retro future formula

I think you're talking about two different things, Francesco:

1. Retro Futurism, which is the revival of images of the future from the past (for instance, in fashion, the Pierre Cardin 'Moon Age' look of the late 60s might be revived in 2001 as a tribute to Kubrick's film '2001', and there'd be a wistful sense that the future looked so much better from the past).

2. The cycle of Retro Revival. One fashion designer welcomed the arrival of the 21st century, since he was sure it would spell the end of the endless cycle of style revivals (the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, etc) But it doesn't seem to have changed anything, they continue apace. (I still don't know what the decade we're living in is called, the Naughties, the Zeroes? But it will probably develop its own style in between revivals of other decades, and itself be revived circa 2025.)

One theory calls this process 'Accelerated Recontextualisation' and suggests that the cycles of revival are getting shorter and shorter, so that a time will come (I think someone mentioned 2013) when styles are simultaneously invented and revived. So things will be 'innovative' and 'ironic' at the same time. Some people think this 'revival meltdown point' has already been reached in certain districts of Tokyo.

Things come back because of quite simple market forces like 'buy low, sell high'. They come back for psychological reasons ('Gee, Dad looked cool in that grunge shirt when he first met Mom, maybe if that style came back I could play at being a real Grunge Adult myself...'). And they come back because periods of neglect give things an aura of 'otherness' or 'strangeness' or what I like to call 'ostranenie' which they lacked first time around. Things that were designed as cheap commercial products therefore come back as something like art. If you catch them at the right moment of their revival (early, before they become over-familiar, commoditised, cheap and trashy once more) they can be as unsettlingly beautiful as Japanese masks.

But has this not always been the case. I mean Retro futrism is new but nostaligia seems to be ever present.

True momus ! retro future formula is only a catchphrase I used to refer to the way past style are projected in other decades in new forms .proper retrofuturism is dealing ,as you point out, with the idea of discovering images of future coming from the past. The interesting thing about this is that our attention is focused on products that are marked with the two eras represented : the era in which the product was made and the era of the narration : Hanna & barbera cartoons about future families driving flying cars but in which women are devoted housewives cooking for their husbands who worked all day. We are fascinated by this naivete . futurism itself (the avant-garde movement ) is to be considered a late manifestation of romantic ideals more than other things . yesterday I went to see Ennio Morricone with Rome sinfonietta & chorus and on the way home me & friends were trying to decide what to listen … “kid a” no “ moby” no “stones” no then I discovered an old alberto camerini tape in the car ( a guy you like ,I think , momus ) an eighties italian pop wonder . in a song called “il re di plastica” (“the plastic king” the incarnation of technology acceleration ) the guys sings ,after having accepted the allure of the plastic king , “..il Tempo se ne è andato” ( Time has gone away ) .well this is exactly the kind of naive take on post-modern end of history ,continuous present that fascinates me. Your “ostranenie” theory is good for explaining retro revival but maybe works better on an individual or micro groups level . there’s still some strange dynamic that makes some style win their years of trendiness and others perish in few weeks . but I know these are hyper complex socio-economical phenomena that require serious deepening.

Part of the drive towards reavaluation is the rise of the sampler..Producers and DJ's are constantly searching for samples that a) haven't been heard much before b) feature people unlikely to sue. The search is on for exactly the kind of music that nobody's heard. The more peripheral, the further from the musical mainstream the better - lounge records, audio demonstration discs, music for babies, soundtracks to unwatched films ...BUT i guess that still doesn't describe why some are so much more popular than others. Its strange to see a track like that "I fell asleep among the flowers" chorus go unnoticed for 25 years and then turn up on 3 tracks in a month (independently , apparently) As for the right time for a grunge revival...well in Britain I've just seen the first of the indie-dance revival cds come out so I guess "The best grunge album in the world...ever (vol 1)" is due pretty soon. Momus, I always wondered - does the Japanese retro revival thing happen for homegrown cultural trends too? I'm used to seeing startlingly accurate Japanese versions of San Fransisco 1967 or Madchester but does this apply toJapaneses 'scenes' too? One of the things I love about the Japanese copycat scene is that it didn't seem to be based on nostalgia the way British retro scenes were - it seemed to be a matter of choice rather than just people getting stuck in the decade in which they were happiest. True?

These are wise words, indeed. I wish I'd said them all first.

