The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Police, Van Halen, (VAN HALEN?? Jeez, I CAN NOT find my knees), the Spice Girls…and now Sly Stone. Pick your flavour, this summer’s comeback acts are as numerous as You Tube messageboard comments proclaiming Courtney Love guilty of the murder of Kurt Cobain – and just as offensive. Come backs are good for those who choose to conduct them, but they are bad for everyone else. Bad – because they slow culture down. We need new blood, new ideas, ideas that are a response to the present, not a reflection on the past.
Francis Bacon said, (incongrouous as it may seem in light of my last statement, but you’re just going to have to get over it, because this isn’t an abject reference, it is an insight into the mind of a true visionary…): ‘There is no sentiment in me – none – sentiment is for the dead.’ Bacon could not bear nostalgia – he thought it pointless. Not the gentle, Robert Frost kind, but the contrived retrospection that glorifies the past, simply because it is the past. This kind of nostalgia turns one’s head to mush, makes you lazy.
Take nostalgia in the form of clip-shows for instance. The clip-show is junk-food telly, sure, but why is this type of programme so popular right now? Well, probably because clip shows are so cheap to make, but apart from that, they have the same effect as a couple of Nurofen – they dull the pain, they numb you. They take you back to a soft and fluffy time, (a media-saturated childhood, spent in front of MTV, perhaps), when everything was simpler. Retrospection is a funny thing, of course, because it makes us believe that back in the day, children’s programmes were funnier, pop music was catchier, adverts were more… iconic…hmmmm.
The real purpose of those shows is to ease fin-de-siecle anxiety. Here we are in a new century and everything is the same as it was in the last. We feel that the advent of a new century should bring change, and we know that technological watersheds such as the invention of the internet are significant to change, but we can’t yet muster the courage to oust our outmoded ideas. We romanticise them instead. At the turn of last century, in the early years of industrialization, while society was processing fundamental change, there was stagnant period where things appeared not to be moving forward. Visionaries such as Picasso were pushing the boundaries of painting, but he was at the extreme fringes of society. More towards the centre the ‘search for a new style’ had – thrown up – literally – Beaux-arts, the aesthetic over-load movement, (Just imagine Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen …everywhere). Today, at the turn of this century, clip shows distract you from progress and land you in a similarly terrifying predicament.
Everyone knows what an ice-breaker it is in the pub when someone starts a conversation about He-Man, and the beaming jubilation one feels when he or she triumphantly recalls that He-Man’s cat, before it magically turned into Battlecat was named…Cringer! It is an affirmation of one’s existence – that giddy rush when you realise – ‘It was ages ago, but I WAS there…’ We get comfort from it, but the truth is that it is nonsense. Having a longer memory for the insignificant minutiae of popular culture than that of your immediate company does not make you a wit. Justin Lee Collins has built a career on this false premise. That’s why I hate him. This trend has turned us all into gibbering verbally incontinent bores, intellectual geriatrics. You should only tell stories when you’ve done enough stuff to warrant the telling, recounting real-life experience, not episodes of Grange Hill.
For any artist, it’s really frustrating. Look at fashion, music, art and what so you see? The recycling of ideas. I went to college at the height of what theorists were calling ‘a period of Uncertainty’ in art. People were starting, well, not starting – the concept had been kicking around since the late 60’s, Guy Debord and Society of The Spectacle, Barthes proclaiming the Death of the Subject, Baudrillard in the 80’s, Simulacra and Simulation, Paul Virilio in the 90’s, ‘Art and Fear’ – curmudgeonly prophet of doom and sworn enemy of modern art – yeah art college was a right barrel of laffs post the YBAs – having no choice but to arbitrarily lump all these guys together, suffice to say the general outlook was overwhelmingly negative for the budding young artist, struggling to make work that mattered in the year 2004. Art was on a massive downer.
Anyway, the general opinion was that there was no such thing as a truly new idea – we’d taken the model of Western Capitalism as far as it could go in terms of creating art and music and we had thus descended into a period of decadence where all we did was self-indulgently rake over the past. Clip-shows and New Rave are manifestations of this theory. A nineties revival? How utterly predictable…came after the 80s revival, right?
The only solution, according to subversive thinkers such as Jean Fisher and Michel de Certeau, is to change your ideology – wipe the slate clean and start again – it’s not impossible, but it’s not an immediate solution – we can’t just forget all that tv we watched. So we’re a bunch of decadents. Think the last days of the Roman Empire, shifting from a pagan to a Christian belief system. Think Constantine finding God in Nova Roma, (like Olda Roma, but with more leg-room and added sat-nav), and the idea of one God gradually being disseminated throughout the Empire. A period of confusion crystallizes in the interim lasting approximately 100 years… One hundred years with no dominant culture…We eventually arrive at the Crusades and The Dark Ages. (Some may lament this change and question it’s merit as a development. Nothing illustrates the difference more acutely than the fact that under the Romans the world had public toilets, when Christianity took the reigns, we actually regressed to pooping in the streets).
Back to now. So what do we do? Ironically a template already exists in the annals of history, and again, I ask you would indulge me. Although the axiom would appear to be, ‘I reference, therefore I am’, there is no call for those passionate about it to cease reading the books and listening to the music of the past; it’s just that we don’t need to bear the responsibility of carrying this vast catalogue of ideas around with us as if everything new that we do owes something to it.
Before Sly Stone was considering a comeback via Vanity Fair, he made a record at the end of the 1960s called ‘There’s a Riot Goin On’. It was a response to the post-sixties hangover that was affecting every self-defined ‘individual’ from John Lennon down. Sly had intended to make a celebratory record, one that proclaimed the revolution had been a total success. But he couldn’t. Drugs casualties, race riots, social injustice, political corruption, mass murder, assassination; these were the variables he had to work with. Collectively, amongst the counter-culture there was an anxiety, an uncertainty – not dissimilar to the one we face now. There was a faceless difficulty that was palpable, but had no name. Everyone felt this, but no one could see a solution. What Sly Stone did in songs Family Affair and Africa Talks to You The Asphalt Jungle, and what we need some brilliant artist to do now – is sum this feeling up, dignify it, ratify it, describe it and DEFINE THESE TIMES in which we live as a period in their own right, not a post-script to some era gone by. Then we can move on. You can only make work out of the tools that you have, not the tools you think you should have, or as Joe Strummer put in The Future is Unwritten: ‘Look outside your window and tell it like it is.’ What great artist among us is going to make the record, write the novel, or create the piece of visual art that will fulfil this purpose for our culture now? The biggest quest for artists today is to come to this very realisation and then, through struggle, vision and sheer passion, find a way to pass the message on. I tell you this, when I’m not thinking about boys or where to acquire my next pair of large, black, horn-rimmed spectacles, this is what I’m thinking about. I have set myself the challenge of making this work. ‘There’s a Riot…’ is a brilliant record, by the way. If you don’t already own it, you should buy it.
But skip the comeback.