Do you think music is progressing or turning in circles? Are bands constantly recycling old themes and riffs, looking to the past, or rather innovating and inventing? I suppose it depends whom you are talking about, but that’s true there are recurrent references to the 60s every time I read a review, sometimes to the 70s, or 80s, 90s, as we are constantly turned to the past to describe new music, and most of the time we are finding a decade to connect with. Are we right? Are we ignoring all the rest? Or is the music really fetishizing the past?
In the San Francisco Weekly, Yeasayer's Chris Keating was asked about Simon Reynolds' book 'Retromania', which focuses on the idea that current music is crazy about the past, as if we had reached a tipping point and exhausted all the possibilities, as if the only things we could do is reprint oldies, re-release box-sets, reform old bands, organize reunion tours and dwell the good old times.
This is what Keating had to answer:
‘Yeah, sure. But that's been a theme throughout musical history. That seems to me something that old dudes who are out of touch say: "Nothing new is going on these days." It often happens with people who are from a punk rock background, where punk rock was really a very orthodox rock 'n' roll movement. You look at the late '70s, and here they are trying to reference music from the '50s, just back-to-basics, three-chord rock 'n' roll, as straight and direct as it can be. And it's great. I think it's always a cycle of referencing the past in a slow progression. But it seems to me like dudes in their late 40s and 50s are the ones who are like, "Nothing new is going on these days." I was just watching some crazy footage of a sissy bounce concert, Big Freedia, and I'm like, "This doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard." Or I was just watching Buraka Som Sistema play in Germany — this shit's fucking nuts: Two drummers, DJ, weird-ass dancing, a kind of crazy combination of Angolan rhythm and Baile funk. This is not something I've seen before. People, to me, do romanticize the past, and I think it's always been that way. There's always going to be a progression. And that's just one of these things that's bullshit, that people who are washed up tend to say.’
I totally want to agree with him, I want to believe that new things are possible and do exist in music despite some obvious repetitions of the past. I could give you a list of Los Angeles bands which cultivate a 60s revival with a twist, and it still works – the success of Best Coast is one obvious example. But there also is a lot of new things going on, often born from a combination of different things. Even if it is not the case anymore, the first Beck’s albums were like nothing else I had heard before, the Flaming Lips are always pushing the weird envelope and the British electronic scene (Massive Attack anyone?) has been very innovative. Punk is reinvented every time I go see a local band I like, and there is definitely new things in music out there,… I nevertheless include myself in the ‘dudes’ he is talking about.