Simon Reynolds

I don’t know about that – it depends what area of the culture you are talking about. In a wider sense, excitement about the future and feeling that it was going to be dramatically different than the present was strongest during the 1950s and 1960s (and to an extent, also very strong in the early 20th Century when you had all the World Fairs showcasing new technology and “the house of the future”, as well as films like Metropolis). But certainly in the 1950s and 1960s there was a lot of excitement about space exploration and things like plastics as “the material of the future”, which spilled over into fashion with designers like Courreges, Rabanne and Cardin using man-made fabrics and imitating the outfits of astronauts. In some ways, the 1970s was when the confidence in the future began to wane significantly. Some commentators at the time regarded the Seventies as the decade when the dream of the future died. It was when concerns about overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion really set it – a loss of faith in narratives about progress and unlimited economic growth. There was a gloomy feeling that all the wild hopes of the Sixties had faded and that utopian drive for change have collided with stubborn reality. A sense of social stagnation. And musically that was reflected in punk with its talk of “no future”. But certainly in the narrow sense of what’s going on in popular music, in the later years of the Seventies, electronic sounds and machine rhythms are starting to become widespread and they are heading towards the dominance that they enjoyed in the Eighties.  Synthesisers had been quite widely used in rock music and other genres in the early Seventies, but they were used in a way that accentuated their musicality and the human role in playing  – groovy and funky with people like Stevie Wonder, subtle and expressive with someone like Joe Zawinul in Weather Report or other figures in jazz fusion, and in rock bands, instruments like the Moog were often used to play solos as a display of virtuosity. What Moroder and Kraftwerk pioneered was a mechanistic feel – the sequenced rhythms felt like the machines had taken over and humans were no longer in charge. Of course that is an illusion, since it’s human decisions applied to technology that produce the outcome, but it felt to listeners like “automatic music”, a preview of a glistening, streamlined, remote-control future. “I Feel Love” and “Trans Europe Express” especially, coming in the same year of 1977, have a huge impact, grabbin the ear of all kinds of musicians like the Human League and Sparks.

 

The interesting thing about Kraftwerk is that often their reference points on the level of lyrics and visual imagery are referring back to the early 20th Century – the autobahn, the Trans-Europe Express, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Soviet modernist graphics on the cover of The Man-Machine. But sonically they are inventing the Eighties and Nineties already in the Seventies – pioneering the sequenced feel and drum machine rhythms of synthpop and techno and trance. So there’s an interesting mixture of retro-futurism and actual futurism. But with Computer World, the thematics are bang up to date – there is a perfect integration of the cutting edge, state-of-art sound and the things they are singing about (pocket calculators, computer dating, the idea that computers feed into a more controlling and surveillance oriented society). There was a lot of talk around 1979-80 about microchips and “will everyone be put out of work by robotic factories?” and increasing awareness of the importance of computers in office jobs, government bureaucracy, statistical analysis, the finance world, etc. On the leisure front, you also had the beginnings of computer games and videogames, with Space Invaders and Pacman. Electro music is basically the child of Kraftwerk and Space Invaders. By the end of the Eighties, Kraftwerk have fallen behind the state of the art, or become paralysed in their attempts to keep up. So by the time of 1991 and the Mix album with its remodelling of their classic tunes of the 1970s and early ‘80s, Kraftwerk are starting to do what they have done for the last 30 years now: exist as a musem of the future, or more accurately, a museum of their own past futurism. So if you see Kraftwerk in 1991 as I did, but also in 1998, as I did again, and then once more in 2014, you are experience a kind of living archive, a group that is commemorating itself and celebrating its own achievements, but not able to participate in current pop culture. The shows by 2014 are incredibly impressive, with 3D visuals, but the music is essentially an act of audio preservation: a sonic museum exhibit. And when you go see them, there are multiple levels of nostalgia at work – a kind of ironic nostalgia for the imagery of the clean, robotic future that they used to celebrate, but also nostalgia for Kraftwerk’s own history and the feeling of intense excitement about the future that their records used to stir, back when they were pioneers rather than curators of their own legend. It’s interesting that we still get imagery of the clean, bright, spotless, perfectly organised future in the world of Silicon Vallely – in the advertising for personal technology like phones and laptops and also entertainment technology (hi-definition TV, games, VR). But I don’t think anyone believes that the futurein a general sense will look like a pristine techno-paradise, with moving sidewalks and everyone flying to work in little air-vehicles and taking vacations on the Moon.  There might be elements of our lives that are futuristic like that (our smartphones, the dashboard of our cars, our domestic entertainment centers… what happens in hospitals is increasingly science fiction). But in other respects, we know the future will be chaotic, dirty, dangerous. And the new technology also enables  psy-ops, disinformation, social media disseminated conspiracies, drones, surveillance and monitoring by the state and by corporates harvesting our data. So the image of the future is tarnished even more so now.

