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The Ethics of Nostalgia

The way we represent history on screen and on blogs has very little to do with the way ‘it really was’, but with the way we want it, and need it, to be. A few months ago, a new television drama called Puberty Blues, set in a 1970s Australia, was shown on Australian television. It was extremely popular and very similar to the American Mad Men series in its exploration of the sexist culture of the past. For me, Puberty Blues had little to do with sentimentalising or aestheticising the past. Yet, like Mad Men, it was sold as a nostalgic trip into a ‘better’ and ‘simpler’ time, and was used as an avenue to regurgitate 1970s fashion and sell vintage wares to modern audiences. I don’t doubt there are many people who viewed the series as just that: an aesthetic nostalgia. But there were probably also viewers who saw it for what it was: an exploration of the cultural context of sexism that has little to do with buying vintage jeans from the 1970s, or reviving fondue parties.

It all depends on how you look at things. And I guess that’s the point that moves things beyond a purely postmodernist engagement with the past, into a metamodern one. Because as much as we may still love to superficially aestheticise history as a ‘style’ and a consumer ‘product’, we are also witnessing an engagement with nostalgia that is about ethics rather than simply style. Like postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, our current engagement with the past is consciously aware of what Fredric Jameson has termed its own “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”, yet nevertheless seeks to say something beyond style in the process. [2] We will always return to the past, and perhaps less energy needs to be spent thinking about whether this is a ‘new’ phenomenon, and more on how we choose to see, represent and interpret the past as producers, consumers and viewers, moving towards a more balanced love of aesthetics coupled with an increasingly conscious understanding of history and the present.

From here.

I find myself thinking a lot about nostalgia from a pop culture point of view, and I have to shamefully admit that I’d never really considered it as an ethical (or unethical, really) exercise in flattening the past at all. This piece is food for thought that I’m going to be chewing over for awhile, I suspect.

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366 Songs 333: I Don’t Know What’s Happened To The Kids Today

Based on the lyrics alone, I feel like I should hate Labi Siffre’s “I Don’t Know What’s Happened To The Kids Today.” It is, after all, the rantings of a confused and angry old man who doesn’t get the kids today – He even calls them “the kids today”! – and says things like “Didn’t have none of this crazy music/Didn’t have none of these crazy clothes/We didn’t have guys gettin’ high on the doorstep/We didn’t have none of those/No, no, no.” But this is a majestic song, a deconstruction of that attitude in which the music – initially, just Siffre’s repetitive, gentle-yet-insistent acoustic guitar – both softens and ultimately overwhelms the complaints and the bitterness. By the time you reach the strings, Siffre’s narrator has gone from a figure of contempt to a clearly sad, heartbroken man dealing with rejection from his family and unable to deal with it, and as he repeats “I don’t know what’s happened to the kids today” over and over, the music answers him with the sudden appearance of drums and bass, then strings, then horns, building to something that’s just beautiful; the promise of a new beginning that’s bolder than the hate and small-mindedness that’s come before. Like Super Furry Animals’ “No Sympathy,” a song that would come years later but which I’d hear first, this is something that provides its own meta-textual critique, a song that offers a hateful outlook and then emphasizes how small and petty it is without needing to use words at all.

I love this song.

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He’s Been Here For Years

This week’s Time piece is something that still feels a little unfinished, as if I’m writing around the subject as opposed to about the subject, if that makes sense? I didn’t quite find the magic bullet that allowed me to put everything together properly in time before the deadline (I am mixing metaphors there, I know), and as a result, I’m somewhat frustrated with myself. Still, the nature of the Internet beast: This time tomorrow, no-one will remember it and I’ll already be at work on the next one…

It’s a piece about the seeming revival for Peanuts and Charlie Brown, and how it’s not exactly what it seems. At least I got to marryPeanuts and LL Cool J in the headline, and create this wonderful piece of Google dissonance:

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Platforms Are Important

What the findings suggest, Holton said, is that the news platforms a person is using can play a bigger role in making them feel overwhelmed than the sheer number of news sources being consumed. So even if you read The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and ESPN in a day, you may not feel as inundated with news if you read on your phone instead of on your desktop (with 40 tabs open, no doubt). The more contained, or even constrained, a platform feels, the more it can contribute to people feeling less overwhelmed, Holton said. A news app or mobile site, for instance, is an isolated experience that emphasizes reading with minimal links or other distractions. Compared with reading on the web at your computer, your options seem smaller.

“There was no connection between the number of news outlets people were using, so it made us think it was the device,” Holton told me. “You see less of a statistically significance between outlets and more between platforms.”

