I have to cover the 20th century in 20 minutes and so apologise in advance for exaggerating some things and ignoring others. The following panel will correct me. WHY ARE WE HERE? I am a musician and so I ask simple questions. I should start with the simplest and most obvious question – why are we gathered here to discuss a period some thirty years ago? Why look back at a time that looked forward? This is the main theme of my little speech: looking forward and looking backward. Is it nostalgia? This was once a diagnosis of a fatal case of homesickness. Nowadays it implies dissatisfaction with time, not place. But as people who did not have this home created this event, nostalgia cannot be the complete answer. MYTHIC PAST It’s possible to yearn for a time that never existed – where everyone in the 50’s was a beat poet, everyone in the 60’s was a hippy and in the 70’s we were post punks. But my feeling is there is some truth in what we are discussing and so we need to dig deeper than just that. I’m showing Richard Hamilton’s work because it resonates with a few things I need to discuss. It was created for an exhibition called This is Tomorrow, where artists anticipated future society. It sits right at the front of the pop art period and thus anticipates much of ‘sample culture’. It’s funny and critical and that’s important too. When talking about the so-called ‘post punk’ era some of the words we use seem to be aligned with modernism – the ideas of progress and innovation particularly talk about things somehow being improved by scientific culture. MODERN The modern was a magic time when architects would dress as their own buildings - I must admit this image of William Van Allen as the Chrysler Building is an obsession of mine. A mantra. The modern looks forward to a world where science will bring everything a person could desire. Of course science also defines what is desired. If you seek something outside of that you will be disappointed and angry. Brave New World said all this long ago. Doubt about the humanity of modernism has been with us for a very long time and the debate flexes back and forward. The claim that the recent post modern period offers a ‘radical doubt’ is forgetful of many previous critics. It is not radical or new, simply successful. Let’s try take an overview of the modern, concentrating on music. I should follow Paul Johnson in placing Beethoven as a modern composer not only on his forcing the advance in piano-forte technology but also his role as flawed genius. His music required an expansion of technology that equalled the synthesisers of the 20th century - more notes, metal frames to pound, and the dynamics of 'piano-forte'. He is the first of our tortured geniuses in music mythology. Wagner is vastly important to 20th century music for allowing atonal composition (democratic pitch) and motifs that describe action and psychological states – the business of film music. He also brings the idea of 'total art' which is so important to this day. It’s current fashion to start 20th century music with Russolo and the Futurists – the dates are convenient for a start. The Futurist musicians themselves had a deep respect for Wagner. They were notable for excellent manifestos and indifferent results, more journalists than composers. The Barrons created film sound tracks from oscillators and tape and are best known for Forbidden Planet although they were not credited because 'it was not music'. Note the relationship between science fiction and progressive music. Raymond Scott could never find musicians that could play fast or precisely enough for his music. And so he invented machines that could do the job - music robots. He is best known for the Powerhouse theme used in Bugs Bunny. That's very modern. Here is Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop probably creating the theme from Doctor Who that very minute - again the link between science fiction and progressive music is important. We need to come back to it. Electronic Music Studios turned a room full of equipment into a sound suitcase - a surface that a musician could see as an instrument ... or a pet. EMS empowered people from Pink Floyd to SPK. Here's Morton Subotnick who made Silver Apples a 'serious' music piece that fit on the 2 sides of an LP record and brought rhythm into the electronic music realm - soon after the Silver Apples would bring it all the way over to popular music with drums and oscillators. And Kluster are possibly the best proof that progressive (experimental?) music existed before the 'post punk' - the sound that the UK press called 'krautrock' anticipated most of what we examine here today. The evidence is that music did progress, that new sounds were heard and that modernity played a part. But this progress doesn't belong to any era or any scene - the 'post punk' is arguably 'kraut' or 'prog-rock' interrupted and then re-inspired by the punk interval. In any case, innovation is a continuous flow and remains so today. In the 80's came a lack of nerve. Possibly the gap between the Futurists' powerful words and middling actions explains their fascination to later journalist ‘revolutionaries’. Zang Tumb Tumb inspired ZTT Records from which Paul Morely spoke a great deal about revolution but in the long run brought Frankie Goes To Hollywood to the world. It’s impossible to mention the band Art of Noise without digressing to the Fairlight CMI that made the sounds on their albums. The practical manifesto was that the CMI could reproduce any sound that the mind could desire – the reality was that it shipped with a library of preset sounds that ended up on everyone’s music. Mars Lasar laid a heavy hand in the 80’s soundscape. I would describe this homage (shown here as Peter Saville's record covers) as a kind of Cargo Cult Appropriation (building fake airstrips) – attempting to borrow the spirit of our Betters to validate the new. Like authors in the middle ages who pretended to quote Plato for their thoughts, the idea was to borrow respect from past. This alignment with previous revolutionaries is sincere – there’s little or no criticism expressed in the borrowing. On the sleeve of Kraftwerk's Man Machine album El Lissitzky is credited as ‘inspired by’. When Baker and Robie borrowed both melody and rhythm from Kraftwerk for Planet Rock the respectful homage was dropped - it was busness as war. Baker was well aware of the appeal that Kraftwerk held for his audience and wanted to 'steal fire' from this source undetected. Imagine if Kraftwerk had been engaged - a missed opportunity! Note the background of this slide - Planet Patrol was the American name of a UK children’s show with puppets - again the connection with science fiction / robots and so on. Electrofunk has consistently maintained that connection with science fiction – Daft Punk are the great grandchildren of Planet Patrol. The Vocoder is the church instrument