Some of what “newness” provided is still provided through the latest increments in digital technology – new games, new apps, new internet stuff. My son, who is 13, is buzzed up on this and is chasing wanting the latest thing in terms of games, computers, social media, netstuff. But I don’t know if the category of the new or of “progress’ in the cultural-artistic-political senses means anything to him: the idea that things get better. And I know that the science fiction concept that ruled my teenage years—outer space, the very idea of the 21st Century—mean nothing to him.
I can’t think of many really new things in music. Some of the bass sounds in dubstep—the wobble, brostep, Skrillex end of it—seem pretty extreme, if not completely new then a development along on an axis of intensification from things being done in the Nineties. And similarly the use of AutoTune and “vocal science” effect, while building on Nineties techniques, seems to be a growth area—it seems to be a way that musicians indicate contemporaneity and “this is now”. You get that across the board from mainstream pop and rap to underground and experimental music—an interest in vocal weirdness, the denatured and posthuman voice.
From 2013, Andrzej Marzec interviews Simon Reynolds for Czas Kultury ; a download is available on Academia.edu.
The League of Gentlemen:
The League of Gentlemen:
2 comments:
It all goes a bit "Sailor's Tale" in places, doesn't it. Always a good thing.
Reynolds wrote a book about glam rock, which I must read.
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