Museum of Me
Aug. 24th, 2004 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThere's a sort of time travel you do in the doldrums of summer. You're back at your family home, in your old room. It's like a Museum of You, stuffed with old cassette tapes, magazines, things you haven't looked at or listened to for years. But who is the 'You' the Museum is organised around? It isn't the You you are now. It's more like a distant relation, younger, more open, more conformist, more confused. The place you go to when you flip open an old magazine or snap in an ancient tape is simultaneously familiar and strange, you and not you; a lost continent, a snapshot of a vanished society, a missing person. The You in it is an individual, yet also a mere repository for contemporaneous memes. Your personality suddenly looks less personal, less voluntary, more collective, more brainwashed. It makes you anxious.
You pull out a magazine, listen to a tape. You're transported to nineteen ninety something. Or perhaps you came here by a different route. You were on holiday in some remote place, there was no TV, just a stack of dusty old magazines, a drawer of old tapes of radio shows. Bored and ever-so-slightly morbid, you entered the world of the media ephemera of the recent past. Before long you got lost, engrossed and grossed out by some dead year, its parallel world of stars, songs, styles. Luscious Jackson, Money Mark, St Etienne, Army of Lovers! You'd forgotten all about them! They mean so little now, yet seemed important at the time.
A whole range of queasy feelings opens up. What is style? How come what we thought was beautiful and elegant back then looks lame, tame, baggy, silly now? Why do the tropes we most admired then (that shuffling Soul II Soul beat that seemed like such a step forward from the 'telegraph pole' snare drum sound of the 80s) sound the most hackneyed now? And is there any place to hide from the built-in obsolescence, any guarantee of intemporality? If you really were transported back through time to 1991, you'd be condemned to live it all again, meme by meme. It would be useless to have 'the taste of the future'. You'd be out of kilter. People wouldn't listen, wouldn't be ready. They'd find you ugly, perverse. There's no inherent superiority to the styles we have now. We've simply agreed to be on the same page as each other. This narrative isn't going anywhere, it isn't building up to anything or progressing. It's a shaggy dog story. Perhaps it's chasing its tail, perhaps just feebly wagging it.
But what about the emotions you invested in this stuff, the money you spent on records and clothes now fit only for charity shops? Did you waste your money and your time? Was it a terrible delusion? Have you 'learned your lesson'? Will the stuff you're into now look as silly, as dated, as knee-jerk trendy, in ten years' time? And in twenty, will you have forgotten it all too? Or will you be stuck in a karmic hamster wheel of eternal, inevitable revivals?
This is the fascinated, anxious state of mind I find myself in, thanks to Cornelius and Olive and the fact that I'm staying in the room of an Osaka Olive-shojo girl.
An Olive-shojo is a girl who buys Japanese girls' style magazine Olive. Started in the mid-80s and now defunct, Olive was a rather refined teen fashion magazine featuring willowy fresh-faced European models and a rather delicate, austere aesthetic. Because the kind of girls who read Olive are also the kind of girls who populate a certain kind of 'quality' cafe, you'll often find back issues in such places, on a shelf below the art books.
Sensitive boys -- the kind who read French novels, watch Godard films, and have at some point liked Cornelius -- go for Olive-Shojo girls. The Olive-shojo I'm currently staying with has copies of Olive going back to 1992. (For 80s Olive, we just have to walk a short distance to the Rompoo Cafe, which has a collection going back to 1985.) She also has tapes of Cornelius' radio show from the mid-90s. We've been listening to them as we drive around Kansai, and my head is getting fucked up. What year is it?
Things got even more confusing when one of the tapes (I think it was the New Wave special that seemed to consist of Keigo playing nothing but B-52s tracks, broadcast in about 1995 on Osaka's FM 802) ended and there on real-time 2004 radio came... Keigo Oyamada, doing a one-off one-hour show of his recent remixes and record picks for NHK Radio.