Oddly enough, friends of mine in Iowa edited and produced a magazine in Iowa in the '80s called "RetroFuturism." I was young and naive enough to think they'd invented the term. Anyway, I know now that the idea has been kicking around for at least a couple decades, so it's sort of retrofuturist to speak of retrofuturism.

Sidebar: Though I knew nothing at all about it in advance, I went to the movie "The Others" last night with friends and though I'm not usually one to like popular movies, I liked it while my friends despised it. I liked it most of all for its conceit of the living haunting the dead. And then I thought, isn't that what Retrofuturism is all about? We the living continue to haunt the dead, to ransack their closets and play their records and steal their ideas. But maybe that's the way it's always been, maybe that's just art being art. Maybe Retrofuturism is just a very old idea with a (sort of) new name. We're always learning from the past and making the same mistakes. We have new technology to do the same old things. We've been on a revivalist circuit since time began. In the year 10 they must have already been nostalgic for the year 0.

This sucks, in UK we have a nostalgia show called 'I love the 1990s', one in a series comprising 'I love the 1970s', 'I love the 1980s'. Each comprises a look at pointless superficial aspects of a certain year, the 'pop culture', completely ignoring any serious socio- political undercurrents of the time and relating it to pop culture instead having several celebrity non-entities giving their cringe- inducing non-opinions. The worst is that they're going to have a look at 1999 in a few weeks , how can you get nostalgic about 2 years ago? I wouldn't mind if it was intelligent, or at least PoMo, even though I hate that, just anything that doesn't insult your intelligence to a point where you feel you can appreciate geri halliwell. Re-evaluation of the past definitely has its merits, though, considering the state of present music scene(IMHO). I mean, I discovered the work of John Fahey, Van Dyke Parks, This Heat, Durutti Column through intense dissatisfaction with the present. Prog and fusion might have been for the most part excrement, but you also had groups like henry cow, soft machine, miles davis' group, etc, etc, and maybe it is a travesty that some of these guys get ignored considering what they had to offer, although the phrase 'opening pandorra's box comes to mind.'

I'm really looking forward to I Love 1999, mainly because it seems to be like some kind of cliff-edge. Can they really carry the series on beyond that point? What'll happen next? Will Kate Thornton be sent exclusive promo copies of records so that she can be nostalgic about them before they've been released? What happens when they get beyond 1999? 2000? 2001? 2002? Will fads and crazes be created specifically for the series?

I'm also looking forward to it because 1999 seems to be the point when the Nostalgia Industry really kicked off (that whole pre- millenial thing). So there is the real possibility (if they programme makers are smart) of Stuart Marconi reminiscing about those early nostalgia programmes ("Those shows where it's just a load of old clips strung together with some deadbeat Z-List celeb talking rubbish - what WERE we thinking?")

Sorry ,Stuart Maconie's beaten you to it....he did a brief skit on some radio 4 show last week - "I love 2001" - where he talked about the best shows of the year being the nostalgia ones. Listening to it tho' it started me wondering - can you predict what a decade will be remembered for? The yuppy and currency dealer "greed is good", money mad 80's that dominates 80's retro shows bears little resemblance to the one I grew up in ( and the sex'n'drugs an' fighting in the streets 60's we all know about seems similarly fictional to my parents - "no, that was just in London ,dear") Any idea what's going to be shoehorned onto our memory of the nineties?

1999 = by no means the year that synchronic nostalgia became light entertainment. "The Rock'n'Roll Years? What were we thinking?" I find these progs mildly diverting and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO GET ANNOYED ABT!! They contain nothing of socio-political weight: no indeed — for that I turn to You've Been Framed and my hilahrious private kollektion of Mr Blobby Clips.

Sorry, I didn't mean that 1999 was when Nostalgia first became Entertainment but it was when I at least first got deafened by the "Whooosh" noise of the Nostalgia Industry taking off.

I hope your You've Been Framed collection features only Jeremy "Human Clock" Beadle era YBF. Imagine how difficult it must be to make JB seem Really Really Talented, Lisa Riley has that, er, skill in bucketloads.

Taing sides: Jeremy Beadle vs Shane Ritchie

Thank GOD there's no good name for the decade we're in now. Names of decades = Use Other Words Please. Referring to a 10-year span of human history and assuming people know what you mean = dudududud.

Multiples of 10 = dud, duh. I *bin* knowin that tracer honey. Can't we try alternating blocks of 14 and 9 now? You know it makes sense.

Interesting!

I can hardly believe that Tracer Hand has been around this long.