100 Books #67 - Simon Reynolds' RETROMANIA

"History must have a dustbin, or History will be a dustbin, a giantic, sprawling garbage heap." - Simon Reynolds in Retromania

Well, Mr. Reynolds, you surprised me. I tucked in to Retromania expecting a nice, long, curmudgeonly rant, about how pop finally has eaten itself, but what I got was a history lesson as much as anything, and a case made for the notion that pop has been eating itself all along.

I must admit I felt as though I was clinging on to the tail end of Reynolds' arguments with my fingernails through much of this book. I've heard of maybe half of the bands he mentions, and have actually heard the music of maybe a third of said bands. This is a book that could have benefitted from the very technology that he somewhat decries; I would have loved to be able to just click on a band name and play some samples. As it was, I found myself throwing down the Kindle and taking up the laptop to hit Blip.fm or YouTube to get an idea of what he was talking about. Which was very educational, but also very inconvenient.

I thought, too, that 496 pages was rather a lot to spend with any writer who was basically telling me something I already kind of knew: that popular music has largely stopped trying for the fresh and new and has instead gone the way of sartorial fashion, raiding its closets and collections for old stuff that can be tweaked and reworked a bit and presented as something hot and new. What I hadn't counted on, though, was Reynolds' thorough and thoughtful approach to figuring out why and how that had come to be.

A lot of the usual culprits come up, of course: the quest to step out of or stand athwart the mainstream (just because the Music Industry says this is what I should like now doesn't mean I have to), the advent of Mp3s and digital music players that mash everything up and level out the playing field (it's fun to hear a brand new Magnetic Fields Track one minute and Cleoma Breaux and Joe Falcon the next; no music ever goes away just because it's old, now), in general the sheer weight of the past of recorded music (the Industry's decades-long strategy of throwing up everything to see what would stick means there is a hell of a lot of old music still around on vinyl, just waiting to see a turntable again), and of course the roots of nostalgia and that longing for times that seemed free and full of possibility instead of fettered with responsibility, infirmity and age.

But of course the music that makes you feel that way again is different for every age group, isn't it? Because that's just an accident of what was popular when you were young -- or, in many later cases, what wasn't popular. I still run screaming from a bar if I hear too many hair metal songs in a row, because to me, that's the music of my oppressors, most often heard from the trunk of a car or the interior of some frasshat upperclassman's locker. I clung to my parents' music, to Andy Williams and Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio, stuff that is now regarded as timeless and classic and is all but revered but in the '80s was considered worse than passe.

Your mileage may vary.

Where Reynolds really gets interesting on this subject, though, is when he takes up the idea of "curation." Curation is a much-used term these days. All the hip kids are doing it. You're probably doing it, if you have a blog or a YouTube page or are a DJ on something like Blip.fm. And it's being done at the highest levels by people with real resources, too, of course. The people who plan all those revival and reunion tours, the brain trust behind the "I Love the ___" shows, the issuers of B-side compilations and deep track collections marketed to those who want to think of themselves as real connoisseurs of style X or period Y. It's all very interesting, because, of course, rock 'n' roll started out as deliberately primitive and barbarous, a Whitmanesque yawp, cacophonous and sexy and loud and parent-frightening, the very antithesis of highbrow. But somewhere along the way, the people who loved it weren't satisfied with things as they were and wanted to get highbrow, and by the time that impulse was born, there was plenty of raw material over which to paw and put down or praise, to classify and connect into geneaologies, to resurrect and revive...

...And the thing is, with so much recorded music out there in the world*, still perfectly playable, and with so many would-be experts and appraisers out there, too, for every single that only got pressed one time in a run of a dozen copies that no one originally wanted, there is somewhere a small tribe of people who will, if given a chance, drone on at one for hours about how it is the greatest record ever and how only the elect can appreciate it.

And, as Reynolds points out, some form of this has been going on for pretty much as long as there has been recorded music. People latch on to something and won't let it go, or dig up something old from the dustbin and since it's new to them they don't think it's retro if they borrow from it for something of their own.

That's the key right there, I think: everything, however old, is always new to somebody.** And sometimes that somebody is very brave to stick to his or her original enjoyment and enthusiasm in the face of the many who can't wait to jump in on the party and tell him or her that the music they've just found is stale or used up or just plain bad. And every once in a while, that somebody finds a way to make their old find feel new for other people, usually people who are younger than the ones who yawn and say "been there, done that, bought the tee shirt."

