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imomus
It's autumn 2007. We should be getting the gist, by now, of what the style of this decade -- what the Lyon biennale is calling "a decade that has not yet been named" -- has been all about. I tend to cotton onto decades around about the eighth year. If you'll allow me to jump in a couple of months early, I'll give you my barometric reading of the noughties now. I think this decade has essentially been about the dialectic between guilt and exuberance. The polarities flicker, complementing and contradicting each other.Basically, this flicker thing is the result of a debate we're having with ourselves about consumerism and responsibility: should we try to act responsibly and pioneer an ethical consumerism of "controlled shrinkage", or should we fiddle while Rome burns -- grabbing other people's oilfields and melting the poles in the process? Should we go the way of recycling, fair trade and organic ingredients, or the way of brash colours and drugs and hedonistic oblivion? The answer, so far this decade, is "both". Back in April I laid the style dialectic out in a piece called A conversation between Apollo and Dionysus which put the Bape-like jackets of CassettePlaya next to the controlled graphic design of magazines like Monocle and Fantastic Man.
The sort of plain designs covered in Fukasawa and Morrison's Super Normal book have their origins in the late 80s, when everything from Mac computers to Coke got rebranded as "Classic" -- the unique selling point being a fetishized reversion to a "timeless" plain vanilla form of things, an ethical investment in solid, sensible practicality. This Apollonian-Vanilla "return to simplicity and utility" (super-protestant, eco-conservative, but also a kind of ancestor worship) ties in with consumer guilt about excess -- it's the anorexic antithesis to consumerist bulimia. It reduces, slims down, strips away. It's like someone with a headache who can't stand too much noise. To the extent that guilt is very much present in our unnamed decade, Apollo-Vanilla moralism (think of Katherine Hamnett) still speaks to us. But the yin to its yang is the style being described variously as Nu-Rave or The New Ugly. For convenience, let's call it Ugly Nu-Rave.
Ugly Nu-Rave is all about brashness. It draws inspiration not from guilty, conservative 80s "classic vanilla" culture but from the acidic club culture of the early 90s. It's unapologetically ugly; beauty is just yesterday's brash energy turned tame, formulaic, canonical and predictable. If organic, ethical, conservative Apollo-Vanilla is the anti-folk movement, Ugly Nu-Rave launches, this decade, with Electroclash -- Fischerspooner, Chicks on Speed, Exchpoptrue. It's a party style, not a proddy style. It's all about embracing energy and colour, rejecting guilt. It revives the drugs-and-hedonism of early 90s acid house club culture. Of course, this can be combined with ecological awareness -- think of Paris collective Andrea Crews, who party hard but make a virtue of recycling secondhand clothes and working closely with charities like Emmaus. So Ugly Nu-Rave works well with Apollo-Vanilla.
Take graphic design. If the Apollo-Vanilla look of Monocle and Fantastic Man is rooted in Purple magazine's late-90s "return to order" (Times type and sensible layouts!), Ugly Nu-Rave worships a different ancestor in the same era: David Carson's cluttered, exuberant Raygun style. In August, Creative Review ran a feature on The New Ugly which nested the basic dialectic in the question: "Stretched type, day-glo colours and a flagrant disregard for the rules: are we witnessing a knee-jerk reaction to the slick sameness of so much design or a genuine cultural shift?"
Creative Review focuses on the controversially stretched type Mike Meiré made for his redesign of 032c magazine recently, and Meiré is an interesting case, because his Brand Eins design, earlier in the decade, very much took the tidy Times route -- he seems to have switched from Apollo-Vanilla to Ugly Nu-Rave out of sheer boredom. But if I'm right that this isn't so much an opposition as a dialectic (and-and rather than either-or), well, why not go from one to the other and back again? I'd say some of the more interesting of today's bands (Thieves Like Us, Battles, Hot Chip) are both "stretching type" and being neo-classicist. Think of the "novelty" vocals in Battles' Atlas, or think of Bjork's double whammy -- her Nu-Rave sleeve for "Volta" and her eco theme in first single "Earth Intruders".Another example of a nice balance between Apollo-Vanilla and Ugly Nu-Rave (between responsibility and brashness) is my current favourite fashion blog, Merry Daily. Tokyo Bopper, where these bloggers work, is a shoe and fashion store in Harajuku selling hiking boots with brightly-coloured laces. They're fascinated by "classic" camping and hiking designs like rucksacks, or folk-trad designs like tartan. There's clearly a conservative-conservational, ethical and ecological message in that, but they want to be brash and colourful too -- you see that in the high-contrast colours, the laces, and in the graphic design on their style sample books; no Muji-style plain white backgrounds here! The too-conservative, ethical and ecological themes of Apollo-Vanilla are balanced by Ugly Nu-Rave's redeeming transformative power. As artist Thomas Hirschhorn puts it: "Energy, yes! Quality, no!"
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Date: 2007-09-28 08:44 am (UTC)http://www.katharinehamnett.com/Biography
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Date: 2007-09-28 08:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:17 am (UTC)I keep meaning to write a post about how no one makes representations of the future any more (while there were tons in the seventies), but it involves research, and I'm supposed to be at work.
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Date: 2007-09-28 05:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:22 am (UTC)oh sry I thought this was Blue States Lose!
Date: 2007-09-28 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:50 am (UTC)Marxy
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Date: 2007-09-28 09:56 am (UTC)are dungarees back yet?
Date: 2007-09-28 01:04 pm (UTC)As soon as everyone drops black I start striding out with pride.
