Postmodernism as Topic #2: The Go! Team Listen To Yr Childhood

I belatedly return to a subject that I embarked upon a while ago in reference to Deerhoof’s new record Deerhoof vs. Evil, which is an exploration of postmodern practices and concerns as the topic, not just the aesthetic or process, of pop music. The Go! Team, whose 2011 album Rolling Blackouts is quite possibly their best yet, have self-consciously crafted an unmistakable signature sound, yet their approach goes further than that. At many levels, the Go! Team represent the postmodern age, through postmodern means (form as well as content), referencing other postmodern media in a thoroughly postmodern game of signification. Just a cursory listen to Rolling Blackouts could demonstrate several layers on which the tenets of postmodernism are being addressed as well as merely inhabited. The main ones that I want to discuss are: the creation of a sonic ‘frame’ through which a ‘listening’ to the early 90s is pre-mediated, and a direct engagement with the musical language and cultural meanings of TV theme tunes.

Paean to Four Chords

I've taken some time out from this site in order to establish my new classical blog - the biting point - but I felt compelled to write this article after being comprehensively wooed by Secret Eyes, the 2008 album by Swedish indie-disco-pop duo Cloetta Paris. My recent relationship with this album seemed as good an excuse as any to write what will be a tribute post to a perfectly common - even quintessential - pop gesture, but one which always manages to totally seduce me. It is a gesture in some ways emblematic of the simple but endlessly repeatable pleasures that pure pop is capable of. It is the gesture which is largely responsible for my personal weakness for both epic, super-mainstream club music and unpretentious, playground pop-punk. It is a four-chord harmonic sequence.

Postmodernism as Topic #1: Deerhoof's Multicultural Metropolis

Pop music, or perhaps pop post-Beatles, is an inherently postmodern art-form. Specific areas of pop music go even further in embodying the idea of postmodern art: hip hop especially, with its reliance on borrowings, recomposition and the playful combining of fragments from multifarious musical sources, but also most dance music, along with a lot of electronic music in general. This is an art-form for which the delineation of meaning depends on the shared ability of both artist and listener to navigate a multi-genre, multi-cultural network of aural signs and symbols, one which stretches back through musical history and across physical and digital space. Yet this seemingly complex process of signification is too culturally ingrained within the pop community to be much reflected upon. Such postmodern tools of meaning production are used, as I’ve tried to argue many times in this blog, to articulate ideas outside themselves, beyond any reflexive compulsion to understand the systems behind the operation of these tools. Pop music can ‘mean’ too potently and too effectively to waste much time exploring how it comes to ‘mean’ in the first place.

Halcyon Narcosis: Deerhunter and the Darkness Beneath

The more I listen to Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest, the more I'm convinced that it's haunted. As I familiarise myself with each track, so I'm sure that I can perceive the same shadowy presence beneath the surface of each. Reading around online reviews today, I wanted to see if anyone else sensed this presence as much as I do, and I was fairly surprised to find myself quite alone in my interpretation. And yet I can't shake it - the face that I can just see in my mind's eye (or ear), printed deep beneath each track, gains clarity with each new hearing. It is all the more convincing because, for me, this pervasive face which keeps flashing or flickering out of focus seems to hold the record together, and to provide the clues to why the album seems so much more than a 'celebration' of Bradford Cox's real and imagined memories. However the band may have wished to have constructed their latest album, the whole thing was built on a grave site from the start.

Bedroom Music #1: Private Fantasies, jj's kills

The gorgeous photograph serving as cover art for jj's free-to-download (and therefore physically coverless) mixtape, kills, does more than capture some of the soft-edged, gauzy quality of the duo's sound, and of Elin Kastlander's voice. Like all images attached to internet releases, it provides a sense of materiality - of record as multi-sensory object. Moreover, though, it perfectly illustrates the key subject of the record. A boy's face, turned in light sleep upon snowy sheets, the whole image washed in a pink-grey filter, very close and tender and intimate. Private bedroom art. This is what jj address, in process as much as subject, on their mixtape: our personal and private relationships with songs, how they are recreated and recontextualised within the unique circumstances of our interior lives.

10 From '10: My Favourite Albums Of The Year

I don't have the money to assess every new record that comes out, or even all the critically-praised or hyped ones, so I wouldn't presume to comment on the 'best' albums of the year. I can, however, say with confidence that this short list represents my ten favourite albums released in 2010.

Everything Is New #2: Swanlights and the Ghost in the Garden

So now it's Antony and the Johnsons' turn to completely undermine one of my exhaustive analyses with a new album and a new direction. October's Swanlights is quite a different work from the earlier records that I discussed in my last post about the band, but to be honest, it does represent the following-through of the kind of stylistic changes that 2009's The Crying Light indicated. Already, by then, Antony had knotted his sheets together, or tressed and meshed some long flaxen wig, preparing to escape the dark attic room of his Gothic mode, descending the tower walls and taking refuge in the grounds. The Crying Light was Antony's first outdoors album, with its fixation (both musical and lyrical) on the natural - snow and dust, light and earth, birds and streams. Swanlights continues this trend - it is a druidic ritual of minerals and water.