Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

It's an undeveloped thought, but the notion just came to me as I took a look at the new Destroyer album, Kaputt. The LP is leaving the critics foaming at the mouth. Indeed, it sounds like a very decent album of its kind, but all the retro 80s music / video / imagery like it that has been swirling around in the last year or two is starting to seem a little like it's overpowering our culture.

Was the 80s like this? I was there, and I'm not sure it was. The decade seemed less obviously 80s. I don't recall this weird sense of revivalism being so obviously at play in so much popular music at the time. I'm not hailing that era as one that stands out in musical history. But it does strike me as strange that we are now mining it so savagely.

Three concepts - none of which I understand - seem to be behind this 1980s revivalism, or at least attempt to explain it. They will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the discourse of modern popular music criticism. Yawningly familiar.

1. Hypnagogic pop

This one comes from America, I think. Or most of the bands who bear its trademarks are from the US anyway. I think this is people like Toro y Moi, Pocahaunted, Ducktails - that kind of thing. Poppy, but nostalgic, with layers of fuzz / feedback / dreaminess. This one was cooked up by Wire critic David Keenan. On one level, it's a totally legitimate attempt to understand an important musical strand of the present day. On the other, it's a heap of blather-filled pseudo-profundity. I can't quite work out which. In his essay on the topic, which I didn't even notice in Wire when it came out a year or so ago, he talks of this then new musical sound seeming similar to - I'm paraphrasing - the phase between sleeping and waking that we all experience. It has something to do with Don Henley's Boys of Summer as well, I think I remember him saying. Anyway, irregardless of the clarity / credibility of Keenan's theories, it pointed to the fact that this 80s revivalism was live and among us.

2. Hauntology

I believe this was coined some time before Keenan's theory - back in about 2006, perhaps - by Simon Reynolds. I think this is supposed to be more British in sound, and includes bands like Broadcast and the Belbury Poly set. I don't think the principal difference is geographical, but it's the only one I can work out.

3. Chillwave

This is the vulgar younger brother of the other two, a sort of cheap, tabloid stain of a genre invented by those too thick to understand (1) and (2). As far as I can make out, it is a label that can be used with reference to people like Washed Out and Neon Indian, but not serious musicians like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds or anyone like that. They're more hypnagogic - or H pop, as some people have taken to calling it now.

So those are the three strands of musical labelling used in discourse around the topic of 80s revivalism. What few seem to hint at is the possible sterility of this phase we are going through. I love it, and check out the new "H pop" bands hailed by Pitchfork every day. But it does worry me that all this revivalism hints at a larger cultural failure - the failure to conjure up anything new. I don't think it applies more broadly to other sounds - dubstep, for instance, is a fresh, vital force in modern electronic music - but the fetishism of this genre for the past is worrying.

Will it last, or are we in the middle of one of those phases like Brit pop that we all look back on and laugh about years later? I'm not sure. I like all this revivalism stuff. That's the problem. I just wonder what it says about where we are right now that the cultural world I live in is looking more like Miami Vice every day.

Hype Williams - one of our most mysterious bands - in Wire magazine

Hype Williams are up and coming. Ones to watch, perhaps - like a decent player you've seen put in a performance in a reserve match for your local team.
They have shrouded themselves in mystery - so that it's not clear who they are, how long they've been around or what they're all about. Elliptical interviews in the media so far have compounded this impression - as have a series of bizarre lo-fi videos on youtube and a couple of scrappy, tinny but nonetheless interesting albums.

So, given the enigma around them, it is good to see the mystery electronics duo in the Wire this month. They appear in the Invisible Jukebox section - often the best read in the whole magazine. It's still not clear who these people really are. According to the blurb at the start of the interview, "Hype Williams is the performing name of Inga Copeland and the pseudonymous Dean Blunt". The profile tells us the duo met and started working together about two years ago in London, where Blunt was born and raised. Copeland, we learn, is Russian.
Reporter Lisa Blanning then offers some typically Wire-esque thoughts on what we might describe as the meaning of Hype Williams - whose work, we are not surprised to read, "dovetails perfectly with the primarily American phenomenon of Hypnagogic pop." Like most of the stuff they review, you might say.
Hype Williams, we read, specialise in "musical inquisitiveness and tactile evocation". Can work out the first bit, but not sure if the second half of the phrase is supposed to make any sense or not.
I won't say much about the entertaining interview - but it is the most revealing piece on the band I have read so far. There's a funny bit when Blunt pokes fun at the journo's suggestion that they have links to Hypnagogic pop - saying he has only heard one James Ferraro song, and has never even been to LA.

Later in the magazine, their LP, Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Reel, is reviewed - as is 7" Do Roids and Kill E'rything.

Hype Williams still appear to be in their formative stages, but I sense, somewhere amid all the mystery surrounding them, something very interesting. I'm excited about where they go from here - and will find out a lot more with their third LP, One Nation, which is out in March.

In the meantime, here is the excellent Chatline - which features Copeland washing Blunt's hair in slow motion for about ten minutes.



According to Wire, there are some exclusive tracks from the band on the magazine's website. But when I had a quick look just now, I couldn't see any. Keep an eye out HERE anyway, if you're interested.