Why follow?
In a league table of cultural influences, where IS fashion?
On a tangent I watched the Captain Beefheart Letterman interviews on Youtube last night.
Old Don reminded me of how much colour meant to his music in his description of Ice Cream For Crow. As he describes you know the moon at night and the ice cream for, you know ..crow, throwing in some jibes about Ray Gun and his jelliebeans ans asks Letterman, "Yeah?" and Letterman says, "Yeah!" and Beefheart looks, smirks and says "Yeah?!"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 02:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 02:04 pm (UTC)Nice high rising terminal (http://imomus.livejournal.com/190260.html) there!
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Date: 2007-09-28 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 03:47 pm (UTC)I think the answer to that depends on what the meaning of the word "isn't" isn't.
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Date: 2007-09-28 04:43 pm (UTC)It's the old "Hey, where are all the flying cars?" mentality. We're waiting for the future around which we had prepared all of our emerging trends. That's why we're standing around confused right now. The future hasn't caught up with our concepts. The future, in other words, is a slow piece of shit.
-Max
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Date: 2007-09-28 04:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-09-28 05:27 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 06:18 pm (UTC)As for peace signs, pay a visit to my old high school and there will be dozens of Beatles loving hippies obsessed with "free hugs" and throwing the peace sign any chance they get.
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Date: 2007-09-28 05:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-09-28 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 06:36 pm (UTC)2. I like the Zeroes, it sounds a New York punk band, but people find it negative! (No imagination). Noughties is too 'naughty nineties'. Soon into early Teenies (not in a sexual sense, of course), and we'll look back and say 'Who are we kidding, we just sat at laptops'.
3. I don't know about your photos at all. The Zeroes culture in the UK has been monochrome, the death of trainers (hurrah), running eyeshadow, no razors. I quite liked it, the colour=cheerfulness thing is for art students who switch to graphics. That is their pole position. Mine=the glum should sort it out, not blame culture. It's not responsible for you, not your morality guide, and hasn't been since De Profundis, or was it de Sade..
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:10 pm (UTC)i'm not too convinced about these examples. isn't this basically just say Wild & Lethal Trash vs. purple mag - as 90s stuff as you get save the internet revolution. if anything to me the 0s have been about the further 'molecularization' of already chopped-up 90s things, increased non-commitment etc on one end , conglomeration of capital and stuff at the other. very little formal changes as such , maybe a couple of endearingly naive attempts neo-hippy, emo-rock etc
throw away your books go out into the streets!
Date: 2007-09-28 09:47 pm (UTC)snap from the wonderful streetswear website DROP
http://www.dropsnap.jp/index.html
Re: throw away your books go out into the streets!
Date: 2007-09-29 01:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-28 09:58 pm (UTC)Who knew that the 2000s would be like it was in 1999, when everybody thought that the future would be austere, Warp Records-ish glitchy music coupled with a synthesis of fragile illustrative designs and sterile Designer's Republic typography?
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Date: 2007-09-28 11:39 pm (UTC)Personally I really like the plain styles with crazy colors and patterns. For too long I have not understood which patterns and colors match with what, and so I've been frightened of messing it up (not sarcasm). But these days it is nice; the guidelines for acceptable fashion have relaxed. When I ask friends whether it's okay that my shoes are lighter than my pants, or that I'm wearing an argyle sweater over a plaid shirt, they just tell me who cares, nobody cares, and in fact, people like it when you mess up like that. Great!
Lately, however, my ambition is to make popular neo-Trachtian wares. It's basically the equivalent of US country western wear, except a lot cooler. I'm just having trouble getting started with it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 01:07 am (UTC)I think the guidelines should tighten up a bit. Otherwise, it's just a formless soup, and that isn't very interesting. It's the tension that is generated by toying with the parameters that's fun. Blurt is just a bore.
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From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 01:50 am (UTC)It's been such a top-down, marketing exec driven movement that to me it doesn't feel like any kind-of energy. It's like somebody following the 20-year retro rule was standing around with a calender and said, "all right, 1987 was 20 years ago - start up the TR-808!", and then some guy pulls a huge rusted-out lever the thing starts shaking violently squelches out dust after a decades long hiatus.
Anyway. Here in New York City, that style is so ... I don't know, Urban Outfitters. I don't have any issue with that store in particular, but it's been so ubiquitous I want to gouge my eyes out. It's like seeing girls from Jersey or Queens strutting around clad head-to-toe in H&M.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 04:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 01:52 am (UTC)Or else everything will explode and we'll never live to see it.
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Date: 2007-09-29 08:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 02:14 pm (UTC)One thing I've noticed is an axis running from, on one side, a pastoral/folk revival (indie-pop kids really getting into Dylan and the Fairport Convention, hipsters with rustic-looking beards, and music like the folk revivalism of Beirut, the pastoral prog-pop of The Arcade Fire, "new hippies" like Devendra Banhart and the organic influences in the likes of Animal Collective and Hot Chip), and on the other side, a sort of atomised, abrasive, fuck-you urbanity, fuelled by cocaine and fashion, in the form of electropunk, electroclash, punk house, Shoreditch/Williamsburg hipster culture, VICE Magazine, nihilistic stances and ironic offensiveness. Your Apollo-Vanilla/Ugly Nu-Rave axis sounds like an aesthetic analogue of this.
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Date: 2007-09-29 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-01 01:13 am (UTC)even radiohead is doing it with their new album packaging...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 07:53 pm (UTC)