Just as a copy of Olive magazine from 1985 and a copy of Olive from 2004 have something in common, despite grotesque differences in style (1985 is all baggy pierrot outfits, glazed foundation, stripey post-modernist aviator graphics garments, fake crests, models with high-lit big hair...), so Cornelius in 1995 and Cornelius now have a lot in common. Like Olive, Cornelius is both trendy, bobbing about like a cork in the tide of current memes, and sui generis, eternally wedded to his own idea of what style is all about.
The 2004 Cornelius show (I'll post a playlist in Comments) sounded, if anything, more sui generis than the 1995 show. In 1995 Cornelius is a happy, giggly, bubblegum-didactic star, centre of the Shibuya-kei phenomenon. He discusses the records with a female music journalist, pointing out the 'conceptual' elements in one, another's 'psychedelic drumming', and you imagine 90s magazines like H and Barf Out holding the front page. 'Quick, an issue about psychedelic drumming! Who can get us shots of the sleeves?' There's a sense of someone delighting in, and cataloguing, every style of music ever created (another 1995 show consists entirely of novelty records which mention monkeys). Cornelius now, though, sounds like a slightly lonely tensai, a producer genius living on his own meticulous, increasingly peaceful island.
The 2004 show begins with a very impressive track called 'Utopies' which can only be called 'pointilliste'. Starting with a clipped rhythm of coloured dots of sound, each clearly distinct in the mix -- a snare, a layered vocal, a slap bass hit -- it builds into a horribly proficient piece of Fairlight jazz-funk before seguewaying into Scritti Politti's 'Wood Beez'. Keigo's voice no longer guides us through the tracks -- he has become something more abstract, a brand, an instantly-recognisable curatorial sensibility. Announcements are made by the elderly, unctuous voice actor heard on Pizzicato 5's 'Happy End Of The World', an NHK continuity announcer of impeccable 1950s enunciation who happens, by a weird and humourous co-incidence, also to be called Keigo Oyamada.
One striking difference between Cornelius in 1995 and Cornelius in 2004 is that then he seemed to be opening a window on every type of music in the world and refreshing the landscape of pop music in the process. Now, though, there's something oddly airless in his show. It's an island untouched by any breezes but his own. Everything he plays fits into the ambience of his 'Point' album. Here's an extension of the ambient nature sounds, here's a computer rock workout, and there are those clipped Dolby 5:1 post Beach Boys vocals he loves so much. Even the records by other people tend to sound like 'Point' out-takes; not surprising, since he's playing his own remixes of Kings of Convenience and Beck.
Now, I was never as trendy as Cornelius, never the avatar of a sensibility and centre of a scene that he was in the 90s. But I can't help comparing my own recent DJ sets, where I establish 'universe of Momus' in exactly the same way as Keigo is doing here, over the course of an hour or so. I play bits of my own current work, and bits of the stuff influencing it. The selection is both hot-meme trendy (80s concretish electronica, ethno-musicological field recordings and spooky folk music are hardly my own unique quirks) and so much a recognisable personal universe that it might strike some as insular. Oh, quelle surprise, here comes more Analog Baroque, and here comes more Fake Folk!
Diaries, notebooks, commonplace books, scrapbooks, zuithitsu, website essays, records, this blog... sometimes it seems like all I've ever done is collect, pose, meme-splice, google, culture-jam, imagine and curate my way towards a style which both expresses me and freshens me. Some judicious mixture of me and world, past and future, here and there, now and then, hot and not. I can't guarantee that what I'm loving and moving towards will co-incide with what other people are loving and moving towards; after all, my life seems atypically peripatetic, and a lot of the work now being made in all media leaves me dyspeptic, apoplectic, apocalyptic. All I can do is try to create, and to respond, in some synchronised, balanced way. The danger for me, as for Cornelius, is that I may be stuck on a (beautiful) island of my own making, keeping my Robinson Crusoe journal for my nonexistent rescuers, fooling myself into believing that where I'm at is where it's at, or where it should be at, or where it will be, and brainstorming my way into a future which may be entirely fictional (one which, at the moment, seems, somewhat absurdly, to involve the aesthetics of wood and bathing).
