Rip it up and start again!

[imomus]

Over the last month or so I've been reading Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-84 (thanks, Suzy, for the advance copy!). I've just been dipping in, reading a chapter here and a chapter there. This is the music and the era of my pop induction, my pop indoctrination, so of course I'm interested. But I have the strange impression that Simon's book—exhaustively researched, wise in its conclusions—"reads itself". It doesn't demand cognition as much as recognition. "Ah yes, I remember them! And yes, they did go downhill after that record!" I have the impression that everything here is redundant information, stuff I read in the NME years ago.

But the film is a saddening bore, for I wrote it ten times or more
It's about to be writ again, as I ask you to focus on
Sailors, fighting in the dancehall...

I know this story too well, partly because (as in the chapter on Postcard Records and the Scottish scene) it's my story. The music of 1978-84 (and writings about it) is the Old Testament of my music career, full of Deuteronomy-like proscriptions, commandments, specifications, family trees, lore and law. My reservation about Simon's book is not to do with its treatment of that now-distant period, but the place it occupies in the landscape of now. It's part of the museumization of pop music. I see it heralding endless post-punk articles in Mojo magazine, or filling the Other Music newsletter with ever-longer lists of re-releases on (God bless 'em!) LTM. "Rip it up and start again" is a great description of the attitude behind the music Simon's dealing with, but it certainly isn't a good slogan for the effect the book will have on today's music scene. "Frame it and let's live through the whole bloody thing again" would be more accurate. And that's exactly the problem with pop music now: we're crushed under the weight of the past, and of our excessive respect for it. Pop music used to be an ugly, messy, unfinished place with lots of space for growth (a kind of Berlin), now it's all been cleaned up, it's tidy, it's documented, it's the Louvre, it's Paris, it feels finished.

As a musician I don't feel that, of course. But I couldn't do what Simon does: I couldn't write about pop music. My own "rip it up and start again" gesture in the past year has been to start writing about design, a field I don't know that much about, to be honest. But it's interesting for me for that very reason. I don't immediately know how I feel about any given designer's work (and I've just spent the morning interviewing a designer I'd never previously heard of, Alex Rich in Tokyo, for ID magazine in New York). When I read articles about design I don't immediately recognize where the political faultlines are running: I don't immediately think "Oh, this is a neo-functionalist position like the one X took in his 1986 book..." or "This guy's an interventionst like Y..." But above all I don't feel like design is so paralysed by the glories of its past that it's stuck in retro re-issue mode, issuing endless peans to "classic" designers, publishing magazines that deal only with the design of past decades. It may just be my unfamiliarity with the subject that makes me say this (and this might relate to my reluctance to learn Japanese: I like being baffled, because it stops me being bored) but in design, everything feels like it's still to play for. Ripping up restarts daily.

Comments

Designer vs Musician

[(Anonymous)]

I lived through that period too (being around the same age as Momus). I've been meaning to order the book, but this entry has made me realise that I am probably buying the book for reasons of the comfort of recognition and nostalgia. I'll buy a new CD instead.

"Rip it up and start again" in graphics is pretty much the mantra of a designer and design shamelessly borrows from the past like pop music. However, unlike Art it has less of the analytical pigeon-holing to find descriptive 'isms' ( although it can share the posturing). It's perhaps more ephemeral and throw-away then pop music; partly due to it's primary function of servicing a product and its maker's ego is sublimated to that end. Pop music does the opposite. Any design where an individual's persona or style comes through is in the minority. It the photographers that are the stars.

Often if a particular movement can be discerned it is a 'sign' of the of the times. If an individual does something distinctive ( often a result of meme-splicing) then that new style gets absorbed and it becomes fashionable and pervasive. Like music a lot of this reconstruction is driven by technology, so as an example we have lo-fi techniques being digitally manipulated in hi-tech ( glitch design ? ). I guess for Nick design is refreshing because the samples, filtering and construction of the work is less apparent. This is perhaps why as a non-musician my ignorance of how music is designed is a kind of bliss.

Tinkering with Apple software like Garageband does kind of diminish things when one understands a little of how things go together. However I have to admit that the hidden musician inside me could get quite addicted to making music this way and is envious of teenagers who have these tools at their disposal. Post-punk made me buy a guitar and want to be in a band at art school in '81 but I soon realised I didn't have the desire to physically learn three chords and preferred the experimental sounds it made a lot more and I was more into the romantic idea of being in a band. So Garageband is exciting to me because it is enabling and the learning curve less steep than a real instrument. The cottage industry based around it is growing and in the same way that the word processor turned everyone into print studio, now the recording studio is in the public domain and tacky results are prevalent. Yet I am sure there will be some people who will produce great things who might never have done so otherwise. So Nick, how do you view this phenomenon as a musician ? ( as I don't recall any discussion from you on the subject). Sorry for the long post.

Richard