Simon Reynolds

 

I couldn't really say, it depends on which area of culture you're talking about. In a broader sense, enthusiasm for the future, and the accompanying sense that it would be radically different from the present, was stronger during the Fifties and Sixties and, to some extent, also at the start of the twentieth century, when there were world's fairs showcasing new technologies like "The House of the Future", alongside films like "Metropolis". But certainly in the Fifties and Sixties there was a lot of excitement about space exploration and about plastic as the "material of the future", which made its way into fashion thanks to designers like Courrèges, Rabanne and Cardin, who used artificial fabrics and mimicked astronaut suits.

In a sense, the Seventies were the period when faith in the future began to noticeably decline. Some commentators of the era regarded the Seventies as the decade in which the dream of the future died. It was when concerns about overpopulation, pollution and resource depletion led to a loss of faith in narratives of progress and limitless economic growth. There was a bleak sense that all the wild hopes of the Sixties had evaporated, and that the utopian drive for change had run up against a far more stubborn reality. A sense of social stagnation. And musically, this was reflected in punk, with its "no future" message. But certainly, in the strict sense of what was happening to popular music, by the end of the Seventies electronic sounds and machine rhythms had begun to take on an importance that in the Eighties would become outright dominance.

Synthesizers had been widely used in rock and other genres in the early Seventies, but in a way that emphasized their musicality and the human role in playing them: groovy and funky, with artists like Stevie Wonder, subtle and expressive, with Joe Zawinul of Weather Report or other figures from the jazz fusion scene, while in rock bands instruments like the Moog were often used to produce solos as a display of virtuosity. What Moroder and Kraftwerk pioneered instead was a mechanistic feel: sequenced rhythms gave the impression that the machines had taken over and humans were no longer in charge. Of course this was an illusion, since it was human decisions applied to technology that produced the result, but to listeners it sounded like "automatic music," a preview of a gleaming, streamlined, remote-controlled future. "I Feel Love" and "Trans Europe Express" in particular, released in the same year (1977), had an enormous impact, capturing the attention of all kinds of musicians, such as Human League and Sparks.

 

The interesting thing about Kraftwerk is that their reference points, in terms of lyrics and visual art, often go back to the early twentieth century: the autobahn, the Trans Europe Express, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," the Soviet modernist graphics on the cover of "The Man-Machine." But sonically, they were already inventing the Eighties and Nineties back in the Seventies, paving the way for the sequences and drum-machine rhythms later used by synth-pop, techno and trance. So there's an interesting blend of retro-futurism and present-day futurism at work. But with "Computer World," the themes get updated: there's a perfect integration between cutting-edge sound and lyrical content (pocket calculators, computer dates, the idea of computers fueling a society oriented toward control and surveillance). Around 1979-80 there was a lot of talk about things like microchips and concepts along the lines of "will everyone lose their jobs to robotic factories?", as well as about the need to raise awareness of the growing importance of computers in office work, government bureaucracy, statistical analysis, the financial world, and so on. On the leisure side, there was also the beginning of computer games and arcade video games, with "Space Invaders" and "Pacman."

Electronic music is essentially the child of Kraftwerk and "Space Invaders." By the late Eighties, though, Kraftwerk had fallen behind the state of the art, or found themselves paralyzed trying to keep up. So, by the time of "The Mix" (1991) and the reworking of their Seventies/early-Eighties classics, Kraftwerk had begun doing what they've done for the last thirty years: existing as a museum of the future, or more precisely, a museum of their own past futurism. If you saw Kraftwerk in 1991 the way I did, and again in 1998, as I also did, and then once more in 2014, you're experiencing a kind of living archive, a group that commemorates and celebrates its own achievements but is no longer able to take part in the pop culture of the moment. The 2014 shows are impressive, with all that 3D imagery, but the music is essentially an act of audio preservation: a sound-museum exhibit. And when you go to see them, there are several layers of nostalgia at work: a kind of ironic nostalgia for the images of a clean, robotic future they used to celebrate, but also nostalgia for Kraftwerk's own history and for the intense excitement about the future their records used to generate, back when they were pioneers rather than curators of their own legend.

It's interesting that we're still being shown images today of a clean, bright, spotless, perfectly organized future, in the world of Silicon Valley, in advertising for personal technology like smartphones and laptops, or entertainment technology (high-definition TV, gaming, VR). But I don't think anyone really believes the future, in a general sense, could be an unspoiled techno-paradise, with moving sidewalks and little aircraft used to commute to the office or vacation on the Moon. There may be aspects of our lives that are genuinely futuristic (our smartphones, our car dashboards, our home entertainment centers... what happens in hospitals is increasingly like science fiction), but in other respects, we know the future will be chaotic, messy and dangerous. And new technology also enables psychological manipulation, disinformation, conspiracy theories spread on social media, drones, and surveillance and monitoring by states and corporations harvesting our data. So the image of the future is even darker now.

