The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
Triggered by Bob Dylan's 80th
It’s the 11th edition of Laughing Stock, where Rich Walker asks why we have to rake over the past every time there is an anniversary of a ‘classic’ album.
"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever" - Harry Smith
It was Bob Dylan what did it. The straw that broke the camel’s back. The incomprehensible troubadour recently turned 80, and with it came a slew, neigh, a tidal wave of ‘content’ about him, his legacy, his influence, his life, his times, his…tediousness? No one addressed that last one unfortunately, but the others were fully covered. Stereogum ran a feature where 80 artists wrote about their favourite Dylan song. Eighty! Eight-Zero pieces of content to read about obscure Dylan songs that no one except that person apparently cares for. The Guardian wrote a gushing account that claimed ‘the man has written more than 500 immortal songs’ and compared him to Shakespeare characters (Prospero, if you were intrigued…). The BBC went a bit lowest common denominator and just ran an ’80 things you might not know about Bob Dylan’; Rolling Stone did a standard best songs list…but there’s 100 of them, which isn’t really in keeping with the whole 80 theme; I can only imagine what Mojo and Uncut did, but I assume they drowned in a sea of their own Dylan related spaff so it could, mercifully, be the end of them. Look, I get it. People love Bob Dylan for some reason, and that’s cool. He did some Important Things for music apparently, and for that he will always be canonical. The issue with this is it’s an example of an increasingly popular strand of music journalism that only looks back at things gone by, the past, stuff from yesteryear, and claims that things were just better then, that albums that are worthy of a 2000 word write up had to be made 20+ years ago, and a revisionist critical eye has to be constantly cast over them.
In a world where online music publications have to attract more and more clicks to make any money from their ‘content’, an album anniversary article is an easy win. Pick something that came out 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago and get someone who loves that album to do a glowing, passionate write up about it. Watch the clicks roll in as fans of said artist retweet it with ‘can’t believe this came out 15 years ago! What an album!’, job done. Stereogum frequently does it, sometimes more than once in a week. Does Air’s 10,000 Hz really warrant a 20th year write up? And yet they only properly review one new album a week. Pitchfork does it every week under the guise of their ‘Sunday Review’, giving the full treatment to an album that ‘isn’t in our archives’ (i.e. they didn’t think it was cool enough/fit the aesthetic of the site first time round), whereby they rarely give anything less than 9.0. Any time a ‘classic’ album has any kind of anniversary, online sites will fall over themselves to try and look at it from a different angle, write something new about something that simply cannot have any more analysis invested upon it. Sometimes there is revisionism (‘it was misunderstood at the time’), sometimes it’s used as a demonstration of an artists’ development, and there’s a lot of imposing today’s cultural and political agenda on albums that were made years ago, but that’s about as deep as any new analysis is going to go. It all feels a bit...pointless?
Aside from clicks and therefore revenue, maybe the main reason for running anniversary content is to introduce a new audience to something they may not have known about. Yet are audiences, particularly younger audiences, going to be bothered reading about an album they haven’t heard of that is 20 years old? With pure conjecture, I’d venture that for the majority of them, they won’t, why would they? They will be more likely to come across an Echo and the Bunnymen track in a Spotify playlist than they are to read about it in a 40th anniversary essay. It’s a rampant form of retromania, pop’s addiction to its own past, as Simon Reynolds succinctly put it. Mark Fisher lamented the loss of ‘future-shock’ (possibly an outdated concept, now the internet has opened up global culture clashes that are producing wild new stuff like Shanghai’s SVBKVLT label), but he also talked about ‘past-shock’, whereby if you took music back through time, people from the past wouldn’t be shocked by it, but shocked at how familiar it is. The same applies to these websites - someone from the 70s would have a field day reading about the Bowies, the Dylans, the Franklins and wonder where the new had gone. Â
The popularity of such content speaks to older, more affluent music fans. In a 2011 Quietus interview, Simon Reynolds said ‘the posher you are the more you have invested in a narrative of things being much better in the old days when people knew their place.’ It strikes me that this is the prevalent attitude in the UK at the moment; Brexit, the seemingly immovable Tories, statues, ‘Churchillian’. It’s a worrying prospect that this attitude might seep further into popular culture where we look back more than we look forward, where celebrations of the old are more popular than those of the new. It already manifests itself on big festival bills, with heritage acts occupying top billing over exciting new artists who could use it to break through; where Hyde Park is occupied all summer by Pimms guzzling 55 year olds paying £120 to watch Pearl Jam play Ten in full. It’s coming for journalism too.Â
What these publications need to do is focus on the now and the new rather than the past. Use those 2000 words to espouse the joys of Hyperpop, introduce us to scenes we didn’t know existed. Independent magazines like Crack and Loud & Quiet don’t run retro columns, they don’t need to. Their focus is on thrilling new music that will light up readers' ears, lead them on a voyage of discovery into new and exciting forms of music. I’m not saying don’t listen to old music, old music is great, let’s just stop writing lazy anniversary pieces about albums where there can’t possibly be anything new to say. Quit living in the past. Find an interesting way to talk about older music, like The Quietus’ Baker’s Dozen column. The world does not need another take on albums from The Beatles (wait until Peter Jackson releases his Get Back documentary, oh boy there’s gonna be a lot of Let It Be reappraisals written up), Hendrix, Young, or Winehouse. Please...let them be.Â
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributers to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
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