The Maccabees
Given to the Wild
Fiction, January 2012

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With typical hyperbole, the NME last month described Given to the Wild by The Maccabees as “the first classic album of 2012”. “By casting themselves to the flames”, the magazine’s reviewer wrote, the band “have forged an identity more purely them than ever”. Another review for The Fly magazine talked about the record’s “sweeping stamp of maturity” and “affective emotion”.

This is not the place to draw attention to the preponderance of tautology and confused writing in the British music press. However, it might be worth considering exactly what The Maccabees’ supposed mature classicism amounts to. Indeed, if Given to the Wild is truly a definitive summary of British alternative rock music in 2012, then we should be able to use it to compile a list of the genre’s key tenets.

With this thought in mind, The Oxonian Review has examined the album, and is able to identify the following Five Pillars of 2012 British Indie:

1) Vocal affectation. Something strange has happened to the voices of the nation’s youth. Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks yelps lyrics rather than sings them, as though drawing attention to the “idiosyncrasy” we all know is a clear sign that we are in the presence of Serious Pop Music. Perhaps this is what The Fly means by “affective emotion”. It’s a sort of meta-singing, an emotional emotion, an attempt to transcend the art of song by focusing solely on the human voice as an instrument of exquisite affectation. In case you weren’t aware already, Given to the Wild is a high-concept project.

2) Camouflaged poshness. The second point is closely related to the first. Privately-educated upper-middle-class people from London like The Maccabees have probably always talked in braying, nasal tones. But to enter the elite of 2012 British Indie, Given to the Wild suggests, we must combine a pedigree of indoctrinated R.P. grandiloquence with gestures at gritty cockney bathos. The result is a vocal delivery and overall aesthetic that conjures images of Kate Middleton doing a Jamie Oliver impersonation. The Maccabees like cricket and rugby rather than football, but their clever balance of exaggerated parochialism and urban pluck helps to paper over such privileged credentials.

3) Pastiche and formal repetitiveness. In the eyes of the NME, Given to the Wild represents “a brave sci-fi dawn”. However, without wishing to pour scorn on this succinct conflation of several different clichés, I would like to urge that scepticism be applied to hopes of a Maccabees-led futurist insurgency. Sadly I could detect no real signs of innovation within the formal confines of the album, only composite pastiches of the last thirty years of alternative rock music, though there were occasional attempts to depart from post-Libertines conservatism into the territory of hipster dilletantism. This may have been “the Wild” referred to in the title.

4) The persistence of the guitar band mythos. To give credit where credit is due, at times during the course of the album it seemed as though that The Maccabees were trying to do something genuinely progressive. However, there will inevitably be something self-defeating about attempting to move on from a culture of guitar-band commercialism when you are still being packaged and sold as an orthodox guitar band on a Universal Music Group subsidiary label. As far as making an avant-garde statement goes, I felt the band were severely hampered in this respect.

5) The lack of political engagement/any discernible worldview whatsoever. Opinion varies widely on the desirability or otherwise of political art. But surely everyone would agree that some sort of ethos or attitude to life on the part of the artist is an important part of aesthetic experience, especially in an “independent” art form with a proud heritage of counter-cultural dissent. Does Given to the Wild come with a discernible philosophy attached? Or even a thought or two about something or other? A band with a name as richly allusive as The Maccabees seems to promise a re-engagement with vital issues like religion, politics, and cultural history. However, a quick glance at Wikipedia undermines hopes of uncovering a Maccabees worldview: “The band came up with the name by flicking through the Bible and picking out a random word”. Somewhere in this metaphor of meaninglessness is the Fifth Pillar of British Indie in 2012.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Motion Sickness of Time Travel
Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious
Digitalis, August 2010

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My first experience of MSOTT, named for a phrase from William Burroughs’ novel, The Soft Machine, was the sublime “Electric Rain” mix for mnml ssgs. The tracklist reads like a who’s who of the synth world, made up entirely of low-fi gems released in criminally small quantities on CD-R and cassette. Seeping was originally produced as a run of 80 tapes in 2010 and was repressed in similarly small numbers by Digitalis in 2011.

Rachel Evans, the goddess behind the moniker, told me that “you can afford to release tapes more frequently and in smaller numbers, unlike records which have a significantly longer turn-around time and don’t make sense to release in small quantities.” But, due to its popularity it was eventually pressed on vinyl. I was extremely lucky to get hold of the third edition (white vinyl, catalogue no. ‘digiv032′, for all the trainspotters). It is quite simply the most beautiful, emotive hour of music I have ever heard.

Evans is clearly influenced by nature and the mysticism of the forest; reflections from her log cabin studio in LaGrange, Georgia. The tracks feel organic. Not acoustic, but, equally, not purely electronic. Evans laments in her Siren tones over hazy kosmische pulses, and a guitar can even be heard on “Mental Projection”. You can never quite decipher what she says, but the vocals transmogrify the sounsdcapes into something more accessible and human than her peers’ offerings. Evans’ aim with MSOTT was to make her voice sound as beautiful as possible. The voice here is the music. The synths are extra. And the synths themselves are incredible.

Considering Seeping is a collection of six tracks, each of unique character, there is a surprising coherency to the album. Evans wrote Seeping, she says, “a few days after I graduated from college in one sitting and [my husband] Grant said I should send it to somebody.” You are aware of the beginnings and ends, but in the middle you float, unaware of the passing of time. The album isn’t warm, uplifting ambience, nor is it dark, soul-destroying drone. Instead, it strikes a perfect balance along the spectrum, alighting somewhere near melancholy.

Harry Scholes studies biochemistry at Oriel College.

Diagrams
Black Light
Full Time Hobby, January 2012

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Black Light is the debut solo album from former Tuung singer and songwriter Sam Genders, now recording as Diagrams, a name that he hopes suggests the “crisp, minimalist pop music” that makes up this album. As a concept Diagrams works well, and though the ideas flow freely, and some miss the mark, the songs cohere thanks to Genders’ honeyed vocals.

“Ghost Lit” is a melancholy opener, with blippy synths and jazzy guitar overlaid onto a conventional indie-rock chord pattern. As it builds, Diagrams’ sonic hallmarks become clear: half-synthetic string orchestras, those ubiquitous Futureheads harmonies and an ear for sentimentality – Genders is never afraid to milk a melody.

