Nostalgia, atemporality and music blogging

Simon Reynolds: how do you write about music when the volume of creation is unmanageably large? You give up on criticism, give up on finding something Significant. Instead, you just churn out excited brief notes on whatever track has dropped into your feed in the last 5 minutes.

That's what Pitchfork are doing with their offshoot Altered Zones. 15 bloggers post prolifically "with a sensibility that could be fairly described as post-critical". Because, says Reynolds, "there's just too much [music], and that filtering doesn't seem to be quite the thing to do with it"

So far, so typically net/ADHD/affect-driven. More interesting is the implied link between this cultural surplus and a culture of nostalgia.

"Everybody knows" that we're drowning in nostalgia. But our nostalgia has two distinct patterns, one transitional, the other here to stay. The first is our parent's nostalgia -- the mainstream, modernist-nationalist TV nostalgia of "remember the 80s" shows. This variant functions as a stand-in for the mass culture of the past, a nicotine patch for modernism. It conjures up a feeling of experiencing the same media alongside your neighbours, friends and enemies. Since that shared culture no longer exists in the present, it's transposed into the past.

So that form of mass-culture nostalgia is a transition phenomenon: it'll vanish as there are no longer generations growing up with mass-culture upbringing. "Remember the 90s" is already strugging; "Remember the noughties" perhaps won't function at all.

But the 'nostalgia' currently riding high in music is something else entirely. It's "ahistorical omnivorousness":

I don't think [it] really has much to do with all the '80s ghosts haunting this music. From YouTube to sharity blogs, the Internet is an ever-expanding data sea, and these young musicians are really explorers, voyaging into the past and diving for pearls.

Bruce Sterling covered this last year in a speech at the Transmediale digital art festival in Berlin:

So how do we just — like — sound out our new scene? What can we do to liven things up, especially as creative artists?

Well, the immediate impulse is going to be the ‘Frankenstein Mashup.’ Because that’s the native expression of network culture. The “Frankenstein mashup” is to just take elements of past, present, and future and just collide ‘em together, in sort of a collage. More or less semi-randomly, like a Surrealist “exquisite corpse.”

tw: yes