Old electronic music no longer ages because the culture stopped progressing

Evidence

It seems symptomatic to me that “Gold”, the single off the debut album by Darkstar, is a cover of a Human League b-side from almost thirty years ago. It’s definitely an interesting move for Darkstar to make, in terms of their previous music and the scene they’re from, dubstep. But as an aesthetic act the creativity involved is curatorial rather than innovation in the traditional-modernist sense: it’s about finding an obscure, neglected song and re-situating it within the historical narratives of British electronic music. The whole idea of doing a cover version, which is totally familiar as an artistic move within rock, is still pretty unusual within electronic music culture. What also struck me listening to the remake next to the original (which I’d never heard before) is that both versions sound more or less as “futuristic” as each other. Well, the Darkstar reinterpretation obviously is technically more advanced in many ways; there are things done on it sonically that weren’t available to the Human League and their producer Martin Rushent. But in terms of the overall aesthetic sensation generated, neither version seems any further “into the future” than the other. Certainly, it doesn’t feel like there’s thirty years difference between the two. And it’s that precisely that feeling — that the Human League are contemporary with us — that is so mysterious and hard to explain. They ought to sound to us as ancient as early Fifties fare (Johnny Ray, say, or Louis Jordan) would have done in 1981 heard next to the Human League of “Love Action”. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1237

Categorization

• SEED: A usable essay angle: why remakes/cover versions are structurally foreign to electronic music and what their arrival in dubstep-era culture reveals about the end of futurism.
• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s broader hauntology corpus (Ghosts of My Life) and to the present-anachronism reading where a 1981 record feels contemporary. — connects to: North continues an electronic-pop mode that stalled prematurely in the mid-1980s — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 447; Synthpop’s futurism is now a superseded past rather than an available future — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 448; Electronic pop’s lost link to avant-garde art reads now as a requiem — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1223 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Late-century music still feels contemporary because no new paradigm replaced it #corroborates (0.88) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 383
• Post-Nineties electronic music retreated into conventional musicality and recessive detail #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1252
• Mainstream music of the 2010s fixated on recreating past sounds rather than innovating #corroborates (0.82)
• Culture has not undergone a genuine paradigm shift since the sixties #corroborates (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 382
• Late-2000s electronic pop continues a mode of synthpop curtailed in the mid-1980s #qualifies (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1244
• Contemporary electronic music has decelerated from rave’s rate of innovation #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1228
• Electronic dance music moved from formal innovation to production refinement across the 2000s #corroborates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1257
• Perfect digital archivisation kills the evanescence that made media culturally fertile #complicates (0.70) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 370