Lead single “Tall Buildings” is more lively, its gentle funkiness and breathy strings recalling Prefab Sprout. It’s hooky too, and a commitment to pop melodies is what dominates this debut. More curious are some of the textures and forms that he employs: the initially skittish “Mills” seems to feature an uncredited guest appearance from Rick Wakeman, rocking out over the outro, while “Antelope”’s time signature changes suggest King Crimson playing chamber pop. Or perhaps The Minutemen with Peter Gabriel on flute. This is the most charming song on the record, and its quickly-changing, concise arrangement rewards repeat plays. This fractured danceability gives way to the easy sway of the title track, powered by the Graceland-esque rhythms popularised by Vampire Weekend, and now adopted by every second indie band. We’re in familiar territory, but it ambles along well enough, propped up by those ear-catching synths and a hummable refrain.

“Animals” occupies much the same sound-world– all palm-muted Telecasters and boomy toms – but it’s set in 7/4, and the bridge sounds like Aphex Twin. Sadly though, this oddness fails to fully counteract the sugary sweet refrain “I never believed in love ‘til now”, and when everything collapses into the sound of a brass band, it’s all a bit too much. “Peninsula”, however, is an entirely lovely closer. It’s driving, it’s sentimental and it does sound a bit like Elbow, but the conclusion thrills as the drumming grows ever more frantic and a discordant synth threatens to overwhelm those “uh-oh” vocals.

A likeable, tune-packed debut then, that marries eloquent rhythms to a glossy, bells-and-whistles production – Genders has crafted a winsome, eclectic album, unified by his mathematical concept and, if you can forgive its tweeness, there’s plenty to enjoy here.

Mike Smith plays and teaches guitar. He is studying for an MA in Music at Oxford Brookes University.

Adam Harper
Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making
Zero Books, 2011
234 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-1846949241

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The title of Adam Harper’s Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making appears to promise a broadly positive work about the continuing relevance of modern music, so to be met on the first page by the dour assessment that “serialism has all but died out [and] faith in musical modernism has subsided” is somewhat disconcerting. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Harper does not wish to sound the death knell for serialism but to recontextualise it, to rescue it from obsolescence. The trap that many modernist “composers” (and the definition of the term is contested herein) fall into, Harper suggests, is one of treating modernism as a series of conventions and techniques. What they should really be doing, he argues, is using the spirit of such devices as a means of reinventing every aspect of music-making.

Harper writes of an “old modernism” for which the groundbreaking innovations that once made it so radical—such as the 12-tone technique—have now become like the conventions they sought to undermine. Modernism has become trapped, subjected to the preservationism—the insistence on performing and composing in the “correct” manner—that afflicts many musical styles, from popular to folk to classical. What is more, the conventionalisation of the erstwhile radical facets of this “old modernism” further serves to highlight the aspects of musical performance that have been left uncontested. This has resulted in many so-called modernist performances that claim to be “explorational” whilst often tacitly preserving many of the trappings of the traditional classical musical world. Most in need of radical overhaul, the main body of Infinite Music suggests, is the conservatism surrounding performance and composition. For the former is often presented in the recognisable manner of a classical concert in which the audience sits in silent reverence as the artists “explore”, while the latter still maintains its air of prestige and exclusivity. It is these two facets of music-making that Harper aims to revolutionise.

“Where do we draw a line around what musical variables composers observe and potentially serialise?” asks Harper. “We don’t. That was the old serialism, the old modernism”. Harper is searching for a more holistic musical egalitarianism, one that treats timbre, instrumentation, and performance conventions with the same levelling hand as serialism did pitch. “No restrictions whatsoever” is what Harper demands of this new modernism, and it is a cri de coeur that is as meticulously and thoroughly explained as it is inspiringly progressive.

But in this utopian desire to rid the modernist musical landscape of all restrictions, Harper hints at two caveats that need adding. The first is that the abnegation of restrictions must allow for aspects of conventional musical language to be incorporated into the resultant sound world. Melody, harmony, and most importantly, repetition and recapitulation of ideas must be included in this new modernism, for it is these devices that facilitate a sort of real-time dialogue between composer (or musician) and audience. The opportunity to second-guess the flow of the musical narrative, and to have those guesses either confirmed or contradicted, is where one finds delight in musical performance. Harper suggests as much in positioning the music created by modernism “somewhere between the old and familiar…it’s a relation between old and new”. This liminality affords the music a chance to comment upon all conventions of music making, whilst seeking avenues literally to modernise their usage. Truly modernist music “must also situate itself with respect to the familiar in some way, however small, and this link with or establishment of the familiar is what can facilitate appreciation”.

But this facilitation of appreciation is not simply a means of forcing modernist music out of the cloistered, elitist world Harper suggests it now inhabits. Nor is it to popularise and heighten the influence of the music in a manner that modernism in its old guise, Harper claims, singularly failed to do. What this endeavour attempts is to rupture perhaps the most pervasive convention of music-making: the idea that the audience is a passive receptor of the musical meanings of the composer/musician.

This leads to the second caveat, one that Harper touches upon in his egalitarian approach to the definition of the composer. In broadening the definition of this otherwise exclusive concept to include all those engaged in music making, proclaiming “we can all be composers, and we are all composers”, Harper alludes to Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” (addressed in greater detail later in the book). Harper explores Small’s notion that everyone engaged in the process of music-making—even (or perhaps especially) the audience—is engaged in a process of “musicking” that makes them integral to the creation of meaning.

The necessity to include the audience in modernist music is evident from the above example. A dialogue that includes the old but challenges the new must be established, and the role of the audience in not only interpreting but creating the music must be recognised and celebrated by modernism, breaking once and for all that most recalcitrant of conventions: the schism between performer and audience.

If there is a danger that a manifesto such as Harper’s—one that propounds a more egalitarian musical world and seeks to imagine the future—should drift into idealism and daydream, or worse, into the very type of proscriptive demagoguery that it seeks to dispel, then Harper counteracts it by providing a framework for reassessing music-making that is practical and thorough, wide-ranging and speculative, yet honest and humble in its intentions. In seeking new definitions of what constitutes the “space” of the musical soundscape, and by suggesting potential extensions of this space, Harper does not purport to have “solved the problem” of old modernism by defining precisely and entirely the space of new modernism. Rather, Harper espouses a view of modernist music as infinite. He provides the reader with:

not just a single system [for the imagining of music] as was offered by serialism, but a system of systems, an infinite system allowing for the creation of subordinate musical systems or what will be called ‘musical objects’, describing how they interrelate and how they’re perceived (or not). It sees music as a complex system of variables relating primarily to the production of sound, and takes this idea to its infinitely variable conclusions.

It is from this honesty—from not professing to have the entire template (and at not being able to even comprehend or imagine the entire template)—that Harper’s ambition of imagining the future of music-making derives its power. This is a manifesto of possibility, of potential and of limitless imagination. “Why shouldn’t we try to imagine another thousand years of musical history?” asks Harper, defiantly. And in imagining a music with infinite possibility, Harper sees an inspiring, albeit tentative, precursor of this future.