 

In terms of image, graphics, and a positive, optimistic, human attitude, I think Human League are probably the ones who captured it best – I'm mainly thinking here of the album "Dare" and the singles taken from it, like "Love Action", "The Sound Of The Crowd", "Don't You Want Me", and the excellent single released not long after the album, "(Keep Feeling) Fascination". But the remix album "Love And Dancing" was also a fantastic achievement, largely thanks to the genius and incredible attention to detail of their producer Martin Rushent, who showcased many of the techniques that would become standard in club music of the Eighties. But plenty of others emerged with very different points of view. DAF had a fantastic dark, minimalist sound. And it also depends on how you define synth-pop. Generally people use it to describe groups like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode, but the best electronic pop music of the Eighties was represented by electro (Mantronix, Man Parrish, Nitro Deluxe) and by club music post-disco which increasingly used drum machine, synthetic bass, sequenced elements, combined with passionately soulful and erotic vocals. Think of the production team Jam & Lewis, best known for their work with The SOS Band and Janet Jackson, who then actually worked with Human League when the latter needed a new hit in the late Eighties. English groups like Human League probably influenced Jam & Lewis to a certain extent in terms of embracing electronic technology, but then the same thing became true in reverse. So there's a whole dark side of synth-pop tied to this back-and-forth exchange of ideas in the Eighties.

 

I'm not sure I agree that nothing definable as an "underground" exists today. There are certainly genres that a lot of people don't like, or that aren't well known, plenty of minor scenes with a cult following. What I do agree with is that they rarely seem to express the kind of counterculture typical of post-punk or alternative rock, which was instead expressed (albeit differently) by genres like techno, gabber and jungle in the Nineties. This is partly because it's all too easy to put your work online now, there's none of the sense of effort and struggle that came with putting out a DIY record or making a fanzine. But by the same token it's also all too easy to ignore it (one's work online, ed.). Part of what was defined underground had a point of contact with theoverground, a kind of border zone, an attempt to get into the mainstream in order to change it. Nowadays it's more a matter of niche markets that exist happily without being noticed or causing any trouble.

What defined the hardcore continuum, or at least gave it coherence over time despite the sound changing drastically again and again, was the fact that it was mediated by pirate radio, illegal stations broadcasting over the airwaves. They had a territorial base – their broadcast range was limited to within London – which meant they served a local community, usually working-class, with a high percentage of listeners from minority backgrounds. But they were also public: their broadcasts ended up on the very same frequencies used by state radio or licensed commercial stations. So they were invading a public space, asserting the existence of minority populations, minority musical tastes. The way the internet works isn't the same. You can have an infinite number of broadcasts coexisting without ever interacting. Internet radio stations are broadcast to people who already know about them; it's pre-selected. Whereas the defining feature of a pirate station is that people who don't know that kind of music can stumble onto the broadcast unintentionally, and even people who hate that music, and maybe fear the people associated with it, can end up hearing it. So it's a far more significant intervention. Pirate stations that turned into online broadcasters completely lost that status as a rebel force, as public action.

  

Yes, it could be that, in the sense that the future gets invested with the role of container for hopes and possibilities, because the past isn't appealing, it represents constraint. For many people the past means oppression, worse conditions, and for a large part of the Black population it involves things like colonialism and slavery. Middle- and upper-class people, on the other hand, are more likely to have a rosier view of history and tradition, because their situation wasn't so bad to begin with. I think that, generally speaking, among working-class populations, both white and Black, what stands out is how taste tilts toward the ultra-modern. Whether it's music, clothes or furniture. There isn't that bourgeois interest in antiques, vintage aesthetics or retro sounds.

In the UK, there's a class of people referred to disparagingly as chavs, a word for what Marx would have called the lumpenproletariat. In other words, people who, whether or not they work, aren't involved with trade unions and have no sense of solidarity as a social class. I think every country has a similar kind of population, and every language probably has its own derogatory term for them, used as a marker of social exclusion. Part of the snobbery directed at them has to do with how flashy their clothes are, how they have no interest in watching BBC costume dramas or reading the classics, and how trashy and low-grade their music supposedly is. But I've long noticed that, in practically every country in the world, chav taste in sound leans toward the most futuristic forms, or at least the ones of the moment. It's the most synthetic strains of hip-hop and R&B, with Auto-Tune pushed to the max, or gabber, hard house, dancehall, reggaeton and afrobeat. As always, built on the shiniest electronics, mechanical rhythms, excessive artificial pitch-correction, and so on. So there's a tendency I've called avant-lumpen.