But has pop, or rock'n'roll, ever been for the kind of people who are capable of saying that?

Meanwhile, there is more old music in the world than there ever has been before. Every day there is more. And maybe it's like a teetering stack: to put something new on top, one has to make the effort to climb up past all the old stuff at the bottom, in the middle, near the top. And maybe not everyone has the energy to make that effort.

And then of course there are those who insist that originality is overrated anyway. My parents are kind of like that: both of them still insist on finding it bewildering when we speak of "a Clash song" or "a Cure song" or (my sister, lord love her) "a Quarterflash song". They're just songs, Mom and Dad have told us, again and again. When they were young, singers and bands played each other's songs all the time. If a song was good, lots of people wanted to perform it.

Now people talk about covers and samples, some sneeringly, some adoringly. My parents would just say again, if a song is good, lots of people want to perform it.

If a style is good, lots of people want to get in on it. And in this day and age, doing so is easier than ever. It's almost easier than not doing so. People might not even realize what time machines their iPods, their CD or vinyl or (me!) cassette collections are. It's all music that we like, which is why we have it. And maybe the only thing it all has in common is that we like it.

So is it "retro" or "nostalgia" or is it just the recognition that music is music, whenever it was made?

So yeah, I have some problems with Reynolds, though I lack his staggering erudition on the subject of pop to go toe to toe with him, I am sure. But as you'll see from the second footnote below, I have rather a longer view of musical history than he does. At least I suspect so.

But he does have a point about the fin de siecle nature of the 21st century so far. The petroleum economy is running out of steam, but its impact on our climate and health is only beginning to be felt. A lot of the systems our ancestors built for running the world have proven to be less robust and trustworthy than we thought (though if one insists on kicking all the pins out from under them *cough* Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan *cough* should one be surprised when they collapse?). The space program that inspired so much innovation in high and pop culture has also gone into decline, as Reynolds does rather eloquently describe. The future's brightness probably still requires us to wear shades, but that brightness is proving to be glare off the deserts we're creating. In such a time, how innovative do you feel like being?

Especially when there's still all that old music out there that you haven't listened to yet, just a click away...

*There is, too, an elephant in Reynolds' room, I think: the Baby Boomers. Now, Reynolds was born in 1963 (and thinks, not out of narcissism or so he claims, that that's the year that rock'n'roll really got started as something that could be considered art, blah blah blah ma gavta la nata), which makes him one of the early Gen Xers but, well, he's a lot closer to those Boomers than I am. He remembers the Moon Landing, which I only experienced a gleam in Dad's eye (or more likely Mom's), at any rate. And he does go on, Reynolds does, about how much innovation the '60s and '70s saw, musically. Well, of course it did. There were more young people than ever before, then, all wanting to define themselves against their biological and musical ancestors as much as possible. There was a critical mass, then, that may never happen again. And it's just possible that all the possibilities that rock had to offer all got explored at once, then. Every permutation imaginable is on a 45 somewhere. So of course everything afterwords looks derivative. Add to this discussion the fact that the Boomers have categorically refused to let go of popular culture -- it was for them, not my parents, that "oldies radio" became the unstoppable hose truck that it is -- and thus have forced both their immediate successors (us Xers) and their own children to grow up in their musical shadow, listening to their records and constant reminiscences and assertions that we're nothing compared to their greatness and is it any surprise that most musicians today sound a lot like those of decades past?

**I'm as guilty of this as anyone. In the '90s I lived in Boston and jumped into the "third wave" ska revival with both dancing feet. I never went as deep as some of my friends, who were constantly striving to outdo each other with rare finds from flea markets and record stores, where Skatalites 45s seemed to have been seeded just in time to part these new young fans from their money; competing, too, in pedantry about old two-tone bands and how they didn't need the subtitles to understand the dialogue in "The Harder They Come." I got bored with that pretty quickly, though, because at one trip to a cool old record shop that I'm sure no longer exists in the gentrified replacement for Cambridge's Central Square, I found and fell in love with... are you ready for this?

Byzantine secular classical music.