Tom Astley is reading for a PhD in Ethnomusicology at Newcastle University.

Wilco
The Whole Love
dBpm, October 2011

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The Whole Love is Wilco’s eighth album, and the first to be released on their own dBpm label. The band finally cohered into a stable line-up just before their preceding release—titled simply Wilco (the Album)—and judging by their newest offering, this is for the best. The Whole Love is probably Wilco’s best album in almost ten years. It shares the consistent quality in musicianship and stylistic invention from 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, whilst borrowing liberally from the more out-there elements (panic attack guitar solos, for instance) from 2004’s A Ghost Is Born. Anyone who preferred the straight-ahead Americana of Wilco’s self-titled album from 2009 will also find much to enjoy here in the latest album, as the band work through the electronic and rock material in the first half before breaking out the pedal steel and violins in the second.

The opening track “Art of Almost” is a set of looped samples and keyboards interlocking with Jeff Tweedy’s plaintive vocal. The atmosphere of the song steadily chills with the intensifying lyrical theme of regret and mental self-excoriation until it suddenly inverts for the coda into motorik drumming and a rather ‘classic rock’ guitar wig-out for a further two minutes. Track two is the lead single “I Might”, which sounds much like “Kamera” from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, or possibly “Theologians” from A Ghost Is Born. The Farfisa-sounding keyboard riff by Mikael Jorgensen recalls early 1990s Mancunians the Inspiral Carpets, but this is probably more of a coincidence than any attempt by Wilco to reference the Baggy Era. For all the cheerful strumming guitars found herein it is a remarkably dark song, ending with Tweedy singing “it’s alright/you won’t set the kids on fire/but I might”. “Sunloathe” starts off sounding like a John Lennon solo tune, before gradually devolving into a Paul McCartney solo tune in the last thirty seconds. Lyrically it is closer to “Art of Almost” (i.e lugubrious) than the songs on either side of it, being a mainly piano-and-bass effort masking the self-accusing vocal of “I kill my memories with a cheap disease”.

At this midway point in the album, The Whole Love breaks through into the sunlit uplands of “Dawned on Me” and the cyclical guitar motif of “Black Moon”, which for contrasting subject matter if nothing else provide a relief from all the tears, pain and anger served up so far. “Black Moon” recalls the slow build and close mood of Wilco (The Album)’s slow burner “Solitude”, and is no less a song for it. “Born Alone” closes the first half of the album on a reasonably fast, rocking pace that one imagines is a natural choice for closing a live set.

The second half of the album is a somewhat more sedate affair, ranging from “Open Mind” moseying through the American country tradition, to the incendiary “Standing”. The album has only one obvious misstep: the jarring ragtime hoedown of “Capitol City”, which couldn’t be more out of place if Wilco had written it as a fifteen-minute happy hardcore mashup. Luckily the glissando guitars of “Rising Red Lung” reward repeat listening as a sort of musical palate-cleanser. The album’s title track is surprisingly brief, and rather overshadowed by the mellow country odyssey “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)”. Wilco manage to distil much of the preceding songs into a single twelve minute canter, and end The Whole Love on a gentle sunset, rather than the amp-destroying powerchord airstrikes we might have expected in earlier years.

The Whole Love is a rather understated album considering the ear-busting guitar solos with which Wilco have assaulted their listeners in the past, but it’s no bad thing that they’re trying out a few more modest arrangements. Some listeners will no doubt be relieved that the band evidently decided not to revisit whatever musical landscape from which AGIB’s “Less Than You Think” originated (no fifteen minute ambient keyboard choirs here). Wilco play to their strengths for much of the album, namely Nels Kline’s scratchy lead guitar lines and Jeff Tweedy’s growling vocals for the fans to become re-acquainted with, and plenty for new listeners to discover. Overall, this album offers the sound of a band gleefully plundering its own back catalogue and managing to further itself musically at the same time, which is not something many groups on their eighth album have the talent, energy, or inclination to do.

Will Merrow-Smith works for Oxford University Press and once hung up on Colin Dexter.

The Horrors
Skying
XL Records, 2011

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In 2006 the Horrors were a heavily made-up garage band whom the NME and Channel Four went out of their way to promote as the Next Big Thing. This didn’t work, since much of the listening public successfully ignored them until the release of Skying, despite the album before this (Primary Colours) being held as a miraculous turnaround in the band’s artistic development.

Skying begins with “Changing The Rain”, which sounds like a wind tunnel covering Daft Punk’s soundtrack to Tron: Legacy. The CD liner depicts a studio filled near ceiling-high with keyboards of every make and marque, as if to de-emphasise the fact that The Horrors were once very much (shock, horror) an indie guitar band. “Changing The Rain” makes a strong bid for stardom, however the best part of the song doesn’t occur until the coda, where the correct emphasis is given to the Kraftwerkian octave-hopping synth-bass. This alone adds a spark of life to what was merely a plodding mid-tempo piece of unimaginative electronic rock.

From here, the album touches on various parts of 70s-to-80s synth-pop and pop-rock (U2, Simple Minds, and the aforementioned Kraftwerk) mainly by drowning everything in reverb to the point where one cannot make out Faris Badwan’s appalling singing. One gets the impression that the Horrors are probably terrible live, if this degree of studio trickery is needed to make them even half-listenable.

“You Said” is particularly offensive, since it reveals the formula the band have repeated shamelessly to pad out the album: a synth chord opens, then a shuffling drum pattern follows before Badwan drones into the song with all the subtlety of a half-brick thrown through a patio door. “I Can See Through You” hints at influences from Screamadelica-era Primal Scream, although it swiftly abandons this promise, fobbing off the listener with yet more reverb-buried vocals and frantic chord-banging by guitarist Joshua Third.

“Still Life” is the lead single to push this sewer on to the airwaves, and has received much praise from certain quarters because of its resemblance to New Gold Dream-era Simple Minds – as if this is behaviour which in any way should be rewarded. In fact it is not like Simple Minds, but like a pastiche of 80s Beatles pastiches such as “Sowing The Seeds Of Love” by Tears For Fears. Sadly, what we have here lacks that song’s knowing nod-and-a-wink to the original material, as well as the musicianship to carry off the imitation. “Still Life” features treadmill drumming and a bass guitar mixed to the front of the track (the kind of thing that makes idiots mention Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band inside a minute) backed up with some backwards-guitar playing major seventh chords and a chirping brass section in the coda, just to ram the point home.