 

In terms of their image and graphics and the overall bright, optimistic, human-positive attitude, I think The Human League probably did it best – I’m thinking here primarily of the album Dare and the singles that came off it like “Love Action”, “The Sound of the Crowd”, “Don’t You Want Me”, and the great single that came not long after the album, “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”.  But also the remix album Love and Dancing was a fantastic achievement, largely down to the genius and incredible attention to detail of their producer Martin Rushent – it showcased a lot of the techniques that would become widespread in Eighties club music. But there’s a lot of other people who came up with different angles. DAF had a fantastic dark, driving minimalistc sound. And it depends how you define “synthpop”… Generally people use that to describe groups like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode. But some of the best electronic pop music of the Eighties was electro (Mantronix, Man Parrish, Nitro Delux) and postdisco club music that increasingly used drum machines, synth bass, sequenced elements, in combination with passionately soulful and erotic vocals. Think of the production team Jam & Lewis, best known for their work with The SOS Band and Janet Jackson. But Jam and Lewis would actual work with The Human League, when the latter really needed to have another hit in the late ‘80s. Probably English groups like Human League influenced Jam & Lewis to some extent in their embrace of electronic technology, but then it goes the other way. So there is a whole black side to synthpop that is part of back-and-forth of ideas in the Eighties.

 

I don’t know if I agree that there is no such thing as “underground” today. There are certainly genres that not many people like or even know about, a lot of minority scenes and things with a micro-cult following. I would agree that it rarely feels like they have an oppositional quality in the way that postpunk or alternative rock had, and that genres like techno, gabber, and jungle had in a different way during the ‘90s. That’s partly because it’s a bit too easy to put your work out there online, there isn’t the sense of effort and struggle that there was with releasing a DIY record or making a fanzine. But also it’s because it’s too easy to be ignored. Part of what defined “underground” is that it had a point of contact with the overground, and this became a sort of borderzone of conflict, of attempting to break into the mainstream in order to change it. But nowadays it’s more like there are lots of niche markets that just happily exist without particularly being noticed or being a nuisance. What defined the hardcore continuum, or at least gave it a coherence over time, despite the fact that the sound changed often drastically, was that it was mediated through pirate radio – through illegal stations that broadcast through the airwaves. So they were territorially based – they had a limited radius of broadcast within London– which meant that they served a local community, usually working class and with a high proportion of minority listeners. But it also meant that they were public – the broadcasts went out onto the same airwaves that the state radio used, and also licensed commercial radio stations as well. So they were invading a public space and asserting the existence of minority populations, minority music tastes.  But the way the internet works is not the same. You can have an infinite number of transmissions that all coexist without interacting. Internet radio stations go out to people who know about them;  it’s pre-selected. Whereas the point of a pirate station is that people who don’t know about that kind of music might stumble upon the transmissions, some people who hate the music and possibly fear the population associated with it are confronted by the transmissions as well. So it’s much more significant intervention, to start a pirate radio station. The pirate stations that have switched to being online presences have completely lost that vibe of being a renegade force, a public action.

 