What's also interesting is the homogenization of taste, the consistency in favoring ultra-contemporary aspects across every area of consumption – not just music but also clothing, hair styling, furniture, personal technology, fast food. When I was writing the hardcore piece, in 1992, I was still a bit unsure about my own preference for hardcore and early jungle; instinctively, I knew I was right to be excited about this music, but it was a moment when tastemakers despised and insulted it. So the reference to it being trashy and "unmusical" is about trying to take those negative terms and flip them into positives (while also acknowledging that, by the standards of conventional musicality, and by what people at the time thought advanced electronic music should sound like, this stuff was crude and badly produced). On one hand, back in 1992, I was questioning the value of musicality itself. And yet, listening back in recent years to a lot of those chaotic, messy tracks that teenagers were making in their bedrooms with very basic technology, I find it striking how musical some of these tracks are, even by conventional standards. They use samples from film soundtracks and old soul and jazz records, but create interesting harmonic contrasts, and rhythmically, the level of sophistication in the cutting and recombination of breakbeats is genuinely advanced. Partly this is because, listening back now, we know that music would go on to evolve into drum and bass, so you hear it as a sketch, a chrysalis. But in 1992, most people dismissed that music as garbage – I remember people saying "jungle isn't music." So, like everyone else celebrating it at the time, I wanted both to wield the idea of "anti-music" as a kind of weapon, and at the same time to say "actually, if you really listen, this is far more interesting sonically than what Sven Väth or others like him were doing at the time, stuff that supposedly well-informed people thought was real techno."

 

I don't know if that's the precise moment the future turns dark; I think it's more a matter of the fact that within science-fiction imagery there has always been a spectrum running from utopian to dystopian. So both coexist at the same time – if you go back to the Sixties, there are science fiction novels and films that are positive, but also others that paint a bleak, desolate picture of the future. Probably there are more dystopian images than utopian ones. In music, there's been both – at the very same time that groups like Cabaret Voltaire and Gary Numan's Tubeway Army presented chilling, paranoid visions of the future, there was also Kraftwerk with "Neon Lights" and Human League mocking cold, J.G. Ballard-style urban imagery in their song "Blind Youth." In the specific case of rave, you get a more positive utopian imagery in the late Eighties/early Nineties, largely because of the effects of MDMA. But then hardcore rave turns into darkside or darkcore, because the long-term negative effects of ecstasy use start creating paranoia. At that point jungle develops into a kind of militant urban sound talking about tension and staying on guard. Songs about the police, about gangster life, about becoming "real" – meaning facing reality in a dog-eat-dog way. The dreams of unity and love, peace and harmony typical of the first house wave, and that honeymoon glow from the early stages of MDMA use – when people thought this drug and this culture could change the world – all of that starts to shatter. People start overdoing drugs, or mixing substances that create confused, disorienting psychological effects. Many start smoking weed, which in the Nineties is very strong and produces jittery, equally paranoid effects, nothing like the mellowness of hippies or Bob Marley. And all of this feeds into the music.

Then there's the aesthetic influence of cyberpunk films – "Blade Runner," "Robocop," Terminator – images of a dark future controlled by some corporation, and many video games that echo that look. The trouble with dystopian films and fiction, though, is that they're exciting. They depict thrilling action and adventure scenes, in which you picture yourself as the hero or the outlaw antihero fighting the system. The philosopher Fredric Jameson, who's also an expert on science fiction, wrote an entire book on the genre, called "Archaeologies Of The Future." The subtitle is "the desire called utopia," which is a nice, very evocative phrase, but I think you could just as well talk about "the desire called dystopia," given how much we enjoy these dark visions of tomorrow, whether it's "Alien" or "The Hunger Games." They feed the desire for the world to be radically different, and for the possibility of living out an intensified, heroic existence ourselves, the chance to be extraordinary in some way. So, with dark jungle, techstep, and the bleak gabber of Mover and PCP Records, these cold future scenarios become appealing. They reflect some of the anxieties and tensions of the present, but transform them into fantasies of struggle and triumph.

 

I don't really have an answer for that. I think one of the main things about the internet is that it hasn't radically transformed humanity. As a context, it's full of all the crap we've brought into it. I was really struck watching "The Social Network," the film about Facebook. Around the same time I was watching a TV series set in ancient Rome, just about a century after the birth of Christ, if I remember correctly. And watching "The Social Network," I thought that if you tweaked the details slightly, the basic plot or the characters' motivations, it would fit perfectly into the ancient world of that Rome series. Because it's all about power, glory, money, betrayal, and so on, and the actual motivations Facebook and social media appeal to are, in the same way, about status, vanity, attracting the opposite sex, cliques, and so forth. Recent developments in the internet, social media and apps all seem to confirm this idea that human nature hasn't changed. Software technology gets used to spread disinformation, mislead, create scapegoats, stoke hatred or fear.