I swear I wasn't trying to outdo anyone, be the most retro or anything like that. I just thought it was the most amazing, haunting, beautiful, sexy and strange music I had ever heard. I still do. I listen to these discs of Christocoulos Halaris' interpretations (oh you should see the liner notes, all about the reconstruction and musicological effort that was undergone to produce these recordings. I've never managed to read all the way through them. I'm not a musicologist. I just want to hear the tunes) all the time, probably more than any other music I own or have access to. In a world where the latter category consists of everything, ever, now, that's saying something.

I'm still waiting for some mad genius to come along and bust some of these moves in something "new" and "fresh." Of course, there's always Arab hip-hop until then.

But see, I've just pretty much proved all of Reynolds' points, haven't I?

100 Books #38 - Edward L. Glaeser's TRIUMPH OF THE CITY

I have a lot of ill-contained rage against car culture, and it all came simmering to the surface as I read Chapter 7 of Edward L. Glaeser's incredibly thought-provoking Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. This is partly, of course, because I have city envy, though it's largely my own fault.*

 I like a walkable city with an interesting downtown area. My love for Toronto, for instance, is extraordinarily well-documented. A place like that has everything I look for -- dining (especially foreign food), people with whom to play games, people doing interesting things on the street, neat graffiti and other artistry, and sidewalks by which I may easily access all of this and more without burning an ounce of gasoline in either my own or anyone else's vehicle (yes, sometimes this involves a lot of walking and very sore feet, but I consider that a more than reasonable exchange, and it's exceedingly enjoyable exercise; I'm the only one in my workplace who actually loses weight on vacation), or in any way increasing my or the city I'm visiting's carbon footprint. All of these things, Glaeser argues, are products of urban density -- for density brings about proximity of one artist or inventor to another, brings about economies of scale that allow ordinary people to enjoy what only the very wealthy could before the rise of the modern city, brings about opportunity (which is why cities attract the poor; they have a better chance of not staying poor if they come to a city and try).

And yes, density can also bring about crowding, slums, crime, poor sanitation and other public health concerns, but these urban ills can be self-remedying ones because they're occurring in cities, where concentrations of economic power, talent, labor and creativity can be harnessed to solve them, as happened in, e.g. 19th Century New York, London, and Paris, three fine examples of cities that thought their way out of these problems and are now, for the most part, very pleasant -- but very expensive -- places to pass some time.**

And the expense is where my real rage comes in. Because most of North America's and Europe's historically walkable cities have artificially depressed the supply of housing in those downtown areas by legislating against height and density, only the very rich can now afford to live there at all comfortably; they are become, in a phrase I encountered again and again in this book (which, sad to say, is something of a repetitive book at times), "boutique cities."

I am a middle class person; moreover, I am a single woman of a "certain" age which means that I am likely to remain a middle class person (unless I backslide, which is entirely likely in the current economic climate, especially if I choose at this stage in life to move away from the town in which I find myself living -- to, in effect, start all over again). I am unlikely to suddenly manifest skills that are in such high demand that I can command six or seven figures a year***, nor am I at a stage in my life where I am likely to choose (or be welcomed in choosing) to cram myself into a tiny apartment with six or seven twentysomethings.So, as things stand now, I'm starting to fear that I am stuck out in the suburbs, exurbs or pretend cities that have grown up around the car.

So yeah, I have city envy.

But so, I didn't realize how much city envy I had until I read this book, because even when Glaeser talks about the crime and poverty and disease and crappy housing that make so many of the cities in the developing world hells on earth circa 2012, he also points out how New York and London and Paris were once like that, and how Kinshasa and Mumbai and Rio can do it, too, and may even do it better with the examples of those cities before them (i.e., maybe they won't make the same mistakes that turned these into boutique cities along the way).

Of course, that's where Glaeser may lose some people, because, as he points out, New York and London and Paris would still be hell-holes without the deliberate and somewhat heavy-handed use of state power. New York, for instance, tried a private water service first, and got boondoggles and very little utility from guys who were more interested in empire building than in public service. And Paris owes most of its charm to Napoleon III's indulgence of one man's dreams (that one man being Baron Georges Eugene Haussman).

