Younger artists can treat a predecessor genre as playable style, not sacred inheritance.
Evidence
Touching on the question of rave nostalgia, the question “Where Were U In 92?” posed by Zomby is interesting on a bunch of levels. There is an echo, possibly unintended, of the marketing slogan for American Graffiti (“Where were you in 62?”, the year the movie is set), George Lucas’s groundbreaking vehicle for mobilising and exploiting generational nostalgia. Then there is also the unexpected biographical fact that Zomby is perfectly capable of saying where he was in 92, because he was twelve and a precocious fan of hardcore rave (which further suggests he must have just followed the trajectory of the music through jungle and speed garage to dubstep just like me and Mark, only quite a bit younger). Even as the album offers a loving pastiche of old skool hardcore, there seems to be an element of mockery of ageing ravers with their “boring stories of glory days” (to quote Springsteen). That would probably appeal to younger dubstep fans who, unlike Zomby, didn’t live through rave as participants and probably find the legacy of the hardcore continuum to be an encumbrance, a burden. Finally, it’s intriguing that Zomby did this pastiche record as a one-off stylistic exercise, in between much more cutting-edge dubstep records such as the Zomby EP on Hyperdub. It suggests that Zomby’s generation can play around with vintage styles without the kind of fanatical identification with a lost era that you generally get with musical revivalism. It’s just a period style, something to revisit. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1253
Categorization
- XREF: Relates to the broader theme of the postwar British ‘hardcore continuum’ Williams lineage Fisher maps across his book, and to debates about nostalgia/musical revivalism in genre studies. — connects to: Pop music advances through mutual negation between styles, not peaceful coexistence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1091
Broader Connections
- Pop music advances through mutual negation between styles, not peaceful coexistence
#expands(0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1091