Skying’s ageing forebears (Simple Minds, early U2, Midge Ure and Kraftwerk) suggest the true target of this album is a late-thirties to early-fortysomething broadsheet music critic. Observe the baffling degree of praise it has received from the likes and one might conclude we’re all going to see the Horrors at “Glasto” with a still-sore ear piercing and a brand new Vespa. The British music industry is firmly under the control of these fortysomethings, who haven’t learned that pop music is for kids. This generation, who grew up too old for grunge and slightly too young for postpunk, are now in charge, trying to sell the soundtrack of their youths to their own children. No wonder the kids all listen to dubstep.

Will Merrow-Smith works for Oxford University Press and once hung up on Colin Dexter.

Simon Reynolds
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past
Faber and Faber, 2011
300 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0571232086

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Has pop culture’s past ever been so abundantly present? From remakes in film and television to the return of just about everything in fashion, it often seems that way. In Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, pop music critic Simon Reynolds (interviewed by Alex Niven in this issue) suggests that the first decade of the new millennium was the “re-decade”, a period characterised by “revivals, reissues, remakes and re-enactments”. “Instead of being about itself,” Reynolds argues, “the noughties has been about every other previous decade, happening again all at once.”

Though best known as a music critic, Reynolds wrote his two major previous books, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1998) and Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 (2005), in the role of music journalist-turned-pop historian. In these works, the impulse to construct a comprehensive and canonical narrative largely predominated over aesthetic discussion and theory. Retromania is different: much less consistently a work of storytelling, it features whole chapters exploring the psychological, sociological, and technological dimensions of our current predicament. In spending so much time analysing the present, it becomes an historical work in a different sense—a record of one music writer’s reaction to the vastly reordered landscape of pop culture consumption.

After an introduction and a prologue outlining Reynolds’s ideas and assumptions about the concept of retro and its present ubiquity, the book is divided into sections titled “Now” (which examines the contemporary moment), “Then” (which consists of detailed accounts of pop music revivals since the 1950s), and “Tomorrow” (which discusses contemporary music and cases of “lost futures”). The “Then” section is where Retromania’s real strength lies, a return to the rich history-telling textures of Energy Flash and Rip It Up. A survey of every significant pop revival since “trad jazz”, it offers an absorbing alternative narrative of pop’s development and highlights the constant repurposing of the old. Reynolds describes fascinatingly kooky figures and bands, such as Ian Levine, Billy Childish, Dr. Feelgood, The Cramps, and Sha Na Na (a doo-wop revival band that performed immediately before Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock).

It is surprising to learn just how much 70s and 80s pop was influenced by that of the 50s and 60s. Reynolds talks of “endless revivals”, but if music-makers and fans have always continually returned to the simplicity of rock ‘n’ roll, aren’t these revivals better viewed as evidence of a continuing tradition, a recurring myth or cultural trope that sometimes tops the charts and sometimes languishes in relative obscurity, but always, in the end, defines the genre? To paraphrase one of Reynolds’s own interviewees, no one accuses classical orchestras of a revival of 19th-century German music. Moreover, Reynolds often misses an important aspect of what might be taken to be revivalism: when the past returns it will inevitably be accompanied by different sounds, different audiences, and different meanings (however subtle those differences may be). He expresses disappointment with 80s band The Jesus and Mary Chain’s use of sugary 50s and 60s pop, for example, but doesn’t recognise that that band’s use of distinctive guitar and vocal timbres, slower tempos, and heavier reverb ultimately transformed their original references quite profoundly.

“Tomorrow” is the shortest section in the book, tying together music of the noughties, “nostalgia for the future” as expressed by the post-war European avant-garde, and cultural theory. Relatively little time is spent on more recent musical developments such as hauntology and hypnagogic pop, which are lumped together with retro hip-hop and mash-up culture, while other acts of the last decade are mentioned only in passing. In attempting to understand the cultural climate in the wake of postmodernism, Reynolds examines and applies the theory of Nicolas Bourriaud—such as his concept of the “altermodern”—which was never really distinct enough from the concepts of classic postmodernism to make a major contribution to the critical terrain and which is not entirely compelling in its appearance here.

While “Then” and “Tomorrow” contain Retromania’s most interesting material, it’s the “Now” section that really typifies the book and presents some of its most thought-provoking claims. Reynolds catalogues every facet of pop music’s current cultural and technological situation, contexts that, he argues, have all in some way caused the eponymous malaise to take hold. He identifies the culprits as, for example, pop music museums, band reunions, Internet sites like YouTube, the allure of record collecting, mp3s (and the “sharity blogs” that provide them), iPods, rock curators, retrospectively invented genres, boxed set reissues, and postmodern hipster culture in general. Bolstered by hundreds of interviews, quotations, and anecdotes, Reynolds approaches each of these areas with the same intensity and eye for fascinating detail that he brought to Energy Flash and Rip It Up. In Retromania, however, value judgement is much closer to the surface. As the book’s opening hints, Reynolds is not particularly enthusiastic about these developments and their purported effects on listening habits and musical creativity. As it turns out, he is almost entirely negative about all of it, and exhaustingly so.

Given that Reynolds often reiterates his allegiances to sci-fi authors like William Gibson and J.G. Ballard, it is fitting that the “Now” section reads like a dystopian science-fiction satire about the future of pop music written circa 1988. This fact hits you as soon as he starts poetically describing the absurdities of rock museums: giant cut-outs of Johnny Rotten, roaming, misty-eyed punks, and threadbare memorabilia encased in glass. Later on, Reynolds rails against every kind of musical digitisation, starting with the premise that “the easiest way to convey how things have changed is to compare the present with conditions when I was a lad back in the late seventies”. The self-awareness hinted at by the colloquialism here does not succeed in tempering the subjective nature of this approach. With only a few token assurances to the contrary, Reynolds suggests that every new form of musical consumption to have developed since the start of his music writing career has ultimately contributed to a process that is “killing music”. His fears, backed up by a sometimes one-sided selection of sources, share the mixture of excitement, panic, and dread that characterised the responses of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Marshall McLuhan (three writers Reynolds often returns to here) to the spread of new structures of consumption like television and shopping malls. For Reynolds, the Internet and its mp3s offer only excess and high speed: he describes this state as “franticity” and concludes that new music-makers are “glutted”.

Yet despite his avowed left-wing, modernist, and mildly Marxist sympathies, Reynolds contradicts leftist critiques of reification and commodification with comments like “it was easier to form attachment to music when it was a thing” and with the relish with which he remembers record shops and the many purchases he made in them. If pop music has benefitted in any way at all from the relative unyoking from industrial production that the Internet has brought, there is not a whiff of this in Retromania. Indeed, Reynolds sees only drawbacks to the digital age. Every time he benefits from new ways of discovering music it seems to happen despite his intentions, and he ventures to struggle free. At one point, he confesses, apparently earnestly, that he once found himself with “thirty simultaneous downloads streaming into my computer at once”—“it was a dark time”, he opines.

