I thought nostalgia was defeated. This is the part of the movie trailer where the camera rises up from darkness, filming a busy sidewalk and playing it back in fast forward. I really thought we’d gotten over it. Daft Punk’s album came and went, now most known for the backing song of that thing Colbert did instead of an artistic statement of any value. That was the monster suddenly coming back to life for one last swipe before it really died, I thought. Camera passes through the concrete, somehow ending up exactly in a lit, large sewer. A shadow grows on the center framed wall. Sting, followed by sudden cut to black.
I was wrong.
If we are doomed to have our ears filled with the echoes of what came before then of course an endless supply of monsters will rise up like Roger Corman films to terrorize and entertain, their own little thrashes echoing forwards to some other hopelessly literal interpreter in the future. Several precise throwback records have emerged in the time between the release of RAM and now. Willis Earl Beal’s city soul, King Krule’s dry British variant, Darkside’s decomposing 70s radio pop, Janelle Monae’s maximalist showcase, Man Man and Islands metamorphosing into doo wop acts, on and on like this. It’s enough to make a youtube commenter claim Daft Punk saw this future coming.
Worse yet, I like most (Man Man sadly excluded) of those records! I listen to King Krule quite often, and I’ve had Darkside’s Paper Trails stuck in my head for a few weeks now. My inability to decry their sounds leads to this conflict. I am no great fan of nostalgia as a driving impulse in music, but I enjoy some albums that definitely trade in the ideas and tones explored by acts and artists that came before. Adding complication is my affinity to vaporwave, which as a form trades largely in misremembered pasts1. I suppose the difference in their case is a deliberate mistake of the process but that implies there is either no intent to the revivalists or that their intent is sure to end in failure, which is obviously not true. This issue grows further complicated when adding in things like the Beast Coast throwback movement and the still growing garage rock sequel from California. Both of those scenes have art that speaks to where I am and who I am right now.
The question must change now that I cannot roundly condemn nostalgia as a sound. So I choose to ask this: Am I confusing these returning sounds for something else?
What are “these returning sounds?” Maybe this is the question that Daft Punk has been able to answer best this year as the only clear advantage of their approach is the clarity of the sound. Those songs, while dull, are razor sharp in recording and production. It is not so easy to pin these similarities onto “this music sounds more good.” Initially I rejected that thought because it implies that sounding good was a thing of the past and also that what we had been living through is ugly sounding songs. The glimmering sound of the most successful pop music stands in contrast to that as cleanly made products carrying so very little of the sound that came from more than a five years ago.
Fortunately, I received indirect clarity from Kanye West. I’d returned to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in the wake of the detestable Yeezus, so try and obtain some kind of understanding. That album has not aged particularly well to my ears. What sounded expansive and deep (production only) ended up sounding a lot more simplified and uninteresting. While a lot has changed in the time between I had one more line of research and inquiry: the actual waveforms of the songs. I know what I’m looking at when I do that now that I’m three albums deep into my own music and have finished my first actual try at mastering a record. The songs on MBDTF have an artificial dynamic sense, keeping a similar overall volume level through intense compression. Instead of a song getting quieter for effect, it just becomes less complicated. This is a telltale sign of the Loudness Wars that people vaguely, occasionally reference. This revisit of MBDTF helped me understand what this production philosophy is, and now helps me move closer to answering the question in question.
“These returning sounds” are indeed the resurgence of something cleaner and less overproduced. This does little to ease my discomfort, though. Nothing about my unease with the sound changes with this revelation. I return to a David Byrne quote I often used to explain why I tend to not mess with heavily produced music: “The better the singer’s voice is, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.” Adapted, the more “perfected” a song sounds the harder time I have suspending my critical mind. That sound used to be the ringing bell to alert my ears that what I was listening to could be industrial fabrication2.
While that perspective is born from confused teenage years, it’s actually a close miss to the answer of this question. The reason for my stigmatizing of older sounds is because of the looming presence of the music industry, and the distrust that arises from that grouping. When I didn’t know any better, I just assumed it was the idea to react against “the man” at all costs without realizing that the structure of power I was trying to build this wall against was going to change strategies. The sounds of those bygone eras are the sound of the music industry then. A quick look at Billboard’s Hot 100 shows how relevant those styles are to the production end of this system: Lots of compressed sound, lots of soaring choruses, a fair bit of influence from EDM’s success, little in common with anything earlier than the middle 2000s. Those prior forms have been abandoned by the production line for the newer, sleeker tunes that will sell in this incredibly uncertain environment. The hardware demands change, as a result. New tech is needed to make these new sounds, and the old tech is circulated into the market at cost, to be used by comparatively fringe artists and people that can make better use of this set of tools rendered no longer relevant by the progress of time.
The answer.
The return of these styles and tone palettes are made possible by the nature of technology. I’ve been confusing their return as some larger directive. The reality seems to be it’s an option being capitalized upon by the ever-leveling playing field of hardware costs in the industry. The clean sound can now imply something else now that it’s no longer the gears in the highest end machinery. For an obvious example, Janelle Monae’s maximalist perspective that incorporates so many forms of black-made popular music that have similarly been left behind by the system’s progression. She uses the perception of their irrelevance to create an Other world for her drama to take place in.
For less obvious examples, first is Willis Earl Beal’s patchwork R&B and soul revival. In its heyday it was music written to help people find a way through. Beal uses it the same, but the conviction in his voice is a mantra in itself. His existence is lean both by choice and by circumstance, and he is singing to try and guide himself as much as anyone who would hear his song and follow. King Krule’s old soul perspective treats the Steely Dan jazz-rock style similarly, a sound used to help explore a vague, mainstreamless time. As a counterpoint, Darkside’s Dan-isms are used to express a similar sentiment of structural and situational embrace in line with the actual source. They struggle less with the search of belonging because they feel they do, and so they turn their attention to making the most of their situation.
I now feel it’s impossible to hold the revival of any form against music in any ethical manner. Certainly when a band’s PR mentions they’re inspired by Fleetwood Mac I’m less likely to check in with what they’ve done, but that’s only relevant to my personal aesthetic taste and not to any larger part of the situation. When the act of revival is treated as spectacle, then it begins to qualify as a work more deserving of suspicion3.
1Pasts to imply different sections of history being lifted out and reconstructed. Very few people in this genre are working with the same chunk of period and locale in their sounds.
2Yes, I understand many people were capable of looking past that for the songs on their own.
3Good that I said that on the day that Reflektor leaked. It’s like I’ve gotten a head start on yelling at more things people like. I swear I didn’t schedule this intentionally, by the way. I forgot the record was even coming out until I entered the final stretch this week.
Fermata over Whole Rest 