no myths anymore

It's a question of bread and water, 

energy and anti-energy,

weapons and armor. 

What was it to you? 

Was it somewhere to draw strength to face the day, was it where the last shreds of politics were making their last stand, was it the only thing around that said, "Me too", slashing through the barriers of country, class, race, gender and sexuality, which are presently being made ever more formidable.

Did pop tell your stories and struggles when others refused to even acknowledge you existed, was it a flickering pilot flight in the dark, was it a galaxy of dancers and dancefloors?

What's it to you?

Politics has been cored-out of everyday experience, most obviously in pop culture. What are the decades blogs if not a testament to the once-prevalent fusion of culture and dissent. Echos remain if you now where to find them, in smaller places and smaller arguments.



Struggle. Class. Race. Gender. Sexuality. Politics. Weapons & Armor, and the correct use of these for the purposes of hacking and slashing.

http://www.mixcrate.com/moonbear2/warwick-university-80212-music-politics-conference-first-speaker-eek-me-119261

We want something uncomplicated, neat and clean and not frustrated.


What if you weren't lucky. What if you knew you were trapped and had no way to get out: past generations at least had the option of rattling their cages. The politics of clinical depression, the lifestyle of joblessness. The agony of hours of fuck-all to do and knowing that it doesn't matter.

We've all been hurt and we've all been damaged.

Retreat, hold territory, survive.

That's what retromania might be all about really, knowing that pop culture won't save you anymore, has ceased to be enough after the clampdown: your vintage clothes; your 40-year old guitar licks; your movie references.

A lot of 2000s pop culture is about secret damage, barely concealed wounds, knowing something's being taken away without you quite knowing the how, who, or why.

And everywhere signals everywhere: "Look away, look away, look away."

There's some retro I think I can live with.

Crossed Over And Crossed Out

That project - an ever evolving, uncontroversial portrait of contemporary tastes in popular music - addressed one problem surrounding music in the file-sharing era to the exclusion of all others. Faced with readers who wanted to know how to be fans in the internet age, Pitchfork’s writers became the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption. Pitchfork’s endless “Best Of” lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions of the Billboard sales charts. Over the years, these lists have (ominously) expanded, from fifty songs to 100 or 200, and in 2008 the site published a book called The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. Similarly, Pitchfork’s obsession with identifying bands’ influences seems historical, but isn’t. When a pop critic talks about influences, he’s almost never talking about the historical development of musical forms. Instead, he’s talking about his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive - he is congratulating himself, like James Murphy in “Losing My Edge,” on being a good fan. While Pitchfork may be invaluable as an archive, it is worse than useless as a forum for insight and argument.

What did we do to deserve Pitchfork? 
The answer lies in indie rock itself.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie’s successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the ’90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping - or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics -and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring,” he said to a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau.

(Click the above for the rest of the article)