This is all a question of age and experience, of course. Younger appreciators of music might be perfectly comfortable with the idea of using Internet archives and mp3 downloads to access music and might view Reynolds’s complaint as an overreaction typical of those on the older side of the generation gap. It would be wrong to fall into the trap of thinking that there is nothing credible in Reynolds’s claims just because he is of an older generation. But equally, if Reynolds is aware, as he surely is, that the same type of inter-generational complaint has been made by almost every critic of art since ancient times, he doesn’t fully address this fact (surely he himself was frustrated with the older generation’s criticisms of rave music’s own “frantic” and excessive qualities in the early 90s?). Instead, he comes dangerously close to reviving the age-old and familiar reactionary refrain that what was once precious is being drained of meaning, significance, and all that was once good about it. This is not to say that Reynolds’s complaints aren’t valid and often persuasively articulated—they do throw down a challenge to be taken very seriously. But they would be even more convincing if they weren’t so one-sided and so clearly victim to subjectivity.

In fact, at times it appears that it is Reynolds himself who is the obvious nostalgic, and his persistent yearning for the better old days regularly echoes that of the pop music he accuses of the same condition. Retromania is full of tender remembrances of the author’s childhood, undergraduate years, and record-collecting hobbies. It even contains some gently poignant asides about his family life and mid-life anxieties. This book can be seen as a portrait of a prominent music critic taking stock, his face dimly reflected in the glass cases displaying the pop objects that appear to have become museum pieces. Yet however subjective we might consider Reynolds’s approach to be, and however mildly reactionary his stance may seem, Retromania remains a work of real historical importance. As 20th-century listening habits give way to those of the 21st, this book offers a timely response to a decisive moment in the development of pop music production and raises concerns that are not easily dismissed. Serious music fans and music-makers alike should read it not just for its striking presentation of pop’s history and teleology, but for its informed and passionate challenge to a burgeoning zeitgeist.

Adam Harper is reading for a DPhil in Musicology at Wadham College, Oxford. He writes for The Wire and blogs at Rouge’s Foam, and is the author of Infinite Music, forthcoming from Zer0 Books.

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Simon Reynolds has been at the centre of British music journalism for nearly 30 years. After studying history at Brasenose College, Oxford in the early 80s (and narrowly missing out on being a contemporary of David Cameron’s), Reynolds starting writing for the pop music weekly Melody Maker, and quickly built up a reputation as an eloquent champion of futuristic genres like post-punk, hip-hop, and acid-house. The author of major studies like Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1999) and Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005), Reynolds is also noted for his ability to venture outside the confines of traditional music journalism and to turn up in unlikely places: his comments feature on the jacket flap of Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991), for example, and he has in the last decade become a driving force in the alternative blogging community that gave rise to the Zer0 Books publishing venture.

Reynolds’s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (reviewed by Adam Harper in this issue), surveys the recent vogue for heritage culture and nostalgia in pop music. A voluminous work that ranges over literally hundreds of examples of “retro delirium”, Retromania is a powerful crystallisation of one of the most talked-about discussion topics of the age.

So what was the gestation process for Retromania?

Some of the concepts go back a long way. For example I use this term “record collection rock”. I formulated that in the early 90s in a piece for the New York Times, and it wasn’t that new a phenomenon even then. I could have used it to describe Spacemen 3 or any number of 80s bands. So it’s always been there in the back of my mind, and it’s something I’ve never quite made up my mind about. It’s that mindset of being, on the one hand, obsessed with the future, but also liking a lot of things that are based on the past, and feeling almost ashamed of liking them.

But specifically thinking “there’s a book there” came partly from doing the post-punk book [Rip it Up and Start Again]. I posit this break at the end of the book, this point at which indie music gets more about the 60s, where it abandons synthesizers for guitars. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that actually it went back a lot further.

I can remember one time looking through the back of Uncut for some reason and seeing adverts for all these live performances and festivals, and it was like this totally garbled, mixed-up blend of history. There were bizarre juxtapositions, and it just seemed weird. So the concept for the book arose out of bemusement really, noticing that there was this industry developing, quite a significant money-spinning sector of the music economy that’s based on nostalgia.

This was one of the defining things of the last decade, and I was surprised no one had written a book about it. But at the same time it’s such a diffuse and scattered phenomenon that I can see why no one had written a book about it. And as a topic it doesn’t have that cheerful tone. Usually music books are cheerful. This is the first book I’ve done that isn’t enthusiastic.

You use the phrase “tipping point” in the book. There’s a sense that we’re approaching some kind of crux…

I don’t know if we are; it may just stay like this forever! Obviously I’m making it seem dramatic; and the way the whole book’s framed—it’s designed to be inflammatory. We might just enter a sort of stasis. It may not be a dramatic thing; pop may just get more and more clogged with the past being recycled.

But there is a feeling of “how can this go on?” People are actually murmuring about reviving stuff from the 90s, and you think, “how can you do this? What can you draw on? You can’t revive britpop. How can you do that?”

Do you think it’s a case of an art form wasting its energy? If you look at, say, English theatre in the 18th century, there’s not all that much of note after the high points of the 17th century. Art forms go into recession, sometimes for as long as a century. Do you think that’s what’s happening?

It could be. It could be that rock, specifically rock, like jazz, will carry on as a sort of heritage thing. It could be like in jazz, where young players come forward who do good stuff, but it’s not going anywhere and it doesn’t have any connection to the zeitgeist. But it’s not just rock that’s ailing; it’s everything—including electronic music now, which is in this weird recursive mode of going back to 90s high points and tweaking and tinkering with them.

It’s not just a lack of energy. It’s not to do with a lack of talent. There are loads of talented musicians around, and they all have great technological tools at their hands. So you can’t say everyone’s being crap and unoriginal. It’s much more macro and structural. It’s like musicians don’t have any choice. Some major seismic thing within the whole terrain in which music is produced has shifted, and it’s almost as though you can’t resist these forces.

I suppose my sense is that it has a lot to do with the decline of socialisation and of people thinking in groups, people coming to a consensus about the new modernistic development, through the music press, or through John Peel, or whatever.

People seem very hostile to groupthink, don’t they? Which is bad. I think a bit of groupthink would be good. It happens in journalism. People are very reluctant to get behind each other’s ideas. I totally got behind David Keenan’s hypnagogic pop idea. I don’t care that he thought of it first; it’s a fantastic idea and I like some of that music a lot.