I must add, lest I mislead people, that my rage is mostly self-directed and is only tangential to the reading of this book, which is, after all, an optimistic one. Perhaps, indeed, it's overly so: Glaeser's vision for a possible American future requires, among other things, the embrace of congestion charges and higher gasoline taxes to discourage car use, the reduction if not elimination for the home mortgage interest deduction (that encourages suburban sprawl by encouraging not only home ownership but the accrual of ever-greater debt to buy ever more expensive houses that, let's face it, do not increase an iota in quality commensurate with increases in price, do they? Which means this extremely popular and entrenched bit of tax law helps drive home prices higher), and, least likely of all, an end to the endemic syndrome of NIMBYism.

Even more controversially, Glaeser calls out a lot of environmental and historic preservation legislation as bad policy that gets bad results. In Glaeser's world, the popular slogan of "think globally, act locally" gets it all wrong: focusing on saving one wetlands (or, for that matter, one block full of mediocre but old buildings) doesn't really help the planet or the locality, because it just sends the builders and their money somewhere else. And often, in the case of those opposing newer, taller buildings in old established cities as of those opposing new development in attractive areas like coastal California, where it gets sent is to place like Houston, or more specifically, to exurban Houston, where sprawl is keenly encouraged by a lack of restrictions on development and the people who wind up living there have to drive to work, to school, to shop, to eat out -- and have to use amazing amounts of electricity to keep their homes livable because Houston in the summer is a sweltering  nightmare without air conditioning. So whether you believe in climate change or not, whether you believe in peak oil or not, whether you believe in suburb as bland conformist hell or not... there is probably something regrettable in the greater scheme of things that offsets, if not worsens, the impact of your saving a pond or three-story apartment building.

As he ponders all this, though, his glasses get a little too rosy. One of his arguments about America, for instance, involves coastal California, climatically ideal for 21st century human habitation, becoming a lot more densely populated than it is -- compact and tall rather than more sprawl, naturally -- which raised my eyebrows because he seemed to be glossing over the problem of how thirsty such cities can't help but be: lots of people need lots of water. Oh, he says at one point, but they could have enough water if all of that irrigated agriculture going on in California were put to a stop and that water diverted to urban/municipal use. This only sounds reasonable, I suspect, to people who haven't paid attention to the realities of western water; the rivers that currently supply all that agricultural and municipal water in California and the rest of the arid southwestern half of the sun belt are grossly over-allocated and no longer even reach the ocean; there might not be enough even if all that agriculture were suddenly to stop. And by the way, how likely is that, anyway?

Still, it's nice to read a book like this and dream, just as it's nice to wonder what the American west would be like if those who drew its state and county  boundaries had listened to John Wesley Powell instead of to the Union Pacific Railroad and the cattle barons. Or to imagine what Rust Belt cities like Detroit might have been right now if their leaders had focused on developing human capital (a favorite argument of Glaeser's: cities are made of people, not buildings) instead of adding more infrastructure to an area that already had too much.****

At bottom, this book, more than anything I've read this year and probably last year, too, made me think, about my own choices, about public policy, about consequences, intended and un-, about, overall, if it's time  to move. Because even though I commute by bike as much as possible and walk to the grocery store (which, mercifully, is just across the street but how much does it suck that it's a five-lane street so poorly patrolled that cars routinely roar by at 50-60 mph) and never eat out or go downtown, sitting around alone in my little house, however attractive and roomy it may be, is no way to spend the rest of my life. I need people.

Preferably, people who have an idea of a good time that does not begin and end with a bar fight.

 *I spent about ten years living on the U.S.'s east coast, most of it in lushly green rural areas that weren't much more densely populated than I was used to, but a few in Boston (with lots of vacations to New York). I finally got homesick at 27, though, and wanted to see what living in Wyoming was like as an adult, so moved back, and then never managed to plan my way back out of here. Eventually I had to leave the tiny town where I grew up and later served as a member of the city council and the water and sewer boards but had no gainful employment and move to Cheyenne, which is Wyoming's state capital but is basically a big suburb with no urban area of which to be sub. Which means I own a car and have to drive pretty much everywhere and I'm  as many hours' driving from the idyllic mountain/river scenes of my rural childhood as I am from the amenities of the nearest real city (Denver).YUCK.

