’s constraint, I think.” And he said, “Yes! Constraint: constraint is liberating.” Which is like that Holger Czukay idea, you know, that restriction is the mother of invention. It’s very simple stuff, a sort of Zen-type idea, isn’t it?

Nietzschean, perhaps …

It’s a very simple idea of course that lots of people have written about. It’s like in The Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, when the guy joins the army because he’s adrift and he doesn’t have anything to do. Being free or having too many choices is paralysing, dissipating.

I suppose there are two different routes that impulse could take. One is a sort of individualistic ethos of self-discipline, and another one is constraint by way of a group. For example, one interesting thing about hauntology is that it only gains currency as a meme because it develops out of an Internet collective and online discussion.

Yeah, but that’s a good example of how people don’t want to “bind and heel” anymore. Do you know that expression? It’s from rugby I think, like when you form a scrum. It’s a long time since I played rugger, but I think that’s what my dad used to shout at me from the sidelines: “bind and heel!” But people don’t want to form a scrum anymore.

The hauntologists were actually very polite about the label. Very few of them said publicly that the term was bullshit. But most of them said, “well we don’t mind talking about this but we don’t feel like it’s what we’re about.” It was the same with post-rock. Very few people rushed to embrace the term. But these terms have a value. Anything that has a centripetal force, that pulls people together toward a hub, creates power, creates a form of agency, an impact.

Musicians are understandably worried about those terms because of course there’s the fashion economy of music, and when the trend is passé they don’t want to go down with it, so I understand why they resist being lumped into these categories. But when things are grouped together, there’s a lot more visibility, a lot more impact—once there’s a word.

Returning to hauntology. Do you think it’s time to lay it to rest?

I think the basic operational idea may come forward in different versions in different generations. But I think they’ve used up that particular set of references now, that particular era. Although the main artists keep coming up with things that I like: Mordant Music came up with that great piece for the British Film Institute about public safety films.

I think the principal artists will carry on doing interesting things. But it’s pretty mapped out. I don’t think they’ve got any surprises up their sleeves. But who knows?

Do you see anything more forward-looking right now?

I mean there are definitely musicians who are slightly innovative or relatively innovative. It’s not like innovation has disappeared off the face of the Earth. But it’s more as if the odds against it are stacked, and when it does occur, it’s usually very peripheral to the mainstream. It doesn’t seem to gain any kind of momentum, in the way that something like jungle created momentum. Jungle went somewhere. It didn’t really conquer the mainstream but it filtered into the mainstream in all kinds of odd ways. Like in America there was a period when it was on commercials, and it was a kind of weird semi-victory for music in the sense that it was on TV all the time as interstitial music—at the start of a news programme you’d have this platter of rapid breakbeats. It was odd. It wasn’t quite what I’d imagined for jungle, but it did get into the mainstream culture.

The thing about all this is that in some senses I’m not a dissatisfied consumer because every year I hear loads of records I like. It’s just that very few of them seem to be new enough; they seem like rearrangements of existing things. There’s not that shock of the new.

For instance, in pop music right now. If you put pop radio on in America, you hear all these big Billboard-topping songs, and they have autotuned vocals on, but the basic fabric of the music is like Ibiza in the late 90s, or the Love Parade. A Ke$ha song, or a Gaga song, or a Black Eyed Peas song, it’s like pop-trance, all the tricks they use, the way the music is organized, and the way it moves internally within the structure of the song. It’s all like a peak hour song at a club in Ibiza. It hasn’t particularly evolved from the late 90s.

Is that not the case with any foundational record of any genre? Like “Rapper’s Delight” could just have been a disco curiosity, but it comes with this whole narrative context that turns it into a big leap forward.

Yeah, maybe there’s something going on now where the new feature is concealed by its attachment outwardly to something that’s quite old. I don’t know what that would be.

The only thing in the mainstream that says “2011” is the use of autotune. It actually goes back to the late 90s as a machine, but [it took till now] to use it creatively as a distortion tool. If you try to imagine 20 years ahead when people are trying to think of what the hallmark of pop music is now, it would be autotune and its weird effects. People like Black Eyed Peas actually use it quite creatively.

So I suppose you can imagine something like that being the site around which a subculture organizes itself, one formal detail.

It could be. I mean that does seem to be the one interesting area across the board: doing stuff with vocals, vocal science. Autotune and weird treatments of the voice. Black Eyed Peas are doing it, and James Blake is, and I suppose in a funny sort of way Salem and those sorts of groups. Weird stuff with the voice seems to be one of the areas where there’s some kind of invention going on.

And one thing I thought was really innovative was all this stuff from Chicago, the footwork stuff. Some of it’s horrible because it is quite primitive mechanistic music. But the best of it is really eerie and graceful. And a lot of that is based around weirdness with the vocals: sped-up vocals and slowed-down vocals at the same time, two vocals paralleling each other that are both aberrant from the norm. That’s one of the few things in recent years that has made my jaw drop a little bit—the Bangs and Works CD that [record label] Planet Mu put out. I put on one of my blogs that Mike Paradinas [who compiled the CD] deserves a knighthood for this, because he went through a lot of stuff, and there must have been a lot of quite indifferent material. It’s very functional music in that scene because they make beats for people to do the weird dancing to, so a lot of it’s very functional and probably a bit uninteresting. A lot of it is sub-music. But every once in a while someone will come up with functional yet really eerie and elegant music that you can listen to on headphones. It’s great pop.

The funny thing is, when I signed the contract for this book, the premise was: nothing new is happening. But of course I realised there’s a fatal flaw, which is that it’s going to take me two or three years to write the book and for it to come out, and what if something innovative happens in that time? Fuck! But of course that’s what I most want; that’s my deepest wish as a fan of music, that something innovative will come along, some massive wave of innovation.