But there’s much more ego value in taking the piss or criticising other people’s stuff. Actually joining together, unifying around things, no one seems to want to do that so much any more. That has a lot to do with the Internet, I think; the people who agree don’t tend to bother to post.

On that note, could you talk a bit about your role in the blogosphere? It seems that you found that galvanizing in the last decade.

It did seem very exciting. The fact that it was very collective was the thing I liked about it—the way that people picked up on each other’s ideas, and disagreed but usually in a fairly civil way. It might be quite heated but usually it didn’t end up in ugliness. Or they agreed and it was like they were adding something more to the discussion—it was like passing the baton. It was very exciting and reminded me a lot of the music press, but on a faster turnaround because in the music press you’d pick up on what someone wrote the previous week or you might argue with another paper. There were trains of thought, conversations going on, and then the letters from the readers would come in.

So the blogosphere was a bit like that feeling. But then it seemed to dissipate quite a bit, and I’m not sure why. Partly, I think, Twitter has drained a lot of brain energy away, and perhaps there aren’t as many music things that people can get worked up about together. But certainly I was very inspired by it, and it was great that you could post something enormously long or enormously short, and that seemed to free things up: you could do some writing that was proper essays, or you could do stuff that was chit-chat really—just an undeveloped thought—and it was liberating. But then there’s the fact that no one’s getting paid for it, and that’s depressing, though it’s inspiring that people are prepared to go to all this effort to write very well written stuff for no remuneration.

Do you see any solution to this problem of payment in music as well?

Perhaps the reason for doing music writing will become completely uncoupled from livelihoods and it will become a different economy. I know a musician, I won’t name him, but he did a record that got quite a lot of critical praise. He told me that he put this record out, and it came out via a very hip label, but he didn’t get any money from it. The label put it out for him and he got 20 free copies and that was it. And this is a record that featured highly on critical polls in left-field music magazines and had features written on it. So it is like vanity publishing, vanity music-making.

On the fringes now, if people are doing it not as their way of living then they tend to release 12 records a year because they can—20 tapes a year or something—so you don’t get the same focusing of energy on the record that’s your statement, on something you want to happen. If it’s a series of micro-events then there’s not that same pressure or focus. And I generally think pressure of some kind or other tends to produce better results. I could have done this book as a series of blogposts, and it might have been freer and I might have gone off on all sorts of tangents, but there’s something about the pressure of having to do it as a book that makes it a stronger statement.

Do you think there might be any artificial means of imposing structure?

People seem to be reaching for the idea that discipline is crucial and makes life better. I did a piece for Wire magazine on [record label] Not Not Fun, who are analogue fanatics. One of the musicians I interviewed was French, and we were talking about why he’s so into vinyl and tape. He said, “you know, in French there’s this word contrainte, I don’t know what it is in English.” And I was like, “well, it’s constraint, I think.” And he said, “Yes! Constraint: constraint is liberating.” Which is like that Holger Czukay idea, you know, that restriction is the mother of invention. It’s very simple stuff, a sort of Zen-type idea, isn’t it?

Nietzschean, perhaps …

It’s a very simple idea of course that lots of people have written about. It’s like in The Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, when the guy joins the army because he’s adrift and he doesn’t have anything to do. Being free or having too many choices is paralysing, dissipating.

I suppose there are two different routes that impulse could take. One is a sort of individualistic ethos of self-discipline, and another one is constraint by way of a group. For example, one interesting thing about hauntology is that it only gains currency as a meme because it develops out of an Internet collective and online discussion.

Yeah, but that’s a good example of how people don’t want to “bind and heel” anymore. Do you know that expression? It’s from rugby I think, like when you form a scrum. It’s a long time since I played rugger, but I think that’s what my dad used to shout at me from the sidelines: “bind and heel!” But people don’t want to form a scrum anymore.

The hauntologists were actually very polite about the label. Very few of them said publicly that the term was bullshit. But most of them said, “well we don’t mind talking about this but we don’t feel like it’s what we’re about.” It was the same with post-rock. Very few people rushed to embrace the term. But these terms have a value. Anything that has a centripetal force, that pulls people together toward a hub, creates power, creates a form of agency, an impact.

Musicians are understandably worried about those terms because of course there’s the fashion economy of music, and when the trend is passé they don’t want to go down with it, so I understand why they resist being lumped into these categories. But when things are grouped together, there’s a lot more visibility, a lot more impact—once there’s a word.

Returning to hauntology. Do you think it’s time to lay it to rest?

I think the basic operational idea may come forward in different versions in different generations. But I think they’ve used up that particular set of references now, that particular era. Although the main artists keep coming up with things that I like: Mordant Music came up with that great piece for the British Film Institute about public safety films.

I think the principal artists will carry on doing interesting things. But it’s pretty mapped out. I don’t think they’ve got any surprises up their sleeves. But who knows?

Do you see anything more forward-looking right now?

I mean there are definitely musicians who are slightly innovative or relatively innovative. It’s not like innovation has disappeared off the face of the Earth. But it’s more as if the odds against it are stacked, and when it does occur, it’s usually very peripheral to the mainstream. It doesn’t seem to gain any kind of momentum, in the way that something like jungle created momentum. Jungle went somewhere. It didn’t really conquer the mainstream but it filtered into the mainstream in all kinds of odd ways. Like in America there was a period when it was on commercials, and it was a kind of weird semi-victory for music in the sense that it was on TV all the time as interstitial music—at the start of a news programme you’d have this platter of rapid breakbeats. It was odd. It wasn’t quite what I’d imagined for jungle, but it did get into the mainstream culture.

The thing about all this is that in some senses I’m not a dissatisfied consumer because every year I hear loads of records I like. It’s just that very few of them seem to be new enough; they seem like rearrangements of existing things. There’s not that shock of the new.

For instance, in pop music right now. If you put pop radio on in America, you hear all these big Billboard-topping songs, and they have autotuned vocals on, but the basic fabric of the music is like Ibiza in the late 90s, or the Love Parade. A Ke$ha song, or a Gaga song, or a Black Eyed Peas song, it’s like pop-trance, all the tricks they use, the way the music is organized, and the way it moves internally within the structure of the song. It’s all like a peak hour song at a club in Ibiza. It hasn’t particularly evolved from the late 90s.

Is that not the case with any foundational record of any genre? Like “Rapper’s Delight” could just have been a disco curiosity, but it comes with this whole narrative context that turns it into a big leap forward.

Yeah, maybe there’s something going on now where the new feature is concealed by its attachment outwardly to something that’s quite old. I don’t know what that would be.

