Self-consciously retro/mimetic/nostalgic music – what do you make of it?

Inspired by the sheer glut of backward-looking trad metal bands that clog Bandcamp and the like.

That sounds too negative. I enjoy a fair amount of it, I just can't imagine needing an endless stream of music that makes no effort whatsoever to distinguish itself from past models. In other words, I'm not just talking about bands/musicians that build on bygone aesthetic trends, I'm referring to landfill revivalists who actively aim to be as un-modern as possible.

Of course, this applies to countless other genres as well: progressive electronic, darkwave, country, indie rock, hip hop, New Age, swing, etc.

There are plenty of musicians, maybe even the majority, who have no interest in pushing boundaries or shaking things up. Funny though for some reason I would have thought that metal would be a genre far less likely to suffer from this than others.

I mean...that's the history of popular music in general.

This was a smash hit in 1966!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT0Jh9lUhrc

That's equal parts nostalgia and 'let's rip off The Kinks'.

According to Neil Innes, The Bonzos had learned a salutary lesson about the pitfalls of show business:

"Our trumpeter then was Bob Kerr, great player, and a fun guy. But he was friends with (songwriter and producer) Geoff Stephens, who'd made "Winchester Cathedral" with session men. And he knew Bob, so he rang Bob up saying: 'What am I going to do? "Winchester Cathedral"'s a hit, and I've got no band to promote it.' So Bob came, flushed with excitement, to the rest of us at our digs, saying, 'We can be The New Vaudeville Band!' and we said, 'Certainly not, no way!' So, Bob couldn't understand this, so we said, 'Well, go, you go and do it then, if you want to. Go, never darken our towels again!', kind of thing. But the next thing, on Top of the Pops, was the New Vaudeville Band, with the singer looking exactly like Viv, in a sort of lamé suit, all the musicians wearing the kind of suits we were wearing, with two-tone shoes. They'd even nicked the cutout comic speaking balloons, which we made out of hardboard, with a fret saw, and painted white, and then wrote, 'Wow, I'm really expressing myself!' to hold over somebody's head while they did a saxophone solo. There was the entire image, and for the next few weeks people were saying to us, 'Hey, you're like that New Vaudeville Band!' And that's when I think Legs Larry Smith said, "Well, look ...'—he'd always been arguing for doing some more modern material, so we all said, 'Right, now we start writing our own stuff.' "

there is no aesthetic progress, nothing is new, only our experiences are subject to time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6EyXcFBxA
(btw fuck Queen)

God, yes, I think I posted before about trying to listen to some Queen album that had, like, THREE 20s/30s parodies on it, wtf?

I quite like 20s/30s music but not when a bunch smarmy show-offs like Queen or McCartney do it.

Ever heard Mostly Other People Do The Killing's Blue? They re-recorded Miles Davis's Kind of Blue not just note-for-note (their saxophonist, Jon Irabagon, doubled on alto and tenor) but mimicking the actual room sound and every other element they could. The liner notes were a reprint of Jorge Luis Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".

Parodies are not quite what I had in mind, though. Or perhaps there's a parodic dimension to, say, the Squirrel Nut Zippers' sound, but they seem to be blissfully unaware of it?

xps

The liner notes were a reprint of Jorge Luis Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".

lol that's amazing.

what about if you just want more of something? Like dominik fernow doing the Vatican shadow thing because he ran out of chill muslimgauZe to zone out to

I guess part of me feels like the appeal of that something I keep craving is bound to get spoiled if I indulge in pale copies thereof ad infinitum. To go back to trad metal, I'm a total sucker for those early Sabbath recordings and would be more than happy if someone were to uncover long-lost archival material from that era but much of my enjoyment is predicated on knowing that the music was 'new' at the time (even though there is no such thing sub specie aeternitatis, of course) so when I hear self-conscious worshippers from the past decade approximating that sound as faithfully as possible it just doesn't do it for me, like, it's clearly not the real thing (ridiculous, I know) and it only really works for me when there's a 'twist' (for instance: trad doom with female vox absolutely rules).

There was a Brian Eno interview from a few years back where he sounded genuinely disappointed that there are still bands trying to sound like Roxy Music.