 

There's definitely a kind of "overloaded" aesthetic in a lot of twenty-first-century electronic music, where sounds are sculpted in 3D, with a myriad of tiny details and rhythmic shifts every few bars. The sound design is layered on top of itself, much like what you'd get in action films or CGI video games. Zen Buddhists call it "the mud of options." Software gives you too many parameters to modulate and shade something with. It's the same at every level, even with writing. Computers are great for editing, but not so great for the actual act of writing. In a way, typewriters were better, because you really had to commit to getting a sentence right the first time, sparing yourself the pain of correcting it with correction fluid afterward. That was a genuine push toward writing well. The end result might be sloppier, but it didn't have the over-fussy quality of a piece of prose built with a word processor.

 

I think the simplest explanation is that they no longer knew where to go after that album. They had come full circle, starting out making music built from disco samples, soft rock and Eighties synth-pop, all the way to creating from scratch the kind of music they used to sample – using flesh-and-blood musicians and analog recording – that others, in turn, could have sampled (although I don't think anyone ever actually did). What they had completed was a perfect conceptual arc, but I don't think it left them anywhere else to go. How could they top the success of that record? "Get Lucky" was on the radio here in America at literally every hour of the day, for more than a year. They won six Grammys and were the stars of that very ceremony, performing onstage with heroes like Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers. They pulled off a time-travel exercise, going back to the analog era and pop monoculture, and the world accepted and ratified their ideas as completely as possible. I think it's telling, though, that since then "Random Access Memories" seems to have been completely forgotten. It's vanished from popular memory. You'll never hear "Get Lucky" among the old classics played on the radio. It was the perfect fulfillment, or the ultimate proof, of the theme of "Retromania." I finished the book in 2010, three years before "Random Access Memories" came out, but if I'd written the book later, I could have devoted a whole chapter to that one album alone. It touches on so many themes, beyond just the pathos of retro culture. There's even a song about the space race.

 

Yes, in the past there was a gap between the more physical side of club music and the more conceptual or artistically ambitious projects. But there have always been artists who moved in the middle ground. For instance, the jungle group 4 Hero had plenty of dancefloor hits, but they also made albums like "Parallel Universe," which were a bit too experimental for the dancefloor, since they were inspired by ideas from science fiction, futurology, mysticism and philosophy – subjects usually confined, in that kind of music, to the title and maybe a few samples. The same goes for other drum and bass artists like Goldie. Then there's Underground Resistance, who started out with a catalogue of pure hard-techno physicality, but over the rest of their career carried political messages, philosophical speculation and scientific concepts. I think the difference with conceptronica lies in how much textuality is actually part of the work. With 4 Hero or UR, the "message" element is fairly oblique, more like clues dropped in titles, or sometimes on the label or the artwork, but never overbearing – just a small hint, a bit of text or an image. In conceptronica, on the other hand, you often get actual spoken voices on the tracks, usually the artist's own voice, making statements or exploring ideas. And the releases come with detailed texts, often fairly dense and academic in tone, explaining what they're trying to do, what they're referencing, or what they're committing to. And this in turn reflects another thing that's different from the Nineties, namely the context in which it's all happening: UR and 4 Hero were still part of the rave and club scene, and survived largely on record sales or, in some cases, DJ gigs and remix work. Conceptronica artists today, by contrast, operate much more within the art-world context; record sales rarely generate income, so survival comes far more from performances in subsidized spaces like museums, galleries or festivals. The way they present themselves is similar to visual artists: there's a kind of framing for the informed, educated listener who wants to keep up with what's on offer (often there's literally a presentation within the host institution). It's a textual, cerebral focus quite far removed from the hedonistic, physical focus of club culture.

 

That's certainly an encouraging development. It's interesting to note that, in academic and experimental electronic music of the distant past, there were always plenty of women in pioneering roles, especially in America, with figures like Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Daria Semegen, Annea Lockwood, and others. But generally, in most countries you'll find women experimenters working in what you'd probably have assumed was a very male context. So in a sense, it's as if electronic dance culture has only now caught up to how things were at the very beginning.

 

I have no idea, sorry. You should probably ask my son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who's a music journalist with a particular interest in online genres like hyperpop and the various offshoots of Soundcloud rap, where a lot of the energy lies in the extreme processing of the human voice.