my dwellings among the savages: technostalgia, part 2
by Alejo Manrique
At the same time, I have — as do many a late 20th century man — a love/hate relationship with technological nostalgia. I own not one but two worn-down, 20-plus-year-old Vespa Primaveras (old enough to be considered antique vehicles by traffic authorities). I haven’t gotten around to throwing away my old, mostly inherited vinyl records, and still own a functioning record player. For years I’ve kept a Museum-worthy Inves computer that my uncle bought in the 80s for the price of a car. And yes, I confess, I have gone more than once through my parents’ oh-so-very 60ish library: Latin American boom, Sartre, Camus, the Naked Monkey, the Second Sex, the Third Wave. I hold on to these as relics of eras past, tokens of a mind frame that rests assured that times gone by were inevitably better.
Turns out the music industry honchos know this too and it makes them all go: Yihaa! Because they sure now how to make money of this mind frame; selling the past has been music business’ business from day one, its DNA. Bottle up something that happened once and sell it to be recreated over and over again.
Now, while I am as willing as the next Michael Moore fan to blame everything on corporate culture, I still think this mind frame exceeds the claws of the suited vultures. It’s a universal feeling; it might be a trick of the mind as a means of coping with the decaying vessel it’s nested in: project one’s demise into the whole world. I’m sure there are plenty of neuroscience laureates, smoking chimpanzees and weird-haired public television talk show hosts willing to explain this. In the short (-sighted) range of my experience, I’d say this process manifests itself in the firm belief of every generation: “After us, disaster.”
This is the conflict at the core of rock and roll. The undertow: A random display of new proposals, the pursuit to impose your chosen ideals as hegemonic, the sustained effort to expand against the rising tides of new ways and ideas, the inevitable fall. To all of this, rock and roll just gave a brand new surface. And to a Catholic boy like me, it became a live version of the ideological quarrels we learned — and probably dreamt about leading — in religion class. The Council of Trent redux, with Cobain as Calvin. Yeah I’ll play the bad guy. This is the excitement as well as the comfort I find in music. Thus, the notion of those teenagers — even if it is indeed only an urban legend — is more assuring to me than all that technostalgia ever was.
Sadly the music industry has discarded them in order to concentrate on the last generation raised in the optimistic heydays of unconditional faith in the possibilities of technology, betting that our desire for solace is inextricably linked to the things that can be processed in DVD form. As a result, record shops — the natural purveyors of ammo in our struggle for coolness of yore — have been turned into completely unexciting barren lands. The record industry has doomed itself to an eternal re-run, selling the same records to the same diminishing flock over and over again. Trying to provide 20 years later the excitement you were not able to provide the first time around is a move I praise for its boldness and its unashamed commerciality, but how many special edition Bowie box sets must I own before the joke stops being funny?
Can we blame the new guys for this? I have no will to know what kids feel is their turf nowadays: reality TV, social networks or reaggeton? Surely it is something that we will all find loud, stupid and useless. And that’s the way it should be. I know one thing: There are fewer more distressing sights than a group of zombie thirtysomething teenagers strolling aimlessly through the aisles of a record store filled with the up-for-sale corpses and humped nostalgia of a never-existing happiness. And guess what? Generations don’t get dummier, they get smarter (at a rate of three I.Q. points per decade, no less). So every now and then when I fear there is only music so that there can be new ring tones, I remind myself what were the means and what is the end, and I have to admit that the kids are alright. It’s us we should worry about; we might have been fooled yet again.
tagged under:art, europe, music, technology
declared in my dwellings among the savages