of the 'Paleo Future' - the Sci Fi Future. THE PALEO FUTURE The Paleo Future is a cute term for the future we never had: flying cars, jet packs, robots and moon bases. We once believed in this future but lost faith sometime after the moon landing. Everyone watched Apollo 11. No one watched Apollo 17. Long before the ‘space age’ there was a popular desire to be airborne. The future is long standing. The lady in the space helmet and silver dress is not kitsch – she’s stylish and invites envy. We all would be that Housewife Astronaut. The Century 21 Expo in Seattle built a monorail and Space Needle that still operates. But a main function of world expositions is slum clearance. The expo is a spring cleaning of disagreeable humanity. For example, Brisbane 88 created the South Bank and tore down many old theatres and venues. In 1968 it was still possible for Stanley Kubrick to make 2001 A Space Odyssey that worshipped the notion of progress even up to the level of assisted evolution. HAL was the Frankenstein monster in this case. And for TV programs to feature purple wigs as part of the uniform on a (very soon to be built) moon base. As we've seen the relationship between experimental music and science fiction is symbiotic – Forbidden Planet and the Barons – Fred Judd and Planet Patrol – Doctor Who and just about everyone with a synthesiser. The programs needed the music and the musicians needed the context. Only a few years later George Lucas shifted the culture with THX 1138 – a major point here and in the later Star Wars films was that equipment shown could be a mix of new and antique and span decades of development. Not every building appears to been completed the same year. The future could have a past. Not long after Burgess & Kubrick had a point to make in Clockwork Orange about the near future and the end result of the modern. One thing to note in the film is the housing - the Projects that result from 'slum clearance'. A useful tale of the Paleo Future is Walt Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – an entire city designed by an ‘imagineer’. Disney thought that he had a grip of the future but EPCOT's ringed structure bears a passing resemblance to Plato’s Atlantis ... or Canberra. The idea devolved into Tomorrowland, which still attempted to look forward in exhibits such as Carousel of Progress. By 1997 the site was completely redesigned to resemble Flash Gordon or 'steam punk' futurism – the owners admitted that the future was no longer available in the desired format. PROBLEMS Modernity has many problems, some we can list here. It depends on ignorance of the past to simulate 'innovation'. It enforces uniformity. It requires that all things be measurable as metrics. And it is in denial of its own romanticism. UNIFORMITY To highlight uniformity - there is the idea of the worker suit - that scientifically designed costume that will increase efficiency and effectively turn the worker into a robot (Raymond Scott would approve). In utopian fiction all workers are defined by neatly coded uniforms. Sometimes an entire planet is made of identical aliens (they have no races or even classes). Some of us continued their affection for the modern up to recent times… singing about motorways... The majority of society lost interest. What were engineering marvels became over time a sneering joke. (We use the Hall of Industries for dance parties these days.) THE HUMAN LEAGUE When we finally arrive in our chosen era, we can look at the Human League who represent so much of what we discuss here – the drummerless synthesiser group that seems so futuristic is actually looking backwards equally amused and mocking of the recent past. Their slide show is filled with paleo futuristic images from the 1960’s and earlier arranged like Richard Hamilton’s work. It's pop art. Having become disappointed we rebelled roughly around the early 70's, not for the first time but more effectively than before. The international style took uniformity too far and it assumed that people were identical and had identical needs or it promised to enforce this identity on people - dehumanise them to keep the design tidy. The correction came through architecture where it was most obvious that buildings should work from people and their activities outwards to space that supports and expresses this humanity - leading to every building being a different form. DIFFERENCE This ‘post modern’ idea rippled out through society in a thousand different ways. There isn’t time to mention all of this apart to give the example of Deleuze who described difference as continuous, not imposed as taxonomy but as a generative force. Deleuze was full of jokes including describing his examination of other philosophers as buggering them from behind to engender mutant children. His writings are all generous and playful. It’s very important to note he describes his work as metaphysics. But the net result of this revolution has been debatable. Before we saw the example of the Futurists and ZTT. Now we have Mille Plateaux, which took his title and even the imprint of the publisher and again adopted them with some slight of hand for a collection of similar sounds. When you consider that the publisher derived from the French underground, their logo being used by a German label is particularly ... interesting. Despite the revolutions to and fro we continue to look backwards for authority and approval. Nothing has changed except we have a whole new layer of language that marginalises creativity. Rather than record an album we 'examine the idea of recording an album'. We review, revise, we analyse, we do everything through safety glass and avoid responsibility for the creative act as if it were pornographic. Art has fallen into a passive language that once typified the physical sciences. I am disturbed by the fear implied by this kind of language. I hear people denying that they do anything. They are not making music, it’s non notational, it’s random, it’s all about process. This fear also means keeping to a comfort zone where need approval from the past while hiding behind fake irony. MORE PROBLEMS Revolutions have a well-known cycle of bringing change and then ossifying into a new set of beliefs. Over the last 40 years we’ve reached a state where we have somehow combined the excesses of modernity with the excuses of post modernity.
Say what you like about the moderns - they at least made great chairs. CRITICAL / SINCERE We have surely reached maturity where a balance between naive sincere creativity and cynical criticism can be synthesised to provide the best aspects - rather than the worst of each. John Olsen is a example of what I mean. A SMALL MANIFESTO
Ecology - If we only reflect what has been and don’t seek to add more then is this really recycling or are we just pumping culture out of the past until we run out?
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