There could be something to that – “the future” becomes invested in as a repository of hope and possibility, because the past is not alluring, it represents constriction. For the most part, the past signifies oppression, worse conditions, and for many black people, the past involves things like colonialism and slavery. Whereas your middle and upper class people can maybe have a more positive view of things like history and heritage, because their position wasn’t so bad. I think generally with working class populations, black and white, it is striking how the taste leans towards the ultra-modern. Whether it is music, or clothes, or furniture. There isn’t that bourgeois interest in antiques, vintage aesthetics, or retro sounds. In the UK, there is a class of people that are referred to derogatorily as “chavs”, it’s a word for what Marx would have called the lumpen-proletariat. In other words, working or non-working people who aren’t involved in trade unions and don’t have much sense of solidarity as a class. I think every country has a similar strata of the population and each language probably has its own negative term for them that is used as a weaon of social exclusion. And part of the snobbery is about how flashy their clothes are, how they don’t have any interest in watching BBC costume dramas or reading the classics, and about how “trashy” and “cheesy” their music is. But for a long while I have noticed that “chav” taste in virtually every country in the world is always for their most futuristic sound, or at least the most NOW! sound. It’s the most synthetic forms of hip hop and R&B, with Auto-Tune used to the maximum, or it’s for gabber or hard house, or for dancehall and reggaeton and Afrobeats. Again, always based around shiny electronics, machine beats, excessive AutoTune, etc. So there is tendency that I have called “avant-lumpen”. And again what is interesting is the homology of the taste, how the consistency in favoring the shiny and ultra-contemporary cuts across every area of consumption – not just in music but in clothing, hair styling, interior décor, personal technology, fast food. At the time of writing the 1992 hardcore piece, I was still a little uncertain about my own preference for ardkore and early jungle, I instinctively knew I was right to be more excited about this music but it was a time when the cognoscenti despised and reviled this music. So the reference to it being “trash” and “unmusical” is me trying to take those negative terms and positivize them (while also acknowledging that by the standards of conventional musicality and what people then thought was advanced electronic music, it was crude and roughly produced). On one level, in 1992, I am questioning the value of musicality. However listening back in recent years while there was a lot of chaotic and messy tracks made by teenagers producing in their bedrooms using very basic technology, what I find surprising is how musical – even in conventional terms – some of the tunes are. They are using samples from movie soundtracks and old soul and jazz records, but creating interesting harmonic clashes, and rhythmically, the level of sophistication in the chopping up and recombination of breakbeats is really advanced. Partly it’s because listening back now, we know that the music is going to evolve into drum and bass, so you hear that in chrysalis in the earlier music. Back in ’92 though, most people dismissed the music as garbage – I can remember people saying “jungle just isn’t music”. So as someone celebrating it at the time, I wanted to both wield the “anti-music” idea as a kind of weapon, but simultaneously say “actually, if you really listen, this is much more interesting sonically than what Sven Vath or someone like that was doing then, that supposedly informed people thought was ‘proper musical techno’”.

 

I don’t know if that’s precise moment the future becomes dark, it’s more that within the science fiction imagination, there has always been a spectrum from utopian to dystopian. So both coexist at the same time – if you go back to the Sixties, there are science fiction novels and films that are positive but also ones that paint a dark, bleak picture of the future. Probably there are more dystopian images than utopian ones.  Within music, there have been both – at the same time that groups like Cabaret Voltaire and Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army presented these chilling, paranoid visions of the future, you also had Kraftwerk with “Neon Lights” and the Human League, who actually mocked the JG Ballard-style of cold urban imagery in their song “Blind Youth”. In the particular case of rave, you have more positive, utopian imagery in the late 80s and early ‘90s, in large part because of the effects of MDMA. But then hardcore rave becomes darkside or darkcore, as the long term ill effects of Ecstasy use start to create paranoia. Then jungle develops into a sort of urban militant sound that’s all about tension and being on guard. Songs about the police, about gangster life, about getting “real” – which means confronting a dog-eat-dog reality. The dreams of unity and love, peace, and harmony that you got with early house music and the honeymoon glow of MDMA use in its early stages – and when people thought this drug, this culture, could change the world – all this starts to fall apart. People are taking too many drugs, or a mix of drugs that is creating messy psychological effects. A lot have switched to smoking weed, which is by the ‘90s very strong and creates effects that are not mellow and chilled out like with the hippies and Bob Marley, but actually edgy and paranoid.  So all that is feeding into the music. There’s also the influence of cyberpunk movie aesthetics – Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator – images of a dark, corporate controlled future. You also have a lot of videogames that are based on similar dark aesthetics. The thing about dystopian movies or fiction, though, is that they are exciting. These are thrilling action and adventure scenarios, in which you project yourself as the hero, or the outlaw anti-hero, fighting against the system.  the philosopher Fredric Jameson is also a science fiction expert and wrote a whole book about the genre called Archaeologies of the Future. The subtitle is “the desire called utopia”. Which is a great phrase, very evocative. But I think you could also talk about “the desire called dystopia”. Because we enjoy these dark visions of tomorrow, whereas it’s Alien or The Hunger Games. It feeds a desire for the world to be dramatically different and for ourselves to live a heightened, heroic existence, to be extraordinary in some way. So with the darkside jungle and techstep, and the gloomcore gabber of the Mover and PCP Records, these bleak, cold future scenarios are attractive. They reflect some of the anxieties and tensions of the present, but they transform them into fantasies of struggle and triumph.