The only thing in the mainstream that says “2011” is the use of autotune. It actually goes back to the late 90s as a machine, but [it took till now] to use it creatively as a distortion tool. If you try to imagine 20 years ahead when people are trying to think of what the hallmark of pop music is now, it would be autotune and its weird effects. People like Black Eyed Peas actually use it quite creatively.

So I suppose you can imagine something like that being the site around which a subculture organizes itself, one formal detail.

It could be. I mean that does seem to be the one interesting area across the board: doing stuff with vocals, vocal science. Autotune and weird treatments of the voice. Black Eyed Peas are doing it, and James Blake is, and I suppose in a funny sort of way Salem and those sorts of groups. Weird stuff with the voice seems to be one of the areas where there’s some kind of invention going on.

And one thing I thought was really innovative was all this stuff from Chicago, the footwork stuff. Some of it’s horrible because it is quite primitive mechanistic music. But the best of it is really eerie and graceful. And a lot of that is based around weirdness with the vocals: sped-up vocals and slowed-down vocals at the same time, two vocals paralleling each other that are both aberrant from the norm. That’s one of the few things in recent years that has made my jaw drop a little bit—the Bangs and Works CD that [record label] Planet Mu put out. I put on one of my blogs that Mike Paradinas [who compiled the CD] deserves a knighthood for this, because he went through a lot of stuff, and there must have been a lot of quite indifferent material. It’s very functional music in that scene because they make beats for people to do the weird dancing to, so a lot of it’s very functional and probably a bit uninteresting. A lot of it is sub-music. But every once in a while someone will come up with functional yet really eerie and elegant music that you can listen to on headphones. It’s great pop.

The funny thing is, when I signed the contract for this book, the premise was: nothing new is happening. But of course I realised there’s a fatal flaw, which is that it’s going to take me two or three years to write the book and for it to come out, and what if something innovative happens in that time? Fuck! But of course that’s what I most want; that’s my deepest wish as a fan of music, that something innovative will come along, some massive wave of innovation.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Porno Para Ricardo
Rojo Desteñido
la paja records, 2011

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Despite the image, still prevalent in magazines and tourist literature, that “authentic Cuban music” consists of leather-skinned old soneros tapping out the ubiquitous clave rhythm, rock (in myriad guises) has become something of a national music in post-millennial Cuba. So the fact that a punk band exists on the island is not quite as surprising as one may think. However, that this particular punk band, Porno Para Ricardo, continue to exist—despite total political and artistic ostracization, a four year prison sentence visited upon lead singer Gorki Águila, and continued police harassment—is of some note.

Rojo Desteñido (Faded Red) is the band’s fourth full-length album, and in many respects their most accomplished. Their first, Rock Para Las Masas … Cárnicas (“Rock For the Masses”) was wilfully anarchic, even juvenile, featuring songs about drugs, lesbianism, and a cover version of the theme song from a old Soviet cartoon. 2006 saw the release of Gorki from prison, and the release of the “diptych” albums A Mi No Me Gusta La Políticas Pero Yo Le Gusta A Ella, Compañeros (I Don’t Like Politics, But She Likes Me) and Soy Porno, Soy Popula’ (I’m Porno, I’m Popular). The mood herein is, understandably, more aggressive, more pointed, more political, and more defiant. It is also more anarchic. Interspersed throughout the songs are jokes, bizarre short speeches, and a recurring manic laughter; all tropes alluding to the live gigs forbidden to the band since Gorki’s incarceration.

But this fourth album represents something different. Though it celebrates the same punk aesthetics as its forbears – a fiercely DIY ethos, a “live” sound to recordings, and a socio-political stance that is far from compromising – it takes a more measured sonic approach. The production, for a home-recorded, self-financed and, to all intents, “illegal” album, is much richer. The guitars have depth, as well as distortion; the vocals are sonorous at moments (particularly in “Los Dinosaurios”) as well as being strained. The composition of the album is more diverse, too; shades, perhaps, of post-punk. Certainly a more varied musical palette is utilised here.

Lyrically, there is no let up from previous efforts, and the content provides just as many shock effects (and just as much swearing) as before. Once again, prominent members of the Revolution are called out by name, though this time it is Raúl Castro who is given the limelight in what is perhaps politically speaking the album’s flagship song, “El General”.

It follows a similar line to the band’s most famous track, “El Coma Andante” (“The Walking Coma”, a play on Fidel Castro’s consonant epithet “el Commandante”) by mercilessly lampooning “el segundo Castro” (“the second Castro”). Yet, as with much of the band’s work, behind the veneer of bluster and defiance, there is a lament for their powerlessness and a frustration at the apathy gripping much of their generation:

La gente se pregunta
Qué es lo que va pasar
Pero con Raúl al frente
¡La mierda sigue igual!

The people ask
What is going to happen
But with Raúl at the helm
It’s the same old shit!

The standout track on this album is the cover version of the old bolero standard “Mucho Corazón”. In interview, Gorki speaks of the band’s decision to open their album with this song:

We start the album with a bolero, to give people what they’re not expecting. We open a rock album with a bolero. Of course this is a bolero that somehow sets up the band’s position. It is this bolero by Marcelino Guerra that goes ‘dicen que no es vida, esto que yo vivo’ [they say this is not life that I am living] [laughs]. That is contextualising that bolero within a rock album and even more so with the characteristics of our band has a special meaning. (Gorki, 2010)

For its heartfelt and surprisingly faithful rendition, for incorporating aspects of ‘memory’, even nostalgia, into a punk context, it is perhaps the most shocking track on the album. One keeps expecting the serenity of the intertwining acoustic guitars to be punctured by a ‘punkification’. That the disruption never comes forces one to consider Porno Para Ricardo as part of Cuba’s rich canon of musical greats and as a part of Cuban society, rather than as perennial “outsiders”, “dissidents” or “Yankee copycats”.

All Porno Para Ricardo’s albums can be heard (and bought) from their website.

Tom Astley is reading for a PhD in Ethnomusicology at Newcastle University.

Sean Albiez and David Pattie (eds)
Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop
Continuum, 2011
256 Pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-1441191366

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At some point in the last ten years, Kraftwerk became one of the “consumer products” they had satirised in “Das Model” way back in 1978. Ironically, a band that had always sought to re-appropriate the subversive potential in pop artefacts—the record package, the gig-spectacle, the publicity photograph—were themselves re-appropriated as a cornerstone of noughties fashion culture. Austere shirt-and-tie combos of the kind modelled by the band on the cover of The Man-Machine (1978) became a high-street commonplace. Post-punk revival bands half-inched the group’s neo-constructivist aesthetic. Even the new celebrity aristocracy was keen to be associated with the Kraftwerk brand. Chris Martin was reportedly fond of listening to their greatest hits in the bath; so much so, in fact, that he used the synth riff from 1981’s “Computer Love” as the basis for “Talk”, a centrepiece of Coldplay’s multi-million-selling 2005 stadium rock travesty X&Y.

