15 September 2014

Simon Reynolds on QT / Messing With Kitsch

completely agree…

I thought this when Jame Ferraro went too far… you could almost feel that he’d looked too long and hard at this stuff… the kitsch had won; was no longer ironicized… couldn’t be…

Here's that piece...

and I’ve tried with vapourwave, I really have because it seemed like a nowish genre and some excellent writers were wrangling with it and seeing it in a way that seemed interesting.. but then, before I was even properly looking, it very quickly it ate itself, as the poppies said it would...

vapourwave is the new punk etc

the fact that it's a Wave as well as a vapour is telling, of course.

Because messing with kitsch is like trying to be a revolutionary capitalist; flawed in its very conception and so tempting and apparently so easy to stand aloof and giggle as the waves crush over you; the sea smelling so good, so fresh, so Coke...

The funny thing is, I probably will keep trying with vapourwave for reasons that make me feel ill thinking about them. I'll keep at it and I won't get it until... well, I give it four or five years and I'll find an old hardrive full of vapourcrap that I've downloaded and no doubt then I'll flashbulb memory my self into it again and laugh at my childishness: a retro future retro future... same with Hauntology (Kek removes the a): the then sound of now which is bound for Rough Trade compilations, for features in Record Collector (those Ghost Box sleeves!), for Q Magazine astral travelling...

This is not to say... anything. We've been here long before:


and Can's ethnological forgery is now a new kind of ethnic forgery. Or, rather, the old kind, given a new set of tropes. No doubt j-pop(will eat itself) will be not looking at this stuff and just carrying on because here it is not old-school or new school but (more or less literally) school and already has its commentary as its product, with no distance and (perhaps) little irony or attempt at persuasion.

And on and on...

How to just make sound?

How to just make sound?

How to just make sound?




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