Just like Cornelius, and perhaps just like you, I may be trapped in The Museum of Me. I like it here, but then, I would, wouldn't I?
You pull out a magazine, listen to a tape. You're transported to nineteen ninety something. Or perhaps you came here by a different route. You were on holiday in some remote place, there was no TV, just a stack of dusty old magazines, a drawer of old tapes of radio shows. Bored and ever-so-slightly morbid, you entered the world of the media ephemera of the recent past. Before long you got lost, engrossed and grossed out by some dead year, its parallel world of stars, songs, styles. Luscious Jackson, Money Mark, St Etienne, Army of Lovers! You'd forgotten all about them! They mean so little now, yet seemed important at the time.
A whole range of queasy feelings opens up. What is style? How come what we thought was beautiful and elegant back then looks lame, tame, baggy, silly now? Why do the tropes we most admired then (that shuffling Soul II Soul beat that seemed like such a step forward from the 'telegraph pole' snare drum sound of the 80s) sound the most hackneyed now? And is there any place to hide from the built-in obsolescence, any guarantee of intemporality? If you really were transported back through time to 1991, you'd be condemned to live it all again, meme by meme. It would be useless to have 'the taste of the future'. You'd be out of kilter. People wouldn't listen, wouldn't be ready. They'd find you ugly, perverse. There's no inherent superiority to the styles we have now. We've simply agreed to be on the same page as each other. This narrative isn't going anywhere, it isn't building up to anything or progressing. It's a shaggy dog story. Perhaps it's chasing its tail, perhaps just feebly wagging it.
But what about the emotions you invested in this stuff, the money you spent on records and clothes now fit only for charity shops? Did you waste your money and your time? Was it a terrible delusion? Have you 'learned your lesson'? Will the stuff you're into now look as silly, as dated, as knee-jerk trendy, in ten years' time? And in twenty, will you have forgotten it all too? Or will you be stuck in a karmic hamster wheel of eternal, inevitable revivals?
This is the fascinated, anxious state of mind I find myself in, thanks to Cornelius and Olive and the fact that I'm staying in the room of an Osaka Olive-shojo girl.
An Olive-shojo is a girl who buys Japanese girls' style magazine Olive. Started in the mid-80s and now defunct, Olive was a rather refined teen fashion magazine featuring willowy fresh-faced European models and a rather delicate, austere aesthetic. Because the kind of girls who read Olive are also the kind of girls who populate a certain kind of 'quality' cafe, you'll often find back issues in such places, on a shelf below the art books.
Sensitive boys -- the kind who read French novels, watch Godard films, and have at some point liked Cornelius -- go for Olive-Shojo girls. The Olive-shojo I'm currently staying with has copies of Olive going back to 1992. (For 80s Olive, we just have to walk a short distance to the Rompoo Cafe, which has a collection going back to 1985.) She also has tapes of Cornelius' radio show from the mid-90s. We've been listening to them as we drive around Kansai, and my head is getting fucked up. What year is it?
Things got even more confusing when one of the tapes (I think it was the New Wave special that seemed to consist of Keigo playing nothing but B-52s tracks, broadcast in about 1995 on Osaka's FM 802) ended and there on real-time 2004 radio came... Keigo Oyamada, doing a one-off one-hour show of his recent remixes and record picks for NHK Radio.
Just as a copy of Olive magazine from 1985 and a copy of Olive from 2004 have something in common, despite grotesque differences in style (1985 is all baggy pierrot outfits, glazed foundation, stripey post-modernist aviator graphics garments, fake crests, models with high-lit big hair...), so Cornelius in 1995 and Cornelius now have a lot in common. Like Olive, Cornelius is both trendy, bobbing about like a cork in the tide of current memes, and sui generis, eternally wedded to his own idea of what style is all about.
