Great to hear the k-punk and Blissblog discussion about the sixties. Mark and I were having a similar conversation when we hooked up the other day, which revolved around Bob Dylan. Mark was pretty dismissive of those records (Bringing it all Back Home/Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde On Blonde). I think he thought they were stuffy, irrelevant and classical. I did understand, I mean this kind of geetar-folk is probably the antithesis of everything k-punk stands for.
However, when these records came out they were modern. Even if we choose to put them side-by-side by the Music Concrete "massive" I don't think it negates their veracity and freshness at the time. I think the Warhol/VU/Dylan axis; all leather trousers, dark-glasses and amphetamines is extremely potent. You might not want to slide Dylan in with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, The Velvet's, La Monte Young and Harry Smith but he was there. He was profiling in NYC, hanging with Andy, going round to Allen Ginsberg's appartment to see Harry Smith (who famously REFUSED to come out of his bedroom to meet Dylan, Ginsberg tearing his hair out - echoes here of gutter Cynic philosopher Diogenes refusing to get out of the box he was sitting in when Alexander the Great dropped by, telling Alexander his shadow was blocking out the sun, Alexander confiding to his courtiers afterwards "If I was to be one man other than myself, it would be Diogenes.") Certainly the folk crowd didn't want anything to do with Dylan, and maybe that was Smith's line, though I'm sure he thought it'd be more fun to be intransigent. Dylan was a bad bwoy. While I'd make no claims that these records were pungent with cultural possibilities, to my mind they're still charged with poetry and life.
How did I end up back here? That "Retro Rock TM", (see Stone Temple Pilots, The Doves, White Stripes) is still working it's way through the possibilities of music like Dylan with pathetic faithfulness doesn't diminish the power of the original "original" creative act. Obviously a band like the Velvet Underground (like it or not Paul Meme) are still, if not bursting with vital influence, then a little pungent. Favour the Avant-Folk scene or not, offerings from outfits like Tower Recordings are as modern and exploratory, if not as Grime, then as most Electronica. The whole Concrete thing I did here should make it pretty obvious that skronky synthesiser music aint exactly an invention.
I'd like to return to something I was talking about ages ago, which if I remember rightly people raised one eyebrow at, though SURELY explored somewhere rigorously (by a grown-up for goodness sake!) if not in Philosophy then in the shadowy realms of esoteric literature: "I theorised then that the true timeline, as opposed to the mysterious illusory one which makes up the progression of our day-to-day lives is the line which stretches between UNKNOWING and ENLIGHTENMENT. Unknowing here is the true past, and enlightenment is the true future." If you've read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 you may remember how when the alien life forms examine humans they see not distinct beings with two arms and two legs and a head, but centipedes. Centipede's which are physically linear amalgams of Grandfather/Grandmother/Father/Mother/Son/Daughter. Maybe it's because FAMILY (in the Italian sense) is such a dominant theme to my life that I can vibe with this, but consider your ancestral identity and question, am I really ANY DIFFERENT from them, am I not just the expression of the coordinates mapped out in the genes of my parents. Are we really "getting anywhere"? It's significant to Vonnegut's approach that the "aliens" came from space, not (then) confused by the diurnal and seasonal rotations with which we delineate our existence. My wife would disagree with me with this static time notion, she's a scholar of Bergson, his elan vital is still forward-flowing, though Bergson rails against the facile dimensions of clock time. He famously explained away Xeno's paradox, which is the conundrum you face when "measuring" an athlete's movement along a stretch of track; the last metre at 25mph; the last centimetre at 25mph; the last millimetre at 25mph - the dude never crosses the finishing line. Anyway I'm not equipped with the proper tools to talk about the theory, unlike someone like Mark Fisher. I'll just sound like a wacko ;-D
HOWEVER, I've always thought the way music works backs up this "vision", THE PAST AINT HISTORY! In this sense "Enlightenment" (and thats where I come unstuck, who's to say what is "Enlightened"?) always constitutes the future, and is from time to time stretched a little further forward. In the same way the the past (unenlightenment) is pushed back by Justin Timberlake and Mike Batt. This version of time has it's pasts, presents and futures dispersed across the range of history. The whole terrain pocked with wormholes and quicksand.
Posted by Woebot at September 10, 2003 01:09 PM