From here.

Hmmm.

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366 Songs 332: We Are The Pigs

Another song that has emotional sense memories that threaten to overwhelm the actual music, “We Are The Pigs” has two lives for me; the song itself, with Bond theme-esque spider guitar and horns (Not to mention one of my favorite instrumental breaks in pop music – Listen to the way that Bernard Butler manages to up the drama with the rising guitar line from 2:10 through 2:16, and then BAM, it’s as if the lead guitar gets gently brought down again by the acoustic and rhythm guitars working together; I love that) and Brett Anderson being ridiculously camp and threatening (“As the smack cracks at your window/You wake up with a gun in your mouth” indeed, Brett), and the place the song has in specific friendships and the life I had at the time Dog Man Star came out.

I can’t hear this song without remembering Andy Barnett’s flat as he’d listen to the album before we went out on Monday nights to dance our cares away and pretend that we were more glamorous and attractive than we really were at the time (Well, me, anyway; Andy was always pretty fucking glamorous and attractive; suave and elegant, even). My initiation into Suede, and Britpop as a whole, perhaps, happened on those nights and nights like them. It feels like a lifetime ago, these days.

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366 Songs 331: Selfless, Cold and Composed

“Selfless, Cold and Composed” is full of meaning for me; it’s one of the first times that Ben Folds Five sailed boldly towards the jazzy horizon in both a good (Those drums!) and bad (That piano solo at 3:17, before the strings come in to give it some structure, albeit one that we’ve already heard in an earlier break!) way, for one thing, and it’s a song where the chorus and verse play off each other in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit together well, which… may be intentional (“It’s easy to be” is so 1970s MOR in terms of melody that it sticks out like a sore thumb, but that’s possibly the point, considering that the line mocks the behavior of the person in question)?

Really, though, it’s a song that reminds me of the aftermath of the relationship I was in when Whatever And Ever Amen, the album this track comes from, was released. I remember listening to this with that early-20s sense of “Yeah, why aren’t you clearly upset about me like you should be?” that you get when you’re heartbroken and hurt and confused and don’t understand that whole dumping thing properly. That ridiculously strong emotional sense memory comes on every time I hear the song, and each time that happens, I fight the urge to track down the ex-girlfriend in question and apologize to her for being an idiot. Because, really; I was an idiot, in those days, and especially about her.

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And As They Call You To The Eye of The Storm

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A man stands next to a charred trailer set on fire by dairy farmers in front of the European parliament at Place du Luxembourg, on the second day of a protest against falling milk prices in Europe, in Brussels. Photograph: Olivier Vin/AFP/Getty Images

I don’t know what’s more eye-catching; the destruction, or the nonchalant-ness of the man just standing there, watching.

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Recently Read, Prose (11/27/12)

It’s been a long time since I did this, so this is a list nowhere near complete. In fact, this is just the pile of recently-finished books on my bedside table right now (plus a couple that I Kindled; Why Romney Lost and 47 Percent are digital-only releases, I think); if I were to do a complete list, there’d be a couple more Star Trek books, at least, plus maybe some Jonathan Carroll and Alexander McCall Smith, perhaps? I can’t remember what I’ve been reading beyond these things, I admit it. As you can tell, post-election, I got into a mood for reading some politics, all of which were fun and instructive beyond telling me about their subject (I fancy writing some longform non-fiction at some point, if I can find an appropriate subject and a way to pay for it; reading longform political writing is like going to school for that kind of thing). The Gene Wilder and William Gibson books were both surprising, in their way; the Wilder one, surprising in how much I enjoyed it, and the Gibson in how much I didn’t.

Hopefully, I’ll have the time/brainspace to do these posts more often again. I like keeping track of things like this.

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366 Songs 330: Sandy

Continuing my accidental trend of updated 1960s sounds, Caribou’s “Sandy” takes the beginnings of psychedelia and drone rock and matches them to a better beat to create something that crosses genres and decades; a mix of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that manages to sound like all of them at once, in its own way. There’s a similarity to the Chemical Brothers’ dalliances with psych pop here (especially something like “Let Forever Be,” which may be the most pop thing they ever did), especially with the drum samples, but it’s even more lively and fanciful, especially with the flute and the ephemeral vocal (Especially when it gets to that “I can’t believe what we found” interlude, which sounds as if it’s been lifted entirely from some fop pop from the mid ’60s when frilly shirts and velvet jackets were all the rage). That some power pop band didn’t hear this and immediately beg Daniel Snaith (AKA Caribou) to produce their latest album confounds me. Just imagine what could have been…!