The reduction of Kraftwerk to an aesthetic commodity was unfortunate, not least because the group might have acted—might still act—as a reminder of the seminal importance of context and ethos in pop music. Although the group’s name seems to bear connotations of fashion and lifestyle-cool, “Kraftwerk” actually translates in English to a rather unglamorous-sounding appellation: “power station”. This allusion to an industrial, factory-style utopia recalls the group’s desire to create a “new Bauhaus” for the computer age by reinstating the principles of the early 20th-century German avant-garde, an artistic tradition that they felt had been derailed by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. From the beginning, then, Kraftwerk was an ethical and ideological project as well as an exercise in pop-art-style surface manipulation.

With this in mind, it is refreshing to encounter Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop, a new collection of academic essays on the band, which spurns fashion and firmly returns the emphasis to ideas. Editors Sean Albiez and David Pattie have assembled a compendium of rigorously argued and illuminating discussions of the band, one that more than compensates for the shallower latter-day ramifications of what Alex Seago termed in 2004 the “Kraftwerk-Effekt”.

For a first major academic study on a pop subject, Music Non-Stop establishes a solid foundation for further research in the field. The book is divided into two halves: the first, “Music, Technology and Culture”, focuses on the band itself, while the second looks at their cultural legacy. As David Pattie points out in his introduction: “the sheer range and scope of the band’s influence seems to suggest something more than the refining of a style; it suggests that there is something endlessly generative in both the band’s music and its image.” The essays that follow are a fitting tribute to the full scope of Kraftwerk’s enduring significance.

A usefully historicist opening essay by Sean Albiez and Kyrre Tromm Lindvig looks at the contexts underlying the band’s formation in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany, and at the band’s attempts to exploit and detourn some of the parlous national identities they inherited in this setting. In West Germany, Albiez and Lindvig argue,

[t]here appeared to be endemic amnesia whereby 15 years of Nazi history had been wiped from the collective memory, while the post-1871 German nation was viewed by some with nostalgia and by others with blame…Keenly aware of the FRG’s inherent problems, [Kraftwerk] began to address some of the internal conflicts between past and present, technology and nature, the rational FRG and irrational Nazi and Romantic past, folk and mass culture, conservatism and progress, between old and new and between “man” and machine in their music and art.

This cultural project was a serious undertaking, though the band were not averse to introducing an element of play into the dialogue. Albiez and Lindvig quote from a 1975 interview for the British music paper Sounds, in which band members Hütter and Schneider describe music as “a process of brainwashing and manipulation”, and claim they “have the power to push the knobs on [their] machines this way or that and cause damage…It can be like doctors with patients.” Although remarks like this were often taken at face value and contributed to the standard view of Kraftwerk as cranky pseudo-scientists, for Albiez and Lindvig, the band were clearly “toying with widely held Nazi-related German stereotypes concerning technological control and mastery”.

In perhaps the standout essay of the collection, “Kraftwerk and the Image of the Modern”, David Cunningham assesses the notion of Kraftwerk as a modernist band. For Cunningham, “few artists of the late 20th century have so emphatically or radically embraced…modernism as Kraftwerk.” However, the band’s willingness to make it new was complicated by an emphasis on “the recovery of a lost, or at least catastrophically interrupted central European culture of pre-war modernism.” From Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West to T.S. Eliot’s theory of a 17th century “dissociation of sensibility” in poetry, European modernism was famous for advancing elaborate theories of catastrophic interruption in the distant or recent past, against which the modernist artist could then pose as a messianic redeemer. But locating the historical rupture within modernism itself, as Kraftwerk did, was something of a new development. At a time when modernism is increasingly subject to heritage industry retrospection, perhaps this interest in the recovery of lost futures accounts for the band’s continuing popularity: Kraftwerk were pop’s original retro-modernists.

But if Kraftwerk were among the first artists to go “back to the future” in the late-70s, they were also forward-looking innovators in a more genuine, prosaic sense. As Carsten Brocker’s comprehensive survey of the band’s creative processes demonstrates, this was a band that was both responsive to, and responsible for, many of the major technological innovations that enabled the development of electronic pop music in its infancy. And as David Pattie argues elsewhere in the collection, Kraftwerk’s cyborgian live shows were similarly prescient for offering an ongoing commentary “on our evolving relationship with technology”. Pattie points to the band’s mobile touring studio as “a performative environment which prefigured the world of work, the social world and, gradually, the cultural world.” Long before the laptop became a ubiquitous focal point of contemporary labour practice, Kraftwerk were perceptive enough to highlight the increasingly porous boundaries in latter-day culture between work and play, leisurely and professional spheres.

Of course, the generative, progressive features of the Kraftwerk project can be seen most clearly in the group’s vital influence on almost all of the most meaningful futuristic tendencies in pop over the last 30 years. In a second essay Albiez maps the English translation of Kraftwerk via British synthpop records of the late-70s and early-80s—electronic works like David Bowie’s Low, Brian Eno’s Another Green World, and the early oeuvres of Ultravox and Gary Numan—while Richard Witts extends this discussion of the “British fixation with Germany” to look at Kraftwerk’s interest in Gilbert and George and their influence on northwestern British post-punk bands. Notable among these was Joy Division, whose Nazi-fixated singer Ian Curtis was not quite as alive as he might have been to the ironies that underpinned Kraftwerk’s über-Teutonic presentation.

Most remarkable of all, though, is the story of the group’s legacy in hip-hop and dance music, which provides the subject of the final three chapters. Mark Duffett’s discussion of racial identity in American and European music offers a thoughtful corrective to the orthodox view that “the whole process of cross-racial inspiration was a mysterious miracle”, but there is surely something miraculous and inspiring about the way in which Kraftwerk came to be championed by the proponents of genres like electro-funk, Detroit techno, and acid house. For many of us, growing up all across the planet, musical sub-cultures such as these provided an early point of contact with avant-garde aesthetics and ethos, so it remains something of an ennobling experience to be able to trace their lineage through Kraftwerk all the way back to the Bauhaus. Not many bands in pop history were able to establish a praxis for formal innovation at the same time as creating a humane, educational framework to contain their sublime pop productions. This approachable and necessary study provides a timely reminder of the utopian message of a band whose progressive-modernist legacy is still just about salvageable, despite the cosmetic devaluations of the last decade or so.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.