Context

A rather tangled blog post today, as I try to make sense of something. I was going to post something about this mediated vs. experienced, catholic vs. protestant, indie vs. DJ culture idea, but it's still not straight in my head. Instead, I started thinking about context. Perhaps it started with Alistair Fitchett's blog about twee yesterday, in which he railed on the way that C86 had had degenerated from a reaction against the "dominant culture, which was all about commerce and polish and a desperate rush into adulthood and responsibility" into this sort of wilfull infantilism based on lollipops and kittens.

I accused him of "moving the goalposts" in the way that he seemed to arbitrarily assign "indie-pop music he liked" as non-twee and "indie-pop music he didn't like" as twee. But that brought back the question of context - he's right, in 1986, no one used the term "C86" or "twee" - these things got codified later on, as canons only get defined later on, in retrospect.

But perhaps I have the same problem, when I come to address mine own personal music-of-childhood, shoegaze and its degeneration into "nu-gaze" I start to carp and groan like a cranky old woman myself.

I complain that nu-gaze takes all the kind of stylistic affectations and none of the substance of the original, completely ignoring everything I loved about it in the first place. (For instance, things that were so important to me at the time - the blurring of male and female - being supplanted by this trudging boring masculine display, bleurgh, but I've already talked about this before.)

But this always happens to genres when they become codified as such, doesn't it? When it stops being an exploration, a searching, an escape pod from the status quo that a few artists happen to be on together - and becomes just another blueprint. My same problem, again and again with the neo-psych scene. Irony of ironies. Neo-psych bands are always slavishly reproducing this retrofetishistic sound and complaining when things "aren't very 60s!" when the psych bands OF THE TIME were trying the latest technology and trying to go as far away from the present time as they could. The context has gone, and all we're left with is the artefact.

How much does art depend on its context? Is the hallmark of great art that it perfectly represents its context, or that it transcends it?

The great thing about this book I'm reading, Godel Escher Bach, is how many of the little allusions and allegories and metaphors end up sparking as much thought and mental intrigue as the thrust of the book itself. Almost in an aside, Hofstadter mentioned the idea of records being sent off on probes into space - would an alien recognise Bach as being a crafted piece of art designed to elicit an emotional response? Now how about John Cage's 4'33? So much of the meaning of Cage's work, he posited, only makes sense in the context of late 20th Century music, and its reaction to the hundreds of years of canon of "Classical Music" that went before. Context.

Kind of like Fitchett's thoughts on why the Pastels and the June Brides "WEREN'T" twee, right?

So I suppose that the nu-gazers of today are justified in just getting out their Shoegaze(tm) brand effects pedals and dialling up a certain specific *sound* rather than using and abusing equipment to break down boundaries, blend sounds, explore sonic textures - all those things that *I* associate with the concept of shoegaze. Because without the context, that's all that's left, a document, a template to be copied.

And I go elsewhere for my smeary textures and my drowned beats. Three guesses where I've gone...