The 2004 Cornelius show (I'll post a playlist in Comments) sounded, if anything, more sui generis than the 1995 show. In 1995 Cornelius is a happy, giggly, bubblegum-didactic star, centre of the Shibuya-kei phenomenon. He discusses the records with a female music journalist, pointing out the 'conceptual' elements in one, another's 'psychedelic drumming', and you imagine 90s magazines like H and Barf Out holding the front page. 'Quick, an issue about psychedelic drumming! Who can get us shots of the sleeves?' There's a sense of someone delighting in, and cataloguing, every style of music ever created (another 1995 show consists entirely of novelty records which mention monkeys). Cornelius now, though, sounds like a slightly lonely tensai, a producer genius living on his own meticulous, increasingly peaceful island.
The 2004 show begins with a very impressive track called 'Utopies' which can only be called 'pointilliste'. Starting with a clipped rhythm of coloured dots of sound, each clearly distinct in the mix -- a snare, a layered vocal, a slap bass hit -- it builds into a horribly proficient piece of Fairlight jazz-funk before seguewaying into Scritti Politti's 'Wood Beez'. Keigo's voice no longer guides us through the tracks -- he has become something more abstract, a brand, an instantly-recognisable curatorial sensibility. Announcements are made by the elderly, unctuous voice actor heard on Pizzicato 5's 'Happy End Of The World', an NHK continuity announcer of impeccable 1950s enunciation who happens, by a weird and humourous co-incidence, also to be called Keigo Oyamada.
One striking difference between Cornelius in 1995 and Cornelius in 2004 is that then he seemed to be opening a window on every type of music in the world and refreshing the landscape of pop music in the process. Now, though, there's something oddly airless in his show. It's an island untouched by any breezes but his own. Everything he plays fits into the ambience of his 'Point' album. Here's an extension of the ambient nature sounds, here's a computer rock workout, and there are those clipped Dolby 5:1 post Beach Boys vocals he loves so much. Even the records by other people tend to sound like 'Point' out-takes; not surprising, since he's playing his own remixes of Kings of Convenience and Beck.
Now, I was never as trendy as Cornelius, never the avatar of a sensibility and centre of a scene that he was in the 90s. But I can't help comparing my own recent DJ sets, where I establish 'universe of Momus' in exactly the same way as Keigo is doing here, over the course of an hour or so. I play bits of my own current work, and bits of the stuff influencing it. The selection is both hot-meme trendy (80s concretish electronica, ethno-musicological field recordings and spooky folk music are hardly my own unique quirks) and so much a recognisable personal universe that it might strike some as insular. Oh, quelle surprise, here comes more Analog Baroque, and here comes more Fake Folk!
Diaries, notebooks, commonplace books, scrapbooks, zuithitsu, website essays, records, this blog... sometimes it seems like all I've ever done is collect, pose, meme-splice, google, culture-jam, imagine and curate my way towards a style which both expresses me and freshens me. Some judicious mixture of me and world, past and future, here and there, now and then, hot and not. I can't guarantee that what I'm loving and moving towards will co-incide with what other people are loving and moving towards; after all, my life seems atypically peripatetic, and a lot of the work now being made in all media leaves me dyspeptic, apoplectic, apocalyptic. All I can do is try to create, and to respond, in some synchronised, balanced way. The danger for me, as for Cornelius, is that I may be stuck on a (beautiful) island of my own making, keeping my Robinson Crusoe journal for my nonexistent rescuers, fooling myself into believing that where I'm at is where it's at, or where it should be at, or where it will be, and brainstorming my way into a future which may be entirely fictional (one which, at the moment, seems, somewhat absurdly, to involve the aesthetics of wood and bathing).
Just like Cornelius, and perhaps just like you, I may be trapped in The Museum of Me. I like it here, but then, I would, wouldn't I?