**They are also the three cities focused on in a most entertaining (unless one is very squeamish) documentary series produced last year by the BBC called Filthy Cities. And hurrah for the BBC, for you can watch them on YouTube for free. Here's London, Paris and New York. Enjoy!

***And  yes, a lot of this is because I am unwilling to go back to college and get yet another bachelor's degree. I already have one, in the liberal arts, which is supposed to make me ready for anything but really makes me employable only in diminishing fields which do not allow me to make an actual living, which is why I currently hold a job for which only a high school diploma is required (although a lot of other specific and mostly innate talents are also required). And no, my unwillingness to get another degree is not because of the work or time involved (I acquire and hone new skills all the time, though free resources like MIT Open Courseware, but I have not yet heard of an employer who will treat that as a credential. When one does, I'm stylin'), but because of the expense. College cost enough the first time, even with scholarships, back in the late 80s/early 90s. Now? I'd be paying back student loans for the rest of my life, all on a gamble that whatever "employment ready" field I chose would still be one with a decent job market that would let me earn income to pay back those loans. Stank!

****I wonder what Glaeser would think of the crazy optimistic art/development/whatever project that is Detroit's Loveland.

Essential Listening: Snap Judgment

My life has recently been turned upside-down and inside-out and I did it to myself pretty much deliberately.

I started working the graveyard shift at that job of mine that I can't talk about in public. Suddenly morning is night (and it's y'all's morning now, creeping slowly up on 6am local time) and night is morning; Thursday is Monday and Sunday is Friday, but it was like that a lot before... but now, now I'm a daysleeper.

And that means I miss a lot of stuff I dig on public radio, once my sole resource for culture and news living out here on the edge of a Martian plateau (as my friend Scott Bieser describes it a lot in his fantastic blog Living on Mars). No more Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, no more Splendid Table, no more This American Life. They're available as podcasts, of course, but there's something so great about just having one of these shows rambling on when I start up my car, keeping me company on my commute or my errands.

But this isn't my first graveyard rodeo. No sir. Several years ago, before the KATE STATION was even a glimmer of fancy and I was doing time in the Vertical Trailer Park (a wretched apartment complex that seems to be the only place in this city that lets tenants have dogs), I was a daysleeper then, too. And I discovered that public radio had some pretty fantastic offerings for my wee hours commute home: my local station has The Commonwealth Club of California on Sundays, and that's maybe worth a blog post sometime, too, but on Saturdays, oh, on Saturday's there is Snap Judgment.

Snap Judgment, for those who've not followed my links or regarded my shout-outs on Twitter, is a themed storytelling program that might be considered broadly similar to This American Life, but it's far from a TAL clone. Both shows are lively and fun and often funny and often heartwarming, but where TAL tends to go for the ironic, the arch, the too-knowing, the, sorry to say it, hipster angle on these qualities, Snap Judgment is sincere and earnest and sweet and, above all, affirming. I make it sound like some kind of religious program, but that's not really what's going on here. Snap Judgment, as its tag line names it, is "storytelling with a beat", and that's not just the music they're talking about (though the music is fantastic!); click on over to the show's homepage and click on any episode and listen for a moment. I recommend the first track for each show, which is usually a personal story of host Glynn Washington's, and  he sets the tone. His narration has a lilt, a verve, a rhythm all its own, warm and funny and enthusiastic, no matter the subject matter, no matter how his story portrays him. This is a curious man who wants to know more about everything, and wants to share what he's learned, and everything he shares, he shares with a wow. He shares with wonder. And that's contagious.

Like pretty much every program on public radio these days, this one is available as a podcast, or you can stream it from the site. Do! It's great. But for me, I like to hear it in its obscenely early local time slot, bopping gently along in my car on my way home from a long night's work and smiling. Sometimes I wind up sitting in my garage to hear the end of a story or a song (and where TAL has great music, too, it's usually used as a sort of ironic counterpoint or commentary on what its storytellers are talking about. SJ's music just punctuates the stories told and maybe, just maybe, gets my ass moving in the car seat, but never intrudes). And then, fondly, I shut off the car and I shuffle into my house and go to bed full of my favorite emotions, hope, awe, and a basic enthusiasm for my own species that can sometimes feel a lot like faith. Because really, humans are amazing, and so is the world if you just let yourself be open to appreciating it.

I am one happy Snapper.

Good night!