Novelty is Nothing, Novelty is Everything
Novelty carries a lot of weight in the world of music. We live in the now and want to feel connected to the present. But art and culture are more than transient outpourings of nowness. History is still there and it is part of our experience of the now.
The way for instance early psychedelia sounds in its original mono, or the way old amps create warm guitar tones, and nothing delivers shuddering drama and punch quite like multi track magnetic tape.
It’s the retrospective character of eras in recording. Audio and visual. The high production values on 1990’s music videos for instance, or the tenuous VHS preservation of 80’s garage acts, spooky fluttering shadows on slowly degrading tape. These are elements that compose the now by defining the past.
Find performance footage of Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Einsterzende Nubauten, noticeably filmed in the 1980’s. It feels alien, only approximately real, the way I’ve often pictured scenes from William S. Burroughs novels; just before the alien's head opens to reveal invasive appendages and such.
The sixties in most minds look like the film stock used on the movie Woodstock. And rock and roll at its most elegant, just before it died and entered a long and mythologized afterlife, had the lush look of Scorsese’s Last Waltz.
Preservation of sound and visual has made memory a function of technology and the way it sounded is reduced to how it sounds now. “What was it like” is an irrelevant question. Because history is now, music is now, it’s all here to be heard and seen. The past is not only relevant it’s not even passed.
The search for novelty is an advertising sham, a lie moneymen tell each other to prove it still matters what they think and say. But the now requires no influence from focus groups or board meetings. Translation and interaction reclaim novelty, and relevance is just as much a function of the listener’s involvement as the artist’s investment.
