Rockhunter, Issue 30, 30 October 2006
England All Over Again
What’s with all the current fuhrer about Yndependente English Musicke at the moment? (C86 is here again!!!!!! Scarper!!!! — Ed.)
Imagine to my surprise on reading The Guardian the other day only to see that C86 is back on the agenda. More like on the slab as far as I’m concerned. It’s pretty miserable to hear about ages past being rechurned, specially when one had a hand in creating them in the first place. Mind you, I’ve had my hand in quite often over the years. Bit of a hokey cokey merchant with the old hand, me. In out, shake it all about. Etc. Etc. Etc.!!!! And, let’s face it, the face of retro has changed out of all recognition since the days when liking old discs was widely thought of as a sign of cultural senility. Yeah, Pricey, Reynolds!! Listen up, you totalitarian pop overlords!!! I remember you oppressing me!!!
Ourselves Alone: C86, Creation and the Celtic Pop Revival in the Atlantic Isles
Here, then, are some reflections about the true context of C86. It seems, on rechecking my bulging archives, that I never published the follow-up piece to Issue 18 I’d intended to write on how Creation Records, in creating a sort of ‘retro-activist’ musical cell structure in response to the majors’ back-cataloguing and the C86 bands’ autoethnological revivalism, served as a sort of musical Sinn Fein for independent-minded musicians in the British Isles. And if this is going in the direction I think it is — Celtic Twilight cultural rediscovery and simultaneity goes considerable way to duffing up Empire timeline economics — I still can’t be bothered to think of an analogue for James Joyce or the Abbey Theatre. Any suggestions?
See, back in the mid-80s it seemed as though ‘we’ (those preferring to play guitars and shout) really had got to the stage of thinking of ourselves as being “sons of bastard’s ghosts” and had come to view our musical selves as culturally abject in the face of the aggressively ‘progressive’-seeming technocracy that had always pushed music capitalism. Musical revivalism and national chauvinism — always sadly a feature of collectorism in rock ‘n roll — had contributed to this sense of failure by becoming bogged down in the romanticism of cultural redemption, they merely repeat, uncritically, the discourses of anthropological and cultural domination.
What I’m saying is that Creation Records took on the cultural revival started by the C86 bands and fought the assymetric retro-wars in a different way, foregrounding its cultural revisionism vis-a-vis exposing the simulateneity, or immanence, of non-popular strands and niches. But it took its heirs — the kids! — to progressivize their creed by accepting the representation of inauthenticity as authentic critique. And if we are willing to accept that an authentic political critique can emerge from performance — pointing to the kind of ‘political education’ Franz Fanon talks about — we do so because Creation’s ironic recontextualisation and stylistic metacommentary resignifies the experiences of collecting antiquarian sounds as part of a general critique of the effects of record collecting and revivalist discourse on the formation of cultural identities in different places.
It’s a case not of valuing self-representation and autoethnographical criticism, but understanding that engagement takes many forms. Perhaps the most important effect of the surprising cultural success of the record collectors’ getting across to the gen. pub. the recognition of the simultaneity and pastness of old musics is the emergence of a concept of musical identity freed from the ignominy of primitivism and ethnographic redemption. Collectorism as revisionism is a mode of anti-mimeticism that confronts such a negative vision and puts it under critical pressure. So, yes, I suppose I am saying that collecting records is a form of autoethnographical criticism. And even engagement. Not always, though.
However, the strategies of C86 and Creation, because they lacked the important element of critical self-reflexiveness — like Synge’s and Yeats’s — forestalled the realization of the problem of authenticity. It is less a matter of finding the appropriate technique for unearthing cultural essences and more about coming to terms with the fact that authenticity is an impossible goal — for the musical revivalist intent on representing ‘their’ culture as well as for anyone who comes under the sway of (mis)representations claiming to have a purchase on it.
Actually, going back to an earlier point, if revivalist music (your Crypts and Rubbles revisionists, etc.) are JM Synge, and the ‘timeless’ sounds of berks like The Fuzztones, The Cynics and other eejits stand for WB Yeats, that makes me, Thuh Rockhunter, James Joyce. Not bad, eh?
Thus, from Mod to Garage Punk (itself a term of revivalist rediscovery) to Garage Revival, which is now a thing in itself, reified, to be repeated ad feckin’ nauseam. So, some good can come out revivalism. But generally it’s not going to change yer life.
Maybe I’ll write this properly soon.
For ever and ever. Arseholes.
Tatty bye.
Ed.
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