 

I don’t really have an answer to that one. I think one of the things about the internet is that it hasn’t radically transformed humanity. As an environment, it’s full of all the shit that we brought to it. I was very struck watching The Social Network, the movie about Facebook. At that time I had been watching a TV series set in Ancient Rome just a century or so after the birth of Christ, if I recall right. And watching the Social Network, I thought, if you changed the details slightly, the essential plot – or at least the motivations of the characters – would fit perfectly into the Ancient World of this series Rome. Because it’s all about power, glory, money, betrayal etc…  and the actual motivations that Facebook and social media appeal to are similarly about status, vanity, attracting the opposite sex, cliqueishness, etc. Recent development with the internet, social media, apps, etc would all seem to substantiate this idea that human nature hasn’t changed. The use of soft technology to disinform, to mislead, to create scapegoats, to mobilise hatred or fear

 

There is certainly a kind of “overworked” aesthetic with a lot of 21st Century electronic music, where the sounds have been sculpted in 3D and there’s a myriad of tiny details and a shift in the rhythm every few bars. The sound design is “over preened”, and very similar to what you could get in CGI-heavy action movies or videogames. The Zen Buddhists talk of  “the mire of options” . The software gives you too many parameters with which you can modulate and nuance something. It’s the same at all levels – even with writing. Computers are very good for editing, but not so good for the actual act of writing. In some ways, typewriters were better because you had to commit to a sentence, because it was such a pain to make a correction using white-out applied to the page afterwards. So there was a kind of thrust and drive to the writing. The end result was sloppier, but it didn’t have the fussed over quality of a piece of prose that has been constructed in a word processing program.

 

I think it is as simple as there being nowhere for them to go after that record. They had gone a complete circle, from starting with work that used samples from disco and Eighties soft rock and synthpop, to actually creating from the ground-up the kind of music that they once sampled from – creating music, using real flesh-and-blood session musicians and analogue recording, that others might sample from (although I don’t think anyone ever did). That was a perfect conceptual trajectory that they completed – but I don’t think it left them anywhere else to go. And how could they surpass the success of that record – “Get Lucky”, here in America, you could hear on the radio every single hour for over a year. They won six Grammys and then dominated the awards ceremony, playing onstage with heroes like Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers. They pulled off this exercise in time travel, back to the analogue era and the pop monoculture, and the world bought into it and ratified their ideas in the most total of ways. I do think it is significant though that since then, Random Access Memories seems to have completely been forgotten. It’s evacuated itself from popular memory.  You won’t hear “Get Lucky” played as a oldie on the radio. The project was like the perfect consummation, the ultimate proof, of the argument of Retromania. I finished the book in 2010, so three years before Random Access Memories came out, but if I had done the book later, I could have had a whole chapter on just that one album. It touches on so many of the issues, and the pathos of retro culture. There’s even a song about the Space Race.

 

Yes, there’s been a gulf between the physically-oriented, functional club music and the more conceptual or artistically ambitious offshoot projects. But there’s always been artists who’ve moved somewhere in between. For instance the jungle group 4 Hero had a lot of dancefloor smashes but also did albums like Parallel Universe that were too experimental for the dancefloor and that were informed by ideas from science fiction, futurology, mysticism and philosophy – usually limited to the title and maybe a few samples in there. Same goes for other drum and bass artists like Goldie. Then you have Underground Resistance, who early on did a lot of banging hard techno tracks that were very physical, but running through most of their output are political messages or speculative philosophy or scientific concepts. I think what is different with conceptronica is to the degree to which textuality is part of the work. With 4 Hero or UR, mostly the “message” element is quite oblique, more like clues given in the titles, or sometimes on the label or the artwork, but not overbearing, just a tiny hint, a little bit of writing or an image. With conceptronica, though, you often have voices in the music, the artist’s voices usually, making statements or exploring ideas. And the releases are accompanied by highly articulated, often quite dense and academic-sounding texts that explain what they are trying to do, what they are referencing or engaging with. And this in turns reflects another thing which is different from the ‘90s which is the context it’s happening in – UR, 4 Hero, etc were still part of the rave and clubbing scene and they largely survived on record sales and for some of them from deejaying or doing remixes. Today’s conceptronica artists operate much more in the art world context, record sales barely generate any revenue, and they survive far more from performances in subsidised spaces like museums, galleries, or festivals. So the way they present themselves is similar to how visual artists present themselves – there’s a sort of pitch to the informed, educated listener, who wants to keep abreast of the latest statements. (And often there’s literally a pitch to the host institution). So there’s a textual and cerebral focus that is quite a long way from the hedonistic and physical focus of club culture.

 

That is an encouraging development, for sure. It’s interesting that in academic, experimental electronic music, going way back, there was always a lot of women doing pioneering work. Particularly in America, with figures like Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Daria Semegen, Annea Lockwood, et al, but in most countries, you’d find  female experimentalists operating in what you would probably have assumed would be a very male context. So in some ways, it’s as though the electronic dance culture has caught up with how things used to be.

 

I have no idea I’m afraid. You should probably ask my son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who is a music journalist with a special interest in online genres like hyperpop and the various descendants of Soundcloud rap, where a lot of the energy is in extreme processing of the human voice.